Abstract
This study focuses on the representation of prostitution on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. After delineating the historical, religious, and juridical contexts of medieval and early modern whoredom and prostitution, this study provides a close reading of representations of prostitution in several late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century plays, including works by Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton and Ben Jonson. Arguing that the theatrical convention of transvestitism allows pre-Interregnum playwrights to use the sexual ideology of whoredom as an analogy, the dissertation traces the playwrights’ use of prostitutes to indict various “social ills,” from the chaotic proto-capitalist market to the class-climbing of the middling sort. The study concludes by claiming that these analogies are foreclosed when the Restoration actress takes the stage. Once the female body inhabits these roles, these roles are no longer analogous; instead, the staged prostitute is limited to the embodiment of the patriarchal nightmare of uncontrolled feminine sexuality.
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