Hoards of whores

Hoards of Whores: Onomastic Mutability in Jacobean City Comedy

Jessica M. Kwong University of Cambridge

In 1611, a fight broke out in a Devon alehouse between John Pulford and Robert Lyle. A witness deposed that after divers speeches they had amongst them, Pulford said that Lyle was his whore, and thereupon took Lyle by the waist and threw him upon the bed, and laying upon him face to face jerked him very grievously; that Lyle complained, praying him to give over for he was not able to endure it. Pulford replied saying, she is my whore, and will do it: and after a while leaving the bed came to the table and there took out Lyle’s privities, and rolled them upon the table saying, look what a fine thing […] my whore hath.1

Pulford then threw Lyle back onto the bed and said ‘she was his whore and he would to her again and rolled his privities’ on the table, saying ‘she is my whore and I will use her […] shall I not use mine own as I list’. Several times, Pulford grabbed Lyle about the neck and ‘kissed him as if he had been a woman’. Lyle begged him to stop and eventually he did, calling for drink and ‘saying his whore should give him a pot of ale for using her’. Lacking money, Lyle borrowed some and paid for Pulford’s ale.

Throughout this vicious assault, Pulford conspicuously uses the feminine pronoun for Lyle while repeatedly calling him his ‘whore’. This

1

DRO Q/SB 1611 cited with legal formulations removed in Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch, and Power in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 1.

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repetition helps Pulford justify his abusiveness. Under the label ‘whore’, Lyle becomes wholly vulnerable and accessible: his genitals can be violently ‘jerked’ and ‘rolled’ on the table, he can be kissed ‘in very beastly sort’, and he can be ‘used’ ‘as if he had been a woman’. This episode instantiates both the power of the label ‘whore’ and the power of nomination: like Adam in the garden of Eden, the person who names establishes authority over that which is named.2 By naming Lyle his ‘whore’, Pulford he can use him as he wishes. His treatment of Lyle demonstrates the predominant view of the whore’s role in early modern England: her body is the property of the man who uses her, she has no right to defend herself, and she is subordinate to the extent that a man can reasonably expect to be compensated for using her. These assumptions are so deeply embedded in the label ‘whore’ that the application of the term itself is sufficient for recreating this power dynamic, even in the absence of a female body.3 Seventeenth century literature is teeming with whores. They appear in sermons, treatises, poetry, polemical tracts, tragedies, comedies, and tragicomedies. In new genres of printed material, the discourse of whoredom was adapted to a wide range of contexts: it was used to justify moral rigour in conduct manuals, lend eschatological urgency to Jacobean sermons, provide risqué amusement in ballads, and frame titillating cautionary tales in rogue taxonomies and cony-catching pamphlets. At least sixty-four plays containing whores or bawds were published within the first quarter of the century alone,

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The biblical account of the Adamic power of nomenclature states that ‘the Lord God formed of the earth every beast of the field, and every foule of the heaven; and brought them unto the man to see how he would call them: for howsoever the man named the living creature, so was the name thereof’ (Genesis 2:19-20).

3 Gowing, Common Bodies, 1.

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and yet, this subject marks a conspicuous gap in Early Modern scholarship.4 In stark contrast with recent work on vagrancy, crime, and witchcraft in the seventeenth century, and numerous studies of prostitution in the eighteenth century, whoredom in the seventeenth century has suffered a lack of attention from both historians and literary critics alike. While studies of moral policing, adultery, and sexual slander have begun to repair this neglect, there remain many lacunae in our conception of the shifting social, cultural, and political significance of whoredom in the early modern period.

A word on the word ‘whore’: while in modern parlance, it carries a heavy condemnatory charge in contrast with the more clinical (but only slightly more neutral) term ‘prostitute’, it is preferable in this case for two reasons: first, it was far more prevalent in early modern period; second, it more accurately frames the scope of this study. In the literature of this period, ‘whore’ is legion, ‘prostitute’ is not.5 ‘Whore’ is employed in many different contexts to signal a range of meanings, implying sexual laxity without strictly referring to a woman who exchanges sex for money as a profession.6 I am interested in representations of women involved not only in professional prostitution but also in other forms of disorderly activity that earned them the label ‘whore’. In what follows, my use of ‘whore’ is interrogative instead of prescriptive. I refer to characters as ‘whore figures’ not as a means of reinscribing a flawed categorisation but rather to circumvent any unwieldy ontological periphrasis.

4

Celia Daileader’s analysis of the 226 plays performed during this period reveals that 96% of these feature at least one scene foregrounding erotic activity; Celia Daileader, Eroticism on the Renaissance Stage: Transcendence, Desire, and the Limits of the Visible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 143-54.

5 ‘Prostitution’ and ‘to prostitute’ were employed in seventeenth century literature, but their use is primarily restricted to religious and moralistic writing.

6 Karen Newman has pointed out that in legal records, prostitutes are rarely called ‘whores’, instead, these texts tend to employ ‘harlot’; Cultural Captials: Early Modern London and Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 138. See also Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 59.

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London was changing rapidly during the Jacobean period. It was a city wracked with growing pains: Its population had more than quadrupled during Elizabeth I’s reign and it continued to draw nearly 4000 migrants per year. By 1590, one eighth of England’s population moved to London at some point in life, fuelling the image of the city as a dangerous devourer of people, traditions, and values.7 Men and women did not simply move to London, they became Londoners. By virtue of its density, variety, and dynamism, the urban environment altered traditional social order and led to increasingly specialized roles and divergent moral codes. Sociologist Robert Park has observed that in large cities, ‘primary’ associations such as the family unit diminish in social significance, while ‘secondary’ or voluntary associations in places of work, worship, and resort, have greater influence on the belief systems and behaviour of inhabitants.8 During the first decade of the century Londoners experienced the ravages of plague, harvest failure, and price inflation, as well as rising taxes, unemployment and vagrancy. The growth of a market economy greatly changed the experience of Londoners’ daily lives: it altered their ways of relating to neighbours and surroundings, of interpreting social and moral structures, and of understanding their roles and themselves. In the early years following the Reformation, the household had been the linchpin of civic society; however, by the seventeenth century the market was rapidly beginning to supplant the home as the pivotal site of social definition. Increasingly, the market became the lens through which urban dwellers interpreted their experiences and shaped their

7

Roger Finlay, Population and Metropolis: The Demography of London 1580-1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 9.

8 Robert Park, ‘The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the City Environment’, in Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities, ed. Richard Sennett (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 115.

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moral views. Ultimately, as men and women negotiated between the residual old and the burgeoning new, volatility bred excitement, opportunism, and anxiety. These changes coincided with and amplified a boom in cultural production; the page and the stage became the media through which Londoners made sense of their environment.

The theatres served a particularly critical function during this time because they engaged in a cultural project that diverged from that of the pulpit, the pamphlet, or the printed treatise. As a necessarily dialogic form, drama is able to animate different points of view more effectively than many other forms of literature. Dramatists instilled these perspectives into human forms that walked, talked, laughed, wept, and raised to Londoners a mirror of themselves.

In the midst of this whirl of motion and change, naming and labelling became an essential means of creating the semblance of stability. Anonymity was akin to ignominy.9 The modern practice of giving an unidentified person the name ‘John-’ or ‘Jane Doe’ demonstrates how namelessness remains socially unsettling. However, while naming and labelling may appear to render a person’s social role more decipherable, this effect often turns out to be illusory. Through the medium of comedy and particularly using the figure of the whore, early modern dramatists explored the profound implications of these concerns, demonstrating that onomastic issues are fundamentally problems of language, identity, and truth.

This paper considers how ‘shifting’ pervaded early modern Londoners’ understanding of their world; it demonstrates how this term became specifically associated with deviant female behaviour and how rigid female categories were

9

Namelessness, as Laurie Maguire reminds us, is the essence of ignominy as its Latin root suggests: in- not + (g)nōmen name; Shakespeare's Names (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 9.

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often applied in legislation and literature to make women seem more fixed and legible. It subsequently analyses how early modern writers explore the problem of deciphering character and determining the relationship between a name or label and the person it designates. Finally, it shows how early modern playwrights employ ‘whore’ figures to highlight female onomastic (and hence, social) mutability and call into question the usefulness of traditional female categories of maid, wife, widow, and whore.

