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Dealers in hole-sale: Representations of Prostitution on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stageTrish Thomas Henley

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THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

DEALERS IN HOLE-SALE: REPRESENTATIONS OF PROSTITUTION

ON THE ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN STAGE

By

Trish Thomas Henley

A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2007

UMI Number: 3282617

32826172007

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by ProQuest Information and Learning Company.

The members of the Committee approve the dissertation of Trish Thomas Henley defended on April 9th, 2007.

_________________________ Bruce Boehrer

Professor Directing Dissertation _________________________ W. Jeffrey Tatum Outside Committee Member _________________________ Celia R. Daileader Committee Member

_________________________

David Johnson Committee Member _________________________ Gary Taylor Committee Member _________________________ Daniel Vitkus Committee Member

Approved: _________________________ Ralph Berry, Chair, Department of English _________________________ Joseph Travis, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ...............................................................................................................v

INTRODUCTION. WHAT LIES BENEATH: MIMESIS, THEATRICAL TRANSVETITISM, AND THE PROSTITUTE STAGED...........................1

Theatrical Mimesis......................................................................................4 The Early Modern Gaze..............................................................................8 The Prostitute Staged ..................................................................................17 1. MEDIEVAL AND TUDOR ATTITUDES TOWARD PROSTITUTION....28 The Early Modern and Postmodern Prostitute............................................28 Catholic Saints, Protestant Martyrs, and the Crux of the Material Body ...33 Saintly Whores............................................................................................40 The Whore of Babylon................................................................................55 2. THE MATERIAL CONDITIONS OF THE EARLY MODERN PROSTITUTE.............................................................................................59 Feminists, Sex, and Whores—Oh my! .......................................................60 English Law and Prostitution: A Brief History...........................................65 The Material Conditions of Elizabethan Prostitution .................................75 Geography, the Theaters, and Prostitution..................................................79 3. “THEY DO BUT BUY THEIR THRALDOMS”: MARRIAGE AS PROSTITUTION........................................................................................82 Early Modern Marriage Contracts ..............................................................83 Everyone’s Price Is Written on his Back ....................................................86 Nuns and Prostitutes ...................................................................................91 Isabella’s Silent Consent? ...........................................................................104 4. “I THINK THEY THINK ME A VERY LADY”: SOCIAL-CLIMBING AND THE PROSTITUTE ..........................................................................106 Velvet Women Within ................................................................................108 Ride and be Ridden.....................................................................................118 Selling Yourself ..........................................................................................121 The Market as Dangerous Fantasy..............................................................126 5. “CRACKED IN THE RING”: CHANGEABLE PROSTITUTES AND THE LONDON MARKETPLACE .....................................................................129 The Prostitute as Market Allegory..............................................................130

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Dirty Money ................................................................................................134 6. DESDEMONA UNPINNED: PROSTITUTES ON PARADE ON THE RESTORATION STAGE...........................................................................150 Enter the Whore ..........................................................................................161 The Interpellating Mirror ............................................................................166 REFERENCES ................................................................................................170 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...............................................................................191

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ABSTRACT

This study focuses on the representation of prostitution on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage.

After delineating the historical, religious, and juridical contexts of medieval and early modern

whoredom and prostitution, this study provides a close reading of representations of prostitution

in several late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century plays, including works by Christopher

Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton and Ben Jonson. Arguing that the theatrical

convention of transvestitism allows pre-Interregnum playwrights to use the sexual ideology of

whoredom as an analogy, the dissertation traces the playwrights’ use of prostitutes to indict

various “social ills,” from the chaotic proto-capitalist market to the class-climbing of the

middling sort. The study concludes by claiming that these analogies are foreclosed when the

Restoration actress takes the stage. Once the female body inhabits these roles, these roles are no

longer analogous; instead, the staged prostitute is limited to the embodiment of the patriarchal

nightmare of uncontrolled feminine sexuality.

v

INTRODUCTION

WHAT LIES BENEATH: MIMESIS, THEATRICAL TRANSVESTITISM, AND THE

PROSTITUTE STAGED

This project began as an inquiry into the theatrical analogy between the prostitute and the

marketplace in early sixteenth-century city comedies. After reading Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair

and Middleton’s A Chaste Maide in Cheapside, I expected to find a fairly homogenous

representation of courtesans and prostitutes as metonymic of the proto-capitalist market.1 The

terms of comparison seemed obvious: both the prostitute and goods in the market circulate; the

prostitute is her own commodity, allowing for a critique of usurious market practices as

unnaturally productive; like the theater, the prostitute might represent a debased market

microcosm where what is sold is seemingly without “real” value.2 Though I certainly found

plays where the prostitute worked in exactly the manner I expected, I also discovered plays

where the staged prostitute exposed hypocrisy and double standards in early modern culture,

such as the exchange of women between men in licit marriages. Even within the city comedy, a

genre overtly concerned with city stereotypes and economics, the representation of prostitutes

does not function simply as a moralistic condemnation of the unnaturally propagative and

usurious market nor is the prostitute limited to an embodiment of the patriarchal nightmare of

uncontrolled female sexuality. Instead, playwrights employ the prostitute in a variety of

metaphoric analogies, analogies that are not always indifferent to the plight of women in general

or even the prostitute specifically.

Certainly, all early modern representations of the prostitute, even the most sympathetic,

reiterate misogynist sexual ideology. The prostitute represents the prodigious example of

1 Throughout the beginning of this introduction I am, for the sake of clarity, using our modern connotations of a “courtesan” as women who exchange sex for material gain or higher status and “prostitute” as one who exchanges sex for monetary gain. These “categories” though are not stable, even by modern definitions. In the Webster’s New College Dictionary, the courtesan is described as “a prostitute; esp. a mistress of a king, or a man of wealth or nobility,” while the OED defines “courtesan” as “a court-mistress; a woman of the town, a prostitute” (n2). Thus, though our connotations seem to imply a clearer delineation, the denotations define a courtesan as a type of prostitute. The difference in both the denotation and the connotation is simply one of class and number of customers, a fact that will become clearer in later discussions of the prostitute. For the early modern prostitute, these categories are even more thoroughly elided. Later in this chapter, I will discuss in more detail the early modern terminology of prostitution. 2 For an insightful comparison of theater and prostitution, see Joseph Lenz’s “Base Trade: Theater as Prostitution” ELH 60:4 (1993): 833-55.

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whoredom, and in the playwrights’ various denunciations, they make use of the prostitute’s

ability to express insatiable appetite, moral degradation, the contaminated body, and the devil’s

helpmate. On the stage, though, the convention of theatrical transvestism prevents the staged

prostitute from being simply a mirror of unbridled feminine appetite. The cross-dressed boy, I

will argue, allows the staged prostitute a metaphoric flexibility.

This study utilizes cultural materialism, performance theory, and feminist theory:

performance theory because my argument gives performance primacy over text and provides

extensive speculation about the difference the sexed body makes in the play’s female roles;

materialism because I attempt to make visible the “real” prostitute, to foreground the experiences

of the women represented, though we have no direct access to the prostitute’s voice. Both

performance and the early modern prostitute are ephemeral. The closest we come to hearing the

voices of actual prostitutes are the transcripts of the ecclesiastical and civil courts, but even these

voices, like the voices on the stage and the voices in the pamphlets, are performed by male

ventriloquists, translated through male scribes and contextualized by the (male) courts officials’

descriptions of the women’s crimes and punishments. In addition, these women represent only a

fraction of the working women as both courts focused their attentions on those of middling and

lower rank. Bridewell Court was particularly concerned with controlling the lower class and the

women charged in Bridewell exhibit the cultural preoccupation with controlling the lower class.

Thus, courtesans and prostitutes who catered exclusively to those of higher rank are rarely

featured in these courts. Though the prostitute’s voice is only an echo, I have attempted to

amplify it whenever possible.

This study is feminist because even though numerous critics and historians highlight the

differences between early modern sexual ideology and our own, the figure of the prostitute, both

actual and represented, exposes frightening similarities between early modern and postmodern

cultural configurations of women. The prostitute, then as now, functions as the extreme example

of whoredom meant to induce all women to be “good girls.” In addition, I argue that current

critics’ insistence on reading the Galenic one-sex model as mostly uncontested and dominant

reveals their own misogynist blind spots. The one-sex model conceives of sex as a spectrum,

with the potentially perfect male on one end and the flawed female on the other. Female-sex

organs are imagined as inverse mirrors of the male organ. The sex organs fail to become fully

expressed male organs because the female body lacks the heat to force the organ's development.

2

Past readings tend to read the one-sex model anachronistically, as an earlier version of Freudian

penis envy. This stress of the one-sex model has repercussions for attempts to theorize the

spectator’s reaction to the boy actor. A focus on Galen’s model places the boy actor at a mid-

point on the sexual spectrum, half way between the perfect male and defective female. Such a

model places extreme stress on gendered behavior and signs, such as hair and clothing, to

perform sexual difference. The reliance on the one-sex model slants the spectator’s focus

toward the imagined female body the boy enacts, rather than a polymorphous eroticism where

the spectator is free to fantasize about the body beneath, the body performed or even the

amalgamation of the two bodies.

If we consider the one-sex model as one of many competing sexual ideologies, some of

which demand a clear line between male and female, then the boy is not, or not only, halfway

between the feminine and masculine; instead, the possibility of seeing the boy as a male body in

drag becomes possible. What I argue for is a model of cross-dressed theatricality as larvatus

prodeo, as the self-reflexive mask that, like the play-texts themselves, calls attention to itself as a

rehearsal of femininity on a male template. The implications these distinctions hold for a reading

of staged prostitution are two-fold. First, the theatrical depiction of the prostitute does not simply

exist as an interpellation of female spectators; instead, the performance of the prostitute can

make use of misogynist sexual ideology to interrogate various social and economic issues and

can even critique patriarchy. This latitude in meaning has the effect of lessening the female

character’s power to name the female spectator “whore” (though certainly they are named as

such elsewhere, for instance in the anti-theatrical tracts). Second, when the Restoration actress

embodies these same roles, these interrogations are foreclosed. Due to the actress’s elision with

the prostitute, the characters become overly determined. Like the origin they copy—the actual

prostitutes—these characters and the actresses who play them serve as a warning to men about

uncontrolled feminine appetite and an impetus to women to remain silent, chaste, and obedient.

The whore on stage overshadows the analogous layers of meaning these prostitutes had the

capacity to signal.

This chapter explores the theoretical foundation of my reading of the prostitutes. In this

introduction I argue that the non-naturalistic, transvestite theater generates a theatrical mimesis

where the difference between the copy and the original remains visible, rather than obscured.

My point is not that the boy actor is a stable sign; instead, I argue for a parallactic vision of the

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boy, one that enables spectators to fixate on their own predilections, on whatever fantasy most

inflames them, the present (but imagined) male body beneath or the absent female body

represented, or both. I also argue against critics who read the one-sex model as the primary

reason for the boy’s instability as sign. I contend that to privilege the one-sex model over other

concurrent paradigms, as many recent critics have, is to ignore both the early modern body’s

lived experience and the biblical model of sexual differentiation, where a more rigid

configuration of genital difference provides the base for patriarchal subjugation of women. I end

the chapter with an examination of the lived prostitute’s association with filth and decay; her

function, both in the early modern period and our own, as the illicit sexual object which

reinforces normative models of heterosexual coupling; and the terminology of whoredom,

particularly as it relates to the prostitute.

Theatrical Mimesis

Though many of the Elizabethan and Jacobean play-texts reiterate the female stereotypes that the

anti-theatricalists, Protestant polemicists, and others use to reinforce the patriarchal subjugation

of women, the theatrical medium communicates these ideologies differently than other media,

such as sermons or pamphlets. As cultural anthropologist Victor Turner points out, the same

message communicated through various media elicits “a set of subtly variant messages, each

medium contributing its own generic message to the message conveyed through it” (23-4).

Turner complicates the notion of mimesis as a simple reflection, noting that the interplay

between cultural texts and performance frequently produces quite unintended levels of meaning:

“the result is something like a hall of mirrors—magic mirrors, interpreting as well as reflecting

the images beamed to it, and flashed from one to the other” (24). Drama is a medium which is

“capable of carrying and communicating many messages at once, even of subverting on one

level what it appears to be ’saying’ on another. Furthermore the genres are instruments whose

full reality is in their ’playing.’ Their full meaning emerges from the union of script with actors

and audience at a given moment in a group’s ongoing social process” (24). The manner in which

actors (both actors in the professional theater and “actors” in the public arena) enact their

performances affects the message communicated.

Part of the difference in affect (and effect) occurs because of the theatrical performance’s

claims about its relationship to the origin it copies. Realism, as Elin Diamond and others have

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argued, is a particularly virulent form of theater because the difference between the “real” and

the copy is obscured in the enactment. This occlusion troubles feminist theater scholars in

particular because the staged women pretend to embody the “real” of female experience.

Realism, “more than any other form of theater representation, mystifies the process of theatrical

signification. Because it naturalizes the relation between character and actor, setting and world,

realism operates in concert with ideology” (Diamond Mimesis 60-1). As Diamond explains,

realism’s fetishistic attachment to the true referent and the spectator’s invitation to

rapturous identification with a fictional imago serve the ideological function of

mystifying the means of material production, thereby concealing historical

contradictions, while reaffirming or mirroring the “truth” of the status quo.

(Mimesis 61)

Realism reinforces dominant sexual ideology through interpellation of the subject. Its enactment

of “real” women, or women whom female spectators experience as “real,” assists the naming of

the female subject according to gender stereotypes. Accordingly, feminists have argued for

theatrical representations of women emphasizing the difference between the “real” and the

staged. Such representations make visible the way in which gender itself is performed and

highlight the constructed nature of gender categories.

In response to this call for non-realistic theater, feminists have looked to postmodernism

for a model of theater where the female characters do not reinforce patriarchal ideology, a model

that enables an overt critique of gender and sexual categories. Postmodern theater is an attractive

model for a number of reasons: “the decentered postmodern subject implies the dismantling of

the canonical cogito/self, whose inferior other has been traditionally gendered female” (Diamond

Mimesis 59); postmodernism destabilizes the notion of the essential self, which in turn

undermines normative sexual ideology; and it and poststructuralist thought give feminists the

rhetorical tools to disrupt such categories, thus exposing the historically specific nature of sexual

ideology.

Feminist theater scholars tend to view the two primary, though in some ways

oppositional, models of theatrical mimesis, those of Plato and Aristotle, as patriarchal in nature,

and they are particularly interested in subverting these mimetic models.3 In both Plato and

3 For a concise discussion of the patriarchal nature of the Platonic and Aristotelian models of mimesis, see Sue-Ellen Case’s Feminism and Theatre (1988) Chapter One, “Traditional History: A Feminist Deconstruction” esp. pp. 5-19 and Elin Diamond’s introduction, pp. i-xvi, in Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater (1997).

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Aristotle, the real is phallogocentric: “the epistemological, morphological, universal standard for

measuring the true is the masculine, the universal male” who represents the origin, the

normative, in the sexual binary (Diamond, Mimesis 58). The patriarchal mimetic model is

recapitulated by both Freud and Lacan. The basis for penis-envy is the girl’s realization that she

is not the mirror image of the male; she lacks the male organ. This conception of gendered

subject formation, like the mimetic models, represents men as the “real” and women as the

mirror of the real. Luce Irigaray points out that the female mirror is necessary to the male’s

formation of ego; this ego must narcissistically bolster its own importance in order to sublimate

the fear of death’s dissolution of the self. Irigaray argues that “woman will be the foundation for

this specular duplication, giving man back ’his’ image and repeating it as the ’same’” (54). The

woman must show “contempt for her difference” in order to “facilitate the repetition of the

same” (54). Irigaray argues that “through ’penis-envy,’ [the woman] will supply anything that

might be lacking in this specula(riza)tion. Calling back, now and forever, that remainder that

melts into the depths of the mirror” (54).

Irigaray elides the Platonic configuration of mimesis, with its denigration of the copy,

with psychoanalysis’s mimetic model of gendered subject formation. She calls this model of

female subject formation “mimesis imposed” (59-60; also qtd. in Diamond, Mimesis 59). For

Irigaray, the female hysteric represents the woman whose own identity and desires have been

“castrated” by the law of the father (60). Woman has been forced into mimetic mimicry of the

male. The male ego requires the woman to mirror him; she is inferior as she is merely the copy.

In Irigaray’s configuration of Freud and Lacan, it is the male ego, not a natural psychic

phenomenon, which forces “penis-envy” upon the female subject. The hysteric, for Irigaray, is

the suffering female subject, who must play the part the male ego has assigned her. The phallic

order, “the master-signifier,” configures the hysteric, “that privileged dramatization of feminine

sexuality” as the “bad” copy to the “good” copy the (male) origin represents (60). The phallic

symbolic order must denigrate the hysteric and reveal it to be a mere representation, rather than

any (female) origin (60).

The hysteric, though, has disruptive potential. In Irigaray’s reconfiguration of Plato’s

cave, she imagines the cave as theater, where the origin is shown to be “already mimicry, a

representation of repetition. Hence mimesis without a true referent—mimesis without truth”

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(Diamond, Mimesis 64). For feminist theater historians this disruptive potential can be seen in

postmodern theater, or in any theater that is non-realistic. Early modern theater is decidedly not

postmodern theater, but there are common elements, places for potential disruption. One of many

non-realistic elements in pre-interregnum English theater was the performance of female

characters by boy actors. In our modern transvestite performance, the drag show, the drag queen

self-consciously controls her own representation of gender, both visually and acoustically. She

usually chooses between three modes of mimicry: the iconic female, where she plays a well-

known female figure; a self-crafted female persona, where the persona is either an amplified

version of the “real” actor or a character piece she has written; or the “’gender-fuck’ persona,” a

conscious blending of stereotypically male and female characteristics (Bateman 40).4 The queen

then performs the chosen role in one of three ways. She lip-syncs, thus appropriating a

recognizable female voice; she impersonates a female, creating a stereotypical or hyperbolic

female “voice”; or she constructs a bi-gendered or ambi-gendered persona, whose physical

characteristics encompass the masculine/feminine binary while paradoxically substantiating a

third, undefined category. All three performance choices emphasize and challenge the societal

pressure to conform to conventional models of gender.

The transvestite boy does not choose his model of representation. The boy actor relies

upon his training, the playwright’s script and the collaborative theater experience—the interplay

between the boy and his on-stage companions—to shape his performance of femininity. The

playwright constructs the representation; the boy embodies it. The playwright decides whether

his female characters will mimic cultural stereotypes or resist them. However, as Turner points

out, performance allows for multitudinous meanings, even for a subversion of “what it appears to

be ’saying’ on another level.” As he notes, the “full reality is in their ’playing.’” Though the

early modern theater, unlike the drag show, does not exist in order to demonstrate the cultural

construction of gender, it certainly, as many other critics have argued, destabilizes early modern

constructions of gender and enacts a polymorphous eroticism.5 Anti-theatrical polemicists

4 For a discussion of drag performance options, see David Bateman’s “’Performing Femininity’ On Stage and Off: Confronting Effeminaphobia through Drag Performance” in Canadian Theatre Review 109 (2002): 38-41. 5 For discussions of the cross-dressed boy actor, desire, and sexual differentiation, see the following: Will Fisher’s Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (2006); Jean E. Howard’s “Crossdressing, the Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England” in Shakespeare Quarterly 39:4 (1998), pp. 418-40; Stephen Orgel’s Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (1996), esp. “The Performance of Desire” pp. 10-30; Michael Shapiro’s Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage (1994), esp. 15-

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hysterically rant about the theater’s magical ability to transform genders and inflame a desire so

intense that any available sex object will do.6 In addition, some of the performance options are

the same: fully grown men may have played the part of the libidinous widow or older women in

the comedies; the boy actors did draw attention to both the male bodies underneath and the

imagined female bodies; and, of course, they also played them straight, attempting to obscure the

mode of performance.7 We, of course, do not have any visual record of these performances, so

we are unable to state for certain how the boys played the prostitutes or how the audience

reacted. But whether they played the prostitute as the hyperbolic female or not, the very nature

of the performance allows for the prostitute’s deconstructive potential. While the staged

prostitute cannot transcend the sexual ideology that smears the original she represents, she can

skew the mirror, reflecting back an image that indicts culture as her image is itself indicted.

The Early Modern Gaze

Theater is a mimetic art, but the mimetic sway theater holds over its audience differs from

culture to culture, from performance to performance, and, indeed, from spectator to spectator.

Theater’s reflection of the “real” varies according to a given culture’s mimetic models, theatrical

conventions, and audience expectations. Performance presents the world back to the spectators,

but some performances emphasize the difference between the “world” and the performed copy,

while others attempt to subsume difference by presenting the copy as the world, as

indistinguishable from the “real.” Spectators’ responses to and interpretations of these

performances differ, based on class, gender, age, temperament and a myriad of other factors. 62; Vern and Bonnie Bullough’s chapter “Playing with Gender: Cross Dressing in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries” in Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender (1993), pp. 75-93; Peter Stallybrass’s “Transvestitism and the ’body beneath’: Speculating on the boy actor” in Desire on the Renaissance Stage (1992), pp. 64-83; Lisa Jardine’s Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (1983), pp.6-36. 6 For an overview of anti-theatrical tracts, see Jonas Barish’s The Antitheatrical Prejudice (1981). Also see Laura Levine’s Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-theatricality and Effeminization, 1579-1642 (1994). Levine’s argument is particularly important to the discussions of female contamination which follow. Levine argues that both the anti-theatrical tracts and the plays themselves betray a “full-fledged fear of dissolution” (4). 7 Critics argue about whether or not the audience noticed the boy beneath the dress. Stephen Greenblatt, for example, believes that because it was conventional, audiences did not pay attention to it (Shakespearean Negotiations (1988), p. 88), while Laura Levine (correctly) points out the anti-theatricals’ fixation on the practice (Men in Women’s Clothing [1994]). For me it seems obvious that audiences noticed. The playwrights call attention to what is underneath the skirt, there are jokes that are reliant upon the audiences’ recognition of the boy, and there were various other performances where women were used are performers (guild performances, court masques,

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The two primary mimetic models in the early modern period are, of course, those of Plato

and Aristotle.8 Plato denounces the poet as an imitator at “three removes” from the origin, one

who merely deceives the naïve reader when he holds up a mirror to nature (Book X 326-341).

The anti-theatricalists apply Plato’s concern with imitative poetry to the theater.9 In

Histriomastix (1633), William Prynne’s diatribe against plays, actors, playwrights, and

spectators, he expresses concern about theater’s counterfeit nature:

If we seriously consider the very forme of acting Playes, we must needs

acknowledge it be nought else but grosse hypocrisie. All things are counterfeited,

feined, dissembled; nothing really or sincerely acted. Players are always

counterfeiting, representing the persons, habits, offices, callings, parts,

conditions, speeches, actions, lives; the passions, affections, the anger, hatred,

cruelty, love, revenge, dissentions; yea, the very vices, sinnes, and lusts; the

adulteries, incests, rapes, murthers, tyrannies, thefts, and such like crimes of

other men, of other sexes, of other creatures; yea, oft-times of the Divell himselfe,

and Pagan Divell-gods. the whole action of Playes is nought else but feining, but

counterfeiting, but palpable hypocrisie and dissimulation which God, which men

abhorre: therefore it must needs be sinfull. (author’s emphasis; sig. X3v)

In Prynne’s eyes, theater’s representation of the world is degraded by the base imitative nature of

the plays and the players. Like Plato, he fears what these false representations induce in the

imaginations of spectators.

Aristotle’s mimetic model presents imitation as a tool for teaching virtuous behavior.10

This model provides the backbone of the defenses of literature and theater. Philip Sidney, in

Defense of Poetry (1595), defines poetry as “an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termed it in his

word mimesis, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth—to speak

touring European companies). See, for example, Brown and Parolin’s Women Players in England, 1500-1660 (2005). 8 Though Artistotle’s Poetics was not published until the mid-sixteenth century (and even then it was available only in Latin and Italian), Horace’s Ars poetica was widely available and had assimilated Aristotle’s notion of mimetic action (Vickers 11-12). 9 For a general overview of Platonic anti-theatricalism, see Jonas Barish’s “The Platonic Foundation” in The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice (1985), pp. 5-37 and Arne Melberg’s “Plato’s Mimesis” in Theories of Mimesis (1995). 10 It is interesting to note that one of the defenses for theatrical cross-dressing is that as long as the boys are portraying the vices of whores, the cross-dressing provides a moral lesson and is not immoral (translated from the Latin and paraphrased in Binns 96). This is the argument provided by John Case in his 1585 commentary on Aritstotle’s Ethics (ibid. 96).

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metaphorically, a speaking picture—with this end, to teach and delight” (sig. C2v). The

Aristotelian model also figures in Thomas Heywood’s defense of theater, An Apology for Actors

(1612):

If we present a Tragedy, we include the fatall and abortive ends of such as commit

notorious murders, which is aggravated and acted with all the Art that may be, to

terrifie men from the like abhorred practices. Either the vertues of our Country-

men are extolled, or their vices reproved. [We do this] either animating men to

noble attempts, or attaching the consciences of the spectators, finding themselves

toucht in preventing the vices of others. If a morall, it is to perswade men to

humanity of good life, to instruct them in civility and good manners, shewing

them the fruits of honesty, and the end of villany. (sig. F4v)

Sidney’s “speaking picture,” though not originally referencing the theater, provides an apt

metaphor for the stage. The trope of “copy as mirror” figures prominently in both Plato and

Aristotle and is a ubiquitous image in early modern literature and drama. Texts place a mirror

before the reader; the text-as-mirror functions both as a mirror of the world and also a mirror

whereby readers can see themselves, recognize their faults in others, and correct those faults in

themselves.11 The mimetic mirror in book titles did not simply reflect the observable world. As

Herbert Grabes notes, textual mirrors could reflect an ideal, reveal the future, or project a

writer’s imagination (39). In these mirrors, though, the reflection is frequently warped. The

copies of the world produced in the texts highlight particular aspects of the origin they reflect—

an ideal, a hidden future, the author’s fancy; they emphasize or skew one particular aspect of the

origin. Like the King James Bible’s translation of 1 Corinthians 13:12, “For now we see through

a glass, darkly; but then face to face,” these metaphoric glasses, these mirrors, only reflect

imperfectly. When we theorize these mirror metaphors, we tend to forget the material reality of

early modern mirrors, a reality which dictates how the reader or spectator “reads” the metaphor.

Flat glass mirrors did exist, but they were expensive and difficult to transport from glass-making

centers, such as those in Venice (Billing 141).12 The mirrors with which the majority of the

11 For a discussion of four basic ways in which the literary trope worked, see Herbert Grabes’ “A Typology of Works Bearing Mirror-Titles” in The Mutable Glass pp. 38-63, esp. p. 39. 12 For deliberations on early modern mirror technology and the implications this has for the mirror metaphor, see Adam Max Cohen’s “Shakespeare’s Hall of Mirrors” pp. 151-70 in Shakespeare and Technology (2006); Christian

10

population was familiar were the convex glass mirrors and tin-plated mirrors, both of which

warped reflections (Billings 141). Contemporaneous visual art sometimes represents this

distortion as in Parmigianino’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” (1524), where the self-portrait

reproduces the round, convex mirror’s grotesquely enlarged reflection of the artist’s hand.

On the early modern stage, the mimetic mirroring of nature also presents a copy with a

difference. The early modern stage was not naturalistic or realistic in nature. The actions of the

characters did not have to be consistent with a psychologically motivated subject; historical

figures wore Elizabethan and Jacobean garb, not historically accurate costumes; play texts called

attention to their own constructedness; and most significantly for this study, female characters

were enacted by male bodies. What difference the boy’s body made in the spectators’

interpretations of performance has been hotly debated. Any theoretical speculation about the

boy’s enactment of gender must first determine how the boy’s body itself signified and then

answer how the addition of the fetishes of female gender affected the body’s ability to signify

“woman.”

Certainly, for English theater-goers, the boy actor on the Elizabethan and Jacobean public

stage was the norm.13 This does not mean, however, that the male body went unnoticed, and

spectators saw only the fetishes of gender worn by the actor. Actors relied on prostheses to

materialize gender on the stage, but this did not erase genital difference nor does it mean that

audiences believed the boy actor to be female while they were wearing the costume.14 Will

Fisher notes that early modern culture saw the signs of sexual differentiation not just in genital

difference, but also in various body features, such as the texture of a person’s hair and the

amount of hair on the body (Materializing 1-2). Fisher, like many theorists before him, looks to

early modern stories of sexual metamorphoses for some of his support. These stories, he notes,

list changes not just in the genitalia, but also in the timbre of the voice, the quality and length of

Billing’s “The Distorting Mirror” pp. 137-59 in Refiguring Mimesis (2005); Arthur F. Kinney’s “Shakespeare’s Mirrors” in Shakespeare’s Webs (2004), pp. 1-33. 13 While performers on the Elizabethan and Jacobean public stage were all male, the audiences had been exposed to female performers in other performance venues. Certainly, women danced and acted in the masques and were seen when continental companies performed at court. Even those of lower rank, though, could have seen female performers. Stephen Orgel notes that in the early sixteenth century there are records of women performing in pageants and guilds and women performed as singers in the 1630s (Impersonations 1-11; esp. 4-5). Also, see the introduction to Women Players in England, 1500-1660 (2005), pp. 1-21, eds. Pamela Allen Brown and Peter Parolin.

11

hair on the head, and the amount of facial hair (Materializing 1-17). What these descriptions

argue for is a culture where the sex/gender, nature/culture dichotomies are not firmly in place

and where, as Fisher points out, “prostheses,” among which Fisher includes “beards, hair,

codpieces and handkerchiefs[,] are both integral to the subject’s sense of identity or self, and at

the same time resolutely detachable or ’auxiliary’” (Materializing 26). What these descriptions

do not do, though, is reveal a culture where there is no genital differentiation or where the sexual

demarcation between male and female bodies is unreadable and must rely exclusively upon

gendered behavior. Sex is defined, and genital difference still has meaning in this differentiation.

As Fisher acknowledges,

by calling attention to the role of the beard and the hair in these sexual

transformations, I do not mean to downplay the importance of the genitalia or to

imply more generally that they were not crucial for determining an individual’s

gender. On the contrary, if we think of physical features as ’weights’ on a scale,

then genital morphology was clearly a massive weight, and may even have been

’heavier’ than all the other features combined” (9).

Fisher’s prosthetic-gender argument speaks to subject formation, to the way in which things

added to and deleted from one’s person might help constitute subject identity; the argument also

demonstrates the way in which one could be an effeminate male or masculine female. While

Fisher’s configuration of early modern sexed identity is convincing and more nuanced than many

others who use the one-sex model as their theoretical base, his recapitulation of the stories of

sexual metamorphosis as proof of his theory is problematic.

Critics who repeat these stories of sexual metamorphoses frequently use them to argue

that early moderns universally believed in the ability of one sex to morph literally into another.

In order to make this argument, critics read the one-sex model as the homogenous model of

sexual differentiation. This belief in literal sexual metamorphosis is, of course, a logical one for a

culture that believed in a spectrum of sex, rather than dimorphic sex, where the imperfect, female

Other served to define the male as perfection, providing nothing more than the flawed reflection

of the male. Ideology, however, is rarely logical, and in this instance, critics have given the

model much more weight than did early modern English culture.15 One of the most frequently

15 For concise critiques of current criticism’s overstatement of the one-sex model’s pervasiveness, see Patricia Parker’s “Gender Ideology, Gender Change: The Case of Marie Germain” in Critical Inquiry 19 (1993): 337-64 and Janet Adelman’s “Making Defect Perfection: Shakespeare and the One-Sex Model” in Enacting Gender (1999), pp.

12

quoted sections of Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex (1990) is the Marie/Germain Garnier story in

which a young French girl is reported to have suddenly sprouted herself a penis as she worked up

a sweat chasing pigs (126-7).16 (This is also the story Fisher uses.) This story was first recorded

in Ambroise Paré’s Deux livres de chirurgie (1573), then published by Paré in Des monstres et

prodiges (1573).17 Montaigne mentions the story in his travel journal (September 1580) and

repeats it in the 1588 edition of Essays, in “On the power of imagination” (1:21; 111).18 (The

essays, though, were not available in England until 1603, and the travel journals were not

published for another one hundred and eighty years [Parker 341].) Since Laqueur’s rendering of

the story, critics have recapitulated it ad nauseum as proof that English culture at large believed

in the genital homology of Galen’s one-sex model, where the female genitalia are the imperfect

mirror to the perfect male member.19 Current criticism’s repetition of the one-sex model

obscures the competing explanations of sexual ideology.20 It ignores early sixteenth-century

humanists who were already questioning Galenic medicine and refuses to acknowledge the

influence of Vesalius (1514-64) and other anatomists who displayed the body for others to se

Some of these early anatomists were particularly concerned with rebutting Galenic thought a

with emphasizing sensory proof as the basis for speculations on the body, including speculati

about sexual difference. According to Jonathan Sawday,

e.

nd

ons

23-52. For a list of critics who have used the one-sex model as the primary basis for arguments regarding early modern sexual differentiation, see Adelman, n. 7, pp. 43-4. 16 Stephen Greenblatt in Shakespearean Negotiations (1988) makes use of the story before Laqueur (80-1). 17 See Patricia Parker’s “Gender Ideology, Gender Change: The Case of Marie Germain” in Critical Inquiry 19 (1993): 337-64, n. 2 for publication history. 18 All quotes and translations from Montaigne’s Essais taken from The Complete Essays, trans. M.A. Screech (Penguin 1999). 19 Patricia Parker in “Gender Ideology” notes that critical repetitions of the story “situate[s it] within a model of 'the defectiveness of women, their failure to reach nature’s goals: a penis’” and use the story to describe “a teleology of gender seen as characteristic of the Renaissance as a whole” (339). Parker points out that Europe was already debating the idea of woman as an incomplete male before the one-sex model’s decline in the seventeenth-century (340). She goes to demonstrate how Montaigne’s own use of the story reveals an anxiety about male impotence, rather than proof of male superiority and female lack. Adelman points out that the medical treatises themselves held competing ideologies and models and were not nearly as influential as critic’s usage of the one-sex model implies. 20 For an outline of competing sexual ideologies, see Janet Adelman’s “Making Defect Perfection: Shakespeare and the One-Sex Model” in Enacting Gender (1999), eds. Viviana Comensoli and Anne Russell, pp. 23-52.

13

Vesalius and his contemporaries [. . .] in their urge to overturn Galenic authority,

stressed the primacy of ’ocular evidence’ in their explorations of the body. The

important difference between their undertakings and those of classical authority,

they continually claimed, was that, unlike Galen and those who followed Galen,

they had seen the body with their own eyes. (26)

By ignoring the one-sex model’s contentious relationship with other competing ideologies,

critics create a culture in which sex is always a sliding scale; it anachronistically “proves”

Freud’s model of “penis envy.” The one-sex model is a particularly attractive model for those

theorizing about the boy actor’s polymorphous sexuality, but total reliance on this model

neglects ideologies simultaneously promulgated—ideologies where sexual differentiation must

be clear. For example, it obscures the biblical model of sexual differentiation, an equally virulent

sexual ideology, and one which depends upon the clear demarcation between male and female.

Anti-theatrical tracts frequently bring up biblical passages that forbid both sexes from attempting

to resemble or behave like the other sex. The various biblical injunctions against the polling of

women’s hair and the wearing of the clothes of the opposite gender, reiterated in all the anti-

theatrical tracts, have been generally viewed by literary critics as an example of the importance

of gendered behavior to solidify sexual difference because of the genital homology present in the

one-sex model.21 These readings, though, ignore both the chain-of-being model and the biblical

mandate of women’s subjugation. Both of these models make manifest a universe ordered by

God, where one’s place in it, both socially and sexually, is, according to these models, inherently

stable. While these models are not explicitly motivated by genital difference, clear sexual

differentiation is necessary for the models to remain coherent.22

More problematically, this story has been used to claim that English early moderns

believed that sexual transformation—specifically from female to male, rather than the reverse—

was a physical possibility, rather than an imaginative possibility. This is an attractive reading

because it emphasizes the way in which our own dimorphic model of sexual differentiation is

21 Laura Levine, in Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-theatricality and Effeminization, 1579-1642 (1994) points out that Jonas Barish has characterized the anti-theatricalists as believing in a stable, unified self. Levine contradicts this position by noting the myriad examples where these writers seem neurotic about the theater’s ability to enact a metamorphosis on the spectator, in particular by the theater’s ability to emasculate the male viewer. 22 I am not arguing that social or even sexual differentiation was always stable. Only that these models demand this implicitly.

14

itself a construct, a culturally specific reading of bodily difference. The reading, though, is a bit

naïve. For one thing, there are several components of this Marie/Germain story that are rarely

noted. Firstly, Ambroise Paré’s text, characterized by Laqueur as “a collection of clinical tales

and observations” (126), is not exactly a medical treatise; instead, it is one of a rash of texts

figuring human monstrosity.23 Of the Marie/Germain story, Greenblatt writes, “the prodigious is

of interest because it reveals the natural. After all, such spectacular change merely repeats or

represents the normal development of males through the healthy operation of bodily heat”

(Shakespearean 81). Greenblatt’s reading, however, assumes the one-sex model to be pervasive,

and it also disregards early moderns’ lived experience of the body, a body which had rarely

experienced (or even witnessed) such a profound sexual metamorphosis. These stories are

among the early modern versions of urban (or rural) myth. As Jody Enders points out in Death

by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends, what underlies urban legends is a cultural fear

(xix-xxx). The prodigious example of the female morphing into the male provides an apt

imaginative and metaphoric warning to women to adhere to the prescribed gender codes and

exposes the male fear of effeminization, of being contaminated by the female. It is worth noting

that there are no stories of men literally becoming women. Paré felt the need to explain why

women could transform, but men could not: “Now since such a metamorphosis takes place in

Nature for the alleged reasons and examples, we never find in any true story that any man ever

became a woman, because Nature tends toward what is most perfect and not, on the contrary, to

perform in such a way that what is perfect should become imperfect” (On Monsters and Marvels;

qtd. in Parker 339). The anti-theatricalists, though, rehearse this neurotic fear of feminine

contamination again and again.

In both the attacks and defenses of theater the spectators’ impressionism figures

prominently. The belief in the ability of the “speaking picture” to influence its viewer is

predicated upon the power early moderns give the imagination. This power arises in part from

the way in which visual input worked upon the humoral body. In particular, the spectator’s

humoral composition determines how potent the theatrical spectacle will be. The imagination,

23 For the popularity of such texts, see Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston’s “Unnatural Conceptions: The Study of Monsters in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France and England,” Past and Present 92 (1981): 20-54. For discussions of how the monstrosity functioned in early modern England, see Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe (2004), especially David Cressy’s “Lamentable, Strange, and Wonderful: Headless Monsters in the English Revolution,” pp. 40-63. Also see “Monstrous Mothers: Property and the Common Law” in Melissa Mowry’s The Bawdy Politic in Stuart England, 1660-1714 (2004).

15

residing in the brain, is inflamed either by spectacle or memory. Wright argues in The Passions

of the Minde in Generall (1604), “the imagination putteth green spectacles before the eyes of our

wit, to make us see nothing but greene, that is serving for the consideration of passion” (51). This

spectacle evokes different levels of response from the viewer:

the diversities of complexions wonderfully increase or diminish Passions: for, if,

the imagination bee very apprehensive, is sendeth greater store of spirites to the

heart, and maketh greater impression: likewise, if the heart be very hote, colde,

moyst, tender, cholericke; sooner, and more vehemently it is stirred to Passions

thereunto proportionated; finally, if one abound more with one humour than

another, he sendeth more fewell to nourish the Passions, and so it continueth the

longer, and the stronger (Wright 47).24

It is this bodily mechanism that anti-theatricalists fear theatrical spectacle will trigger. And,

certainly, their rantings imply that this trigger happens involuntarily. As Laura Levine has noted,

the denunciations of the theaters reveal a “frightening vision that representations can actually

make the things they stand for mimic them—a vision of a kind of mimesis in reverse” (120).

According to the anti-theatrical tracts, the only way to prevent the actor from controlling the

spectator is to avoid the spectacle altogether. What is particularly dangerous is the theater’s

ability to conflate the male and the female in the figure of the boy actor. Levine contends these

fears reveal a belief in a subject that is both without volition and monstrous (16). The obsession

with the effeminized man, she says, exposes the fear that man has “no inherent gender and is

monstrous precisely because of this fact” (19). For the anti-theatricalists, “the hermaphroditic

actor, the boy with the properties of both sexes, becomes the embodiment of all that is

frightening about the self” (Levine 19).

Prynne, for example, concedes that the theater might have its educational uses so long as

the female sign is eradicated. “Academicall” plays, he says, “managed onely by Schollers in

private schooles, and colledges” could be “at least wise tolerable” as long as six “provisos” are

followed (sig. B4r). Two of the six relate to the male representation of women: “that there bee

no Woman’s part” and “that there be no putting on of Womans apparel” (sig. B4r). This

24 The process by which the imagination triggers immoral actions is thus: “the imagination commeth by sense or memorie” and activates “purer spirits” which “pitch at the dore” of the heart. The heart then “bendeth, either to prosecute it, or to eschew it” at which point it “draweth other humours to helpe him” (Wright 45).

16

hysterical phobia, though, is less a result of the one-sex model than it is a fear of feminine

sexuality and its power to effeminize or contaminate the male.25 This fear is exposed not only in

the polemicists’ concern with the boy actor’s sexual power, but also in the cultural construction

of the early modern prostitute.

The Prostitute Staged

Up until now, I have been using the term “prostitute” somewhat anachronistically. The modern

American definition of the noun “prostitute” is a person who exchanges sex for money, but the

early modern use of the word as a noun or verb was not so clearly limited to the economic

dimension of the term. Certainly, women who exchanged sex for money existed in Elizabethan

and Jacobean England, but the way in which culture defined this exchange was slightly different

from our own. It is useful to remember, as Ruth Mazo Karras observed in her study of medieval

prostitutes, that even though the actual practice of prostitution and indeed some of the

terminology may be the same, the connotation and even the denotation of some of these terms

have changed over time (Common Women 10). Karras claims that for medieval European

prostitutes “it was not the exchange of money, or even multiple partners, but the public and

indiscriminate availability of a woman’s body that was the defining feature of prostitution” (10).

For late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century usage of the word, one of the defining features

is still the common access, but it also can be the sale of the body.26 The etymology of

25 Embedded in the anti-theatricals’ fear of the female sign is the fear of the underclass’s inability to resists their bodies’ urges and how sexual spectacle acts on their imaginations The anti-theatricals the audience, comprised mainly of the underclass, do not have enough reason to control their passions. In the mid- and late seventeenth-century, royalist pamphleteers use the sexual ideology of prostitution, as women who are all body without reason, as an analogy for anti-royalists. As Melissa Mowry points out in The Bawdy Politic in Stuart England, 1660-1714, late Stuart polemical texts conflate prostitutes with democratic sentiments, comparing the interregnum parliament to a parliament of common women, all body but no head or a monster with many heads (1-16). 26 Many theorists have unquestioningly applied Karras’ characterization of medieval prostitutes to early modern prostitutes. For example, Cristine Varholy in her 2001 dissertation, Representing Prostitution in Tudor and Stuart England, quotes Karras’ definition, then contrasts it with modern penal code definitions. She offers no speculation on shifts in the early modern definitions. She also defines early modern prostitution as an “older character-based activity,” while modern prostitution is, she writes, “an activity-based activity” (40). This differentiation is, I believe, a false one, as it denies the way in which modern prostitutes are still conceived of as perverse and deviant, though we define the deviance differently: early modern prostitutes were deviant because they had insatiable appetites—for jewels, status, money—while the myth about our modern prostitutes is that they all prostitute themselves for drugs. Yet again this story we tell ourselves is about the women’s inability to control their own bodies. The definitions of both cultures work to obscure the cultural demand for the service and the economic hardship of some of those who offer the service. In other words, in both cultures, the “blame” for the existence of prostitution is displaced onto the prostitute.

17

“prostitute” is Latin. “Prostituta” specifically refers to a female prostitute, while the Latin verb

from which the noun derives means “to place before, expose publicly, offer for sale, prostitute”

(OED a. and n.). In 1611, John Florio includes the Italian definition of the verb, “prostituire,

isco, ito” in Queen Anna’s New World of Words. It is “to prostitute or abandon to euery mans

abusing for money, to play the whore or bawde. Also to practice whoredome or bawderie” (406).

Thus, in Italian, the definition certainly included the monetary exchange.

The English definitions of “prostitute” and “prostitution” sometimes emphasize the

indiscriminate access and sometimes also include the monetary exchange. What the definitions

always highlight is the prostitute’s pollution. Edmund Coote includes “prostitute” in his list of

words at the end of The English School-master (1597).27 He defines the word as “set open for

uncleanness” (sig. M1v). It is unclear whether Coote categorizes the word as a verb or a noun.

He could mean a prostitute is someone who is set open for uncleanness or to prostitute is to set

open for uncleanness. Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabeticall (1604), printed only seven years

later amends the definition to “set open for uncleanesse, to set foorth to sale” (sig. G8r).

Cawdrey’s definition clearly emphasizes the economic exchange between the prostitute and her

john, though this definition does not explicitly reference the gender of the seller or sex as

product: it is not clear who is selling what, but the first clause of Cawdrey’s definition makes

explicit the moral dimension of the sale. Definitions printed only a few years later than these two

add gender specificity: John Bullokar’s An English Expositor (1616) defines the verb, “to

prostitute” as “set to open sale: to offer to every man for money” (sig. H4r) and Henry

Cockeram’s English Dictionary (1623) lists “prostitute” as “to set to open sale, to offer ones

bodie to every man for money” (sig. M1v). Though these last two definitions use the indefinite

third pronoun “one,” the bodies are offered to every “man,” implying a female body. Robert

Greene in A Disputation Between a He Cony-Catcher and a She Cony-Catcher (1592) defines a

harlot as someone “whose quiver is open to every arrow, who likes all that have fat purses, and

loves none that are destitute of pence” (207).

While certainly all of the definitions include the idea that the bodies are open, common,

and indiscriminately offered, they are also bodies involved in an exchange, an exchange that is

characterized as “unclean.” The prostitute, for both early modern culture and our own, embodies

27 I originally searched for all the terms that follow in the on-line Lexicons of Early Modern English database (http://leme.library.utoronto.ca). All future references to the definitifons are found in the LEME, unless otherwise noted. I am grateful to Gary Taylor for bringing the LEME to my attention.

18

the filth and taboo Western culture associates with sexuality, particularly female sexuality.

Georges Bataille explicates the link between “decay and sexuality” (58).28 According to Bataille,

many of our taboos occur as a result of our fear of death, specifically the fear of the self’s

subsumption into nature’s void. Sexual activity is connected to death and decay through its

association with the life cycle (and, thus, the death cycle): sexual activity is itself a forgetting of

the self, a little death. In addition, the organs involved in sexual activity are also involved in

bodily purgation. Bataille writes, “if we view the primary taboos as refusal laid down by the

individual to co-operate with nature regarded as a squandering of living energy and an orgy of

annihilation we can no longer differentiate between death and sexuality” (61). Anthropologist

Mary Douglas also characterizes the idea of bodily pollution, that which taboo protects against,

as a “reflection on the relation of order to disorder, being to non-being, form to formlessness, life

to death” (5). Thus, the policing of women’s sexuality attempts to contain the fear of death.

Bataille and Douglas are fundamental to Julia Kristeva’s configuration of abjection,

which itself is formed as a reaction to traces left by the “archaic mother.” Kristeva credits

Bataille with being the first to link “abjection to ’the inability to assume with sufficient strength

the imperative act of excluding.’ [He] specified that the plane of abjection is that of the

subject/object relationship (and not subject/other subject) and that this archaism is rooted in anal

eroticism rather than sadism” (author’s emphasis 64). Of Douglas’s work, she notes that “filth is

not a quality in itself, but it applies only to what relates to a boundary and, more particularly,

represents the object jettisoned out of that boundary, its other side, a margin” (69).

