At the end of ‘The Lion and The Ass’, Hester Pulter claims to have demonstrated a clear moral. ‘By these Storyes’ of jealous animals, she writes, the reader ‘may plainly See / The Noblest Mind is from Suspition Free’ (ll. 21–22). Such clarity was expected of emblem poems, which ‘educat[ed] their readers by providing a clear moral […] to apply to their own lives’ (see Rachel Zhang’s Curation, Emblem Books as Parenting Guides). Yet this particular emblem does not quite follow the convention. Much like the rest of the manuscript, ‘The Lion and the Ass’ is a complex, even convoluted poem, which builds to a startling conclusion. Pulter does not simply condemn suspicion. Rather, she praises something that is not all that ‘plainly see[n]’: a kind of ‘Noble Jealousie’, which enables the marriage between an ‘indulgent’ cuckold and his cheating spouse (l. 21, l. 13, l. 7).
Part of what makes this poem challenging is its approach to romantic jealousy itself. Here as elsewhere in her manuscript, Pulter praises animals who kill their adulterous spouses. Take her claims about the elephant, who is a kind of ideal husband, an animal who ‘Transcend[s]’ all others in ‘Noble Jealousie’ (l. 14, l. 13). According to an earlier emblem in the manuscript, The Elephant84, this creature is superior to the gallants of contemporary England, who let their wives ‘fool out their days / At balls and taverns, seeing wanton plays’ (ll. 38–39). Unlike these men, the elephant is both chaste and attentive, willing to kill his spouse if she cuckolds him: ‘For chastity this gallant creature’s crowned / … / Yet he’s so tender of his reputation / He kills his female if he doubts scortation’ (ll. 16–23). Likewise, in ‘The Lion and the Ass’, the lion is a ‘slave’ to his lioness until — and only until — he has certain knowledge of her infidelity (l. 6). Like a leonine Othello, he demands not ocular but olfactory proof; unlike Othello, he never suffers from agonizing doubt. He kills his lioness if he ‘Smels the Panthers Strong perfumes’; otherwise, ‘That Shee is false to him hee never dreams’ (l. 9, l. 12). The poem imagines a jealousy free from suspicion: an intense care and attentiveness without the concomitant fraught uncertainty.
Yet suspicion was central to the early modern understanding of jealousy. As Bradley Irish has documented, the two were at times rough ‘synonym[s]’ of one another, ‘suspicious’ an acceptable gloss for ‘jealous’.1 According to some thinkers, jealousy could in fact be ‘defined’ as a kind of suspicion: a ‘griefe for suspition of dishonesty in married yoake-fellows, Husbands or wives’.2 For most men, Mark Breitenberg has argued, jealousy was thus indistinguishable from an anxiety-producing ‘interpretive crisis’.3 An entire industry of ‘Renaissance treatises on jealousy, marriage, and the proper conduct of wives’ arose to help these men ‘“read” correctly the signs of women’s sexual behavior’: a task that many believed was doomed from the start.4 As the pamphlet Tell-Trothes New-years Gift (1593) puts it, ‘if she means to deceive thee, her invention is hard to be prevented, for, watch her ever so narrowly, she [will] finde a time to performe her knavery’.5 In other words, the ‘sexual behavior of women’ was ‘impossible’ to ‘interpret’ conclusively, making jealousy — and cuckoldry itself — inevitable.6
The lion faces this very interpretive challenge. As Pulter makes clear, he is readily fooled by his lioness, who ‘wash[es] her[self]’ so effectively ‘in Some Cristall Streams / That Shee is false to him hee never dreams’ (l. 11–12). The rhyme, which also appears in Pulter’s poem The Invitation to the Country2, is here, as there, a marker of disappointed idealism. Like the country house, whose ‘Enamelled vales and crystal streams / Prove’ to be nothing but ‘dreams’ (l. 91–92), so too is this lioness’s fidelity a mere ‘dream’, the false product of some ‘crystal stream’ (l. 12, l. 11). If the lion at first seems to be an involved and attentive spouse — much like the elephant — his awareness has its limits. His interpretive process is revealed to be fallible: he may smell the panther, but his lioness can easily wash off this scent. Whatever his ‘Noble Jealousie’, it seems, the lion is at last just another cuckold, tricked by his cunning spouse (l. 13).