According to London’s magistrates, the ceaseless tide of immigrants, visitors, vagrants, and single women beggared description; new labels were needed to impose order on this growing mass of strangers.10 This phenomenon was not confined to legislation: court books swelled with defamation cases as the wider population became acutely sensitive to the power of labels and the importance of defending oneself against the wrong ones. Names and labels gave comforting boundaries to human identity in a context where everything else seemed to be shifting.

‘Shifting’ itself accrued new meanings. Movement had become a defining feature of early modern London as people shifted at unprecedented rates from country to city, from suburb to centre. Plays like Thomas Middleton’s Michaelmas Term and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside show characters like Andrew Lethe and Touchwood Senior arriving from abroad and from other parts of England to try their fortunes in London. Interestingly, when these immigrant characters are female—Franceschina in John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan, the nameless Country Wench in Michaelmas Term, the Welsh Gentlewoman in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, and later, Aretina in James Shirley’s The Lady of Pleasure, for example—they are often portrayed as being sexually dubious, if not fully-fledged whores. Female movement in 10

Griffiths, Lost Londons, 192.

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Renaissance literature is often regarded with deep suspicion and carries with it the potential of sexual corruption.

The changing structure of the economy resulted in increased ‘shifting’ between social strata. Citizens moved from poverty to wealth like the citizenturned-Lord Mayor in Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday, and vice versa, like Shakespeare’s Timon and Middleton’s Witgood in A Trick to Catch the Old One. Again, however, female mobility between social levels frequently provoked damning criticism; if a woman moved up in the world, like Dekker’s patient Grisill or Bianca in Women Beware Women, gossip often followed about what sexually illicit thing she had done to merit her rise. Poor women were already stigmatised as being sexually available; potential for upward mobility only exacerbated this stereotype. Conversely, if a woman’s fortunes fell like Jane’s in The Shoemaker’s Holiday or Prue Gallipot’s in The Roaring Girl, explanatory rumours inevitably focused on her sexual misbehaviour.

Thus, although male shifting usually signalled industriousness and selfdetermining skill, women who shifted, either socially or geographically, were subject to sexual suspicion.

‘Shifting’ simultaneously accumulated connotations of dishonest and disorderly behaviour. In city comedies characters use ‘shifts’ or tricks to accomplish their aims. In Michaelmas Term, Thomasine, who must act quickly to secure Easy’s love after her husband’s ‘death’ wonders ‘O, what shift shall I make now?’ and promptly falls to the ground ‘in a feigned swoon’ (4.4.55). The Roaring Girl’s Moll orchestrates a ‘shift’ to bring Sebastian and Mary Fitzallard together (7.41). Thomasine’s ‘shift’ earns her a new husband, and Moll’s brings Sebastian a wife; both characters use harmless but dishonest ‘shifts’ for the sake of achieving marriage.

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The term ‘shift’ frequently appears in early modern polyglot dictionaries to explain the meanings of words in other languages; the synonyms that cluster around it reveal the extent of its association with criminality. In his ItalianEnglish dictionary, A World of Words (1598), John Florio translates ‘Bazaro’ as ‘a shifter, a conicatcher, a setter, a cogger, a haltersacke’; the phrase ‘Ruffola Raffola’ is colourfully defined as ‘by pinching and scraping, by shifting or scambling [sic], pell mell, in bugger mugger, by hooke or crooke, heglediepigledie, helterskelter’ (my emphasis).11 These many uses of ‘shift’ attest to the word’s widespread application and criminal connotations in early modern English. Furthermore, although the early modern English usage of ‘making shift’ (making do) remains in our lexicon, the gendered undertone of this phrase has not persisted. Shakespeare’s ‘master-mistress’ has ‘A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted / With shifting change, as is false women’s fashion’ (Sonnet 20, 3-4). Given that in early modern thought, women were consistently portrayed as being fluid and constantly shifting due to their cold and moist humoral composition, it should come as no surprise that in the seventeenth century, much ire over social change was directed toward women and their ‘disorderly’ activities.

In his analysis of the labels used to refer to those committed to Bridewell in the first half of the seventeenth century, Paul Griffiths finds that the number of ‘disorderly’, ‘idle’, and ‘unruly’ women increases and outnumbers male detainees dramatically. This significant feminization of

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For words with similar associations, see Florio’s entries for accattare, gaffare, mucciare, trabalzo, andar in striazzo, busca, levantino, menchiattaro, ruspatore, and scarpisatore; John Florio, A World of Words (1598). In Richard Perceval’s A Dictionarie of Spanish and English (1599) the noun ‘Artimáña’ means ‘deceit, sleight, shifting’ and ‘Engáño’ is ‘coosenage, cunning, shifting’. In Randle Cotgrave’s A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (1611), the verb ‘Busquer’ is ‘to shift, filtch, prowle’ and ‘Ruser’ means ‘to beguile, deceive, shift, use tricks’ (my emphasis).11

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crime-labels in the early seventeenth century suggests that ‘[e]ither more women were breaking the law or magistrates felt that this was so (or both).

Women were now closely linked to crimes spawned by urban growth.’12 Over the same period that more women were being committed to Bridewell, Laura Gowing has noticed a ‘uniquely high level of female participation in litigation’.13 Both of these trends suggest that as London’s city fathers struggled to deal with the mounting pressures of urban growth, women were increasingly targeted as the source of disorder. Lisa Jardine notes, ‘In times of general social dislocation, fears about change are often displaced onto women.’14 On both legislative and personal levels, naming and labelling became early modern Londoners’ antidote to shifting and disorder.

A plethora of texts were published that offered descriptions for types of people that one might encounter in an urban setting, detailing their outward appearance, predilections, activities, moral and mental attributes, and notably classifying these characteristics under a definitive label. Such works were called ‘speaking pictures’, ‘living images’,15 and ‘lively portraicture’.16 One of the first of these collections, published in 1608, was Joseph Hall’s Characters of Vertues and Vices, in which the author describes how the ancient philosophers ‘draw out the true lineaments of every vertue and vice, so lively, that who saw the medals, might know the face: which Art they significantly termed Charactery’.17

12

Griffiths, Lost Londons, 204.

Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 34.

14 Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1983), 162.

15 Joseph Hall, Characters of Vertues and Vices (London, 1608), sig. A5r.

16 Thomas Overbury, Sir Thomas Overburie His Wife (London, 1616), sig. A8v.

17 Hall, Characters of Vertues and Vices, sig. A5r.

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‘Charactery’ became a highly fashionable literary genre. The most successful collection of character sketches, Sir Thomas Overbury’s A Wife, was reprinted twenty-three times over the course of the seventeenth century.

Between the first edition in 1614 and the eleventh in 1622, the population of characters multiplied from twenty-two to eighty-two, and included ‘A Good Woman’, ‘A Dissembler’, ‘A Flatterer’, ‘A Welchman’, ‘A Whoore’, and ‘A very Whoore’. Though the popularity of Overbury’s volume owed something to the mysterious circumstances of his death, the fact that the printer, Lawrence Lisle, felt compelled to repeatedly augment this collection of ‘sundry persons’ demonstrates that beyond their connection to scandal, the sketches themselves were extremely popular.

Charactery captivated the imagination of English writers and readers in the early seventeenth century, serving a similar reflective and interpretative function as drama. Texts that pinpointed identities and gave concrete names and categories to people helped make the urban environment appear more knowable and less frightening. Being able to identify with the characters on the stage and page generated a sense of corporate identity, enabling Londoners to conceptualise where they belonged in the shifting society.

Prior to the seventeenth century, the term ‘character’ was not used in its modern, figurative sense to denote a person’s interior qualities. The noun derives from χαρακτήρ, a ‘mark engraved, impressed or stamped’ on the surface of a coin or seal’,18 and was employed to signify a distinctive physical mark, a ‘graphic sign or symbol’.19 Hall specifically defines ‘charactery’ as the

18

‘χαρακτήρ’ in Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940).

19 ‘Character, n.’, in OED Online, accessed 13 May 2010, http://www.oed.com.

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art of reading people, as one would read the symbols stamped on the surface of a ‘medal’.

While an external mark might be visible to all, interpreting its significance often proves problematic. As Jonson reminds us, ‘characters’ could also be ciphers: there are ‘sundry ways / To write in cypher, and the severall keyes, / To ope’ the character’.20 In virtually every sphere of Renaissance thought, anxieties abounded with regards to the problem of how ‘to ope’ the character’, decipher the truth, and strip away the obscuring filter of imperfectly signifying signifiers.