Female sexuality is therefore doubly contaminated as a sexual body and as the body

which brings forth life. The taboos set in place to ensure female “purity” reinforce the idea of a

stable subject and occlude the eventual movement of all subjects into the non-beingness of death.

Purity is, as Mary Douglas writes, “the enemy of change, of ambiguity, of compromise” (162).

Rituals of defilement also protect against female contamination, here meaning contamination of

culture by the female body. As Kristeva points out, “the defilement from which ritual protects us

is neither sign nor matter. Within the rite that extracts it from repression and depraved desire,

defilement is the trans-linguistic spoor of the most archaic boundaries of the self’s clean and

proper body” (author’s emphasis 73). These archaic boundaries are feminized as they are

28 For an insightful explication of the link between death and sexuality, See Susan Zimmerman’s The Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare’s Theatre (2005), especially pp. 3-6 and 25-89.

19

remnants of the pre-symbolic order. The mother, through “frustrations and prohibitions”

territorializes the infant’s body, “shapes the body into a territory having areas, orifices, points

and lines, surfaces and hollows, where the archaic power of mastery and neglect, of the

differentiation of proper-clean and improper-dirty, possible and impossible, is impressed and

exerted” (72).

For early modern culture, the prostitute’s association with dirt is not just metaphorical: it

is literal, a fact demonstrated by the early modern definitions of the word “prostitute.” “To

prostitute” one’s self or to be a “prostitute” is to be open to an unspecified uncleanness. This

openness has particular implications for a culture that believed in the humoral body. Gail Kern

Paster compares the humoral body to the Bakhtinian grotesque body (Embarrassed 14). Paster’s

sites of comparison are the body’s liminal places: “the bowels, the belly, the genitalia, the

excretory organs, the mouth—sites of consumption and evacuation, the body’s thresholds and its

sites of pleasure” (14). Like the grotesque body, the humoral body “transgresses its own limits”

and provides early moderns with the model of a permeable body (14). For Paster, this grotesque

humoral body transgressing its boundaries is both the male and female body. Certainly, both men

and women display anxieties about bodily transgression. As Paster observes, these anxieties are

expressed in specifically gendered terms. Early modern culture envisions the female body as

that which can contaminate the male. Medical treatises, play-texts, and anti-polemicists alike

fantasize about a perfect male body, the body that can purge out contaminants, but these texts

also neurotically fear what the female body expresses. The liquids and words pouring from the

female are not conceived as purgation, as a cleansing of the female body; instead, they are bodily

pollutants that can potentially infect the male body. Peter Stallybrass has pointed out similarities

between early modern characterizations of the female body and the Bakhtinian carnivalesque

body; like the grotesque body, the female body is always in danger of overflowing its

boundaries; thus, the need for patriarchal surveillance (Patriarchal 123-27). For early modern

males, the anxiety about the female body is precisely that it is always potentially open to

uncleanness and that this porous body might contaminate the male body. The female body is the

place where dirt and disease reside. The early modern male body fears penetration by the female

body. This penetration can occur as lust engendered by the eye or as a literal invasion of the

diseased female body. The early modern female body is one whose lack of control, whose

libidinous nature and porousness risks contaminating, consuming, or penetrating the male bodies

20

with which she comes in contact. The very signs of her body—the open mouth, the leaky breasts

and sex organs—signify incontinence in all its forms.

This feminine contamination is, not surprisingly, conceived of as an effeminization of the

male. Stephen Orgel writes, “women are dangerous to men because sexual passion for women

renders men effeminate: this is an age in which sexuality itself is misogynistic, as the love of

women threatens the integrity of the perilously achieved male identity” (Impersonations 26).

Femininity is contagious; lust is the contagion; and the visual stimulus of the male imagination is

frequently the causative agent for the contagion. Though the female humoral body is easily

penetrated, male anxiety centers on what leaks out of the replete, female body. Patriarchal

control of women’s sexuality certainly exists as a mechanism allowing men to control the

exchange of women. However, the female body also functions as a site of displacement, where

male anxieties about their own bodies’ permeability, their own unstable subjectivity, can be

rehearsed.

For early modern culture, the prostitute embodies the tendency of all female bodies. Left

to her own devices and without a man’s surveillance, all women are (potentially) prostitutes.

According to various tales, prostitutes became prostitutes for one of two reasons: their libidinous

natures and overarching appetites or their corruption by another (older) woman.29 In Thomas

Middleton’s Your Five Gallants, (1606 or 1607), a brothel-owner lectures a novice prostitute on

her duties:30

We’ll trouble you with no

more; nay, you shall live at ease enough. For nimming

away jewels and favours from gentlemen (which are

your chief vails), I hope that will come naturally enough

to you. I need not instruct you; you’ll have wit, I

trust, to make the most of your pleasure. (1.1.231-236)31

29 There are, of course, exceptions to the common explanation of how prostitutes become prostitutes. The texts which provide some of these exceptions are discussed in later chapters. 30 For play-text dates, all dates will refer to performance dates unless otherwise noted. 31 All citations of Thomas Middleton’s plays are reproduced from Oxford U.P.’s forthcoming Collected Works of Thomas Middleton by kind permission of the general editor, Gary Taylor.

21

In the same play, Mistress Newcut, a merchant’s wife, pays the brothel-owner for the pleasure of

behaving like a prostitute. She tells the owner that “she must have choice [of gallants], you

know; I come for no gain, but for sheer pleasure and affection” (1.2.20). In Thomas Nashe’s

manuscript poem “The Choise of Valentine’s,” the first-person poetic persona hires an

expensive, sexually insatiable prostitute who can only be satisfied with a dildo, a “little dilldo”

That bendeth not, nor fouldeth anie deale,

But stands as stiff, as he were made of steele,

And playes at peacock twixt my leggs right blithe,

[…]

He is a youth almost tuo handfuls high,

Streight, round, and plumb, yet hauing but one eye,

[…]

Attired in white veluet or in silk,

And nourisht with whott water or with milk;. (241-43; 269-70; 273-74)32

Nashe’s poetic persona goes on to discuss how

I am not as Hercules the stout,

That want those hearbe’s and rootes of Indian soile,

That strengthen wearie members in their toile;

Druggs and Electuaries of new deuise

Doe shunne my purse; that trembles at the price.

Sufficeth, all I haue, I yeald hir hole,

Which for a poore man is a princlie dole.

I paie our hostess scott and lott at most,

And looke as leane and lank as anie ghoste. (301-10)

32 The composition of this poem is unknown. There is no record of its publication during Nashe’s lifetime, and it therefore probably circulated in manuscript form as might be expected given the scurrilous subject matter. According to Ronald McKerrow, there are three existing manuscripts: one at the Bodleian (Rawl. MS. Poet. 216, fol. 96-106 and fol. 94); one in the Dyce Collection at South Kensington (44) and a third manuscript which McKerrow had seen but, strangely, had been requested not to name. McKerrow numbers the poem in the anonymous collection as 538, vol. 43, 295v to 298v (McKerrow 397-402). Presumably, this manuscript belonged to a private collector who, in 1957, was embarrassed to admit that he or she owned it. The Bodleian manuscript does not include the author’s name, but the title of the poem is listed as “Nashe’s Dildo.” The Dyce manuscript has neither a title nor an author listed and parts of it are written in code (again probably due to the salacious nature of the poem’s topic). An 1899 edition, “privately printed for subscribers only” (400), lists the title of the poem as “The Choise of Valentines or the Merie Ballad of Nash his Dildo” (McKerrow 400).

22

Obviously, the focus of Nashe's poem is the sexual insecurity of the narrator, his inability to

please the prostitute sexually. However, the inability to please her results not only from his

sexual lack, but from her insatiability. Nashe’s narrator pays for the most expensive prostitute in

the house and spends the majority of the poem lamenting his inability to satisfy her. He uses the

surrogate penis after his own detumescence. He is unable to afford the early modern versions of

Viagra, and the prostitute’s vagina, earlier described as a “deepe intrenched wound” (254), a

“gaping mouth” (258), and a “Stigian gulph” (271), is a synecdochic chasm, a hole, devouring

his money and essence, leaving him looking like death, a “lean and lank” ghost worn out and left

penniless by the prostitute’s insatiable appetite for sex and money.

Philip Stubbes represents the radical Protestant stance. In The Anatomy of Abuses

(1583), he writes of whoredom consuming and decaying the body:

There is no greater sin before the face of God, than whordome [. . .], it bringeth

everlasting damnation to all that live therein [. . . ], it dimmeth the light, it

impaireth the hearing, it infirmeth the sinews, it weakeneth the joints, it inhabiteth

the marrow, cosumeth the moisture, [. . .], it weakeneth the whole body, [. . . ] it

bringeth death before nature urge it, malady enforce it, or age require it. (sig. H4r)

For Stubbes, as for the other writers, sex consumes those who engage in it.

In both the medieval and early modern stories about the seduction of prostitutes, older

women are frequently responsible for the temptation of young sexual innocents. One common

story tells of an old woman who either forcibly debauches a young girl by selling sex (rape,

really) with her to the highest bidder or through a more subtle manipulation of a naïve virgin.33

We see this stereotype reconfigured in Shakespeare's Pericles, where Marina is sold to a bawd

and her husband. Marina's value is enhanced because she's a virgin. Sometimes the story depicts

a woman who takes advantage of her superior rank (frequently of the merchant class) and

debauches a female servant or destitute dependent (sometimes her own child).

The second version of the procurement myth shows up in many medieval exempla and

fabliaux (Karras 62). One specific story Karras references is repeated in numerous texts and tells

of an old woman who is approached by an amorous man who would like her to play bawd to his

sexual advances toward some young, unsuspecting girl. The old woman “feeds her puppy

33 For various example of medieval procurement, both literary and juridical, see Karras, pp. 11; 25; 36; 57-64; 129.

23

mustard to make it cry and then tells the young woman that this was her daughter, transformed

into a dog because she would not yield to a lover’s advances” (62), thus ensuring that the girl

will acquiesce to future advances. As Karras points out, these stories place the blame for the

young girl’s debauchment on the (other) woman, not the randy male. This conventional

narrative is still being depicted in William Hogarth’s 1732 series of six engravings entitled “A

Harlot’s Progress.” The series depicts the rise and decline of a prostitute. In the first engraving

we see a young girl being approached in the busy London streets by a decrepit old woman. The

first four engravings show her dallying with a customer, primping for a visitor, languishing in

Bridewell, and wasting away from syphilis. The final engraving shows that no one mourns for

the prostitute after she dies.

Medical treatises emphasized the literal filth of the prostitute’s body. Prostitutes were

thought to be infertile. The infertility was thought to be caused by frequent sexual activity. The

womb became clogged with dirt or was thought to become slippery or smooth due to constant

sexual activity; thus the seed would not stick.34 In Dragmaticon Philosophiae, William of

Conches writes, “Prostitutes after frequent acts of coitus have their womb clogged with dirt

(oblimatam) and the villosities in which the semen should be retained are covered over; that is

why, like greased marble, the womb immediately rejects what it receives” (trans. and qtd. in

Jacquart 25).35 The mechanism for infertility is a build-up of bodily dirt.36 Strangely, though

these theorists never warn married women that this might be a cause for their infertility. This

particular cause of infertility seems only to occur when the woman is sexually incontinent and

involved with numerous sexual partners.

As the delineation of the various definitions of “prostitute” shows, there is no concise

taxonomy of prostitution. Nor is there a concise taxonomy of the larger category in which the

prostitute falls: whoredom. “Prostitute,” “courtesan,” “punk,” “whore,” “strumpet,” “package,”

the list of names with which men and women could defame women sexually seems endless. All

34 See Karras, p.82; Joan Cadden’s “Western Medicine and Natural Philosophy” in The Handbook of Medieval Sexuality (1996); p. 66; Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset’s Sexuality and Medicine (1988), pp. 63-64. 35 Those who adhered to the Galenic two-seeds theory of reproduction contrarily believed that prostitutes were infertile because they did not receive pleasure from sexual acts (Jacquart 64). 36 Cadden notes that this infertility is specifically associated with venery (66). Medical treatises do not claim that married women damage their reproductive capability through repeated sexual intercourse with their husbands. Early modern men, though, can damage themselves with the little death, by releasing too much “heat and moisture” (66).

24

belong to the larger category of whoredom, but the category itself is ambiguous. The word

“whore” was applied to a woman who had transgressed in some unspecified way. To name a

woman “whore” was not, necessarily, to accuse her of sexual transgression or of selling sex.

Instead, the accusation named her as one who would, given the opportunity, transgress sexually.

The problem, of course, is that once one is accused of whoredom, the original behavior is

obscured. The woman may as well have engaged in sexual incontinence; the accusation of

whoredom based on verbal incontinence was just as damning as the accusation based on sexual

incontinence because once a woman is labeled a “whore” all possible transgressive behaviors can

be assumed of her. Women found the accusation of whoredom damaging enough that they

frequently took their accusers to court.37 The threat of sexual defamation, primarily through

accusations of whoredom, was used as one of many controls on women’s behavior. As defined

by early modern patriarchy, the ideal woman was silent, chaste, and obedient. Any deviation

from any one of these behaviors opened up the possibility of accusations of whoredom. Thus, as

Peter Stallybrass points out, the transgressions of the tongue elided with transgressions of the

body (Patriarchal 126).

This elision meant that in order for women to avoid sexual defamation, they had to

submit to the patriarchal control of all of their behaviors. The ambiguity of the terminology

makes any study of prostitution, in either the literary or theatrical texts or the civil or

ecclesiastical court books, difficult. In the literary texts, sometimes the exchange of money or

goods is obvious and sometimes it is not. In the Bridewell court book records from the Tudor and

early Stuart time period, the sexual crime, whether it involved the exchange of money or

indiscriminate sex, is the crime of whoredom. Thus, the scribes do not always feel that it is

necessary to discuss the economic exchange. In addition, court record-keeping and the label of

the women’s crimes are not consistent, resulting in a shift of terms from one scribe to the next

and even inconsistencies in the way an individual scribe describes the sexual crime.38 For

37 For discussions of early modern sexual defamation see Lisa Jardine’s ’Why should he call her whore?’ Defamation and Desdemona’s Case” in Addressing Frank Kermode (1991) pp. 124-53; Richard Cust’s “Honour and Politics in Early Stuart England: The Case of Beaumont v. Hastings” in Past and Present 149 (1995): 57-94; Laura Gowing’s Domestic Dangers: Women, Words and Sex in Early Modern London (1996); and Robert B. Shoemaker’s “The Decline of Public Insult in London 1660-1800” in Past and Present 169 (2000): 97-131. 38 At the 2007 GEMCS conference in Chicago, Melissa Mowry noted that the scribal inconsistencies of the Bridewell Court Books change significantly after the Restoration. Where pre-interregnum scribes listed the place and circumstances of the arrests fairly consistently, but did not consistently use the same words to describe the crime, Restoration scribes frequently omitted the details of the arrest, regularly named the crime as “whoredom,”

25

example, in March of 1599 a scribe refers to a gentleman having “carnal knowledge of the body

of Mary Bennett” (BCB 4 78r); on March 30, 1603, a scribe with a different hand refers to a

woman named Martha as a “notorious harlot” (BCB 4 382r); while in September of 1605 a third

scribe notes the appearance of a woman named Ellen, whom he describes as a “vagrant” and

“nightwalker” (BCB 5 58v).39 Like the various terms which fall under the linguistic category of

whoredom, these juridical designations are not stable or concise. As is the case with the literary

representations of prostitutes, the only time we can know for certain that a woman exchanged sex

for money is if the author or scribe chooses to include this information. Thus, when a scribe

records that the “notorious bawd” Mrs. Windsor “sometime [received] Xs and sometime 5s” for

allowing a Mr. Baker to lie with Helen Cootes, we can assume that Helen is a prostitute (BCB 4

732v; qtd. in Ungerer 146). The exchange of money, the discussion of how many houses the

women have stayed in, and the frequency with which the same woman appears in the BCB

records are all clues as to whether the woman is a sex worker or not, but like the linguistic

categories, the juridical categories elide the sex worker with those who are sexually

promiscuous. Both the linguistic and juridical vagueness work to paint all women who defy

patriarchally inscribed sexual behavior with one brush, but what is at the heart of the fear of

uncontrolled female sexuality is more than the patriarchal anxiety about maintaining purity and

legitimacy in the patrilineal line. This anxiety results from the terror of bodily dissolution and

feminine penetration, which is more fundamental and more deeply unconscious.

The anti-theatricals exhibit this neurotic fear. Certainly, these tracts demonstrate the

terror of what the imagination might engender in the spectators. The imagination itself though

was said to be triggered by the penetration of the image through the eye. Much as the medieval

model of love/lust was metaphorically conceived of as Cupid’s arrow shooting from the

woman’s eye and piercing the lover through his own eye, the theatrical spectacle enters the eye

and inflames the imagination. Usually anti-theatrical writers imagine the theater as wholly

male—a theater performed by men for men. The women in the audience, like the boy actor

performing them, embody the dangers the theater holds for the male spectator. Though the anti- and began separating their entries by sex, listing all of the male defendants together and all of the female defendants together. Pre-interregnum scribes also frequently include information naming the woman as a servant of a certain house, but Restoration scribes tend to include only the woman’s name and the crime. 39 Even the term “nightwalker,” which in our own time period is synonymous with prostitute, is in the early modern period ambiguous. See Paul Griffiths’s “Meanings of Nightwalking” in Seventeenth Century. 13:2 (1998): 212-38.

26

theatricals acknowledge the female spectator, the acknowledgment of her presence is only to

name her whore.40 It remains to be seen whether the prostitute on stage manages to

communicate through the male voice that ventriloquizes her.

40 See, for example, where William Prynne compares the play-houses and the stews from earlier time periods with the early modern playhouse: “the play-house and the Stewes were one and the same in ancient times; because after the Playes were ended, the Whores who resorted to the Play-houses, or were harbored in them, did prostitute themselves upon the Theater, unto the lust of others. Where they all derive the Word fornication; from Brothels and Play-houses, where Whores were kept and prostituted after the Playes were acted. And are they not now the same? What are they but the very filth, the drosse, the scumme, of the Societies and places where they live?” (V1r)

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CHAPTER 1

MEDIEVAL AND TUDOR ATTITUDES TOWARD PROSTUTION In order to understand the various ways in which playwrights employ their prostitutes, one must

know the numerous models of whoredom and attitudes toward prostitution which were available

to early modern playwrights. These models include hagiographical depictions, patristic polemical

texts, juridical categories, and early literary and theatrical portrayals. These early representations

and societal attitudes, like our own, are conflicted and stereotyped. We have the prostitute with

the heart of gold; they had the repentant prostitute. We have the intra-venous drug-using

prostitute; they had the pleasure-seeking prostitute. Currently, both British and American laws

focus on punishing the prostitute, rather than the johns;41 medieval and early modern laws were

more concerned with marking the prostitute as whore, rather than on the eradication of

prostitution. This chapter also presents a summary of Catholic and Reformist attitudes toward the

prostitute. I review some of the medieval and early Tudor literary and theatrical representations

of prostitutes. My aim is not to offer an inclusive list of all possible sources. Instead, this chapter

demonstrates the variety of possible models, focusing on those models that would have been

accessible to the culture at large, and which most seem to inform the prostitute characters in

Elizabethan and Jacobean theatrical portrayals. These depictions of prostitutes and of the

institution of prostitution are incongruous and in many instances diametrically opposed to one

another. It is in part this colorful cultural milieu which enables the playwrights’ diverse parade of

prostitutes; and it is the prostitutes’ association with a variety of behaviors which allows for the

range of analogous uses on stage.

The Early Modern and the Postmodern Prostitute

The religious status of prostitution is imbricated with Catholic notions of purity and chastity as

well as with stereotypical configurations of male and female sexuality. Like the medieval and

41 Karen Sharpe in Red Light, Blue Light: Prostitutes, Punters, and the Police (1998) states that the most common method of controlling prostitution in England is not to arrest the punters (the johns), but to arrest and “re-arrest the females for soliciting” (202). It was not until the eighties and nineties that lawmakers in England began to also focus on the punters. In 1985, the Criminal Law Revision Committee Report ‘Prostitution in The Street’ proposed that “men who ‘persistently’ solicit the services of prostitutes” should be penalized (Sharpe 200); in 1990, the Sexual Offences Bill proposed that the word “persistently” be dropped from the legislation so that the police could arrest a man who had not “persistently” hired prostitutes (Sharpe 200). The bill did not pass. One obvious result of the word “persistently” remaining in the law is that it leaves it up to individual police officers to decide if they have seen the clients before and to define “persistently.”

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early modern laws pertaining to prostitution, the patristic stances on the institution condemn its

practitioners, justify its necessity, strive to mark prostitutes as unambiguously whores, and yet,

contradictorily, leave the category vague enough to include, and thus control, the sexual behavior

of all women. The two most foundational patristic opinions on prostitution are those of Saint

Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas. Both Augustine and Aquinas characterize non-

procreative sex, either within or without marriage, as sinful. There is, though, a hierarchy of

sinfulness. Augustine argues that if men must commit unnatural sex acts (here “unnatural” is

defined as any sex that is unproductive), then it is better to commit these sins with prostitutes,

who are already fallen, rather than inflict these acts upon their wives. As Karras notes, early

church fathers conceive of male sexuality as a “hydraulic model” (6). Men’s sex drive must have

an outlet. If prostitutes are not available, then the fear is that men would corrupt young daughters

and chaste wives, either through seduction or forcible rape. Though our stereotypes about

procurement have changed, our stance on male sexuality as hydraulic, as sexual desire that builds

up and must be released, still has currency, though we have added some amendments.

Sociological and psychological studies as recent as 1960s and 1970s have configured women as

responsible for prostitution. One sociologist in 1965 claimed that “the uninterrupted capacity for

[sic] the human female for sexual activity and sexual attraction [. . .] introduces sex as a

permanent elemant [sic] in social life and ensures constant association of the two sexes” (Davis,

“Prostitution” 272; qtd. in Sharpe 110). Women’s capacity to have sex whenever and repeatedly

ensures “constant contact.” Later, she writes, “prostitution [. . .] enables a small number of

women to take care of the needs of a large number of men. It is the most convenient outlet for

armies and for legions of strangers, perverts and [the] physically repulsive in our midst” (Davis,

“Prostitution” 288; qtd. in Sharpe 110). While we no longer obsess about the prostitute’s ability

to entice otherwise reasonable men to commit fornication, there are some similarities in the

attitudes that underlie our own configurations. For example, the sociologist above constructs

male sexuality as a need, rather than a desire. Many men have sexual needs, which the prostitute

accommodates. According to many twentieth-century sociologists and psychiatrists, men can

sometimes be “perverts,” who have non-normative or "unnatural" sexual needs to which only a

prostitute can or would attend. A 1906 study of prostitution observes, “wives have become

incapable of becoming the sexual mates of their husbands. The husbands, without being carried

away by any impulse or strong passion or any desire for infidelity, seek abroad what they cannot

29

find at home” (Ellis 206; qtd. in Sharpe 112). Studies in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s still view

the prostitute as someone who caters to the perverse sexual needs of men, and they frequently

perpetuate the belief that the prostitutes share these perversities. E. Glover in The Pathology of

Prostitution, published in 1957, notes that prostitutes have an “infantile sexual impulse” which

causes them to acquiesce to men’s kinky sexual demands (120; qtd. in Sharpe 113). Modern

studies refer to the clients as “normal or practical” men who are in town for business and

“perverse” men who are either socially inept and cannot get sex without paying for it or, as

mentioned above, are going to the prostitutes for kinky sex.42 In the first two constructions,

men’s sexual desires are still considered a need that must be released. In the last, the perverse

prostitutes still “save” the good women, the wives, from the unnatural sexual needs of the

husband, just as Augustine claimed they did.

Saint Thomas Aquinas compares whores to sewers: “Remove the sewer and you will fill

the palace with ordure; similarly with the bilge from a ship; remove whores from the world and

you will fill it with sodomy” (4.14; cited in Karras 185, n. 10).43 Though the hydraulic model

aligns with the medical discourse discussed earlier, where the whore’s body literally fills with

the filth built up in the man and unfit for his wife, neither the “hydraulic” model of male

sexuality nor any other model offered in the medieval or early modern time period focuses on

male agency in illicit sex acts. This is not to say that the men are not morally condemned as

engaging in fornication or adultery, but the woman is always more guilty than the man. In

Measure for Measure, first performed by the King’s Men in 1604 and then revived in 1621, the

Duke (disguised as a friar) confesses Juliet, asking her if she “mutually committed” the sin of

fornication with Claudio. Juliet answers that she did, to which the Duke responds, “Then was

your sin of heavier kind than his” (2.3.30). Even the hydraulic model, which at least seems to

admit that male sexuality could be disruptive of social and moral order, configures male

sexuality as a "natural" buildup, which must be released. Contradictorily, the sexual urges of

early modern whores, a broad category that includes the prostitute, are aligned with venality and

avarice. Whores seek immediate gratification of all urges, sexual or otherwise. In addition, the

literary and hagiographic depictions of prostitutes displace all agency onto the prostitute. The 42 See Karen Sharpe’s chapter, “The Punters” in Red Light, Blue Light: Prostitutes, Punters and the Police (1998), pp. 109-32.

30

more beautiful a whore is, the more threatening. The more public a woman’s display, the more

likely it is that she is a whore or in danger of being defamed as a whore. The visual spectacle of

the prostitute leeches away men’s ability to reason, just as she strips them of their purses. For

modern theorists of prostitution, the prostitute can still be constructed as avaricious. Davis,

whom I quoted earlier, believes that “the craving for sexual variety, for perverse gratification all

can be demanded from the woman whose interest lies solely in the price” (Davis 275-6; qtd. in

Sharpe 112). Thus, some prostitutes are not perverse at all; instead, like the medieval and early

modern models I examine below, the prostitutes, according to these theorists, will do absolutely

anything for money or for drugs, no matter how degrading. Discussions of male agency in

modern studies of prostitution are usually a side note. Even studies with self-proclaimed feminist

intentions usually devote no more than a chapter to the psychology, sociology, or economic

considerations of the "punter," a British slang term for the prostitute’s customer.44

During the early modern period, the Church of England had a very clear attitude toward

the whore’s agency. In the first book of homilies, Thomas Becon, in the homily “A Sermon

against Whoredome and Uncleanness,” provides no room for moral equivocation.45 While

Becon does not speak specifically about prostitutes, they are, of course, included within the

category of whoredom. For Becon, whoredom and adultery have become sins that are “winked”

at and not condemned. Due to this cavalier attitude, the world is supposedly overrun with

whores:

Although there want not, good Christian people, great swarms of vices worthy to

be rebuked, unto such decay is true godliness and virtuous living now come, yet

above other vices the outrageous seas of adultery (or breaking of wedlock),

whoredom, fornication, and uncleanness have not only brast in, but also

overflowed almost the whole world, unto the great dishonour of God, the

exceeding infamy of the name Christ, the notable decay of the true religion, and

the utter destruction of the public wealth. (118)

43 Karras points out that there is some doubt as to whether or not Aquinas actually wrote these words. Regardless of whether he did or not, the words were attributed to him in the early modern time period. 44 See for example Maggie O’Neill’s Prostitution and Feminism: Towards a Politics of Feeling (2001). In this sociological study of prostitution, only one chapter focuses on male desire and the women’s clients, though she does occasionally devote a few paragraphs to discuss the men in other chapters. 45 This homily was first printed anonymously in the first book of homilies in July of 1547. Thomas Becon, who was one of Cranmer’s chaplains, claims authorship in his Collected Works printed by John Day in 1564.

31

Becon goes on to define “adultery” not just as sex outside of marriage, but as any illicit and

immoral sexual intercourse. He writes:

by the word adultery, although it be properly understood of the unlawful

commixtion (or joining together) of a married man with any woman beside his

wife, or of a wife with any man beside her husband, yet thereby is signified also

all unlawful use of those parts which be ordained for generation. (118)

Thus, for Becon and the Church of England, adultery consists of any sex not purposive to

procreation.46 Though I discuss the moral laws in more detail in chapter two, it is useful to point

out that this definition of adultery underlies the logic behind Protestant calls for harsher penalties

for adulterers and fornicators. The harsher penalties for adultery are recommended in Reformatio

legum ecclesiasticarum, first published in 1571, but written during Edward VI’s reign.47 The

law, though, is finally enacted in 1650, but the law reinforces the gender inequality promulgate

in the cultural attitudes and stories. Adulterous women are condemned to death, but not

adulterous men (K

d

reps 92).

Becon’s homily also emphasizes the filth associated with sexual sin: “breaking of

wedlock, whoredom, and fornication defile a man [. . .] corrupt both the body and soul of man,

and make them [. . .] the filthy dunghill or dungeon of all unclean spirits” (120). He later calls

whoredom a “filthy, stinking, and abominable sin in the sight of God” (121). While the

Reformists’ polemical position is harsher, the metaphors it utilizes are familiar and can be traced,

as we will see below, to Catholic constructions of whoredom and desire.

46 The construction of whoredom given in the homily would have been very familiar to Elizabethans and Jacobeans. The homilies were frequently read aloud during regular sermons, and they were also read while church members performed their public penance for committing whoredom and adultery. This penance frequently occurred in church with the accused in the white sheet of the penitent (Bond 198). 47 In 1550 the House of Commons proposed a committee to revise ecclesiastical jurisdiction and laws. Cranmer attempted to get the recommendations passed in March of 1553, but Northumberland halted the attempt. The recommendations in Reformatio legum ecclesiasticarum were never acted upon, but they were published by John Foxe in 1571 with the blessing of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker. Parker’s permission though does not mean that the recommendation had official doctrinal approval. In fact, the laws recommended had neither royal, parliamentary, nor ecclesiastical approval. They were published, though, which means approved or not, the recommendations were available for public dissemination among the literate. For further information about the Reformatio legum ecclesasticarum, see James C. Spalding’s “The Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum of 1552 and the Furthering of Discipline in England” in Church History (1970); Martin Ingram’s Church Courts, Sex and Marriage inEngland, 1570-1640 (1987), p. 151; and Barbara Kreps’ “The Paradox of Women: The Legal Position of Early Modern Wives and Thomas Dekker’s The Honest Whore” in ELH (2002), pp. 91-2.

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Catholic Saints, Protestant Martyrs, and the Crux of the Material Body

Before examining specific depictions of prostitutes, it is useful to foreground one primary

difference between Catholic and Protestant polemicists: the conflicted relationship to the

material body.48 These arguments are pertinent to our discussion of prostitutes for two reasons:

first, the debates regarding bodily materiality, decay, and salvation bring us back to Bataille’s

and Douglas’ theorizations about taboo and how these taboos relate to female sexuality. Second,

and most importantly, the Protestant reformists’ reformulation of Catholic constructions of the

body and soul results in a rhetorical analogy linking idolatry, materiality, and whoredom.

Through this analogy, an analogy with which every Elizabethan church-goer would be familiar,

dangerous female desire becomes even more firmly grafted onto the female material body. The

whore/idolatry analogy takes root in the cultural imagination. In fact, the analogous relationship

between whores and idolatry later shows up in Rainolds’ debates with Gager and Gentili,

published in 1599 as Th’overthrow of Stage-Playes. Gentili accuses Rainolds of claiming that all

those who see the boys in women’s clothing lust for them, even if the boys themselves do not

have lascivious intentions. Rainolds clarifies his position. He claims that he does not mean to say

that the boys stir up “unclean affections” in all men, but only in some. He continues,

Doe you graunt, that you, and your youth, have uncleane affections, to the intent

you may blame my speech? If not, why tell you me, that the putting of womanlie

raiment upon men, hath not stirred any such bestlie thought in any of you; when I

spake expresslie of unclean affections? Besides, can you accuse yourself, or anie

other, of anie wanton thought stirred up in you by looking on a beautifull

Woman? If you can; then ought you beware of beautifull boys transformed into

women by putting on their raiment, their feature, looks and facions. For men may

be ravished with love of stones, of dead stuffe, framed by cunning gravers to

beautifull womens likeness; as in Poets fables appeareth by Pygmalion, by Venus

48 The following discussion of Catholic materiality and Protestant anti-materiality is greatly influenced by Susan Zimmerman’s insightful discussion of bodily materiality in The Early Modern Corpse (2005), especially Chapter 2: “Body Imaging and Religious Reform: The Corpse as Idol,” pp. 24-89. Though Zimmerman is primarily interested in how the Reformists’ rebuttals of Catholic materialism affect playwrights’ depictions of and spectators’ reactions to staged corpses, her explication of the Reformists’ rhetorical link between whoredom and idolatry (pp.55-60) has repercussions for the staged prostitute as well. For discussions of the early church fathers’ debates regarding bodily dissolution and medieval materiality, see Peter Brown’s The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (1988) and Carolyn Walker Bynum’s Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (1996) and The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336 (1995).

33

Gnidia in stories: and Charea, araied like an Eunuch onely did move the beastlie

lust of him who was lasciviouslie given in the Comedie. (sig. E4v).

Rainolds’ definition of idolatry strays from the Protestant condemnation of those who worship

saints’ images. He defines idolatry as being moved to lust by any representation. What is

particularly problematic for him is the contaminated female sign the boy embodies. The boy

might elicit spectators’ lust by representing the female, just as men are ravished by pictures of

beautiful women. The analogy, though, also compares women to dead stuff. As I mentioned in

the introduction, women’s bodies are frequently associated with the death’s decay. The analogy

between whoredom and idolatry underlies Rainolds’ comparison between the boy actor and

idolatry.

The analogy between the whore and the idolatrously decked churches exposes the root of

the Protestant attack on idolatry: Catholic configuration of the material body. Protestant

reformists view the privileging of Christ’s humanity over his divinity as a diminution of God’s

unimaginable divinity. This privileging is sinful, according to the Protestant polemicists, because

it makes God over in man’s image and does not admit to the inconceivable divinity of God and

Christ. The whorish Catholic church seduces worshippers into spiritual fornication through its

focus on image. The visual representations seduce man into believing that he is potentially divine

or that God is partially human. This analogy between the whore and the papists provides early

modern playwrights with an additional model of the whore and serves to reinforce the cultural

perception of the prostitute as pleasure-seeking temptress, leading men on to eternal damnation.

This rhetoric, as well as the Reformation and post-Reformation use of the biblical Whore of

Babylon to attack religious opponents which I discuss later, make the whore’s seductive power

seem supernatural. The whore’s logic leads whole religions and entire governments astray.

One of the primary reformist attacks on Catholicism centers on accusations of idolatry.

The Catholic practice of praying to saints and using iconographical depictions of saints and other

images in churches and polemical texts led to charges of idolatry by the reformists. This attack

on iconographical practices, though, is symptomatic of a larger problem for the reformists: the

Catholic mystification of the body and conflation of saints’ bodies and human bodies with

Christ’s body. Both Catholics and Protestants believe that Christ was the embodiment of God

and that he sacrificed his mortal body to save man’s immortal soul, but one primary difference

between the two offshoots of Christianity is how these branches relate to the two aspects of

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Christ: the immaterial deity and the material, mortal body. For Protestants, “the Catholic system

of worship hypostatized the body, thereby privileging the material principle over that of the

spiritual in the Christian system of belief” (Zimmerman 25). For the reformists, the body’s rot

and decay are inescapable because they result from the fall. To imagine human bodies as

incorruptible ignores the fallen state of all men, who are saved only through God’s grace, not

through good works or martyrdom. The homily attempts to “reformulate the prevailing concept

of the body/soul relationship so as to counteract the materiality of Catholicism, but without

repudiating the paradoxes at the heart of Christian doctrine” (Zimmerman 25).

For Catholics and Protestants alike, one primary mystery is the mystery of resurrection

and the (dead) body’s transmutation at the moment of resurrection. Early church fathers debated

about how a body that had putrefied and dissolved into the ground could rise again at the

resurrection. What form did the resurrected body take? Did it retain the age, estate, and gender of

the previous body at the time of death or was the resurrected body an unimaginably divine body,

free from bodily imperfections and signifying markers? This debate was particularly virulent in

the fourth century (Walker, Resurrection 59-114). If mortal bodies decayed in the grave, in what

form did they rise again? What transformative process does the body take when it rises again? Is

the resurrected body a sexless, ageless body as Gregory of Nyssa argues or is the resurrected

body, as Jerome would have it, re-fleshed and individuated?

The fear of bodily decay is the fear of the abyss. As Walker notes, biological processes,

such as bodily decay, “threatened identity itself” (Resurrection 113): “the extraordinary bodily

discipline of the ascetic movement, in both its Origenist and anti-Origenist branches, was

directed toward making the body static and incorruptible. Change itself was the problem”

(Resurrection 112). The fourth-century debates provide the basis for the twelfth-century belief

that “the resurrected body was structurally as well as materially identical with the body of earth”

(Resurrection 136). Thus, gender, rank, and bodily individuation were “reassembled” at the

moment of the resurrection. This view of the resurrected body de-emphasized the rotting body in

the ground and fantasized that the dead retained their identities and material individuation. The

dead bodies of Catholic saints expressed their divinity by resisting putrefaction. For example, in

volume four of The Golden Legend written by Jacobus de Varagine and translated into English

by William Caxton in 1484, St. Mary Magdalene’s “blessed soul departed from the body and

went to our Lord. And after it was departed, there issued out of the body an odour so sweet-

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smelling that it remained there by the space of seven days to all them that entered in” (85). The

Catholic practice of preserving parts of the saints’ bodies as religious relics provided material

“proof” of the saints’ bodily incorruptibility, of their divinity.

For the Protestants, tortured bodies are described as in extreme pain and the bodies are

simply fragile shells from which the soul escapes. In Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), Foxe

takes pains to describe graphically the damaged bodies of Protestant martyrs. When describing

one Mr. Hooper’s execution by burning at the stake, he writes: “Then being in his shirt, he tooke

a point from his hose him selfe, and trussed hys shyrte between his legges, where he hadde a

pound of gonne powder, in a bladder, and under each arme the like quantity, delyuered him by

the garde” (1563 edition 103). After praying, he tells the people watching and assisting with the

execution that he forgives them. Foxe describes the wood as green, but finally:

A fewe drie faggots were brought & a new fire kindled [. . .] & that burned his

nether partes, but had small power above because of the winde, saving that it did

burne his heare and swel his skin a little. [. . .] he said with an indifferent loude

voice: For gods love (good people) let me have more fire: and all this while his

nether partes did burne. For the faggots were so fewe that the flame did not burn

strongly at his upper parts. The third fyre was kindled within a while after, which

was more extreme than the other two: and then the bledders of gonnepowder

brake, which did him small good, they were so put, and the wind had such power.

In the which fire he praied, with somewhat a loud voice Lord Jesu have mercy

upon me [. . .] These were the last wordes he was herd to sound: but when he was

blacke in the mouth, and his tongue swollen, that he could no longer speake: yet

his lippes went, till they wer shrounke to the gommes: & he did knocke his brest

with his hands until one of his armes fel of, and then knocked still with the other,

what time, the fat, water, and bloud dropped out at his fingers endes, until by

renewing of the fire, his strength was gonne, and his hand did cleave fast in

knocking, to the yron upon his breast. So immediately bowing forwardes, he

yelded up his spirite. (103-4)

There is no sweet smell lingering after this martyr departs. Certainly, the descriptions of the

tortures applied to Catholic saints are frequently gruesome, but the torturers sometimes have

difficulty penetrating the body and it takes numerous attempts to kill them. Here Mr. Hooper’s

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martyrdom is expressed in his serenity in the face of extreme pain. Foxe describes the tortured

body in vivid detail and focuses on the leaky fluids of fat, water, and blood. By the time he yields

his spirit, the frail body has been ravaged.

Catholic hagiography resists the specter of bodily dissolution through the fantasy of an

incorruptible body, while reformist texts revel in the body’s putrefaction. For reformists, the

body, alive and dead, signifies man’s moral decay. The homily “Against Peril of Idolatry and

Superfluous Decking of Churches” is broken into three parts.49 As Zimmerman rightly observes,

“the real business of the homily is to harden the distinction between body and spirit in order to

emphasise the differences between the Deity and His subjects” (47). According to Protestant

writers like the homilist, Catholic images are idolatrous because they lie. They encourage men to

worship God in their own image. Thus, they encourage self-worship. In addition, they lie for the

same reason that Plato’s artists lie. No representation can accurately depict the “origin.” Thus, in

the third part of the homily, the anonymous composer writes, “no true image can be made of

Christ’s body, for it is unknown now of what form and countenance he was” (217). Even pictures

of Christ are problematic because they depict only the artist’s imagination of Christ, and the

early modern imagination is always suspect.

The first part of the homily criticizes the Catholic differentiation between the words

“idol” and “imago” or “image,” accusing Catholic polemicists of not admitting that the decking

of Catholic churches with images constitutes idolatry (169). The second part recounts various

church fathers’ teachings on idolatry and ends by reciting the story of Empress Irene, mother of

Constantine the Sixth, at whose feet the homilist sets “the sea of mischiefs the maintenance of

images hath brought with it” and “the horrible schism between the East and the West Church”

(210). The homilist graphically depicts Empress Irene’s monstrosity, detailing her ambition to

rule without her son, her role in persuading Constantine to put out one uncle’s eyes and cut out

the tongues of four other uncles, and her desecration of her father-in-law’s body (203). Of Irene,

he writes, her “ambition and desire of rule was insatiable, [her] treason, continually studied and

wrought, was most abominable, [her] wicked and unnatural cruelty pass Medea and Progne, and

49 This homily was first printed at the end of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments. He attributes the text to Master Nicholas Ridley. Griffiths, though, believes there is doubt about this attribution given that most of the other information Foxe gives about the homily is incorrect. For example, it could not possibly have been presented to King Edward VI, given that one of the texts quoted in the homily, “Leonis Imperatoris de Bellico Apparatu Liber e Graeco in Latinum converses” was not in print until after King Edward’s death. Griffiths argues that the homily was actually presented to Queen Elizabeth, probably in 1560 (xxix-xxx; n. 1; n. m.).

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[her] detestable parricides have ministered matter to poets to write their horrible tragedies” (204).

Thus, in the second part of the homily, the ambitious whore Irene almost single-handedly

corrupts the early church and institutes practices responsible for damning thousands of men’s

souls.

The third part of the homily, “Against Images and the Worshipping of Them,” explicitly

compares the decked-out churches to whores whose extravagant dressings blind men and lead

their souls astray. The displacement of men’s responsibility for their interactions with whores

onto the whores themselves is commonplace in hagiographic stories of prostitutes. The homilist

evokes the image of whores working for Satan and compares the whores to the sumptuously

spectacular churches. Part of this analogy’s “logic” comes from Paul’s earlier analogy between

idolatry and “spiritual” fornication. Seduction by the whorish images in the church results in a

susceptibility to seduction in all its forms. The homilist writes, “And it was very agreeable (as St.

Paul teacheth) that they which fell to idolatry, which is spiritual fornication, should also fall into

carnal fornication and all uncleanliness by the just judgments of God delivering them over to

abominable concupiscences” (229). The homilist claims that the Catholic church brazenly

encourages idolatry by “teach[ing] that images are to be honoured and worshipped” (237) and

that this brazenness shows the Church to “have now taken an harlot’s face, not purposed to

blush, in setting abroad the furniture of their spiritual whoredom” (237). Thus, he reconfigures

the church’s differentiation between idols and images as the shamelessness of a painted harlot.

Later in the homily, the author switches the position of the analogy so that instead the

whore occupies the position of the first term, while the idolatrous church becomes the term of

comparison:

Now as was before touched, and is here more largely to be declared, the nature of

man is none otherwise bent to worshipping of images, if he may have them and

see them, than it is bent to whoredom and adultery in the company of harlots.

And, as unto a man given to the lust of the flesh, seeing a wanton harlot, sitting by

her, and embracing her, it profiteth little for one to say, Beware of fornication;

God will condemn fornicators and adulterers; (for neither will he, being

overcome with greater enticements of the strumpet, give ear or take heed to such

godly admonitions; and, when he is left afterwards alone with the harlot, nothing

can follow but wickedness;) even so, suffer images to be in sight in churches and

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temples, ye shall in vain bid them beware of images (as St. John doth) and flee

idolatry (as the Scriptures warn us); ye shall in vain preach and teach them against

idolatry. For a number will notwithstanding fall headlong unto it, what by the

nature of images, and by the inclination of their own corrupt nature. Wherefore,

as a man given to lust to sit down by a strumpet is to tempt God, so is it likewise,

to erect an idol in this proneness of man’s nature to idolatry, nothing but a

tempting. …. Doth not the word of God call idolatry spiritual fornication? Doth it

not call a gilt or painted idol or image a strumpet with a painted face? Be not the

spiritual wickedness of an idol’s enticing like the flatteries of a wanton harlot? Be

not men and women as prone to spiritual fornication, I mean idolatry, as to carnal

fornication? (247-48; author’s emphasis)

Like the anti-theatrical tracts, the logic here hinges on the potentially corruptive power of the

early modern imagination. A number of men will be tempted by the mere sight of a harlot

because their corrupt natures make them prone to fornication, but it is not just their own corrupt

nature that causes them to fall. It is also the “nature of images.” Though these men have been

warned against fornication, once they are alone with the harlot, “nothing can follow but

wickedness.” Men and women are “prone to spiritual fornication” and thus, should avoid the

images of the Catholic church as they would avoid the public display of beautiful harlots.

The next analogy moves from a general comparison between the churches and loose

women to a specific comparison between images and prostitutes, and churches and brothels:

And of this ground of man’s corrupt inclination, as well to spiritual fornication as

to carnal, it must needs follow, that, as it is the duty of the godly magistrate,

loving honesty and hating whoredom, to remove all strumpets and harlots,

specially out of places notoriously suspected or resorted unto of naughty packs,

for the avoiding of carnal fornication; so is it the duty of the same godly

magistrate, to drive away all spiritual harlots, I mean idols and images, specially

out of suspected places, churches and temples, dangerous for idolatry to be

committed there. (249)

The images are prostitutes; the worshippers are clients; the churches are brothels. And the

Roman Catholic clergy are bawds who, like the whore, serve the devil: “And as he were the

enemy of all honesty that would bring strumpets and harlots out of their secret corners into the

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public market place, there freely to dwell and occupy their filthy merchandise, so is he the enemy

of the true worshipping of God that bringeth idols and images into the temple and church” (249).

Like the madam, these clergy “sell” their filthy images to the worshippers, moving the unclean

filth into the public market to practice its craft, “spiritual fornication.”

Though the homilist attempts to differentiate Catholic ideology from Protestant, he

utilizes portrayals of whoredom and prostitution pulled directly out of hagiographical tales of

prostitutes. In the tales of saintly prostitutes, whores endanger men’s souls and the clearer the

woman’s involvement in actual prostitution, the more damning her depiction. The displacement

of male agency onto dangerously unsupervised female sexuality and the depiction of the

prostitute as embodied filth are nowhere more clearly exposed than in the stories of the prostitute

saints.

Saintly Whores

There are four prostitute saints in Catholic hagiography: Mary of Egypt, Margaret/Pelagien

(sometimes written as Palagia), Thaisis, and, of course, Mary Magdalene. The stories of these

four saints include elements that Protestant polemicists, early English playwrights, and even the

scurrilous pamphleteers utilize. Though not all of these women are described as professional

prostitutes, they are known as the prostitute saints because of their sexual availability and

indiscrimination. Obviously, the model for the repentant prostitute comes from these stories.

Through repentance and God’s grace, all four women eventually repent though their stories end

in dramatically different fashions. There are varying versions of all four stories, and the

continental versions stress different elements of the stories than do the English versions. I give

fairly detailed summaries of the four stories and the most popular English variations to the

stories because these hagiographic myths inform later models in various ways. The summaries I

rehearse here are taken from William Caxton’s translation of Jacobus de Varagine’s The Golden

Legend.

