husbandship

Hence his eternal inadequacy, and the withering scorn that accompanies it in the works of Ovid and others: In a sense the cuckold is not simply a failed husband, but an emblem of failed husbandship in general, or, worse yet (and this, I think, is what happens at the hands of Renaissance authors), the cuckold intimates that husbandship can never really succeed on its own terms, as an institution created and upheld by masculine authority.