2 The Rice Institute Pamphlet
For there’s no motion
That tends to vice in man, but I affirm
It is the woman’s part: be it lying, note it,
The woman’s; flattering, hers; deceiving, hers;
Lust, rank thoughts, hers, hers; revenges, hers;
Ambitions, covetings, change of prides, disdain,
Nice longing, slanders, mutability,
AU faults that may be named, nay, that heU knows,
Why, hers, in part or aU; but rather, aU;
For even to vice
They are not constant, but are changing still
One vice, but of a minute old, for one
Not half so old as that. TU write against them,
Detest them, curse them.5
In thus venting his personal feelings upon all womankind,
Posthumus is very much in fire tradition of the anti-feminist
Uterature; writers of this stamp insist that women are known
for their deceit. In Nicholas Ling’s compilation of universal
wit, for example, we find that “Womens sorrowes are eyther
too extreame, not to bee redressed, or else tricked vp with
dissimulation, not to be beleeued. Who findes constancie in a
woman, findes all thinges in a woman.”0 Again, one of Robert
Greene’s characters, Philador, warns a lover that “Womens
faces are not the Christals of truth, nor their words Gospell:
what she hates outwardly, she likes inwardly, and what
shee thrusts away with one finger, shee will pull againe with
both her hands.”7 Even in The Faerie Queene we learn of
“the wyles of wemens wits,”8 and that “womans Subtiltyes
can guylen Argus.”9 The well-known Schole house of women
insists, further, that women are particularly adept at dissem-
bling with their husbands; that no matter how well you
dress them or how easy you make life for them, they will find
some other men to amuse them, and if a child comes,
Loke they saye, on thyne owne face
Beholde well, bothe nose and eye
Nature it selfe, the father wyll trye.1°