Inconstancy: Changeable Affections in Stuart Dramas of Contract

Abstract

Early seventeenth-century English writers did not invent the idea of inconstancy but they wielded it with a particular urgency. Writers from Raphael Holinshed to John Bulwer wrestled with a classical system of humors that categorized northerners as essentially changeable, giddy, “facile, light, and inconstant as women.”¹ The English incapacity to hold themselves “styl,” as Andrew Boorde puts it in 1547, was proverbial and it placed the English at an inherent disadvantage with other nations, disposing them to unpredictable changes of opinion and making them too quarrelsome to settle disputes effectively.² This constitutional inconstancy figures importantly in a variety of discourses in the period: discourses of ethnicity, nation, political organization, medicine, psychology, and domestic life, to name a few. It is part of the larger field of terms for alteratio—the manifestation of passionate alteration—in which physiological and emotional transformations are imbricated in Renaissance psychology.³ Framed in the negative, it anchors neo-Stoic arguments about the need for gentlemanly self-discipline; framed in the positive (as impressibility or adaptability) it is recuperated by anti-Stoic arguments about the virtue of authentic, unstudied feeling.⁴

For now I see inconstancy

More in women than in men remain.

— The Passionate Pilgrim

O the unsounded Sea of women’s bloods,

That when ‘tis calmest, is most dangerous.

— Chapman