ABSTRACT
The cuckold's blazon associated the head of household with anxieties of physical and emotional dismemberment an association that, within the context of domestic tragedy, both assumed and sharply satirized prevailing models of the ideal household. The blazoning/dismembering of the cuckold had significant consequences for domestic ideology in early modern England, as domestic literature of the period embraced the axiomatic principle. The dramatic literature of this period, however, very rarely represents a healthy household body; in early modern drama, cuckoldry loomed over representations of domestic life, and the body of the potentially cuckolded husband was often subject to threats of highly symbolic physical violence. From the start of Arden of Faversham, Thomas Arden's suspicion of Alice and her lover, Mosby, manifests itself in a powerful relationship between home and body. Drama materializes what remains imaginative in lyric; by placing the actor's body in the position of the blazoned object, the thrill of potential violence is keener.
