Rashness

Rashness appears as one of Fortune’s chosen advocates in the attempted arbitration over the Duke of Newcastle’s enmity with Fortune. Its defining action is a reckless courtroom intervention: instead of answering the Duchess’s account of the Duke’s conduct, Rashness portrays her defense as insolent ambition and calls on Fortune to visit further misfortune upon the Duke, the Duchess, and their allies. The episode makes Rashness a vivid personification of impulsive, punitive counsel, set against Prudence’s appeal for peace.

Role in the Arbitration

When the Empress’s Immaterial Spirits arrange a hearing, the Duke of Newcastle appoints Prudence and Honesty to speak for him, while Fortune chooses Folly and Rashness. The parties cannot agree on a judge until they settle on Truth. The Duke is absent, so the Duchess speaks for him; Fortune’s own opening case accuses him of choosing Honesty and Prudence over her, scorning her favors, and resisting her power.

Rashness enters after Folly’s speech proves incoherent. Folly and Rashness initially speak over one another so rapidly that neither the assembly nor they themselves can understand them. Fortune orders them to speak singly, and Prudence adds that they should speak wisely as well. Fortune takes that rebuke badly, but then directs Rashness to make its case. The sequence makes Rashness’s defining trait part of the scene’s action: haste first disrupts deliberation, then shapes the substance of the argument.

Accusation and Counsel

Rashness addresses Fortune as her superior and condemns the Duchess for answering without permission. It presents her defense of her husband as a double offense: she has contradicted Fortune and placed Honesty and Prudence above her. Rashness warns that if Fortune allows those virtues to outrank her, people will cease to admire or serve her, and she will be reduced from a deity to a destitute mortal. Its proposed remedy is not adjudication or reconciliation but retaliation: Fortune should inflict as many misfortunes and slights as she can upon the Duke and Duchess and their two friends.

That plea directly opposes the account the Duchess has just given. The Duchess argues that the Duke chose integrity because he could not entrust his reputation to Fortune, who favored neither the honest nor the honorable; she also insists that he remained respectful toward Fortune and sought no injury to her favorites. Rashness does not meet those claims with evidence. Instead, it recasts moral independence as a threat to Fortune’s authority, making punishment serve the preservation of power rather than the resolution of the dispute.

Contrast with Prudence and Outcome

Rashness’s intervention sharpens the hearing’s contrast between revenge and repair. Prudence says that she has come not to make more wounds but to heal those already made, and asks that Fortune and the Duke be reconciled. Rashness urges Fortune to deepen their injuries. Its warning that Fortune may lose worship if virtue is honored also exposes the insecurity beneath its defense of her status: the argument treats ethical regard as a rival to power, not as a standard by which power might be judged.

The plea does not produce a judgment. After Honesty speaks in the Duke’s defense, Fortune refuses to hear Truth’s decision and leaves in anger. Rashness’s counsel therefore belongs to an arbitration that fails to reach its intended resolution. The scene does not establish that Fortune follows Rashness’s recommendation; rather, it shows the recommendation’s punitive logic alongside Fortune’s eventual refusal of the very process meant to settle the quarrel.