Mary of Egypt. The Mary of Egypt story tells of a monk named Zosimus who upon

entering the desert finds “a [naked] creature which was all black over her body, of the great heat

and burning of the sun” (vol. 3 106). Zosimus covers her with his mantle and then is frightened

and amazed when the woman addresses him by name and floats “nigh a foot and a half” above

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the ground (106). He asks her to tell him her story. At first she resists, telling him that “if I

should recount mine estate ye should flee away from me like as from venomous serpent, and thy

holy ears should be made foul of my words, and the air should be full and foul of corruption”

(107). Finally, she explains that at the age of twelve she journeyed to Alexandria and then gave

her “body openly to sin by the space of seventeen years, and abandoned it to lechery and refused

no man” (107). After seventeen years, Mary wishes to journey to Jerusalem to worship the cross.

As payment for her passage, Mary offers her body to all the sailors for the duration of trip.

When Mary arrives, she tries to enter the church to worship, but is “suddenly and invisibly put

aback many times, in such wise that I might not enter into the church” (107). She realizes she

cannot enter because of her sinful life and prays to the Virgin Mary, promising that she will

repent and live a chaste life. She worships in the church and then accepts three pence from a man

with which she buys three loaves of bread. A voice tells her to pass through Jordan, which she

does. She lives in the desert, seeing no man for seventeen years. In those seventeen years, she

survives on the three loaves of bread, which have become hard as rock, then on herbs. Her

clothes rot off of her body and any time she is tempted to go find meat and drink, she prays to the

Virgin. After praying and weeping one night, she sees a bright light and all of her temptations

melt away. She tells Zosimus, “And sith, I have been delivered of all temptations and am

nourished of spiritual meat of the word of our Lord” (108). She asks Zosimus to come to her

next year and give her the holy sacrament. He returns the next year and is amazed to see her walk

on water. She asks him to return at the end of the year, so that he may pray for her. He does and

finds her dead and laid out for burial. Mary has left Zosimus a letter stating that God took her

two days after her having received his sacrament and she asks him to pray for her and bury her.

The ground is too hard, but a lion happens by who digs a hole for Zosimus to bury Mary in.

In this version of the story, we do not know whether Mary takes money for sex or not. In

some versions of this story, she is a professional prostitute. Other versions expressly deny that

she accepted money. In the original Latin text, translated from Greek, Mary claims that she does

not accept money because she would be able to sleep with a greater number of men if she did not

charge (Karras 123-4). Caxton does not mention the exchange of money in The Golden Legend

but in his Vitae Patrum, published in 1495, he states: “during the time of seventeen years and

more she had continually made residence at the public brothel of the same town with other

common women there being, in abandoning and using her proper body to all that came, and with

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no other thing got her living” (fol. 68r; qtd. in Karras 124). Karras observes that for the medieval

world Mary’s commonness made her a prostitute (and whore). She was the “property of all men

because in a sense she was the property of none” (Karras 124). It is interesting to note that Mary

at first refuses to tell her story because “thy holy ears should be made foul of my words, and the

air should be full and foul of corruption.” Even the verbal repetition of her whoredom has the

potential to contaminate the man, penetrating his ear and befouling his body. Once she has

repented, the story fantasizes about a hermetically sealed body, ingesting only the “spiritual meat

of the word.” This female body no longer leaks fluids, though she still worries about the power

her voice has to pollute. Mary’s words, she fears, have the potential to infest and contaminate,

while the word of God purifies. The Catholic versions of these stories imagine a body without

processes, free even of the desire to sustain itself, a body that is impermeable and desiccated, a

body that is no longer truly a body.

Saint Margaret or Saint Pelagien. Margaret/Palagien is the prostitute saint’s story that

varies the most out of the four. Only one text describes Margaret as a woman who takes money

for sex, and in fact, The Golden Legend claims that Margaret led a chaste life. The features that

all of the versions have in common are that Margaret is of high rank and that she eventually

disguises herself as a man and lives the life of a monk until her death. Sometimes she lives

among monks; sometimes she lives among nuns (as a man); and sometimes the story describes

Margaret living as a male hermit until her death. The texts refer to her interchangeably as Saint

Margaret or Saint Pelagien (Pelagia), Pelagien being the male name she gave to herself. In The

Golden Legend, the beautiful, rich Margaret leads a chaste and honest life. On her wedding day,

“the virgin was inspired of God that the damage of her virginity was brought by so great harmful

enjoying, and stretched her to the earth sore weeping, and began to think in her heart the

recompense of her virginity, and the sorrows that follow of marriage, and reputed all the joys of

the world as ordure and filth” (vol 5 239). For Margaret, the “great harmful enjoying” of sex,

even within the confines of marriage, causes her to reject all earthly pleasure. At midnight,

Margaret polls her hair, dresses as a man, and flees from her marriage bed to a nearby monastery

where she lives as a monk. After receiving her training, Brother Pelagien is sent to be the master

of the abbey of nuns. When a “virgin which was dwelling without the gates” of the convent

becomes pregnant, Pelagien, as the nearest male, is accused of fornication by the nuns and closed

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in a pit. The cruelest monk is assigned to Pelagien’s care. He gives her small quantities of bread

and water and then departs. Margaret “was not troubled in any manner, but ever thanked God,

and comforted herself in her continence” (240). When she feels death approaching, she writes a

letter to the monks explaining who she is and asking to be buried as a virgin. The nuns and monk

are penitent and bury her honorably in the church.

Other versions of St. Margaret depict her as an actress (Caxton refers to her as “a juggler

or dancer” in Vitae Patrum) who is beautiful, vain, and promiscuous. She hears a sermon,

repents, and then lives as a male hermit in the desert. Fellow hermits discover her true sex after

her death (Karras 126). The only version that depicts her as a prostitute is a Middle English

version recorded in W.M. Metcalfe’s Legends of the Saints in Scottish Dialect of the Fourteenth

Century (1896):

She was a fair enough woman

And drew many a man to sin

For she made her body common

In lust of the flesh and lechery.

[. . .]

And did a good business with her flesh. (2:205; qtd. in Karras 126)

As Karras observes, Margaret’s designation as an actress, juggler, or dancer all associate her

with whoredom, even without mentioning her sexual activity explicitly (126).

It is interesting to speculate why versions of this particular story vary so dramatically. In

some of them, Margaret’s chaste, in others a whore, but throughout the period she is described as

a prostitute saint. Two aspects of her story may contribute to this depiction: the enjoyment of sex

and her cross-dressing. Though the Margaret is not chastised for polling her hair and dressing as

a man, all those hearing of her cross-dressing would think of Deuteronomy 22.5, which prohibits

wearing the clothing of the opposite sex. Thus, her association with whoredom, even when she

remains chaste in some versions, may be due to her disobedience, though certainly there is

nothing in The Golden Legend that implies moral condemnation. The fourteenth-century, Middle

English version of the saint’s story most strongly associates her with prostitution (Karras 126).

This association is perhaps indicative of a culture that increasingly considers cross-dressing to be

a serious offense. We have already discussed how anti-polemicists viewed theatrical cross-

dressing, but cross-dressing has become an issue for the courts as well. Certainly, by the mid-

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sixteenth century we know that cross-dressers were being punished. Though cross-dressers were

frequently picked up for crimes other than cross-dressing, they were often publicly punished in

the cross-dressed attire they were wearing at the time of the arrest. The clothing they wear during

their punishment is often specifically mentioned in the court records. Michael Shapiro includes

records of cross-dressers who were punished in Appendix C of Gender Play on the

Shakespearean Stage (1994). The records appear in the Repertories of the Aldermen’s Court,

housed in the City of London Record Office. On July 23, 1556, one woman who was

apprehended dressed as a soldier is sent to the pillory for several hours, then “to be conveyed to

Bridewell and there to be whipped naked to the girdlestead [waist] and then there to be safelie

kepte till my Lord Mayors further pleasure shalbe knowne” (227). On April 20th, 1575, the court

orders Magdalyn Gawyn, who was found dressed as a man, to the pillory where she is to be

bound “having her heare hangynge over her sholders and apparelyd in th’attyre wherewith she ys

nowe clothyd” (227). In this instance, the court expressly orders that she be exhibited at the

pillory in an ambi-gendered display. Her shaming depends upon the display of male and female

signs of gender. On July 3rd, 1576, Dorothy Clayton, a spinster accused of dressing like a man

and of whoredom, is to “be set on the pillory in Chepeside there to remayne in such kynde of

mans apparel, as at the tyme of her apprehension did [wear], and afterwards to be comytted to

Bridewell there to remyne untyll further order shalbe taken for her deliverance” (230).50

Sometimes these women are accused of whoredom, and sometimes they are not, but this does not

really tell us whether or not they were prostitutes or even whether they were caught participating

in sex outside of marriage.51 It does tell us that court authorities included the public display of

their cross-dressing as part of their shaming.

50 The first punishment requires the display of the woman’s body “stripped to the girdlestead” for her public shaming. The last two punishments rely upon the public display of the fetish objects for the humiliation of the prisoners, and thus, belie the one-sex model as the dominant discourse pertaining to sexual difference. These punishments are only punishment if those viewing the transgressors are able to see both the fetish of sex and the imagined body of the transgressor, which signify sex simultaneously. The existence of this sort of punishment also means that early modern theater audiences may have seen cross-dressing outside of the London theaters. The existence of this sort of punishment makes it unlikely that audiences did not notice the boy underneath the fetish, as Stephen Greenblatt has claimed (and as I have discussed in the introduction). The audience’s gaze would already have been accustomed to a double-vision, seeing the “real” but not visible body of the prisoner and the body signified by the fetishes of gender. 51 Some literary critics have claimed that the absence of the accusation of “whoredom” pertaining to some of the women appearing in the Bridewell Court Book records is significant. For example, Karen Worley Pirnie, in her 1998 dissertation, “‘As She Saith’: Tracing Whoredom in Seventeenth-Century London from Bridewell to Southwark,” claims, “unlike some male dramatic characters, who seem always ready to accuse any woman of whoredom, the

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The Middle English version emphasizes Margaret’s role as actively leading men to sin.

As we will see later in this chapter, the whore as the active agent of the devil is a common

characterization in early Tudor and Stuart depictions of the prostitute as well as in the

hagiographic story of Thaisis. The more closely the woman is associated with actual prostitution,

rather than the less precise designation of whore, the more the texts indict her as personally

responsible for imperiling her clients’ souls. This feature is overtly apparent in the only one of

the four “prostitute saints” who is clearly and consistently identified as a professional prostitute:

Thaisis.

Saint Thaisis (or Thais). In his translation of The Golden Legend, Caxton begins Thaisis’

story by claiming,

Thais is said of taphos, that is to say death, for she was cause of the death of many

that died for her sin. Or she is said of thalos, that is to say delight, for she was

delicious to men, and accomplished all worldly delights, or she is said of thalamo,

that is will or affection of marriage, for at the last she had will to be married to

God by great penance. (vol. 5 240-41)

Thus, Thaisis’ body gave men “worldly delights” at the expense of their souls. The phrase “she

was cause of the death of many that died for her sin” displaces the men’s will to sin onto Thaisis

as though men lose the ability to reason when they catch sight of her. It is “her sin” that causes

the death of many. In the figure of Thaisis the “petit mort” becomes an embodied death,

ensnaring men and damning them. It is not surprising, then, that Thaisis’ penance involves

extreme self-denial and living in her bodily excretions. governors of Bridewell rarely labeled the women who come [sic] before them, even when they do seem to have exchanged sexual favors for survival” (5). There are several reasons why we should not read the absence of the accusation of whoredom as meaning the Bridewell governors did not consider the woman before them to be a whore. First, as I discuss later in the dissertation, Bridewell court scribes are not consistent in their terms. Even the same scribe will describe the same behavior in different terms. Also, though Pirnie wants to read the depositions of the women as a place that “confer[s] the agency of the speaker on women normally silent” (4), these voices are translated through a male scribe, who chooses what to include and what not to and who, given the early modern technology of scribal record-keeping, is more likely to paraphrase the woman than to faithfully transcribe every word coming out of her mouth. And, finally, though there are women who come before the court, who, as Pirnie demonstrates, have appeared before and are obviously professional prostitutes, and yet are not labeled “whores” or sometimes even punished, this verbal and physical “leniency” does not necessarily demonstrate sympathy for the women’s economic situations on the part of the either the Bridewell governors or the scribes. Instead, it might be indicative of a bribe being exchanged (which, of course, the scribe would not record or perhaps even know about), of a lack of consistent record-keeping, or of the fact that the women, just by being hauled before the Bridewell court,

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Thaisis “was a common woman, and of so great beauty that many followed her, and sold

all their substance, that they came unto the utterest poverty” (241). Her many lovers fought over

her so that “her house was oft full of blood of young men that drew to her” (241). An abbot

named Pafuntius hears of her and disguises himself. He gives her a shilling so that she will sleep

with him. Thaisis takes him to her chamber where the bed “was preciously adorned with clothes”

(241). Pafuntius tells her that the place is not secret enough. Thaisis leads him to several other

chambers, but each time he claims that the room is not private enough and he fears being seen by

others. Finally, Thaisis, frustrated, exclaims, “there is within a place where no man entereth, and

there shall no man see us, but God and if thou dread him there is no place that may be hid from

him” (241). The abbot asks if she knows that there is a God to which she replies that she does,

and she also knows of heaven and hell. Pafuntius asks, “if thou knowest this, wherefore hast thou

lost so many souls? And thou shalt not only give accounts for thine own sin, but thou must

reckon them that by thee have sinned” (242). At this point, Thaisis begins to weep and tells

Pafuntius after three hours have passed she “shall go withersoever [he] wilt, and shall do that

which [he] shall command” (242). During these three hours Thaisis gathers up all of her

belongings and takes them to the middle of the city where she burns them, saying, “Come ye

forth all that have sinned with me, and see ye how I burn that which ye have given to me” (242).

After destroying goods worth “five hundred pounds of gold,” she follows the abbot to a

monastery of virgins, where he leads her to a cell and seals the door with lead:

The cell was little and straight, and but one little window open, by which was

ministered of her poor living. For the abbot commanded that they should give to

her a little bread and water. And when the abbot should depart, Thaisis said to

him: Father, where shall I shed the water, and that which shall come from the

conduits of nature? And he said to her: In thy cell, as thou art worth. And then she

demanded how she should pray, and he answered: Thou art not worthy to name

God, ne that the name of the Trinity be in thy mouth, ne stretch thy hands to

heaven, because thy lips be full of iniquities, and thine hands full of evil

attouchings, and foul ordures. (242-43)

were quite obviously whores and therefore, there is no need for the scribe or the governors to consistently attach this linguistic label to the women before them.

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The abbot tells Thaisis to repeat, “Lord thou hast formed me, have mercy on me” (243). After

three years pass, the abbot remembers Thaisis and goes to the abbot Anthony to see if God has

yet forgiven her for her sins. Saint Anthony tells his disciples to stay up all night and pray about

her. Eventually, Paul, Anthony’s disciple, has a vision where he sees three virgins “in heaven a

bed arrayed with precious vestments, which three virgins arrayed, with clear visages” (243). The

virgins are Dread, “which drew Thaisis from evil,” Shame, “of the sins that she committed and

that made her to deserve pardon,” and Love of Righteousness, “which had brought her to high

sovereign place” (243). Pafuntius takes Paul’s vision as a sign of “God’s will” and journeys to

the monastery of virgins, where he opens the door to the cell. Thaisis protests and begs that he

leave her enclosed, but Pafuntius explains that God has forgiven her for her sins. Thaisis replies,

“I take God to witness that sith I entered herein I have made of all my sins a sum, and have set

them tofore mine eyes, and like as the breath departeth not from the mouth and the nostrils, so

the sins departed never from mine eyes, but always have bewept them” (244). Pafuntius tells

Thaisis that God has not forgiven her because of her penance, but because “thou hast had always

dread in thy courage” (244). Thaisis leaves the cell and dies fifteen days later. Caxton ends the

story with a paragraph about Saint Effrem’s conversion of “another common woman” whom he

hired for sex then led into the center of a marketplace, saying, “sit down here, that I may have to

do with thee” (244). When the whore demurs given that everyone would watch, and she would

be ashamed, Effram points out that God is always watching, and “she went away all ashamed”

(244).

Thaisis’ story is the most disturbing of the four. Though the various medieval stories

about prostitutes frequently do not mention the economic exchange, the prostitute is very often

associated with venality at a more insidious level. Rather than pronouncing judgment on a one-

time monetary exchange between the prostitute and her client, the texts portray the prostitute as

leeching both life and inheritance from the men. Thus, Thaisis not only leads the men astray by

endangering their souls through fornication; she impels them to sell “all their substance,” which

results in their “utterest poverty;” and she causes them to lose their lives fighting over her. Like

Isabella from Measure for Measure, who begs the Duke to forgive Angelo for his lust because,

she says, “I partly think / A due sincerity governed his deeds, / Till he did look on me” (5.1.442-

44)52, Thaisis’ beauty enfeebles men, causing them to lose their ability to control their reason.

52 Quoted from Oxford’s forthcoming Collected Works of Thomas Middleton, pp. 1551-89.

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The prostitute or even the beautiful, chaste woman, like Isabella, is culpable because she is the

impetus to imagination; she is the vehicle for the stirring of the imagination, which “putteth

green spectacles before the eyes of our wit, to make us see nothing but greene, that is serving for

the consideration of passion” (Wright 51). The prostitute, like a succubus, drains the men of

substance in all its forms: reason, wealth, and life. The cultural configuration of the prostitute as

a parasite whose body leaks filth out of all her orifices while she lives off others’ patrimonies

displaces male agency onto the prostitute and provides early modern society with an image of the

most basic beliefs about all female sexuality.

Thaisis’ punishment, to remain for three years in a hermetically enclosed cell living in

her own filth, enacts yet again the fantasy of the enclosed body. In this instance, though, the

fantasy entails man’s ability to seal off the whore’s poisonous beauty from the outside world, to

keep her filth from endangering him. Thaisis’ very words, like Mary of Egypt’s, are airborne

contaminants capable of contaminating even God. Thaisis is not allowed to confess her sins

aloud. Instead, she must imagine them in her head, “setting them before her eyes.” She cannot

even reach her hands up to pray, so contaminated is she with “evil attouchings, and foul

ordures.” In fact, her sins are too base for penance alone. Pafuntius tells Thaisis that God has not

forgiven her because of her penance, but because “she hast had always dread in thy courage.”

According to Panfuntius, she is forgiven because at some level she has always been afraid. If

this is true, if Thaisis is forgiven not because of her repentance but because of her fear, then what

has been the purpose of the penance?

The other disturbing fantasy is the “vision” received by Paul. The virgins, strangely, lie

on a beautifully adorned bed and are themselves “arrayed” on the bed like beautiful objects. This

vision reminds the reader of the whore’s bed, itself beautifully adorned. Thus, we have two

commonplace sexual fantasies: the virgin(s) and the whore. Certainly, erotic visions and

descriptions are quite commonplace in Catholic hagiography;53 however, this vision is

reminiscent of the whore’s bedchamber and the three virgins are allegorical, but more

specifically are psychological manifestations of the whore’s current mental state. She has

internalized the dread, shame, and “love of righteousness” necessary for her alignment with

patriarchally inscribed behavior. She is now an interpellated subject, wishing to remain in her

53 See Carolyn Walker Bynum’s Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (1996) for a summary of hagiographic eroticism.

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filthy cell, acknowledging her own filth. This filth occurs not only because of her status as a

whore, but also because of her status as a beautiful woman who allows others to look upon her.

Her sin is such that even if God forgives her, man cannot. She dies fifteen days after leaving her

cell.

Mary Magdalene. Mary Magdalene, the patron saint of repentant prostitutes, is the most

famous of the four prostitute saints. Early modern prostitutes were frequently referred to as

“maudlins” and the continental houses for reformed prostitutes were also called maudlin houses.

The various stories about Mary Magdalene, though, are more closely associated with whoredom

in general than with having sex for money. Beginning in the sixth century, Mary Magdalene’s

story conflates several different biblical stories, all from the New Testament (Karras 120): the

story of Christ’s exorcism of Mary of Magdala’s seven demons (Luke 8:2); the story of Mary’s

presence at the sepulcher and her conversation with Christ at the ascension (Mark 16:9; John

20:14-18); the story of Martha and Lazarus’ sister, Mary of Bethany, who listens to Christ while

Martha serves them (Luke 10:38-40); and the story of the unnamed woman who washes Christ’s

feet and dries them with her hair at the home of Simon the Pharisee, where Christ relates the

parable of the two debtors (Luke 7:30). Though the Bible does not tell us specifically what Mary

has done to earn the designation of “sinful woman,” patristic and medieval writers assumed the

sin to be sexual in nature. Mary Magdalene is also the subject of a popular Middle English

saint’s play,54 and even the Protestant Lewis Wager retells her story in An Enterlude of the

Repentance of Marie Magdalene (published in 1567), though the Protestant story, as we shall

see, differs significantly from the Catholic saint’s tale and saint’s play.

In The Golden Legend, we are told first of Mary’s rank. She descends from a line of

kings. Her name “Magdalo” comes from the name of the castle she inherits. Her brother,

Lazarus, inherits part of Jerusalem, while Martha inherits Bethany. Mary “gave herself to all

delights of the body” (vol. 4 74), while Lazarus “entended all to knighthood,” so Martha, who is

wise, manages her own holdings and those of Lazarus and Mary. Mary “abounded in riches, and

54 Clifford Davidson claims that “the evidence of the dramatic records is that the saint play genre was normal fare in England—more common, in all likelihood, than the liturgical drama or moralities, though probably less popular than the folk play or biblical drama, which includes the great cycle plays that we associate with cities like Coventry, York, and Chester” (150). The only extant manuscript of the saint’s play, Mary Magdalene resides in the Bodleian, MS Digby 133. The exact date of composition is unknown. This play is one of only two extant pre-Reformation saints’ plays written in Middle English, the other being the Conversion of Saint Paul (Davidson 152; n. 25).

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because delight is fellow to riches and abundance of things; and for so much as she shone in

beauty greatly, and in riches, so much the more she submitted her body to delight, and therefore

she lost her right name, and was called customably a sinner” (74). Mary then goes to Simon the

Pharisee’s house and washes Christ’s feet with her tears and dries them with her hair. Simon

doubts that Christ is a prophet and tells him that a true prophet would have known that Mary is a

sinful woman, and he claims that a genuine prophet would not have allowed her to touch him.

Christ reproves Simon, forgives Mary of all her sins, and casts seven devils out of her. Christ

then loves her and the Legend states that “he would that she should be his hostess, and procuress

on his journey, and he ofttimes excused her sweetly; for he excused her against the Pharisee

which said that she was not clean, and unto her sister that said she was idle, unto Judas, who said

that she was a wastresse of goods” (75). And because he loves her, he raises Lazarus from the

dead and heals Martha’s “flux of blood.” This is the Mary who witnesses Christ’s death and to

whom he first appears after the resurrection. This is the Mary whom Christ makes “apostolesse

of the apostles” and who spends the fourteen years after the ascension preaching the word of

God. This is the Mary who with Lazarus, Martha and other disciples is put out to sea in a ship

without a rudder so that they would drown, but through God’s providence is protected and taken

to Marseilles. When she and her companions arrive, no one will receive them, and they sleep

under the porch of a temple, where Mary witnesses people sacrificing to idols. Mary rises up and

begins to preach the word of God and “then were they amarvalled of the beauty, of the reason,

and of the fair speaking of her. And it was no marvel that the mouth that had kissed the feet of

our Lord so debonairly and so goodly, should be inspired with the word of God more than the

other” (76). The prince of the region and his wife go to the temple to make a sacrifice to the idols

so that they might have a child. Mary forbids the sacrifice and later appears to the wife in a

vision, saying, “Wherefore hast thou so much riches and sufferest the poor people of our Lord to

die for hunger and for cold?” (77) The wife is afraid and does not tell her husband of her dream.

Mary appears a second night and tells the wife she must tell her husband to comfort the poor and

the needy. The wife still does not say anything. The third night Mary appears to the wife and

husband “with a frowning and angry visage like fire” and says, “Thou tyrant and member of thy

father the devil, with that serpent thy wife, that will not say to thee my words, thou restest now

enemy of the cross, which hast filled thy belly by gluttony, with divers manner of meats and

sufferest to perish for hunger the holy saints of our Lord…Thou shalt not escape so ne depart

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without punishment, thou tyrant and felon because thou hast so long tarried” (77). The couple

wakes and decides it is “more profitable” to obey her. They tell Mary they will obey her in all

things “if thou mayst get of thy god whom thou preachest, that we might have a child” (78).

Mary prays, and they conceive. The husband decides to journey to Saint Peter, but his pregnant

wife insists upon going as well. They leave Mary in charge of their holdings. During the stormy

journey by sea, the wife gives birth and dies. The sailors want to throw her body overboard. The

husband convinces them to go ashore and bury her, but the earth is so hard that they cannot bury

her so they leave her on the ground. The husband covers her with a mantle and leaves the living

infant beside her, as he will die without her milk anyway. He prays that his son should not perish

and then continues on to Saint Peter. The prince stays with Saint Peter for two years, learning of

the faith and seeing the places where Christ had preached. On his journey home, they happen to

pass the same shore where they had left his wife and son. The man sees a small child throwing

rocks into the sea. The child, who had never seen other people before, runs to his mother’s body

and hides under the blanket covering her. The man is amazed to see that the child suckling on his

mother’s dead body. The man prays to Mary Magdalene, asking her also to restore his wife, as

she has seen fit to care for the child. The woman revives and tells the man that she has been with

him all along and then recounts his various conversations and journeys with Saint Peter. They

return home and destroy all the temples in their kingdom. Mary retreats to the desert and lives

alone for thirty years without food or water. At every hour the angels come and lift her into the

air, and she hears the music of the heavens, which fills her with “right sweet meats” (83). After

thirty years, a priest searching for a solitary life takes up residence near her, and God allows him

to witness the angels’ care of Mary. The priest tries to approach Mary so that he might ask about

this miracle, but every time he approaches he begins to swell and become weak and lose his

breath. He then comprehends that this “is a secret celestial place where no man might come” and

he calls out Jesus’ name three times and Mary appears, though the priest can only hear her, but

not see her. She tells him who she is and that he has been allowed to see her because he must go

to Maximin and tell him that the day after the resurrection she and the angels will appear to

Maximin in the oratory. At the appointed time, Mary appears, floating above the earth “the space

of two or three cubits” (85). She receives communion, stretches herself out on the altar, and dies.

Her sweet-smelling body remains there for seven days, after which time the priests anoint the

body and bury it. The saint’s story ends by rehearsing several other miracles that had been

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attributed to Mary Magdalene. The miracles occur due to direct prayer to the saint or through

worship at her sepulcher or through the efficacy of various relics. The text also recounts an

alternate beginning to Mary’s story, telling how Mary had been engaged to John the Evangelist.

When Christ calls John, he leaves Mary. In response, she “gave herself to all delight, but because

it was not convenable that the calling of St. John should be occasion of her damnation, therefore

our Lord converted her mercifully to penance, and because he had taken from her sovereign

delight of the flesh, he replenished her with sovereign delight spiritual tofore all other, that is the

love of God” (88).

The second version of how Mary was saved erases Mary’s own agency in her salvation.

Here she is saved not because of the logic of the parable of the two debtors that Christ tells

Simon, but because God does not want John’s salvation to be the cause of her damnation. In

addition, Mary’s body is conceived of as a vessel, which God empties of delight for the flesh, but

then fills back up with “delight spiritual.” It is as if the female body can only be imagined as a

leaky sieve. She must be filled back up so that she can express the word of God, rather than her

own natural filth.

The earlier saint’s play conceives of the impetus for Mary’s sin differently.55 In the play,

we are given a psychological motivation for Mary’s eventual degradation. Her father has died,

which leaves Mary in despair and also leaves her without parental supervision. In the saint’s

play, Mary’s castle is besieged by the seven deadly sins and she begins to live the life of a sinner.

Though her sins are sexual in nature, only two brief episodes pertain to this part of her life: a

scene set in a tavern (ll. 470-546) and a scene in an arbor where she has assignations with her

“valentynys” (ll. 564-87). The settings and the plural “valentines” reveal her sins to be sexual,

but, like the saint’s stories underpinning the play, the play does not explicitly depict the sex.

Shortly afterward, Mary’s angel visits her in a dream, telling her to “remembyr on mercy” and

“make [her] soule clyre” (l. 600; qtd. in Davidson 153). The remaining text includes Christ’s

revival of Lazarus, Mary’s presence at the sepulcher, and the various miracles attributed to her,

55 It is possible that there were other early dramatic versions of Mary Magdalene that are not extant. There are records of at least three performances of a play called Mary Magdalene: “in the parish church at Taunton, Somerset in 1504; an outdoor production at Chelmsford in 1561 (this may have been the Digby version), and quite possibly another at Magdalene College, Oxford in 1506-7” (White xxvi). Mary also appears in other liturgical dramas like the fourteenth century play, Sepulchrum and a vernacular, non-cycle mystery play, The Sepulchre, for which we have only a fragment. The date of composition is unknown (Adams 73, n. 1).

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such as her visit to Marseilles. The play ends with her solitary life, depicting the angel’s feeding

her with communion wafers, and her death.

As Clifford Davidson observes, the saint’s plays encouraged emotive responses from the

audience, attempting to evoke a sympathetic association with the saint. This emotive response

evoked by a visual spectacle concerned some audience members, one of whom, disapproving of

audience members who cried when they watched the Passion performed, complained, “‘they ben

reprovable that wepen for the pley of Cristis passioun.’ They would be better off, he [goes on to]

say, if they would weep for their own sins ‘and of theire children, as Crist bad the wymmen that

wepten on him’” (qtd. in Davidson 151).

Protestants’ handling of Mary Magdalene differs dramatically. An Interlude of the

Repentaunce of Mary Magdalen was published in 1566, four years after its author, Lewis Wager,

a former Franciscan, had died. The date of composition is unknown, but the prologue’s mention

of the king implies that it was written during the reign of Edward VI (White xxii-iii). The only

evidence we have that the interlude was performed comes from the prologue, which states that

the actors “have ridden and gone many sundry waies; / Yea, we have used this feate at the

universitie” (25-6). Unlike the Catholic version, this play does not focus on the miracles;

instead, the play represents Mary’s sinful life much more completely than its Catholic

counterpart. In this interlude, her sinful life occupies more than half of the play. In addition,

Mary’s nature is sinful from early childhood. The vice, Infidelitie, fondly reminiscences with

Mary, “Iwis mystresse Marie, I had you in myne armes, / Before you were iii yeares of age

without a doubt” (216-7). In fact, her parents’ coddling functions as a cause of Mary’s lascivious

behavior. Mary notes:

Certainly my parents brought me up in chyldhod,

In virtuous qualities, and godly literature,

And also they betstowed upon me muche good

To have nourtred in noble ornature.

But everymore they were unto me very tender,

They would not suffer the wynde on me to blowe,

My requests they would always to me render,

Whereby I knew the good will that to me they did owe. (248-255)

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When Mary’s parents die, leaving her “the greatest part” of their worldly possessions, Mary’s

already vain and sinful nature becomes lascivious. Mary is closely aligned with the figure of

vanitas. At the play’s opening, she is obsessed with her outward appearance. Both the wordplay

between Mary and the Vices and the on-stage action demonstrate Mary’s whoredom:

INFIDELITIE. Mistress Mary can you not play on the virginals?

MARY. Yes swete heart that I can, and also on the regals,

There is no instrument but that handle I can,

I thynke as well as any gentlewoman.

INFIDELITE. If that you can play upon the recorder,

I have as fayre a one as any is in this border

Truly you have not sene a more goodlie pipe,

It is so bigge that you hand can it not gripe. (837-44)

In addition to the overt sexual dialogue, Mary kisses the vices, sometimes one at a time, but

occasionally the stage direction implies that she is kissing all of them, as in the stage direction

after line 830, which notes, “Mary embraces the Vices” (830.1). The visual representation of the

Protestant version of Mary depicts her whoredom much more graphically than the Catholic

dramatic representations.

Certainly, the Protestant depiction of Mary influences both the later theatrical depictions

of whores but also the prostitutes who appear in the pamphlets and rogue literature. For

example, in Greene’s “The Conversion of an English Courtezan,” published with “A Disputation

between a He-Cony-Catcher and a She-Cony-Catcher” (1592), the fallen woman’s childhood

begins her decline. The courtesan was born to “honest and wealthy parents, who had many

children,” but she was “their only daughter, and therefore the jewel wherein they most delighted,

and more, the youngest of all, and therefore the more favoured; for being gotten in the waning of

[her] parents’ age, they doted on [her] above the rest, and so set their hearts the more on fire”

(227). Like Mary’s fall, this courtesan’s fall resulted from her permissive, elderly parents who

were of middle rank. The courtesan laments that now she realizes “in sparing the rod, they hated

the child; the overkind fathers make unruly daughters” (227). As with Mary, the attention from

her parents makes her realize her own beauty. She becomes vain and needs to be publicly

admired, so she goes out frequently so that men will look at her. Being looked at leads to her

eventual seduction:

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A maid that hazards herself in much company may venture the freedom of her heart by

the folly of her eye, for so long the pot goes to the water, that it comes broken home; and

such as look much must needs like at last. The fly dallies with a flame, but at length she

burneth; flax and fire put together will kindle. A maid in company of young men shall be

constrained to listen to the wanton allurements of many cunning speeches. [. . . .] Youth

is apt to yield to sweet persuasions, and therefore, cousin, think nothing more dangerous

than to gad abroad. (230)

The courtesan’s beauty and public display lead inevitably to a lascivious life, which itself gives

way to vile prostitution. First, she has one lover, then two at a time, and then she moves from

committing fornication to adultery—all because her parents did not spank her, or so the story

implies.

The Whore of Babylon

The other dominant biblical model of whoredom is, of course, the whore of Babylon from

Revelation 17. In Revelation 17, the whore wears a scarlet gown and holds a golden cup filled

with the “abominations and filthiness of her fornications.” She rides upon a beast having seven

heads and ten horns. The Whore of Babylon becomes an overtly politicized representation, most

dominantly read as the Catholic church, though, as Laura Lunger Knoppers has recently

demonstrated, the whore was alternatively utilized by the Fifth Monarchists and the Dutch

(1656) to depict Oliver Cromwell as the whore of Babylon (Knoppers 100-18).56 Representations

of the whore of Babylon were thus not consistently deployed. She is illustrated in Luther’s Das

Newe Testament Deutzsch (1522), Tyndale’s New Testament (1536), and Coverdale’s New

Testament (1538). In addition, she provides the model for Duessa in Spenser’s Fairie Queene

and Dekker’s “Empress of Babylon: under whom is figured Rome” (title-page) in his play, The

Whore of Babylon, entered in the Stationer’s Register in 1607.

The Whore of Babylon represents a chaotic body politic, overrun with corruption. Her

arrival ushers in the apocalypse. Later, this image of the whore is used to expose and attack

Charles II’s papist leanings during the Restoration. In The Second Part of the Collection of

56 See Laura Lugner Knopper’s “‘The Antichrist, the Babilon, the Great Dragon’: Oliver Cromwell, Andrew Marvell, and the Apocalyptic Monstrous” in Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe (2004), pp. 93-123, for an excellent summary of the various ways in which the whore was politicized in the Reformation.

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Poems on Affairs of State, published in 1689, the anonymous editor compiles satirical depictions

of Charles’ mistresses to censure his anti-Protestantism. He includes Andrew Marvell’s “Satyr”

of Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth. Marvell writes:

That Pocky Bitch,

A Damn’d Papistical Drab,

An ugly deform’d Witch,

Eaten up with the Mange and Scab.

This French Hag’s Pockey Bum

So powerfull is of late,

Although it’s both blind and dumb,

It rules both Church and State (27).

Here, the whore’s scarred, French ass rules the country. Charles’ sexual relationship is sodomitic

and has infected the body politic. Compare the duchess’ depiction to that of Nell Gwynn in

volume two of the collection. This one is wisely anonymous:

Hard by Pell-mell lives a Wench called Nell,

K. C______ the S_______ he kept her;

She has got a trick to [handle his prick]

But never lays Hands on his Sceptre;

All matters of State from her Soul she does hate,

And leaves to the Politick Bitches.

The Whore’s in the right, for ‘tis her delight

To be scratching just where it itches. (21)

While Nell as “the Protestant whore” has no desire beyond her own pleasure, the Catholic whore

feels compelled to use her unnatural sexual wiles to sway the weak king.57 Alison Conway has

noted these popular tracts conceive of Gwyn’s whoredom as simply a job. The Catholic whore,

though, through her seduction of the king’s natural body, corrupts the king’s body politic.

Here as elsewhere, the whore is filth. She brings chaos and sin in her wake, and her

permeable body contaminates those who look upon her and congress with her. The prostitute is

the monstrous example of the whore, and while many of the early literary and dramatic

representations associate her with those of middling rank, her juridical associations (as we will

57 See Alison Conway’s “Defoe’s Protestant Whore” in Eighteenth-Century Studies (2002), pp. 215-233.

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see in the next chapter) serve to link her to the lower class. Certainly, the lived experience of the

average London citizen would also have associated flesh-and-blood prostitutes with the lower

class because these were the prostitutes who were most visible, i.e. the streetwalkers, the whores

doing penance in the churches, and the prostitutes carted by the Bridewell governors. The earlier

biblical depictions, though, work to obscure the economic conditions of the prostitute. Thus,

though there are texts that are extremely concerned with the abuse of the underclass, like

Whetstone’s Promos and Cassandra, the sympathy does not extend to prostitutes, who are

conceived as pleasure-seeking and avaricious, not economically driven to prostitution.

Contradictorily, as we shall see in the next chapter, the representations of prostitutes as pleasure-

seeking succubae, coupled with the lived experience of prostitutes as associated with the lower

class, help to reinforce the growing fear of the underclass, a fear which we can trace through the

changes in juridical mandates pertaining to prostitution. Though all members of the underclass

suffered as a result of the Tudor attitudes toward the underclass, women, as their sexual crimes

were frequently written on their bodies, suffered disproportionately.

Though the ideologies of the Catholic Church and the Protestant reformers are disparate

on several important theological points, their stances on women’s role in sexual misconduct are

markedly similar. Certainly, the churches chastised male transgressors, but the sexual instigator

in both branches of Christianity is the female. Male agency is displaced onto the visual spectacle

of the woman. The woman becomes a “whore” not only if she actively engages in sexual

misconduct, in which case her sin is greater than the man, but also through the public display of

her beauty, which arouses the male imagination. This arousal results at the very least in the

man’s temptation to sin, and, depending on his own humoral make-up, might very well lead his

mortal soul into peril. The state of the woman’s soul is rarely the subject of concern. In the

prostitute saints’ stories, the whore’s redemption also results in saving male souls as the

“enclosure” of the whore’s body safely seals her away from weak men. Thus, her salvation is

almost beside the point. The sexual ideologies, reinforced by patristic and reformist writers such

as Augustine, Aquinas, and the homilists, describe male sexual release as “hydraulic,”

uncontrollable, but natural, while the female sexual “urge,” also uncontrollable, is perverse,

“unnatural.” The “filth” of sexuality is housed almost exclusively in the female body,

characterized as a “sewer” and a “bilge.”

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This characterization, as we will see, permeates all classes of women. It also influences

the way in which the state aligns with the religious sexual ideologies. When Nell is characterized

as a whore who does no harm, the characterization is not a shift in how the culture views the

whore. The comparison between Nell and the Duchess of Portsmouth seems different in that Nell

does not attempt to sway the king. Nell has no political ambition, but she is still a pleasure-

seeking whore. Her pleasure is simply self-pleasure, whereas the Duchess’s pleasure-seeking

includes seeking power and influence. Nell has no power because she does not want it--not

because she cannot have it. Whores, in the Restoration, are a threat to the king, to the very

kingdom. The state, even before the Restoration, perceives women’s sexuality as a threat; and it,

like the church, works hard to contain it.

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CHAPTER 2

THE MATERIAL CONDITION OF THE EARLY MODERN PROSTITUTE

This chapter presents an overview of ecclesiastical and common laws pertaining to prostitution,

explores the connections between the theaters and the London brothels, and surveys theater

entrepreneur Philip Henslowe’s involvement in the profession. I also recapitulate the paltry body

of research focused on the material conditions of the early modern prostitutes, tracing what little

we know, or rather can speculate, about the fee systems, the hierarchy, the procurement and

housing of these prostitutes. I examine the Bridewell Court Book records, wherein scribes

recorded the names of the accused, the details regarding and location of their transgressions, and

the prescribed punishments for these prostitutes, bawds, and idle men in order to highlight the

way in which class issues are closely tied to gender issues in the Bridewell court.

I begin this chapter, though, with a discussion of feminist attitudes toward prostitution.

Given that this project does not present an overtly presentist argument, this beginning may seem

incongruous or unnecessary to a discussion focused on the pre-Interregnum theatrical depictions

of prostitution. Yet it seems important to highlight the way in which our own representations of

and attitudes toward prostitution are still informed by these early modern models. British and

American laws still recapitulate the model of the prostitute as the instigator of the economic

exchange, rather than responding to the demand for sex workers. Sex workers are still

stigmatized, while the punters and johns, though occasionally prosecuted, are culturally

configured as men reacting to sexual urges they cannot control or for which they have no outlet.

The women are still seen (and sometimes see themselves) as “saving” the men’s wives from

having to perform the men’s “unnatural” sexual demands. Western culture still views the

economic and sexual exchange between the sex worker and the client as perverse. It also seems

important to remember that the prostitutes on which some of the playwright’s depictions were

modeled were real people, who lived on a daily basis with the “whore stigma” as the self-

proclaimed “pro-sex” feminists now call it. While the early modern prostitute is the abject in

every sense of the word, some modern sex workers have been given several outlets to voice their

own responses to their lifestyle and trade. Some of these modern outlets are certainly as

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exploitive as Robert Greene’s A Disputation and many early modern pamphlets were.58 And, as

we shall see, even the women and men most concerned about women’s rights, the feminists,

some times reinscribe the patriarchal denigration of prostitutes, thus recapitulating the “whore”

stigma. These conflicting “modern” attitudes are sometimes based upon attitudes promulgated in

the medieval and early modern period.

Feminists, Sex, and Whores—Oh my!

During my undergraduate days, I had a male professor who recounted his experience attending a

lecture given by a well-known feminist (whom he did not name) while he was at graduate

school. He attended the lecture with a “football-playing” buddy of his, who at the end of the

lecture, articulated his appreciation for the feminist’s stance on sexual intercourse. When my

professor looked at him quizzically, the buddy enthusiastically stated that he had never heard a

feminist claim, “All sex was great” to which my professor responded, “She said, ‘All sex is

rape.’” I do not recall in what context this story was recounted in the class. I have no memory of

it being a particularly “anti-feminist” moment (though I have always suspected that this was

actually a common, misogynistic joke about feminists that I just had not heard, rather than an

actual lived experience). Yet, the story has always stuck in my mind because, intentionally or

not, it painted feminists’ response to sex (and men) as universal and unequivocal. It is also the

feminist stance that popular culture attributes to all feminists. What it ignores is the logic behind

the over-generalized statement, “all sex is rape.” And, of course, it ignores third-wave feminists’

various responses to this position. 58 See for example, HBO’s Cat House: The Series, now in its second season. In this show, we voyeuristically watch sex workers in a legal brothel, The Bunny Ranch, in Nevada service their clients. It’s on cable, so the show’s content is of the same ilk as other soft-core porn cable shows like Showtime’s now defunct The Red Shoes Diaries. We also hear the sex worker’s personal stories, discussing how they became prostitutes, why they became prostitutes, what their most dangerous moments as prostitutes were, if they enjoy their jobs, and what kind of sex they personally enjoy. (The question “were you sexually abused as a child” comes up a lot.) Thus, the series contains both bathos and pornography. The series uses some of the film techniques of other reality shows like Survivor (though no one is voted off) by introducing the women by their first names or their “working” names and developing the women into “characters” through editing. Some of the sex workers and the (male) brothel owner (whose current girlfriend also works for him) have appeared twice on the Tyra Banks talk show (2/21/2006; 2/13/2007). Thus, the women’s exploitation is exploited. Before both televised appearances, Tyra issues a disclaimer, stating that neither she nor her show’s producers advocate prostitution. She is in fact, she tells us, very opposed to it. However, during the Cat House employees/stars second appearance on the show, the brothel owner mentions how many e-mails he now gets a day from young women who saw him and the women on their last Tyra Banks appearance and now want to know how they too can be Bunny Ranch employees. During the second show, Tyra asks inane questions, such as the one she asks of the brothel owner’s girlfriend/employee, “How can you stand ‘dating’ (I believe actual air quotes were

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For many feminists, the problem has to do with the cultural construction of desire, in

particular with the interpretation of woman as passive object of desire and man as the active

subject. The construction is recapitulated in the most common sexual/economic exchange that

occurs in prostitution. Our typical picture of the prostitute is the one that is most visible: the

streetwalker. In this exchange, the streetwalker sells herself, presenting her wares on the street,

while the consumer drives by and chooses which peach to pluck. Prostitution, pornography, and

other institutions associated with sex reinscribe these attitudes and propagate heterosexual

monogamy as normative and all other sexual partnerships as illicit and perverse. Thus, many

feminists, especially second-wave feminists, take the position that though women involved in

these industries are victims of this construction, they also help to perpetuate it; they conclude that

these institutions must be shut down in order to help reject these constructions.59 Many third-

wave feminists are diametrically opposed to this stance and in fact see a way out of the

patriarchal construction by embracing the “whore stigma.” One such feminist accuses the

second-wave feminists of having “internalized the universal hatred of women and named the

sexually assertive woman, ‘the whore,’ as the cause of women’s pain” (Alexander 83). The way

out of these constructions, according to the self-named “pro-sex” feminists (these feminists

specifically see themselves as deconstructing linguistic categories), is to fight for a redefinition

of sex workers as, simply, service workers.60 In “Thinking Sex” (1984), Gayle Rubin writes of

being taken to task for substantiating patriarchal views of women by referring to prostitutes as

victims and claiming that prostitution was another system that occurred in patriarchies whereby

the male victimizes the female. Rubin’s friend, who works in a massage parlor, points out that

this feminist view privileges the same side of the binary that patriarchal constructions of female

sexuality privilege. In other words, Rubin’s configuration also relies upon the prostitute as the

lesser term in the john/prostitute binary. The prostitute is degraded or abject; she is an object

acted upon, even in the feminists’ configurations, not a decision-making subject. Rubin’s friend

states that her own choice to be a prostitute should not be configured in terms of sex or gender or

even sexuality. Instead, any discussion of the prostitute and prostitution should be discussed in

used) a man old enough to be your father?” Tyra’s wrinkled-up nose and tone of voice display her disgust as though only a perverse prostitute would date a (randy) older man. 59 See, for example, Sex Traffic: Prostitution, Crime and Exploitation (2005) written by Paola Monzini. 60See for example, Priscilla Alexander’s “Feminism, Sex Workers, and Human Rights” in Jill Nagle’s Whores and Other Feminists (1997), pp. 83-97.

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Marxist terms. Is the prostitute being adequately compensated for her labor? Is she as protected

by the law as other wage-earners? This is the basis for the claim that prostitution should be

legalized and that legalization will assist in deconstructing the notion of paid sex as the term that

normalizes heterosexual monogamy.

Neither stance has been particularly effective at changing culture in the U.S. And both

sides ignore the valid points present in both arguments. There are women for whom prostitution

is not a choice so much as the only choice. These women are not feeling sexually empowered by

controlling their own sexuality. Instead, they worry about being able to discern which johns are

dangerous. Street prostitution, though, is not the only form of prostitution nor is it the most

common. In the U.S. the image of the prostitute promoted in the media is the drug-using street-

walker. She runs away from home, starts using drugs, and then starts selling herself to get her

next fix. As I mentioned in the introduction, this view of the prostitute has at base the same

beliefs about women who sell sex as did the medieval model. It is a model of a woman who

cannot control her own desires. Certainly, there are street-walkers who use drugs, and there are

street-walkers who sell sex in order to get them. And, according to statistics, street-walkers are

far more likely to be drug-addicts than other prostitutes.61 In some studies, the majority of the

street-walkers interviewed admitted to routine drug use.62 Only around 20% of prostitutes,

however, are street-walkers (Porter 104). The other 80% work as call girls, as brothel prostitutes,

and in massage parlors. With the birth of the internet, the sex industry has changed and

flourished.63 The sex workers who have benefited the least by the internet are street prostitutes.