This was not a new conundrum. The relationship between language and the world it designates had been the subject of debate since Plato’s Cratylus.21 Were names ex congruo (natural and motivated) or ad placitum (arbitrary and conventional)?22 Socrates probes these questions in dialogue with two interlocutors who champion opposite extremes of the onomastic spectrum. As a linguistic conventionalist, Hermogenes argues that there is no natural language; thus, names are arbitrary and reveal nothing about their objects themselves. As long as a group that shares a dialect or local convention agrees upon a designation for an object, this name is valid.

Cratylus, on the other hand, represents the camp of extreme linguistic naturalism and holds that names not only naturally correspond with the intrinsic

20

Ben Jonson, The Workes of Benjamin Jonson (London, 1616), sig. 3X2r.

Raphael Demos, ‘Plato’s Philosophy of Language’, The Journal of Philosophy, 61 (1964), 595-610. Aristotle’s Peri Hermeneias (De Interpretatione) contributes an opposing view in which he argues that naming is purely conventional.

22 Bacon describes these two positions in ‘The Advancement of Learning’ Book II.XVI.3 in Francis Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. by James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, 12 vols., Vol. 5 (Boston: Brown and Taggard, 1861). See also Renata Botvina, ‘Francis Bacon's Natural Philosophy as a Universal Language’, Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric, 8 (2005), 89-99 (98); Maguire, Shakespeare's Names, 2.

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properties of their objects, but also that language is so supreme that a given object’s nature can be deduced from its name.23 From late antiquity to the Renaissance, a strong and sustained rivalry developed between these two views.24 Where Hermogenes fails, Aristotle proves a more powerful advocate; in De Interpretatione, he adamantly denies that words have natural signification and argues that language is given arbitrary meaning through convention.

The Christian tradition is more closely aligned with the cratylic view.

The Book of Genesis describes how prior to the collapse of Babel, the Adamic vernacular was perfectly congruent to reality. The way language originally functioned was analogous to the divine powers of statement and designation by which God had spoken the world into being. The loss of this Ur-Sprache ruptured the relationship between words and reality, causing them language to become an imperfect signifier. ‘Our speech interposes itself between apprehension and truth like a dusty pane or warped mirror. The tongue of Eden was like a flawless glass; a light of total understanding streamed through it.’25 In a post-Babel world, how much can a word tell us about the thing it names?

Are there any remnants of Ur-Sprache or is all language, as Aristotle argues, firmly rooted in arbitrariness and convention? How can we pierce through the 23

Note that while Cratylus argues that names are distilled descriptions of their objects and present the path for acquiring knowledge of the objects themselves, his resolute commitment to the Heraclitean concept of universal flux has disturbing implications on his linguistic beliefs.

Cratylus holds that everything in the world is in a state of transition, but Socrates demonstrates that by carrying this to its logical conclusion, knowledge itself cannot be possible because no predication can be made of that which changes. Although Plato’s dialogue ends with Cratylus accepting nominally that some things must be stable for knowledge to exist, in Metaphysics, Aristotle reports that Cratylus eventually clung to the idea of flux to a greater extreme than even Heraclitus, positing that nothing and no one can ever be known or spoken of at all.

24 Anne Barton, The Names of Comedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 10-1.

25 I Corinthians 13:12 describes the predicament of postlapsarian language as seeing ‘through a glass darkly’. George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, 2nd edn.

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 60-1.

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obscuring filter of imperfect language to grasp the truth? Although the basic questions were ancient, the seventeenth century saw them debated with renewed urgency; from biblical exegesis to the interpretation of scientific data, the hermeneutic technique of ‘de-ciphering’ gained widespread application.

Texts on musical theory, medicine, history, and numerology; study guides for learning foreign languages; advice literature; and scriptural exegeses proudly advertise that they function as a ‘key’ to a certain subject, in which ‘unknowne knowledge’, ‘secrets’, or ‘mysteries’ are ‘laide open’ or ‘discovered’. One commentary on Paul’s epistle to the Romans is tellingly called A key to the key of Scripture.26 Post-Reformation theology advanced the belief that every man was personally obliged to decipher God’s word.

Protestantism was principally a religion of the book, and the form of textual engagement it prescribed profoundly shaped the hermeneutic strategies of both the educated and the lay believer.27 Richard Bernard writes that the act of deciphering is itself an act of piety: ‘the Lord hath given to his Church the gift of interpretation, which he wil [sic] have them to exercise, which shee could not doe, if all were plaine’. 28

26

William Scalater, A Key to the Key of Scripture (London, 1611).

Although a high rate of illiteracy was a great hindrance to Protestant evangelism, MacCulloch reminds us that in the late sixteenth century, both the church and the godly laity employed a variety of strategies to reach illiterate parishioners such as reading aloud, using illustrations, distributing catechisms, and musical settings of psalms to familiar tunes; Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Later Reformation in England, 1547-1603, 2nd edn. (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2001), 136-8. For an account of how the exercise of biblical exegesis and iconoclastic fervour shaped a great deal of literature in Tudor and Stuart England, see Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination 1558-1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

28 Bernard believes readers should not be discouraged by the difficulty of the book: ‘The very title telleth us, that it may be understood, for it is a Revelation, that is, a discovering and making manifest of secret and hidden things’; Richard Bernard, A Key of Knowledge for the Opening of the Secret Mysteries of St. Johns Mysticall Revelation (London, 1617), sig. Ev; K3v-K4.

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Like exegetical literature, works of charactery engaged in the social project of deciphering and applying the correct name to the wide range of figures that populated London. One of the most frequently recurring and overdetermined ‘characters’ in early modern literature and legal records is the whore. In Overbury’s collection of characters ‘the Whoore’ ‘lives a Reprobate, like Caine, still branded, finding no habitation but her feares, and flies the face of Justice like a Fellon.’29 The whore is often characterised as a Cain-like murderess because she sets out to destroy men’s bodies and souls.

In one of his sermons, Thomas Tuke describes the whore as ‘shamelesse’, ‘bold’, and ‘brazen faced’. Witchlike, she attempts to ‘wooe’, ‘intice’, and ‘beguile’ men with her ‘magicall enchantments’ and ‘alluring incantations’, ‘By her painted breasts of profites and pleasures, shee useth thousands to commit fornication with her’.30 Tuke’s warning is typical of early modern moralistic writing: sermons throughout the Jacobean period portray the whore as a ‘temptresse’ who ruins mens bodies, reputations, and souls. Thomas Gibson frames the ‘whorish woman’ as a savage destroyer who ‘lyeth in wait as for a prey’ and ‘will hunt for the for the precious life of a man’; she wounds many and even ‘strong men are slayne by her.’31 John Reading proclaims that there is ‘no beast so cruell as an harlot, none other can bite the soule: […] the curses of the damned, and malice of the divell, are not so hurtfll [sic], as the flattry and love of a whore: shee consumeth the estate, rotteth the body, killeth the soule’.32 Robert Greene satirises this type of rhetoric in his Disputation, where Nan a Traffique triumphs in the debate over whether a male or female

29

Overbury, Sir Thomas Overburie His Wife, sigs. F1v-F2v.

Thomas Tuke, The True Trial and Turning of a Sinner (London, 1606), sig. G4v.

31 Thomas Gibson, The Blessing of a Good King (London, 1614), sig. Q5v.

32 John Reading, A Faire Warning Declaring the Comfortable Use Both of Sicknesse and Health (London, 1621), sig. D3r.

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conycatchers are worse: ‘men theeves touch the bodie and wealth, but we ruine the soule’, she proclaims.33 The vast majority of portrayals of the whore in Jacobean sermons regurgitate Old Testament representations of her. In Proverbs, the whore is an adulteress who not only seduces but ‘forces’ a foolish youth to commit carnal sin: And, behold, there met him a woman with the attire of an harlot, and subtil of heart. (She is loud and stubborn; her feet abide not in her house: Now is she without, now in the streets, and lieth in wait at every corner.) […] With her much fair speech she caused him to yield, with the flattering of her lips she forced him.

