5 ms·

Sex, Whipping, and Pottage in Stepney

57 points by benbreen 11y ago

esloanpa 11y ago
This is a fun read and describes a lot of the social "types" seen in Shakespeare's London. The thing that interested me the most was the discussion of the scold, a figure that makes a lot of appearances in art from the time. The scold, the over-domineering woman who beat/verbally humiliated her husband, was a character that seemed to provoke a fair amount of anxiety in people during this time. An unruly woman like a scold was thought to represent a house in disorder, and was seen as the result of a husband's failure to adequately assert his masculine authority. To counter the behavior of the scold, a husband could employ a number of strategies, including the scold's bridle, which you can see here: http://bit.ly/1QTuxrU http://bit.ly/1QTuxrU and here: http://bit.ly/1PedRgu http://bit.ly/1PedRgu It's an amazing historical artifact of a time when female speech was particularly feared. The idea of a man walking his wife on a leash is particularly jarring, and I find it impossible to imagine that such things were ever actually the case...but lots of woodcuts seem to indicate it was. Have questions about the culture of the Renaissance, or Shakespeare in general? I'd love to answer them. I'm a Shakespearean working in a SaaS company and love to talk about the wild period that his plays came from. Let's talk!
- k__ 11y ago
  I always find it interesting how people talk about the past, like everything has changed since then. After I went to a theater play of victorian times, everyone was shocked about the fact that a man and a woman couldn't be in one room when no one else was there if they weren't married. But a few weeks later I overheard a call of a girl sitting next to me in a train station, where she told the caller that she "didn't let her male friend drive her home from the party, last night. because no one else was driving with them and she didn't want the people to get a wrong picture so she called a taxi" I found this an interesting read too. especially the cuckold stuff. Even today it's hard for a man to let the women take charge, because society is harassing him if he does.
  - esloanpa 11y ago
    Yep. Even though we like to claim that we are far more modern and advanced than our historical predecessors, many of the same narratives and anxieties about what is or is not appropriate for men and women remain the same as in the Renaissance and even ancient Greece/Rome.
- ttctciyf 11y ago
  The Taming of the Shrew riffs on a similar theme, right? I find that play fascinating, partly for the unresolved play-within-a-play setup (when the inner play ends, we never go back to the container play..) and partly for the similarity to the 1001 Nights story[1]. Any speculation about the relation between the two works? 1: https://1000into1night.wordpress.com/26-the-sleeper-and-the-waker/ https://1000into1night.wordpress.com/26-the-sleeper-and-the-...
  - esloanpa 11y ago
    It does! Kate is a classic shrew/scold. But what makes "Taming" really interesting to me is that Petruchio is a far greater shrew/scold than poor Kate. The play within the play angle also fascinates me. Te way it gets sort of tossed aside after the first act and never resolved leads to all sorts of questions about the writing of the play itself. Did Shakespeare intend to have this framing mechanism and then it got forgotten in the process? Is this a result of lazy editing, or no editing? Did the printers miss something? The framing play often ends up getting cut, or awkwardly forced into a resolution by directors. It's wonderfully weird. :) -emily
douche 11y ago
There were a lot of really interesting English social customs that are recorded from that Tudor/Stuart period. Between all the cuckolds horns, shrews, scolds, and conflicts between Catholics, Anglicans and the Puritan/Quaker/other protestant splinter groups, there's a lot of bizarre-seeming rituals that people undertook. Not to mention accusations of witchcraft. One of the better books I read in my coursework on early modern England was Fire From Heaven, which covers a bunch of this stuff (http://amzn.to/1VzJn8r http://amzn.to/1VzJn8r) One I came across recently, reading one of the Patrick O'Brian Aubrey/Maturin novels was the practice of wife selling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wife_selling_(English_custom) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wife_selling_(English_custom))
- thaumasiotes 11y ago
  You really confused me with the apparent reference to http://www.amazon.com/Fire-Heaven-Mary-Renault/dp/0375726829/ http://www.amazon.com/Fire-Heaven-Mary-Renault/dp/0375726829... ;p
sandworm101 11y ago
This sort of treatment is not distant history. It all boils down to the concept that women were their husband's literal property. A husband being bossed around by his wife was akin to a farmer being bossed around by his horse. And if you think treating people as legal property was abolished alongside slavery, think again. "Wife selling persisted in England in some form until the early 20th century; according to the jurist and historian James Bryce, writing in 1901, wife sales were still occasionally taking place during his time." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wife_selling_%28English_custom%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wife_selling_%28English_custom...
- _yosefk 11y ago
  From the Wikipedia article: "Although the custom had no basis in law and frequently resulted in prosecution..." and "Writing in 1901 on the subject of wife selling, James Bryce stated that there was "no trace at all in our [English] law of any such right." (It also says that people did it despite it being illegal, but this doesn't seem very different from any subculture encouraging illegal behavior at any point in time, in that such subcultures always exist, and one can't extrapolate the attitudes within such a subculture to the entire society.)
  - sandworm101 11y ago
    No trace in the law doesn't mean it was illegal. What that means is that no court has reported a case on the matter. That can mean it was very rare, or just was so accepted that it was never challenged in court, or happened in those many places where courts were not much of an option. Even if something gets to some form of courtroom, the chances that a decision would be written down and reported were slim during most of english history.
    - thaumasiotes 11y ago
      Read that quote again. "Although the custom [...] frequently resulted in prosecution..." It was illegal. I don't think, before the modern era, the law applied very well to the peasantry. It makes me wonder if the current system we aspire to, one law for everyone in the same country, really makes sense. There's something to be said for the rich ordering their society their way, and the poor ordering their society their way.

