Were there no women, men might live like gods.

The line is a deliberately provocative, misogynistic epigram: it imagines an all-male world as serene and “godlike,” implying that women introduce disorder, temptation, expense, or emotional turmoil into men’s lives. Read in the context of early modern English satire and city comedy, such a sentiment often functions less as a literal program than as a rhetorical flourish—an exaggerated complaint meant to amuse, sting, or frame a broader critique of courtship, marriage, and social ambition. Even so, the aphorism crystallizes a period commonplace in which women are cast as the source of men’s moral or practical difficulties, revealing the gendered assumptions that underwrote much Renaissance humor.