Prostitution and Plastic Surgery in Seventeenth-Century England

Exchanging Flesh: Prostitution and Plastic Surgery in Seventeenth-Century England. Emily Cock Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English) Discipline of English and Creative Writing The University of Adelaide March 2013 Table of Contents Table of Contents ..................................................................................................................... i Table of Figures ....................................................................................................................... ii Abstract .................................................................................................................................. iii Declaration of Originality ........................................................................................................ v Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................... vi Note on the Text ................................................................................................................... vii Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 1 “Selling what they ought to give”: Selling Sex and Valuing the Body in The London Jilt...... 32 “The Custome of Sinning taketh away the Sense of Shame”: Shame and the Bawd. .......... 97 Part One ............................................................................................................................ 98 “Affecting glory from vices”: Negotiating Shame in Prostitution Texts. .......................... 98 Part Two .......................................................................................................................... 136 “My own Base Sex seduc’d me first to Sin”: The Role of the Bawd. ............................... 136 “Lead*ing+ ‘em by the Nose into publick Shame and Derision”: Pox and Plastic Surgery in the Seventeenth Century. ................................................................................................... 165 “Off Dropt the Sympathetic Snout”: Reading Rhinoplasty. ................................................ 220 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 263 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................ 267 Primary Sources .............................................................................................................. 267 Secondary Sources .......................................................................................................... 281 f Emily Cock Page i Table of Figures Figure 1: Henry Bennet, First Earl of Arlington, after Sir Peter Lely (c1665–1670). ............... 1 Emily Cock Page ii Abstract This thesis investigates discourses of shame, sexuality, disease, and the commoditised body in seventeenth-century England. I examine literary and non-literary sources relating to corporal interpretability and the exchange of human flesh in two areas: prostitution and plastic surgery. I consider the relationship between these exchanges and the individual’s access to social capital, and explicitly examine the role of shame in facilitating or hindering the trades. Through close readings of fictional and archival prostitution texts (especially The London Jilt), I examine representations of sexual and other bodily exchanges as fraught commodity transactions. In conjunction with this, I consider in detail the transplantation of purchased flesh allegedly involved in rhinoplasty, which also posited a shameful commodification of the body. The reconstruction of the nose was most prominently detailed by the Bolognese surgeon Gaspare Tagliacozzi in De curtorum chirurgia per insitionem (Venice: 1597), and he became synonymous with the highly controversial operation. Histories of plastic surgery currently state that after Tagliacozzi’s death in 1599, his procedure disappeared from medical knowledge. I demonstrate that this was simply not the case, and provide a thorough book history of an English translation of De curtorum chirurgia that was published in London in 1687 and 1696. In order to account for rhinoplasty’s stigmatization, I examine its association with syphilis and the shame associated with that disease, and the manner in which it was thought to enable the patient to ‘pass’ as healthy. I also trace the popular narrative around Tagliacozzi that suggested he would purchase the skin required for his graft from “the brawny part of *a+ porter’s bum”, and that it would shrivel and die when its donor Emily Cock Page iii did.1 This discourse provides an as yet unexamined archive through which to understand early modern England’s relationship with the commodification of living human bodies. 1 Samuel Butler, Hudibras, ed. John Wilders and Hugh de Quehen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), I.i.280. Emily Cock Page iv Declaration of Originality This work contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university or other tertiary institution to Emily Cock and, to the best of my knowledge and belief, contains no material previously published or written by another person, except where due reference has been made in the text. I give consent to this copy of my thesis when deposited in the University Library, being made available for loan and photocopying, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. The author acknowledges that copyright of published works contained within this thesis (as listed below) resides with the copyright holder(s) of those works. I also give permission for the digital version of my thesis to be made available on the web, via the University’s digital research repository, the Library catalogue, and also through web search engines, unless permission has been granted by the University to restrict access for a period of time. A version of Chapter Two, Part One appears as ‘Affecting glory from vices: Negotiating Shame in Prostitution Texts, 1660–1750’, in Performing Emotions, ed. Philippa Maddern and Joanne McEwan (Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming). Emily Cock March 2013 Emily Cock Page v Acknowledgements I can only offer my very sincere thanks to my supervisors, Dr Heather Kerr and Dr Lucy Potter, for their invaluable support, guidance and advice in all aspects of this project. I would like to thank the staff of the Barr Smith Library at the University of Adelaide for their ongoing assistance, and the special collections staff at the Universities of Aberdeen, Glasgow, and Edinburgh, and the British and Wellcome Libraries. I am also grateful to the internship program at Brepols Publishers for facilitating my archival research. The thesis is given with love to my parents, who have always provided unflinching support: to Dad, who taught me to love stories, and to Mum, who taught me to love books. My special thanks go to my sister, Kirsty, who has held the main charge of keeping me sane and enduring my ‘interesting’ discoveries. And to the friends, family, coworkers and fellow postgrads who have borne with my many inappropriately-timed remarks on syphilis, flogging, and prosthetic genitals. Emily Cock Page vi Note on the Text I have retained original spelling in all quotations. I have silently modernised the use of “u/v/w” and “i/j”, and long-s has been printed as “s”. Emily Cock Page vii Introduction Introduction Figure 1: Henry Bennet, First Earl of Arlington, after Sir Peter Lely (c1665–1670), © National Portrait Gallery, London. Emily Cock Page 1 Introduction His nose is the first thing that you notice. In the portrait that hangs in London’s National Portrait Gallery, Henry Bennet, First Earl of Arlington (1618–1685) appears with a black patch covering the top of his nasal bridge (Figure 1). The viewer is instantly distracted from the rich bronze silk cloak in which Bennet is draped, and forced to wonder why he has adopted a fashion usually associated in the seventeenth century with the fop, or the playhouse Lady of Pleasure. Moreover, injuries to the nose were in this period almost inevitably attributed to the rages of syphilis, or ‘the pox’. In Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle (c.1607), for example, the knight Sir Pockhole is unfortunate enough to find that the pox has “cut the gristle of *his+ Nose away, / And in the place *a+ velvet plaister stands”.2 Sir Pockhole denies the source of his disfigurement, but the joke lies in the fact it is evident to all. Was the pox the Earl’s trouble, too? In fact, no. Bennet’s “velvet plaister” was designed to draw attention to an injury he sustained while fighting for the Royalists in the Civil War. After the Restoration, he used the injury to curry favour with the King. It was a risky strategy, which faltered as his political influence fell. More favoured courtiers began to use the patch as a point of mockery, and Bennet found himself exposed to shaming for his politics, his personal quirks, and his attempt to control the interpretation of his body. A study of the relationship between this interpretability and the individual’s access to social capital is the focus of my thesis. Central to my study is the exchange of living human flesh in the practices of prostitution and plastic surgery, particularly rhinoplasty, and I examine the variety of exchanges that enabled, challenged, or accompanied these trades. 2 Francis Beaumont, The Knight of the Burning Pestle,

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