In the first act of the play, Flamineo helps his master, Brachiano, conduct an affair with his sister, Vittoria. In order to allay the suspicions of her husband, Camillo, Flamineo uses a paradox and alludes to recent political events in England:
Wear it i’th’ old fashion: let your large ears come through; it will be more easy. Nay,
I will be bitter. Bar your wife of her entertainment; women are more willingly and
more gloriously chaste when they are least restrained of their liberty. It seems you
would be a fine, capricious, mathematically-jealous coxcomb; take the height of your own horns with a Jacob’s staff afore they are up.
These politic enclosures for paltry mutton makes more rebellion in the flesh than
all the provocative electuaries doctors have uttered since last Jubilee.
Women, Flamineo claims, are more “willing” to be chaste (and to resist the temptations of other men) when they are “least restrained of their liberty.” To Webster’s audience, this logic would have been understood as a paradox, as chastity and “liberty” would have been understood as opposite or contradictory ideals. Further, Flamineo argues that the “politic enclosures” have created more “rebellion” than all the “provocative electuaries” (or aphrodisiacs) created by “doctors.” Here, Flamineo metaphorically compares Camillo’s attempts to keep his wife away from other men to the early modern practice of “enclosing” land, or in other words, of converting previously-public land into private property for the wealthy. Flamineo’s reference to “rebellion” is an allusion to the many revolts by peasants in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, who opposed the practice of “enclosure.” Flamineo, then, suggests that Camillo’s attempts to keep his wife “private” will spur her to rebel against his possessiveness, just as the peasant farmers rebelled against the enclosure of once-public land.
