The Absolved Riddle

T HE RIDDLE of the Duchess in Women Pleas'd has to do with the Freudian question: What does woman want? That's the question whose subject is the answer to which, as Freud might have guessed without saying, there is no question, which is why the riddle has to be not answered but-as Fletcher has the Duchess say, not once (or intentionally) but prophetically twice-absolved (2.5.112-13),1 as if it never should have been asked. Her daughter's lover Silvio labors and travels through untold cities, consulting Diviners, Dreamers, Schoolemen, deep Magitians, all of whom-like the current discourse on the pleasures of the feminine text-give severall meanings (4.1.3-4), as we might expect from the oracular hermeneutics of an absolutist age. For it is an age which constructs an arcane stability against contingency in a chaos of consultation, as Jonathan Goldberg observes of the ideological mystifications of King James.2 But here is the answer brought back by Silvio, the absolution of the riddle in this curious play

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• “A Wild Shambles of Strange Gods”

  Andrea Solomon, Andrea Remi Solomon•Historicizing Christian…•1998

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