(Proverbs 7:10-21; my emphasis)

Preachers quoted these passages to warn their congregations of the dangers of whoredom in both its spiritual and worldly sense. As with any idol, the whore had the power to compel a man to abandon his covenant with God, but she was uniquely terrifying in her concerted, malicious desire for his ruin. As Thomas Adams cautions his readers, ‘the harlot is ambitious and would usurp God’s due and claime to the heart, the soul […] which she loves not for itself but for the destruction of it.’34 A woman could be labelled a whore not only for her sexual behaviour but also the volume of her voice, her temperament, and her refusal to stay at home. As the records of Bridewell and the ecclesiastic courts show abundantly, men and women of Renaissance London were acutely aware of the power and extension of this label. Gowing documents the term’s usage as a means of asserting moral superiority amongst neighbours. ‘Whore’ was an inclusive and

33 34

Greene, A Disputation Betweene a Hee Conny-Catcher, and a Shee Conny-Catcher, sig. C4v.

Adams, The Devills Banket, sig. X3v.

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static category that subsumed other markers of identity; once a woman was branded a whore, there was little possibility of social redemption.

In striking contrast with her portrayal in legal contexts and moralistic literature, whores were not only popular figures in drama, the playwrights of city comedy evidently found rich potential for variation in this category and through them explored the shifting roles of urban woman. In city comedies, whore figures are more subtly, variously, and fluidly portrayed than their counterparts in other literary forms. Establishing a convenient umbrella term of ‘whore’ enabled compartmentalization of the fear of uncontainable and disorderly women. City comedies exploded this category, demonstrating that the whore did not exist on the margins, threatening to encroach on polite society, but was instead so various and flexible as to be inextricable from it.

One of the primary methods in which dramatists like Middleton challenged this category was through a nuanced portrayal of, and at times a radical challenge to the cultural practices of naming and labelling whore figures.

Halfway through Middleton and Dekker’s 1611 play The Roaring Girl, an outspoken, cross-dressing character nicknamed Moll Cutpurse excoriates Laxton, the conniving man who has propositioned her: Thou’rt one of those That thinks each woman thy fond flexible whore: If she but cast a liberal eye upon thee, […]

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.

Those are the lecher’s food, his prey. He watches For quarrelling wedlocks and poor shifting sisters: ’Tis the best fish he takes.

(5.72-101)

In this extraordinary speech, Moll redefines the category of ‘whore’. She describes the widespread assumption that poverty and liberality in women is

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equivalent to sexual availability, and reveals the predatory nature of men like Laxton. It was widely believed that poor women were sexually indiscriminate.35 By contrast, Dekker and Middleton contradict the popular view and show that many women who are given this label are not predatory but preyed upon.

In John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan, the character Freevill defends whoredom as the only way for downtrodden women to earn a living: A poor decayed mechanical man’s wife, her husband is laid up, may she not lawfully be laid down, when her husband’s only rising is by his wife’s falling? A captain’s wife wants means; her commander lies in open fields abroad, may not she lie in civil arms at home? A waiting gentlewoman, that had wont to take say to her lady, miscarries or so; the court misfortune throws her down; may not the city courtesy take her up? Do you know no alderman would pity such a woman’s case? Why, is charity grown a sin, or relieving the poor and impotent an offence?

(I.i.105-19)

The women that Moll and Freevill describe are neither the rapacious harlot of Proverbs nor the brazen Whore of Babylon; they are impoverished and vulnerable, participating in the trades available to them but always teetering precariously on the edge of destitution. Because of this speech, critics have 35

Thomas Harman comments that once poor women are ‘broken and spoiled of their maidenhead’, then they ‘have their name of doxies […]. And afterward she is common and indifferent for any that will use her’; A Caveat for Common Cursitors, sig. F4r. Preacher Robert Allen echoes Harman’s claim that vagrants indulge in ‘filthiness of adultery and fornication [in] all places of their confused lodging together, at every fair and market throughout the land’; Robert Allen, The Oderifferous Garden of Charitie (London, 1603), sig. A2v. Contrary to the somewhat naïve stances of earlier historians A. V. Judges, Frank Ayledotte, and others, Linda Woodbridge and Paul Slack argue that Harman’s Caveat is far from a credible historical account of early modern vagrancy or criminal types. It is part of a jesting tradition and merely masquerades as a sociological study; however, Woodbridge cautions that to view the Caveat as simply a jestbook is tantamount to collusion with a particularly callous view of indigence (finding poverty funny). She points out that the genre of rogue literature initiated by Harman had real consequences; its rhetoric and attitudes shaped the perspectives of those who framed poor relief policies and anti-vagrancy measures in the early modern period. Woodbridge, Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature, 39-79. See also Paul A. Slack, ‘Vagrants and Vagrancy in England 1598-1664’, in Migration and Society in Early Modern England, ed. Peter Clark and David Souden (London: Hutchinson Education, 1987), 49-76.

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often read Moll as a champion of women and proto-feminist ideals; however, these readings gloss over Moll’s equally important disapproval of wives like Mistress Gallipot, who flirt with gallants and behave lewdly simply out of boredom and moral weakness.

The myopia of many modern readings of The Roaring Girl arises because the resurgence of critical interest in the play coincided with the height of second-wave feminism in the 1970s-80s. Somewhat predictably, these critics seized on the temptation to identify the subject of the play and the woman who inspired it as an early instance of advocacy for women’s rights. Mary Beth Rose considers Moll a direct dramatic incarnation of the cross-dressed virago in the Hic Mulier/Haec-Vir pamphlets, arguing that her portrayal signals authorial sympathy with ‘sexual non-conformity, female independence, and equality between the sexes’.36 Viviana Comensoli argues that Moll asserts an alternative system of values that contradicts the normative ideal of companionate marriage. Jean Howard (who in recent work has tempered her earlier readings) argues that the play stages multiple and contradictory representations of sexuality, marriage and gender roles; Moll ‘lodges a critique of the specific material institutions and circumstances which oppressed women in early modern England’,37 even though London society is shown to have no place for her in the end. Although other readings, such as Jane Baston’s and Marjorie Garber’s, make the contrary argument that Moll’s treatment in the play eventually reaffirms patriarchal order, these are still framed according to a misleading binary. While these

36

Mary Beth Rose, ‘Women in Men's Clothing: Apparel and Social Stability in The Roaring Girl’, English Literary Renaissance, 14 (1984), 367-91 (368).

37 Jean Howard, ‘Sex and Social Conflict: The Erotics of The Roaring Girl’ in Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage, ed. Susan Zimmerman (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 180.

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analyses are valuable, they nevertheless limit readings of the play to a binary set of interpretations and make the assumption that Moll must either subvert or support the existing gender norms.

Deborah Jacobs cautions against readings that employ a ‘feminist discourse that is willing to rigorously historicize material conditions of women’s existence but still retains a transhistorical resistant “woman” and is, furthermore, determined to find “her” in other cultures’.38 She aptly observes that critics of The Roaring Girl have tended to minimize the performative, material experience of the play in favor of projecting evidence of modern gendered discourse. This is perhaps understandable given that The Roaring Girl has primarily been ‘read’ as a text;39 however, it is preferable to dispense with these anachronistic readings altogether and focus on the way the play questions the possibility of straightforward charactery and undermines the assumptions attendant upon names like ‘Moll’ and labels like ‘whore’.

Marjorie Garber has drawn attention to the fact that in The Roaring Girl, Mary and Moll seem to be parallel figures and can be read as two sides of the same coin: Sebastian wants the first Mary, so he pretends to want the other; both are dressed up in men’s clothing by the same tailor and in the end, the second Mary becomes a stand-in who is finally replaced by the first (that they share the name ‘Mary F’ is also a calculated similarity).40

38

Deborah Jacobs, ‘Critical Imperialism and Renaissance Drama: The Case of The Roaring Girl’, in Feminism, Bakhtin, and the Dialogic, ed. Dale M. Bauer and Susan Jaret McKinstry (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 79-80.

39 There are no records of performances of the play between 1611 and 1951 (T. S. Eliot grumbles in 1927 that ‘In The Roaring Girl we read with toil through a mass of cheap conventional intrigue’). T. S. Eliot, ‘Thomas Middleton’, in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed.

Frank Kermode (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 189-95 (189).

40 Contrary to Garber, Howard sees a clear distinction between Mary and Moll, and wonders if the actors who played the two characters in the Jacobean theatre would have been different in stature, in order to register ‘the contrast between the charming androgynous boy/woman and the

19

The connection between Mary and Moll is part of our experience of the play from the start. In the prologue, the authors explain their purpose and give a clear explanation for why the Moll of this drama will not satisfy some audience members’ expectations for how her character should be. They describe other roaring girls, including women who defy city authorities, the whore who ‘sells her soul to the lust of fools and slaves’ and finally, the citizen’s wife whose questionable activities can lead to her husband’s bankruptcy. Their roaring girl is none of these, they tell us, and they introduce her finally as ‘Mad Moll’ promising that their drama will present her life. But when the prologue ends, it is Mary Fitzallard who first appears on stage, dressed as a seamstress. Mary’s identity is kept ambiguous throughout her dialogue with the bombastic servingman, Neatfoot, and her own soliloquy.

