The name is absent

The Elizabethan Imogen         3

Posthumus’ insistence that women are full of evil thoughts
and that they are more lustful than men is a theme which is
dwelt upon at length in King Lear, not only by Lear himself,
who asserts that the “simpering dame ... that minces virtue,
and does shake the head to hear of pleasure’s name” has yet a
“riotous appetite,” but also by Edgar, who speaks of the
“undistinguished space of woman’s will.”¹¹ Similarly, one of
William Bercher’s characters states that all men think that
“wymen be more desyrous of camall lust then men.”¹² The
Praise and Dispraise of Women, in speaking of women, puts
it even more bluntly thus: “For it seemeth that they are more
bome and bredde vppon the earth, for to enterteine and
nourish Voluptuousnesse and Idlenesse, then for to bee
trayned vp in matters of wayght and importaunce.”¹³ Indeed
in Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois, Monsieur goes so far as to say
that no one can imagine the hidden evils in women’s
thoughts:

Oh, the unsounded sea of women’s bloods,
That when ^,t is calmest, is most dangerous!
Not any wrinkle creaming in their faces
When in their hearts are Scylla and Charybdis,
Which still are hid in dark and standing fogs,
When never day shines, nothing ever grows
But weeds and poisons, that no statesman knows:
Not Cerberus ever saw the damned nooks
Hid with the veils of women’s virtuous looks.¹⁴

The substance of Posthumus’ diatribe against women is
rather succinctly put as follows by the Reverend William
Whately in his Treatise of the Cumbers and Troubles of Mar-
riage: “Yea, an hundred, and a thousand faults, doe he hid in
the painted box of the bosome of euerie of Euahs daughters.
Good bringing vp may conceale them; good instructions may
diminish; and good nature, for a while, may keep them
under, and keepe them secret,”¹⁵ but they are still present

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