“’tis our best art to dissemble well”: Performed Chastity and Purloined Women in Thomas Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters
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Thomas Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters offers a kaleidoscopic view of tricksters who constantly dissemble for their economic and sexual profits. A prodigal Dick Follywit cheats his rich grandfather Sir Bounteous Progress, a seemingly chaste wife Mrs. Harebrain commits adultery, and Sir Bounteous’ kept-mistress Frank Gullman passes as a virgin. The expansion of market economy in early modern England that established social relations via economic transactions set a stage for these tricksters to dissemble. In particular, women’s dissembling is worthy of notice in this play. The courtesan launches herself into a marriage market by performing virginity, and Mrs. Harebrain cuckolds her jealous husband by feigning her fidelity. Both women’s theatricality makes sexually anxious men deceived by their own follies. The outstanding trickster Follywit is ironically tricked into a marriage to the courtesan, and Harebrain inadvertently gives his wife a chance to cuckold him. Examining the way in which dissembling works in the play, I will argue that women’s performances function as a double-edged sword. Performed chastity intensifies male antipathy towards desiring women but mocks imprudent husbands whose sexual fantasy of virginity make them blind to the fact that chastity can be performed. Men’s efforts to regulate female sexuality turn out to be futile, and their women are purloined by their sexual rivals. Meanwhile, dissembling is for women a means to constitute themselves as transgressive yet autonomous desiring subjects despite patriarchal restrictions of female sexuality and to survive the mad world in which sex is the close nexus of money.
Abstract
Thomas Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters offers a kaleidoscopic view of tricksters who constantly dissemble for their economic and sexual profits. A prodigal Dick Follywit cheats his rich grandfather Sir Bounteous Progress, a seemingly chaste wife Mrs. Harebrain commits adultery, and Sir Bounteous’ kept-mistress Frank Gullman passes as a virgin. The expansion of market economy in early modern England that established social relations via economic transactions set a stage for these tricksters to dissemble. In particular, women’s dissembling is worthy of notice in this play. The courtesan launches herself into a marriage market by performing virginity, and Mrs. Harebrain cuckolds her jealous husband by feigning her fidelity. Both women’s theatricality makes sexually anxious men deceived by their own follies. The outstanding trickster Follywit is ironically tricked into a marriage to the courtesan, and Harebrain inadvertently gives his wife a chance to cuckold him. Examining the way in which dissembling works in the play, I will argue that women’s performances function as a double-edged sword. Performed chastity intensifies male antipathy towards desiring women but mocks imprudent husbands whose sexual fantasy of virginity make them blind to the fact that chastity can be performed. Men’s efforts to regulate female sexuality turn out to be futile, and their women are purloined by their sexual rivals. Meanwhile, dissembling is for women a means to constitute themselves as transgressive yet autonomous desiring subjects despite patriarchal restrictions of female sexuality and to survive the mad world in which sex is the close nexus of money.
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