In her effort to frame The Roaring Girl as a tidy rehabilitation of a transgressive figure, Jane Baston describes this scene as the establishment of a ‘model woman’ against whom the ‘Other—the bad woman’ (Moll) ‘is shown as strange and monstruous.’41 For this scene to fit into her reading, Baston assumes that the audience immediately recognizes Mary as a paragon of virtue—an expectation which, I would argue, has no textual basis. We know nothing about Mary when she appears on stage, and the ensuing dialogue pointedly calls her virtuousness into question, resisting any attempt to read her simply as a ‘paradigm of woman’.42 A closer look at the opening scene will allow us to re-imagine the audience’s experience of the development of these two characters.

more frightening, but alluring, hermaphroditical adult female’. Howard, ‘Sex and Social Conflict’, 181.

41 Jane Baston, ‘Rehabilitating Moll’s Subversion in the Roaring Girl’, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 37 (1997), 317-35 (11-2).

42 Ibid.

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The play opens with an anonymous woman on stage; the audience is unaware both of her name and of the fact that her costume is a disguise. The servant, Neatfoot, asks her whom she wishes to speak to, calling her ‘sweet damsel, emblem of fragility’ (1.2-3), and ‘fairest tree of generation’ (1.8); however, his diction does not establish her ‘chastity’ and ‘modesty’, as Baston would have it, but instead make obvious what he presumes her purpose is. ‘You shall fructify in that which you come for: your pleasure shall be satisfied to your full contentation’ (1.6-7) he says, telling her that when his master is ‘erected’ (1.9), he will bring him to her. Neatfoot plains clear that she is little more than a piece of flesh to satisfy his master’s sexual needs, now that his hunger has been satisfied by food. When asked for her name, Mary’s use of the phrase ‘falling-bands’ (1.16) not only ‘puns on bond (her precontract with Sebastian) and banns, part of the betrothal ritual’43 but also the removal of garments, and the action associated with what Bellafront’s pimp calls the ‘falling trade’ (6.37) in The Honest Whore. Neatfoot then indecorously bids her to ‘venture [her] modesty in the hall amongst a curl-pated company of rude serving-men’ and take what they have to offer, the sexual implications of which are patently obvious. He invites her to drink wine and then ‘Our young master shall then have a feeling of your being here’ (1.27). Up to this point, although Mary Fitzallard is presented as meek and timid, her status as a chaste woman has been severely undermined by her interlocutor.

Neatfoot’s sexualized diction has the same effect as Lucio’s greeting to Isabella in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure: ‘Hail, virgin, if you be—as those cheek-roses / Proclaim you are no less’ (1.4.16-7). Lucio’s words pointedly call attention to the equivocal nature of appearances and signal the

43

Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, ‘The Roaring Girl’, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, ed. by Coppélia Kahn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 721-77 (725).

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potential deception in Isabella’s virginal complexion. In both cases, the elaborate verbal formulations of virtue have the effect of mocking, not affirming it. At Neatfoot’s suggestion, we wonder who this seamstress is and suspect that she must be up to no good. Mary Fitzallard’s identity is not revealed until later in the scene, and in the absence of any other information about her, the audience is led to make the natural assumption that she is the ‘Moll’ that the prologue has just described. Even after Sebastian addresses her as ‘Guy Fitzallard’s daughter’, he calls her ‘Moll,’ and the audience might reasonably believe that she is the ‘Mad Moll’ of the prologue. Only after Sebastian describes the other Moll to Mary do we begin to realize that we have not yet met the titular ‘Roaring Girl’. Moll Cutpurse first appears in Scene 3, after she has been repeatedly discussed and described by other characters. In this opening scene we observe Neatfoot using exaggeration and innuendo to manipulate how we perceive Mary. He successfully casts Mary in a dubious light because we know nothing else about her. She exemplifies the malleability of our impressions, and serves as a silent visual reminder of this later in Scene 8. The first scene prepares us for the rest of the play, during which we are led to repeatedly question the reliability of the characters’ performances. The many ambiguities in Scene 8, the multiple voyeuristic levels and the differing perspectives that these generate probe us to wonder how reliably a name can signify a character. Sebastian, Mary, and even Moll are shown to be variable canvases, as spectators arrive at very different conclusions about the subjects they’re presented with, depending on what they seek to find.

The Roaring Girl foregrounds the problems involved in extrapolating a person’s character from their name or social label, a practice for which the

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stakes rose as social power became increasingly predicated upon credit.44 Craig Muldrew vividly depicts the complex, mutual financial obligations that bound people together across boundaries of class and wealth. Contrary to the parameters that define modern economic calculation, ‘in early modern discourse about the market, economic trust was interpreted in terms as emotive as other forms of human interaction such as neighbourliness, friendship and marriage.’45 Deciphering a person’s character and determining his or her trustworthiness (or, alternatively, discovering how to appear trustworthy to others) was not only an important social skill, it was essential for economic success.46 Dekker and Middleton’s play shows that beyond mere hermeneutic difficulty, often the things we claim to ‘know’ about a person are grounded in our own biases.

In The Roaring Girl, the two Mary Fs conspicuously share a name but represent very different kinds of women. Mary Frith is a swearing, pipesmoking transvestite and Mary Fitzallard is Sebastian’s timid, rather dull fiancée. While initially they could not be more different, the connection of these two characters through one name generates a channel of transfer between the two, whereby certain qualities of one gradually rub off on the other. Sir Alexander, a justice of the peace and the senex iratus of this play, fears that his son’s purported fiancée will turn out to be a whore on account of her name: ALEXANDER

Methinks her very name should fright thee from her,

SEBASTIAN

And never trouble me.

Why is the name of Moll so fatal, sir?

44

This theme is not unique to city comedy; tragedies like The Duchess of Malfi also tackle these issues.

45 Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (London: St. Martin’s, 1998).

46 See Ibid., 148-72.

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ALEXANDER

Many one, sir, where suspect is entered, Foreseek all London from one end to t’other More whores of that name than of any ten other.

(4.157-162)

In Sir Alexander’s view, women named ‘Moll’ are predisposed to whoredom.

He points out the correlation between the name and sexual promiscuity, whilst Sebastian argues that Moll should be praised all the more for not following the example of the women with whom she shares a name. Unbeknownst to his father, Sebastian’s defence of Moll also applies to his true beloved, Mary Fitzallard. Moll herself draws attention to their shared name when she brings the couple together later, ‘I pitied her for name’s sake, that a Moll / Should be so crossed in love’ (8.66-67). That ‘Mary’ and ‘Moll’ are variations on the same name enables the audience to consider the idea that the virgin/whore dichotomy may ultimately be two sides of the same coin. The nightmare for the Alexanders of the early modern audience lies in this subtle infection of the chaste female figure with the need to transgress gender divisions even as she pursues a traditional union.

Middleton and Dekker defy the audience’s nominal expectations for both characters by problematising their names. Their onomastic strategies reveal much about both playwrights and characters and affect how we perceive the latter in performance. Unlike Jonson and Shakespeare, Middleton does not favour any particular practice of naming throughout his dramatic career. He rarely employs exclusively cratylic or hermogenic onomastic principles in any of his plays, choosing instead a variety of naming methods depending on the effect he aims to achieve with each character.

In Cratylus, Socrates declares that in naming, we ‘give information to one another, and distinguish things according to their natures’. Middleton’s practices of naming tend to do the opposite, making us question the

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assumptions we attach to names or labels by demonstrating that the range of behaviours a person can engage in is much broader than what we might expect if we adopt a cratylic attitude toward their name. Contrary to Jonson, who consistently favors cratylic naming in both his comedies and his masques, Middleton’s habits of nomenclature change throughout his career between 1603 and 1621. In The Phoenix (1604) for example, Middleton uses overtly cratylic, single-word, italianate names like ‘Lussurioso,’ ‘Falso’, and ‘Fidelio’ to mark the moral qualities of his characters, whereas in later plays such as A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1611), character names like ‘Maudline Yellowhammer’, ‘Oliver Kix’ and the unnamed Welsh Gentlewoman generate subtler connotations. Throughout his career Middleton experiments within the cratylichermogenic spectrum, using surnames, oxymorons, and anonymity to invite different responses from his audience.

