Musacchio unpacks the ensuing complexity through popular Florentine conceptions of adultery,
cuckoldry, and house scorning.
Masculine anxieties around old age, impotence, and
cuckoldry were still present three centuries later despite progress in the sciences and the liberal sociopolitical attitudes promoted by the Spanish Second Republic (1931-36).
While the threat of
cuckoldry from conspecifics has been incorporated into investigations of mobbing behavior (Berziiis et al., 2010), we could not find examples from the literature on mobbing that address other risks presented by conspecifics during mobbing.
(4.2.10-18) The song hovers uneasily between self-glorification and self-mockery, since horns could also signify
cuckoldry. But the song's "lusty horn" has phallic power as well as suggesting impotence.
Moreover, just prior to asking for Bardolph's whereabouts, Falstaff rails against a reluctant creditor, charging him with
cuckoldry via an elaborate figure: "And yet he cannot see, though he have his own lantern to light him" (1.2.4748).
Themes range from
cuckoldry to corruption and draw much laughter from an audience, releasing the tension raised by the melodrama of the main story.
We don't know why, but Benedick muses, when explaining why he remains a bachelor, about the inevitability of wearing horns-i.e., a fear of
cuckoldry. Ben Carlson's Benedick exhibits a real bitterness in these lines, suggesting they are not merely a pro forma masculine complaint.
His story does end in this ease--"This Januarie, who is glad but he?" (2412)--but also in its opposite, his
cuckoldry unrepentantly accomplished and successfully concealed.
In the episode of the Sibyl of Panzoust, the signs generated by absence and loss in the porous text have pointed to emasculation and
cuckoldry and will lead Panurge next to begin a new consultation, one with Nazdecabre, a mute, who, continuing with absence of speech, will communicate the same prediction.
For this, the birds likely employ the swingers' solution of swapping DNA via
cuckoldry. Genetic analyses increasingly reveal that few monogamous bird species actually are--at least sexually speaking.
For Shakespeare's frustrated, aristocratic lovers whose labors arc lost because of the message of a death, the cuckoo in the song of spring heralds the specter of
cuckoldry in that season's erotic frenzy, while the owl of winter wisely oversees the "merry" consolations of the humblest aspects of domestic life.