Yet the poem does not condemn his cuckoldry. Pulter reserves her ire not for this lion, nor even for this lioness, but for the ‘Ass’: a creature ‘hairbraind’ with jealousy (l. 15). Unlike the lion, who is at times fooled by his wife, the ass attempts ‘to prevent’ any and all adultery (l. 18). As Pulter recounts, he even castrates his children at birth, worried that they may one day sleep with their mother. The comparison between these two animals — the lion and the ass — leads to a surprising conclusion: a cuckold can be preferable to a non-cuckold, if that non-cuckold is ruled by irrational jealousy. As Pulter makes clear, the ass is ‘wild’, ‘hairbraind’, and ‘mad braind’ at least in part because he ‘fears the Horn’ (l. 15, l. 24, l. 19). For Pulter, it seems, this fear of cuckoldry — and not cuckoldry itself — is the real problem.
In fact, Pulter later argues, what people actually ‘scorn’ is not cuckoldry but wittolry (l. 20). The wittol — a ‘man who is aware of and complaisant about the infidelity of his wife’, according to the Oxford English Dictionary — is a problematic figure in her poetry.7 More than once, Pulter describes the wittol as especially repugnant: ‘below a beast’ (l. 45), according to ‘The Elephant’ (Poem 84), or ‘the peoples Scorn’ (l. 20), according to ‘The Lion and the Ass’. This distaste was not unusual. Though Jennifer Panek has documented a ‘dynamic continuum of wittols’, not all of whom were met ‘with automatic, unmitigated contempt’, many did believe wittols to be ‘even baser, less manly, and more contemptible than a regular cuckold’.8 As Jean De Chassanion puts it, the wittol is ‘a monstrous kind of creatures, and degenerate not only from the law of humanity, but of nature also’.9
In this poem about a cuckolded lion, Pulter thus singles out two figures for special condemnation: the ass, who is ruled by fear of cuckoldry, and the wittol, who is complacent with cuckoldry. The poem’s only ‘regular cuckold’, by contrast, receives different treatment.10 The lion, though fooled by his lioness, enjoys something rather surprising: what is in some ways the poem’s best relationship. This is not to say that his marriage is perfect. As Pulter makes clear, the lion is ‘most indulgent’ (l. 7): a term which may be glossed as ‘too forbearing, weakly lenient’.11 In a world in which ‘an adulterous woman gravely threatened her husband’s allegedly natural authority’, the lion has failed to exercise adequate control over his spouse.12 Yet Pulter’s criticism of the lion, especially in comparison to her clear condemnation of the ass and the wittol, is relatively brief. His ‘Jealousie’ is still ‘Noble’, his ‘indulgent’ approach the best of three bad options (l. 13, l. 7).
