ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the midwife's open, "on-the-record" narratives were not the only tales to trigger male anxiety; she also appears in early modern texts as obscuring a child's parentage and a wife's sexuality. The crowd-pleasing trope of the loose-lipped wife and her drunken female gossips crossed generic boundaries and infiltrated all families from the highly sacred to the lowly and common. In the Chester Play of the Deluge, even Noah—the patriarch handpicked by God to carry on the human race—has a wife who drinks heavily with her gossips before boarding the ark, refusing to do so without her female friends. In The Winter's Tale, an irate Leontes calls Paulina a "midwife" when she presents him with his queen's daughter and insists upon his paternity. Paulina was not present at Perdita's birth, but because her story of Hermione's innocence contradicts the king's tale of an adulterous wife and a bastard daughter, the epithet and its hostile context suit her.
