The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street (30 page)

Trulls, trots, molls, punks, queans, drabs, stales, nuns, hackneys, vaulters, wagtails - in a word, whores - were everywhere, but professional prostitution was only part of it. According to the same writers the theatres were a general free-for-all of assignations, pick-ups and uninhibited flirtations, a place where ‘light & lewd disposed persons’ congregated for ‘actes and bargains of incontinencie’. We have already noted that ‘Cheapside dame’ spotted by Henry Fitzgeoffrey, and that seductive lady whose heavily perfumed head-tire gave Father Busino such palpitations. They are not tarts, but they are women on the look-out for fun and sex:

Citizens wives . . . have received at those spectacles such filthie infections [moral corruption] and have turned their minds from chaste cogitations, and made them of honest women light huswives . . . There is the practising with married wives to traine them from their husbands, and places appointed for meeting and conference.

A minor poet writing in 1600 particularly associates the Globe (‘the Bank-side’s round-house’) with this sort of promiscuity - it is a place where ‘light-tayld huswives’ come ‘in open sight themselves to show and vaunt’. The Elizabethan spelling ‘huswife’ reminds us that a housewife could also be, etymologically at least, a ‘hussy’.
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The theatre is also a place where a man brought his mistress rather than his wife - thus Dekker’s lovely image in
Satiromastix
(
c
. 1601) of a well-breeched citizen sitting ‘in your penny-bench theatre with his squirrel by his side cracking nuts’.

Stephen Gosson, a playwright who became a moral scourge of the theatre, describes the procedures of a pick-up -

In the playhouses at London it is the fashion of youthes to go first into the yarde, and to carry theire eye through every gallery, then like unto ravens, where they spy the carrion, thither they flye, and presse as near to the fairest as they can . . . They give them pippines, they dally with their garments to passe the time, they minister talke upon all occasions, & either bring them home to theire houses on small acquaintance, or slip into tavernes when the plaies are done.
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Thus Wilkins the theatre man, doubtless a playgoer as well as a playwright, relates directly and perhaps profitably to his other career in the sex-trade. His is just the sort of tavern one might ‘slip into . . . when the plaies are done’, though in his case it would be the northern playhouses - and especially the Red Bull in Clerkenwell, in business from
c
. 1604 - which would supply this clientele.

The association between the playhouse and prostitution is perennial, but in the years 1604-5 we find a particular concentration of interest in prostitution on the stage. In this brief period there were three plays onstage featuring prostitutes in the title-role - John Marston’s
The Dutch Courtesan
, ‘playd in the Blacke-Friars by the Children of her Maiesties Revels’ in
c
. 1604 and published in 1605; and Thomas Dekker’s two-part drama,
The Honest Whore
, the first with contributions by Thomas Middleton, performed by Prince Henry’s Men (the former Admiral’s Men) in 1604, and the sequel performed by the same company in 1605. Middleton, meanwhile, as well as contributing scenes to
The Honest Whore
, published two prose-pamphlets in 1604, of which one (
The Black Book
) is largely set in the brothel-quarter of Pickt-hatch, and the other (
Father Hubberd’s Tales
) frequently features prostitutes. Another ‘courtesan’, Frank Gullman, appears in his
A Mad World, my Masters
(
c
. 1605).

In Marston’s
The Dutch Courtesan
a young gallant, Freevill, is about to marry, and must break off his long liaison with the eponymous ‘courtesan’ Franceschina. The jilted prostitute is furious, and when Freevill’s high-minded friend Malheureux conceives an unexpected passion for her - ‘That I should love a strumpet! I, a man of snow!’ - Franceschina promises herself to him, but only if he will kill Freevill. The two friends hatch a plot: Freevill goes into hiding so Malheureux can pretend he has killed him. So successful is the pretence, however, that Malheureux is arrested for murder. Freevill reappears in time to save him; his stratagem, he claims, was to cure Malheureux of his unseemly passion for the prostitute. Franceschina is condemned to be whipped and imprisoned.

