Fletcher’s Golden Showers

[print edition page number: 213]

John Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed and The Captain are full of women who sexually dominate men with their urine. In fact, at least three of Fletcher’s plays, two-coauthored with Francis Beaumont, involve women emptying or threatening to empty their chamber pots on men in scenes that twenty-first-century readers might register as kinky.^[1] Although these plays feature the subversive trope of sexual domination through urine, they deploy this kinky trope to conservative effect. In The Tamer Tamed and The Captain, women threaten to dump their urine on [214] men who have disrupted the early modern family model by refusing the ideals of procreative and companionate marriage.^[2] In Fletcher’s now-obscure marriage comedy The Captain, the contents of women’s chamber pots are dumped on a male suitor’s head as he stands beneath a window. In dumping urine on him, The Captain’s women incite a confrontation that compels Jacamo, the eponymous captain, to renounce his misogyny and confess his love for Franck, the play’s female protagonist. This scene, which positions women on the top and a man on the bottom, reflects the broader sexual dynamics of the play, at least in the first several acts, which feature multiple instances of women’s sexual dominance of men. Although this event might seem unusual in the context of marriage comedy, The Captain is far from the only play in Beaumont and Fletcher’s oeuvre to feature female characters throwing or threatening to throw the contents of their chamber pots on misogynistic men. Fletcher also uses the chamber pot as a plot device in his better-known marriage comedy and response to early modern shrew-taming literature, The Tamer Tamed. In both plays, communities of women band together to subdue men who threaten contemporary ideals of companionate marriage through their misogyny. Thus, Fletcher’s female characters perform the kinky act of dumping urine on unruly men to discipline them into appropriate domesticity, but once the men submit to their traditional roles, the women embrace roles as submissive wives. In sanctioning the women’s sexual dominance, Fletcher challenges contemporary cultural narratives that paint women’s erotic domination as deviant, but at the same time, the women’s erotic domination ultimately advocates for a view of marriage in which wives remain subordinate to their husbands.

The Chamber-Pot Trope in Shrew-Taming Literature

Fletcher is deeply indebted to other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century popular literature for his use of the chamber pot as a central plot device. Seventeenth-century English ballads cast the chamber pot as a site of erotic dominance. Ballads such as “Poor Anthony’s Complaint” and “Mirth for Citizens” feature wives dominating their husbands with sex and urine. “Poor Anthony’s Complaint” resembles other ballads about scolding wives from the period, in that it features a first-person speaker complaining of his wife’s tyrannies in a familiar arc. He begins by lamenting that she does not allow him sufficient time to finish his dinner, that she serves him scalding broth, that she scolds him while he “rock[s] Bearn in the Cradle,” and most significantly, that she urinates on him as he attempts to sleep. As Poor Anthony lies in bed, his wife intends to “take the pot” to urinate but instead takes a “Leaky Cullender” and “all bepist [him] sweetly,” soaking both him and their bed in her urine and calling him a cuckold when he confronts her.^[3] Whereas “Poor Anthony’s Complaint” only hints that his wife’s urinary indiscretions proceed to sexual improprieties with another man through its allusion to cuckoldry, the speaker of “Mirth for Citizens” identifies his wife’s extramarital affairs as one of his chief degradations. Even more significantly, he connects her adultery with her practice of requiring his service while she uses the chamber pot. The speaker’s wife in this ballad declares her mastery [216] over the household the morning following their marriage, requiring her husband to wait on her and retaliating with a cudgel when he threatens to beat her with a stick. However, even her beatings pale beside the humiliation of waiting upon her and her paramour in their bed as they relieve themselves:

Another thing troubles my head
and grieves me worse than this,
When her Comrade is with her in bed
I must reach her the pot to piss.^[4]

Like “Poor Anthony’s Complaint,” the speaker of “Mirth for Citizens” presents a hyperbolic list culminating in sexual degradation. Although he employs the image of the chamber pot to obvious comic effect, it nonetheless suggests a cultural anxiety that unruly wives might overmaster their husbands with their bodily fluids and lust.

