husband

   Wives appear to have regularly addressed their marital partners as ‘husband’ in the seventeenth century. Shakespeare has many instances of the word being used vocatively on its own, or in phrases like ‘good husband’, ‘gentle husband’, ‘good sweet husband’, ‘my husband’, and so on. In Henry the Fifth Pistol is addressed by his wife as ‘honey-sweet husband’, and seems to think it no more than his due. In The Taming of The Shrew the tinker Christopher Sly awakens from a drunken stupor and is told that he is a lord. His ‘wife’, a pageboy in disguise, enters the room and addresses him as ‘noble lord’. ‘Are you my wife, and will not call me husband?’ says Sly, and adds that only his men should call him lord. Whether modern husbands are less good, sweet, and gentle than their seventeenth-century counterparts is difficult to say, but they are certainly less often addressed in such terms by their wives. ‘Sleepy fat husband’ occurs in The Philanderer, by Stanley Kauffmann, used by an affectionate wife, but more usual today would be ‘hub’ or ‘hubby’.