There is something intuitively problematic about a strategy of compensation in which female sexual appetite is to provide reassurance to early modern males. However neatly plays like Cooke's Greene's Tu Quoque (1611), or Fletcher's Wit Without Money (1614) – or Keep the Widow Waking (1624) – may package the widow's lust as a tool to defuse her challenge to a husband's domestic authority, they do so against the thrust of that other, more common cultural coding of female sexuality: rapacious, irrational, bestial, destructive; a general threat to the rational male order of things, and a private threat to the personal honor of individual men. One might justifiably charge that although my own theory of how various play texts construct a fantasy of male sexual mastery accounts for anxieties of financial and domestic control, it tends to overlook intimations of a different kind of anxiety. When, to win Eudora, Tharsalio of Chapman's The Widow's Tears (1604) must resort to advertising himself as “the most incontinent and insatiate man of women that ever Venus blessed with ability to please them,” capable of making “nine in a night … mad with his love” (2.2.75–77; 87–88), or when in Wit Without Money, Vallentine marches Lady Hartwell off to church with vehement protests of his manhood, would an early modern audience have been able to suppress associations of the kind so vividly laid out by Jonson's Quarlous?