The women’s choice of punishment in the ballads is by no means unusual within the context of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature. Medieval and early modern texts are rich in accounts of women emptying their chamber pots upon men — for disciplinary purposes and otherwise. Socrates’s wife represents the archetype of the shrew in many verse and prose works. Xanthippe appears most famously in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the Wife of Bath’s narratives of the shrewish women in her husband’s book, among them “How Exantippa cast pisse up on [Socrates’s] hed.” In his study of urinary comedy in medieval and early modern texts, Shawn Normandin argues that the Wife of Bath’s example demonstrates medieval fears about women’s speech, fears that are linked to the portrayal of urine as “a convenient sign of female debasement” [217] and “a humorous emblem of female prolixity.”^[5] For Normandin, medieval and early modern writers describe female urination both to acknowledge and diminish contemporary anxieties about women’s bodies since urine occupies a medial position in the hierarchy of excrement that privileges feces and menstrual blood as more revolting substances and therefore more capable of influencing masculine behavior: “The triviality of piss, which rarely achieves the satiric intensity of shit, contains the threat of female treachery by debasing its agents.”^[6] However, if texts such as the Wife of Bath’s prologue nullify female resistance to male authority by trivializing chamber-pot discipline, the comic texts of the English Renaissance seem to reverse this trend. Although plays such as The Tamer Tamed and The Captain cast urine-throwing as a primarily female activity, they contradict the idea that it carries less power than feces-throwing, especially since these plays typically connect the practice to even more taboo sexual desires, such as incest.^[7]

Underlying male attempts to trivialize female “leakiness” is a visceral fear of the uncontained female body, as well as an anxiety that women [218] might weaponize the stereotypes imposed upon them.^[8] In staging the women’s threats to empty their chamber pots upon the men in The Tamer Tamed, Fletcher directly responds to the popular shrew-taming work most influential to his plot, The Taming of the Shrew. In Shakespeare’s version, Petruchio alludes to Xanthippe in listing the qualities of the shrew he would be willing to marry in order to secure a large fortune (Shrew 1.2.65–72).^[9] In comparing Katherine to Xanthippe, Petruchio opens the possibility that a wife will eventually subdue him with a chamber pot, even though his punishment is deferred until Fletcher’s response to Shakespeare’s play. Maria replaces Petruchio’s first wife in the role of shrew so readily perhaps because Fletcher’s characters never name Katherine directly.^[10] She fills the void left by Katherine’s death. Indeed, his first marriage seems to have primed him to submit more readily within his second marriage. As commentators such as Lucy Munro note, Fletcher casts Katherine’s subjugation as much less final than Shakespeare’s ending suggests.^[11] In the first act, we learn that his first wife’s specter continues to haunt Petruchio in his sleep:

the bare remembrance of [her]
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Will make him start in’s sleep, and very often
Cry out for cudgels, cowl-staves, anything,
Hiding his breeches out of fear her ghost [219]
Should walk and wear ’em yet.
(Tamer 1.1.31, 33–36)

Whereas Shakespeare’s Petruchio never threatens Katherine with physical violence, Fletcher suggests that Petruchio resorts to the more conventional shrew-taming methods after starvation and sleep deprivation fail to subdue Katherine entirely.^[12] The explicit violence omitted from The Taming of the Shrew is perhaps imagined here as taking place in the interval between Katherine’s final speech and her early death. Not only does this passage anticipate Maria’s own resolution to wear the breeches within her household, but it also works to justify her preemptive measures of barring Petruchio from his house and placing him under quarantine. When Maria first embarks on her tamer-taming, she does not take pleasure in denying Petruchio sexual satisfaction. She characterizes her plan to delay the consummation of her marriage as “Fasting [her] valiant bridegroom” and denying herself the “delights” and “pleasure” of the bedchamber, her rhetoric mirroring Petruchio’s strategy of taming his first wife in its dual focus on self-denial and fasting the tamed spouse (Tamer 1.2.120–21).^[13] Maria’s compatriot Bianca goes even further in reclaiming Petruchio’s rhetoric when she alludes to the untamed wife as a “free haggard,” or falcon,

