The Anatomy of Melancholy

A man who marries a wife from a disreputable inn or alehouse, buys a horse in Smithfield and hires a servant in St Paul’s—as the proverb goes—is likely to have a worn-out nag for his horse, a rogue for his servant and a thoroughly “honest” woman for his wife. “The daughter is presumed to resemble her mother,” says Nevizzano. Like mother, like daughter; “a bad egg from a bad crow”; a cat follows its kind.

Do you really expect a mother to pass on honest Manners, different from those she has herself?

If the mother is unchaste, in all likelihood the daughter will “take after her mother”—follow her in all her good qualities.

Do you believe that a daughter of bull-loving Pasiphae Will not herself become a bull-seeker?

If the mare trots, the foal will not amble. My last caution is that a woman should not give herself in marriage to a fool or an obviously melancholy man: jealousy is a symptom of that disease, and fools have no restraint. Justina, a Roman lady, was badly persecuted and later killed by her jealous husband. She had ordered this epitaph to be engraved on her tomb as a warning to others:

Learn from Justina’s example; learn, you fathers, Not to let your daughter marry a foolish man, and so on.

Learn, all you parents, from Justina’s case, Not to marry your children to fools.

After marriage I can give men no better advice than to treat their wives well. “What a married friend told me, I will tell you just as cheaply,” says Nicostratus in Stobaeus: to avoid future quarrels and for peace’s sake, “when you are in bed, beware of your wives’ flattering speeches at night and lectures behind the bed-curtains in the morning.” Let men also do their best to support their wives according to their means, as Patrizi repeatedly urges, and allow them reasonable freedom as time and place require.

Many women are driven to prostitution, as Nevizzano observes, because their husbands are so harsh and keep them so short of food and clothing: “poverty forces them to prostitute themselves.” Poverty, hunger and lack of means make them unchaste—or ill-treatment does; their husbands’ surly behaviour drives them to rebel, or their bad example leads the women to repay them in kind.

At the opposite extreme, some are too generous. As the proverb says, “The thrush shits its own ruin”: they make a rod for their own backs, as Candaules did with Gyges in Herodotus, praising his wife’s beauty himself and insisting that Gyges see her naked. By giving their wives too much freedom to wander about and a lavish allowance, they contribute to their own miseries. “Wives’ breaths smell very foul,” as Plautus jeers—they have ugly souls—and by their paint and cosmetics they provoke “their husband’s hatred,” their husband’s hate, especially:

When the husband’s lips are miserably smeared with sticky stuff.