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- Title
Why Do Cuckolds Have Horns?
- Authors
McEachern, Claire
- Abstract
The article discusses the prevalence of the cuckold horn humor in English Renaissance drama and other literature in the late 16th and early 17th centuries in the context of the horn as a figure of soteriological inquiry, or the problem of reading salvation in the displaced signs of selfhood. It states that as in many respects for many people, their state of salvation was not discernable, what the horn displaces is a form of anxiety or at least uncertainty. It explores the provenance of the horn in its Ovidian and Mosaic incarnations and its prevalence in the literature of the English Renaissance in order to understand what the humor of the horn reveals about the 16th- and early 17th-century preoccupation with knowing salvation.
- Subjects
HUMOR in literature; HORNS (Anatomy); CUCKOLDS; RENAISSANCE; EARLY modern English literature; 17TH century English drama; 15TH &; 16th century literature; SALVATION; MOSES (Biblical leader)
- Publication
Huntington Library Quarterly, 2008, Vol 71, Issue 4, p607
- ISSN
0018-7895
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1525/hlq.2008.71.4.607