4 - Horns of plenty: cuckoldry and capital

Summary

Plenty's horn is always full in the City.

Dekker and Ford, The Sun's Darling

Down the Thames from Renaissance London, approximately three miles east of St. Paul's and on the Surrey shore, in a location which came to be known, variously, as Cuckold's Haven or Cuckold's Point, stood a monument to the ostensibly unavoidable consequences of marrying a woman. Though some distance from the City proper, the priapic marker of Cuckold's Haven – a makeshift arrangement of wooden pole topped by animal horns – participated in an odd form of literary engagement with the drama of early Jacobean London, coming to serve, paradoxically, as an urban icon. From its earliest recorded appearance in the diary of Henry Machyn in 1562, Cuckold's Haven provided London's playwrights with a popular local reference point. Edward Sugden's dictionary of topographic allusions in English Renaissance drama cites over a dozen references to the locale, most of them in comedies directly concerned with London or London characters. In plays like The London Prodigal (1604), Northward Ho! (1605), The Isle of Gulls (1606), and The Travels of the Three English Brothers (1607), Cuckold's Haven constitutes the equivalent of a geographical punch line. In Eastward Ho! (1605), for example, Security, Winifred, and Quicksilver – a trio of unscrupulous city adventurers who have set out for Virginia – wash ashore at that humiliating location.