57 points by benbreen 11y ago

This is a fun read and describes a lot of the social "types" seen in Shakespeare's London. The thing that interested me the most was the discussion of the scold, a figure that makes a lot of appearances in art from the time. The scold, the over-domineering woman who beat/verbally humiliated her husband, was a character that seemed to provoke a fair amount of anxiety in people during this time. An unruly woman like a scold was thought to represent a house in disorder, and was seen as the result of a husband's failure to adequately assert his masculine authority. To counter the behavior of the scold, a husband could employ a number of strategies, including the scold's bridle, which you can see here: http://bit.ly/1QTuxrU http://bit.ly/1QTuxrU and here: http://bit.ly/1PedRgu http://bit.ly/1PedRgu It's an amazing historical artifact of a time when female speech was particularly feared. The idea of a man walking his wife on a leash is particularly jarring, and I find it impossible to imagine that such things were ever actually the case...but lots of woodcuts seem to indicate it was. Have questions about the culture of the Renaissance, or Shakespeare in general? I'd love to answer them. I'm a Shakespearean working in a SaaS company and love to talk about the wild period that his plays came from. Let's talk!

k__ 11y ago
I always find it interesting how people talk about the past, like everything has changed since then. After I went to a theater play of victorian times, everyone was shocked about the fact that a man and a woman couldn't be in one room when no one else was there if they weren't married. But a few weeks later I overheard a call of a girl sitting next to me in a train station, where she told the caller that she "didn't let her male friend drive her home from the party, last night. because no one else was driving with them and she didn't want the people to get a wrong picture so she called a taxi" I found this an interesting read too. especially the cuckold stuff. Even today it's hard for a man to let the women take charge, because society is harassing him if he does.
- esloanpa 11y ago
  Yep. Even though we like to claim that we are far more modern and advanced than our historical predecessors, many of the same narratives and anxieties about what is or is not appropriate for men and women remain the same as in the Renaissance and even ancient Greece/Rome.
ttctciyf 11y ago
The Taming of the Shrew riffs on a similar theme, right? I find that play fascinating, partly for the unresolved play-within-a-play setup (when the inner play ends, we never go back to the container play..) and partly for the similarity to the 1001 Nights story[1]. Any speculation about the relation between the two works? 1: https://1000into1night.wordpress.com/26-the-sleeper-and-the-waker/ https://1000into1night.wordpress.com/26-the-sleeper-and-the-...
- esloanpa 11y ago
  It does! Kate is a classic shrew/scold. But what makes "Taming" really interesting to me is that Petruchio is a far greater shrew/scold than poor Kate. The play within the play angle also fascinates me. Te way it gets sort of tossed aside after the first act and never resolved leads to all sorts of questions about the writing of the play itself. Did Shakespeare intend to have this framing mechanism and then it got forgotten in the process? Is this a result of lazy editing, or no editing? Did the printers miss something? The framing play often ends up getting cut, or awkwardly forced into a resolution by directors. It's wonderfully weird. :) -emily

douche 11y ago

There were a lot of really interesting English social customs that are recorded from that Tudor/Stuart period. Between all the cuckolds horns, shrews, scolds, and conflicts between Catholics, Anglicans and the Puritan/Quaker/other protestant splinter groups, there's a lot of bizarre-seeming rituals that people undertook. Not to mention accusations of witchcraft. One of the better books I read in my coursework on early modern England was Fire From Heaven, which covers a bunch of this stuff (http://amzn.to/1VzJn8r http://amzn.to/1VzJn8r) One I came across recently, reading one of the Patrick O'Brian Aubrey/Maturin novels was the practice of wife selling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wife_selling_(English_custom) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wife_selling_(English_custom))

thaumasiotes 11y ago
You really confused me with the apparent reference to http://www.amazon.com/Fire-Heaven-Mary-Renault/dp/0375726829/ http://www.amazon.com/Fire-Heaven-Mary-Renault/dp/0375726829... ;p

sandworm101 11y ago

This sort of treatment is not distant history. It all boils down to the concept that women were their husband's literal property. A husband being bossed around by his wife was akin to a farmer being bossed around by his horse. And if you think treating people as legal property was abolished alongside slavery, think again. "Wife selling persisted in England in some form until the early 20th century; according to the jurist and historian James Bryce, writing in 1901, wife sales were still occasionally taking place during his time." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wife_selling_%28English_custom%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wife_selling_%28English_custom...

_yosefk 11y ago
From the Wikipedia article: "Although the custom had no basis in law and frequently resulted in prosecution..." and "Writing in 1901 on the subject of wife selling, James Bryce stated that there was "no trace at all in our [English] law of any such right." (It also says that people did it despite it being illegal, but this doesn't seem very different from any subculture encouraging illegal behavior at any point in time, in that such subcultures always exist, and one can't extrapolate the attitudes within such a subculture to the entire society.)
- sandworm101 11y ago
  No trace in the law doesn't mean it was illegal. What that means is that no court has reported a case on the matter. That can mean it was very rare, or just was so accepted that it was never challenged in court, or happened in those many places where courts were not much of an option. Even if something gets to some form of courtroom, the chances that a decision would be written down and reported were slim during most of english history.
  - thaumasiotes 11y ago
    Read that quote again. "Although the custom [...] frequently resulted in prosecution..." It was illegal. I don't think, before the modern era, the law applied very well to the peasantry. It makes me wonder if the current system we aspire to, one law for everyone in the same country, really makes sense. There's something to be said for the rich ordering their society their way, and the poor ordering their society their way.