Play: A Cure for a Cuckold

Overview
A Cure for a Cuckold is a dark comedy attributed to John Webster and William Rowley, first performed around 1625. The piece intertwines sharp satire with sly theatrical devices, balancing witty dialogue and farcical episodes against a persistent undertow of moral ambiguity. It treats marriage and masculinity as social performances, exposing how pride, insecurity, and reputation warp private affections into public spectacle.

Structure and Tone
The play runs two parallel plotlines that mirror and comment on one another: one plot leans toward broad comic invention and physical humor, the other edges into more ironic, sometimes bitter observation. Both employ deception and role-playing, disguises, tricked confidences, staged scenes, to probe what it means to be cuckolded and what a supposed "cure" for jealousy might look like. Humor frequently turns on the vernacular and the rhythms of city life, while moments of darker insight puncture the laughter and leave a lingering unease about the costs of social honor.

Main Narrative Arcs
One storyline follows a jealous husband whose fear of being cuckolded consumes his reason. His friends and would-be counselors propose theatrical remedies designed to expose or correct imagined infidelities. Those contrivances, arranged meetings, false witnesses, and contrived temptations, generate comic misunderstandings even as they spotlight the husband's fragile authority. The other plot traces a pair of young lovers and their social entanglements; their quarrels and reconciliations play out against wider concerns about trust, reputation, and the marketplace of desire. Each arc stages tests of fidelity that answer to different cultural logics: one tests male honor through spectacle; the other measures female constancy within shifting economic and social pressures.

Characters and Comic Mechanics
Characters range from earnest lovers and jealous husbands to scheming servants and bawdy city gallants, each playing distinct roles in the theatrical machinery of deception. The authors exploit contrasts between high-minded rhetoric and low practical jokes, allowing lower-status figures to engineer situations that expose the pretensions of their betters. Physical comedy, wordplay, asides to the audience, and sudden reversals create a rhythm that keeps the action brisk, while occasional tonal shifts remind the audience that mockery can have real consequences for those mocked.

Themes and Social Critique
Jealousy, fidelity, and the politics of trust form the play's central concerns, but it treats these themes with more irony than moralizing. The "cure" offered for cuckoldry is never purely restorative; instead it reveals how attempts to police intimacy often produce the very disorder they claim to remedy. Questions of gender intersect with issues of class and commerce: women's reputations are fragile and frequently regulated by men's anxieties, while men's honor depends on performances that may be as theatrical as any stage trick. The result is a comedy that exposes the social theater of domestic life.

Legacy and Reading Today
The work's mingling of rough comedy and pointed satire makes it a revealing artifact of early seventeenth-century drama, showing how playwrights could use humor to address anxieties about marriage, status, and public perception. Its ambiguous ending resists tidy resolution, leaving audiences to decide whether harmony has been truly restored or merely rehearsed. The play remains of interest for its energetic stagecraft, its willingness to court discomfort alongside laughter, and its incisive portrayal of how social esteem and personal affection can be manipulated by artifice.