As modern readers, our experience of naming in these plays differs greatly from that of early modern audiences. Present day playgoers are usually furnished with a program containing a list of the characters’ names, along with their function within the play world, and their connections to one another; as readers, we are also given speech headings that designate the speaker of each line and reinforce the extent to which each character is defined by his or her name. An early modern audience would have lacked both of these tools and would only have been able to learn the characters’ names when the author chose to reveal them. Soubriquets, disguises, and role doubling would have made it additionally difficult to be sure who was speaking. Names could be withheld and revealed at opportune times; names could be changed and used to give dimension to characters or to dislodge their fixity. In Act 1, Scene 2 of Measure for Measure, the bawd enters for the first time to the line ‘behold, where Madam Mitigation comes’ (1.2.35); an audience lacking former exposure

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to the play might reasonably assume that this is her name. She later referred to as ‘Mistress Overdone’ in Act II, but this occurs in her absence (2.1.75).

Besides the Duke, she is the only character who is never asked her name and who is never addressed by her name while she is on stage.47 All other characters in the play are either asked for their name or addressed directly; even the executioner is addressed by name when he is summoned (‘What ho, Abhorson; where’s Abhorson there?’ 4.2.15). The character of the bawd, however, is notably detached from any concrete proper name although, according to Pompey, she has many.48 This ‘nomenclutter’, as Randall McLeod calls it, resists the editorial obsession with ascribing ‘primary or transcendent unity to the notion of individual, isolated character’.49 The playwright’s decision to not pin her down by naming her on stage emphasises her dramatic slipperiness and raises the possibility that if a bawd can have any name (or many names), conversely, a character of any name might be a bawd. Eventually, of course, ‘sainted’ Isabella herself becomes a ‘Madam Mitigation’ for Angelo.50

47

In the Folio’s list of characters, the Duke is called ‘Vincentio’ but nowhere else in the play is this name mentioned.

48 Pompey points out that she has had nine husbands and is ‘Overdone by the last’ (2.1.191); she has therefore had at least ten different names.

49 Random Cloud [Randall McLeod], ‘‘The Very Names of the Persons’: Editing and the Invention of Dramatick Character’, in Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, ed. David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 88-96 (93).

50 Over the course of two decades, John Jowett and Gary Taylor have amassed evidence for their case that the Folio text of Measure for Measure is in fact Middleton’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s original play. They argue that in particular, the bawd and her name are products of this revision. The disjuncture in her lines between 1.2.49-60 (in which she heralds the news of Claudio’s arrest) and 1.2.70-6 (in which she does not know who he is or why he is being carried to prison) seems to allow for the possibility of either a compositing error or the incursion of another hand. While there appears to be insufficient evidence to support Jowett’s general contention that the bawd figure ‘must belong to the adaptation’, her brief monologue (‘Thus, what with the war, what with the sweat, what with the gallows, and what with the poverty, I am custom-shrunk’; 1.2.67-9) bears a resemblance to the complaint of a bawd named Prigbeard in Middleton’s The Blacke Booke, who grumbles about his ‘bad takings all the last plaguy summer, that there was no stirrings, and therefore [he is] undone for want of doings’

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While textual names may seem to be comfortingly solid anchors, their static uniformity is itself artificial. Early modern speech headings are inconsistent at best, and are often symptoms of editorial choice and interpretation. In the first printed edition of A Trick to Catch the Old One, published in 1608 by George Eld, Witgood’s mistress is given the speech headings ‘Cur’, ‘Curt’, and ‘Curti’, all abbreviations of ‘Curtizan’. We cannot be entirely certain if this choice was Middleton’s, a playhouse scribe’s, George Eld’s, or that of others who might have influenced the printing of the text.

Tiffany Stern reminds us that the full play texts we receive often began as messy patchworks of material that had to be integrated to form a single text.

Plot-scenarios, arguments, person-lists, actors’ parts, backstage-plots, songs, scrolls, prologues, and epilogues were often discrete documents (composed non-linearly) that would not always have been written into the playbook.51 In Jacobean printed plays where whore or bawd characters have a proper name but do not play substantial parts, it is common for them to be given speech headings that describe only their social role; the 1617 edition of Middleton and Rowley’s A Faire Quarrel gives Meg and Priss the headings ‘Bau’ and ‘Whor’ respectively, while the Folio edition of Measure for Measure gives variations on ‘Bawd’ for Mistress Overdone and ‘Clowne’ for Pompey.

For plays in which whore characters play a substantial role, however, naming practices vary. Both of the 1604 editions and the 1615 edition of The Honest Whore have ‘Bell’ for Bellafront. Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan, published in 1605, gives ‘Mar’ and occasionally the full name ‘Mary Faugh’ for (211-13). See their initial comments in Shakespeare, The Complete Works; Taylor and Jowett, Shakespeare Reshaped, 1606-1623; John Jowett, ‘Measure for Measure: A Genetic Text’, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1542-6.

51 Tiffany Stern, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 32-3.

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the ‘old woman’ who plays the bawd, and ‘Fran’ for Franceschina, the titular courtesan herself. Meanwhile in Middleton’s A Mad World (printed in 1608 but not by Eld), the whore character unequivocally is addressed by the proper name of Frank Gullman throughout the play, but in print she is still assigned the speech heading ‘Cur’.

Unlike The Roaring Girl, Middleton’s A Trick to Catch the Old One enjoyed sustained popularity; there have been sixteen editions of Trick since 1608, which have been relatively consistent in labelling Witgood’s mistress.

Virtually all of the play’s editors, including Alexander Dyce, Charles Laurence Barber, and George J. Watson refer to this character as ‘Courtesan’. Some editions use the early modern spelling ‘curtizan’ but George R. Price (1976) is alone in qualifying this in his dramatis personae, where she is listed as ‘The Curtizan Jane, formerly mistress of Witt-good’. Valerie Wayne, the play’s first female and feminist editor, is also the first to opt for the speech heading ‘Jane’ in the Oxford edition, although this proper name is spoken only once in the play.

Defending her decision, Wayne argues that there are two main problems with the speech heading ‘courtesan’; first, its fixity obscures the character’s many shifts in social identity and second, it reinforces a misconception of her as a professional prostitute (a woman who makes a living by trading sex for money and is available to anyone who can pay) whereas she has functioned only as Witgood’s mistress and remains chaste throughout the play itself.

As a character whose status shifts from mistress to widow to wife, ‘courtesan’ seems an inaccurate way to describe her; however, many other city comedy characters also play different roles and assume new names throughout the action. In A Mad World, My Masters, Follywit spends a large portion of the play under the alias ‘Lord Owemuch’, but Oxford editors Peter Saccio and

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Celia Daileader do not air any possibility of altering his name in the play text.

There is something fundamentally different about the courtesan’s case in Trick that requires particular editorial attention. Perhaps the first reason arises from the fact that even while many comedic characters assume other roles, they clearly possess stable proper names that anchor them to a primary identity; even the minor character, Hoard’s niece, possesses the proper name ‘Joyce’ (although Wayne notably retains ‘Niece’ as her speech-heading.) By contrast, the courtesan is given only a label and, as Wayne notes with discomfort, ‘We never learn her “real” name’. Pace Wayne, Middleton’s point is precisely that she does not have one.

Wayne argues that editorial fidelity to the original texts causes the modern audience to see the character like Hoard does. She also reminds us that readers are especially at risk of misunderstanding the character’s identity.

‘Members of a theatre audience can alter their perceptions of the character as she changes more readily than a silent reader can, since the textual label is a constant reminder of her first identity. A familiar proper name is, however, about as individualized as a physical body without specifying a social role.’52 There are problems with this solution. First, applying a static proper name to this character belies her initial namelessness (and the power of anonymity) as well as her function as a fundamentally flexible figure. The static name ‘Jane’ obscures the character’s shifting performance as much as does the label ‘courtesan’ because it is equally fixed. Middleton is committed to avoiding a single, fixed identity for this character from the beginning of the play. When first she enters the stage, Witgood calls her a range of names in

52

Valerie Wayne, ‘Introduction: A Trick to Catch the Old One’, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 375.