Though punitive at the end, the play derives much of its energy from the sexual frisson of Franceschina. She is variously called a ‘pretty, nimble-ey’d Dutch Tanakin’, a ‘soft, plump, round-cheek’d froe [Dutch
frow
, woman]’, a ‘plump-rumped wench with a breast softer than a courtier’s tongue’, an ‘honest pole-cat of a clean instep, sound leg, smooth thigh, and the nimble devil in her buttock’, and so on. She is the epitome of the high-class tart, the Christine Keeler or Heidi Fleiss
de ses jours
. When Malheureux refers to her as a whore, Freevill reproaches him: ‘Whore? Fie, whore! You may call her a courtesan . . .’Tis not in fashion to call things by their right names.’ She plays on the lute and the cithern, singing songs with suggestive lyrics about nightingales sleeping next to ‘prickles’. She has an enchanting if silly foreign accent - ‘Vill you not stay in my bosom tonight, love?’; ‘O mine aderliver [Dutch
alderliefest
= dearest] love vat sall me do?’ - but she seems more hybrid ‘continental’ than merely Dutch. Her name is Italian, and her language contains many French inflections (‘my shambra’ for chamber, and ‘Foutra ’pon you’). Her clientele is also cosmopolitan: she consorts ‘with the Spaniard Don Skirtoll, with the Italian Master Beieroane, with the Irish Lord Sir Patrick, with the Dutch merchant Haunce Flap-dragon, and specially with the greatest French’. Some of her clients are ‘wealthy knights and most rare bountiful lords’, and some are upright citizens - her ‘custom’ is ‘not of swaggering Ireland captains, nor of two shilling Inns o’ Court men, but with honest flat-caps, wealthy flat-caps [London tradesmen]’ (2.2.13- 17, 28-30).

A similar characterization of the upmarket prostitute is found in Middleton’s pamphlets of 1604, evoked with a certain lip-smacking relish:

He kept his most delicate drab of three hundred [pounds] a year, some unthrifty gentleman’s daughter . . . She could run upon the lute very well, which in others would have appeared virtuous but in her lascivious . . . She had likewise the gift of singing very deliciously, able to charm the hearer, which so bewitched our young master’s money that he might have kept seven noise of musicians for less charges . . . She had a humour to lisp often, like a flattering wanton, and talk childish like a parson’s daughter . . . He would swear she spake nothing but sweetmeats, and her breath then sent forth such a delicious odour that it perfumed his white satin doublet better than sixteen milliners.
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In Dekker’s
Honest Whore
- nominally set in Italy but with much that is particular to London, not least the powerful scenes in Bedlam and Bridewell (probably Middleton’s work) - the eponymous whore is Bellafront (‘pretty face’). In Part 1 she is converted to ‘honesty’ by Count Hippolito, but when she declares herself in love with him he rejects her. Hippolito marries the daughter of the Duke of Milan, and Bellafront is married, unhappily, to the worthless Matheo. The play was a big success, and Dekker obliged with a rapidly written sequel, in which the bleakly ironic development of her marriage is that Matheo wants her to return to prostitution to pay for his extravagant lifestyle. She meets Hippolito again, now a widower: this time it is he who falls in love with her, and tries to seduce her; and this time it is she who virtuously resists. The play ends with a coda described on the title-page as ‘Comicall passages from an Italian Bridewell’, in which various prostitutes are paraded before being taken away for hard labour or whipping. One of these, Katarina Bountinall, comments ironically on the idea of a whore turning honest: ‘Foh! Honest? Burnt [deflowered] at fourteen, seven times whipped, six times carted, nine times duck’d, search’d by some hundred and fifty constables, and yet you are honest? Honest Mistress Horse-leech, is this world a world to keep bawds and whores honest?’ (2778-81).

The play of Shakespeare’s which belongs to this time, and which mirrors these preoccupations, is
Measure for Measure
. Its first recorded performance was at court in December 1604; it had possibly played at the Globe shortly before this. It is a play which confronts many difficult social issues, but one of its central concerns is the control of prostitution - or rather the impossibility of this: ‘Does your honour mean to geld and splay all the youth of the city?’ - and it features a comic duo in the brothel business, the bawd Mistress Overdone and the pimp Pompey Bum. The setting is Vienna, but in all respects other than its name is London in 1604.

Its central story concerns the attempted seduction by the acting governor of the city, Angelo, of the virtuous and virginal Isabella, a novice nun, in return for the life of her brother, who has been condemned to death for ‘lechery’ under new harsh laws enacted by the same Angelo. These new laws have a counterpart in reality. On 16 September 1603, a royal proclamation ordered the demolition of houses and rooms in the suburbs frequented by ‘dissolute and idle persons’: ostensibly a precaution against the further spread of the plague, but in effect an edict against the brothels of the suburbs.
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This is precisely reflected in the opening of the play, where Mistress Overdone receives the dire news from her pimp:

POMPEY: You have not heard of the proclamation, have you?