Yet the current image of the prostitute promulgated by the U.S. media is almost exclusively that

of the street-walker. As with the ambiguous early modern definition of “whore,” painting all

prostitutes with one descriptive brush allows citizens to view all prostitution as detrimental to the

prostitute’s and the john’s health and as a public nuisance. It promotes the attitude present in

Theodore Dalrymple’s article, “Reflections on the Oldest Profession,” which appeared in The

New Criterion in April of 2004. Reacting to the texts which inherited the Elizabethan attitude of

61 See Judith Porter and Louis Bonilla’s “Drug Use, HIV, and the Ecology of Street Prostitution” in Prostitution, Pornography, and the Sex Industry: Sex for Sale (2000), pp.103-22. 62 Ibid., 107-119. See also Karen Sharpe’s Red Light, Blue Light (1998), pp. 93-108 and Eleanor Miller’s Street Woman (1987), pp. 87-118. 63 See Ronald Weitzer’s introduction to the collection of essays, Prostitution, Pornography, and the Sex Industry: Sex for Sale (2000).

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some of the rogue literature (specifically Maupassant), where the underclass is clever and bilks

those who deserve it, Dalrymple argues that these texts have romanticized the prostitute and that

only academics in their “pleasing ivory tower” can retain the “much distorted and reduced” view

of the prostitute as anything but a public nuisance (49). He writes of his first “real” encounter

with a prostitute in the hospital where he worked as a doctor:

I met my first prostitute to speak of in real life in the same hospital as I met my first

burglar, at about the same time. She was middle-aged, but still working—after a fashion.

Her physical charms had faded, for which she tried to compensate by layers of make-up,

and her teeth had dropped out; the price she commanded, therefore, was very small.

[ . . . ] One morning, she was found dead in her hospital bed. There was a rumor that she

had been poisoned by injection by one of the nurses, who was unable to tolerate her

screams any longer. (48)

He goes on to write,

There used to be prostitutes [. . .] who solicited on the street where I live, until my next-

door-neighbor-but-one organized a local campaign to drive them away. Perhaps it is a

sign of my insufficient absorption of the lesson of Maupassant’s stories, but until they

were driven away I did not find the removal of used condoms from the bushes and the

gutter outside my house a congenial task, and, in my heart of hearts, when I saw the

municipal van doing its round to distribute free condoms to those whom we must now

called [sic] sex workers (What are pimps? Sexual liaison co-ordinators?), all in the name

of harm reduction, my feelings as a householder were stronger than those as a doctor, and

I wished not that harm should be reduced, but that it should be maximized. (49)

Dalrymple’s article is disturbing for several reasons: even though he is a doctor, he cannot find

any sympathy for the prostitutes he sees or with whom he comes into contact in his role as a

doctor. In addition, his attitude is not merely apathetic; it is malicious. He wishes for them all to

catch venereal diseases and die. While Dalrymple is arguing that literature had skewed his view

of the “real” world, he has also, though he does not mention it, been influenced by media images,

which the one prostitute he meets confirms for him.

To believe that this prostitute is representative of all prostitutes serves the same societal

function as the Elizabethan belief that any “lusty” idle man must not want to work, and,

therefore, must be plotting illicit ways to bilk honest citizens out of their money, or worse, plot

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the downfall of the government. We still use this sort of stereotype for public policy decisions.

Think of the stereotype about the homeless or Ronald Reagan’s depiction of the welfare mom in

the 1980s. These stereotypes encourage the average citizen to look upon those who need

assistance with suspicion and outright hatred, thus allowing both the average citizen and the

government to ignore the social problem or to believe that the appropriate response is

punishment. This attitude also encourages law enforcement to focus on punishing the prostitute

and not those who demand her services. To be a prostitute is to be associated with the criminal

underworld. For Dalrymple, as for Dekker in The Belman of London and Greene in A

Disputation, the whore and the thief go hand in hand. The two feminist reactions to prostitution

outlined above are problematic because both imagine the prostitute based on the feminist stance

they have decided to take, rather than taking a feminist stance based on the realities of

prostitution. Many second-wave responses both see the prostitute as victim (which she

sometimes is) and patriarchal co-conspirator, while the “pro-sex” feminists refuse to

acknowledge that not all prostitutes have the skills or knowledge to take their sexuality by the

horns and flaunt it. Most of the “pro-sex” feminists are involved in the sex industry by choice,

but there are victims as well. Both stances tend to ignore issues of class, which now as in the

early modern period are necessary for any true understanding of prostitution. As we will see later

in this chapter, for the early moderns the Elizabethan Poor Laws encouraged this sort of

stereotype and helped parishes avoid giving financial assistance to the needy.

Prostitution is not going away. What is more useful than feminist in-fighting is to

examine the history of Western prostitution and to view what has changed and what has not.

Superficial examinations frequently miss the fact that while certain stereotypes have shifted, the

attitude underneath the new stereotype is often the same. For example, some studies claim that

the modern definition of “prostitute” has changed from the prostitute as a “common woman”

whose sexual indiscrimination names her whore to our contemporary definition, which

supposedly describes a prostitute as “one who exchanges sex for money.” This second definition

is more attractive to us because the definition itself seems not to pass moral judgment and does

not seem to be biased by gender or class. Instead, it is simply a question of an illegal economic

exchange, but, of course, the economic definition simply obscures the class and gender biases

associated with prostitution.

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This second definition, though, is not the only definition. See for example, the OED’s

definition, which Cristine Varholy quotes in order to show how the modern prostitute is different

from the Elizabethan and Jacobean prostitute because she is not defined by her indiscriminate

sexuality, but simply by the activity, the economic exchange (Varholy 42-3).64 The definition

Varholy unproblematically quotes, though, does still highlight the immoral behavior. A

“prostitute” is “a woman who is devoted, or (usually) who offers her body to indiscriminate

sexual intercourse, esp. for hire; a common harlot” (n.1a.).65 The third definition the OED gives

is “a man who undertakes male homosexual acts for payment” (n.1c). Varholy reads the first

definition as though it said “always for hire.” She does not note how the actual definition

privileges the indiscriminate nature of the sexual activity as the most defining feature. She does

not discuss the third definition at all, though this third definition makes clear the gender bias still

built into the OED definitions. The male prostitute only has sex for money, while the woman is

“devoted” to “indiscriminate sexual intercourse.” The definition still works to define female

prostitutes as whores, “common harlots,” while the male prostitute truly is defined only by the

economic exchange, by the sex of his client, and by the type of sex he engages in.66

English Law and Prostitution: A Brief History

A brief history of English laws pertaining to prostitution shows, as I mentioned in chapter

one, that the medieval attitude toward prostitution was complicated. It also demonstrates where

the roots of many of our current attitudes lie. Prostitutes were, of course, condemned and

ostracized. However, prostitution itself was considered by many church fathers and city officials

to be a necessary evil. The laws of the civil courts in particular demonstrate a societal belief that

prostitution protected the chastity of “honest” women from unnatural and sinful sex and allowed

men to purge their sexual energy by using the services of the already fallen women, the

64 One problem with Varholy’s use of this definition as a “modern” definition is that the OED is a conservative document. It records previous word usages. Thus, the definition she defines as modern is a much older definition (see footnote below). 65 The OED has since emended this definition. The draft revision definition of June 2007 reads: “a woman who engages in sexual activity in return for payment, esp. as a means of livelihood; (formerly also) any promiscuous woman, a harlot.” The earliest usage of the term with this definition is listed as 1607 (Beaumont’s Woman Hater, 3.2, sig. E2). The earliest usage of the OED definition quoted by Varholy had been 1613 (Purchas’ Pilgrimage 8.4.627). 66 There are, of course, problems with the male definition as well. One problem being that the definition does not admit to the possibility that women might also buy his services.

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prostitutes. As I have already established, these attitudes regarding the men’s sexual behavior as

opposed to that of the prostitute exhibit the way in which men’s dalliances with the prostitutes,

while certainly frowned upon, were thought of as a purgation of male passions at the same time

that the male body risked contamination from the prostitute. English culture conceives of the

prostitute’s body as a sewer, a repository for filth. Medieval and early modern laws exhibit this

same sort of ambivalence toward the prostitute. Around the time of the Reformation, attitudes

and laws pertaining to prostitution shift. Many historians have attributed this transformation both

to the rise in syphilis rates and the movement from Catholic views of sexuality to Protestant

views. As I discuss below, though, these changes probably had as much to do with issues of class

and the emergence of early capitalism as with either the syphilis rates or the alteration of moral

codes.

Many laws existed that attempted both to control where prostitution occurred and to mark

the prostitute clearly off from “honest” women. Yet, frequently these laws were vague enough to

regulate all women’s behavior, though they focused particularly upon those of lower rank. Some

of the laws directed at “whores” also worked to prevent all women from dressing above their

station. For example, a 1351 statute in London forbade “‘common lewd women’ from wearing

fur or ‘noble lining’” (Karras 21). The statute further ordered that all whores wear striped hoods.

The statute stated the reason for this sumptuary law, complaining that whores “‘now of late from

time to time assumed the fashion of being clad and attired in the manner and dress of good and

noble dames and damsels of the realm’” (Corporation of London Records Office, L-B H, fol.

208r; qtd. in Karras 21).67 This law would, according to the statute, allow “‘all folk, natives and

strangers,… [to] have knowledge of what rank they are” (21). A law in 1382 reiterated this

external signifier stating, “‘all common whores, and all women reputed as such, should have and

use hoods of ray only. . . And if any one should be found doing to the contrary thereof, she was

to be taken and brought to the Compter, and the Sheriffs were to have the coloured hoods [or

fur]” (CLRO, L-B H, fol. 139r; qtd. in Karras 21). Ostensibly, these laws seek to mandate

external signifiers that clearly differentiate the “lewd women” from the chaste, but in reality

these laws keep all women from dressing above their station. Thus, fear of being labeled a whore

serves to keep women from wearing clothing designated for those of higher rank. It also further

elides all lower-ranked women as whores through the shared dress of the whore. Due to the

67 Hereafter all records from the Corporation of London Records Office are abbreviated as CLRO.

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broad category of “whoredom,” a woman need not have committed any sexual crime to be

labeled a “common whore” or a woman “reputed as such.” Thus, any unaccompanied woman

could be taken in and accused of whoredom. Single women and strangers were likely targets for

this sort of elision. Stow notes that the prostitutes of the Southwark stews

were forbidden the rites of the church so long as they continued that sinful life,

and were excluded from Christian burial if they were not reconciled before their

death. And therefore there was a plot of ground called the Single Woman’s

Churchyard, appointed for them far from the parish church. (371)

England never instituted the Magdalene houses for repentant prostitutes, though they were used

on the continent. In addition, the “single woman’s” churchyard conflates prostitutes with

unmarried women.

As Karras observes, in addition to policing class-climbing, the sumptuary laws mentioned

above also provided authorities with a way to tax prostitution as the sheriff confiscated the

offending clothing. These sorts of laws, where a tax or fine is levied, frequently existed

simultaneously with laws forbidding prostitution. Not all prostitution, however, was illegal in

medieval England. The existence of both laws forbidding “whoredom” and laws that policed the

dress of whores is yet another example of the double standard. Thus, prostitution was allowed to

exist, but the women were ostracized. Many towns banned the “common woman” from coming

within their city walls, but designated a place directly outside the walls for them. “Common

women” and lepers were frequently mentioned in the same breath. In other laws, “common

women” were elided with vagabonds and the focus was on controlling all disorderly people, of

which the prostitute was but one type (Karras 19). Prostitution was evil, but necessary. It should

be punished, but not eradicated.

These laws also conflated the single woman with the whore. This early pressure to marry

in order to keep one’s reputation becomes, as we will see in chapter three, even more insistent at

the beginning of the seventeenth century. In 1492 the Leet court (the manorial court that met

semi-annually) stated that anyone harboring common women or bawds would be fined (Karras

20). Attached to this fine though was the statement that “no single woman, being in good health

and strong in body to labor within the age of fifty years take or keep from henceforth house or

chambers by herself; nor that they take any chamber with any other person, but that they go to

service till they be married” (Karras 20). In 1495, the wording becomes stronger, stating that

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those women who were under the age of 40 must live with an honest person who could account

for them, or they needed to become a servant (Karras 20). This fine again is aimed at all single

women of lower rank, rather than simply the prostitute. The assumption here is that any single

women who is not being controlled by her husband or her father is in danger of becoming a lewd

woman. All single (lower-class) women will become whores if they are not controlled. It is

perhaps this conflation of whores with lower-class women that results in the virulent reaction

that lower-class women have toward prostitutes in the Victorian time period. In her study

Prostitution and Victorian Society, Judith Walkowitz observes that many upper-class women

advocated for prostitutes, while the working-class women vilified them (137-148). Walkowitz

speculates that this reaction might have occurred because of the conflation between prostitutes

and the lower class. Thus, lower-class women felt as though they needed to differentiate

themselves clearly from the prostitutes, while the upper-class women did not identify or feel

identified with the prostitutes.

“Strange” (foreign) women, separated from their families, were particularly vulnerable to

the accusation of whoredom. Foreign women were stereotyped as bawds and prostitutes, though

not enough research has been done to show whether this stereotype is based in reality or simply

another version of virulent early modern ethnocentrism. Whether based in reality or not, the

stereotypes show up in the dramatic representations. For example, John Marston’s The Dutch

Courtesan, performed at Blackfriars and entered into the Stationers’ Register in 1605, obviously

plays on this stereotype. Marston gives his courtesan an accent and notes how she is accessible to

all men, no matter where they are from. Her bawd boasts,

I have made you acquainted with the Spaniard Don Skirtoll, with the Italian,

M.Beieroane, with the Irish Lord, S. Patrick, with the Dutch Marchant, Haunce

Herkin Glukin Skellam Flappdragon, and specially with the greatest French, and

now lastly with this English. (2.1; p. 87).

The Dutch courtesan accepts anyone who can pay, accepting Dons and merchants, Italians and

the Irish. She exemplifies the medieval definition of the prostitute as a “common woman,” but

she also embodies English fears about the English body politic, allowing herself to be used,

penetrated, and contaminated by foreigners.

Prostitution, though, was not illegal everywhere in England. In pre-Reformation England,

the state licensed three jurisdictions for brothels, but prosecuted those who ran brothels out of

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private houses or who ran non-licensed brothels. The jurisdictions were the Southwark suburb in

London, Sandwich in Kent, and Southampton in Hampshire. The latter two are, of course, port

towns, and Southwark lies on the Thames. Thus, we can conclude that the location of the

brothels is a function of the “hydraulic” model of male sexuality. All three jurisdictions lie in

areas where single men and men who were traveling, such as merchants and ambassadors, were

in high numbers. We do not have a lot of information on the Sandwich and Southampton

brothels, but we have many records of the laws pertaining to the brothels in Southwark. Though

Southwark was under London’s jurisdiction beginning in 1327, the suburb also contained a

liberty, which fell under the jurisdiction of the church, specifically the bishop of Winchester. The

majority of the Southwark brothels were located here. (Bankside falls within the bishop of

Winchester’s liberty.) According to Karras, it is unclear exactly when these brothels became

officially sanctioned, but it seems as though the Bishop of Winchester first sanctioned these

brothels, which probably already existed in the liberty (37). By the fourteenth century the area is

commonly referred to as “Les Stuwes” (Karras 37). Though we do not know much about the

customers who frequented these legal brothels, there are records that tell us what laws regulated

the brothels and the prostitutes. The prostitutes were not allowed to live in the brothels and were

required to leave the liberty on holy days and during the sitting of Parliament. The prostitutes

could not be married or diseased. The brothel-owner was not allowed to lend money to his

prostitutes nor could he sue to recover any money, if he did lend it to them.68 In addition, the

brothel owners were not allowed to force the women to work while they waited for customers,

and they could not force a woman to remain in the brothel against her will. The bishop’s officials

were supposed to search the brothels to ensure that women were not being forced into

prostitution.

We are unable to determine how many of these protections were actually followed.

Records do show that, even though the prostitutes did not live at the brothel, they paid higher

rent than the going rate (fourteen pence per week) (Karras 38). We also know that the laws

banning the brothels from staying open on holy days and when parliament was in session were

repeatedly violated; although, as Karras points out, these laws might only be on the books so that

the bishop had yet another way of making money off of the brothels, as punishment for violating

68 Contrary to the stereotype about women panders, the records we have of these brothel owners show them to be men. See Karras, 33-47.

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this order was the payment of a fine, paid to the bishop’s officials (38). One further problem is

that those responsible for protecting the brothels owned the land the brothels stood on, so they

had a vested interest in satisfying the brothel operators, rather than protecting the prostitutes. In

the fifteenth century, there were also rumors that the court system was corrupt because the stew-

holders were reputed to run the courts (Karras 40). Karras notes that the laws regulating the

brothels adhered to the medieval double standard that female sexuality was dangerous and male

sexuality was natural and must have a release (41). Thus, the prostitutes were to remain invisible,

but available. These brothels, though, lost their legal status. In 1506, eighteen brothels were

closed, but twelve shortly reopened.69 Then in 1546, Henry VIII permanently revoked their legal

status. The statute claims that “toleration of such dissolute and miserable persons” had become a

public threat. The prostitutes

without punishment or correction exercise their abominable and detestable sin, [and

because of this] there hath of late increased and grown such enormities as not only

provoke instantly the anger and wrath of Almighty God, but also engender such

corruption among the people as tendeth to the intolerable annoyance of the

commonwealth, and where not only the youth is provoked, enticed, and allowed to

execute the fleshly lusts, but also, by such assemblies of evil-disposed persons haunted

and accustomed, is there daily devised and conspired how to spoil and rob the true

laboring and well-disposed men. (Hughes and Larkin 365).

Prostitutes corrupt the youth, and they attract “evil-disposed” men. The proclamation conflates

prostitutes with idle men, as later Elizabethan laws will, and as the rogue literature also does; it

imagines the prostitute and those who consort with her to be plotting ways to fleece those who

work. As Thomas Dekker will later write, the prostitute is always in the company of criminals:

“the companion of a Theefe is commonly a Whore” (“Belman” H2r). With Henry VIII’s

proclamation all prostitution in England becomes illegal, but, of course, it does not go away. In

fact, it does not even move. In Elizabethan England, Bankside is still the hotbed for hothouses.

In medieval and Tudor England, the prostitute could be prosecuted in both the

ecclesiastical courts and the civil courts. The ecclesiastical courts were responsible for punishing

all moral crimes. Thus, the various crimes they punished that were associated with prostitution

were fornication, adultery, procuring, harboring, communication of venereal disease, whoredom,

69 We have no records telling us why the brothels were closed in 1506 or why they reopened later.

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incontinence, and keeping a brothel.70 Most of the crimes punished by the church courts,

however, did not have to do with organized or professional prostitution, though some of the men

punished for adultery were men who “kept” women, and we do occasionally hear a woman

charged for having sex with multiple men in a short period of time, which might indicate that she

was a professional prostitute.71 Some of the women charged with incontinence or whoredom did

seem to have been prostitutes. Karras notes that church records in London sometimes refer to a

woman as an “indicted whore,” perhaps indicating that she had already been found guilty of

whoredom in the civil courts (28). In the medieval period the charge of whoredom outside of

London is less common, with the women frequently charged with the more specific sins of

fornication or adultery (Karras 28). However, as Laura Gowing has shown, the use of the

accusation of whoredom to defame women sexually becomes increasingly common in the early

seventeenth century.72 As with the definition of adultery discussed in chapter one, some of the

definitions of these sins change after the Reformation. For example, before the Reformation, the

charge of harboring covered running a brothel (though as mentioned above, this crime is

sometimes more specifically defined as “keeping a brothel”), knowingly allowing sexual liaisons

in one’s house, and failure to supervise unwed persons in one’s household.73 According to R.H.

Helmholz, the working definition previous to the Reformation seemed to be “knowingly

permitting sexual activity between unmarried persons to occur within an area under the control

of the person charged with the offense, usually the person’s house” (258). Around the last half of

Elizabeth’s reign there is a shift in the ecclesiastical definition of harboring. Persons who

knowingly or even unknowingly allow an unmarried pregnant woman into their home start being

charged with harboring (Helmholz 261-65).

Thus, like the definition of adultery, the definition of harboring widens to include giving

aid or shelter to anyone who must have committed fornication, even if the act did not occur in

70 See Paul Hair’s Before the Bawdy Court (1972); Ralph Houlbrooke’s Church Courts and the People During the English Reformation (1979); James C. Spalding’s The Reformation of the Ecclesiastical Laws of England, 1552 (1992) and especially Martin Ingram’s Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570-1640 (1987). 71 See for example Hair’s entry from 1626 in Sussex, describing a man who had set up a former servant, who had already been tried for incontinence, in her own home where he “payes the rent of the howse, where (as the fame goeth) he resorteth to her usually, to the offence of many and the great grief and vexacion of his wife” (54). 72 See Laura Gowing’s Domestic Dangers (1996). 73 Being a “notorious bawd” could get you in trouble with both the consistory courts and the common law courts.

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one’s own home. Pregnant women are easy prey because the sign of their “sin” is written on their

bodies. Sometimes the accused claimed to be unaware that the woman was pregnant. In 1616,

Thomas Browne of Northampton was accused of “harboring Susan Westlie in his house.”

Westlie is concurrently charged for “being begotten with child by an Irishman whose name we

know not” (PDR Correction book 41, p. 139; qtd. in Helmholz 263). Browne claims that he did

not know she was pregnant and that when he discovered her condition he threw her out. He is

still punished. The ecclesiastical church’s increased focus on moral crimes may not be simply a

reaction to the Protestant definitions of morality as defined by the church. The widening of the

definition may also be a result of an increased conflation of moral weakness and lower-class

status (though this attitude is certainly present in the medieval attitudes, it becomes the overt

motivation for public policy in the Elizabethan period). As Marjorie MacIntosh has shown,

church courts did not become terribly interested in punishing sexual offenders until 1552, when

parish officials were permitted to refuse aid to the poor “whose moral behavior was inadequate

or who did not display suitable deference” (25).74 There was suddenly a monetary incentive for

labeling moral offenders as the more the church courts were able to refuse aid, the more money

the parishes were able to keep. McIntosh has also argued that class issues as well as gender

ideology provided the impetus to label moral offenders. The rise in charges included men, but

the sexual ideology of the time sets women up as easy targets. This is certainly part of the reason

that the church courts wanted their citizens to turn away unmarried pregnant women, as the

parish had the obligation to care for any foundling left in the parish. Even if class issues initially

motivate the increased policing of morality, the policing translates into a gender inequality for

two reasons. First, the sexual ideology naming women the most likely moral offenders already

exists. Second, women are much more likely to need aid; therefore, they are more likely to be

singled out by the church courts, if the motivation is as McIntosh believes a way for the parishes

to refuse aid.

The most common place for professional prostitutes to be tried, though, is the civil court.

If apprehended in London, Elizabethan and Jacobean prostitutes ended up before the Bridewell

governors. Henry VIII constructed Bridewell after a fire in 1512 destroyed part of the Palace of

Westminster. He began construction in 1515 and finished in 1523. Bridewell was located

74 I am of course not claiming that moral crimes were not punished. As Karras has demonstrated, they obviously were. But McIntosh has gathered statistical analyses that quite decidedly show the rise in ecclesiastical church punishments follow the Elizabethan Poor Laws, beginning with 1552 statute.

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between Fleet Street and the Thames along the bank of the Fleet River. It is named after the well

near where it was located, which itself was named after St. Bride’s Church. Henry lived in the

palace for a few years, vacating it for Whitehall and Hampton Court, at which time it became a

residence for ambassadors. (According to L.W. Cowie, this is the residence where Holbein’s The

Ambassadors [1533] was painted in [351].) In 1552, Edward VI endowed Bridewell Palace and

Greyfriars Monastery (later Christ’s Hospital) to the city for the purpose of educating poor boys.

Francis Bacon in “A Brief Discourse Upon the Commission of Bridewell” (1587) quotes the

royal charter as stating,

the Governors have authority to search, enquire, and seek out idle ruffians, tavern

haunters, vagabonds, beggars, and all persons of evil name and fame whatsoever they be,

men or women, and then to apprehend the same to commit to Bridewell, or by any other

way or means to punish and correct them as shall seem good to their discretions. (509)

The charter thus left the means of punishment and the definition of “evil name and fame” up to

the Board of Governors. In fact, the scope of the charter and the unclear jurisdiction caused

Parliament and even the governors themselves to question the extent of the governors’ range and

powers. (The purpose for Francis Bacon’s Discourse quoted above was to argue for limiting the

governors’ reach.) Both men and women were housed there, though on opposite sides of the

building. According to Cowie, the long gallery became a “workshop for cloth-weaving and

packthread-making, while other rooms contained spinning-wheels and blocks for beating hemp”

(352). The men also cleaned ditches and streets, while the women pulled carts around town for

garbage collection. From 1557 through the eighteenth century, poor boys and orphans were

housed in Bridewell and craftsmen were paid to take the boys as apprentices in shoe-making,

tailoring, silk-weaving, pin-making, and flax-dressing. By 1576, Bridewell was seen as a model

for controlling the poor and an act of Parliament required J.P.s in each county to find a building

in which to house their own bridewell and to provide “a stock of wool hemp, flax and other stuff

to the intent that youth may be brought up to labour and not grow into rogues, and that idle

rogues may not have any just excuse for saying that they cannot get any service or work” (Cowie

352). During Elizabeth’s reign, Bridewell also housed religious dissenters.

Bridewell was best known, though, for housing whores. The typical punishment was

carting, whipping, and frequently imprisonment in Bridewell. Women were dressed in the blue

gowns that designated them a whore or in sheets and then paraded around whatever part of

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London they had been arrested in (so that all their neighbors would know). Then they were taken

to the pillory, stripped to the waist and publicly whipped. Like public executions, the public

whippings were popular entertainment, and in 1633 a whipping-post was installed in a room that

had a built-in public viewing area. It remained popular after the Interregnum, when in 1677, a

“balustraded gallery” with a raised dais for the pillory was added so that more spectators could

be accommodated and so they had a better view of the whore.

The punishments and crimes were not consistent and were left up to the discretion of the

governors. Examination of the Bridewell Court Books shows the inconsistencies, but they

demonstrate that the sexual nature of the crimes was not the main focus of Bridewell; instead all

those called before the courts were there for violations of the Elizabethan Poor Laws. 75 The

sexual nature and circumstances of the person’s apprehension are sometimes mentioned, while

their idleness or their disturbance of public order is always mentioned. The act of exchanging sex

for money is not illegal until the eighteenth century.

In addition, the power and effectiveness of Bridewell waxed and waned in direct relation

to the current board of governors’ fluctuating levels of zealousness. In 1576-77, there was a

particularly strong attempt to purge prostitution. These purgations frequently focused on

commercial business that provided cover for brothels. This is probably due to the perception that 75 All future references will be abbreviated as BCB. No one has yet done a complete statistical analysis of the BCB though some article-length studies have given some preliminary statistics. See for example, Paul Griffiths’ “The Structure of Prostitution in Elizabethan London” in Continuity and Change (1993), pp. 39-63 and Gustav Ungerer’s “Prostitution in Late Elizabethan London: The Case of Mary Newborough” in Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England (2003), pp. 138-223. Book-length studies that make extensive use of the BCB include Karen Pirnie’s and Cristine Varholy’s dissertations (previously cited) and Melissa Mowry’s The Bawdy Politic in Stuart England, 1660-1714 (2004). No published book-length study of Tudor or early Stuart prostitution yet exists. One problem with a complete statistical study of the BCB is that the records are not complete. We are missing the records from 1562 to 1574, from 1579 to 1597, and from 1610 through 1617. An additional problem is, of course, that the BCB can only tell us so much. They are not a reliable statistical analysis of actual crime, only of what was prosecuted and only from the extant BCB. Thus Griffiths decision “to compare the literary account with that of the Bridewell court books,” and his reading that “both similarities and differences will emerge as we investigate some aspects of the structure of prostitution in Elizabethan London and the distribution of power in the brothels” is problematic, and ultimately, not very useful (40). Neither the BCB nor the literary references can be trusted as reflections of reality. The BCB can tell us where the court’s energy was placed, how they defined (or did not) the crimes they charged, and the strata of women and men who came before the court. It can tell us something about the circumstances of the women who came before them, but we cannot from this information claim that we know anything about all levels of prostitution or about what the women themselves felt or thought (as court is not where we normally confess the “truth,” but is instead where we tell our accusers what we think they want to hear). They also cannot tell us what kinds of crimes went unreported or what sorts of people were never arrested. In addition, there is no way to truly differentiate between what the playwrights know to be true about the world, what they assume to be true, and what they think their audience wants to see. As Melissa Mowry has noted, many recent critical works on the sexual subalternity see in the archives what they want to see, seeing “reality” when it suits their argument (Mowry “Sex and the Archives” in Journal of British Studies [2005]).

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prostitutes attracted people with evil intentions and that inns and the like allowed many members

of the underclass to gather together. Paul Griffiths makes the odd claim that the BCB records

show that the purge only targeted the brothel prostitutes and not the street prostitutes, but the fact

is that the brothel prostitutes are easier to identify in the court books because they are brought in

with other women and almost always accompanied by their bawd, who is frequently identified as

a “notorious bawd.” Any men brought in with a single woman and then identified as “having

carnal knowledge of her body” could be lovers abroad or a prostitute and her client. By contrast,

in 1602, four Bridewell overseers contracted by the Bridewell governors turned Bridewell into a

brothel, making money off of the prostitutes who were already imprisoned.76

Material Conditions of Elizabethan Prostitution

Linda Woodbridge observes that “the Crown’s interest in vagrancy also points to the role of the

Poor Laws (in regard to both relief and punishment) in the consolidation of state power”

(Vagrancy 152). In 1531, the state began implementing a consistent policy in relation to the poor.

Previous to 1531 “the general practice in the early Tudor period [had been] for local authorities

to punish vagrants, and if they were not native beggars, to order them back to their home”

(Palliser 124; qtd. in Woodbridge 152). Beginning in 1585, provost-marshals appointed by the

Crown rounded up vagrants and charged them with idleness in common law courts. Though the

crown dictated policies to parishes, parishes had to raise the monies to follow through with the

policies. Thus, as already discussed, the ecclesiastical courts began finding ways to avoid poor

relief, which fell under their jurisdiction—not the civil court’s. The poor laws frequently

coupled their statutes with stances on poor relief. For example, the 1597 poor law included both

An Act for the Relief of the Poor and An Act for the Punishment of Rogues, Vagabonds, and

Sturdy Beggars. The poor relief act mandates church wardens to choose “four substantial

householders” whose job it will be to set “to work the children of all such, whose parents shall

not by the said persons be thought able to keep and maintain the children” (sig. B2-B2v; qtd. in

Woodbridge 154-5). As Woodbridge argues, these laws help to centralize state power.

76 See Ungerer, 153.

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Discussions of the material conditions of Elizabethan prostitutes are problematic for a

number of reasons. First, we have nothing recorded in the voice of the prostitute, nor have we

discovered records belonging to actual brothels. The closest we come to hearing the voice of an

Elizabethan prostitute describing her working conditions, her motivations for prostituting herself,

and her history of involvement comes in the BCB. As I mentioned before, these voices are

recorded by scribes who are inconsistent about what details they include. In addition, court is not

the place where prostitutes are most likely to speak openly and honestly about their lives. An

added problem is that the BCBs from the Jacobean period are incomplete.77 Furthermore, much

of the “information” we have on Elizabethan and Jacobean prostitution comes from literary

sources. Many literary critics, strangely, assume the information recorded in the various fictional

representations of prostitutes to be true.78 Thus, the prostitute becomes conflated in the criticism,

as in the legal records and rogue literature, with thieves. Literary critics are especially likely to

fall in love with a certain narrative and look for proof of its existence in the archival records. For

example, though many historians have assumed that an Elizabethan underworld prostitution ring

existed, basing this claim on the various literary references to canting language and the rogue

literature popular from the 1590s on, there is no archival evidence of such a ring.79 There is

some evidence of cooperation between bawdy house-owners. For example, Paul Griffiths claims

that if a brothel was running a brisk business on a certain evening, they would frequently collect

prostitutes from neighboring brothels and bring them back to the house for the evening. We do

not, however, see any organized system showing up in the records.80 This by itself, though, does

not mean that the ring did not exist, as perhaps those who were organized might have been able

to buy their way out or had some control of the court system, as was rumored in the fifteenth

century.

77 August 1610 through June 1617 are missing. 78 See for example, Wallace Shugg’s “Prostitution in Shakespeare’s London” in Shakespeare Studies (1977), pp. 291-313. Paul Griffiths, quoted extensively in this chapter, also sometimes conflates the literary with the “factual.” 79 For debates about the existence of an organized underworld, see A.L. Beier’s Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560-1640 (1985). He argues against rampant organized crime and focuses instead on the reason for the increase in poverty (and correspondingly vagrancy). For the other side of the argument, see Gamini Salgādo’s The Elizabethan Underworld (1977) and more recently Bryan Reynolds’ Becoming Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England (2002). 80 See Griffiths “Prostitution”, p. 44.

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In London and the surrounding suburbs, there is evidence of a variety of types of

prostitution operations. Some bawdy houses contained “lodgers,” which accommodated women

who rented the space and then worked alone.81 Occasionally, clients would pay a fee in order to

“lodge with a favorite.” Nashe’s client in “The Choise of Valentines” must pay extra for his

favorite. The BCB also list clients who wanted only one particular prostitute. Many prostitutes

moved from one brothel to another, with the average stay being between three and twelve

months. Bridewell records show that most prostitutes “lay” at a particular brothel and paid for

the space by the week, with the fee the prostitute paid ranging from 4 to 6 shillings (Griffiths 46).

Our understanding of the fee system is far from complete since we have only the BCB

records from which to draw our data. The exchange of money, as mentioned before, is only

occasionally noted as the definition of whoredom is only indiscriminate sex, not necessarily a

monetary exchange. Paul Griffiths has taken a sample of 111 payments from the BCB and comes

up with an average of 4s 3d. The records show, though, that the system was flexible and

dependent upon the relationship between the prostitute and the bawd and the prostitute and the

client. Sometimes the client gave the fee to the keeper, who then gave the prostitute her cut.

Sometimes, the client paid both the keeper and the prostitute; and other times, the prostitute

received the money and then gave a percentage to the house. What we can surmise is that the

high range of fees is from 10 shillings to 3 shillings and that the fees were lower for street

prostitutes. Again, we should recall that these figures represent the sorts of prostitutes who

appeared before the Bridewell governors. It seems as though haggling frequently occurred.

Perhaps the prostitutes gauged their prices according to the perceived rank of the client. The

BCB records back up the literary claims that virgins claimed a higher price. A Mr. Paul

Mowdler, merchant, apparently bought Katherine Williams’s maidenhead for 40s, which he paid

to the bawd, Mistress Corbet (BCB 4 395v; qtd. in Griffiths 47). In The Dutch Courtesan, Mary

tells Francischina, the courtesan, “I ha made as much a your maidenhead, and you had been mine

owne daughter, I could not ha sold your Mayden head oftner then I ha done” (2.1; p. 87).82 Mary

has repeatedly presented Francischina as a virgin in order to make a little extra money.

81 Ian Archer in The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (1991) points out that records left from the occasional crackdowns on brothels indicate that not only were the prostitutes fairly mobile, moving from one establishment to another, but the various kinds of commercial businesses used to cover as brothels were diverse as well (213-14).

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Procurers seem to have been mostly male, along the lines of modern “pimps.” The

records show that the procurers recruited women, frequently from other houses. They were not

only involved in recruitment efforts, but seem to have also regulated access to the prostitutes.

Occasionally, the procurers were also brothel-keepers, but usually they worked for many

different houses, procuring for up to nine different keepers or bawds. In hagiographic and literary

references the bawds are almost always female; According to Griffiths, court records show that

14% of the keepers prosecuted at Bridewell were male.83 Again, this number only represents

percentage of bawds recorded in the Bridewell governors’ records. Keepers and prostitutes show

up regularly in the BCB records.

According to Paul Griffiths, most clients do not belong to the upper class, though this is

one of those problematic claims.84 While Griffiths’ claim cannot be validated, we can look at his

sample and observe that of those charged, most belonged to the underclass, a finding which is to

be expected, I would think, given the Bridewell governors’ focus on the “idle.” Griffiths took a

sample of 219 clients named in the BCB dating from the 1570s and found that the largest

percentage were apprentices and servants (39%), followed by craftsmen and tradesmen (12.3%),

foreign merchants and gentlemen (11.4%), and then, strangely, ambassadors (7.8%).

Contradictorily, Ungerer argues, “another salient feature of Elizabethan clientage was the large

body of foreigners serviced by prostitutes. The foreign clients ranged from ambassadors and their

retinues to merchants and refugee craftsmen” (150). To back up this claim, Ungerer does not

offer statistical evidence; instead, he quotes from the many places where the nationality of the

john is recorded (150; n. 30).85

83 We have no way of knowing if the number of arrests is truly representative of the number of keepers. As in the medieval period, keepers may have been well placed or may have paid bribes in order to stay out of court. 84 Again, these numbers are more representative of the people who were arrested rather than of the actual people involved in prostitution. 85 Ungerer’s reading of the BCB is even more fanciful than Griffiths. In his article, he follows one particular prostitute through the records, but, of course, the records can only tell us so much. Ungerer cannot resist the urge to fill in the lacunae. When he reads in the BCB that the prostitute’s, Mary Newborough, merchant client insists on feeding her Italian food (though he was born in England to Italian parents), Ungerer claims that “Tomas Marini must have found the cooker of Jane with the ‘long nose’ provincial, her food unpalatable and perhaps even detrimental to the health and sexual efficiency of his mistress” (151). He bases this explanation on the fact that Mary’s bawd claims that the prostitute’s “dyett was usually dressed at the said Marynes house” (BCB 4, fol. 72v). The entire article continues in a like vein.

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One first-person account by a client shows up in the personal correspondence of the

Italian merchant, Paolo Gondola. While it tells us nothing representative about the transaction, it

is an interesting account. The BCB scribe records Mary’s bawd as saying that her English-Italian

merchant was frequently accompanied by two friends, one named “Pawle Gundelo,” whom she

designates as an “estranger” (BCB 4, fol. 72v). The record implies that they visit Mary together,

but it is not really clear nor are we given any hint as to what happens once they are in Mary’s

room. Paolo Gondola’s personal correspondence, though, implies that he had visited prostitutes

with friends and personally witnessed the sex. He writes that he and one Alesandro Manelli

visited a brothel, where Alesandro could not follow through with the sexual intercourse with the

“Pottone” and showed himself to be a fool, though Gondola claims to have given him pointers

before going in (qtd. from personal correspondence in Ungerer 155).86

The records of Bridewell arrests do show that, unsurprisingly, the arrests focused on the

poor. While the sexual sin or circumstances are not always recorded, the scribe always lists

where the women were arrested and if they belong to anyone’s household. A representative entry

occurs in March 1599, where “Elizabeth Thomas, servant to Peter Dirkens [?] saith that one

Richard Thomas late servant unto the said Dirkens hath had [?] and carnal knowledge of her

body” (BCB 4, fol. 75v). Melissa Mowry has observed that after the Restoration the BCB

scribes begin separating the offenders by gender. All women tried that day are listed together,

and all men are listed together, even if a man and woman came into court together).87 The

scribes also stop mentioning the place of the arrest and begin regularly to note any sexual

misconduct. Thus, after the Interregnum, for whatever reason (perhaps this results from an

attempt to regularize the record-keeping), gender and sexual misconduct, rather than simply

class, become important signifier

s in the BCB.

Geography, The Theaters, and Prostitution

Areas of London specifically associated with prostitution were Clerkenwell, East Smithfield,

Shoreditch, Aldgate, St. Katherine’s, and Southwark, which included Bankside. The Red Bull

Playhouse was located in Clerkenwell; The Theatre and The Curtain were located near

86 Ungerer seems to be reading this sexual display by one man for another as some sign of Italian merchant’s corporate identity. 87 Mowry discussed the BCB at the 2007 GEMCS conference in Chicago.

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Shoreditch; The Rose, the Globe, the Hope and the Swan were all in or near Southwark. Joseph

Lenz’s excellent essay “Base Trade: Theater as Prostitution” (1993) has already clearly outlined

the connection between the Elizabethan theaters and the language of prostitution. A few of his

main points bear repeating. Steven Mullaney observes that the earliest metaphorical associations

of Elizabethan theater with disease come from the history of the suburbs as a marginal

space/place where medieval lepers were housed. Lenz delineates a shift in analogy, from

comparing theater with the characteristics of leprosy to a comparison that focuses on the

syphilitic body as well as a conflation of the various characteristics of whoredom.88 Lenz

speculates that this analogical association may have come not only from many of the theaters’

proximity to land that traditionally (and still) housed brothels, but also from Philip Henslowe’s

specific involvement in prostitution. It was shortly after Henslowe in 1580 leased the land upon

which sat the Little Rose, a notorious inn that had been a known brothel at least since the twelfth

century (838). In 1587, he then built the Rose Theater on the same grounds. Henslowe’s close

association with prostitution as well as the proximity of the stews to the theaters provides the

basis for the analogy. It is also possible that Henslowe’s son-in-law, the actor Edward Alleyn,

owned properties that may have housed brothels.89 If Henslowe owned and operated brothels (or

at least collected rents), as Burford and others contend, the association with the theater was

probably literal, and the claim that prostitutes plied their trades in the theater was more than

likely true. Henslowe was a clever businessman and tended to buy businesses that supported his

other ventures in some way. For example, we know that Henslowe was involved in pawn-

broking.90 Pawn-broking is a useful side trade for a theater owner as costuming was the theater’s

single most expensive cost. It would also be useful for a brothel owner. In Middleton’s Your

Five Gallants a pawn-broker supplies clothing for the brothel keeper’s whores. (Perhaps this was

Middleton providing a caricature of Henslowe?)

88 See especially chapter two, “The Place of the Stage,” in The Place of the Stage (1988). 89 E.J. Burford’s Bawds and Lodgings, (1976) pp. 89-110, claims that the Barge, the Bell, the Cock, and the Unicorn were brothels at the time that Edward Alleyn “owned” the property. (After Henslowe’s death in 1616 a suit was filed claiming that Henslowe’s will had been altered so that it didn’t show these properties Alleyn claimed were his, were actually Henslowe’s.) S.P. Cerasano points out that even though these properties were historically brothels, there is no actual proof that they were still brothels when Alleyn/Henslowe owned them. (See S.P. Cerasano’s “Edward Alleyn: His Brothel’s Keeper?” in Medieval and Renaissance Drama (2001), pp. 93-100. 90 See Natasha Korda’s “Household Property/Stage Property: Henslowe as Pawnbroker” in Theatre Journal (1996), pp. 185-95 and Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass’s Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (2000).

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The stew-stage analogy, though, provides an apt comparative term for any morally

troubling exchange. At the end of his article, Lenz looks to Troilus and Cressida where he finds

“a troubled and troubling exposition on the ‘base’ nature of any exchange or transaction, whether

sexual, economic, or aesthetic” (834). Troilus and Cressida is not the only play where morally

troubling exchanges can be found. Many playwrights expose such “base” exchanges through the

stew-stage analogy. Playwrights take advantage of the commonplace comparison between the

theater and brothel. The prostitute provides the playwrights with a flexible character. Any

person, place, or thing associated with her is automatically debased. Within the culture, she

exemplifies the most troubling aspects of both women’s and men’s natures. Playwrights (and

early modern culture) displace their own discomfort with death, disease, and sex upon the

prostitute.

The prostitute also bleeds into other “categories.” She is associated with not only a sexual

exchange, but also an economic exchange. She stands outside the licit exchange of women

through marriage, but her exchanges with men are in many ways similar to the licit exchanges

between men and women. And though we post-moderns do not have direct access to the early

modern prostitute’s voice, her presence, in the early modern community and on the stage,

reminded passers-by and spectators that not all women could be successfully controlled. The

public punishment of women, meant to keep other women in line by making the prostitutes’

punishments a spectacle, also revealed these women’s existence to the public. The attempts by

both church and state to control women’s sexuality exposed not only women’s “base” natures, as

was intended, but also the power that those natures can have over the more “reasonable” sex,

thus, deconstructing male power and reason. The theatrical convention of the boy actor, the

various models available to the playwrights, and the conflicted and contradictory juridical history

of prostitution all assist the playwright in using the sexual ideology to indict cultural ills, as we

shall see in the next three chapters.

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CHAPTER 3

“THEY DO BUT BUY THEIR THRALDOMS”: MARRIAGE AS PROSTITUTION

In many Tudor and Stuart plays plots pertaining to marriages or impending marriages develop

dramatic tension. The preoccupation with marriage occurs in part due to the shifts in attitudes

toward marriage that occur in the early modern period. Obviously, the emergent Protestant

definition of a successful marriage as a companionate marriage is the locus of one of these shifts,

as is the broadening of the term “chaste” to describe a woman who only engages in sex with her

husband and only for the purpose of procreation. Whoredom is increasingly relied upon as the

oppositional term in a binary, marriage/whoredom, a binary which has narrowed the options

from the Catholic trinity: lifelong celibacy/marriage/whoredom. The Tudor and Stuart writers

use the definition of whoredom as it pertains to marriage in two primary, but contradictory,

manners: the Protestant polemicists employ whoredom in order to mark clearly matrimony as the

only licit and moral option for adults of marriageable age, particularly female adults; while some

of the playwrights, contradictorily, expose the similarities between marriage and prostitution. To

demonstrate this second use of “whoredom,” I look to two plays that clearly elide prostitution

and marriage: Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, first performed by the Lord Strange’s Men in 159291

and then revived in 1601, and Shakespeare and Middleton’s Measure for Measure, performed by

the King’s Men in 1604 and revived in 1621. It is no coincidence that both of these plays include

marriageable women, nuns, and women associated with prostitution. The playwrights, though,

use these categories of women to different effect. In The Jew of Malta Marlowe juxtaposes

common everyday practices, such as marriage and marriage negotiations, with overtly corrupt

activities. This side-by-side comparison exposes the base motives in practices deemed moral and

licit. Personal gain motivates all human activity in the play. This move effectively elides the

difference between the normative, figured in the Christian characters, and the monstrous, figured

91 The first recorded performance of The Jew of Malta is in 1592; the actual date of composition, though, may have been earlier. As with the Measure for Measure text, The Jew of Malta is problematic because the first extant version (1633) we have was printed after the text was revised. Thus, The Jew of Malta may have been altered by Thomas Heywood in much the same manner as Measure was altered by Middleton. (Later in this chapter I give more attention to the Middletonian alterations.) Because little work has been done to show exactly what Heywood might have contributed, other than the prologue and epilogue, I have left the attribution to Marlowe alone. As I discuss later, sufficient evidence has been given to show that Measure has been substantively altered by Middleton; thus I attribute this play to both writers.

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in the Jew.92 Thus, the play reveals a system where the stimuli for all exchanges are not based in

moral or ethical decisions. Morality and ethics merely cover the prime motivations: money, sex,

and power. In Measure for Measure the comparison yields a different appraisal. In this play, the

nun and the prostitute are pressed into marriage. The state manipulates these women who, in the

world of the play, have taken control of their own sexuality. Both the convent and the brothel are

run by women, but by the play’s end both nun and prostitute have been absorbed back into the

patriarchal body.