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addition to ‘courtesan’, from the possessive and pejorative ‘my loathing’, to the affectionate and domineering ‘best invention’. Within fourteen lines of her appearance, her designations are already numerous and disparate, generating an immediate lack of certainty about her character. Because Middleton denies this character a ‘real’ name, her performances become not merely mimetic but constitutive. By not giving this female character a ‘real’ proper name, Middleton purposefully establishes her fluidity and any textual label (even a proper name) inevitably undermines the potency of this dramatic choice.

Second, her character may not be constructed in a conventional way by abstract social labels, but it is certainly defined in relation to them as a figure that highlights their inadequacy. This character is given a profusion of labels throughout the play in numerous attempts to pin her down. Witgood refers to her as ‘my loathing’ (1.1.30), ‘courtesan’ (34), ‘round-webbed tarantula’ (34), ‘best invention’ (44), ‘widow’ (3.3.40; 52), ‘whore’ (5.2.111), virgin’ (160), and ‘aunt’ (162) while other characters in the play call her ‘rich widow’ (4.5.155), ‘Dutch widow’ (156), ‘wife’ (4.4.170), ‘whore’ (5.1.12), ‘quean’ (19), ‘courtesan’ (5.2.95), ‘strumpet’ (97), ‘common strumpet’ (124), ‘virgin’ (160), and ‘aunt’ (162). Her assumed name is ‘Jane Meddler’ (2.1.38) and once she is married she becomes ‘Jane Hoard’ (5.2.30). The fact that none of these labels ever seems wholly accurate or satisfying only serves to further emphasise her slipperiness. Her character is ultimately defined by her onomastic and social flexibility.

Finally, while proper names have fewer distinct, cratylic associations for modern audiences, the textual speech heading ‘Jane’ can obscure the onomastic complications that this character raises. Proper names often did specify social roles in early modern England. A name could profoundly affect how society viewed the bearer, as we have seen with Sir Alexander’s assumptions about

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Moll. Proper names in city comedy do not remain neutral but instead accumulate complex associations; a name, even a familiar one, can be just as heavily loaded as a social label like ‘courtesan.’

During the early modern period, the name Jone or Joan, a low form of Jane, became synonymous with ‘poor woman,’ as with Joan Trash in Bartholomew Fair and ‘greasy Joan’ from the refrain of the song at the end of Loves Labours Lost (5.2.920, 928). A popular ballad entitled Jone is as Good as My Lady (1620) casts Jone as the archetypal figure of all lower class girls who can bake, brew, spin, and card and are thus as good as any women of noble birth. The ballad particularly emphasises Jone’s (and all poor women’s) sexual availability and prowess: Any thing that longs to man, Joane will doe it if she can, She will seeke all sorts to please, And love no idlenesse or ease: Then good friend I say to thee, Joanes as good as my Lady. 53

In the end, the ballad all but transforms Jone into a whore, claiming that she could perform as well as any lady if she is dressed up in a ‘Silken Gowne’ with ‘paynted cloathes [and] phantasticke dyes’. While Wayne’s speech heading ‘Jane’ may allow the modern reader to approach her with fewer preconceptions about her character, it dulls the ultimate impact of her triumph by obscuring onomastic nuances that would have been apparent to early modern audiences.

Middleton intends for her namelessness—and its ensuing discomfort—to be felt.

Wayne’s editorial dilemma exposes the difficulty of having to assign textual names or labels for plays in which female identity is constructed as 53

Anonymous, Jone Is as Good as My Lady (London, 1620).

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conspicuously fluid. Like the now commonplace lists of dramatis personae, speech tags imply that characters are ‘solid entities that pre-exist their functions in the play, rather than illusions built up out of the simultitudinous dynamic of all the ingredients of dramatic art, of which character is only a part’.54 In Trick, this figure is constantly renamed: she self-identifies as a ‘courtesan’ (1.1.47) and assumes the fictional role of ‘widow of Anthony Meddler’ (4.4.254-5) only to be forced into marriage, becoming ‘wife to Walkadine Hoard’ (255). In their first scene together following the wedding, Hoard summons her with ‘Wife, Mistress Jane Hoard!’ (4.4.83-4) and uses the vocative ‘wife’ six additional times throughout the scene. When the trick is finally exposed, Witgood assuages Hoard’s concerns and pledges that ‘Excepting but myself, I dare swear she’s a virgin’ (5.2.159-60). By playing the whore, widow, wife, and virgin and disrupting the normative order of these roles, she destabilizes these early modern categories of female identity.

This character’s behaviour in each of her disparate roles belies her designations; Middleton shows her resolutely defying the implications of her own names and thereby undermines both the fixedness and mutual exclusivity of these female categories. As the ‘courtesan’, she behaves with surprising chastity, having only ever had sex with Witgood (an activity from which they both abstain throughout the course of the play). Jennifer Panek has pointed out that the ‘whore’ in A Mad World, My Masters is also notably chaste throughout the play; in contrast with the supposedly well-behaved wife of Harebrain, Frank Gullman’s particular skill as a courtesan seems to be abstaining from rather than indulging in illicit sex.55 Unlike even Frank, however, ‘Jane’ has not been

54

Cloud, 97-6.

Jennifer Panek, ‘The Mother as Bawd in the Revenger’s Tragedy and a Mad World, My Masters’, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 43 (2003), 415-37.

55

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‘common’ at any point in her life. She reminds Witgood at the beginning, ‘I have been true unto your pleasure’ (1.1.36), and Witgood confirms to Hoard at the end that she has not shared her bed with anyone else.

Playing the part of the widow, ‘Jane’ assumes the name ‘Meddler’. In addition to referring to the act of mixing and involving oneself in the affairs of others (as she does, in the familial conflict between Witgood and his uncle), the verb ‘to meddle’ also denotes the act of intercourse.56 The ‘widow’ also shares her name with the fruit of the medlar tree (mespilus germanica), colloquially called an ‘openarse’57 because of its widely gaping apex.58 The name is appropriate for a courtesan and a widow, both of whom would have already had sex; medlars were not eaten until they had partially rotted through the bletting process. To the early modern audience, Middleton’s use of the name ‘Meddler’ would have clearly designated the ‘widow’ as sexually available; again, however, she firmly resists this label and refuses to engage in premarital sex.

The Host tells Lucre, Witgood’s uncle, ‘I know my mistress will be married ere she go down, nay I’ll swear that. For she’s none of those widows that will go down first and be married after’ (2.1.67-70).

Finally, she not only defies the legal restrictions embedded in the label ‘wife’, she uses other characters’ expectations to her advantage. In assuming the title of ‘wife to Walkadine Hoard’, ‘Jane’ should relinquish all of her legal autonomy; however, she again thwarts the limitations of her label by proving that wives are not legally helpless. Having entered into the state of coverture, 56

In one ballad, the narrator specifically advises his listeners against this activity; lying in the debtors prison, he proclaims that if he ever walks free, ‘I never more will give consent, / To meddle with a whore’. Anonymous, A Caveat or Warning for All Sortes of Men Both Young and Olde, to Avoid the Company of Lewd and Wicked Woemen (London, 1620).

57 ‘Medlar’ in Gordon Williams, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature, 3 vols. (London: The Athlone Press, 1994), 871.

58 The medlar ‘resembles a small brown-skinned apple with a widely gaping apex and persistent calyx-lobes’; ‘medlar, n.1. OED Online, June 2010, Oxford University Press, 30 July 2010.

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she loses her legal entity and is subsumed under her husband’s, becoming a feme covert. In addition to removing a woman’s right to own property, make a will, and enter into contracts, coverture excluded married women from bringing suits against their husbands.59 Although ‘Jane’ might have been able to sue Hoard for defamation in the ecclesiastical courts for calling her a ‘common strumpet’, she would technically have been unable to bring civil action against him for forced marriage (‘rape’, in her words; 5.2.134). Tim Stretton has demonstrated, however, the legal application of coverture was neither automatic nor always consistent; ‘the day to day application of the doctrine to litigants depended on the diligence not of the courts, but of litigants themselves’60 A small but tenacious group of wives in the early modern period succeeded in bringing action against their own husbands. Middleton’s own mother, Anne, used coverture to her legal advantage when her second husband, Thomas Harvey, attempted to seize control over the portions bequeathed to his young step children. In December of 1586, Anne turned herself in to the authorities for defaulting on her children’s legal inheritances and Harvey, as her husband, was compelled to pay for her debts in full.61 In Middleton’s play, perhaps in tribute to his mother Anne, the courtesan character’s orchestration of both her own marriage and her defence in the final scene demonstrate a keen legal mind that is able to use the limitations of her status to her own benefit. Although the audience is aware that ‘Jane’ very much desires marriage to Hoard, she often calls attention to the precariousness

59

Tim Stretton, Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 22.