Mrs OVERDONE: What proclamation, man?

POMPEY: All houses in the suburbs of Vienna must be plucked down.

Mrs OVERDONE: And what shall become of those in the city?

POMPEY: They shall stand for seed - they had gone down too but that a wise burgher put in for them.

Mrs OVERDONE: But shall all our houses of resort in the suburbs be pulled down?

POMPEY: To the ground, Mistress.

Mrs OVERDONE: Why here’s a change indeed in the commonwealth! What shall become of me? (1.2.85-97)

Pompey’s comments about the city brothels are typical of the play’s constant bawdy undertone. ‘Stand for seed’ ostensibly means they are left standing like seed-corn, but within the brothel context ‘stand’ and ‘seed’ refer to erections and ejaculations. Also characteristic is the world-weary observation of profiteering in high places: a ‘wise burgher’, one in the know, has bought up these condemned properties on the cheap.

For Overdone this is a disaster to cap a bad year, for ‘what with the war, what with the sweat, what with the gallows, and what with poverty, I am custom-shrunk’. Editors gloss this as a close reflection of events of 1603 - the continuing war with Spain, the plague, the bout of executions further to Jesuit-linked plots against King James (the ‘Main’ and ‘Bye’ plots), and the slackness of trade in the deserted city. In Middleton’s
Black Book
, entered on the Stationers’ Register in March 1604, the pimp Prigbeard similarly complains ‘of their bad takings all the last plaguy summer’ when they were ‘undone for want of doings’.
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The brothel world of Mistress Overdone and Pompey Bum is concisely drawn. Overdone (also called ‘Madam Mitigation’ - she ‘mitigates’ the pangs of sexual desire) is described as a ‘bawd of eleven years continuance’, and prior to that she was doubtless a prostitute herself. ‘You that have worn your eyes out in the service’ probably refers to her suffering from the optical atrophy which is a symptom of advanced syphilis. Her brothel in the suburbs ‘plucked down’, she moves into the city and opens up another. She calls it a ‘hot-house’ - originally a
bagno
or bath-house, but now just a synonym for a brothel: another word was ‘stew-house’, from which the familiar Jacobean term ‘the stews’ to mean a red-light district. ‘I have seen corruption boil and bubble till it o’errun the stews,’ says the Duke at the beginning of
Measure
.

We enter this ‘hot-house’ or brothel only in the words of others - mostly Pompey and one of his customers, Master Froth. It is in appearance a tavern. Pompey is its ‘tapster’ or ‘drawer’ - as we would say the barman - who is also a pimp: a ‘parcel [part-time] bawd’. The place serves food and drink, though the only victuals we actually hear of are ‘stewed prunes’, sitting in a ‘fruit dish’ which the garrulous Pompey specifies as ‘a dish of some three pence’. Prunes are often associated with brothels: possibly they were considered aphrodisiac. Pistol, an habitu’ of bawdy houses, ‘lives upon mouldy stewed prunes and dried cakes’ (
2 Henry IV
, 2.4.155).
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The house has an ‘open room’ called the Bunch of Grapes (the rooms of taverns were named, as at the Boar’s Head in East Cheap, where there were rooms called the ‘Half Moon’ and the ‘Pomgarnet’, or Pomegranate). This open room is something like a public bar. A fire burns in the grate - the room is ‘good for winter’. Elsewhere there are private rooms, booths and snugs. Here we might find Master Froth, ‘a man of fourscore pound a year, whose father died at Hallowmas’, sitting in a ‘lower chair’; and the prattling gallant Lucio who had earlier got Kate Keepdown with child; and a selection of the other customers listed by Pompey, all of them ‘great doers in our trade’. There is Master Caper in ‘a suit of peach-coloured satin’, purchased on credit from Master Three-pile the mercer; and ‘young Master Deep-vow, and Master Copperspur, and Master Starve-Lackey the rapier and dagger man, and young Drop-heir that killed lusty Pudding, and Master Forthright the tilter, and brave Master Shootie [Shoe-tie] the great traveller, and wild Half-can that stabbed pots . . .’ (4.3.9-18). These are the gallants and men-about-town who are Mistress Overdone’s clients at her tavern-cum-brothel in the city.
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