Early Modern Marriage Contracts

Measure for Measure asks if there are degrees of sin or if the definition of sin is unequivocal.93

The play, though, could as easily be asking if there are degrees of marriage. There are two

marriage contracts present in the play: Claudio’s per verba de praesenti espousal with the now-

pregnant Juliet and Angelo’s broken marriage negotiations with Mariana.94 Much of the

criticism produced in the eighties focused on these contracts. Carol Thomas Neely, in Broken

Nuptials (1985) argues that the bed-trick which Isabella and the Duke use to cement Angelo into

his broken contract “is a coersive assault that feels like rape” (92), while Margaret Loftus Ranald

points out in an earlier essay that neither the bed-trick nor Angelo and Mariana’s aborted

contract would have held up in ecclesiastical court.95 Angelo has every right to cancel the

marriage as Mariana is unable to provide the dowry that had been negotiated. If Mariana had

argued in the English ecclesiastical court that she was married to Angelo because of the bed-

trick, Angelo could have claimed “the impediment of error personae” (78). By including

marriage contracts that are ambiguous, the play exposes the way in which juridical definitions

can determine one’s moral culpability. How the state defines marriage determines whether

these characters have or have not committed the sin of fornication. The court in Measure is the

92 The reading of Marlowe’s Jew as villain and social critic is commonplace. For example, see Lloyd Edward Kermode’s ‘Marlowe’s Second City’: The Jew as Critic at the Rose in 1592” in SEL (1995), pp. 215-29. 93 As has been noted repeatedly, the play’s title references the sermon on the mount. 94 There are, of course, other marriages: Lucio’s forced marriage to the “punk” he supposedly impregnated and the Duke’s proposal of marriage to Isabella, which goes unanswered. 95 See Ranald’s article, ‘As Marriage Binds, and Blood Breaks’: English Marriage and Shakespeare” in Shakespeare Quarterly (1979), pp. 69-81. By contrast, Margaret Scott argues that Angelo would have been deemed married even if error personae was ruled, but would have been issued a divorce (769). See Scott’s “Marriage Contracts in Measure for Measure (1982), pp. 790-804. See also David Cressy’s “Holy Matrimony” in Birth, Marriage, and Death (1997), pp. 285-97.

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state’s court, not the church’s. The state controls the definition of marriage and, therefore,

controls the definition of morality. In the world of the play, the state, not the church, determines

what constitutes sin. The state’s naming of the individual determines his or her position within

the culture and serves to interpellate the subject. Juliet is named “fornicatress,” while Mariana,

Julietta, and Isabella are all named “whore.” Both Catholic and Protestant polemicists use the

ideology of whoredom to motivate people to marry. Coppélia Kahn characterizes the Catholic

stance as “better to marry than to burn” (248). This stance sees life-long celibacy as the most

perfect state a fallen human can ascribe to, but admits that most people are not strong enough to

resist carnal urges, and therefore, should marry to avoid committing the sin of fornication.

Aquinas claims that

the pleasures of sex are more vehement than the pleasures of food and exert more

pressure on us [. . .] for the more we give way to them the more they dominate us

and the more able they are to overthrow our strength of mind. Even married sex,

adorned with all the honourableness of marriage, carries with it a certain shame,

because the movements of the genitals unlike those of other external members

don’t obey reason. (Summa Theologiae 429)

Even sex within marriage carries shame. The only pure state is the celibate state. Yet the Roman

canon laws are fairly free in defining what constitutes a legally binding marriage. Spousals such

as the one Claudio claims to have made with Juliet were recognized by the ecclesiastical

churches, though the church courts, of course, preferred a church service to have followed.

According to Ingram, “neither solemnization in church, nor the use of specially prescribed

phrases, nor even the presence of witnesses, was essential to an act of marriage” (132).

Reformers found this ambiguity deeply troubling and repeatedly attempted to reform

English ecclesiastical court canons pertaining to marriage. Reformers attempted to solidify the

defining features of marriage in the mid-sixteenth century in the Reformatio legum mentioned

earlier. The proposed changes would have invalidated marriages made without parental consent.

In 1604, the year Measure was first performed, canon laws were amended, though they did not

go as far as the reformers would have liked. Parental consent was only required for children

under the age of twenty-one, though “marriage by license” required parental consent no matter

the age of the bride and groom. Spousals, however, were still recognized, and those marriages

that ignored the parental consent rules were not declared invalid (Ingram 136).The marriage laws

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in England were not drastically reformed until Lord Hardwicke’s marriage act passed in 1753.

This act finally invalidated any marriage not solemnized in a church and also required the banns

to be read.

What does change is the reformers’ focus on the importance of having a companionate

marriage. In addition, as many critics have noted, the idea of the authoritative paternal figure

who decides upon whom to endow his daughter gives way to a model of a man and a woman

who are attracted to each other and willingly choose to marry. With the companionate marriage

comes a slight shift in the configuration of sexual pleasure within marriage. Neely sees this shift

first in Erasmus’s Epistle in laude and praise of matrimonie (1530). She reads the text as

implying that “sexuality provides not just progeny (the main argument of the epistle) but intrinsic

fair pleasure” (248). The treatises on marriage, though, are clear to warn of the dangers of

allowing this pleasure too much sway, even within marriage. William Whately’s Bride Bush: or

a direction for married persons (1617) makes clear the perils:

the married must not provoke desires for pleasure’s sake, but allay desires [. . .]

Excessiveness inflameth lust [. . .] The married must no oftener come together, than for

the extinguishing of this passion in grafted in the body [. . . ] To incite themselves by

mutual dalliance for pleasure’s sake, and to awake the sleeping passions [. . . ] this is a

fault, even betwixt yokefellows. (20; qtd. in Kahn)

Kahn points out that the danger raised by Whately relates to the specter of whoredom. On the

one hand, the reformists conceive of marriage as guarding against whoredom. In the homilie of

the state of Matrimonie worshippers are told that “the word of Almightie GOD doth testifie and

declare, when the originall beginning of Matrimony commeth, and why it was ordained.” God

ordains matrimony so that a man and woman might “bring foorth fruite, and to avoide

Fornication.” It goes on to warn,

GOD hath straitly forbidden all whoredome and uncleannesse, and hath from time

to time taken grievous punishment of this inordinate lust, as all stories and ages

have declared. Furthermore, it is also ordained, that the Church of GOD and his

kingdome might by this kinde of life be conserved and enlarged, [. . .] in that God

giveth children by his blessing.

Men and women must marry to avoid whoredom and fornication, but increasingly the treatises

warn of the way in which whoredom can enter even the marriage bed. Thus, the tracts admit that

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sexual pleasure is natural, but too much sexual pleasure is perverse. Too much pleasure is a sign

of whoredom, and whoredom in the homilies, as I have already discussed, is gendered female.

This is one of Othello’s problems with Desdemona. Though he sees no sign of fornication, her

passion for him declares her a whore. He then allows Iago to convince him because, due to the

sexual ideology, he already believes. Where many of the early church fathers had admitted that

all sexual pleasure was somewhat sinful, they defined marriage as the state in which one could

avoid fornication. There was sin in married sex but it was ameliorated. For the reformers, though

chastity is now a binary, the line between the chaste wife and the whore is easily crossed. As Ian

Maclean has pointed out, “a woman cannot be simultaneously clean and unclean, married and

unmarried” (27). The Protestant ideology taints all sexual choices available to women: women

are discouraged from remaining virgins, as it is their job to procreate; the women most clearly

designated chaste, the nuns, as we will see below are linguistically conflated with prostitutes; and

even the wife can be in danger of committing whoredom within the marriage. This bleeding of

whoredom into all possible choices available to women makes it easier for the state (or husband)

to name a woman whore. There are no clear-cut “chaste” positions. Both Marlowe and

Middleton take advantage of this conflation to very different effect.

Everyone’s Price is Written on his Back

Act Two, Scene Three of The Jew of Malta begins with two officers leading slaves onto the

stage.96 Marlowe makes the point of the scene overt, when the second officer tells the first,

“Everyone’s price is written on his back” (2.3.2). The slave sale then, presumably, serves as a

tableau throughout the remainder of the scene. Barabas enters the marketplace to attend the slave

sale. While shopping for a slave, he encounters first Lodowick, then Mathias, both of whom

barter with Barabas for his daughter’s hand. This pivotal scene couples the language of

economics with that of love and sex, highlighting the theme of prostitution, which shadows the

rest of the play.

Barabas enters, reminding the audience in an aside that he has sworn vengeance upon the

governor. Lodowick, the governor’s son, tries to insinuate himself into Barabas’s house so that

he can be close to Barabas’s daughter, Abigail. Lodowick feigns interest in a purchase, asking

Barabas if he “canst help me to a diamond” (2.3.49) to which Barabas replies, “Oh, sir, your

96 All citations taken from Everyman edition of Marlowe’s The Complete Plays, ed. Mark Thornton Burnett (1999).

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father had my diamonds. / Yet I have one left that will serve your turn” (2.3.50-1). Marlowe

quickly conflates this object of economic exchange, the diamond, into a symbol of sexual

exchange. “Jewel” here refers to both male and female genitalia.97 Thus, Lodowick asks Barabas

to help him to Abigail’s maidenhead, while Barabas’s rejoinder points out that Lodowick’s

father, the governor, had already partially castrated him. Barabas’s wry response, that he only

has one diamond/testicle left, cleverly exposes the way in which the display of Barabas’s

masculinity is linked both to his ability to wreak revenge upon Ferneze as well as to the

frustrating fact that he must rely upon the commodification of his daughter for his revenge.

In case the audience has not caught the pun on “diamond,” Barabas in an aside tells us, “I

mean my daughter. But e’er he shall have her, / I’ll sacrifice her on a pile of wood” (2.3.49).

Abigail, perversely, is both Barbaras’s one testicle and the one bargaining chip he has left.

Barabas’s aside forces the audience to read the following exchange as overtly referring to

Abigail. Lodowick’s question, “What sparkle does it give without a foil?” (2.3.56) elicits

Barabas’s answer, “The diamond I talk of ne’er was foiled” (2.3.57). Then in an aside, he says,

“But when he touches it, it will be foiled” (2.3.57). The superficial meaning is obvious: a ring’s

setting enhances its sparkle. This ring has never been set. The first level of the sexual pun is also

obvious: Barabas’s “jewel,” Abigail’s maidenhead, has never been fouled. She’s a virgin and as

a virgin, she is valuable as an exchangeable commodity. There is a second pun, though.

Lodowick’s line: “What sparkle does it give without a foil” plays on an additional definition of

“sparkle” as “a vital or animating principle”98 and “foil” as sword/phallus. The secondary

meaning reads as follows: how can it (she/Abigail’s maidenhead) begin life/live without a penis

to animate it?

The haggling over the diamond continues until the scene abruptly shifts into religious

language that at first seems unrelated. Barabas ironically claims that Lodowick deserves his

charity in exchange for the charity shown to Barabas by Ferneze. Ferneze “to make me mindful

of my mortal sins— / Against my will, and whether I would or no, / Seized all I had and thrust

me out o’doors, / And made my house a place for nuns most chaste” (2.3.76-9). Lodowick

97 In Frankie Rubenstein’s A Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Puns and their Significance, 2nd ed, “jewel” is glossed as Elizabethan slang that could mean either “maidenhead” or “stones” (137-8). 98 OED n.3. The OED records the first written use of this definition as 1399, but it is also used in 1599 in Sir John Davies’ Nosce teipsum.

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piously responds, “No doubt your soul shall reap the benefit” (2.3.80). Lodowick exposes his

Catholicism by viewing Barabas’s forced good work, the conversion of his house to a convent,

as something for which God will “no doubt” pay him back. Barabas’s response uses Protestant

stereotypes of Catholics:

And yet I know the prayers of those nuns

And holy friars, having money for their pains,

Are wondrous [aside] and indeed do no man good.

[Aloud] And, seeing they are not idle, but still doing,

‘Tis likely they in time may reap some fruit—

I mean, in fullness of perfection. (2.3.81-6)

The most obvious joke here (so obvious that even Lodowick catches it) is the implication that the

friars are having sex with the nuns: the lines, “they are not idle, but still doing / ‘Tis likely they

in time may reap some fruit,” snidely assumes that the friars are “doing” the nuns, and that they

may become pregnant and deliver children, “reap fruit,” as a result.99

The first three lines of the passage are perhaps more subtle. Three relevant early modern

uses of the word “pain” were “suffering or loss inflicted for a crime or offense,” “the punishment

or sufferings thought to be endured by souls in hell,” and “the sufferings or throes of childbirth”

(OED n. 1a, 2, and 3d). When Barabas characterizes the prayers of the friars and nuns as

wondrous, “having money for their pains,” he insinuates that the friars have money to pay for

their penance; he alludes to the corruption of the Catholic Church, where the penance required of

the parishioners by the clergy frequently included a monetary bribe; and he also implies that the

nuns are prostitutes, who take money from the friars for their sexual pain and also take bribes to

keep quiet about their pregnancies.

The sexual jibes are significant: they imply that no woman is chaste. Even the virgin

Abigail is absorbed into the nunnery, itself elided with the brothel. Yet the economic language is

also thematically important. There is no separating the Catholic Church from the political or the

economic. An Elizabethan audience could hardly have missed Ferneze’s seizing of Barabas’s

worldly possessions and house in order to raise money as an allusion to Henry VIII’s dissolution

of the monasteries in the 1530s, directly following the 1533 Act of Supremacy. Ferneze’s “good

99 “Doing” as a euphemism for sexual intercourse has been around since at least the late sixteenth century (OED v.1.b).

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work,” like Henry VIII’s confiscation of monastic lands, are both shown to be economically, not

religiously, motivated.

Barabas continually conflates the nunnery with the brothel. Lodowick chastises Barabas

for his bawdy innuendo, telling him to “glance not at our holy nuns” (2.3.87). Barabas replies

that he does it only “through a burning zeal” (2.3.88), and then he mumbles that he is “hoping

ere long to set the house afire! / For, though they do a while increase and multiply, / I’ll have a

saying to that nunnery” (2.3.88-9). Nunnery here, again, refers to his house as a convent/brothel.

Marlowe is perhaps making a specific historical allusion here. During Wat Tyler’s uprising

against John of Gaunt in 1381, 60,000 men marched toward London, killing tax collectors and

burning both monasteries and brothels along the way (Burford, London 90-3). Or perhaps he is

alluding to the Jack Cade rebellion in 1449 when the Bankside stews were burnt to the ground

(Burford, London 104). Even if Marlowe did not have a particular historical moment in mind,

oppressed peasants and/or drunken apprentices burnt or tore down the brothels in Southwark

frequently.

The religious allusions in this play stress the corruption of the church and the way in

which even the church is involved in Machiavellian machinations; however, most of these sorts

of allusions center upon the friars. The references to “nuns” and the “nunnery” continually

reiterate the theme of prostitution. Their corruption is sexual. The nastiest version of this

language occurs in Act Three, Scene Four, when Barabas prepares a poisoned porridge for the

nuns, who now include his daughter. Earlier, Barabas has characterized his daughter’s

conversion as whorish. When Ithamore confirms that Abigail sent him for a friar, Barabas refers

to her as “false, credulous, inconstant Abigail” (3.4.27). The entire scene is rife with prostitution

puns and sexual innuendo. Porridge is another word for “stew,” which alludes to the slang for

brothel. Dish or pot is common slang for vagina (Rubinstein 295). Thus, Ithamore’s aside, “Was

ever / pot of rice porridge so sauced?” (3.5.107-8) becomes “was ever a pudendum so wanton?”

Barabas tells Ithamore where to deliver the porridge, explaining that “there’s a dark entry where

they take it in” (80). As Celia R. Daileader has convincingly argued, dark back doors frequently

alluded to anal sex, and such references show up regularly in conjunction with prostitute and/or

courtesan characters.100

100 See “Back Door Sex: Renaissance Gynosodomy, Aretino, and the Exotic” in ELH (2002): 303-334).

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What then is the significance of prostitution in the play? In the slave market scene, the

analogy between prostitution and Barabas’s marriage negotiations is blatant. As Barabas seems

to barter away his daughter’s flesh, first with Lodowick, then with Mathias, the tableau of the

slave market is silently displayed behind them. We move from an overt slave market to a version

of it that is a bit more culturally acceptable, the exchange of women between men. Marlowe

obviously wants us to make a connection between the two. In addition to forcing the audience to

look upon the slave market while Barabas casually negotiates a marriage he has no intention of

following through with, both Lodowick and Mathias literally objectify Abigail. Lodowick

transforms her into a diamond. When Mathias in the same scene attempts to discuss Abigail with

Barabas, he morphs her into a book in order to conceal the purpose of his conversation from his

mother.

The actual prostitute in the play, Bellamira, is introduced directly following this scene.101

Bellamira is the same as the prostitutes in the Tudor interludes and Whetstone’s Promos and

Cassandra. She is in it for the money. Like Mistress Overdone, she worries about how politics

have affected her custom: “Since this town is besieged, my gain grows cold: / The time has been

that but for one bare night / A hundred ducats have been freely given: / But now against my will

I must be chaste” (3.1.1-4). Like Dekker’s, Greene’s, and Jonson’s prostitutes, Bellamira’s

companions are thieves. One difference between Bellamira and other theatrical prostitutes,

particularly those who appear in Jonson’s plays, is that she is clearly marked as a prostitute. Even

Ithamore, who sees her on the street and falls for her, recognizes her as such, saying, “I know she

is a courtesan by her attire” (3.1.28-9).102 The prostitute, like the Jew, is externally differentiated

from the licit characters in the play, but she is no different than all of characters who inhabit the

Jew’s world: they are all in it for the money.103

Marlowe juxtaposes licit economic exchanges with prostitution and slavery. Marriage is

compared to prostitution. Nuns are elided with whores. Christians are compared to Jews. All are

exposed as base, as having prostituted themselves in exchange for a worldly reward. Prostitute or 101 See Patrick Cheney’s Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession (1997), pp. 152-3, for a discussion of Bellamira as a parody of Spenser’s Mirabella. 102Randall Nakayama “‘I Know She is a Courtesan by Her Attire’: Clothing and Identity in The Jew of Malta” in Marlowe’s Empery (2002), pp. 150-163, eds. Sara Munson Deats and Robert A. Logan. 103 For a discussion of how avarice works as a theme in the play, see Fred B. Tromly’s chapter “Playing with Avarice: The Jew of Malta” in Playing with Desire (1998), pp.92-132).

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nun, man or women, they are all prostitutes. While Marlowe juxtaposes prostitution with the

nuns in order to reveal how we are all the same, Shakespeare and Middleton’s play uses the

conflation in Measure for Measure in a much different way. In this play, the juxtaposition and

ultimate conflation relate more directly to gender stereotypes, exposing how the state controls

women’s sexuality and male access to women.

Nuns and Prostitutes

Measure for Measure (1603 or 1604) is a problem comedy in more ways than one. Generically,

it is a hybrid, a tragicomedy. The play ends with the typical Shakespearean comedic ending:

everyone is married, thereby assuming their rightful places in the social hierarchy. Yet not

everyone is happy about these marriages. In fact, it could be argued that all the marriages have at

least one potentially disgruntled party. In addition, like many early modern plays, Measure also

leaves a tangled textual history. The first print-copy we have is the 1623 folio version, which,

problematically, is also a hybrid, as the text was adapted by Thomas Middleton around 1621.104

Thus, the folio version had already been subjected to adaptation. For actors and directors certain

performative aspects, such as the characterization of Isabella, are also problematic. Does she

accept the Duke’s offer of marriage or not? There is no hint in the text. In addition, the play’s

ideology pulls at itself. In places, the Catholic version of mercy and chastity seems to be in

place; in others the Protestant worldview of moral justice and sexual sin rules. This is probably a

result of the Protestant Middleton’s revision of the (likely) Catholic Shakespeare, but any attempt

to force the playwrights into conventional religious positions is also problematic.105 Middleton’s

oeuvre provides a broad model of women: whores, virgins, widows, courtesans, prostitutes,

wives and mothers. Some will prostitute their own nieces and daughters; others are strong-willed

and well-intentioned.106 This text is difficult for actors, directors, and critics, partially because

104 For evidence of this adaptation, see John Jowett’s introduction to Measure in the forthcoming Collected Works, pp. 1546-50 and Taylor and Jowett’s final chapter, “‘With New Additions’: Theatrical Interpolations in Measure for Measure” in Shakespeare Reshaped, 1606-1623 (1993). 105 For a discussion of how this tension relates to the playwrights’ own religious beliefs, see Gary Taylor’s “Singularity” in Reinventing Shakespeare (1989), pp. 373-445. 106 For a reading of Middleton’s courtesan characters as progressive, see Celia R. Daileader’s “The Courtesan Revisited: Thomas Middleton, Pietro Aretino, and Sex-phobic Criticism” in Remaking, Rethinking, Revisioning: Images of Italy in Early Modern English Culture. Ed. Michele Marrapodi. New York: Palgrave, forthcoming.

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there are so many performance options. The Duke can be played as a lecher or a prig. Isabella

can be played as a woman adhering to her own values at any cost or as a thoroughly interpellated

subject, one who believes that in her virginity rests her entire worth as a person. The argument

that I am about to make relates to the text-as-hybrid. I am not particularly interested in whatever

the original Shakespearean text said. His version is after all, a revision of Whetstone’s texts and

thus is no more an “original” than is Whetstone’s retelling of the folktales and Italian sources on

which his own texts are based. There are moments in the argument when I do point out the

likelihood that one or the other author contributed a certain passage, but my purpose in doing so

is to read the text as palimpsest, to highlight where the performative and textual tensions now lie.

Whetstone’s text contained the prostitute Lamia, which many critics have noticed is missing

from Measure for Measure. In the remainder of the chapter, I argue that Isabella is the (absent)

prostitute. Through the juxtaposition of the nun and the prostitute, this play provides a critique of

the exchange of women in patriarchal marriage.107 It exposes the motives behind marriage as

primarily ideological and reveals the way in which the new marriage contract, in which the

woman willingly and freely subjugates herself, enacts a forced prostitution maneuvered by the

state.

In Act Three, Scene One, Pompey, the tapster/pimp/clown, has been arrested. Elbow, the

bumbling constable, responds to a comment made off-stage, saying, “Nay, if there be no remedy

for it but that you will needs buy and sell men and women like beasts, we shall have all the world

drink brown and white bastard” (3.1.269-71).108 109 Though the antecedent of “it” is unclear,

Pompey’s next speech makes clear that “it” is prostitution: ‘Twas never merry world since, of

two usuries, the merriest was put down, and the worser allowed by order of law, a furred gown to

keep him warm” (273-7).110 The “two usuries” are usury and prostitution. In The Revenger’s

107 Whetstone’s Promos and Cassandra contained a prostitute character, Lamia, which Shakespeare deletes and replaces with the bawd, Mistress Overdone. For a discussion of why Whetstone includes Lamia, see Charles T. Prouty’s “George Whetstone and the Sources of Measure for Measure” in Shakespeare Quarterly (1964), pp. 131-45. 108 This and all other Measure citations have been taken from the Collected Works of Middleton, forthcoming. 109 See Notes and Queries December 1992 and March 1994 for comments on the relevance of “brown and white bastard.” 110 Pompey is referring to English law. In 1543, usury was legalized; the rate set at 10%. During Edward VI’s reign, the law was repealed and interest rates soared, must to the outrage of the English people. Elizabeth reinstituted an

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Tragedy, Castiza, the virgin whose mother would whore her to the Duke’s son, feigns obedience

when she tells her mother she will “do as you have wished me, / To prostitute my breast to the

Duke’s son / And put myself to common usury” (4.4.102-4). Usury and prostitution are related

because both were said to produce unnaturally. In usurious practices, money, dead and, thus,

barren, unnaturally “reproduces” by gaining interest. The usurer makes money without making a

product or selling his own labor. Prostitution also reproduces money unnaturally, as it has no

tangible product or licit labor by which it makes money, while the prostitutes themselves

reproduce unnaturally by producing bastards, a fact that Elbow’s preceding pun introduces. The

two usuries are further related because “usurious contract is one of cupidity rather than

necessity” (Pearlman 219). Usury was construed as theft and considered a sin. What the usurer

sells is time, and time belongs to God, not man (Pearlman 219). Thus, “to contrive that money,

which is naturally sterile, should bear fruit is to pervert nature” (Pearlman 219). Illicit sex,

particularly prostitution, becomes synonymous with “usury” because of the relationship between

“the breeding of money and the question of fecundity and barrenness” (Pearlman 220). The

prostitute, though, is also associated with unnatural barrenness. As I noted in the introduction,

prostitutes were frequently assumed to be barren due to the buildup of semen in the prostitute’s

body. As far as I am aware, no medical treatise claims that a married woman’s barrenness might

also be due to too much sex, though presumably the mechanism would be the same. Isabella, like

the prostitute, is unnatural in her refusal to follow Protestant mandates to marry and reproduce.

She is unnaturally barren. Marc Shell in The End of Kinship (1988) claims that “the collision of

two motive forces powers the plot of Measure for Measure. On the one hand is the urge to

reproduce our own kind, no matter how; on the other is the urge to set limits on how we

reproduce or to arrest reproduction altogether” (29). Isabella and the (absent) prostitute, though,

are unnatural. They represent opposite ends of the binary that Shell points out: the prostitute

reproduces unnaturally, an example being the silent, but perhaps staged, whore the Duke claims

Lucio impregnates, while Isabella refuses to reproduce at all. Both are unnatural in their refusal

to multiply according to patriarchal rules. Isabella rightly, according to early modern sexual

ideology, values her chastity, but she refuses to circulate it. She refuses to allow her virginity to

upper limit in the act against usury, again setting the rate at 10%, but contradictorily declaring usury a sin. See John W. Draper’s “Usury in The Merchant of Venice” in Modern Philology (1935), pp. 37-47.

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be a gift between men, though, of course, as a nun, she must “marry” Christ.111 In order to force

Isabella’s containment within the patriarchal body, she must be commodified and exchanged.

She must be consumed. The closing of the convents attempts to force women to either exchange

themselves in marriage or commodify themselves as whores.112 In addition to having control of

their circulation, nuns also frequently had control of their purses, a source for further male

anxiety.113 In the play Isabella is forced into circulation and ultimately coerced into exchanging

her virginity as grateful repayment for her brother’s life. Though the text does not give us any

indication what she chooses, the logic of the play indicates that she must give herself freely. The

Duke’s proposal sets Isabella up. With Angelo, she manages, with the Duke’s help, to avoid the

fornication her source character, Cassandra, is unable to circumvent. At the play’s end, when the

Duke proposes, he has already saved her brother. Isabella should then already feel grateful and

gift the Duke with her willing subjugation, her willing acceptance of his proposals. Carole

Pateman argues that the marriage contract, where one woman and one man freely choose one

another, needs to be seen as an unequal contract. Both prostitution and marriage, she argues,

guarantee a man sexual access to women. In the marriage contract, women (freely) agree to

subjugate themselves to the husband.114 To cloister oneself is to avoid what Pateman calls the

“sexual contract.” In Whetstone’s Promos, Cassandra is not a novice nun, merely a virgin. And

she does not manage to remain chaste as she, unlike Isabella, eventually chooses to exchange her

virginity for the repeal of her brother’s death sentence. Cassandra marries Promos, Angelo’s

source, not the Duke. In Measure, Isabella is a novice nun; and she resists.

111 Nancy Bradley Warren has characterized the nun’s vow of chastity different from the priest’s. The nuns by committing their virginity to the church as the Brides of Christ were “placing their bodies in the Church’s possession, becoming “a private space inaccessible to others.” The nuns’ chastity still retained value because it “was a commodity whose circulation had to be closely regulated in order to protect it from devaluation and debasement” (5). 112 Though women were likely to live some part of their lives single, “more than 90% of those reaching adulthood in the sixteenth century would marry, and more than 80 per cent in the seventeenth century” (Cressy, Marriage 285). 113 The tenth-century nun and playwright Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, for example, was thought have taken the vow of obedience and chastity, but not poverty. For discussions of the economic freedom possible for some medieval nuns, see Marilyn Olivia’s The Convent and the Community in Late Medieval England (1998), esp. pp. 37-74 and pp. 186-201. See Roberta Gilchrist’s Gender and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Religious Women (1994), pp. 63-90 and 167-9. Of course, this economic freedom isn’t always the case. Warren notes that nuns were sometimes accused of unchaste behavior due to their “participation in the realm of commerce” (5). 114 See Pateman’s The Sexual Contract (1988), esp. pp. 116-218.

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We are introduced to Isabella and the nun, Francisca, directly after the Duke has privately

met with the Friar.115 Isabella’s name is the same as Saint Isabel, the thirteenth-century saint,

daughter of King Louis VIII, and sister of King Louis IX. She refused several royal marriages

and eventually founded a convent of the Order of Saint Clare. Saint Isabella’s convent did not

hold to all of the strict rules of the Saint Clares.116 Members of her order were allowed to hold

property, and Isabella herself never entered the convent, though she remained unmarried for the

rest of her life. The scene begins with Isabella asking a question of Francisca in response to a

comment we do not hear. Our introduction to Isabella clearly establishes that she has her own

Catholic brand of precision. She is rigorous enough to rival Angelo. She asks Francisca, “And

have you nuns no farther privileges, / Holy Francisca?” (1.4.1). When Francisca misconstrues

her, thinking Isabella believes the rules too strict, Isabella corrects her: “Yes, truly, I speak not as

desiring more, / But rather wishing a more strict restraint / Upon the sisterhood, the votarists of

Saint Clare” (1.4.3-5).117 The detail that Isabella is novice to the Saint Clares seems

Middletonian to me. Three years after this adaptation, Middleton has a character in A Game at

Chess repeat a story about a sister of the Saint Clares. One reason for the specificity in Measure

is, as many editions of the play have noted, that the Poor Clares were known for strictness.

Previous editions have glossed the specific order, the Poor Clares, as having a reputation for

strictness. The Norton notes the setting of this scene as “A convent of St. Clare, an order known

for austere discipline” (2036; n. 1.4), while the Riverside glosses Saint Clare as “thirteenth-

century foundress of an order of nuns (the Franciscan ‘poor Clares’) having a rule of extreme

austerity” (589; n. 1.5). Thus, previous editions have read the reference to the Saint Clares as

115 The scene with the Duke and the Friar was probably moved by Middleton to occur before the introduction of Isabella as opposed to following it directly (see p. 1557, n. 1.3a). Jowett believes that this shift “facilitates the doubling of boys’ parts.” 116 There had been of an order of this particular branch of the Saint Clares in London, just outside of Aldgate on the street that is currently called Minories. These Minoresses followed “Isabella’s Rule,” which had less strict rules governing the ownership of property than the rules ordered by Saint Clare. See Gless’s Appendix, esp. 262-64. There rules regarding speaking to men where just as strict. The Rewle of Sustris Menouresses Enclosid orders the nuns to cover their faces with veils at all times. In addition, “when anybody to any sisters shall speak, first shall the Abbess be warned thereof or the president, and if she grant, then shall the sister speak with the stranger so that she have two other sisters at the least with her, that they may see and hear all what they do or speak” (80; qtd. in Gless, Appendix 263). 117 Darryl J. Gless has pointed out that Catholics did not see Measure as a particularly positive depiction of Catholics. He cites Father William Sankey, a censor for the Holy Office, who had decided that out of the entire folio only Measure needed to be wholly excised (65).

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demonstrating that Isabella has chosen a particularly strict order. This specific detail, therefore,

gives the precise Angelo an equally precise Catholic counterpart. Daryl J. Gless has pointed out

that Isabella’s desire for restraint might also indicate her own lascivious nature; her desire to be

cloistered and ruled by the strict rules of the Poor Clares may be due to her inability to rule

herself (99). There is very little textual support, though, for Gless’s reading of Isabella. Any

attempt to read Isabella as a “naturally” lascivious woman trying to control her sexual urges

comes from outside the lines Isabella speaks.

One “outside” influence on this reading might come from the early seventeenth-century

reputation of the Saint Clares. By the time of the adaptation, the Saint Clares were also smeared

with sexual innuendo. In Middleton’s A Game at Chesse (1624), the Black Queen’s Pawn

accuses the Black Bishop’s Pawn of fornication: “whose Neice Was shee you poysond wth

childe, twice? / And gave her out possest wth a foule Spirit / when twas indeed youre Bastard”

(5.160-2). The source for the story of the pregnant woman whom priests said was possessed

comes from John Gee’s Foot out of the Snare (1624), one of Middleton’s sources for A Game at

Chess.118 John Gee was an Anglican clergyman who flirted with Catholicism in the 1620s. Gee

writes of a story current “some two or three yeeres since” of a woman who left her husband and

moved to Brussels where she was “admitted into the order of Nunnery, I meane a Nunne at large,

one of the uncloystred sisters of the order of Saint Clare.” The woman then leaves the sisters and

accompanies Father Drury to England where she is an “inlarged nun.” Drury tells everyone that

she has been possessed with an evil spirit, which makes her “belly swell like a woman with

child.”119 This story associates a sister of Saint Clare with the anti-Catholic smears of lechery,

whoredom, fornication, and adultery; a priest impregnates a nun (who was already married

before becoming a nun and, thus, an adulteress). In addition, the fact that the nuns are

“uncloystred” leaves them open to accusations of whoredom. Middleton certainly uses

“nunnery” as brothel in other texts.120 The doubling of the boy parts may have also enhanced

118 John Gee was an Anglican clergyman who flirted with Catholicism in the 1620s. While attending a sermon by the Jesuit priest Father Robert Drury, the building he was in (the French ambassador’s residence) collapsed. Father Drury and many others died, but Gee lived. Seeing this as a sign that God had saved him, he published Foot out of the Snare in order to expose the evils and tricks of Catholics. Obviously the text could not have been available to Middleton at the time of the adaptation (as Gee had yet to get his foot out), but the story could certainly have been current as the Father Drury he speaks of dies in the house collapse of in October of 1623. 119 See the footnote in act 5, n. 160-2. 120 For a brief discussion of Middleton’s use of nunnery to mean brothel, see Notes and Queries (1993), pp. 192-4.

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this conflation. Jowett speculates that 1.3 was repositioned from 1.5 (or 2.1) in order to

accommodate the doubling of the boys’ roles. He notes that Isabella may have also doubled as

Julietta, but sees the most likely distribution as “(a) Isabella, (b) Bawd and Mariana (c) Juliet,

Nun, and boy” (1157, n. 1.3[a]). This doubling elides the nun and the pregnant Juliet, and

perhaps, the pregnant Saint Clare from the story above. Like Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, this one

reminds the audience of the anti-Catholic conflation of nuns and prostitutes, though this reminder

is certainly more subtle.

When Lucio appears at the gates, telling Isabella that Angelo “[. . . ] who never feels / the

wanton stings and motions of the sense” has arrested her brother for fornication, Isabella sensibly

asks what she can do about it (1.4.57-8). Lucio tells her, she must “soften Angelo” and “assay

the power you have” (1.4.69; 75). This second line echoes what Claudio had told Lucio about

Isabella when he bid him find her. Claudio had asked Lucio to “[. . .]Bid herself assay him. / I

have great hope in that, for in her youth / There is a prone and speechless dialect / Such as move

men” (1.2.164-7). He goes on to say, “[. . .]; beside, she hath prosperous art / When she will play

with reason and discourse, / And well she can persuade” (1.2.167-9). The wit and reason Isabella

later shows are in addition to her primary power: “her prone and speechless dialect / Such as

move men,” which itself results from her “youth.” The most likely usage of “prone” here is

“ready” or “inclined,” but the line also paints the picture of a silent woman on her back,

“moving” a man. When Isabella asks what power she has, Lucio replies,

[. . .]. Go to Lord Angelo;

And let him know, when maidens sue,

Men give like gods, but when they weep and kneel,

All their petitions are as freely theirs

As they themselves would owe them. (1.2.79-83)

She is to kneel and weep in order to move him to compassion. To move the humoral body is to

open it up, not just to compassion, but to passion.

In Act Two, Scene Two, Isabella comes to beg Angelo for her brother’s life. This scene

directly follows the bawdy exchange about Elbow’s pregnant wife and begins with the Provost

telling Angelo that Claudio’s sister waits to see him and describes her as “a very virtuous maid, /

And to be shortly of a sisterhood, / If not already” (2.2.20-1). Angelo tells the Provost to “let her

be admitted,” but “see [. . .] the fornicatress [Julietta] be removed” (2.2.22-3). Isabella substitutes

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for Juliet.121 In this scene, Lucio, who in fetching Isabella acts the role of procurer, here plays

the role of a bawd instructing a novice prostitute.122 When Isabella gives up after her first try at

Angelo, Lucio encourages her:

Give’t not o’er so. To him again; entreat him.

Kneel down before him; hang upon his gown.

You are too cold. If you should need a pin,

You could not with more tame a tongue desire it.

To him, I say! (2.2.43-47)

Isabella tries again, and again Lucio tells her she’s “too cold.”123 She’s tries yet again, and this

time Lucio says, “Ay, touch him; there’s the vein” (2.2.72). This line could be referring to the

clever bit of rhetoric she’s just spun, or she could be actually touching him (or both). As Isabella

begins to make headway (or seems to), Lucio eggs her on, saying, “O, to him, to him, wench! He

will relent. / He’s coming; I perceive’t” (2.2.127-8). Lucio sounds like the bawd coaching the

virgin whore. And, in fact, Isabella’s performance inflames Angelo in a way that presumably

nothing and no one ever has. Her effect on him is the same as the effect whores have on other

men.

After Isabella departs, Angelo’s not sure what hit him. Bewildered, he asks in soliloquy:

What’s this? What’s this? Is this her fault or mine?

The tempter or the tempted, who sins most, ha?

Not she; nor doth she tempt; but it is I

That, lying by the violet in the sun,

Do, as the carrion does, not as the flower,

Corrupt with virtuous season. Can it be

121 See Alexander Leggatt’s article, “Substitution in Measure for Measure” in Shakespeare Quarterly (1988), pp. 342-59, for a discussion of the numerous substitutions in the text. 122 John Jowett sees this scene as one that has been altered by Middleton. The lines spoken by Lucio were originally spoken by the Provost (see the introduction to the play in the forthcoming Middleton collection, esp. p. 1547). Why the change? Jowett reads the change as “both augment[ing] [Lucio’s] role in the play and add[ing] a note of ironic detachment to the intensity of [Isabella’s] debate with Angelo” (1547). He notes that lines 132, 135, and 159 are likely additions of Middleton. I see Lucio becoming bawd. 123 Kathleen McLuskie views Lucio’s comments as another example of male characters defining and framing Isabella: “his approving remarks and comic asides act as a filter both for her actions and for the audience’s view of it” (33). See “The Patriarchal Bard: Feminist Criticism and Shakespeare: King Lear and Measure for Measure” in Political Shakespeare (1985), pp. 24-48.

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That modesty may more betray our sense

Than woman’s lightness?

[. . .]

Does thou desire her foully for those things

That make her good? [. . .]

[. . .]

[. . .] What, do I love her,

That I desire to hear her speak again,

And feast upon her eyes? [. . .]

O cunning enemy, that, to catch a saint,

With saints dost bait thy hook! Most dangerous

Is that temptation that doth goad us on

To sin in loving virtue. Never could the strumpet

With all her double vigour—art and nature—

Once stir my temper; but this virtuous maid

Subdues me quite. (2.2.164-171; 175-6; 178-80; 181-87)

In this speech, Angelo first refers to her as the tempter, but then says that she does not (willingly)

tempt. It is his nature, rather, that causes him to lust after her. Of course, viewing her as innocent

only inflames him more as he has so fetishized her virtue that it serves as goad to his desire. By

the end of the speech, though, he has lapsed into some of the language associated with

whoredom. Though he never accuses her of purposefully arousing him, he thinks of her as the

devil’s tool. Like the prostitute who limes the bush to catch her prey, the devil has used Isabella

to tempt Angelo. In the last four lines the “strumpet” and the “maid” are elided. The strumpet

cannot seduce him, but the maid can. The lines, “What do I love her / That I desire to hear her

speak again / And feast upon her eyes,” echo the nun’s injunction earlier in the play. When Lucio

knocks, the nun tells Isabella

Turn the key [. . . .]

You may, I may not; you are yet unsworn.

When you have vowed, you must not speak with men

But in the presence of the prioress.

Then if you speak, you must not show your face;

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Or if you show your face, you must not speak. (1.4.8-13)

The nuns may not both show their faces and speak for fear of accidentally causing the man to

have sinful thoughts.124 Apparently, the nuns have reason to worry. Angelo desires Isabella’s

voice and eyes. Later, even Isabella recognizes her own responsibility. When in Act Five, Scene

One, Isabella is asked to get down on her knees and beg again, this time by Mariana, she begs for

Angelo’s life, claiming, “I partly think / A due sincerity governed his deeds / Till he did look on

me. Since it is so / Let him not die” (5.1.442). Like the prostitute, she leads men to sin.

When Isabella returns in Act Two, Scene Four, a servant announces that “One Isabel, a

sister, desires access to you” (2.4.17). Angelo replies, “Teach her the way” (2.4.18). When

Angelo asks why she’s come, she replies, “I am come to know your pleasure” (2.4.31). The

language again is overtly sexual. Isabella is again the young whore who has come to learn how to

please. After engaging in rhetorical foreplay, Angelo gets Isabella to admit that women are weak,

which she readily does. Angelo reveals his true motives:

I think it well,

And from this testimony of your own sex,

Since I suppose we’re made to be no stronger

Than faults may shake our frames, let me be bold.

I do arrest your words. Be that you are;

That is, a woman. If you be more, you’re none.

If you be one, as you are well expressed

By all external warrants, show it now,

By putting on the destined livery. (2.4.130-38)125

Isabella must play the whore because she’s a woman and cannot be stronger than her womanly

frame. Angelo’s line, “arrest your words,” means both that he is catching her rhetorical error

with her own admission, but also, “Shut up.” Isabella’s loquacity helps name her whore, even if

she is chaste, and it is this violation of the trinity of feminine virtue (to be silent, chaste, and

124 See David Sundelson’s “Misogyny and Rule in Measure for Measure” in Women’s Studies (1981), pp. 83-91. In this article Sundelson points out that “the rules of Isabella’s convent seem designed to protect men more than women” (86). 125 Mario DiGangi reads this speech as displaying Angelo’s “anxiety about female autonomy (as the super-feminine virgin) and its threat to male desires for ownership (596). See Digangi’s “Pleasure and Danger: Measuring female Sexuality in Measure for Measure” in ELH (1993), pp. 589-609.

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obedient) that incites Angelo. Though Isabella seems to be veiled in part of the play, Angelo’s

earlier comment about her voice and eyes tell us that she is not in her first scene with Angelo.

Her violation of this injunction incites Angelo’s desire. The fault is hers. Her response to

Angelo’s proposition, “then Isabel live chaste, and brother die” (2.4.183-5), demonstrates that

actual fornication is not what allows her to be named whore. It is her ability to rouse Angelo’s

previously slack desire and her dereliction in preventing the man from being aroused that names

her whore.

When the veiled Mariana enters in the final scene, the Duke tells Friar Peter to “first let

her show her face, and after speak” (5.1.167). The nun’s rules are again raised. Mariana, like an

avowed nun, declines to show her face, saying she will not do so until her husband bid her. At

which point we hear the famous misogynist interplay between Mariana, the Duke, and Lucio:

DUKE. What are you married?

MARIANA. No, my lord.

DUKE. Are you a maid?

MARIANA. No, my lord.

DUKE. A widow then?

MARIANA. Neither, my lord.

DUKE. Why, you are nothing then; neither maid, widow, nor wife!

LUCIO. My lord, she may be a punk, for many of them are neither maid, widow,

nor wife. (5.1.170-78)

The source for this pun is Promos and Cassandra. In Shakespeare’s source Cassandra has

exchanged her virginity for the repeal of her brother’s death sentence and a promise of marriage.

Promos reneges on both. Cassandra names herself whore:

I monster now, no mayde nor wife, have stoopte to Promos’ lust.

The cause was, neither sute nor teares could quench his wanton thurst.

What cloke wyl scuse my crime? My selfe, my conscience doth accuse

And shall Cassandra now be termed, in common speech, a stewes? (469)126

In Measure, the Duke both denies the possibility that a woman can be anything except a maid,

widow or wife, and, with the pun on “nothing,” claims she is nothing except her genitalia. And,

of course, the three options all use the woman’s genitalia to define her. As many other readers of

126 See Charles S. Felver’s explanation in Shakespeare Quarterly (1960), pp. 385-87.

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the play have pointed out, these definitions are predicated upon not just the legal status of wife

(against which the other terms are defined), but also on the woman’s sexual activity, the

presumed number of lovers. The Duke, as the representative of the state, determines the

definitions.127 The term “maide” is not synonymous with nun. “Maide” implies the girl is a youth

and a virgin. There is no place for single women, particularly single older women. What is

important to note, though, is that the state of maidenhood is a dangerous state to be in. To be a

maid is to be always in peril of being named whore. Every single woman in this play (with the

exception of the cloistered nun) is named whore. And as the Duke shows, it is not your sexual

experiences, but the way that power names you that determines your status. The Duke can name

Isabella and Mariana “whore,” as he does when he pretends to not believe them, or he can name

them “wife” as he does when he marries Mariana and Angelo in the final act, and as his

unanswered marriage proposals to Isabella also attempt to do. In fact, he can name them

“widow” as he demonstrates when he threatens to execute Angelo directly following Isabella’s

marriage. The absent prostitute represents the alternative to marriage, while Mistress Overdone

represents the single older woman. The state names them both whore.

The play’s representation of prostitution is usually read as showing the ridiculousness of

the law. The state rounds up the ambiguous cases of fornication, but the most obvious fornicators

in the play, those involved in prostitution, escape punishment until the play’s end. There is an

added function, though. Prostitution exists because the government needs it to. It provides the

derogatory term in the binary mentioned above: wife/whore. The treatises on marriage define the

impetus to marry as the state where one escapes whoredom, though the treatises also warn

women that even within marriage they can be named whore. A married woman is not safe; she is

just safer. Pompey notes the ineffectiveness of attempts to eradicate prostitution. This is a change

from the source. In Promos we have a scaffold scene. In Act Two, Scene Seven, of the main

source, “sixe prisoners bounde with cordes, Two Hacksters, one Woman, one lyke a Giptian, the

rest poore Roges, a Preacher, with other Offycers” enter (2.7 stage direction). The prisoners sing

about how awful they are and how the audience should look upon them as examples. The song

127 For arguments pertaining to the Duke’s use of state power, see Jonathan Dollimore’s “Transgression and Surveillance in Measure for Measure” in Political Shakespeare (1985), ed. Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, pp. 72-87; Ryan Kiernan’s Measure for Measure: Marxism Before Marx” in Marxist Shakespeares (2001). Ed. Jean E. Howard and Scott C. Shershow, pp. 227-43. For an alternative reading, see Anthony B. Dawson’s “Measure for Measure, New Historicism, and Theatrical Power” in Shakespeare Quarterly (1988), pp. 328-41.

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highlights the fact that Christ always knows their sins and that they will all eventually be caught.

By contrast, the criminals in Measure are guaranteed future trade. In Act One, Scene Two,

Pompey reassures Mistress Overdone that though “all the houses in the suburbs of Vienna must

be plucked down,” she should “fear not.” “Though you change your place, you need not change

your trade [. . .] there will be pity taken on you. You that have worn your eyes almost out in the

service, you will be considered” (1.2.82; 94-7). Pompey uses the passive voice here. He does not

admit who the agent of the pity will be, but the use of passive voice and the wording of the

passage implies that it is the state itself that will take care of Mistress Overdone. She has done

service (and presumably serviced) the state and will be taken care of.

The first time Pompey is arrested he jokes with the judge and ridicules his accuser.

When Escalus tells Pompey that what he does is unlawful and will not be allowed in Vienna,

Pompey mocks him, saying, “Does your worship mean to geld and spay all the youth of the

city?” (2.1.218). Pompey asserts that prostitution exists because of the demand that it do so.

