ABSTRACT

When Thomas Hobbes wrote in 1651 that in a time of war the life of man could be ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’, 1 he might have added that the lives of women in peace time were often no different. Plague, infection, sickness, hunger, and the risks of childbirth and venereal infection were all serious dangers women faced. Those of the ‘better’ or ‘middling’ sort might be insulated against some of these hazards but despite a constant flow of theological, astrological, medical, legal, and social publications urging all the qualities that made for a good wife, virgin, maid, or daughter, dearth ensured that prostitution still flourished. Hunger, ignorance of biology and threadbare education made out-of-wedlock pregnancies a daily fact of early modern life. But prostitution was a problem far easier to denounce than to solve, a reality that begins to register in the literature. Writers continued to warn against the arts, glances, deceits and ruses of courtesans but, by the early seventeenth century, they were also concerned with wider anxieties that illicit sex inevitably raised. In particular, dramatists such as Thomas Dekker, John Marston and Thomas Middleton began to depict prostitution as a social problem in need of a social solution. 2 In the emerging genre of civic comedy, place would need to be found for the courtesan, to accommodate, recuperate, or absorb her into the social fabric, or otherwise make her disappear. A sub-genre of what might be termed ‘marry-a-punk’ plays emerged in which rakes were wedded to whores, but, as the ending of Measure for Measure indicates, this move could have uneasy effects. Marriage to a prostitute left narrative complications unresolved, and implied that just as whores could become wives, so also wives might prove wicked. Dramatists could achieve what the authorities could not by converting the courtesan into a wife, or revealing her as truly innocent, but doing so allowed these equivocations to persist. Furthermore, it ignored the fact that even as playwrights transformed their prostitutes into citizens, hardship and poverty would continue to turn citizens into prostitutes in the alleyways, gardens, messuages, tenements and chambers of the city.