Which is that woman that has wing, and knows it,
Spirit and plume — will make a hundred checks
To show her freedom, sail in every air
And look out every pleasure, not regarding
Lure nor quarry, till her pitch command [219]
What she desires …
(Tamer 1.2.150–56)

Here Bianca redefines Maria’s defiance as an expression of freedom rather than of self-denial, stating that the free falcon will disregard her keeper’s lure[s] and desired quarry in favor of her own pleasure and What she desires. After hearing Bianca’s celebration of the free haggard who looks after her own pleasure, Maria enters into the spirit of the taming more fully, imagining herself “Turn[ing] him, and bend[ing] him as [she] list” and “mould[ing]” him to such a degree that even “aged women” without “teeth and spleen may master him” (Tamer 1.2.173–75). Her tamer-taming endeavor, which begins as a necessity, becomes a source of pleasure.

Unlike the shrew-taming ballads of the period, The Tamer Tamed sides with the disobedient wife who must resort to urinary violence to assert her agency. At the start of the play, Maria’s docility runs counter to the tempestuousness of Petruchio’s erstwhile wife, so much so that Petruchio’s friends express pity at the prospect of an obedient woman further flattened by a domineering husband. Tranio imagines Maria’s future as Petruchio’s wife in the first scene of the play:

She must do nothing of herself, not eat,
Sleep, say ‘Sir, how do ye’, make her ready, piss,
Unless he bid her.
(Tamer 1.2.45–47)

If she continues in her seeming docility, Petruchio will impose such tight control on her person that he will regulate all of her bodily functions, both alimentary and excretory. In response, she can only answer Petruchio’s expectation of total bodily control down to her piss by weaponizing her body and its products. [221]

Erotic Domination to Restore the Marital Hierarchy

In spite of Maria’s successful rebellion, Fletcher certainly does not present his readers with a progressive view of gender in The Tamer Tamed. After all, his comic resolution magically reverses Petruchio’s declaration of submission. She begins the play as “the gentle, tame Maria” and ends as an obedient wife (Tamer 1.2.75). However, the play allows women to assume positions of sexual dominance in the service of correcting transgressive familial bonds and improper erotic desires. After Petruchio accedes to Maria’s demands at the end of the play, she renounces her former defiance in favor of wifely submission to a husband’s appropriate authority:

As I am honest,
And as I am a maid yet, all my life,
From this hour, since you make so free profession,
I dedicate in service to your pleasure.
(Tamer 5.4.54–57)

After the ramping tricks that Maria enacts throughout the narrative, such an ending allows for a comfortable return to Petruchio’s mastery. In one sense, Maria’s vow upon her honesty and maidenhood, or her continued celibacy, invites the audience to think of the play’s ending as properly the beginning of the marriage.^[14] Now that Petruchio has suffered his comeuppance, he will assert mastery again, albeit in a gentler form and on condition of his continued commitment to companionate behavior. The Tamer Tamed allows Petruchio the last words, as well as the privilege of instructing husbands about the proper way to approach marriage, as he asserts: [222]

I have my colt again, and now she carries,
And, gentlemen, whoever marries next,
Let him be sure to keep him to his text.
(Tamer 5.4.88–90)

Within his formulation, Maria’s rebellion against improperly exercised male authority only facilitates his proper exercise of marital governance, as well as her own appropriate position within the marriage as the colt who carries. However, Maria’s use of the conditional within her own vow clearly recalls the terms of her previous disobedience since she only offers her service on the condition of her husband’s free profession of reciprocal love. She might revert to her previous dominance if he balks at his new role, but she remains fundamentally aligned with the conservative strictures placed on wives.