Even though both Pompey and the bawd are eventually imprisoned, the audience has no reason

to believe that the state has now succeeded in eradicating prostitution. Pompey’s earlier

arguments about what drives the trade are far more convincing that the last minute arrest of

Mistress Overdone. In fact, the audience’s lived experiences with Bridewell and London

prostitutes would also reinforce this reading. As I mentioned in chapter two, at the time of the

play’s first performance, Bridewell had just weathered a scandal when in 1602 four

subcontractors had actually turned Bridewell into a brothel, taking in clients and paying the

prostitutes with fine foods and a cut of the profits. Not only is it impossible to eradicate

prostitution, but prison does not truly reform them. By 1621, government corruption was a public

scandal. Francis Bacon had recently been found to have taken bribes. Neither the play’s

resolution nor the audiences’ lived experience lends the play’s “eradication” of prostitution any

credence. Instead, it shows Isabella her own possible fate. The state can name her whore and

then punish her, regardless of whether her body has been used. The state defines her definition,

and, thus, determines her value. Isabella’s “value” has nothing to do with “real” chastity, only

with perception. The play’s resolution only enhances this reading of Isabella. As with most

comedies, all the couples are married off: Claudio to Juliet, Angelo to Mariana, and Lucio to a

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voiceless pregnant whore. And, strangely, the Duke proposes to celibate Isabella, a proposal she

neither accepts nor declines.128

Isabella’s Silent Consent?

Isabella is a problem child. Is Isabella a proto-feminist, who fights to retain control of her body

and is unwilling to be dragged into a patriarchal exchange, choosing instead the company of

women? Or is she the prime example of the interpellated subject, valuing her virginity above all

else because that is what society teaches her is the most valuable aspect of her person? In fact,

what the play says is “who cares?” The “reality” of Isabella’s person, her thoughts, her desires,

her moral system is not relevant. What is relevant is the male fantasy projected upon her. She

plays them all. Regardless of what Isabella is, proto-feminist rebel or patriarchal victim, virgin or

whore, by the end of the play she has been absorbed back into the patriarchal body; the articulate

Isabella has been made mute by the law of the father. She is a voiceless cipher upon whose body

spectators either read silent consent or rebellious dissent. The fact that the mostly male spectators

get to decide which she is only makes this object position more clear. She is the abject prostitute.

The character of Isabella embodies both the rebel and the victim. She is both the nun and

the prostitute, the virgin and the whore; the play-text projects male fantasies upon her at the same

time that she represents male fears about women escaping patriarchal control. The play

highlights the early modern elision of prostitution and usury as unnaturally productive. In this

configuration, the nun, like the prostitute, is exposed as unnatural, though the nuns are

unnaturally sterile. The juxtaposition of the brothel and the convent as unnatural would then

seem to present heterosexual marriage as the only normative, or natural, option. The forced

marriages at the end, though, expose marriage itself as unnatural, as patriarchally compulsory,

for both the men and the women. The play demonstrates that the definitions of women are

128 Various scholars have attempted to give a definitive reading. Jerald Spotswood, for example, argues against the directorial choice that Isabella take the Duke’s hand, implying silent consent. He quite logically asserts that if Isabella had given her consent, by giving him her hand, then the second more ameliorated proposal would be unnecessary. See Spotswood’s “Isabella’s ‘Speechless Dialect’: Subversive Silence in Measure for Measure in Explorations in Renaissance Culture (1991), pp. 246-60. In “English Marriage” Ranald notes that a “young woman’s silence constitutes constructive consent” (75). See also Barbara Baines, “Assaying the Power of Chastity in Measure for Measure” in SEL (1990), pp. 284-301. Baines claims that Isabella now adheres to the Saint Clare’s rules: “she shows her face but remains silent, perhaps with the key to the convent still in her pocket” (299). She ends the essay by noting “whether or not Isabella is free to keep the convent key, she clearly holds the Duke’s ‘key’ in her pocket” (299). Baines’ point is that Isabella still has some power, even if she is unable to refuse his proposal. To claim this power, though, Isabella has to learn to use it, and the only way she used it (intentionally or not) earlier in the play was through the use of her voice.

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culturally constructed, not real. The labels change with the whims of the state. We do not need

to know Isabella’s answer. She has no answer. She is abject. She is object.

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CHAPTER 4

“THOU SHALT BE A LADY, TOO”: SOCIAL-CLIMBING AND THE PROSTITUTE

In Jacobean England, the social order was under stress. Treatises delineating the social hierarchy

were quite clear about who was at the top and who was excluded from the social order

altogether, but those of middling rank were not as clearly differentiated. The aristocracy, of

course, occupied the highest echelon, while servants, women, and apprentices did not show up in

the order at all. Where one fell in the order depended upon “birth, wealth, occupation and the

life style that accompanied their gradations” (Fletcher 1), but which of these criteria had the most

weight depended upon who was describing the order. In 1583, Sir Thomas Smith explained the

different strata in De Republica Anglorum. He observes, “We in England divide our men

commonly into foure sortes, gentlemen, citizens and yeomen artificers and laborers” (20). While

Smith is quite clear about who is included in the first category, he is unsure exactly how the sub-

groups in the last three groups fall into order. He lists both “citizens and burgesses” and yeomen

as being “in the degree next unto gentlemen” (29). He includes merchants with the fourth sort, all

of whom are “rascals.” The lowest order includes “day labourers, poore husbandmen, yea

marchantes or retailers which have no free lands, copi-holders and all artificers” (31, 33). By

contrast, in 1587 William Harrison, in The Description of England, characterizes citizens,

burgesses, and merchants as the occupants of the place below gentlemen (115). These men’s

view of the order depended upon their place in it. Smith, a member of the gentry, uses land

ownership as the most important factor in the order. Citizens and burgesses occupy a higher

place in his order through virtue of their law-making capacities. Harrison, as a London-born

citizen, sees merchants as inhabiting a more significant place than Smith does.129

What both of these treatises demonstrate is that though the social ideology of the chain of

being dictated a set and unmovable social order, changes to the English economy exerted

pressure on this worldview. Families did rise and fall, and in London especially the primary way

to raise one’s family was through the increasingly capital-based market, which then allowed

these families to buy land. Lawrence Stone notes that between 1558 and 1641, “families were

moving up and down in the social and economic scale at a faster rate than at any time before the 129 Lawrence Stone has pointed out that land ownership really was the most significant factor in determining one’s rank. Though money allows those of the middling rank to obscure their rank through conspicuous consumption,

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nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (36). Merchants who managed brisk trade could raise

themselves by acquiring land, gaining civil offices, or strategically marrying off their daughters.

For London citizens social mobility seemed to be a possibility. James’s tendency to raise the low

and his practice of selling knighthoods only added to this belief in social advancement. All three

of these social-climbing options, though, are only available to those with capital. Thus, in

Middleton’s A Trick to Catch the Old One, entered into the Stationer’s Register in 1607, the old

usurer Hoard attempts to marry a “widow” he believes to be landed; in Dekker’s The

Shoemaker’s Holiday, first performed 1599, the shoemaker, Simon Eyre, raises himself to the

position of Lord Mayor; and in Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, performed around

1613, a goldsmith, Master Yellowhammer, tries to force his daughter Moll to marry a gentleman

named Sir Walter Whorehound.

The ability of a person who is lower on the social ladder to consume and display the same

commodities as those above caused great anxiety for those concerned with keeping the ranks

distinctive. In 1573, the Merchant Taylor’s court books gave voice to this anxiety:

at our common playes and such lyke exercises which be commonly exposed to be

seane for money ev’ry lewed persone thinketh him selfe (for his penny) worthy of

the chief and most commodious place without respecte of any other either for age

or estimacion in the common weale. (qtd. in McLuskie, “Making” 135)

Anyone who pays a penny consumes the same spectacle as those of higher rank. As those of

lower rank have also paid, they feel themselves as worthy of the best view as those of higher

rank. In Jonson’s plays, the London market, where these commodities are bought and sold, is a

dangerous place, where cony-catchers, usurers, and dishonest merchants compete to ensnare

those whose greed, desperation, or lack of wit leads them into bad deals.

This chapter focuses on Ben Jonson’s play Bartholomew Fair, performed by the Lady

Elizabeth’s Servants in 1614. This play exposes the immoral social scrambling of those in the

middle of the social scale. Prostitution functions as a microcosm of this world. Like the men and

women in the play, those involved in prostitution scheme and sacrifice their moral integrity for

material goods. In the world of the fair, the class-climbers resemble the prostitutes, due to their

attempts to sell themselves and each other in order to move up the social ladder or to gain the

statistical analysis of the mobility of land demonstrates that those who wished to move up the social ladder did so by purchasing land. See Stone’s The Crisis of the Aristocracy, pp. 36-39.

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capital that enables the move. Jonson allows the audiences to view, side by side, the common

practices of social advancement and the voracious appetites of the prostitute and her customers.

The final effect is the exposure of a system where those jockeying for social position sell

themselves and each other in the name of social advancement. The class-climbers abase

themselves. In addition, both the market and the prostitutes expose how desire is constructed.

The market is a cornucopia of bodily pleasures. Food, drink, and women are all to be had for the

right price. The prostitutes at first seem to represent a bodily need. Like food and drink, the male

bodies might need sexual satiation. The play, though, exposes the desire for the prostitute as

more complicated than a carnal itch to be scratched. The prostitutes are not simply holes that

allow male release. Some of them sell a fantasy. As we will see, the fantasy they sell is related

to the middle-ranked male’s desire for social advancement. Men lust after women not only

because of beauty, but because of the woman’s social currency, or the facsimile of it. I end with

a brief comparison to Jonson’s The Alchemist, performed by the King’s Men in 1610. Here the

prostitute also functions as fantasy. Doll Common’s ability to metamorphose into whatever

vision the men desire reveals a market that can be entered in an endless variety of manners, but it

also makes clear the way in which men’s own dreams of social advancement blind them to the

dangers inherent in such an amorphous market.

Velvet Women Within

In a 1995 essay on Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, Erin Roland-Leone states, “Jonson contributes

to Renaissance man’s fear of cuckoldry and wreaks additional havoc on the already widely

defamed female sex by perpetuating the period’s deeply rooted misconceptions about the nature

of women and female incontinence” (12). At the end of her essay, Roland-Leone curtly sums up

her reading of Jonson’s play:

Rampant antifeminism was all in good fun. We can only assume that the common

audience, firmly rooted in its own lack of knowledge about just what, in fact,

made women tick, was vastly entertained by Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair.

Contemporary theater-goers, operating under the same misconceptions about

female sexuality as Jonson, surely found nothing shocking in the playwright’s

colorful display of women’s inherent physical and sexual incontinence. Thus,

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audiences unwittingly contributed to a wholesale ignorance regarding the female

sex which flourished for centuries. (13)

Roland-Leone views the play as simply and unabashedly misogynist. She assumes a naïve

audience, with no lived experience of women (and apparently comprised of no women), an

audience possessed of “wholesale ignorance.” She also ignores the non-realistic features of the

pre-Interregnum theater, paying no attention to way in which the ironic distance between the boy

actor’s present body and the body imagined might affect the audience’s interpretation of the

play. Even more problematically, she disregards the ways in which almost all of the characters

represent the worst qualities in humans. Roland-Leone does not have much to say about the

characterization of the men, who are hardly depicted as the reasonable sex. Justice Overdo is

incapable of policing his own wife, let alone the market, and plans on marrying his ward, Grace

Wellborn, off to his idiot brother-in-law in order to keep her wealth in his family. Ned Winwife

is selling himself off to the wealthiest widow he can find, and the pretentious Puritan Zeal-of-

the-land Busy is a horrible glutton. Certainly, the stock quips about the women are nasty. The

women cannot control their own bodies, and all the women in the play are assumed sexually

available for the right price. Women morph into animals, pigs and horses, and leak various body

fluids throughout the play. Even Grace, the stock virgin, must attempt to sell herself, though here

again Roland-Leone ignores what Grace’s double-bind says about men’s roles in the legal

prostitution of women: the marriage market. Certainly she ignores the function that the female

gender stereotypes play in the larger themes of the comedy. Jonson uses the virulently

misogynist sexual ideology to indict those who would use the market for social or monetary gain.

The setting of the play is itself a character.130 The various booths of the market remain on

the stage in the background, representing the numerous temptations and commodities available

in the market. Bartholomew Fair occurred yearly on Saint Bartholomew’s Day in August. Yet

Smithfield, where the fair occurred, was known as a marketplace year-round and had been for

hundreds of years. In A Survey of London, John Stow cites William FitzStephen regarding the

ancient Smithfield marketplace:

130 Kate Chedgzoy, Julie Sanders, and Susan Wiseman argue that in BF Jonson offers “a complex understanding not only of drama, but of its relationship to and representation of the driving forces—economic, sexual, and status-concerned of extra-theatrical relations. In Bartholomew Fair Jonson seems to elaborate this awareness of a specific dynamic to offer another theory of authorship for the commercial stage—one linked explicitly to place and to social relations” (10-9). The reputation of Smithfield and the reality of the yearly fair inform the main themes of the play.

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Without one of the gates is a plain field, both in name and deed, where every

Friday, unless it be a solemn bidden holy day, is a notable show of horses to be

sold; earls, barons, knights, and citizens repair thither to see or to buy; there may

you of pleasure see amblers pacing it delicately; there may you see trotters fit for

men of arms, sitting more hardly; [. . . ] In another part of that field are to be sold

all implements of husbandry, as also fat swine, milch kine, sheep, and oxen; [. . . ]

At this city, merchant strangers of all nations had their quays and wharfs; the

Arabians sent gold. (106)

Stow, commenting on the marketplace in 1598, adds that “horse-coursers and sellers of oxen,

sheep, swine, and such like remain in their old market of Smithfield” (108). In addition,

Smithfield was famous for its stewhouses, executions and jousting matches (Burford 48, 154,

178). It is a place associated with whores, criminals, and nobility. The play, like the setting it

evokes, presents a place where various ranks mix. In Bartholomew Fair, one of the traditional

marketplaces of London becomes the setting for a play about the new marketplace where

anything and anyone is for sale. In London, King James, in order to raise money, forced men to

buy knighthoods. Sumptuary laws had lapsed. And those who fought for positions at court spent

their patrimonies keeping up with the latest fashions and conspicuously consuming the most

recent New World imports in an effort to gain and retain the court’s attention. These fashions

and tastes were aped by those in the middle, who were themselves trying to climb the social

ladder and gain favor with the London merchant class and the powerful citizens who ran London.

As the lines blurred between the lower-level nobility and the prosperous merchants, anxiety

about how to differentiate between the social strata increased. One could no longer be sure of

someone’s rank just by looking. Those who were newly minted members of the gentry or had

only recently acquired their wealth were very concerned about making sure the ranks below them

were clearly differentiated, even as they attempted to be indistinguishable from the rank above

them. The fair, though, is not London, and those who willingly partake of the fair’s abundance

are either morally depraved, mentally deficient, or both. The play’s moral compass and most

highly ranked character, Grace Wellborn, would prefer to stay home, saying, “Truly, I have no

such fancy to the fair, nor ambition to see it. There’s none goes thither of any quality or fashion”

(1.5.129-30). She is forced to go, just as she is forced into the marriage market by Justice

Overdo. The fair, then, is attended by those of the middle rank and those of the lower rank. And

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while it at first seems to be the upside-down site of Bakhtinian carnival, Bartholomew Fair is not

simply a place of festive release; the disorder at the fair reveals a world where social aspirations

cause the world’s disorder. The setting enables a comparison between the prostitutes who display

their own bodies as a commodity and those of the middling rank who sell themselves and buy

others in order to gain cultural credit.

In Jacobean London, movement along the class continuum was made possible either

through marriage or by manipulating the increasingly money-based economy through buying or

selling commodities. Jonson uses the female sexual ideology, with its association with

acquisitiveness, to enact his critique. We first meet Dame Overdo, the wife of a justice of the

peace, outside of the fair. Jonson draws our attention to her most prominent external signifier of

class—her French hood. Wasp the surly servant of her brother, greets her:

Mary gip, goody she-Justice, Mistress French-hood!

Turd i’your teeth! And turd i’your French hood’s teeth, too,

To do you service, do you see? Must you quote your Adam

To me? You think you are Madam Regent still, Mistress

Overdo, when I am in place? No such matter, I assure you.

Your reign is out when I am in, dame. (1.5.15-19)

Wasp, who stings as his name implies, ridicules Dame Overdo’s pretensions.

As Jones and Stallybrass have noted, clothing helped constitute the subject. To wear the

clothing of a particular rank is to re-shape the subject. In addition, the sumptuously clothed

female body, like the prostitute, works upon the imagination and leads men to sin. In The

Anatomy of Abuses, Philip Stubbes gives voice to the most neurotic fantasies about the power of

clothing:

Pride is tripartitite, namely, the pryde of the hart, the pride of the mouth, & the

pryde of apparel, which (unless I bee deceived) offendeth God more than the

other two. For as the pride of the heart & the mouth is not opposite to ye eye, nor

visible to the sight, and therefore intice not others to vanitie and sin [. . .] so the

pride of apparel, remaining in sight, as an exemplary of evill, induceth the whole

man to wickedness and sinne. (sig. B4r; qtd. in Jones and Stallybrass 3)

The spectacle of the clothed body enters the eye, provokes the imagination and induces vanity,

greed, and lust in others. Overdo’s hood is synecdochic for her personhood, but Wasp’s use of

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the word “dame” points to the instability of such self-fashioning. The word “dame” had multiple

meanings in early modern England. It was a title addressed to abbesses, female rulers, the

mistress of the household, and a term designating a woman of rank (OED n.II,1.2a; II.5). Wasp’s

reference to Overdo as “Madam Regent” and his mockery of her “reign” point to her pretensions

and the way in which she overreaches her position. “Dame” is a term that has first broadened so

as to be indistinctive, but at this time, it is going through perjoration. The OED notes that it was

“a form of address originally used to a lady of rank, or a woman of position” but that it

“gradually extended to women of lower rank, and, after the 16th c. [was] left to these” (n.II5).

In Act Four, Scene Five Overdo’s hood makes another appearance. In this scene, the

drunken Dame Overdo has found herself alone in the tent of Ursula, the pig woman, who is a

bawd/prostitute and a seller of pork. Justice Overdo has already noted Ursula’s ubiquitous

presence at Smithfield as well as her occupational flexibility. He tells the audience in soliloquy:

“She hath been before me, punk, pinnace, and bawd, any time these two-and-twenty years, upon

record” (2.2.76-8). Ursula’s self-fashioning applies to her various jobs. She has been a

prostitute, a bawd, and a fence for stolen goods. In Act Four, Ursula is in the midst of an

occupational crisis. There are simply not enough prostitutes to “man” the fair. In her desperation,

she attempts to recruit Dame Overdo and the young Puritan wife, Win Littlewit. Both women’s

husbands have left them to their own devices, a decision which shows both Justice Overdo and

John Littlewit to be incompetent husbands. Littlewit has in fact left his wife in Ursula’s care, a

fact which unnerves his wife as she is being left with Ursula and two strange men. Dame Overdo

has come in search of a chamber pot and is inside urinating. Her inability to hold her water

reminds the audience of the disorderly nature of women who are unable to control what leaves or

enters the orifices of their bodies because of their allegedly inconstant and appetitive natures.131

Ursula tells her compatriots and fellow bawds, Jordan Knockem and Whit, to woo Win Littlewit.

Both Whit and Ursula, like Wasp, use Overdo’s clothing to stand in for her person. Whit

responds to Overdo’s request for a chamber pot by referring to her as “velvet voman,” while

Ursula tells the men she goes to “work the velvet woman within” (4.4.204; 4.5.18). Velvet in

gowns had been covered in the Elizabethan sumptuary laws and was not to be worn by any

below the rank of baron’s sons or knights and the wives of such. These attempts to police

131 For a discussion of this scene in relation to the humoral body, see Gail Kern Paster’s The Body Embarrassed (1993), pp. 34-39.

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external class signifiers had lapsed under James’s rule, and thus fabrics only signified one’s

ability to pay, not one’s “natural” rank. “Velvet,” though, also had a less noble connotation.

Velvet was frequently used to signify “vulva” (Rubinstein 294). Additionally, “French velvet”

brings to mind not only Dame Overdo’s French hood, a social marker, but also syphilis, the

“three-pile disease of the vulva of the French whore who communicated the disease” (Rubinstein

294-5). This conflation is not simply a joke at the expense of women; it also gestures to the way

in which people prostitute themselves in order to climb the social ladder. It reveals conspicuous

consumption and overreaching self-fashioning to be a disease, insidious and contagious.

Alice the underclass punk brings this point home. Shortly after Ursula leaves the stage to

work on Dame Overdo, she returns, crying for help because “yonder is your [Whit’s] punk of

Turnbull, ramping Alice, [who] has fall’n upon the poor gentlewoman within, and pulled her

hood over her ears and her hair through it” (4.5.59-61). Alice enters, beating Dame Overdo

before her. As Wasp has before her, Alice focuses on Overdo’s apparel. She exclaims, “they are

such as you are that undo us and take our trade from us, with your tuftaffeta haunches” (4.5.63-

5). She laments that “poor common whores can ha’ no traffic for the privy rich ones. Your caps

and hoods of velvet call away our customers and lick the fat from us” (4.5.67-9). This scene

parodies class conflict, noting the jealousy of those who reside on the lower rungs of the ladder.

It also gives voice to cultural anxiety pertaining to the social mobility of the middling rank.

Alice, upset over her position in the hierarchy of whores, articulates the frustrations of the lower

classes, which are stuck where they are. The two characters whose class positions are so

unimportant that they do not even warrant acknowledgement in the treatises cited earlier are the

characters who give this anxiety voice.

In addition, Dame Overdo is recognized by a prostitute as being one of her kind. Jonson

emphasizes this elision of difference by giving Dame Overdo the first name of Alice, the same

name as the whore who attacks her, a fact we learn in the final scene of the play. For Alice, the

clothing Overdo relies upon to constitute her as a prominent citizen’s wife and perhaps disguise

her as a woman of even higher rank instead marks her as a prostitute. Alice again makes

Overdo’s clothing stand for her whole person. It is the “hoods of velvet” that “call away” Alice’s

customers. There is a hierarchy among whores. Katherine Eisaman Maus, in Ben Jonson and the

Roman Frame of Mind, points out that “the similarities between Jonson’s whores and his middle

class women are more strikingly obvious than their differences” (83). Maus observes that one

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difference between the prostitutes and the middle-class wives is that “Jonson’s whores by their

frank self-knowledge achieve a kind of limited intelligence, and gain our qualified sympathy

when the hypocritical, self-deceptive bourgeois women merely repel us” (84). Thus, Jonson’s

plays present prostitution as “fall[ing] into a general class of vicious and incontinent behavior; he

does not single it out as a particularly gross scandal” (Maus 83). The gross scandal is the

middle-ranked women’s desire for class-climbing. As I have noted before, medieval sumptuary

laws elided prostitutes and the lower class in order ostensibly to mark the prostitute off from

“chaste” women, but they also functioned as an additional method of discouraging women from

dressing above their rank. Leah Lydia Otis observes the way in which these two issues were

conflated in the medieval period:

While dress codes for prostitutes continued to be important, the emphasis toward

the middle of the fourteenth century was placed on forbidding rich and elegant

clothing and decorations [. . . ] These measures were part of the sumptuary laws

of this period, issued to restrict conspicuous consumption and to discourage the

blurring of social and class lines by inappropriate dressing. Restricting the

elegance of prostitutes was especially important in the eyes of municipal

authorities, who believed that allowing public women to wear sumptuous clothing

would have been tantamount to encouraging honest women to debauch

themselves. (80)

In Jacobean London, these laws no longer held. Anyone who had money could purchase these

goods. This included kept women. Well-endowed prostitutes and those of middling rank could

buy and wear these social markers as long as they had money. This scene also conceives of the

social ladder as one where the consumption by those on the upper and middle rungs affects those

below. Alice grotesquely depicts Mrs. Overdo as a visual enticement who lures all the customers

to her, and “licks the fat” from the common whores. The fat is both profit and the fat from the

common whore’s body, which is literally consumed, melted away. She starves because of whores

like Overdo.

This scene also points to the male fantasy of the woman of rank. Men can move up the

social ladder by marrying above their “natural” station, or if they are landed, but poor, by

marrying a wealthy merchant’s daughter. The scene makes literal the class-climbing gallants’

need to screw the right woman in order to move up the ladder. Even sexual fantasy is informed

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by class aspirations as men flock to the prostitutes who dress the part of the upper-class lady.

Desire is revealed to be continuously deferred and displaced. The man wants social currency, and

thus desires the woman who can give that to him. When she is unattainable, for whatever reason,

he craves momentary satisfaction with the whore who resembles her. The whore need only dress

like her; the body the clothing hides is irrelevant. The fleeting fulfillment of this fantasy is

something he is willing to pay for. It is sex with the fetish object, not the actual woman under the

gown, which he desires. In Jonson’s The New Inn, a tailor, before delivering the expensive

clothes his high-class female customers have ordered, dresses his wife in the clothes and then

takes her out in public, pretending to be her servant. When the wife is caught by the lady who

ordered the gown, she confesses:

It is a foolish trick, madam, he [her husband] has;

For though he be your tailor, he is my beast:

I may be bold with him, and tell his story.

When he makes any fine garment will fit me,

Or any rich thing that he thinks of price,

Then must I put it on, and be his countess,

Before he carry it home unto the owners.

A coach is hired, and four horses; he runs

In his velvet jacket thus, to Rumford, Croydon,

Hounslow, or Barnet, the next bawdy road:

And takes me out, carries me up, and throws me

Upon a bed— (4.3)

In this play, it is not the wife’s desire that motivates the misrepresentation of her rank. The

husband’s sexual fantasy is to have sex with a woman above his station. He enacts the fantasies

he has of his female customers. In addition, the sex is described in terms of mastery. The

“servant” manhandles the lady, carrying her up and “throwing” her on the bed. The description

implies both a need to assert mastery over the lady and an intense sexual desire. A lord who

hears the confession, disgustingly comments that the tailor “lies / With his own succuba, in all

your names” (4.3). A second lord adds, “And all your credits” (4.3). The host says, “Ay, and at

all their costs” (4.3). The nobles characterize the sex as “fornication,” stating that the tailor is

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“fornicating with [his] own wife” (4.3). The wife is punished as a whore: she is carted with a

basin banged before her.

This male desire helps create the lust for clothing in the women. Women, both prostitutes

and citizen’s daughters, long to dress the same as highly ranked women, so that they may lure

the landed noble and marry above their station or attract the higher-paying customer. Male desire

for higher-ranked women helps to produce the women’s desire for fashionable clothing. Whit

and Knockem prey on this lust when they attempt to lure Win, the Puritan wife, into prostitution.

Jordan asks Win why she “should lead a dull honest woman’s life, that might live the life of a

lady?” (5.4.26-7). Jordan’s argument appeals to Win’s desire to dress the part of the lady. Jordan

tells her that she shall “have her wires, her tires, her green gowns, and the velvet petticoats”

(4.5.35-6). Win, as the wife of a scrivener and the daughter of a puritanical Protestant, does not

have access to these signs of class, which in her circle are deemed sinful and extravagant.

Knockem describes the colors and the fabrics in order to tempt Win. The “green gown”

conflates fashion and sexual concupiscence. Gown was slang for “cunt,” due to the possible

pronunciation of “coun” for gown (Rubinstein 113). Green, as we have discussed, was the color

of passion. “To give a green gown” was to engage in sex in the grass, which resulted in grass

stains. Green was a color specifically associated with whoredom, due to its linkage with passion,

but colorful clothing was also a class signifier. Jane Schneider notes that the color of clothing

shifted significantly from the Elizabethan to the Jacobean period. In her article, “Fantastical

Colors in Foggy London,” Schneider explains that Elizabeth chose to wear mostly black and

white, black to represent “constancy” and white to represent her virgin status, though she would

shift into an attention-getting color when the occasion called for it (110); for example, during

royal processions Elizabeth would wear scarlet, a color which connotated “both rank and

ceremony” (115). It was also a color forbidden anyone below the rank of baron. Elizabeth’s

daily clothing, though highly elaborate in style, was usually in shades of white or black. Even

Elizabeth’s courtiers, following the example of the queen, usually rejected bright colors.

Schneider cites an analysis of color in the clothing of male courtiers in the Elizabethan period:

“seventy three percent of the youthful figures are in white or light colors; 70 percent of the older

figures are in black” (111). One reason for this lack of color was that colorful dyes for clothing

were difficult to obtain as most needed to be imported from exotic ports (111-14).

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Elizabeth used early modern color symbolism when she shaped her spectacles. Colors

had moral meanings assigned to them. A 1552 statute of the court proclaimed that “true” colors

were limited to the following shades: “scarlet, red, and crimson, and then a host of non-descript

shades including brown-blue, orange-tawny, russet, marble, sheep’s color, lion’s color, motley or

iron gray, something called ‘new sad color’ and something called ‘puke’” (Schneider 117). Other

colors were considered “false and deceivable” (117). Puritan rhetoric reinforced this belief by

naming colors that were “offensive to God for diverting attention from the ‘true colors’ of

virtue—colors that could not be judged by appearances or works” (Schneider 118). In 1583, the

ever-reproving Stubbes wrote that clothing “‘in diverse and sundry colors’ in ‘silk velvet, taffetie

and such like’ were a colossal waste” (qtd. in Schneider 118). There is a shift, though, when

James appears at court. In 1603, Henry Crosse protested:

Every man has fallen in love with himself [. . .] his mind is set on fashions,

fangles and garish clothes [ . . ] in the judgement of wise men, such are but a

blowne bladder, painted over with so many colours, stuft full of pride and envy [ .

. .] in whomsoever such [outward] badges of vanitie appears, it is a sure token

there is a stinking puddle of vainglory within. (qtd. in Schneider 118)

Elizabeth’s clever manipulation of color symbolism in her court stands as yet another sign of her

skills as the consummate politician. The fact that James remained oblivious and reveled in

garish colors and rich fabrics is yet another sign that he was not.

Win’s interest in green gowns and velvet petticoats gestures to a London where the

clothes of many of the citizens had become increasingly flashy, not only in an imitation of

James’ court or because of a recent shift in the draperies market, which allowed Londoners to

have access to fabrics dyed in London, rather than relying on imports. Fashion signaled class. As

fashion fetishes lost their ability to signify rank by becoming available to wider segments of the

population, those citizens who were most concerned about signaling their rank, namely the upper

middle class and the increasingly anxious landed nobility, moved to more and more exotic and

expensive signifiers, such as hard-to-get hues. These colors were frowned upon by the Puritans,

but Win has been lured by the conspicuous display in the London streets. She wants what she

sees, and this leaves her open to sexual seduction.

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Ride and Be Ridden

Bartholomew Fair elides another class signifier with prostitution: the coach. In The New Inn,

part of the tailor’s wife’s “dressing up” is to hire a coach. The wife refers to the roads as “bawdy

roads,” inferring that sex does not only happen at the inn, but also occurs in the coach. In

Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl, Laxton tries to pay for sex with Moll. He asks to

meet Moll in Brentford, Staines, or Ware. When Moll asks what they will do there, Laxton

answers, “Nothing but be merry and lie together; I’ll hire a / coach with four horses” (Scene 3.

290-1). Moll responds, “I thought ‘twould be a beastly journey. You may / leave out one well;

three horses will serve if I play the jade myself” (3.292-3). In Bartholomew Fair, Knockem tells

Win that as a prostitute he will “provide [her] a coach to take the air in” (4.5.93-4). Win, unused

to such lavishness, questions if he can really provide such an expensive luxury. Knockem replies:

They are as common as wheelbarrows where

there are great dunghills. Every pettifogger’s wife has ‘em,

for first he buys a coach that he may marry, and then he

marries that he may be made a cuckold in’t. For if their wives

ride not to their cuckolding, they do ‘em no credit. Hide

and be hidden, ride and be ridden, says the vapor of

experience. (4.5.96-102)

The coach is yet another fetish that has been lessened in value by its increasing availability.

Lawrence Stone observes that one conspicuous expenditure was transportation. Those who

would use transportation to impress needed to own a heavy coach, a traveling coach, and a sedan

chair (Stone 566-7). The heavy coaches were available during Queen Mary’s reign, but “it was

not till about 1590 that most earls could boast of one of these formidable new status symbols,

and it took another quarter of a century to become a common possession of the middling gentry”

(Stone 566). They were not a cheap luxury: the chassis, sans decoration, cost approximately £30

and the harness cost around £20. In addition, velvet used to upholster the coach might cost an

additional £50, while the horses were £20 each (Stone 566). Stone notes that the number of

horses used to pull the coach also displayed one’s rank: in 1600 four horses demonstrated one’s

high rank, while by 1620 “no man of fashion could make do with fewer than six” (566). In

Bartholomew Fair, both social-climbing and marriage are a form of prostitution. The economies

of conspicuous consumption and marriage lead to the wife being ridden in the back of the coach.

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The man buys social signifiers so that he can attract a wife. The social signifiers of both the

coach and the wife increase his social “value,” but the wife lessens it by cuckolding him. The

exhibition of the wife plays upon cultural anxiety over cuckoldry. Like the prostitute, the wife

rides in the coach as a spectacular display. The use of the wife as display makes her an object.

She is a commodity that the husband purchased, and like the prostitute, the wife’s display also

serves to “sell” her to the man with whom she will cuckold the husband. On the one hand,

parading the wife in the coach flaunts the husband’s rank and social prominence; on the other

hand, this same display provides access to other men who might sleep with the wife, perhaps

even in the coach, thus providing doubt that any son she bears is the progeny of her husband. In

the nineteenth century, the coach still retained the connotation of both an object signifying social

status and a place of illicit sexual liaisons. In Madame Bovary (1856), Emma Bovary is

convinced by Léon to enter the carriage with him alone because “It’s done in Paris!” We’re told

that “this observation, like an irresistible argument, convinced her” (Flaubert 204). While we’re

not allowed to see the sexual encounter in the coach, we hear a voice inside tell the driver to keep

driving. The driver “did not understand what frenzy of locomotion drove these individuals to

insist upon not stopping” (205). Certainly, we are meant to recognize lust as the frenzy of

locomotion, but in Madame Bovary sexual lust and the lust for social status are frequently elided.

In early modern drama, the anxiety about the visual stimulus of the woman in the coach

shows up in other plays. In Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, the third madman exclaims, “Woe

to the caroche that brought home my wife from the masque at three o’clock in the morning! It

had a large featherbed in it” (4.2.104-6). In The Revenger’s Tragedy, sexual prostitution is

elided with moral prostitution. Vindice, disguised as the Duke’s son’s pander, tells Gratiana that

she should sell her daughter’s chastity to Lussurioso, saying that in her place, he would

raise his state upon her breast

And call her eyes my tenants; I would count

My yearly maintenance upon her cheeks,

Take coach upon her lip, and all her parts

Should keep man after man, and I would ride

In pleasure upon pleasure (2.1.95)

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The coach here functions as the social-climbing reward Gratiana could reap were she to

prostitute her daughter.132 The mother rides in the coach as her daughter is ridden by “man after

man.” The daughter is divvied up into parts, creating a sort of blazon of the daughter’s

marketability. Each part is exchanged for social and literal currency. In Bartholomew Fair, the

urge to self-promote and the uneasiness surrounding the visual display of (and public access to)

women come into conflict in the class-signifying coach, placing the social-climbing husband in

the role of bawd and the prominently displayed wife in the role of prostitute. Win’s

characterization as a horse to be bought and sold at market emphasizes the role of the coach.

Earlier, Knockem had sized up Win, comparing her to a prize mare:

Is’t not pity my delicate dark chestnut here—with the fine lean head, large

forehead, round eyes, even mouth, sharpe ears, long neck, thin crest, close

withers, plain back, deep sides, short fillets, and full flanks; with a round belly, a

plump buttock, large thighs, knit knees, straight legs, short pasterns, smooth

hoofs, and short heels—should lead a dull honest woman’s life, that might live the

life of a lady. (4.5.20-27)

The common riding metaphor as slang for sexual intercourse is, of course, relevant here. But

Knockem’s appraisal also mocks the blazon, cutting her into parts which he then describes in

terms of horse parts. Like the horses sold at Smithfield, Win, whose name “whinnies” like a

horse, is a commodity to be sold, and she is a whore/horse to be ridden. Women who sit in the

coach both ride and are ridden. They both capitalize on their commodity status and are used by

it.

Of further interest in this passage is the use of economic language. The men buy

themselves coaches so that the women will marry them; however, if the wife “ride not to their

[the husbands’] cuckolding, they do ‘em [the men] no credit.” If the wife and coach are not

ridden out to be displayed, then neither the wife nor the coach can gain the man the cultural

credit that this display might earn him. The wife is commodified like the prostitute.

132 For commentary on Middleton’s depictions of parents who sell their children, see Jennifer Panek’s “The Mother as Bawd in The Revenger’s Tragedy and A Mad World, My Masters” in SEL (2003), pp. 415-437. Panek points out that Middleton exposes how the overt whoring of daughters into illicit couplings is not much different than the “licit” commodification of a daughter’s chastity on the marriage market. As she observes, “even in the absence of financial gain for the parent, virginity still functions as a currency of exchange, as what makes the daughter ‘saleable’” (432).

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Jonson continues to juxtapose class signifiers and prostitution in the final act of the play.

Jordan and Whit, having successfully convinced Win and Madam Overdo to play the prostitute,

take the women, masked, to the fair’s puppet show. The women are prominently displayed in

order to lure customers. The men seat Mistress Overdo in a chair, as she is so drunk she cannot

stand or remain conscious. Win, however, is courted on all sides. Leatherhead, a hobby horse

seller, asks Win, “Will it please Your Ladyship sit, madam?” (5.4.42-3) to which she replies,

“Yes, good man.” She then turns to Edgeworth and excitedly whispers, “They do so all-to-be-

madam me, I think they think me a very lady” (5.4.44-5). Win is courted by the lowest of the

low, but to Win in her fine clothes and addressed as a lady, this fact is irrelevant. When

Edgeworth asks, “Is not this a finer life, lady, than to be clogged with a husband?” (4.4.59-60),

she enthusiastically responds, “Yes, a great deal” (5.4.61). If to be a woman is to be prostituted

into marriage anyway, this life does indeed shine by comparison (though the underclass Alice

might disagree). Win is better dressed and better attended. Men flock to her and defer to her.

The use of “lady” in this scene obscures the difference between the well-to-do lady and the

prostitute. Justice Overdo, referring to Win, asks Whit, “is this a lady, friend?” (5.4.53). Whit

answers, “Ay and dat [gesturing to Dame Overdo] is anoder lady, shweetheart. If dou hast a

mind to ‘em, give me twelve-pence from tee, and dou shalt have eder-oder of ‘em” (5.4.54-6).

The word “lady” did, of course, signify class, but it had been broadened to include “a mistress.”

The audience is then unable to tell whether Justice Overdo means to ask if Win is a woman of

high rank, or if he inquires, as Whit assumes, if she is a prostitute. Yet again Dame Overdo’s

external signifiers do not readily place her in one position or another; she is simultaneously a

whore and a prominent citizen’s wife. In the economy of prostitution, she is worth the same

amount as Win: twelve-pence.

Selling Yourself

To be a wife is to be a prostitute. To be a young unmarried woman is also to be a prostitute.

Grace Wellborn is the ward of Justice Overdo. As a female ward, she represents another way to

make money and rise in rank in Jacobean England. Orphans became wards of the king, who then

gave the ward to the highest bidder. Becoming a guardian allowed the guardian the right to

arrange the marriage between the ward and the one he deemed suitable. If the ward refused the

match, s/he forfeited his or her inherited lands to the guardian. Thus, Justice Overdo cleverly

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decides to marry his well-born ward to his imbecilic brother-in-law, keeping Grace’s wealth and

lands all in the family. This arrangement is clearly similar to prostitution as Overdo acts the

bawd, prostituting Grace in marriage.

Grace is understandably displeased with her potential match to Cokes. In an attempt to

rid herself of Cokes, she decides to marry someone else—anyone else. At the fair, Grace is

separated from her chaperone, Mistress Overdo, and left alone with Ned Winwife and Tom

Quarlous. She decides that either man will do, and in order to decide between them, she has

each man write a word or a name, which she will show to the next person who walks by and ask

them to check which word they prefer. She will then give herself to whichever man wrote down

that word. This unromantic method of choosing a husband is juxtaposed with the mythos of

courtly love through the words the men choose. Quarlous chooses “Argalus,” from Sidney’s

Arcadia and Winwife chooses “Palemon” from Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale.” Both names

refer to heroic lovers. Grace’s own name emphasizes both the high of courtly love and the low of

animal lust as “grace” was also a bawdy joke for an erect penis and for the vulva based on the

Greek etymology of the word (Rubinstein 114). In addition, “your grace” is a form of address

used for the nobility. Thus, the word-play works in much the same manner as the play on “lady,”

eliding the noble address with the scurrilous. Grace’s lands give men hard-ons. The courtly

language is just a way to get under her skirt, which itself is just a way to climb the social ladder.

Grace understands that there is no way to escape the prostitution of her person and her lands. The

only way to assert power is to prostitute herself, rather than wait for a man to do it for her.

Overdo’s monetary-motivated marriage and Grace’s own unromantic attempt to slip out of that

marriage expose the ethos of courtly love as merely a cover for economic motivators. Grace

incites men’s desire through her use as social currency, not because of any innate quality.

Jonson further parodies courtly love in Littlewit’s adaption of Hero and Leander. In the

puppet show, this traditional tale of tragic love transforms into a story about a prostitute and her

johns. Hero is no longer Venus’s priestess; she is instead a cheap Bankside punk, who resides in

a room above an alehouse. Cupid “because he would have their [Leander’s and Hero’s] first

meeting merry” decides to “strike Hero in love to him with a pint of sherry, / Which, he tells her,

from amorous Leander is sent her, / Who after him into the room of Hero doth venter” (5.4.181-

4). Leander competes for Hero’s attention with Pythias and Damon who entertain their audience

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with bawdy joke after bawdy joke about prostitutes and sex. Here, love is not romantic. It is

motivated by desire, which is in turn motivated by base sexual urges or social climbing.

Grace’s attempt to control her own prostitution is thwarted. Quarlous, having

surreptitiously learned that Winwife’s word has been chosen, has stolen the marriage license that

was meant to solidify the union between Grace and Cokes. Quarlous is now in control of Grace’s

“prostitution.” He brokers a deal that splits her value between Winwife and himself. He will turn

over the marriage license to Grace and Winwife on the following condition: “you [Winwife] are

possessed o’the gentlewoman, but she must pay me value” (5.5.91-2). Jonson exposes Grace as

the commodity she is, a commodity useful for social advancement. Her value is determined not

by any innate qualities, like grace or chastity; instead her value is revealed to lie solely in her

social currency. Her value is split: Winwife gets the title and Quarlous gets money. Both are

useful for social advancement.

Jonson, though, does not represent all forms of prostitution as equal. As I mentioned

before, Maus sees Jonson as being decidedly harder on the middle-class wives than on the poor

starving prostitutes. Grace’s marriage to the gentleman Ned Winwife is preferable to the

thwarted match with the esquire Bartholomew Cokes. Cokes, like the middle-class wives, leaks.

He is unable to retain his personal possessions, allowing even his clothing to be stolen. The loss

of his possessions declares him to be a fool who would be make a horrible head of household.

Though Grace loses the ability to completely control who receives the social currency her person

holds, she is able to refuse Cokes. In addition, she marries a man who has the one quality she

demands: intelligence. When Grace tries to explain to Winwife and Quarlous why she does not

want to be married to Cokes, she states,

‘Tis true, I have professed it to you ingenuously

that, rather than to be yoked with this bridegroom is

appointed me, I would take up any husband, almost, upon

any trust—though subtlety would say to me, I know, he is

a fool, and has an estate, and I might govern him and enjoy

a friend beside. But these are not my aims. I must have a

husband I must love, or I cannot live with him. I shall ill

make one of these politic wives. (10-17)

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She would take up “almost” any husband other than Cokes. Of her two arbitrarily chosen

possibilities, she admits that she cannot differentiate between Winwife and Quarlous:

How can I judge of you, so far

as to a choice, without knowing you more? You are both

equal and alike to me yet, and so indifferently affected by

me as each of you might be the man if the other were away.

For you are reasonable creatures; you have understanding

and discourse. And if fate send me an understanding hus-

band, I have no fear at all but mine own manners shall make

him a good one. (4.3.32-39)

Thus, Winwife and Quarlous are equally acceptable because Grace believes that she can turn any

man with “understanding and discourse” into a good husband. Here the men, not the women, are

the wax for Grace to imprint herself upon.

Those who would see the fair as simply the topsy-turvy carnival miss the moral censure

some of the play’s characters pronounce upon it. As I mentioned earlier, Grace states that she

wishes to avoid it. Quarlous, who chooses his wife based on the amount of money she has,

refuses to partake of the prostitutes. Of a marriage to Dame Purecraft, he asks, “it is money that I

want; why should I not marry the money when ‘tis offered me?” (5.2.81-2), but when Edgeworth

invites Quarlous to enter Ursula’s and “take part of a silken gown, a velvet petticoat, or a

wrought smock” (4.6.20-1) Quarlous declines. In fact, he vehemently rebuffs him:

Keep it for your companions in beastliness; I am

None of ‘em, sir. If I had not already forgiven you a greater

Trespass, or thought you yet worth my beating, I would

Instruct your manners, to whom you made your offers.

[. . .] The hangman is only fit

to discourse with you; the hand of beadle is too merciful a

punishment for your trade of life. (4.6.23-9)

Though Quarlous trades sexual access to the widow in return for access to her purse, base

prostitution, which is also a sexual and monetary exchange, is “beastliness.” In fact, Ursula’s

body, the “sow of enormity,” and the goods she sells in her tent, cannot be seen simply as the

positive manifestation of the grotesque body and festive excess.

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To see carnival only in terms of its festive excess is to ignore the dialogic, the push/pull,

of the various linguistic and symbolic categories circulating in the play. In The Politics and

Poetics of Transgression, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White note that Ursula’s pigness allows

various connotations of “pig” to fight with each other. The authors observe that an “ideological

combat is enjoined around the pig which becomes the site of competing definitions and desires”

(63). Furthermore, Stallybrass and White see Ursula’s grotesque body as the “go-between,” the

bawd of the inner (body) and the outer (world), the animal and the human, those of rank and

those of the underclass (65-6). Ursula, they say, “moves out from the fair to enter and transform

the space of official law and order, uncontainable within any one of the discursive confines

applied to her, comprehensible here as the confounder of the closed, hierarchical and strictly

individuated classical body” (66). I agree with their view of Bartholomew Fair as a place where

“an ideological combat is enjoined” and that this combat ensues most clearly in Ursula’s tent.

But to view her as the “confounder of the closed, hierarchical and strictly individuated classical

body” is to ignore Jonson’s own hierarchy in the play. It is true that Ursula is not punished at the

end, and that, as the authors point out, this play does not end with the disguised authority figure’s

restoration of order, but instead ends with the silencing of the magistrate, who then takes the fair

outside the fair, inviting those on stage to end at his house (65-6). Not all closed bodies,

however, are confounded. Grace retains her dignity and never loses (or leaks) her control. While

she does lose her inheritance, the loss occurs because she is forced to prostitute herself in order

to thwart Justice Overdo, not because of an innately leaky body. Quarlous and Winwife are not

divested of their clothing, status or authority as are the other men in the play. Stallybrass and

White note that one of the circulating meanings of the pig is the “pig’s symbolism [. . .] as an

emblem of moral corruption within Christian discourse” (63). The authors and others have

observed that Jonson’s play revives medieval stagecraft in that he presents the booths on

stage.133 Thus, they function somewhat in the same manner as the mansions of morality plays,

where the mansions symbolically represented a particular point in a man’s life or a site of

temptation. Stallybrass and White point out that Ursula’s pig-booth “probably occupied a

dominant position at stage left, which had been traditionally the location of Hellmouth” (63). The

booths remain on stage during the action of the fair and, therefore, function as they did in

133 There are also scenes in The Roaring Girl where characters move from shop to shop, but the impression of moral transgression is not as strong as in Bartholomew Fair.

