Chapter 2 - Transgressive Action: The Impatient Prodigal Husband

Summary

Chapter 2 examines the concept of prodigality and the impulse to seize the moment through the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century prodigal son as a temporally subversive denier of delay. I begin with metatheatrical moments that define the prodigal’s denial of futurity in Shakespeare’s second tertralogy. I argue that the action of the prodigal’s riotous living, which challenges hierarchies of age, is paradoxically figured as a period of delay: it is a rejection of social maturation that threatens to feminise the prodigal as ineffectual. I go on to examine five Prodigal Husband plays that constitute a specific sub-genre of city comedy: Thomas Heywood’s How a man may chuse a good wife from a bad (1601-2) andThe Wise Woman of Hoxton (c.1604), the anonymous The London prodigall (1603-5) and The faire maide of Bristow (1603-4), and George Wilkins’ The miseries of inforst mariage (1605-6). In these plays, we see prodigality enforced by the older generation in order to disempower the young. However, when the prodigal son’s repentance is delayed, and he becomes a prodigal husband, he poses a threat to the stability of the marital unit, and potentially to systems of patriarchal control.