The Captain uses the chamber pot trope to similar effect, casting Franck, a gentlewoman, in a sexually dominant role only long enough to curb her would-be suitor Jacamo’s misogyny. While The Tamer Tamed positions its principal marriage at the beginning of the drama, with the chamber-pot scene following later, The Captain adopts the more conventional narrative in marriage comedy, staging its marriages at the end. In spite of their differences in narrative structure, both plays punish characters for their transgressive erotic relationships with urinary degradation. In a dynamic that closely resembles Maria’s and Bianca’s interactions, The Captain’s tamers, Franck and Clora, conspire to douse Jacamo in urine when he refuses to believe Franck’s protestations of love. However, the play precedes this final act of domination with a prolonged series of erotic foreplay in which Franck, Clora, and other characters participate. While the chamber pot brings together Franck and Jacamo in a more conventional marriage, the erotic domination leading up to the chamber pot displaces sexual agency onto other characters, particularly Clora. Although Franck accepts that she must dominate Jacamo in order to win him, she derives no enjoyment from her friends’ subsequent [223] order that a chamber pot be poured on his head. On the other hand, Clora takes considerable pleasure first in dominating Jacamo with verbal taunts and later in plotting his urinary humiliation. In the play’s third act, Clora’s brother Fabritio formally introduces Jacamo to Franck and Clora, although Franck has already fallen in love with Jacamo before their first meeting. Jacamo enters into the acquaintance with misogynistic rudeness based on the conviction that no woman could ever find him attractive. While Franck answers his rudeness with polite admiration, Clora answers it with sarcasm and mocking compliments, ordering Jacamo to “be merry,” as it would be a “pitty” for a “faire man of [his] proportion” to “have a soule of sorrow” (3.3.75–76).^[15] When Jacamo becomes angry at what he perceives as Franck’s derision and Clora’s genuine ridicule, Franck finds his anger attractive, and Clora pretends to agree, stating that she “[could] kisse him,” an action that Jacamo carries out later in the play (Captain 3.3.118).

Although Clora assumes the role of misogynist tamer for Franck’s benefit, for her, the role provides its own erotic reward and source of pleasure. The next scene in which she, Franck, and Jacamo meet confirms and justifies her erotic involvement in Franck and Jacamo’s kinky courtship, as well as the erotic involvement of Franck’s brother Frederick. When Jacamo next visits Franck’s house, he declares his love for Franck before kissing her, Clora, and finally Franck’s brother Frederick, as he mistakes Frederick for a “sweet woman” (Captain 4.3.61). After the trio laugh at Jacamo for his mistake, he brandishes his sword at Frederick in a gesture that reinforces the homoerotics of the kiss. Frederick then pretends to be wounded so that the servants will drag Jacamo from the house. As Mario DiGangi argues in his reading of the play, Fletcher in this scene uses the homoerotic disorder of Jacamo’s mistaking Frederick [224] for a woman “as a striking emblem for heteroerotic disorder.” Jacamo’s resultant “humiliation” after the kiss “finally allows him to recognize and accept the sincerity of Frank’s love.”^[16] His humiliation in this scene also anticipates his later urinary humiliation.

Ultimately Clora, rather than Franck, devises the plan that shocks Jacamo into listening to Franck’s declaration of love; she suggests that one of the household maids pour either a bowl of water or the contents of a chamber pot on his head. However, Clora’s brother Fabritio diminishes the women’s erotic agency when he adds his own instructions for how the urine should be gathered. Rather than merely instructing a maid to dump a chamber pot on Jacamo’s head, Fabritio suggests that the maids should gather as much urine from as many women in the household as possible and empty it on Jacamo’s head in order to “anger” him enough to draw him into the house and force him to listen to Franck’s declaration of love:

Take all the women-kind in this house, betwixt the age of one, and one hundred, and let them take unto them a pott or a bowle containing seven quarts or upwards, and let them never leave, till the above named pott or bowle become full, then let one of them stretch out her arme and power it on his head, and Probatum est, it will fetch him, for in his anger he will run up, and then let us alone.
(Captain 5.2.42–49)

Although this passage differs from The Tamer Tamed’s chamber-pot discipline, in that the women actually throw the “watrish humours” on the offending man (Captain 5.3.7), it nonetheless highlights the repeated concern with female community and urinary discipline found in Fletcher’s canon. In both instances, communities of women organize against a man whose misogyny threatens an early modern ideal of companionate [225] marriage, and they punish his hatred by confronting him with one of the bodily fluids most offensive to his misogynistic worldview: their urine. However, Fabritio’s insistence that the urine be gathered by all the women-kind in this house shifts Franck and Clora’s gesture from a kinky register, as it reinforces the fate for which all women are destined and which Jacamo’s misogyny obstructs: procreative matrimony.

