Cuckolds all a Row

This musical notation and verse from J. Ashton's 1883 anthology presents a bawdy song mocking cuckoldry, a staple subject of early modern satire. The piece belongs to the long tradition of printed humor that predates modern comics—a lineage running from broadside ballads and chapbooks through Hogarth's moral sequences and into the satirical prints of Gillray and Rowlandson. Such prints circulated among both literate and semi-literate audiences, blending word and image to ridicule social pretension, sexual transgression, and marital misadventure. The cuckold figure, humiliated and publicly shamed, recurs throughout this tradition as both comedy and social control, reinforcing masculine honor codes through laughter and degradation.