Even more curious, this portrait of marriage is incongruous with Pulter’s other writing on the subject. Elsewhere, it seems, Pulter treats adultery as a symptom of wider societal disorder. Her emblems, ‘unusual in the degree to which they comment on immediate political and social events’, often attack young men, the ‘gallants’ of England, who have neglected both their social and political responsibilities (see also the ‘Headnote’ to ‘The Elephant’ (Poem 84)).13 As she writes in ‘The Elephant’ (Poem 84), these ‘lords in noble breeding failed’ to be ‘valiant’, a ‘want which [made] us bleed / In our brave king’ (l. 30, l. 28, ll. 27–28). Now, these same ‘gallants of our age’ ‘neglect’ their wives ‘to drink, rant, throw the die’, while these women ‘to temptation […] open lie’ (l. 24, l. 36, l. 37). For Pulter, these marital and social problems mirror one another: ‘the new system of government’ is ‘an inversion of the established social hierarchy’, much like ‘the kind of disorderly, woman-on-top marriage that was conventionally assumed to produce cuckolds’.14
In ‘The Lion and the Ass’, however, this correspondence between family and state is less pronounced. The lion is a creature of extremes: at once a ‘Tirant’ to his subjects and a ‘Slave’ to his wife (l. 4, l. 6). On the one hand, he is the uncontested ruler of his realm. Much of the poem emphasizes his authority: he is a ‘Tirant’, whose ‘vassals’ ‘all assemble’ to ‘Stand examinated’, ‘Subject’ to ‘his Mercie’ (l. 4, l. 1, l. 2, l. 3, l. 5). Notably, though Pulter claims to have ‘plainly’ shown that the lion is ‘from Suspition Free’, the lion is in fact not without suspicion: in the more expansive sense of the term, he is clearly jealous — that is, suspicious — of his people (l. 21, l. 22).15 Yet he takes a different approach to his lioness. With her, this fierce ‘Tirant’ is passive, even ‘indulgent’: a ‘Slave’ to her affections (l. 4, l. 7, l. 6). In a book otherwise full of unappealing portraits of marriage — of men who ‘roam’ in ‘taverns’ or ‘tyrannize at home’ (ll. 15–16), of wives comparable to slaves (see The Marmottane89 and This Poor Turtledove85) — Pulter lands upon a surprising portrait of a cuckold and his spouse. What Pulter depicts, that is, is a marriage in which a man, not a woman, is made into a slave. Pulter’s undeniable disapproval of adultery — as well as her disdain for the lion’s indulgence — exists alongside this curious reversal.
- Bradley J. Irish, ‘Jealousy in Early Modern England’, Studies in Philology, 121 (2024), 432–463 (p. 437). As Irish writes, ‘the word jealous was sometimes employed in the broadest possible sense as a synonym for suspicious’. I am grateful to Irish for sharing material from his forthcoming book, which has since been published; see Bradley Irish, The Rivalrous Renaissance: Envy and Jealousy in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 2025).
- Thomas Wilson, A Christian Dictionarie (London: Printed by W. Jaggard, 1612), p. 244. See also Irish, ‘Jealousy’, p. 436, which considers this quotation. For a further discussion of jealousy, see also Bradley Irish, Emotion in the Tudor Court: Literature, History, and Early Modern Feeling (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018).
- Mark Breitenberg, ‘Anxious Masculinity: Sexual Jealousy in Early Modern England’, Feminist Studies, 19 (1993), 377–398 (p. 379). See also Breitenberg’s book, which expands upon the article: Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
- Breitenberg, ‘Anxious Masculinity’, p. 384.
- Tell-Trothes New-yeares Gift, ed. by Frederick J. Furnivall (London: N. Trubner & Co., 1876), p. 35. Breitenberg, ‘Anxious Masculinity’, p. 390, also discusses this quotation.
- Breitenberg, ‘Anxious Masculinity’, p. 390.
- Entry ‘wittol’, The Oxford English Dictionary (2024) <<http://www.oed.com>> [accessed 29 March 2024].
- Jennifer Panek, ‘“A Wittall cannot be a cookold”: Reading the Contented Cuckold in Early Modern English Drama and Culture’, JEMCS, 1 (2001), 66–92 (p. 67). Panek accounts for the full range of approaches to the early modern wittol, noting that not all commentators were as contemptuous as Pulter.
- Jean De Chassanion, The Theatre of Gods Iudgements (London: Printed by Adam Islip, 1597), p. 344. Irish, ‘Jealousy’, p. 460, also discusses this quotation.
- Panek, p. 67.
- Entry ‘indulgent’, The Oxford English Dictionary (2024) <<http://www.oed.com>> [accessed 30 July 2024]. On Pulter’s different approach to parental indulgence, see Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich, ‘In Defense of Indulgence: Hester Pulter’s Maternal Elegies’, JEMCS, 20 (2020), 43–70.
- Irish, ‘Jealousy’, p. 440. On the relationship between cuckoldry and the loss of domestic control, see Panek, p. 71.
- Alice Eardley, ‘Introduction’, in Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda, ed. by Alice Eardley (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies Press, 2014), 1–38 (p. 28).
- Eardley, pp. 28–29; Panek, p. 67.
- See Irish, ‘Jealousy’, p. 437.