Franck, Clora, and Fabritio act according to an “approv’d receipt” for tamer-taming, and Fabritio even prescribes this degrading urine rinse as medicine, suggesting that the women’s watrish humours can treat Jacamo’s unbalanced humors and discipline him into matrimony.^[17] The same watrish humours that elicit Jacamo’s initial anger also cure his aversion to productive marriage, as the women’s urine draws him into the house and Franck’s tears convince him of her devotion. After the maids empty their urine on his head, Jacamo enters the stage lamenting the women’s contempt for him:

I ever knew no woman could abide me,
But am I growne so contemptible, by being
Once drunke amongst ’em, that they begin to throw
Pisse on my head? For surely it was pisse.
(Captain 5.3.1–4)^[18]

What Jacamo takes as contempt for his drunkenness, Franck transforms into a mark of affection and intimacy, watering his pitty with her tears [226] even as the maids water his head with their urine (Captain 5.4.34). Indeed, the plotters render the urine and the tears equivalent, since both substances signal Franck’s authenticity and discipline Jacamo into exhibiting the pitty appropriate in a man (Captain 5.4.35).^[19] The women’s brief expression of dominance only facilitates Jacamo’s transformation into the productive husband and master of his household. Franck’s collaboration with Clora, Fabritio, and the maids intensifies Jacamo’s humiliation, providing an audience to witness his degradation, but it also displaces her dominating gesture onto other agents, particularly Clora, who first derives pleasure from ridiculing Jacomo before receiving his kiss and then finally colludes to dump urine on his head. What may register as kinky and subversive on first glance, partnering with Clora to subdue Jacamo, also allows Franck to slip back into the role of gentlewoman, now settled into a traditional pairing.

While Maria’s pleasure in taming Petruchio differs from Franck’s comparative passivity, she also relies on a community of women to help dominate her lover. As Petruchio prepares to consummate his marriage, his friend Sophocles warns him that Maria and the women have barricaded the men from the house and that Petruchio should not attempt to enter lest he be “beaten off with shame” as Sophocles was with “a waterwork” flying “from the window with” considerable “violence” (Tamer 1.3.89, 92–93). When the women use their chamber pots as ammunition, they mock the early modern patriarchal assumption articulated by Gail Kern Paster in The Body Embarrassed, the “discourse [inscribing] women as leaky vessels by isolating one element of the female body’s material expressiveness — its production of fluids — as excessive.”^[20] They turn the discourse about their bodily excess into a weapon against men who assert that women require the strictures of marriage to exercise control [227] over their bodies. Maria’s improper decision to abstain from consummation directly challenges Petruchio’s marital sovereignty since it delays a crucial portion of the marital contract — the sexual act that cements the bond and promises children.^[21] Sophocles describes her preparations for a siege in terms of the body’s excretory and sexual functions: her “chamber’s nothing but a mere Ostend” with “pewter cannons mounted” in “every window” ready to emit “waterwork[s]” (Tamer 1.3.92, 96–97). This reference to the siege at Ostend denotes the women’s usurpation of military authority, but it might also be read as engaging the bawdy connotations of the Low Countries, given the presence of chamber pots and the “Long tongues” lining the “lower works” (Tamer 1.3.101).^[22] Indeed, the women’s barricade resembles the urinating vulva, as medical literature of the period often likens the clitoris to the tongue and assigns it the same functions as the penis: it contains the urinary passage and imparts sexual pleasure.^[23] Maria’s defiance perverts Petruchio’s expectation of their wedding night as she simultaneously withholds her body from the desired consummation while also challenging her husband’s supremacy by asserting her own sexual mastery and forestalling Petruchio’s ejaculation with the threat of her own. Her armed barricade underscores and corrects the perverse bond that Petruchio forms with her father, illustrated most notably in the men’s conversation prior to the wedding night. [228]

