ABSTRACT
“Ghosting Shakespeare in Hulu's Harlots” analyzes the series’ deployment of Shakespeare to interrogate performance of class and gender in the context of eighteenth-century London sex workers. Classified as a period “feminist workplace drama,” Harlots enters fictional London brothels to dramatize the complexity of female efficacy on the margins of mainstream society, both as projected against the world of genteel society and of the streets. Several episodes show the sex workers’ appropriation of Shakespeare's plays to enhance the allure—and perceived value—of the services they provide and to facilitate their status into courtesans, powerful social agents in eighteenth-century London society. In following the series’ inspiration to Harris’ List of Covent Garden Ladies (1750–1790), via “borrowed” Shakespeare's texts, and to the famous Shakespeare's Head tavern that served as a refuge of actual eighteenth-century sex workers, this chapter examines the workings of Shakespeare's cultural capital as a lodestone for perceived authenticity of genteel class and normative boundaries of human identity. Ultimately, the show presents a radical rejection of the Bard's capital and rewrites the terms on which this capital usually operates to present a vision of a female-centered community that foregrounds female efficacy, power, and joy.