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morality plays, as a site of transgression and temptation. Those who enter the booth ar

to gluttony, drunkenness, theft, fornication, and adultery. Quarlous engages Edgeworth to steal

the marriage license and watches the game of vapours that occurs just outside of Ursula’s. He

later repents the decision to use Edgeworth, saying, “I am sorry to have employed this fellow, f

he thinks me such” (4.6.30). Edgeworth believes Quarlous to be the same as he. Quarlous’s

momentary association with Ursula’s booth allows for a temporary elision between Quarlous and

Edgeworth. Quarlous’s resistance of the temptations in the booth restores his difference from

them. For those who give in to the temptation, there is little difference. The middle-class wives’

class-climbing aspirations allow them to be drawn into “real” prostitution and the difference

between them and the working girls is no longer c

e tempted,

or

lear to everyone.

Though no one would try to argue that Jonson is a proto-feminist, the misogynist sexual

ideology does not function simply to name all women whore. Instead, it names all of class-

climbers whore. Jonson allows the audience to view, side by side, the common practices of social

advancement and the base economic motivations of the prostitute. Lust for social advancement

allows the fair-goers to be tempted into adultery. The class-climbing of Quarlous and Winwife,

though, is differentiated from the class-climbing of the middling sort. While Cokes’ marriage to

Grace is seen as overt prostitution, Winwife’s marriage to Grace and Quarlous’s marriage to

Dame Purecraft is not, in the world of the play, as troubling. The final effect is the exposure of a

system where those in the middle sell themselves and each other in order to climb another rung

on the social ladder. In the world of Bartholomew Fair and by extension Jacobean London, the

prostitute is no more monstrous than the citizen.

The Market as Dangerous Fantasy

In The Alchemist, Jonson again makes use of the prostitute. The world of The Alchemist though

differs from that of Bartholomew Fair. In this play, the plague has driven the nobles out of

London and only the underclass, merchants, and Puritans remain. A prostitute, a servant, and a

cony-catcher spin fantasies in order to separate those who remain from their purses. Where the

prostitute in Bartholomew enacts male fantasies about noble women, Doll Common performs

any role required of her. When at the play’s beginning Doll Common attempts to smooth the

ruffled egos of her compatriots, Subtle refers to her as “Royal Doll” and Claridiana. Face tells

her, “Thou shalt sit in triumph, / And not be styled Doll Common but Doll Proper, / Doll

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Singular. The longest cut, at night, / Shall draw thee for his Doll Particular (1.1.176-179). Doll’s

name, Doll Common, reveals her to be sexually indiscriminate and more akin to the Jane at the

fair than to the high-class prostitute Jane despises, but Face’s and Subtle’s continuous re-naming

shows Doll’s capacity for metamorphosis. She is royal; she speaks like a romantic heroine; she

can fashion herself not just as “common,” but as proper, and her gift for transformation

guarantees that she shall be some man’s “particular.” For Dapper, she plays the “Faery Queen”

who is “very rich” (1.3.156). For Mammon, she is a mad “lord’s sister” (2.3.224) who will

“mount you up like quicksilver / Over the helm, and circulate like oil, / A very vegetal” (2.3.254-

6). For the Don, she’s to play the whore and beguile him in her bed:

He shall be brought here, fettered

With thy fair looks before he sees thee, and thrown

In a down bed as dark as any dungeon,

Where thou shalt keep him waking with thy drum—

Thy drum, my Doll, thy drum—till he be tame

As the poor blackbirds were i’the great frost,

Or bees are with a basin, and so hive him

I’the swanskin coverlid and cambric sheets

Till he work honey and wax, my little God’s gift. (3.3.41-49)

The sexual fantasy deployed in this speech is dark and dangerous. Doll’s sexual prowess creates

a prison. The rhythm of the sexual intercourse is a sort of torture, where sex deprives the Spanish

Don of sleep and weakens him until he is soft and workable, easily impressed. Like the common

stone that Subtle claims to be able to turn to gold, Doll Common shifts into whatever fantasy is

required of her. Doll is a precursor to the Restoration actress, who is a prostitute, but plays the

lady. But her most important function is to reveal how greed and ambition weaken her victims’

ability to see the truth. Doll acts the part, but the victim’s gullibility arises from their own

ambition.

In both plays, the prostitute exposes the market as dangerous and the naïve buyers and

sellers as potential gulls whose own destructive appetites drive them to sell themselves and

others like beasts. In The Alchemist, Doll stands in for the fantasy of the market. In a world

where self-fashioning and social advancement seem increasingly possible for those in the

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middle, the market morphs into whatever airy castle the consumers envision. In reality, though,

the market is a diseased whore. Buyer beware!

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CHAPTER 5

“CRACKED IN THE RING”: CHANGEABLE PROSTITUTES AND THE LONDON

MARKETPLACE

Your Five Gallants, a city comedy written by Thomas Middleton and performed at Blackfriars

by the Children of the Revels in 1607 or 1608, seems to have been popular when it was

performed, but has received little contemporary critical attention. 134 Ralph Cohen, who has

written the introduction to the play in Oxford’s forthcoming Collected Works of Middleton,

points out that the lack of critical attention is not due to inherent weaknesses in the play, but

rather the play’s dependence on “blocking, props, and costume” for its meaning. The play’s

dependence upon the visual is pertinent to the play’s fundamental theme and one of the reasons

why this play deserves more critical attention than it has received. Your Five Gallants is an

explicit critique of the London marketplace and the on-stage action is vital to this critique. The

play traces the transformation from movable commodities as commodities with social capital to

commodities with unstable and shifting values. The play uses the sexual ideology of whoredom

to pronounce judgment upon a market where movable goods increasingly signify wealth, rather

than rank.

134 George Eld, who printed the 1608 quarto, claims that the play had been performed frequently at Blackfriars (Cohen 1). There are very few instances of the play’s revival in the last two hundred years. Since its initial run, the play has rarely received more than passing critical mention and is seldom staged. There was a very successful production at James Madison University in 1991, where four out of six performances were sold out (Cohen, “Introduction” 1). In 1849 Alexander Dyce dismisses it by claiming that it contains “much humour, but more ribaldry—no characters of interest, nor incidents to surprise” (Steen 101). In 1886, Algernon Charles Swinburne offers an ameliorated opinion, admitting that the play displays a “curious burlesque study of manners and morals not generally commendable for imitation.” He continues, noting that “the play is somewhat crude and hasty in construction, but full of life and fun and grotesque variety of humorous events” (Steen 166). For modern critics, the play is a mere footnote presented in a list of city comedies or given as a brief example of an unsuccessful attempt in that genre. Herbert Jack Heller only mentions the play to note that it, like A Trick to Catch the Old One (1606), was performed by the Children of the Revels (122). He does not even mention the play in his chapter titled “Marrying the Whore,” even though Your Five Gallants concludes by marrying off four prostitutes, an ending which surely deserves at least a paragraph for being the most efficient disposal of whores in a city comedy. Anthony Covatta mentions the play six times, five of which involve brief mentions in a list of other plays. He does devote four pages to the play, but like the nineteenth-century critics, Covatta believes that “the targets are frequently so vague that we can only guess at what he is attacking” (77). The rest of the commentary follows a similar vein. The forthcoming Collected Works of Middleton begins to give the play the critical attention that it deserves. In the introduction to the play, Ralph Cohen notes that Your Five Gallants “plays better than it reads” (1) and suggests that the “theatrical dimension invisible to us on the page can even be stronger in plays that appear ‘thin’ textually” (1).

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The Prostitute as Market Allegory

Whores embody the masculine anxiety regarding female bodies that have wriggled free of

patriarchal surveillance; thus, they furnish playwrights with particularly apt metonymic figures

for the nascent capitalist market due to the comparison between the whore’s disorderly body and

the new, equally disordered, money-based economy.135 The money-based economy, like the

common prostitute, provides access to all comers, regardless of lineage. As we will see, both the

whore and the early seventeenth-century market engendered patriarchal anxiety because of their

escape from licit modes of (re)production and patriarchal control. As the marketplace changes

from “a place to a process to a principle to a power” (Agnew 56), the marketplace, like the

grotesque body, escapes the confinement of the clearly delineated boundaries of fairs and literal

marketplaces, spilling into London proper and beyond (Miller 79-80). The fantasy of the

medieval marketplace, where it seemed as though a “thing” like land or jewelry had “natural”

value, gives way to a market where money unnaturally engenders more money. As I mentioned

in the introduction, the classical, enclosed body is the fantasy of the male body, impervious to

corruption.136 The nostalgia for the past economic system causes the fantasy of a stable market,

enclosed like the male body. As an ever-increasing number of goods poured into London, the list

of movable goods grew and these objects became commodified and abstracted from their

material value. As these goods became available to more and more consumers and began to filter

down to the merchant classes, their “social” significance became unstable. Movable

commodities began to signify wealth, rather than rank, and consumers, especially those in the

city, increasingly exchanged the items as currency. As a result, the value of movable

commodities was abstracted from the value assigned them when attached to a certain household.

135 For a particularly compelling comparison between the carnivalesque female body and the early modern money-based economy, see Miller (73-80). 136 Schoenfeldt takes issue with what he calls Kern’s tendency to “pathologize the leaky body, to see it as something socially embarrassing” (15). He feels that Kern’s argument neglects the humoral model’s reliance on alimental control, on the importance of purging as a method of balancing the body’s humors. Thus, he notes, the expulsion of various noxious gases and fluids do not signal a lack of control, so much as a therapy of “self-regulation” (15). The sexual ideology of the female body, though, provides an apt displacement for the fear of masculine lack of control. Woman’s inability to hold her water and her words is emblematic of her incontinence. And, because the humoral (and the gendered) body is imagined as a sliding scale, rather than our modern (and equally imaginary) binary model, the female body can be imagined as being controlled by monstrous appetite, while the classical male body can be depicted (by the mostly male authors) as one controlled by reason, a body whose orifices consume and purge moderately. It is not the leakiness of the body that Paster, and early modern culture, pathologize: it is the body’s inability to control everything to which it is exposed that this culture most fears.

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Thus, the goods became fungible and their value ephemeral.137 The belief that commodities and

objects of exchange are endowed with “natural,” inherent value gives way to a market where

value fluctuates. The new marketplace, like the whore, contaminates all those with whom she

congresses. The whore is a threat to the male body. The chaotic market is a threat to the

patriarchal body. In this play, Middleton conceives of the market as a contaminant, which can

infect the patriarchal body and through which male consumers risk debt, jail, and ruin.

As I mentioned in the introduction, authors of early modern treatises, playwrights, and

anti-female pamphleteers depict the female body as always open to corruption and to penetration.

This openness also gives rise to anxieties about what might leak out in the form of contagions or

contaminants. The catalyst to contagion is lust as exemplified by Thomas Jordan’s 1637 poem,

“What a Whore Is,” where he writes that the whore will “give you Logick for Adultery” and

“prove lust legitimate” (8-9). In this poem, the whore convinces the innocent man to act on his

illicit desire; the whore’s logic perverts his masculine reason, making him desire what is

dangerous, base, and unnatural. Even the “virgo intacta” female remains vulnerable to forcible

penetration, or the imputation of whoredom, due to the openness of her body, a body that

Stallybrass sees early modern culture characterizing as “naturally ‘grotesque’” (126). The whore

tempts otherwise reasonable men to sin. Like the prostitutes, the market blinds men and leads

them into financial peril. In John Webster’s The White Devil, performed at the Red Bull Theater

in 1612, Monticelso also provides an in-depth description of the whore:

Shall I expound whore to you? Sure I shall;

I’ll give you their perfect character. They are, first,

Sweetmeats which rot the eater; in man’s nostril,

Poisoned perfumes. They are coz’ning alchemy,

Shipwrecks in calmest weather. What are whores?

Cold Russian winters, that appear so barren

137 See Joan Thirsk and Martha Howell for discussions of how this shift happened. Joan Thirsk notes that the quantity of goods on the market in the late sixteenth century “promoted the growth of a consumer society” (107). She also claims that the development of a consumer society affected not only the nobility and the growing merchant class, but also trickled down to laborers and servants, allowing them to make a little extra money through the production of commodities, which allowed them to participate in the consumer culture. The result was that these cottage industries increased the number of available commodities and made them accessible to an ever-widening class of consumer, which in turn increased the rate at which the commodities and money circulated (8), moving England closer to the industrialized and capitalist economy it would later become. Howell speculates that this shift was “the most fundamental development that motored all sociocultural change in the period, the growth of the market and its tendency to render all wealth movable, and, thus, abstract” (19).

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As if that nature had forgot the spring.

They are the true material fire of hell,

Worse than those tributes i’the Low Countries paid,

Exactions upon meat, drink, garments, sleep—

Ay, even on man’s perdition, his sin.

They are those brittle evidences of law

Which forfeit all a wretched man’s estate

For leaving out one syllable. What are whores?

They are those flattering bells have all one tune

At weddings and at funerals. Your rich whores

Are only treasuries by extortion filled,

And emptied by cursed riot. They are worse,

Worse than dead bodies which are begged at gallows

And wrought upon by surgeons to teach man

Wherein he is imperfect. What’s a whore?

She’s like the guilty counterfeited coin

Which, whoso’er first stamps it, brings in trouble

All that receives it.

Monticelso’s speech includes all of the commonplace analogies about whores. She is conceived

of as entering the body through the senses, as food or poisoned perfume. She is unnaturally

barren and bleeds men of their money and even their souls. The insides of the rich whores are

more foul than those dead criminals upon whom anatomists practice their black magic autopsies.

Monticelso’s final economic analogy, of the whore as a counterfeit coin, is intriguing in that the

man who first seduces the woman carries some responsibility. He who initially seduces the

whore, thereby turning her into a whore, makes possible the poisonous encounters she will have

with future men. The whore then is the false coin, whose inflated value, her false semblance,

brings trouble to all who use her. Middleton switches the terms of this common analogy. Instead

of the whore being like a false coin, a false coin is like a whore. As we will see, the market itself

has whorish tendencies.

Middleton’s analogy between the prostitute and the market makes use of the early

modern gendering of economic language. As I discussed in chapter three, Renaissance economic

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language was frequently gendered female. For example in Jonson’s The Staple of News, entered

into the Stationer’s Register in 1626, Pecunia, the infanta of the mines, and her attendants are

associated with legal and economic terminology. Pennyboy Junior refers to Pecunia as “Mistress

Pecunia Do-all,” while Picklock describes her attendants. She has a secretary, “one Broker, / And

then two Gentlewomen, Mistress Statute, / And Mistress Band, with Wax the Chambermaid, /

And Mother Mortgage the old Nurse, two Grooms, / Pawn and his Fellow” (1.6.50-4). In

addition, many of her suitors are bankrupt gentlemen, hoping for her bounty. Pecunia, moneyed

as her name implies, is a way out of bankruptcy. In Your Five Gallants, the gendering of

“usury,” “commodity,” and “counterfeit coins” links the sexual incontinence of whores to the

chaotic Jacobean market.138 As in Measure for Measure, the association of usury with

prostitution assists the play’s critique. The prostitute, like the usurer, produces unnaturally. For

the usurer money unnaturally begets money while the prostitute unnaturally begets bastards. The

term “usury” had broadened to include not only the charging of interest, but any money-making

practice that exchanged no perceptible commodity. In seventeenth-century London, this includes

the practices of pawn-brokering, venturing, money-lending, and many others. Thus the

marketplace was itself unnatural, reproducing itself through unseen modes of production and

without the immediate, material referents provided by the medieval movable-based and land-

based economy.

The use of the word “commodity” to describe the whore seems like a natural descriptor to

our late capitalist eyes. Capitalist women are accustomed to being viewed as objects. But in the

early modern elision of whore and commodity, the whore is not considered a commodity, an

object, to be exchanged between men. Prostitution was stereotypically a female institution.139

The prostitute poses a potential threat to “masculine control of commodity exchanged, to a

desired hegemonic male sexuality” (Newman 506). She is the active desiring agent who acts

138 The practice of usury and counterfeiting has also been linked to sodomy through the same metaphoric logic. Both sodomy and whoredom are symbolic of social disorder. See, for example, Fisher and Greene. 139 As I mentioned in chapter three, the BCB do not actually back up the stereotype. Nevertheless, early modern culture thought of brothels as being run by women and usually assume that older women corrupted the young girls. See for example, Pericles, where the bawd is female and the pander, her husband, is male. The bawd is clearly the head of household (scene 16). As I discuss later, both Dekker and Middleton portray whoredom in manners that contradict the stereotype, Dekker through his admittance that economic factors might drive women to prostitution and Middleton through his depictions of men who trick and seduce women into bed. These women then allow these men to keep them as courtesans or pass them on to other men either because they truly love them or because their reputations as whores leave them nowhere else to go.

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upon the passive male. In the Jordan poem quoted earlier, Jordan characterizes the whore as

“over-charged.” The whore’s “over-charged body” signifies both the notion of the humoral

female body as lustful, over-heated, and an over-priced commodity. In Dekker’s pamphlet The

Belman of London (1608), he claims, “the companion of a Theefe is commonly a whore [. . .] for

what the theefe gets the str[u]mpet spends [ . . .] So when a Harlot comes to the sacking of a

mans wealth and reputation [. . .] she leaves no stratagem unpracticed to bring him to confusion”

(sig v2r). “The whore,” Dekker writes, is “the commoditie.” Thus, he emphasizes both the

whore’s commodification as an exchange object and her threat to male wealth and reputation

through her spending.140 In Your Five Gallants, the prostitute is the market, and she is unclean.

Dirty Money

Because Your Five Gallants is not very well known, a brief synopsis is in order. The plot

revolves around the courtship of Katherine, heiress to a recently deceased knight. Katherine has

six suitors for her hand: Fitzgrave, identified as a “gentleman,” and five gallants, identified by

type: the bawd-gallant, the broker-gallant, the whore-gallant, the pocket-gallant and the cheating-

gallant. Katherine announces that she requires one month in which to mourn the recent death of

her father after which time she will determine which suitor’s hand to accept. Fitzgrave suspects

the nature of the gallants and disguises himself so that he may “see whether their lives from

touch of blame sit free.” While disguised, he discovers their base births and natures and finally

exposes them in a masque in front of Katherine.

The visual action of the play, though, centers on an exchange of gifts between Fitzgrave

and Katherine. Before Katherine announces her plan she meets with Fitzgrave privately, telling

him that she does not want him to be discouraged, but that she feels unworthy of him in that he is

a “gentleman” whose “estate and virtues may command him to a far worthier breast than her

own” (1.2.14-16). Fitzgrave refers to her as an unequalled virgin and offers her a chain of pearls

in order to convince her of his love for her. Katherine bestows a jewel upon Fitzgrave. Both of

these objects are movable commodities. Movables are, of course, movable property, such as

animals, linens, clothing, jewels, books, furniture, and fine metal objects. According to Martha

Howell, in the medieval period, the value of movables depended upon the material value of the

object and the rank of the family possessing the object (19). Thus, part of the object’s value lay

140 For representative commentary on commodities and gender, see Newman, Korda, esp. Bruster, pp. 65.

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in its use as a “social” signifier. Such objects could be used to pass a family’s assets and signs of

rank from one generation to another, or they could be exchanged as social currency, smoothing

and solidifying alliances between one family and another.

The initial exchange between Fitzgrave and Katherine is reminiscent of this medieval

mode of assigning value. In fact, their evaluation of each other evokes the medieval notion of

determining a person’s value. Katherine adheres to the belief that rank, blood, and estate confer

value and virtue upon an individual, while Fitzgrave’s description of Katherine focuses on her

rank as a knight’s heir and her status as a chaste woman. Katherine’s gift to Fitzgrave also

emphasizes her value as a virgin. Katherine’s gift of a jewel stresses the characteristic, as the

early modern slang usage of “jewel” refers to the “treasure” of a woman’s virginity.141

Middleton implicitly compares Katherine’s value as a virgin to the four prostitutes in the

play. The prostitutes here function not as a condemnation of women’s innate whoredom, but

instead are analogous for the London marketplace. Middleton uses the sexual ideology of

whoredom as a point of comparison to the market. The prostitute’s association with filth exposes

the London marketplace as morally depraved. In the play, Middleton explicitly compares

whores, who have lessened their value through harlotry, to counterfeit money. Thus, in Your

Five Gallants, Frip prepares to lend “all the worst money I can find about me” (2.4.118) to the

dicing gallants:

Here’s a washed angel; it shall

away. Here’s Mistress Rose-noble

Has lost her maidenhead—cracked in the ring.

She’s good enough for gamesters and to pass

From man to man, for gold presents at dice

Your harlot: in one hour won and lost thrice;

Every man has a fling at her. (2.4.124-9)

141 As I mentioned earlier, virginity also helped set the price of the prostitute. In Pericles, the bawd tells Boult to buy a new prostitute from the pirates, as their current three are “rotten” (infected with syphilis). She gives Boult advice on what to look for: “take you the marks of her, the colour of her hair, complexion, height, her age, with warrant of her virginity, and cry ‘He that will give most shall have her first.’ Such a maidenhead were no cheap thing if men were as they have been” (scene 16.50-3).

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This passage genders counterfeit money,142 personifying it as a commodity to be passed among

men. The coins, like women, are commodities that lose their value, become common, as they

circulate. The washed angel, a coin that has been washed in acid for the purpose of leeching

away the gold, and the cracked rose-noble, a coin that has had its edges clipped off, are

deflowered. 143 Earlier in the play the cheating-gallant asks the broker-gallant if a ring he has

given him is “safe and secret.” The broker-gallant replies, “as a virgin’s [ring]” (2.1.266-7). To

be “cracked in the ring” is to have been penetrated. Thus, like the common whore, the coins’

values are lessened through their illicit use. Even gold itself is a harlot, commonly handed from

man to man, with every man having “a fling at her.” And like the harlot, money tempts men.

This moment in the play explicitly compares currency to whores, but the play also

implicitly compares the market to whores, specifically to prostitutes. To see how this works, we

need to return to Katherine’s and Fitzgrave’s exchange of movables at the beginning of the play.

For though the initial exchange gestures to the archaic, medieval economic model, Middleton

immediately undercuts this by separating the commodities from their holders and placing them in

circulation. The objects, like the counterfeit coins, pass through a dizzying number of hands.

Sometimes the play’s text comments upon a moment when the object moves from one person to

the next, but at other times the movement is impossible to follow textually. I will briefly follow

the movement of the pearls to illustrate this confusion: the pocket gallant’s boy filches the pearls

from Fitzgrave. The boy gives them to his master, who bequeaths them to the First Courtesan,

who presents them to the whore gallant. The disguised pocket-gallant attacks the whore gallant

and steals the chain, then pawns it to the broker-gallant. The pocket-gallant buys it back then

drops it. The cheating-gallant picks it up. The whore-gallant sees him with it and tries to have

him arrested, but the pocket-gallant happens by, claims it and pawns it again. The owner of the

pawnshop, the broker-gallant, then tries to give it back to Katherine. The jewel (and also a

pawned cloak) circulates in a similarly confusing manner.144 In Shakespeare’s Troilus and

142 For a discussion of medieval and early modern coinage, see Medieval Money Matters (72-86), The Great Coin Debasement (34-113), and especially Fischer’s Econolingua. 143 Valerie Forman expertly relates the early modern definitions of counterfeit coins and the circulation of commodities to the ambiguous characterization of Moll in The Roaring Girl. 144 See Jones and Sallybrass for a brief discussion of this circulation in relation to the circulation of clothing. Jones and Stallybrass also point out the way in which the commodity changes meaning as it changes hands (193-4), but they are mainly interested in the way in which the jewelry and the clothing transform from being “gifts and material memories to commodities that can be cashed in” (194) rather than examining the moral value placed on such exchanges.

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Cressida, written in 1601 or 1602, the value of Troilus’s sleeve, which he has given as a love

token to Cressida, lessens once it becomes a commodity to be exchanged again. Jonathan Gil

Harris points out that the sleeve’s “value shifts—as does Cressida’s own—when she relinquishes

it to Diomedes: in the space of less than a hundred lines it degenerates from a ‘pretty pledge’

(5.2.77), nominally enclaved as a sacred object, to a ‘greasy relic’ (l. 159) that has entered the

sphere of commodity exchange” (486). Where Troilus and Cressida traces one object, Your Five

Gallants follows the exchange of several objects through several different hands. The result is

both a lessening and an abstraction of the gifts’/commodities’ initial values.

The five gallants commodify and exchange these items in attempts to cheat each other

and to obscure their own humble beginnings as they court Katherine. If one of them were to win

Katherine’s hand, he would have both the wealth and status he desires.145 In The City Staged,

Leinwand notes that the gallants of the city comedies represent the new consumerist culture

where one’s rank and lineage no longer determine one’s economic or social “worth” (81-136).

Different playwrights display varying degrees of anxiety regarding these men’s ability to

circumvent the medieval land-based economy and their own lowly births. These gallants

frequently represent a turn from the medieval configuration of lust toward what Elizabeth

Hanson calls the traits of “youth, vigor and opportunism” (233), which are increasingly

necessary to succeed in this proto-capitalist market. Hanson underscores these gallants’ attempts

to find new ways to succeed, strategies that are sometimes licit, like marrying above one’s

station, and frequently illicit, like forcing an unwilling heiress into marriage through abduction

or by duping unknowing gulls. In this play, the gallants’ opportunism is not lauded. These

gallants did not begin in the middle of the ladder, but at the bottom. Middleton ensures that the

audience knows from where and in what manner the gallants have already risen: Frip’s

“beginning was so poor” he “would fain forget it” (1.1.290-1). Primero admits that he “had been

a beggar many a lousy year” (1.1.154) before making money cheating at cards, the winnings of

which he presumably used as start-up capital for his brothel. The play compares Fitzgrave’s

noble virtue and blood to the base practices, beginnings, and natures of those who compete for

Katherine’s hand: your gallants.

145 Pursenet, as opposed to the other four gallants, does not make a serious attempt to court Katherine because “hope is no purchase, nor care I if I miss her. Why I rank in this design with gallants there’s full cause; policy invites me to it. ‘Tis not for love or her sake alone; It keeps my state suspectless and unknown” (1.2.77-80).

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The opening scene of Your Five Gallants is uncharacteristic of a city comedy; Middleton

bypasses the generic thwarted marriage and the gentleman roarers instigating rows on London’s

dirty streets. Instead, he focuses on the legal but dishonest trade of pawn-broking. The first scene

reveals Frip, the broker-gallant, summing up his books. He reads from his account ledger: “Lent

the fifth day of September to Mistress Onset, upon her gown, taffeta petticoat with three broad

silver laces: three pound fifteen shillings” (1.1.6-8). His next four entries indiscriminately list

members of the burgeoning middle class and the nobility: Frip has lent money to Justice

Cropshin, Lady Newcut, Sir Oliver Needy, and even the devil himself, “Master Andrew Lucifer,

upon his flame coloured doublet and blue taffeta hose” (1.1.9-20). Middleton jokes that even the

devil is in need of a little ready cash once in awhile, but the line also associates the pawnbroker

with the devil, marking his trade as illicit. This list of customers also demonstrates, as Ann

Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass have aptly observed, that representatives from every social

class pawned their goods, and clothing, in particular, provided consumers with a movable

commodity that could be pawned for easy cash (27). Pawn-broking is also problematic because it

encourages the mixing of various ranks, and the broker makes his money selling class signifiers

to anyone who can pay.

Most significantly, though, in this opening scene, the audience voyeuristically observes

the manner in which the broker-gallant ascribes value to the goods. When a customer attempts

to borrow twelve pounds for “a fair satin gown; new taffeta petticoat” purchased for less than

twenty pounds, Frip responds:

Why, so: our pawn is ever thrice the value of our money, unless in plate and

jewels. How should the months be restored and the use, else? We must cast it for

the twelve month—so many pounds, so many months, so many eighteen pence;

then the use of these eighteen pences; then the want of the return of those pounds.

All these must be laid together, which well considered, the valuation of the pawn

had need to sound treble. Can six pound pleasure the gentlewoman?

(1.1.91-99)

After negotiation, Frip and his customer agree on the price of twenty nobles. Like most early

modern commercial businesses dealing in commodities, pawnbrokers like Frip bartered with

their clients, normally lending between twenty and fifty percent of the clothing’s actual value

(Jones 29). The bartering shows the value to be unstable and unnatural. Like the prostitute, the

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broker negotiates, and he bases his price on his perception of the customer’s rank and

desperation as well as the material value of the clothing. In the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries, the practice of pawn-broking grew at an extraordinary rate. This growth was due in

part to the burgeoning market of luxury items and a skyrocketing rate of inflation. Pawning

clothes provided an easy way to raise the money needed by the nobility and the merchant class in

order to buy the commodities necessary for the ostentatious display of their wealth.

Frip, though, has found an additional way to make money on the deal: he lends the gown

to a newly minted prostitute for twelve pence a day, paid by Primero, the bawd-gallant. As I

have already mentioned, this practice of lending out pawned clothes occurred frequently and was

more than likely practiced by theater-owner and Blackfriars’ competitor, Philip Henslowe. As

clothing was the theater-owners’ most exorbitant expense, a share in a pawn-broking business

would have made financial sense. However, as Natasha Korda points out, Henslowe may have

saved money not only by dressing his players in the clothes that came in for pawn; he may have

also profited by lending out money to his players and playwrights for clothing and luxury items

that they pawned to him (186). Thus, the exchange within the theater mimics the circular nature

of the consumer culture at large. The players needed the clothing of the next new style to impress

their fellows, or they needed fast cash to pay off a debt incurred purchasing some other

commodity; they pawned their clothing in order to raise the funds. As I mentioned earlier,

Henslowe also owned a brothel, so, like Frip, he may very well have used his pawn-broking

business to clothe his prostitutes.146 Thus Middleton’s depiction of pawn-broking practices may

provide us with a fairly accurate picture of the trade, and it is almost certainly an overt caricature

of Henslowe.

Apart from providing the players with the opportunity to ridicule the competition, the

scene also demonstrates the way in which the movable commodity of clothing could be used by

those of the lower order to disguise their “natural” rank or separated from the rank it supposedly

signified. In Jonson’s The New Inn, performed in 1629, Stuff, the tailor, dresses his wife in the

clothes he makes for his noble customers. He then takes her into public where she plays the lady,

and he plays her servant. The tailor and his wife are found out because the customer, for whom

the dress was made, Lady Frampul, sees Pinnacia and recognizes her gown. Presumably though,

146 See Lenz for Henslowe’s link to prostitution (838). Jones and Stallybrass also discuss the link between theater and pawn-brokers (187-193) and have suggested that Frip could be read, though he does not need to be, as “an allegory of Philip Henslowe” (194).

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the two have successfully duped others into believing she’s of a higher rank, even though, as

Lord Latimer notes, “she answers like a fish-wife” (4.3.49). No one is sure of her lower rank

until her husband claims her as his wife. Lady Frumpel’s chambermaid, Prudence, surprised at

exactly how lowly the woman wearing the gown is, exclaims, “We all look’d for a lady, / A

dutchess, or a countess at the least” (4.3.83-4). Pinnacia admits the game when her husband

“outs” her: “Nay, it shall out, since you have call’d me wife, / And openly dis-ladied me: though

I am discountess’d / I am not yet dis-countenanced” (5.3.93-5). The nobles are so horrified by

the thought that those of the lower rank need only dress like them to be indistinguishable from

them that they order the tailor blanketed, the wife stripped to her flannels and carted, and refer to

the clothes as “polluted robes.”

In Your Five Gallants, Middleton carefully mentions the fabric that comprises each

article of clothing as well as the attendant buttons and accessories. He notes these items for two

reasons: first, these details help determine their value (buttons, ribbons, etc., could be separated

from the clothing and sold separately). Second, and most importantly, the fabrics Frip dons at the

end of the scene and would have been violations of the lapsed sumptuary law. We know Frip to

be a morally compromised social climber because he wears Sir Oliver Needy’s taffeta cloak and

beaver hat in order to woo the knight’s daughter, Mistress Katherine. Middleton emphasizes his

social mobility, revealing Frip’s humble beginnings in soliloquy:

My beginning was so poor, I would fain forget it, and I take the only course, for I

scorn to think on’t: slave to a trencher, observer of a salt-cellar, privy to nothing

but a close-stool or such unsavoury secret. But as I strive to forget the days of my

serving, so I shall once remember the first step of my raising. For having hardly

raked five marks together, I rejoiced so in that small stock, which most

providently I ventured by water—to Blackwall, among fishwives; and in small

time, what by weekly return and gainful restitution, it ris to a great body, beside a

dish of fish for a present that stately preserved me a seven-night.

Nor ceased it there but drew on greater profit,

For I was held religious by those

That do profess like abstinence,

And was full often secretly supplied by charitable Catholics,

Who censured me sincerely abstinate,

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When merely I for hunger, not for zeal,

Ate up the fish—and put their alms to use. (1.1.290-309)

In this passage, Frip remembers his occupation as a serving-man with revulsion, but glories in

his unlikely rise, which he traces to his usurious practice of lending the alms the Catholics gave

him for abstaining from meat. This passage illuminates the way in which external signifiers fail

to connote either economic or moral value. This fact is further emphasized as the action of the

play traces the circulation of this cloak, as well as the movement of the pearls and the jewel. As

the objects move through some decidedly dirty hands, the “social” exchange value of the objects

is muddied.

The failure of circulating objects to denote a “true” value is most clearly emphasized later

in the play. In Act Two, Scene One, the gallants, the prostitutes, and the pilfered jewels are all on

the stage at the same time. The scene occurs in a brothel where, as the prostitutes move from

man to man, the goods pass through the hands of gallants and prostitutes alike. The circulation

of objects in this scene is among the most confusing because more than one object is circulating

and sometimes the passing of the object is not commented on by the characters; thus, it could be

visually represented or the object might mysteriously and suddenly appear in the hands of a

different character.147 Fitzgrave’s jewel, which Pursenet’s boy has stolen from him (an action the

audience sees), shows up in the Second Courtesan’s possession, and she then bestows it upon

Tailby. The ring, taken from the Second Courtesan by Goldstone and pawned to Frip,

miraculously appears in the Novice prostitute’s possession. These last two actions, unseen—or at

the very least, uncommented upon—emphasize the way in which value is abstracted from the

items in this early modern marketplace. Though some items seem to hold sentimental value—

exchanged between lovers—this scene reveals the way in which the gallants and the prostitutes

merely dissemble the potential “social” value of the objects. As Goldstone sneers in an aside to

the audience, “A cheat or two among these mistresses / Would not be ill-bestowed. I affect none

/ But for my prey, such are their affections. / I know it; how could drabs and cheaters live else? /

Then since the world rolls on dissimulation, / I’ll be the first dissembler” (2.1.137-42). The

prostitutes and their sexual circulation, along with the circulation of the commodities on the

stage, represent the illicit circulation of commodities in this whorish early modern marketplace.

147 It is possible that these two items are exchanged as stage business, with no corresponding dialogue. This is, of course, up to the director. Either way though, the emphasis is on the quick and confusing circulation of goods.

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Within the paradigm of early modern sexual ideology, prostitutes are a natural metaphor

for the marketplace. The prostitute, after all, is the prodigious example of whoredom. She

simultaneously gestures to the medieval allegories of lust and signifies the unnatural production

of the money-based market. Like the theater, the prostitute embodies the grotesque body of

carnival. And, also like the institution of theater,148 the prostitute participated in the London

urban economy through unnatural commodification: the patrons of the theater pay money for an

ephemeral commodity, while the prostitutes make their money selling themselves and

unnaturally produce bastards.149 Like the boy actors who counterfeited the prostitutes on the

stage, the actual prostitutes earned money by counterfeiting desire.150 The economic conditions

of Jacobean prostitution further exemplify the chaotic money-based economy because, unlike the

theater, the fee system differed from prostitute to prostitute and even from client to client.151

The product they sold—themselves—had no “natural” or stable value.

Part of the prostitute’s unstable value is demonstrated through an elision between them

and women of rank. Like Jonson, Middleton calls attention to the prostitutes’ and gallants’

ability to represent themselves as members of the gentry. The bawd-gallant tells the audience

that “these are gentlewomen of a sort and worship knights’ heirs great in portions and boarded

for their music [. . .] they are natural at pricksong” (2.1.38-45). The prostitutes are dressed in the

pawn-broker’s merchandise and thus are physically indistinguishable from Katherine (who is not

present in the scene, though Fitzgrave, in disguise, is). In Jonson’s The New Inn women of low

rank dress in the clothing of those above them, while women of high rank also disguise

themselves as women of low rank. Not all those dressed above their stations are humiliated as

the tailor’s wife has been. As part of a prank, Lady Frampul’s chambermaid, Prudence, is

dressed in her mistress’s clothing throughout the play. At the play’s end, she is given a portion of

4000 pounds so that she will be able to marry above her rank, but Lord Latimer steps forward,

148 See Bristol for a comparison between carnival and theater. 149 See Forman’s discussion of commodity and how it relates to whoredom (1533). 150 See Lenz for further links between prostitution and the theater. 151 Comprehensive study of material and economic conditions of Elizabethan prostitution in London do not exist, though both Shugg and Griffiths have provided useful discussions of the Bridewell Court Book records in the 1570s. No comprehensive study has been completed for the early 1600s, though Gustav Ungerer’s 2003 essay does follow one prostitute through the records of this period. His study is particularly useful as a view into possible economic motivations.

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saying, “Spare all your promised portions; she’s a dowry / So all-sufficient in her virtue and

manners, / That fortune cannot add her” (5.1). Latimer had previously been one of Lady

Frampul’s suitors and had never before shown interest in Prudence. Presumably her disguise

allowed Latimer to recognize her “true” value. In this play then, one’s “natural” value is itself

destabilized. Prudence, though lower in rank than the company her mistress keeps, is rewarded

because of her inner nobility. In Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, as I discussed in the previous

chapter, the middling ranks’ social aspirations reveal them to be similar to the prostitute because

of their greedy desire for class-climbing.

In Your Five Gallants, the difference between Katherine and the prostitutes is not

external; only the women’s modes of circulation, Katherine’s private secretness and the

prostitute’s commonness, serve to differentiate them. Middleton parodies Fitzgrave’s and

Katherine’s exchange, showing the gallants and prostitutes feigning the language of love as they

exchange various objects. The First Courtesan receives the chain of pearls from Pursenet, and

later bequeaths it to Tailby. Goldstone takes a ring from the Second Courtesan, which he pawns

to Frip for cash. Tailby exchanges money with Primero.

Earlier in the play, Middleton has linked the prostitutes’ sexual circulation to economic

circulation. In the following speech, the prostitutes morph into food to be consumed, but then

consume the purses of those who feast upon them. In a version of vagina dentata, the act of

coitus with the prostitute serves to “consume” men’s inheritance. The bawd-gallant explains,

Ah, the goodly virginities

that have been cut up in my house, and the goodly

patrimonies that have lain like sops in the gravy. And

when those sops were eaten, yet the meat was kept

whole for another, and another, and another. For as

in one pie twenty may dip their sippets, so upon one

woman forty may consume their patrimonies. (1.1.125-131)

The analogy of the “whore” and the “dish” was commonplace. For example, in Middleton’s The

Revenger’s Tragedy, Spurio, the bastard, convinces himself to commit incest with his step-

mother, by claiming that he was conceived in adultery, adultery was in his nature: “I was begot /

After some gluttonous dinner. Some stirring dish / Was my first father, whose deep healths went

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round / And ladies’ cheeks were painted red with wine, / Their tongues, as short and nimble as

their heels” (1.3.178-82). Later in the same play, Vindice speaks to his dead lover’s skull:

It were fine, methinks,

To have thee seen at revels, forgetful feasts,

And unclean brothels. Sure, ‘twould fright the sinner

And make him a good coward, put a reveler

Out of his antic amble,

And cloy an epicure with empty dishes (3.5.90-5)

In Your Five Gallants, the prostitute is the meat eaten by many, the common “pie” into which

men “dip their sippets,” risking infection from the open, unclean prostitute and all those who

have “eaten” before them. “Consume” works both to describe the frivolous spending of the

men’s patrimonies—gesturing to the spending of the johns’ inheritances—but also to the

“spending” of sperm. It also reminds the audience that the prostitute might literally “consume”

them, by contaminating the clients with the syphilis they risk whenever they “dip their sippets.”

The passage also highlights the unwholesomeness of the commodity—the prostitute—who can

look as though she is whole, a virgin free from disease, but who, like the pie, has been cut again

and again.152

The diseases the men risk, like the counterfeit coins, also have gendered connotations.

Early modern culture conceives of sexually transmitted diseases in terms of the gender of the

person who has it. A woman with syphilis is a contaminating female, while the male has been

contaminated by the female. On a woman’s body, syphilitic symptoms reveal her sinful nature,

looking back to the medieval characterization of “lust” as specifically associated with women

and to the medieval conception of syphilis as God’s curse on the sinful. On the man, however,

the outward signs of syphilis display his contamination. His body has been polluted in both a

literal and figurative sense. The whore’s disease penetrates the male body. In these early modern

texts, the men catch syphilis from the whores with whom they cavort; women are not usually

characterized as catching it from the men.153 A whore gives “a man sweating sickness with

152 “Cut” was one of the many slang terms for pudenda, as punned upon by Middleton in the character of Mistress Newcut, who is not a prostitute, but who has sex with the men at the brothel (a service for which she pays Primero) while her husband is at sea. 153 For further commentary on medieval and early modern conceptions of syphilis as related to morality, class, and gender, see Boehrer (197-214) and Traub (71-87).

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looking on her” (Bartholomew Fair 2.5.108-9), but the whore herself bears the “curse of

strumpets,” which causes sickness to seize her “over-charged body” (Jordan 15-6). In The Dutch

Courtesan, Freevill protests that his whore, Franceschina, is “none of your ramping cannibals /

that devour man’s flesh, nor any of your Curtian gulfs / that will never be satisfied until the best

thing a man has be thrown into them” (1.2.114-7). Whores, then, are capable of devouring men,

and their vaginas become synecdochic chasms capable of swallowing a man’s “best thing.” The

market, like the prostitute, swallows men’s patrimonies and infects them with the “diseases” of

the market: greed, conspicuous consumerism and usurious practices.

The prostitutes further represent the market through their characterization as pleasure-

seekers. For early modern women, pleasure and reproduction were tightly imbricated. Men

were encouraged to give sexual pleasure to their wives because of the belief that chafing

provided the friction necessary to “heat” the body to the point of orgasm. Sexual heat provided

the necessary “spark” to create life in the womb (Laqueur 45-6). Thus, while early modern

sexual ideology conceived of all women as particularly prone to pleasure-seeking, providing yet

another reason for viewing women as libidinous, early modern culture painted the prostitute as

the monstrous version of the pleasure-seeking whore because she sought sex without pregnancy.

As I have already mentioned, playwrights of this period do not typically characterize prostitutes

as women driven to their line of work through economic hardship; instead prostitutes represent

the libidinous, inchoate chaos of desire.154 Anal sex is frequently represented as the prostitute’s

154 Two exceptions are Middleton and Thomas Dekker. Though there are not any prostitutes in Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday, Dekker does show Jane’s vulnerability to sexual victimization due to her economic condition, which is caused by her husband’s conscription. In Dekker's second part of The Patient Man and The Honest Whore, the whore’s husband attempts to pressure her into going back into prostitution because of their economic hardship. Middleton also seems sympathetic to some of his courtesans, many of whom are shown to have been seduced by lascivious men, rather than their own insatiable appetites. In A Trick to Catch the Old One (Witgood blames his courtesan for consuming his purse. Jane, the courtesan, answers, “I have been true unto your pleasure, and all your / lands, trice racked, was never worth the jewel which / I prodigally gave you: my virginity. / Lands mortgaged may return and more esteemed, / But honesty, once pawned, is ne’er redeemed.” Witgood then admits, “I do thee wrong / To make thee sin, then to chide thee for’t” (1.1.36-42). The most overt recognition of men's role in seduction and women's vulnerability due to economic hardship is given voice by Dekker and Middleton's cross-dressing heroine Moll Cut-purse in The Roaring Girl (1611). As Moll physically threatens Laxton for his attempt to seduce her, she tells him, “In thee I defy all men, their worst hates / And their best flatteries, all their golden witchcrafts / With which they entangle the poor spirits of fools-- / Distressed needlewomen and trade-fallen wives, / Fish that must needs bite or themselves be bitten-- / Such hungry things as these may soon be took / With a worm fastened on a golden hook” (Scene 5.92-98). She ends by announcing, “I scorn to prostitute myself to a man, / I that can prostitute a man to me!” (5.111-12). Moll's characterization of women differs from Laxton's earlier judgment that “money is that aquafortis that eats into many a maidenhead: where the walls are flesh and blood, I'll ever piece through with a golden auger” (editor's emphasis 3.201-5). Laxton's prose characterization of fallen women follows the conventional stereotype about whores: they are susceptible to monetary inducement because they are greedy and insatiable.

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attempt to pleasure herself without risking pregnancy. Frequently allusions to anal sex emphasize

the prostitute’s monstrous desire for pleasure and depict her depravity.155 Primero describes his

brothel as having “a curious garden,” “three back doors, and a coach gate” (1.1.121-3). Gardens

were, of course, places of sexual assignation, while the coach refers to a mode of transportation

known for moving both those of higher rank and prostitutes.156 “Back door” references almost

always refer to anal sex, and in this description Primero has three, one for each of his

experienced courtesans.157 Yet, though references to anal sex accentuate the prostitute’s sexual

depravity, they also display cultural anxiety over the prostitute’s escape from male

surveillance—an anxiety also felt about the marketplace, where value is no longer stable. As

Celia Daileader points out, references to anal sex are perhaps troubling due to the association of

anal sex with darkness, a darkness that can be “(mis)used” (323). In literary representation, anal

sex allows the prostitutes to avoid the masculine mark of pregnancy through a sexual sleight-of-

hole. In plays and pamphlets of the time period, prostitutes also potentially fool men into

believing they are virgins by substituting their common-use vagina with virgin-like anal tightness

(316), thereby tricking johns into paying more than their well-used bodies are “worth”—much as

the gulls of the London marketplace can be induced to pay more than a good or service is

worth.158

In Your Five Gallants, Middleton emphasizes the prostitute’s pursuit of pleasure.

Primero, the bawd-gallant, gives advice to his novice prostitute, explaining how she can make a

little on the side:

Nay, you shall live at ease enough. For nimming

away jewels and favours from gentlemen (which are

However, Moll's speech in iambic pentameter admits that the “poor fools” are “hungry” and “must” bite in order to survive. 155 See Smith, Goldberg, Bray, and Orgel for discussions of homoerotic and homosexual relationships during the English Renaissance. Orgel notes that sodomy, though deemed a criminal act, was rarely punished as such (38-9); instead, it is the heterosexual love that threatens the patriarchal system far more than the male/male sodomitical relationship (49). For an excellent corrective of the common reading by queer theorists of Renaissance references to anal sex, see Daileader. See page 307 for her discussion of this particular passage. 156 See chapter five for an in-depth discussion of Jonson’s treatment of coaches in Act 4, Scene 5 of Bartholomew Fair. 157 See Daileader pp. 307 for her discussion of this particular passage. 158 See for example Shortyard and Falselight in Middleton’s Michaelmas Term (1604-6).

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your chief vails), I hope that will come naturally enough

to you. I need not instruct you; you’ll have that wit, I

trust, to make the most of your pleasure. (1.1.232-6)

Here Primero counsels the prostitute to think about financial gain while pleasuring herself.

Shortly thereafter, Frip asks the novice if she is a maid. She responds, “Yes, in the last

quarter,”159 implying either that she has recently lost her virginity or has recently abstained from

sex. While the novice is new to prostitution, she is no maid. Frip then inquires if she is “willing

to pleasure gentlemen” (1.1.48). The Novice cunningly replies, “We are born to pleasure our

country” (1.1.49). The Oxford Middleton annotates this line as alluding to the proverb, “we are

not born for ourselves” but does not mention the obvious pun on “country.” “We,” perhaps

meaning all women, perhaps only prostitutes, are born to pleasure themselves.

The play ends, as I said before, with the public revelation of the gallants’ base natures.

The ending, like most Middletonian endings, is far from clear-cut. Fitzgrave brings about the

gallants’ exposure as frauds through a favorite Middleton device: the masque. In this masque,

though, it is the gallants’ ignorance of Latin that allows Fitzgrave to reveal their base births.

