Representing prostitution in Tudor and Stuart England (William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, Robert Greene, Thomas Dekker)

This dissertation examines literary and cultural representations of prostitution in Tudor and Stuart England, with a focus on the conversion narrative and comic drama. It historicizes early modern conceptions of prostitution through analysis of archival documents, such as the Bridewell Court Books, and less canonical printed texts, such as literary accounts of the siege of the brothel Holland's Leaguer. It studies the diverse, fluid and powerful discourse of "whoredom" deployed in courtrooms, streets, pamphlets, and theaters as communities and writers struggled to interpret, describe, and, often, control illicit sexual activity. I argue that prostitution existed at the border between an emerging market economy and an older, "gift"-based system of exchange, and that it produced a double-edged ideology and discourse that at once articulated the threat perceived in uncontained sexuality and expressed the fantasy of diffusing that threat. Prostitution thus generated profound conceptual and linguistic indeterminacy that itself became as dominant a feature of the texts studied here as the more expected rhetoric of containment and moralizing.; Interrogating traditional portrayals of "fallen women" and participating in contemporary epistemological controversies about the locus and meaning of sexual transgression, early modern English writers used prostitution to examine the perceived dangers of theatrical display; the interrelationships between sexual, social, economic and spatial transgressions; and the difficulty of evaluating human interactions in a market economy. Representations of prostitution in William Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure, Ben Jonson's The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair, Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton's The Honest Whore and Robert Greene's "The Conversion of an English Courtizen" thus figure forth cultural concerns about not only moral transgression and female disorder, but also social displacement, economic disruption and religious uncertainty. I argue that the texts in this study also dramatize the limits of strategies of comic fiction, such as the powerful cultural fantasies of conversion or of the reformative effect of socially acceptable marriages, to produce desired epistemological, social and narrative closure. Further, these texts exploit the indeterminacy of prostitution and its affinities to other more socially acceptable activities to engage in cultural critique.