SOURCE: Maus, Katharine Eisaman. “Horns of Dilemma: Jealousy, Gender, and Spectatorship in English Renaissance Drama.” ELH 54, no. 3 (autumn 1987): 561-83.

In the following essay, Maus explores the relationship between sexual jealousy and the performance of theatrical spectacle in the English Renaissance, with particular emphasis on Shakespearean drama, notably Othello.

The cuckoo then, on every tree Mocks married men; for thus sings he,                                         Cuckoo; Cuckoo, cuckoo: O word of fear, Unpleasing to a married ear! 

(Love's Labor's Lost, 5.2.888-92)

Anxiety about sexual betrayal pervades the drama of the English Renaissance. Traditionally the material of comedy, cuckoldry or the fear of cuckoldry becomes a tragic theme as well in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: in Heywood's Woman Killed With Kindness, Chapman's Bussy d'Ambois, Ford's Broken Heart, Shakespeare's Othello. Not only does jealousy dominate the plots of many plays, but songs about the cuckolded and the abandoned, jokes and saws...