Fitzgrave assigns them each shield-bearers (the whores disguised as shield-bearing boys). On the

shields, Fitzgrave has inscribed Latin mottos, which reveal the gallants’ true natures. For

example, Pursenet’s shield displays his device, “a purse wide open and the mouth downward,”

and his motto, “Alienis ecce crumenis” (5.1.85-7). Unable to read Latin, the men foolishly preen

before Katherine, whose unusual ability to read the Latin, even though she is a woman, further

distinguishes her noble birth from their lowly ones.160

This scene seems to have been influenced by Robert Wilson’s The Three Lordes and

Three Ladies of London, written in 1588. In this interlude three lords, Policy, Pomp, and

Pleasure each have shields upon which their mottos are written in Latin. Like the gallants, they

attempt to court the allegorical London ladies. The ladies, Love, Conscience, and Lucre, are

fallen and all three Lords wish, for obvious reasons, to court Lucre, though in the end they are

paired off with the appropriate quality. Your Five Gallants may have been informed by the play

159 See note 244, in Act One, Scene One. 160 See David Cressy’s “Levels of Illiteracy in England, 1530-1730” in Society and Culture in Early Modern England. Cressy notes that only 5% of women were literate. This, of course, doesn’t calculate how many were, as Elizabeth I was, able to read Latin.

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thematically as well. In Wilson’s interlude, as in Middleton’s play, counterfeit coins circulate.

Teresa Lanpher Nugent notes that in this interlude these “counterfeit coins undermine the value

of authentic currency” (206). In Your Five Gallants, the prostitutes through their elision with

ranked women threaten to lessen their value; the gallants attempt to counterfeit themselves as

men of rank, thus lessening Fitzgrave’s value. Neither Fitzgrave, Katherine, nor the commodities

hold “natural” value. In Wilson’s text, the three lords and ladies are allegories for London.

London becomes stronger when these six people couple. In Your Five Gallants, Middleton seems

to have taken Wilson’s ladies and made them prostitutes. ( In Wilson’s text, they were already

whores.) Middleton’s title also points to some influence by this text. The five gallants are “your”

five gallants. They belong to the audience and by extension, London. The prostitutes, like

Wilson’s ladies, are allegorical; they are the London marketplace.

The play ends by forcing the gallants out of the marriage market, thereby closing off one

avenue of social advancement. The five gallants are returned to their rightful places when

Fitzgrave arranges for four of them to marry Primero’s prostitutes. Primero himself is, it seems,

irredeemable as Fitzgrave proclaims him an “infectious bawd” and sends him off to Bridewell

for a public whipping. Fitzgrave gives the other four gallants the choice of marrying the punks

or having their actions made public and being subjected to the same punishment as Primero.161

Katherine and Fitzgrave are betrothed, and the last lines of the play reinscribe their worth to each

other, with Fitzgrave referring to Katherine as “virgin” (5.2.92) and Katherine bestowing herself

on the “thrice-worthy Fitzgrave” (5.2.97). This ending, though, does not quite restore the play’s

earlier nostalgic portrayal of feudal economies. Fitzgrave in his pursuit of the gallants’ true

identities, has, like the commodities, ventured into some very unseemly territory. Katherine is

shocked by the gallants’ base births and exclaims, “How easily may our suspectless sex / With

fair-appearing shadows be deluded!” (5.2.51-2). It takes Fitzgrave’s masque to expose the

gallants’ falseness to her, and the symbolic fingering of her jewel by these base men who sought

161 This ending does much to argue for reading Middleton as sympathetic to the plight of prostitutes. Though the men are none too happy about their upcoming nuptials, the women, who at first resist marriage to “these whom we loathe worse than the foul’st disease” (5.2.66), are later convinced by Mistress Newcut’s argument that marriage is but “covert-baron” and that they will still be able to “lie with whom” they “list” (5.2.85). The prostitutes from the play are not automatically subjected to carting and whipping; it is instead the “infectious” brothel-owner who is irredeemable. For an extremely convincing argument against labeling Middleton a misogynist, see Celia Daileader’s forthcoming article, “The Courtesan Revisited: Thomas Middleton, Pietro Aretino, and Sex-phobic Criticism.”

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her hand in marriage sullies her. Fitzgrave, who has kept the same company as Katherine’s

jewel, is also contaminated. Nothing and no one seems to be as valuable as they first seemed.

In Your Five Gallants, the prostitutes’ spend, hoard, and are themselves commodified.

The prostitutes’ actions are motivated by lust and the pursuit of pleasure, and they either gull or

contaminate all those who attempt to penetrate them. Thus, the figure of the prostitute represents

the nascent capitalist whore with whose body men must congress in order to survive in the

marketplace. This economic body is troubling in her ability to morph from virgin to whore—

from licit to illicit—in her very commonness. The entire market is a stygian gulf, a vagina

dentata. The market is the prostitute, and she allows all to have intercourse with her, even as they

risk catching her disease—or being maimed by her bite.

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CHAPTER 6

DESDEMONA UNPINNED: PROSTITUTES ON PARADE ON THE RESTORATION

STAGE

On December 8th, 1660, an English woman made history when she became the first-known

professional English actress to appear in a lead role on the British stage (Lanier 97).162 In this

chapter, I examine the difference the female body makes in roles that had previously been played

by boy actors. I argue that though some of the actresses have access to a certain kind of power

through the performance of their sexual reputations, their reputations as prostitutes foreclose the

analogous indictment of social institutions found in the late Elizabethan and Jacobean plays.

Where the boy’s body had allowed playwrights to use the sexual ideology of whoredom and the

character of the whore to denounce the numerous ways in which men and women prostitute

themselves and each other for social and monetary gain, the female body delimits the analogous

use of female sexual ideology. The actress’s body represents whoredom. Though the Restoration

theater is by no means naturalistic, it is a more realistic theater than the pre-Interregnum theaters

had been. The use of scenery, the institution of the proscenium arch and side wings, and the

introduction of the professional actress make the Restoration theater much more capable of

interpellation than the pre-Interregnum theater. Even early eighteenth-century critics looking

back at the shifts to the stage document the way in which Restoration theater is more natural.

John Dennis wrote, “Scenes and Women [. . .] added probability to the Dramatick Actions and

made everything look more naturally” (vol. 1, II 277-8). The difference the body makes can be

162 There are records of non-English actresses performing in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, and we know that English women acted in guild performances, court masques, and closet dramas. In fact, there are also contemporary accounts that recount rumors of English women on the stage before the Restoration. Stephen Orgel points out that in Coryate’s Crudities, Coryate writes of his travels in Venice, noting that there he “saw women acte, a thing that I never saw before” though he has “heard that it hath been sometimes used in London” (Orgel 7). The first known English woman to appear on the public stage has been credited alternatively to Moll Frith, who is known to have taken the stage at The Fortune theater in 1610 following a production of Dekker and Middleton’s The Roaring Girl and Mrs. Coleman, who played the role of Ianthe in the interregnum debut of William Davenant’s Siege of Rhodes in 1656. We have no record though of either of these women receiving payment or of their later appearance on the stage. For information regarding female performers in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, see Brown, Pamela Allen and Peter Parolin. Women Players in England, 1500-1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage (2005). For historical records of professional actresses in the Restoration, see Rosamond Gilder’s Enter the Actress: The First Women in the Theatre (1931). Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians have forwarded both Margaret Hughes and Anne Marshall as possibilities for the 1660 Desdemona, but no accurate record of the name has been found and historians claiming to know the name of the actress have based their assertions on earlier historians’ speculations, rather than documentary evidence.

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seen in the audiences’ reactions to the women, in the common perceptions of the actress, and in

the changes that playwrights make in their characterization of women.

While a version of city comedy remains popular with Restoration audiences, the

prostitute character so fashionable in late Elizabethan and Jacobean city comedies does not

regain popularity. The whore, however, is still ubiquitous. In addition, the elision between the

female characters and prostitutes still appears frequently in play-texts, and while the character is

not revived, the prostitute is still on stage. Now though the prostitute is not represented by a boy

playing a prostitute; instead, it is the actress who is the prostitute playing an upper-class woman,

an important difference that I discuss later in the chapter. The appearance of the professional

actress in England was, of course, eventually normalized by Charles’s decree that actresses play

female roles. This official sanction of the actress, though, comes two years after women begin

acting on the English stage. When Charles II returned from France, one of his first acts was to

issue patents for theater companies to Thomas Killigrew and William Davenant. Two years later,

Charles renews the patents, claiming, “the womens parts [. . .] have been acted by men in the

habits of women, at which some have taken offense” (qtd. in Lanier 42). Charles adds:

We do likewise permit and give leave that all the womens parts to be acted in

either of the two said companies for the time to come, may be performed by

women, so long as these recreations, which, by reason of the aforesaid, were

scandalous and offensive, may by such reformation be esteemed not only

harmless delights, but useful and instructive of humane life, to such of our good

subjects as shall resort to see the same. (qtd. in Lanier 42-3)

The wording of the decree implies that the boy actors are more scandalous than the women, but

certainly this was not the attitude before the Interregnum. In the late sixteenth century, Dr. John

Rainolds, who would later become the president of Corpus Christi College at Oxford, William

Gager, a writer of academic drama, and Alberico Gentili, an Italian Protestant who had been the

Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford University since 1587, began a written correspondence

in which they debated whether Deuteronomy 22.5 forbade all acting. The correspondence is

excerpted in Rainolds’ Th’Overthrow of Stage-Playes, published in 1599, but Gentili’s complete

letters are extant. Though the focus of the debate was not on actresses, the topic of women on the

stage comes up in the debate. Gentili tells Rainolds that he should not use Deuteronomy 22.5 to

condemn the entire profession of acting because there were many plays without women’s parts

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and “actors who play for hire have used actresses and female stage players for a long time now,

although it was not always so, but it is said that men first acted women’s parts. Nor is the

remedy of female stage players in that common kind of acting worse than the evil itself” (qtd.

and trans. from Latin in Binns 111). Rainolds replies that women on the stage would violate

female decorum, would be immodest and shameful, and would perhaps be a worse sin than male

cross-dressing (Binns 112). Even Gentili’s acceptance of female actors is just a rhetorical pose.

In Gentili’s treatise on acting, De Actoribus et Spectatoribus Fabularum non notandis Disputatio,

published in 1599, he writes:

I do not wish women to set foot on our stage, or to mingle with the companies of

men. And I believe that in the more respectable times of antiquity it was for

honorable reasons that men in masks played the parts of women, rather than that

women themselves should play female parts (as happened later and as often

happens today in public acting). For a woman to do this does indeed involve a

great abuse. (qtd. in and trans. by Binns; sig. A7r).

By the time professional English actresses began to act, Spanish actresses had been performing

on Spain’s stages, off and on, since the 1530s, Italian actresses had been acting in commedia

dell’arte since at least the mid-sixteenth century, and French actresses had been on the stage

since 1607 (Heise 357-8; Orgel 154, n. 1; Brockett 177-81; Brockett 189).163 Even with

Charles’s stipulation, the move might have proven financially detrimental to a theater catering to

an audience that was sentimental for the pre-Interregnum theater. After all, foreign troupes that

included women had performed in pre-Interregnum England: Italian actresses performed for

Queen Elizabeth and her court in 1578 (Chambers, vol. 2 262), and in 1629 a French troupe that

included women toured London, appearing at Blackfriars, the Red Bull, and the Fortune (Bentley

25). Thomas Brande’s account of the women’s appearance at Blackfriars is frequently quoted as

being representative of the opinion of his contemporaries:

certaine vagrant French players, who had been expelled from their owne contrey,

and those women, did attempt, thereby giving just offence to all virtuous and

well-disposed persons in this towne, to act a certain lacivious and unchaste

comedye, in the French tonge at the Blackfryers. Glad I am to saye they were

163The actresses in both countries were controversial. See Ursula K. Heise’s “Transvestism and the Stage Controversy in Spain and England, 1580-1680” in Theatre Journal (1992).

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hissed, hooted, and pipin-pelted from the stage, so as I do not thinke they will

soone be ready to trie the same again. (Bentley 25)

Yet the fact that the women went on to perform on at least two other London stages argues that

though they may have been vilified, people turned out to see them. The London audiences,

however, did not demand that the English stage follow the example of the continent. Thus, there

was no guarantee that the Restoration audiences would accept the actress’s presence.

For a short period of time, audiences could catch one production with a woman in a role

and another production the next day with a boy actor. Thus, like Spain, the English stage could

have accommodated both the boy actors and the female actress.164 According to Rosamond

Gilder, at least eight boys acted in women’s parts in the year 1660 (139). A few of these boys,

like Edward Kynaston, William Betterton and James Nokes, went on to become well-known

tragedians and comedians (Gilder 139). Michael Shapiro has argued that actresses did not appear

earlier because of the way in which boy actors were trained. He claims that the guild model of

training boy actors was disturbed by the closure of the theaters during the Interregnum and that

theater owners were forced to hire women because the apprentice boy actors had grown and been

forced to move into other crafts (Shapiro, “Actresses” 186).165 Certainly, the guild model of

training, by its very nature, is conservative. The craft is a mystery passed from one generation of

masters to the apprentices, who will be the next generation’s masters. While this does help

explain why English actresses did not appear earlier, it does not completely explain why the

introduction of the actresses succeeded financially or why they managed to replace the boys

completely. As I mentioned, both boys and women were on the stage in 1660, and some of these

boy actors were very popular.

Furthermore, Shapiro’s additional point that there were only a few trained boys and the

demand for theatrical productions forced the theaters to hire women ignores the fact that there

were no trained English women. Audience response to both the boy actor and the actress

demonstrates that, at least initially, the boy was frequently thought to be the better and more

164 Heise notes that during the early seventeenth-century Spanish officials seemed to be unable to decide which was worse, the boy actor or the actresses. In 1600 “boy actors are forbidden to wear make-up,” and in 1601 there are forbidden to act in the female roles (360). Previous to this time period, though, both the boys and women appear on the stage. Heise points out that there is evidence of women on the stage in the 1530s through the ‘80s, but that by 1587 an Italian company applies for a special dispensation to tour with their actresses, implying that at some point women are barred from the Spanish stage (358). 165 Strangely, Shapiro doesn’t emphasize that the “force” came from Charles II.

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professional actor. John Downes, a prompter for the Duke’s Company, in his 1708 Roscius

Anglicanus reminisces that Edward Kynaston “being then very young made a complete female

stage beauty, performing his parts so well—that it has since been disputable among the judicious,

whether any woman that succeeded him so sensibly touched the audience as he” (qtd. in Gilder

140). And though some spectators did write about exceptional performances by women, there are

also many first-person accounts of flawed performances. Samuel Pepys sneers at a 1666

performance by Mrs. Norton: she “pretends to sing, but do it not excellently” (qtd. in McAffee

255). Of a performance by Nell Gwyn in 1667, he writes, “above all things Nell’s ill speaking of

a great part made me mad” (qtd. in McAffee 247). In addition, the women had a reputation for

unprofessional behavior. Women were reputed not to show up on time, or sometimes not at all,

and to steal clothes.166

Certainly, even with Charles’s demand that women take the stage, the spectators could

have shown their disapproval through their purses, but the women, even with their initial

reputations for unprofessional behavior and bad acting, were quite popular draws. This

acceptance by the audiences is not due, however, to a new open-mindedness or a changed

opinion about women’s natures. In fact, women take the stage at a moment of unprecedented

ideological and economic misogyny. Many historians, such as Karras and others, have noted

that medieval society, even given the sexual ideology we have already discussed, had many more

economic opportunities for women than in later time periods. The Catholic configuration of

chastity gave women the prospect of escaping marriage, occupations customarily held by women

were more abundant, and the opportunities for single women to own property and manage

businesses without a male partner were more plentiful. Even for prostitutes who were ostracized

and demonized, there was some recourse to protection from mistreatment, at least for those who

were able to find work in the legal brothels. Through the Tudor period, these economic

opportunities slowly dried up. By contrast, in the late seventeenth century, cottage industries

typically operated by women had given way to a more stratified subdivision of labor. Women

were increasingly moved into the private, domestic sphere, while men became the sole wage

166 Pre-interregnum theater managers were concerned about this same behavior in the male actors, issuing fines for lateness and forbidding actors from wearing costumes outside of the theater. The point here, though, is that it becomes part of the actresses’ reputations among the spectators, not just an internal issue in the companies.

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earners for the family (Clark 296).167 As Katherine Eisaman Maus has observed: “the

employment of actresses does not coincide with a more general broadening of female

participation in public life. In fact, during the second half of the seventeenth century women

seem to have been losing rather than acquiring opportunities for gainful employment”

(“Playhouse” 600). She goes on to note, “women were less and less likely to run businesses. By

the end of beginning of the eighteenth century, there were few alternatives for undowered,

unmarried women—or married women whose husbands could not support them—other than

domestic service or prostitution” (“Playhouse” 600-1).

This economic tightening is partly a reaction to the ideological shift from Catholic ideals

of chastity to those of the Protestants, which we have already discussed in chapter three. The

broadening of the term “chaste” to include married, monogamous women and the foreclosure of

the choice of life-long virginity compel women to marry. Marriage becomes the only viable way

not only to save one’s reputation, as any single woman could be defamed simply by accessing

cultural stereotypes about widows or single, young women, but also one of the only viable ways

to survive economically. Not surprisingly, this increased pressure to marry and remain in the

private domestic sphere also further substantiates the virgin/whore binary, and, in fact,

encourages unmarried women, or women whose husbands cannot provide for the family, to play

the role of whore, either involving themselves in actual prostitution or becoming involved in

professions that name them whore, like that of the actress. The lack of economic opportunities is

also a reaction to the economic changes. Women become increasingly viewed as a commodity.

The actress, like the prostitute, becomes a commodity. This sets up a sort of feedback loop,

where culture insists upon viewing the women as commodities, as objects, while limiting

women’s ability to choose independent roles that do not depend upon women’s

commodification. Women then take advantage of the opportunity to commodify themselves and

name themselves whore. This explains perhaps why becoming an actress might be attractive to

women without many economic choices, but it does not explain why audiences accepted women

on the stage.

How then do we explain the actress’s appearance on the stage at a time when culture

would seem to dictate that she stay home and marry? In The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, Michel

167 For a detailed analysis about how the shift from a “family wage” to an individual wage effectively pushed women into domestic labor, which became increasingly devalued compared to wage-earning, see Alice Clark’s Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (1919), especially her conclusion, pp. 290-308.

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Foucault argues that our belief that culture forbids us to speak about sex—that we have been

ordered to repress sexual urges and the desire to speak about them—is, in fact, just a myth.

Instead, the patriarchal order has been compelling us to speak about sex; at least since the

medieval church’s compulsion to confess not only our sexual acts, but also those acts we desire

but have not yet acted upon (Foucault 17-49).168 This compulsion to confess, with patriarchy

defining what falls into the category of sin, helps to reinscribe patriarchal ideology. The actress’s

appearance on the stage, while not a compulsion to speak about sex, can be thought of as a

compulsion to view. The body of the Restoration actress serves as a site of inscription for the

male members of the audience, as well as the playwrights and as a site where they can displace

both their fear of and their desire for the early modern stereotype of female concupiscence. In

addition, the actress becomes an even more fitting target than the boy actor for the anti-theatrical

rhetoric. Both anti-female and anti-theatrical rhetoricians spin their anxious sound bites around

the difference between “seeming” and “being.” Women are always suspect because of their

natural porousness and volubility. Actors are suspect because they lie through impersonation.

The actress embodies both faults. The anxiety shifts from the one voiced by Rainolds, that the

boy dressed as a woman would excite the spectator to commit unnatural sexual acts, to the

anxiety that spectators might lust after the whore on stage, become enamored by the character

she plays, and make the fatal mistake of marrying her.169 Jeremy Collier, for example, in Short

View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage, published in 1698, laments, “Love

has generally a Party Within [the plays]; And when the Wax is prepared, the Impression is easily

made. Thus the Disease of the Stage grows catching” (author’s emphasis 185; qtd. in Rosenthal

Women). To be tricked into desiring a whore is to be diseased, as Lucio says to the Duke in

Measure for Measure, “Marrying a punk, my lord, is pressing to death whipping, and hanging”

(5.1.521-2). Thus, the spectacle of the female actress differs from the spectacle of the boy actor.

In both, though, attention is frequently focused on the body.

168 I do not mean to simply Foucault’s thesis, by implying that patriarchy has a sort of consciousness. Instead, I am highlighting the way in which culture circulates and reinscribes itself. I also do not deny the many problems later theorists have had with Foucault’s faulty and imprecise historicization. These criticisms do not weaken Foucault’s argument that Western culture impels us to speak (in a whisper) about that which it configures as taboo. 169 For a discussion of the cultural anxiety over class-climbing actresses, see Laura J. Rosenthal’s “Reading Masks: The Actress and the Spectatrix in Restoration Shakespeare,” pp. 201-18, in Broken Boundaries: Women & Feminism in Restoration Drama, ed. Katherine M. Quinsey (1996).

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Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, as I have mentioned, frequently called attention to the

boy’s body as he enacted the female character. For example, in Middleton’s revenge tragedy

Women Beware Women,170 a suitor’s fool advises the suitor on what flaws to look for when

judging whether or not a woman would make a good wife. He jokingly recommends that the

suitor arrange to view her naked as women “may hide a number [of flaws] with a bum-roll”

(2.2.128). Part of the joke here is that the male body has a “thing,” while the female body has

“nothing.” Later, in the play, Isabella’s father arranges to have her displayed for the suitor so that

the suitor can decide whether she is suitable for marriage. Though the suitor cannot force her to

disrobe, as his servant Sordido has suggested, he does ask her, “will it please you walk, forsooth,

/ A turn or two by yourself” (4.1.122-3), so that the suitor and the fool can look up her skirt as

she turns her back on them. Both the male body and the female body are evoked as the audience

can choose to imagine the character’s female body or he can imagine what one would actually

find under the skirt: the male body. A third option, of course, allows the spectator to see the

fetishes of female gender and imagine the naked male body beneath the skirt—whatever turns

the spectator on.

Due to this imaginative freedom, the pre-Interregnum theatrical gaze is nothing like the

twentieth-century filmic gaze. While most playwrights write for a male spectator, imagining a

male desire for which they write misogynist jokes, these moments when the playwright calls

attention to the male body accommodate the female spectator as well as the male. In addition, the

parallactic gaze allows the same audience member to oscillate between fantasies. Many scenes in

pre-Interregnum comedy and drama call for a focus on the body; sometimes the playwright

focuses upon a specifically gendered body, and sometimes the focus, as in the Women Beware

Women scene cited above, allows the spectator to choose. Peter Stallybrass observes that the

play between the boy’s body and the female character’s body would have functioned as

destabilizing gender. It called attention to the indeterminacy of gender by emphasizing the

“slippage within the signifier” (Transvestitism 74). Writing specifically of Act Four, Scene

Three in Othello, where Desdemona tells Emilia to “unpin me here” (4.3.34), Stallybrass notes

that on the pre-Interregnum stage these theatrical moments impel spectators into

170 The performance dates for Women Beware Women are unknown. The play is published in 1657, and according to John Jewett, it is not revived until the RSC production in 1962 (page proofs to the introduction to the play in the Oxford Collected Works, forthcoming).

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contradictory attitudes about sexuality and gender: gender as a set of prosthetic devices

(in which case, the object of sexual attention is absorbed into the play of these devices;

[and] gender as the “given” marks of the body (the breast, the vagina, the penis) which

(however analogous in Galenic medicine) are read as the signs of absolute difference (in

which case, sexuality, either between man and woman, woman and woman, or man and

man, tends to be organized through a fixation upon supposedly “essential” features of

gender). But on the Renaissance stage even those “essential” features are located—

whether prosthetically or at the level of the imaginary—upon another body. (74)

Thus, as noted in the introduction, the boy actor, like the drag queen, exposes the constructed

nature of gender. The boy actors engender desire in spectators, but the desire can arise from the

fetishes of female gender or from the imagined “essential” signs of the (male) body or both.

Stallybrass notes that the uncertainty of the audience members’ sexual fixations, “configuring

their objects both in terms of the magic of the fetish objects where boys are transformed into

women and where they are effeminized through the prostitution of their body” (75), made the

anti-theatrical polemicists particularly uncomfortable. Think then how uncomfortable they

become when there is no transformation. The actress is the prostitute. Thus, it should not surprise

us that the spectators’ reading of the female characters changes when the genital sign underneath

the skirt changes and that this reading is conflated with the actress whose body provides the sign.

The female body narrows the spectator’s gaze. As Deborah Payne has pointed out, filmic theory

of the gaze does not provide a satisfactory model of the theatrical gaze.171 The interaction

between actors and spectators is more complex and dynamic than that between the film spectator

and the film. The spectators can interrupt the action on stage and the actors on stage can look

back. Theater, as Barbara Freedman has discerned, “displays a fractured gaze, or shows that it

knows that it is showing” (69). Yet the Restoration stage encourages the spectators to gaze upon

the actresses’ bodies and presents them as objects, as commodities, and as sex toys. In fact,

some critics have argued that in Restoration theater one begins to see the roots of ocularcentrism

so foundational to our own performative arts.172 Theatrical conventions promoted the primacy of

171 See Payne’s “Reified Object or Emergent Professional? Retheorizing the Restoration Actress” in Cultural Readings of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Theater (1995), pp. 13-38. 172 See, for example, Thomas A. King’s ‘As if (She) Were Made on Purpose to Put the Whole World in Good Humour’: Reconstructing the First English Actresses” in The Drama Review 36:3 (1992), pp. 78-102.

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the actresses’ bodies as actresses were encouraged to flash their breasts, proving they were

indeed all woman, and the rise of the breeches roles provided further opportunity for visual

arousal. Spectators, playwrights, and anti-theatricalists alike denigrated the actress, referring to

her bodily filth and sexual availability. She embodies the sexual ideology I outlined in the

introduction. Thus in Dryden’s epilogue to Tyrannick Love, first performed in 1669, Nell Gwyn

arises from her death bed and proclaims, “Here Nelly lies, who, though she liv’d a Slater’n / Yet

dy’d a Princess, acting in S. Cathar’n” (qtd. in Rosenthal, Counterfeit 11).173 I do not deny that

there is a power available to the actress who seized it.174 Many of these actresses seemed actively

to construct their own sexual identities or at least were perceived as having done so. There are

many reports of Nell Gwyn openly admitting that she was a whore. For example, in a letter dated

1675, Mme. de Sévigné writes of speaking to Nell about Charles II’s Catholic mistress, Louise

de Kéroualle. According to Mme. de Sévigné, Nell comments upon the mistress’s behavior,

saying, “If she be a lady of such quality, why has she become a whore? She ought to die for

shame. As for me, it is my profession. I don’t pretend I’m anything else” (qtd. and trans. from

the French in Conway 220). We have no way of verifying that Nell actually said this, but there

are many characterizations of Nell which show that the matter-of-fact acceptance of her

whoredom, whether she actively constructed it or not, gained her the admiration of many in

London. It may have given some of these women a certain amount of power, but the sexual

reputations of these women cut both ways and were inescapable, whether the actress was

regarded as a whore or a virgin.175 Furthermore, the female body did limit the whore characters’

flexibility, and while the audiences no longer saw both the male body and the female body, there

was still a sort of double vision. As Laura J. Rosenthal contends, the audiences were well aware

of these women’s sexual reputations and their class; therefore, they “watched with a double 173 For a more complete review of prologues and epilogues that name their actresses as whore, see Rosenthal’s “Counterfeit Scrubbado”: Women Actors in the Restoration” in The Eighteenth Century (1993), pp. 3-22. 174 For a discussion of how the scholars obscure the Restoration actress’s agency and power in her sexual commodification, see chapter two of Kirsten Pullen’s Actresses and Whores: On Stage and in Society (2005), pp. 22-54. See also Gilli Bush-Bailey’s Treading the Bawds: Actresses and Playwrights on the Late-Stuart Stage (2006) and Kirsten Pullen’s Actresses and Whores (2005). 175 There were actresses who were reputed to be chaste. For example, both Mary Betterton and Mary Lee had generally good reputations (Rosenthal “Women” 6), but there was always suspicion that they were dissembling. In addition, the women’s reputations frequently limited the kinds of roles they could pull off. Nell Gwyn seemed to have been able to play the virgin, but many other women with lewd reputations were booed off the stage when they played against type. Thus, typecasting based on sexual reputation becomes a problem as soon as women take the stage. The point is their sexual availability was always part of their professional reputations.

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consciousness,” seeing both the lower-class whore and the upper-class female she impersonated

(Rosenthal “Women” 9).176

In addition to prologues, epilogues, and pamphlets that maligned the actress, playwrights

revived older plays, rewriting them to accommodate not only current theatrical trends, but also

the women’s bodies. The revival that critics have discussed most frequently is that of The

Tempest. There are two versions: Dryden and Davenant’s The Enchanted Island, first performed

in November of 1667, and Thomas Duffet’s parody of the revival, The Mock-Tempest,

performed in 1674. Dryden and Davenant double Prospero’s daughters, who are sexually

precocious and give this Prospero a much more difficult time than did their vapid predecessor,

the original Miranda. They give Caliban a sister, for whom Trinculo and Stephano fight in the

hopes of ruling the island. And they add a breeches role in the character of Hippolito, a male,

played by an actress, who cannot understand why (s)he cannot have all the women and must

choose only one. As many critics have noted, this play makes more explicit the exchange of

women that is fundamental to Shakespeare’s original plot.177 In addition, the Hippolito role

objectifies the woman’s body, showing off her ankles and calves.

The parody strips away yet another layer of the plot that obscures the women’s exchange

and reveals it to be prostitution. Prospero becomes the keeper of Bridewell, and Duffet casts the

orange girl, Betty Mackarel, in a breeches role as Ariel. In the prologue, Betty and a fellow actor

discuss her sexual availability. The actor tells her that now that she is an actress she has a higher

calling:

Think of thy high calling Betty, now th’art here,

They gaze and wish, but cannot reach thy Sphere,

Though ev’ry one could squeeze thy Orange there.

(qtd. in Rosenthal “Counterfeit” 15)

176 Rosenthal argues that the actress-as-whore construction exists to help stabilize the class disruption the actress enacts. She points out anxiety centered on lower class women being able to act like those of higher rank (“Women” 11). To name the actress whore names her as unmarriageable and helps to fight this anxiety. What Rosenthal doesn’t note is the way in which the actress, as a public woman who displays her beauty and body, is already named whore before she ever appears in the clothing of her “betters.” 177 See, in particular, both of Laura Rosenthal’s articles on Restoration actresses.

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These actresses perform not just their public parts, but also their private lives. Their personae

give rise to the first sustained cults of personality, and their bodies, displayed on stage, subsume

the analogous meanings possible before the Restoration.

Janet Adelman gives an insightful critique of why many Renaissance theorists are so

interested in promulgating the one-sex model as a dominant model of sexual ideology (“Defect”

23-52). Adelman claims that this model attracts critics because it seems remote from our own

issues with women and instead displaces modern issues onto an unfamiliar model. In addition,

she notes, the one-sex model “does away with the anatomical basis for gender—and hence for

gender fixity—only at the cost of doing away with women’s bodies: there is only one sex and

that sex is male” (Adelman, “Defect” 39-40). This insistence upon viewing early modern sexual

difference through this model allows critics the ability to obscure the fear of female regression—

or a slipping from masculinity into femininity—about which our own culture still obsesses.

Certainly, these critics focus on regression, but the model is alien to our own, and thus, hides the

way in which these fears, and even the basic beliefs about women, are unchanged. Adelman

writes, “insofar as the ‘one sex’ is inevitably male, anatomically speaking the female body can

scarcely be said to be present. But despite—or sometimes because of—this disappearing act,

English Renaissance literary scholars have rushed to embrace the Galenic model, discovering in

it a new orthodoxy” (25). Yet as the punishments for female cross-dressing discussed in chapter

one demonstrates the female body with its signs of genital difference is imbricated in early

modern misogyny. Nothing demonstrates the difference the female body makes more than the

moment when the Restoration actress first treads the boards.

Enter the Whore

The play chosen for the introduction of the professional English actress on December 8th,

1660 was Othello. Though history did not believe the performance of the first female

Desdemona momentous enough to record the actress’s name for prosperity, we do know that

Thomas Killigrew, whose company staged the production at the Red Bull Theatre, believed that

a specially commissioned prologue welcoming his Desdemona to the stage was in order.

Killigrew hired Thomas Jordan (who also wrote the aforementioned poem “What a Whore Is”) to

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memorialize this production.178 The playwright plays with what he knows will be the perception

that the actress is a prostitute. As we can see in the prologue, Thomas Jordan named the actress

“whore” and “commodity” before she had a chance to build her own reputation. The prologue is

worth reproducing in its entirety:

I Come, unknown to any of the rest

To tell you news; I saw the Lady drest;

The Woman playes to day; mistake me not,

No Man in Gown, or Page in Petty-Coat;

A Woman to my knowledge, yet I can’t

(If I should dye) make Affidavit on’t.

Do you not twitter Gentlemen? I know

You will be censuring; do’t fairly though;

‘Tis possible a virtuous woman may

Abhor all sorts of looseness, and yet play,

Play on the Stage, where all eyes are upon her;

Shall we count that a crime France calls an honour?

In other Kingdoms Husbands safely trust ‘em,

The difference lies onely in the custom;

And let it be our custom I advise;

I’m sure this Custom’s better then th’Excise,

And may procure us custom; hearts of flint

Will melt in passion when a woman’s in’t,

But Gentlemen you that as judges sit

In the Star-Chamber of the house, the Pit;

Have modest thoughts of her; pray do not run

To give her visits when the Play is done,

With “dam me, your most humble Servant, Lady:”

She knows these things as well as you, it may be:

Not a bit there, dear Gallants, she doth know

178 The prologue and epilogue were published under the title “A Prologue to Introduce the First Woman that Came to Act on the Stage in the Tragedy call’d The Moor of Venice” in A Royal Arbor of Poesie Consisting of Poems and Songs (1663).

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Her own defects, and your temptations too.

But to the point in this reforming age

We have intents to civilize the Stage.

Our women are defective, and so siz’d

You’d think they were some of the Guard disguiz’d:

For (to speak truth) men act, that are between

Forty and fifty, Wenches of fifteen;

With bone so large, and nerve too incompliant,

When you cal Desdemona, enter Giant:

We shall purge every thing that is unclean,

Lascivious, scurrilous, impious or obscene;

And when we’ve put all things this fair way

Barebones himself may come to see a Play.

The prologue begins with a double entendre. The speaker claims to have come “unknown to any

of the rest” to pass on the news that at long last a woman will play a female role. His evidence is

that he “saw the lady dressed.” This line can be read either as a report from a wide-eyed,

backstage witness who has seen the fully costumed actress, as the latter double entendre, “I can’t

(if I should die) make affidavit on it,” implies. Or the actor is the post-coital observer of the

actress’s ablutions, as the line “a woman to my knowledge” indicates, with its secondary

meaning that the speaker knows her carnally. A third possible reading of the line is that the actor,

unbeknownst to the actress, watched her dress—either way he invites the audience to envisage

the actress’s body before she even steps out onto the stage. The prologue imagines a completely

male audience. Thus, when the speaker bemoans how “our women are defective,” the line at first

seems to speak from one male to another about the defects of all women and only with the

continuation after the caesura (which would act as a comedic pause in the spoken line) does the

line limit this to theatrical “women”—to boy actors. Women were the defective sex. The entire

prologue invites the audience to think of the actress as a whore. The actor admits that it is

“possible” for a virtuous lady to “abhor all looseness, yet play, / Play on the Stage, where all

eyes are upon her.” The word “abhor,” of course, contains the word “whore,” while the first use

of “play” at the end of the line break leaves open the manner of play, which in the next line the

actor amends to acting. The clause, “where all eyes are upon her,” emphasizes the actress’s role

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as spectacle and the visual spur to carnal thoughts in the audience, even if the actress herself,

unlikely as it is, might be chaste. The actor urges the audience to “have modest thoughts of her,”

but then admits that “she knows these things as well as you, it may be,” thus acknowledging that

she may be as familiar with all of their penises as well as the audience members themselves.

In addition, the actress is seen as a commodity, as an object that will “procure us custom.” The

passion the actress induces in the male audience may be the result of pathos, but it may also be

passion of a more lascivious tint.

Why choose this particular play? This actress was presumably untrained. We do not

know what process Killigrew took in selecting her or what qualities he was looking for. Nor do

we know what adaptations the company made to the text for this revival. Was Jordan also

responsible for adapting the text or did he just provide the prologue and epilogue? (Even if they

performed the play-text relatively unchanged, the bookend of the new prologue and epilogue,

which we will look at later, changes the audience’s reading of Desdemona.) We also do not

know how they played the roles. Did they play them straight, for pathos, or was the audience

now in the same position as Othello, seeing Desdemona as whore? Are they able to sympathize

with him all the more because they, too, can read Desdemona as whore? One crux in the play is

the external signs of Desdemona’s whoredom. Othello demands ocular proof, telling Iago,

[. . . ]. ‘Tis not to make me jealous

To say my wife is fair, feeds well, loves company,

Is free of speech, sings, plays, and dances well.

Where virtue is, these are more virtuous,

[. . .]

[. . .]. No Iago,

I’ll see before I doubt; when I doubt, prove;

And on proof, there is no more but this:

Away at once with love or jealousy. (3.3.187-196)179

This description of Desdemona could also be a description of the actress, who publicly speaks,

sings, and dances. In addition, the word “plays” hearkens back to the prologue, where the actor

tells us with a wink, “Tis possible a virtuous woman may / Abhor all sorts of looseness, and yet

play, / Play on the Stage, where all eyes are upon her.” Is it? At this particular production, we

179 This and all other Othello citations taken from the Norton Shakespeare.

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can only assume that some attention is called to the actress’s body. We do not know if this

Desdemona flashes her breast; perhaps she does this as Othello kills her or as she is being

unpinned. Certainly, Bianca’s body must have been emphasized. Bianca, one of the few

prostitutes represented by Shakespeare, here must have taken on the role of display, perhaps

appearing in scenes where she has no lines, but could serve as eye candy. Iago tells us that

Bianca is a prostitute. In the folio, Iago, attempting to trick Othello into believing Cassio has

slept with his wife, asks Cassio instead about his whore, Bianca. In soliloquy, Iago tells us his

plan:

Now will I question Cassio of Bianca,

A hussy that by selling her desires

Buys herself bread and cloth. It is a creature

That dotes on Cassio—as ‘tis the strumpet’s plague

To beguile many and be beguiled by one.

He, when he hears of her, cannot restrain

From the excess of laughter. (4.1.91-7)

The medieval configuration of the prostitute who leads many men astray shows up in this speech.

Bianca “beguiles many” and is the fool who is herself caught by one. She is so foolish that her

lover cannot restrain from laughing at her whenever he is asked about her. She is also the verbal

replacement for Desdemona, as a few moments later Othello overhears Cassio speaking of

Bianca, but Othello believes that he is speaking of Desdemona. The way the Restoration

audience read this Desdemona must have depended in part on whether she is clearly

differentiated from Bianca or not. Already having been defined by the prologue as sexually

available, is Desdemona’s “seeming” more believable than her “being?” Does the audience

doubt right along with Othello? Certainly, the possibility for this reading is present.

Killigrew’s new epilogue reads:

And how d’ye like her? Come what is’t ye drive at?

She’s the same thing in public as in private;

As far from being what you call a Whore,

As Desdemona injur’d by the Moor;

Then he that censures her in such a case

Hath a soul blacker then Othello’s face.

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The tongue-in-cheek prologue and epilogue frame a play that is itself deeply concerned with the

issue of feminine chastity and male skepticism. Desdemona gets herself into trouble by not

adhering to the triad; though chaste, she is not silent, chaste, and obedient. She is also not

private. Her disobedience of her father, her loquaciousness, and her public nature allow Iago to

paint her as a whore. Is “seeming” to be a whore the same as “being” one?

The Interpellating Mirror

In 2004, the Florida State University Department of Theatre asked if I would write a

performance review of the premiere of Mark Medoff’s new one-act, Prymate, for the Theatre

Journal. The play ends with a full nude scene. The scene clearly exposes the animalistic nature

of humans by stripping away the fetishes of culture and reversing the play’s opening tableau;

where an ape had stood before us, there now stands a naked female. We are meant to read her as

representing all of us. The end of the play tells us humans are not different from the animals

because we have reason; instead, we use reason to obscure our animalistic desires, to obscure the

way in which we are exactly the same as animals. The stage is lit by three on-stage floor lamps,

and the actress’s body is artfully shaded until she moves into the pools of light. The actress

(Heather Tom playing Allison Alexkovsky-Wilcox) steps into the light three separate times, each

time extinguishing the light from the lamp. As she reaches for the lamp, she is in profile. Each

time the actress moves into the lamp’s beam, a man a few rows behind me gives a catcall. I am,

of course, immediately pulled out of the moment. By the time Tom reaches the third floor lamp, I

am tense in my seat, resisting a strong urge to leave the theater. I experience conflicting

emotions. The foremost emotion is rage, but I also feel embarrassment and, surprisingly, shame,

then shame at feeling ashamed. In order, I think, to divert my attention from my own emotional

reaction, I begin to wonder about the reactions of others. I wonder if Heather Tom has heard the

whistles and responding giggles (of course, she has) and if it has been as distracting to her as it

was to me. She does not show it. I wonder about the female giggles I hear coming from the

vicinity near the male spectator. Are these giggling women with him? Do they truly admire his

bravado? Or are they women still vacillating between the cultural impetus to embody the object

and the less insistent invitation to become their own subject?

Eventually, I return to my own reaction, and it is at this moment—truly as I sit in the

theater—that I have a sudden flash of insight. I finally understand—understand with a visceral

166

comprehension that I feel, literally, crawling on my skin—the theoretical discussions of

theatrical mimesis, the Lacanian mirror, and Irigaray’s rebuttal. The mirror present in this

moment resembles a fun-house mirror, with rays bouncing off at strange angles and hitting

objects not directly in the male spectator’s gaze. This moment in the play demands a nude body,

but a female body fails to signify simply humankind, as might a nude male body; the nude

actress brings with her her history as sexual object, as commodity, as spectacle, as whore.180

When Tom first appears, I immediately grasp the significance of the naked body to the themes of

the play. I am able to identify with the character’s revelation of “civilized” and “reasoned”

behavior as layers that obscure the base desire motivating these behaviors. For me, this

revelation is not gendered; I am able to identify with this character as human, rather than female.

For the male spectator behind me, though, this is not the case. Even though this nude body does

not actively invite objectification, the sexual ideology is so ingrained in this spectator that he

sees nothing but the explicit, female body. Tom’s body fails to interpellate me as simply female

until the male spectator interpellates her. This moment, while not strictly an example of theatrical

realism, functions for me in much the same manner: “Realism is more than an interpretation of

reality passing as reality; it produces ‘reality’ by positioning its spectator to recognize and verify

its truths. In realism the actor/signifier, laminated to her character/signified, strenuously seeks

admission to the right class of referents” (Diamond 60). The “truth” I recognize has to do with

the male reaction to the actress, rather than with a middle-class female character trying to name

me, but it functions the same way. I cannot help but think that for the Restoration female

spectator, the whore playing the lady might have functioned differently than Rosenthal imagines.

Instead of merely showing the difference between the whore as unmarriageable and the lady as

marriageable, it may instead have named all women as “whore,” even the upper-class women

watching, masked as the prostitutes in the audience were masked. There is a difference, of

course, between the emotional response of the Restoration, female spectator and the postmodern

female spectator. I have occasional access to the female body as a normative human, as

representative of “humankind,” until the intrusion of the male gaze—a gaze that though no

longer omnipresent in every performative moment is still, nonetheless, unavoidable. 180 This history is why feminist performance artists frequently use the female nude body to expose cultural double-standards and the construction of woman-as-object. For a discussion of the female naked body and its power to interpellate and resist interpellation, see Sue-Ellen Case’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes: The Naked Body and

167

The first wave of shame I feel comes both as empathy for what the actress might be

feeling as a reaction to her overt objectification and in response to the revelation that my body

too is simply, in some cases and to some people, an object. The configuration of the naked

female body as always pornographic assists patriarchy in the same way that the criminalization

of the prostitute does. Any attractive, naked, female body is always, inescapably sexualized. To

be naked (and female) is to incite desire knowingly, even if you do not intend to incite it. Really,

just to be a young, female body, clothed or unclothed, is to incite desire knowingly. To incite

desire in public is to be a whore (still), which is not to deny the power given those who incite

desire, though there is danger too. According to many members of our society (still), to be

female and publicly naked, no matter what the context, is to invite the sort of reactions given by

the moron in the back of the theater (for whom even the social codes about one’s behavior in a

theater did not overrule the inscribed social behavior for what a man does when viewing an

attractive, naked woman).

The stripper and the prostitute do the same cultural work. The stripper’s public nakedness

and the prostitute’s commercialized sex with strangers both assist in the creation of the binary:

licit (monogamous, private) sex versus illicit (random, public) sex, chaste woman versus whore.

Their bodies’ accessibility is grafted onto all naked or scantily clothed women in the same way

that the early modern ambiguity of the word “whore” helped police all women’s sexuality, not

just the prostitute’s. Yet, I personally do not take one of the dominant feminist responses to

prostitution and pornography: to call for a harder crackdown on the industries. Laurie Shrage

succinctly delineates this dominant opinion in her 1989 essay “Should feminists oppose

prostitution?” Shrage first attends to the dilemma the feminist faces when deciding on her stance

on prostitution. On the one hand, the feminist wants to stand up for the rights of sex workers,

who, because they do not have the legal status to complain about working conditions or abuse,

are frequently victimized, and like the early modern prostitute, today’s prostitutes are still

arrested more frequently than their clients or their pimps, and they still receive the brunt of

cultural blame for the institution (347). According to Shrage, though, feminists ultimately cannot

support prostitution or the sex industry in general because the industry promulgates women’s

Theories of Performance” in SubStance 98, 31:2 & 3 (2002), pp. 186-200 and Rebecca Schneider’s The Explicit Body in Performance (1997).

168

sexual objectification, hegemonic heterosexuality, and patriarchal ideology (Shrage 360).181 A

second feminist camp, calling themselves “whore feminists” or “sex-positive feminists,”

attempts to change the terms, as Shrage has proposed, but does it by embracing and giving voice

to whores. Jill Nagle edited a collection of essays entitled Whores and Other Feminists (1997). In

her introduction, Nagle calls for a postmodern feminism that deconstructs the dominant sexual

binaries: good girl/bad girl: reproductive sex/non-reproductive sex; heterosexual sex/lesbian sex;

and white/non-white (13). In this collection, many women who work in the sex industry and

name themselves feminists contribute essays. Carol Queen, a prostitute, argues that “whores

labour on the front lines of patriarchy” (135). It is a change in what the female body and her

sexuality signify that has to happen.

Certainly, there are many differences between early modern sexual ideology and our

own, between the early modern actress and our own, between early modern culture’s treatment

of the prostitute and our own. These ideologies and configurations function, though, in eerily

similar ways. Perhaps we can only glimpse the past as through a “glass darkly.” Yet if we stare

directly and unflinchingly back at the Restoration actress/whore performing on the stage for the

first time or gaze upon the Bridewell prostitutes working the London streets, we might see our

own cultural history, indeed, our own postmodern present, leering back at us.

181 While Shrage intelligently discusses the dilemma, one aspect of her “solution” borders on the ridiculous. I agree, that, as she suggests, feminists must work on changing the cultural constructions that support prostitution, claiming that prostitution “will be remedied as feminists make progress in altering patterns of belief and practices that oppress women in all aspects of their lives” (360). But her call for a consumer boycott of the sex industry has little chance of working given that feminists do not exactly make up the bulk of sex industry consumers.

169

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BIGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Trish Thomas Henley holds a B.A. and M.A. in English from the University of Idaho. She has an

article on Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander” forthcoming in Exemplaria and has published a review

essay in the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies.

191