Whores and their Metaphors in Early Modern English Drama Myra E. Wright Department of English McGill University, Montréal August 2009 A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy © Myra E. Wright 2009 i Abstract Several clusters of metaphors were routinely used to represent the sex trade onstage in early modern England. Close philological study of these figures reveals that even the most conventional metaphors for whores and their work were capable of meaning many things at once, especially in the discursive context of the drama. This project follows a practice of reading that admits multiple significations for the words used by characters on the early modern stage. I argue that metaphors are social phenomena with consequences as varied and complex as the human interactions they’re meant to describe. Each chapter treats a different set of images: commodities and commercial transactions, buildings and thoroughfares, food and drink, and rhetorical and theatrical ingenuity. Using methods based on the study of conceptual metaphor in the field of cognitive linguistics, I trace the deployment of conventional figures for prostitution in plays by William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, and John Marston. I also introduce occurrences of these metaphors in other genres (news pamphlets, prose narratives, homilies, medical manuals, and so on) to show that they were part of pervasive cultural patterns. The readings below dwell on the figurative associations that were most available to early modern writers as they fashioned prostitute characters for the stage—metaphors commonly taken for granted as literal descriptions of sex work. An understanding of the social force of metaphor begins with the realization that words convey more than any writer, printer, or actor intends. The language of prostitution in the early modern theatre is therefore both common and complex, much like the characters it conjures. ii Résumé Pendant la Renaissance, divers grappes de métaphores étaient utilisées couramment dans les représentations théâtrale de la prostitution en Angleterre. Des études minutieuses philologiques des métaphores pour les putains et leur travail révéler que même les plus conventionnelles pouvaient signifier plusieurs choses à la fois, particulièrement dans le contexte discursif du théâtre. Le projet suit un procédé de lecture qui admet plusieurs significations pour les mots utilisés par des personnages de la Renaissance. Je soutiens que les métaphores sont des phénomènes sociaux qui ont des conséquences aussi variées et complexes que les interactions humaines qu’elles sont censées décrire. Chaque chapitre met en évidence une différente série d’images: les marchandises et transactions commerciales, les bâtiments et les voies urbaines, la nourriture et les boissons, l’ingénuité rhétorique et théâtrale. En utilisant des méthodes basées sur l’étude des métaphores conceptuelles dans le domaine de la linguistique cognitive, je retrace le cortège des figures conventionnelles de prostitution dans les pièces de théâtre de William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, et John Marston. Je signale aussi l’existence de ces métaphores dans d’autres genres littéraires (pamphlets de nouvelles, narratives en prose, homélies, manuels médicaux, etc.) pour démontrer qu’elles faisaient partie des tendances culturelles omniprésentes. Les explications ci-dessous s’entendent sur les associations figurées qui étaiaent les plus à la disposition des écrivains de la Renaissance en façonnant les personnages des prostituées—les métaphores qui étaient souvent considerées comme constituant les descriptions littérales du travail sexuel. Pour bien comprendre la force sociale de la métaphore, il faut realiser d’abord que les mots communiquent beaucoup plus qu’un écrivain, un imprimeur, ou un acteur les destine. La langue de la prostitution dans le théâtre de la Renaissance est donc également commune et complexe, toute pareille aux personnages qu’elle crée. iii Acknowledgements This study was carried out with a fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Additional financial support came in the form of research assistantships and teaching assignments in the Department of English at McGill. I thank the students and teachers of literature who have made these years of study so very rewarding. Wes Folkerth has been a greater influence than he will ever know, as is always the case with a superb teacher. I am indebted to him and his family for their wonderful hospitality. I have learned much from the inquisitive zeal and scholarly grace of Paul Yachnin, who guided me through an earlier phase of research. My dear colleagues Jen Shea and Karen Oberer read and commented on the draftiest drafts of these chapters, until every numb was mouth. Cléa Desjardins has been generous in countless ways. She and her father