60 Stretton, Women Waging Law, 130.

61 Gary Taylor, ‘Thomas Middleton: Lives and Afterlives’ in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, 31.

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of her position and demonstrates acute awareness of her vulnerability, even after she is legally married: ‘I’m yet like those whose riches lie in dreams’ (4.4.148). If she makes any claims to her own wealth that are later discovered to be false, Hoard will have legal grounds to divorce her, leaving her worse off than she began. Thus she must avoid using any words that could be turned against her in court. As Hoard and his two minions, Lamprey and Spitchcock, physically and verbally coerce her into a de futuro spousal, ‘Jane’ very cleverly lays the groundwork for her own future legal defense. Her only responses throughout this scene are ones of reluctance, and finally, she tells him ‘Alas, you love not widows but for wealth. / I promise you, I ha’ nothing, sir’ (203-4).

This statement is blithely brushed aside by the three men, but it is the crux of her protection against accusations that her marriage is invalid.

Ultimately, she displays her legal dexterity by pointing out that he is legally liable for her actions. Even if he chooses to decry her as a whore, she retains the title of ‘wife’. By demonstrating reticence during the spousal scene, she can now declare with confidence that she never sought marriage to Hoard.

She then carefully frames her legal threat, saying that if she had kin who would bring action against Hoard (since, as a married woman, she would technically be unable to sue her own husband) he could be charged with the very serious crime of enforced marriage, or ‘rape’.62 The gravity of her accusation may be difficult for modern audiences to comprehend because the fundamental nature of marriage has changed. As seen in the first chapter, legally binding marriages could be formed with relative ease and informality; enforced marriages were a genuine social problem that could have terrible consequences. Martin Ingram cites many cases in which men are

62

In Ford’s The Broken Heart (1633), Penthea believes herself to be married to Orgilus, and calls the consummation of her marriage with Bassanes ‘a rape’ (II.iii.80).

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compelled by social pressures, the woman’s family, or the rulings of ecclesiastical authorities to marry against their will63 and plays like George Wilkins’ The Miseries of an Enforced Marriage (1605) and A Yorkshire Tragedy (1608),64 based on the story of Walter Calverley, dramatise the disasters that can occur when marriage is not entered into consensually.65 The Calverley case was notorious and became the subject of drama, murder pamphlets, and popular ballads; the issue of enforced marriage would certainly have been present in the minds of Middleton’s audience, adding a chilling frisson to ‘Jane’s’ accusation.66 The church court records are littered with examples of women who are unhappily forced into marriages. Amy Cooke’s mother forced her to marry a ‘lewd idle fellow’ and Joan Boarer was compelled ‘through the importunity of divers of her friends and against her own full allowance and approbation’ to marry Alexander Strugnell.67 Valerie Wayne has shown how Middleton supplies ample details that would have made the character’s accusation of ‘rape’, a viable legal reality.68 Thus, firmly resisting the legal helplessness of

63

Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570-1640, 210-1, 25.

Of uncertain authorship, although the title page claims it is ‘Written by W. Shakespeare’. It is included in the Oxford Middleton and Stanley Wells makes the case, alongside David J. Lake and others, that the play is primarily, if not entirely, by Middleton.

65 Calverley was forced by his guardian to break off an earlier engagement and marry Philippa, daughter of Sir John Brooke. Ultimately, burdened with debt and deranged with drink, Calverley murdered two of his children and attempted to kill his wife; he was executed by pressing at York Castle on August 5th, 1605.

66 Wilkins, Miseries; A Yorkshire Tragedy; Two most Unnaturall and Bloodie Murthers (1605); A ballad of lamentable murder done in Yorkshire, by a gentlemean upon two of his owne children, sore wounding his wyfe and nurse (1606).

67 Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 167.

68 Valerie Wayne, ‘The Sexual Politics of Textual Transmission’, in Textual Formations and Reformations, ed. Laurie E. Maguire and Thomas L. Berger (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1998), 179-210 (198-203).

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her status as a wife, ‘Jane’ demonstrates a remarkably sharp legal understanding and ability to use the limits of her status to her advantage.

Critics have historically been troubled by the function of the Dampit scenes (1.4, 3.4, 4.5), in which the abhorrent usurer verbally abuses his faithful servant, Audrey, and eventually drinks himself to death. Dampit has been seen as a specimen of Middleton’s realism;69 an instrument of catharsis, allowing the playwright and audience to vent their moral disgust for usury;70 or a means to temper our delight in the New Comedy narrative.71 While these perspectives have merit, one aspect of this character’s ‘interruption’ that has yet to be discussed is how the interaction between Dampit and Audrey brutally hammers home the arbitrariness of social labels.

Although his maidservant has done nothing to provoke his ire and is neither lewd nor excessively talkative, Dampit heaps increasingly vile and colourful slurs upon her, casting her as a gossip and a whore. She is called ‘Audreyprater’, ‘beggar’, ‘quean’, ‘bawd’, ‘base drudge of infortunity’, ‘kitchen-stuff drab of beggary, roguery and coxcombry’, ‘cavernesed quean of foolery, knavery and bawdreaminy’, ‘impudent quean of foolery, flattery and coxcombry’ (3.4.45-60), and later, ‘girnative quean’, ‘mullipode of villainy’ ‘spinner of concupiscency’, ‘babliaminy’, ‘unfeathered, cremitoried quean’, 69

Chakravorty, Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton, 60-1.

See Anthony Covatta, Thomas Middleton's City Comedies (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1973), 101-3; Alexander Leggatt, Citizen Comedy in the Age of Shakespeare (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 58; Richard Levin, The Multiple Plot in English Renaissance Drama (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 127-37; R. B. Parker, ‘Middleton’s Experiments with Comedy and Judgment’, in Jacobean Theatre, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (London: Edward Arnold, 1960), 178-99 (187-8).

71 See P. K. Ayers, ‘Plot, Subplot, and the Uses of Dramatic Discord in a Mad World, My Masters and a Trick to Catch the Old One’, Modern Languages Quarterly, 47 (1986), 3-18 (128); Joseph Messina, ‘The Moral Design of a Trick to Catch the Old One’, in ‘Accompaninge the Players’: Essays Celebrating Thomas Middleton 1580-1980, ed. Kenneth Friedenreich (New York: AMS Press, 1983), 112-28; George E. Rowe Jr., Thomas Middleton and the New Comedy Tradition (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 84-92.

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‘cullisance of scabiosity’ (4.5.28-54). In these lines, Middleton lampoons the slander cases that occupied the bawdy courts in legion. ‘Good words [and] sweet terms!’ Audrey replies, ‘to speak before a maid and a virgin’ (4.5.55-6).

As she swats away Dampit’s swarm of verbal confections, the audience is reminded of the extent to which such labelling (and libelling) bears little relation to a woman’s actual sexual status or behaviour. The Dampit scenes highlight what the rest of the play has demonstrated: the courtesan character’s ability to assume four different female roles demonstrates both her amplitude and fluidity as a woman, and the inadequacy of these categorizations of women.

She never completely and exclusively falls into any one of these four categories.

Middleton does not advance this point in an uncomplicated way. No matter how thoroughly ‘Jane’ proves these labels inadequate, she also exists in a society in which labels are tenacious. She never seems to be able to escape the pall of having been a whore, and even as a wife she is Jane Hoard (‘whored’).

Although Jane’s ability, like Moll’s, to ‘slip from one company to another’ (Roaring Girl 3.213) emphasizes that these categories and the women in them are far more fluid than magistrates and ministers would have liked, the connotations of her last names indicate that these same categories persist in subtle ways with all their attendant associations and stigmas.

Through the manipulation of names, labels, and categories, city comedies like these challenged the assumptions about female identity that were deeply embedded in early modern culture. While it may be too optimistic to consider these portrayals as indicative of broader social change, playwrights like Middleton who confront these complex issues demonstrate that early modern attitudes toward disorderly women (‘whores’) were not monolithic and fixed: instead, they were like the women themselves, multivalent and mutable.

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