Skip to main content

In Much Ado About Nothing, act 1, scene 1, Benedict talks about having a recheat winded in his forehead and a bugle in an invisable baldrick, and...

You're right on the money. Benedick is convinced that any woman he married would cheat on him. This would make him a cuckold, and cuckolds were indeed depicted as having horns. (Incidentally, there was another term for cuckolds in the Renaissance: wittol. The distinction is that cuckolds didn't know about the adultery, while wittols knew and tolerated it.)


Let's hit the language first, because Shakespeare's having a lot of fun here. A "recheat" is a hunting call, played on a bugle. It's sounded to call back the hounds tracking the prey. So not only is Benedick creating the image of physical horns on his forehead, the universal symbol of cuckoldry, but he's also implying that he would need to ask his wife to stop cheating on him. That would not be a fun conversation.


A baldrick is a belt that goes over one shoulder and holds something that needs carrying on the opposite hip. A hunter would hang his bugle on his baldrick. So suddenly Benedick has transformed the bugle from a metaphorical horn to a metaphorical penis. If his wife disappeared from home to hang out with other men, Benedick wouldn't have a place to stick his bugle, hem hem. It's interesting to note that by comparing women to baldricks, he might be suggesting they surround their lovers, wrap them up, and hang all over them. He's clearly not into the clingy types.


Note too that Benedick is using this whole extended metaphor to associate love with hunting ... which might give us a bit of insight into why his love life hasn't been very successful.


Now to "cuckold" itself. The work comes from "cuckoo," the bird that notoriously lays its eggs in other birds' nests so they will do the work of raising its chicks (the official term for this is "brood parasitism"). The connection is pretty obvious—the cuckold's wife is out getting impregnated by other men, so the cuckold will be stuck raising a child that's not biologically his.


The explanation behind the horns is a little harder to track down. A popular theory is that they represent deer horns. Male deer fight to establish dominance; the winner gets the girls. The cuckold, like the defeated deer, has no chance to mate. Another theory suggests that the horns hark back to Roman soldiers. Victorious soldiers were apparently given horns to wear as a symbol of their glory. But soldiers are away from home a long time, and, well, what's a girl to do while she's waiting? 


A pretty wild speculation comes from the fact that, back in classical antiquity, when people castrated roosters (to make them capons—better for eating), they also cut off the roosters' spurs (back claws) and grafted them to their combs (the crests on top of their head). The poor creature would look like it was walking around with a floppy set of horns. Cuckolds, like capons, are castrated in the sense that they're not able to reproduce. No baldricks available for their bugles.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Is there a word/phrase for "unperformant"?

As a software engineer, I need to sometimes describe a piece of code as something that lacks performance or was not written with performance in mind. Example: This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. Based on my Google searches, this isn't a real word. What is the correct way to describe this? EDIT My usage of "performance" here is in regard to speed and efficiency. For example, the better the performance of code the faster the application runs. My question and example target the negative definition, which is in reference to preventing inefficient coding practices. Answer This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. In my opinion, reads more easily as: This coding style leads to unmaintainable and poorly performing code. The key to well-written documentation and reports lies in ease of understanding. Adding poorly understood words such as performant decreases that ease. In addressing the use of such a poorly ...

A man has a garden measuring 84 meters by 56 meters. He divides it into the minimum number of square plots. What is the length of the square plots?

We wish to divide this man's garden into the minimum number of square plots possible. A square has all four sides with the same length.Our garden is a rectangle, so the answer is clearly not 1 square plot. If we choose the wrong length for our squares, we may end up with missing holes or we may not be able to fit our squares inside the garden. So we have 84 meters in one direction and 56 meters in the other direction. When we start dividing the garden in square plots, we are "filling" those lengths in their respective directions. At each direction, there must be an integer number of squares (otherwise, we get holes or we leave the garden), so that all the square plots fill up the garden nicely. Thus, our job here is to find the greatest common divisor of 84 and 56. For this, we prime factor both of them: `56 = 2*2*2*7` `84 = 2*2*3*7` We can see that the prime factors and multiplicities in common are `2*2*7 = 28` . This is the desired length of the square plots. If you wi...

What warning does Chuchundra issue to Rikki?

Chuchundra, the sniveling, fearful muskrat who creeps around walls because he is too terrified to go into the center of a room, meets Rikki in the middle of the night. He insults Rikki by begging him not to kill him. He then insults him by suggesting that Nag might mistake Chuchundra for Rikki. He says, "Those who kill snakes get killed by snakes."  He issues this warning to Rikki not to help keep Rikki safe but as a way of explaining why Rikki's presence gives him, Chuchundra, more reason to fear.  Chuchundra starts to tell Rikki what Chua the rat told him--but breaks it off when he realizes he might be overheard by Nag. He says, "Nag is everywhere, Rikki-Tikki." Rikki threatens to bite Chuchundra to get him to talk. Even then, Chuchundra won't overtly reveal any information. But he does say, "Can't you hear, Rikki-Tikki?" This is enough of a clue for the clever mongoose. He listens carefully and can just make out the "faintest scratch-s...