Urinary Discipline and Incestuous Desire

Fletcher’s marriage comedy The Tamer Tamed and Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Captain are idiosyncratic in their juxtapositions of incestuous desire with the chamber-pot trope in early modern literature as evinced by Petronius’s intimate interest in Maria and Petruchio’s impending consummation of their marriage. Petronius’s conversation with Petruchio and his friends before the aborted wedding night rehearses Maria’s urinary punishment of her husband, hinging as it does on images of impotence and sexual defeat. This discussion resembles other comic wedding night ribaldry in that it cements masculine bonds through the ridicule of female sexuality, but it deviates in at least one important respect — Maria’s father joins the other men in teasing Petruchio about his daughter’s impending deflowering. Indeed, Petronius allies himself with Petruchio at Maria’s expense, taking vicarious enjoyment in the prospect of the marriage’s consummation. After Petruchio solicits wagers upon his sexual prowess, Petronius chivvies him to the marital bedchamber in a manner that suggests his own pseudo-incestuous interest both in his daughter’s erotic desire and his son-in-law’s sexual prowess, stating:

Will you to bed, son, and leave talking?
Tomorrow morning we shall have you look,
For all your great words, like St. George at Kingston,
Running a-footback from the furious dragon
That with her angry tail belabours him
For being lazy.
(Tamer 1.3.18–22).

This description of Petruchio / St. George running from Maria / the dragon raises the question of why Petronius is horrified at his daughter’s later rebellion when he finds the imagined prospect of her sexual domination [229] of her husband so titillating. As many critics observe, Petronius aligns himself with Petruchio’s misogynistic perspective of marriage, but this passage suggests an even more specific motive for his misogynistic identification with Petruchio.^[24] Even before she demonstrates her disobedience, Petronius’s address evinces a desire to cut Maria from the family structure — to acquire Petruchio as a “son” in a way that allows him to disown (de-sire) his daughter’s monstrous femininity, figured here as the dragon that threatens Britain’s nationhood and the patrimonial order. When he compares Maria to a monster, he not only follows a long tradition of identifying the dragon with disordered female desire but also anticipates the later terms through which he articulates her disobedience.^[25] In placing the phallic “tail” on his daughter instead of her husband, he unknowingly invokes the “monstrous” desire for sexual authority that Maria expresses in her threat to release urine upon Petruchio and his cohorts.^[26] Petronius can take pleasure in his pseudo-incestuous imaginings of Maria’s insatiable desire precisely because he refuses [230] to identify with her on a filial basis — because he casts her instead as wife to his son.

When Maria subverts the men’s expectations of what form her sexual dominance will take by threatening to dump urine on Petruchio and his friends, she redresses this convoluted triad and returns both Petruchio and Petronius to their appropriate roles. Petruchio’s friends unknowingly prefigure Maria’s taming methods in their replies to his arrogant call for wagers about the outcome of his wedding night. The men unsurprisingly fill their wedding-night jocularity with phallic metaphors, emphasizing the penis’s erotic, as well as its urinary, function. Thus, immediately following Petronius’s comparison of Petruchio to St. George, Tranio imagines Petruchio’s defeat at the hands of Maria: his impotency will be such that “any privy saint, even small St. Davy” will be able to “lash him with a leek” (Tamer 1.3.25–26).^[27] Leaving aside the obvious pun upon the size and function of the root vegetable, the metaphor aligns sexual play with urinary discipline, as it evokes leek’s homonym leak alongside the phrase privy saint.^[28] The play’s answer to the men’s inappropriate exchange closely aligns with medical literature of the period. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century herbals prescribed the leek as a diuretic, with some medical texts noting the leek’s impact upon the sexual and reproductive functions in its ability to engender erotic desire.^[29] The pots launched from Maria’s chamber windows likewise act [231] as physic to one of the play’s principal ills, Petruchio’s unnatural alliance with Petronius’s misogynistic order.^[30] In her taming project, Maria realizes the men’s joking predictions of Petruchio’s impotency, but instead of defeating him with her excessive sexual desire, as the men imagine in their previous exchange, she defeats him with a related bodily function, urination. A golden shower becomes the appropriate punishment for failed erotic play, since even the inferior Welsh patron saint Davy can lash Petruchio in this manner. However, Maria substitutes the men’s desired form of sexual dominance for an undesirable form of erotic mastery from their point of view, as it represents a form that will not admit consummation. When Maria decides to delay the consummation of her marriage, she effectively halts her passage from her father’s authority to her husband’s rule, rebelling against her father’s inappropriate desire to lay claim to her sexuality as much as she rebels against Petruchio’s oppressive government. Her scheme to tame Petruchio is successful partly because she remains in limbo between her father’s and Petruchio’s guardianship until the sexual act.

