Saturday, March 1, 2014

The World Must Be Peopled

I was going to title this post "Shakespeare's Cuckolds," but that would have been misleading, since Shakespeare didn't create many actual cuckolds. (By the way, my students don't usually know what "cuckold" means, but when they find out, they become very interested.) What do I mean by saying, "Shakespeare didn't create many actual cuckolds"? This. For every bona fide Shakespeare character whose wife is truly sleeping with another man, there exist five who only think their women are cheating. Have I done the actual math? Hell, no. But I know I'm right in spirit. The fact is, Shakespeare is way more interested in masculine jealousy than in feminine sexual treachery. To be sure, his plays (not to mention his sonnets, about which, read the whole story in Paint!) do contain a few loose or, to