Gendered Circulation and the Marital Ship of State in Jonson’s The Staple of News

Abstract

n his sermon “The Merchant Royall,” preached in 1607 on the occasion of Lord Hay’s marriage to Honoria Denny and framed as advice for how the couple can achieve a happy marriage, Robert Wilkinson explicates Proverbs 31:14 at length. He asserts that the biblical verse can teach his audience “all the dignity, beauty, duetie of the virtuous wife and holy woman.” This “virtuous” wife, according to Wilkinson, ought to obey her husband as a ship obeys the pilot. Yet he almost immediately confuses the wife’s passive role: he writes that the good wife “is like a shipp indeed, and to nothing so like as to a ship; for shee sits at the sterne, and by discretion as by Carde and Compasse, shapes her course” (7). Wilkinson creates a contradiction, explaining that the wife is like a ship precisely