[7] The wife of Bath's first lesson in the art of domestic government is a panegyric upon the advantages of sturdy lying, in which Pope has not gone beyond the original:
Ye wise wives that can understand
Thus should ye speak, and bear them wrong in hand;
For half so boldely can there no man
Swere and lie as a woman can.
"To bear them wrong in hand" is to affirm wrongfully or falsely. The phrase "to bear in hand" for "to asseverate," was still frequently used in the reign of Charles II.
[8] The wife of Bath accuses her old husbands to their faces of having delivered this kind of railing lecture to her when they had come home at night "as drunk as mice." The drunkenness and the railing are alike inventions of her own, but she appeals to her niece, and Jenkin, the apprentice, to bear witness to the truth of her assertions. The version of Pope is not so vivid, so lively, or so close to nature as the original, and he has nearly passed over one of the most prominent characteristics of the speech. When the wife of Bath taunts her husband with the reproaches she pretended he had heaped upon her, she intersperses her repetition of his objurgations with abusive and disdainful names by way of comment upon his monstrous sentiments. Old caynard or villain, Sir old lecher, thou very knave, lorel or worthless fellow, old dotard schrewe or sinner, old barrel full of lies, Sir old fool, are some of the appellations by which she marks her opinion of the doctrines she fathers upon him. After reciting his alleged complaint, that women concealed their vices till they were married, she adds that the maxim is worthy of "a schrewe," or scoundrel. When she imputes to him the declaration that no man would wed who was wise, or who desired to go to heaven, she follows it up with the wish that thunder and lightning would break his wicked neck. When he is charged with having said that there were three things that troubled earth, and that a wife was one of them, she hopes that the life of such a villain will be cut short. When she taxes him with quoting the proverb that a house not water-tight, a smoky chimney, and a scolding wife drove men from home, she retorts upon him that he is himself a scold, and intimates that his years are an aggravation of the vice. This is not only natural as the sort of scurrilous language which the wife of Bath would have used if the drunken invectives had been real, but was part of her plan for bringing her husbands into subjection. Her indignant recriminations were intended to browbeat them into meekness.
[9] She enlarges in the original upon this device, which was one of her capital resources. She quotes the proverb, that he first grinds who comes first to the mill, and upon this principle, when she had done wrong, she began by attacking her husband;
Or elles I had often time been spilt.
The poor man thus suddenly assailed stood upon the defensive, endeavoured to vindicate his innocence, and was heartily glad to hold his tongue on condition of receiving forgiveness for faults he had never committed.
[10] By pretending that she went out to watch her husbands she got the opportunity for indulging in freaks and jollity with her youthful friends.
Under that colour had I many a mirth.
For all such wit is given us of birth;
Deceipt, weeping, spinning, God hath give
To women kindely while they may live.
And thus of one thing I avaunte me,
At th' end I had the bet in each degree,
By sleight or force, or of some maner thing,
As by continual murmur or chiding.
"Kindely" is by nature.