Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Male Varlets
Female prostitution wasn't the only game in town. Early-modern London had "a thriving trade" of "[m]ale-male prostitution," according to Valerie Traub in The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (167). Traub points us to a 1597 text called The Theatre of Gods Judgement, written by a Puritan, Thomas Beard, who "tightly link[s] the erotic deviation of sodomy to the gender deviation of effeminacy" (167).
Saturday, September 26, 2009
The Infinite Variety of Names for Whoredom
According to the Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales, Shakespeare "uses forms of the word 'fairy' in at least ten of his plays. . . . [and] mentions elves in five plays; nymphs in eight plays, Venus and Adonis, The Passionate Pilgrim, and the Sonnets; sprites or supernatural spirits in 20 plays, Venus and Adonis, Troilus and Cressida, and The Rape of Lucrece; goblins and hobgoblins in five plays. These references, as well as marked presence of fairies in the works of Spenser, Drayton, and Lyly, among many other contemporaries, indicate that fairy folk and legends were familiar to Shakespeare's audience."
Shakespeare clearly liked his fairies and populated his work with them. But for prominence in Shakespeare's works, fairies and their ilk come in a distant second behind prostitutes and their kind. Whereas many of the Bard's works include references to fable-folk, virtually all of his works contain references to prostitutes, panders (i.e., pimps), and/or houses of prostitution. In fact, I can't think of a single play that fails to touch on prostitution. If we follow the Oxford Companion's logic cited above, Shakespeare, his contemporaries, and his audience were far more familiar with prostitution than they were with fairy folk and legends.
My goal in this post is to begin cataloging the astounding variety of names and terms that Shakespeare and his contemporaries use to refer to
1. female prostitutes;
2. male prostitutes;
3. panders (male or female "brokers" of prostitution); and
4. sites of prostitution (e.g., brothels).
If you can help me to add to this list, or if you find that I have incorrectly included a term here, please let me know.
Male Prostitutes
Hamlet famously refers to himself as a whore in the "O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I" soliloquy (2.2). Hamlet is decrying his inability to take action; he complains that he's all talk and no action, that he "Must like a whore unpack my heart with words, / And fall a-cursing like a very drab,/ A stallion." As for the word drab, Polonius has referred earlier, in 2.1, to drabbing as one of several vices in which young men get themselves mixed up. The Riverside editors gloss drabbing as "whoring." Hamlet uses these two words -- whore and drab -- even though both usually refer to female prostitutes, particularly rather low ones. But then he switches: stallion. No two ways about it here -- stallion refers to a male, literally an uncastrated male horse (what we'd call a stud today) used for breeding, and virtually every editor, including the Riverside fellows, glosses this as a "male whore." But here we run into a textual problem: The First Folio does not use stallion; it uses scullion, a "kitchen menial," and to many editors the First Folio is sacrosanct. But scullion? Really? Maybe. Either way, Hamlet adds to our whore vocabulary three names.
Shakespeare clearly liked his fairies and populated his work with them. But for prominence in Shakespeare's works, fairies and their ilk come in a distant second behind prostitutes and their kind. Whereas many of the Bard's works include references to fable-folk, virtually all of his works contain references to prostitutes, panders (i.e., pimps), and/or houses of prostitution. In fact, I can't think of a single play that fails to touch on prostitution. If we follow the Oxford Companion's logic cited above, Shakespeare, his contemporaries, and his audience were far more familiar with prostitution than they were with fairy folk and legends.
My goal in this post is to begin cataloging the astounding variety of names and terms that Shakespeare and his contemporaries use to refer to
1. female prostitutes;
2. male prostitutes;
3. panders (male or female "brokers" of prostitution); and
4. sites of prostitution (e.g., brothels).
If you can help me to add to this list, or if you find that I have incorrectly included a term here, please let me know.
Male Prostitutes
Hamlet famously refers to himself as a whore in the "O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I" soliloquy (2.2). Hamlet is decrying his inability to take action; he complains that he's all talk and no action, that he "Must like a whore unpack my heart with words, / And fall a-cursing like a very drab,/ A stallion." As for the word drab, Polonius has referred earlier, in 2.1, to drabbing as one of several vices in which young men get themselves mixed up. The Riverside editors gloss drabbing as "whoring." Hamlet uses these two words -- whore and drab -- even though both usually refer to female prostitutes, particularly rather low ones. But then he switches: stallion. No two ways about it here -- stallion refers to a male, literally an uncastrated male horse (what we'd call a stud today) used for breeding, and virtually every editor, including the Riverside fellows, glosses this as a "male whore." But here we run into a textual problem: The First Folio does not use stallion; it uses scullion, a "kitchen menial," and to many editors the First Folio is sacrosanct. But scullion? Really? Maybe. Either way, Hamlet adds to our whore vocabulary three names.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Welcome
"Shakespeare's Strumpets" explores the close relationship between English Renaissance drama and prostitution -- two entertainment industries that jostled for business largely in the Liberties of London, especially in Southwark. The blog is academic, but not. I'm a college English professor (part-time), and I studied Shakespeare and Renaissance drama in a PhD program at a major university. I'd hoped to write my dissertation on the dramatists' views of and relationship to the prostitutes and brothels who were some of their closest neighbors (and competitors!). I didn't finish the dissertation; instead, I got a life! But this literary-historical subject still fascinates me, and I'd like to share it here as I further my research and develop more ideas. With luck, my ideas will be augmented by the ideas of visitors to the blog.
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