Cuckoldry

The state of marital infidelity has always attracted scorn for the deceived husband rather than for the adulterous wife. This general feature of European society derives from the earlier notion that the wife was the man’s property or servant and was thus expected to obey him. (Revealingly, the original sense of seduce was not sexual, but wrongfully to persuade another man’s labor to leave him.) The humiliating words associated with cuckoldry have always been too sensitive to become personal insults in English, and even their currency has diminished in modern times. It is important, as with most sexual matters, to distinguish between the action and the word. Writers may be sensitive about the use of the words cuckold and unfaithful , but adultery is a major motif of medieval literature, both in tragic contexts, such as Tristan and Isolde and Lancelot and Guinevere, and in the comic worlds of the fabliau.

Cuckold derives from cuckoo , alluding to the parasitic habit of the female bird in changing its mate frequently and laying its eggs in other birds’ nests. The association is common in medieval folklore, literature, and iconography. The old form kukewold , borrowed from Old French cuccault , made up of cuccu plus the pejorative suffix – ault , first appears about 1250 in the satirical and polemical poem The Owl and the Nightingale (l. 1544). The term was clearly regarded as embarrassingly direct, even in John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes (ca. 1440): “To speke plaine Englishe, made him cokolde. Alas I was not auised wel before Vnkonnyngly to speake such language: I should haue sayde how that he had an horne…. And in some land Cornodo men do them call.” (The references to “horn” and “Cornodo” ( cornuto ) are clarified later in this entry.)

The verbal extension of “to cuckold” is recorded from about 1589, exclusively applied from a male perspective, explained in Dr. Johnson’s definition: “To corrupt a man’s wife; to bring upon a man the reproach of having an adulterous wife; to rob a man of his wife’s fidelity.” Johnson adds a note about alerting a husband of his wife’s infidelity: “it was usual to alarm [provoke] a husband at the approach of an adulterer by calling cuckoo .” Shakespeare alludes to this practice in a song in Love’s Labour’s Lost (1588–1590):

The cuckoo then on every tree,
Mocks married men; for thus sings he—Cuckoo
Cuckoo cuckoo! Oh word of fear,
Unpleasing to the married ear!
(V ii 906-10)

These references show that the term and the name of the symbolic bird were articulated openly in the Renaissance. However, the literary association between the bird and the cuckold is far older, for in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale (ca. 1386) the figure of Jalousye [Suspicion] is depicted with “a cukkow sittynge on his hand.” Shakespeare deals with the theme frequently in both comedy and tragedy, notably in Othello , when Iago encourages Roderigo: “If thou canst cuckold him, thou do’st thyself a pleasure, and me a sport” (I iii 375), and worse, when Othello rages: "I will chop her into messes! Cuckold me! (IV i 197).

A curious related term, rare and generally unknown, is wittol , meaning a conniving cuckold or one resigned to his wife’s infidelity. The term originates in the fifteenth century as wetewold , from witen , “to know” and the suffix – wold , probably from cukewold . In Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597), Ford rants furiously at his imagined disgrace: “See the hell of having a false woman! My bed shall be abused, my coffers ransacked and my reputation gnawn at … Cuckold! Wittol! Cuckold! the devil himself hath not such a name” (II ii 312-18).

The cuckold’s horns form a curious motif widely found in European iconography and literature. This evolved into the practice of placing a set of horns on the deceived husband’s head as a sign of public humiliation, found in the stage direction to a quarto text of The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597): Enter Sir John Falstaff with a Buck’s head upon him (V v). The symbolism is, however, far older in both European and English literature. In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s romance Vita Merlini (ca. 1150), Merlin is betrayed sexually and in a fit of rage tears off the antlers of a stag he has been riding and throws them at his former mistress and her lover. There was even an odd superstition that horns would spontaneously sprout from the husband’s head, alluded to in The Collier of Croydon (ca. 1580): “My head groweth hard, my horns will shortly spring.” This motif in turn led to great numbers of puns and compounds, notably horn-mad (frantic with sexual suspicion), also first found in Shakespeare, in The Comedy of Errors (II i 57).

These English references to the humiliating horns are paralleled by the Italian term for a cuckolded husband, namely cornuto , meaning “horned,” which in that language is a grievous and highly provocative insult. So is the well-known two-fingered gesture of the “horned hand,” formed with the index and little finger erect, suggestively symbolizing the horns of the cuckold. This gesture has been traced as far back as ancient Etruscan and Pompeiian wall paintings, although these contexts are not necessarily adulterous. As has been seen, the term cornuto had been borrowed long before Elizabethan English, no doubt as a witness word reflecting Italian corruption. The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597) carries this comment: “The peaking cornuto her husband, dwelling in a continual larum of jealousy” (“The snooping cuckold her husband living in a continual panic of sexual suspicion,” III v 71). Dr. Johnson defined the term in his Dictionary (1755) in a literal fashion as “a man horned; a cuckold.”

Cuckoldry is much associated with stereotypical acts of tragic frenzy and revenge in the context of Latin countries. This convention is endorsed by the highly popular melodramatic operas Cavalleria Rusticana (1890) and I Pagliacci (1892). However, in English literature cuckoldry is also presented humorously, albeit with a degree of schadenfreud . In the acerbic comedies of Ben Jonson, generally set in Italy, the theme of marital infidelity abounds. Furthermore, in the later Restoration comedy, saturated with sexual intrigue and adultery, there are even characters called Wittol and Horner in William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1672).

Adultery continues to be a major theme in literature and popular culture. Yet the open and direct uses of cuckold, wittol , and cornuto have steadily diminished in currency. Cornuto is no longer regarded as an English word, wittol is virtually obsolete, and cuckold is not commonly heard. Despite the shame of the condition, the term has not become a swearword, nor has it ever been a legal term. At most it is usually uttered sotto voce , or behind the deceived husband’s back, the condition being alluded to by some euphemism or circumlocution. The fact of cuckoldry, rather than the word, is the most likely grounds for a crime of passion.