568 guido ruggiero
them—to accept the adult responsibilities of marriage. he rejects, how-
ever, this ideal obligation and sets off a complex plot which eventually
sees him happily married at the end of the play (as comedies require),
but nicely, given aretino’s irreverent wit, to a young, feminine male page
clearly in his early teens, rather than a woman. suggestively, although a
few characters in the play refer to his evil ways and the price that he
should pay for his sins, everyone, including those who initially criticized
his commitment to sodomy, applauds and accepts his happy male/male
wedding at the end and the implicit conclusion that his sodomy will con-
tinue without embracing the ideal of adult male sexuality.51
That happy ending, however, suggests a somewhat less happy outcome
for renaissance marriage and the discussion of marriage which opened
this essay. The illicit world of sex, although it included a wider range of
related activities beyond prostitution and sodomy in Venice,52 for all its
perceived service in containing (even in a way disciplining) youthful and
dangerous sexual desires and passions, also clearly created problems for
the placement of sex within marriage. for when upper-class husbands in
their late twenties or early thirties married very young women in their
early teens, virgins and sexually inexperienced, their often extensive expe-
riences in the illicit worlds of the city created a very unequal sexual rela-
tionship. That experiential gap could be and was seen at times as serving
the ideal of sustaining an unequal relationship between passive wife and
active husband sexually. from that perspective, his experience and her
lack thereof placed him firmly in command of the situation. nonetheless,
it was an ideal and a reality that had the potential to create significant
problems for both partners, problems often revealed in both literature
and archival documents. first, of course, many men may have found mari-
tal sex with inexperienced and very young brides not satisfying as sex—
51 for a discussion of this comedy and its Venetian dimensions, see ruggiero, Machiavelli
in Love, pp. 19–40, and for the use of the term gioventudini to refer to sodomy, p. 30; for a
compelling reading of the comedy from a different perspective, see also deanna shemek,
“aretino’s Marescalco: Marriage Woes and the duke of Mantua,” Renaissance Studies 16
(2002), 366–80.
52 Perhaps most notable in this area are concubinage, which with its marriage-like
attributes for some fell in a gray area where the licit and the illicit overlapped, along with
a series of sexual activities with clerics which there is not space to discuss in this essay.
The latter is discussed in detail in ruggiero, Boundaries of Eros, pp. 70–88; the former has
recently been studied for Venice by Jana Byars, “concubines and concubinage in early
Modern Venice” (Ph.d. diss., Pennsylvania state university, 2006), which is scheduled to
be published in a revised form as a book by Toronto university Press, and by ferraro,
Marriage Wars, pp. 105–18.