Jan Steen, Morning Toilet, 1663

Have you ever heard of a “curtain lecture?” (The above image isn’t actually a curtain lecture. I just liked the image.)

A “curtain lecture” (sometimes called a “bolster lecture”) is a private reprimand given by a wife to her husband. Back in the days when a bed was often a family’s most valuable possession, many were four-poster types with thick curtains. The curtains kept away drafts, and also, according to generations of male writers, allowed the wife to scold her husband in privacy.

I actually stopped at this reference and wondered about it when I recently read Dicken’s Our Mutual Friend:

‘You are just in time, sir,’ said Bella; ‘I am going to give you your first curtain lecture.’

A search for the term in literature calls up dozens of examples, and they go way back. Here’s one from 1640, in the the book Ar’t Asleepe Husband? A Boulster Lecture by Richard Brathwait. Brathwait is going for levity. A wife’s admonitions, he assures the reader, are meant to be dismissed as random background noise :

This wife a wondrous racket meanes to keepe,

While th’Husband seems to sleepe but do’es not sleepe:

But she might full as well her Lecture smother,

For ent’ring one Eare, it goes out at t’other.*

Ha ha LOL. And here are some images of curtain lectures, all of course rendered by male artists.

From Thomas Heywood’s A Curtaine Lecture, 1637 The text says: When wives preach, tis not in the Husbands power to have their lectures end within an hower. If Hee with patience stay till shee have donn. Shee’l not conclude till twyce the glass Hee runn.

1794 (British Museum)

1799 (Lewis Walpole Library)

1824 (British Museum)

late 19th century via Boston Public Library

*As quoted in Sloan, LaRue Love, “I’ll watch him tame, and talk him out of patience”: The Curtain Lecture in Shakespeare’s Othello. Lamb, Mary Ellen, Bamford, Karen, eds. Oral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern Literary Texts. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, Publishing, 2008, p 88.