ABSTRACT
This chapter describes women, who achieve wealth, status, or power through sexual transgression, has played both a central and contradictory role in literature: they have been admired, celebrated, feared, and vilified. It focuses on the presentation of the courtesan in the sixteenth century, dramas by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Lyly view the courtesan as a symbol of social disease and decay, transforming classical conventions into English prejudices. The chapter describes Lucy Negro of Clerkenwell, who was a woman of considerable renown with a long and successfully disreputable career behind her as a brothel madam, and she was still very much a part of the world of the theatres. Rose Browne as Rose Flower had worked as a prostitute since at least 1574, when Elizabeth Barnewell served as her bawd. She was later married to one 'Prise' and lived in Shoreditch.