Pierre offered much-needed assistance as translators. My work is suffused with gratitude for the loving support of my parents and grandparents who, in the purest sense, made it possible. Yael Margalit, a diligent typing coney if I ever saw one, has been uniquely important to me as a fellow student of textiles and early modern drama. And finally I acknowledge the unparalleled attentiveness of Matt Frassica—like Wilbur, I realize “[i]t is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.” Contents Abstract i Résumé ii Acknowledgements iii Introduction 1 I. Custom 15 Inflation and Depletion in Measure for Measure 17 Selling Sex and Textiles in The Honest Whore 26 Bartholomew Fair Trade 32 Aunts and Uncles in the Prodigal Plot of A Trick to Catch the Old One 38 A Chaste Maid and Others Kept in Cheapside 47 II. Drives and Dwellings 58 The Matted Chamber, Common Coach, and Kept Women of A Mad World, My Masters 59 Doors Open and Closed in The Honest Whore 71 A Doll’s House in The Alchemist 83 III. Meat and Drink 95 The Roasted Bawdy of Bartholomew Fair 97 Stewed Prunes and Stewed People in Measure for Measure 110 The Whore’s Appetite in Northward Ho 121 Intoxication and Purgation in The Second Part of The Honest Whore 134 IV. Cunning 149 The Close Courtesan and her Functions in A Mad World, My Masters 151 Wit, Fit, and Common Knowledge in The Alchemist 162 The Whore’s Will in The Dutch Courtesan 173 Conclusion 182 Works Cited 189 1 Introduction In 1622 Henry Gosson published a small quarto called A Common Whore, which consists of a lighthearted polemic against illicit sex, composed in verse by the popular poet John Taylor. The text was packaged with promises about its ameliorative social force, addressed “To no matter who” (A2), and sold in London’s Pannier Alley. Its author revels in the seemingly boundless potential of the central metaphor he’s chosen, enjoying both the irony of naming his invective after its subject and the fruitful comparison of whore to book. For the conceit to work, Taylor has to present his Whore as “strange,” “common and yet honest” (A3v), the exception that proves the rule. Through the easy availability of the pamphlet, women’s promiscuity will be halted; textual circulation will counteract sexual circulation. Taylor’s readers are beneficiaries of a system of distribution, and whores are its victims: All, from the Cottage, to the Castle high, From Palatines unto the peasantry, (If thei’le permit their wisedomes Rule their will) May keepe this Whore and yet be honest still. Yet is she Common, unto all that crave her, For sixe pence honest man or Knave may have her, To be both turn’d and tost, she free affords And (like a prating Whore) she’s full of words, But all her talke is to no other end, Then to teach Whoremaisters and Whores to mend. She in plaine termes unto the world doth tell, Whores are the Hackneyes which men ride to hell, And by Comparisons she truly makes 2 A Whore worse then a common Shore, or Jakes. (A3v) Within the framing conceit—pamphlet as whore—the poet advertises the kinds of metaphors that make up the text: whore as horse, whore as toilet. The “plaine termes” in which Taylor’s Whore speaks are not unmetaphorical; they are, rather, the most conventional figures for illicit sexuality available in the language of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. But such expressions are no less convincing for their familiarity—Taylor boasts that “by Comparisons” his pamphlet “truly makes” whores appear differently. The reader (“no matter who”) is expected to seek such persuasiveness and to take pleasure in it. Like A Common Whore, the study at hand isn’t just about conventional morality; it’s also about metaphor. And my text has instructive aspirations of its own—it seeks “to mend” certain academic habits of emphasis by being differently “full of words.” Behind and throughout this project is a belief in the social force of metaphor. My reading is motivated by a desire to see what language might reveal about culture and ideology without the speaker’s or writer’s full awareness. The goal of the chapters that follow is to begin to gauge the gathered force of repeated but seemingly inconsequential figures of speech in which one thing is described in terms of another. In pursuing and parsing such commonplaces in a number of early modern plays, I follow the implicit readerly advice of cognitive linguists like George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Mark Turner, and Zoltán Kövecses. These thinkers urge us to set aside our previous assumptions about metaphor and turn instead toward our own everyday expressions. As their studies make clear, it can be difficult to recognize the metaphorical in our own thinking. To read Lakoff and Johnson’s seminal book Metaphors We Live By is to be amazed at the total ubiquity of unlikely comparisons in casual, modern English.