Although Fletcher’s association between incest and urinary dominance is unusual, it is perhaps unsurprising given sixteenth- and seventeenth-century medical theories regarding the composition of semen [232] and urine, both bodily fluids intimately linked with venery.^[31] Although Fletcher does not feature any consummated acts of venery in relation to the plays’ representations of incestuous desire, contemporary remedies for the effects of excessive lust nonetheless reveal a peculiar logic to the plays’ urinary discipline. Particularly in The Tamer Tamed, the women answer the men’s inappropriate expressions of desire with the threat of an emptied chamber pot. Just as incestuous desire threatens to displace seminal fluid into an inappropriate vessel (the daughter), the women threaten to retaliate with a related bodily fluid.

However, The Captain’s subplot reveals the limits of how far women can go in expressing sexual dominance, even as it associates a similar chamber-pot trope with another incestuous dynamic. While The Tamer Tamed’s father exhibits inappropriate interest in his daughter’s sex, The Captain’s father becomes the object of his daughter’s erotic desire. When the widow Lelia, the subplot’s female protagonist, summons a sea captain famed for his bravery to her house to seduce him, she discovers that she has summoned her father. Instead of recoiling at the revelation of his identity, Lelia continues her attempts to seduce him without knowing that Angilo, one of her suitors, witnesses the exchange. Angilo has just bribed Lelia’s maid to hide him in her chamber after she answers his knock at the door. The maid warns him that Lelia will retaliate against him for dissuading his friend from pursuing her by emptying the contents of her chamber pot on his head:^[32] [233]

And if it shall happen that you are in doubt of these my speeches, insomuch that you shal spend more time in arguing at the dore, I am fully perswaded that my Mistris in person from above, will utter her mind more at large by way of urine upon your head, that it may sink the more soundly into your understanding faculties.
(Captain 4.4.28–33)

The maid deems urine upon [his] head an appropriate punishment for the transgression of interfering in Lelia’s sexual pursuits. However, Lelia’s incestuous desire takes precedence as a more serious offense, and he escapes punishment to become her father’s ally in marrying her off to a respectable suitor. Together, they negate her incestuous desire and expressions of sexual dominance by matching her with an appropriate husband.

Ultimately, the conservative messages of both plays limit the extent to which the women characters can express sexual dominance within marriage. The Tamer Tamed’s men, who fantasize about Maria dominating Petruchio through her voracious sexual appetite, but who cannot accept Maria’s chosen mode of dominance, demonstrate the limitations of female sexual dominance in the play’s register. The men in The Captain’s subplot override the maid’s fantasy of Lelia dumping urine on Angilo’s head and circumvent Lelia’s previous sexual agency by forcing her to marry. Clora, who takes pleasure in dominating and humiliating her friend’s suitor Jacamo, enters into marriage with the man who had been unfaithful to her, becoming, in his words, a “piece of” him (Captain 5.4.19). While the play justifies Clora’s and Franck’s domination of Jacamo as facilitating his transition into productive matrimony, the final act removes that justification as both the misogynistic Jacamo and the unfaithful Julio have assumed the roles of productive husbands by the end of the play. Similarly, the final act of The Tamer Tamed characterizes Maria’s previous acts of dominance as tricks, temporary measures designed to subdue Petruchio’s misogyny. After securing Petruchio’s [234] vow to renounce his tyranny, Maria promises that she will “Never” again resort to her “old tricks,” finally submitting to his authority and his “pleasure” (Tamer 5.4.52, 57). Even as Fletcher intensifies the subversive potential of the women’s golden showers by juxtaposing them with aberrant forms of sexuality such as incest, he dampens that potential by authorizing a return to female submission.