The
image above depicts a scene in the company of the worst characters
of the underworld. It was common for such bawds to join together
at late hours of the night to engage in orgies and drunken
brawls. [28]
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During
early modern England, a woman was considered “pure”
and chaste” prior to having sex with a man [25].
Virginity was held in high regard to the point that a virginal woman
became more valuable [25].
Therefore, women who lost their “maidenhead”
were less appreciated, and the whore, in particular, was the most
devalued for her incontinence. The whore’s promiscuity not
only made her seem cheap, but it also served as grounds to condemn
her as sinful. In Thomas Dekker’s The Honest Whore,
Hippolyto tells Bellafront, “You eat but to supply your blood
with sin” [9].
Hippolyto criticizes Bellafront for earning money sinfully to survive
only so that she could continue to practice the sin of prostitution.
Hippolyto detests the whore for selling her body to make enough
money to subsist, and then continue to do so. He is disgusted by
her accordance for men to use her body for pleasure. Again, he enunciates
to Bellafront,
“…For
your body
Is like the common shore that still receives
All the town’s filth. The sin of many men
Is within you…”
[9]. |
This
image of a whore’s body depicts not only the outside perception
of its filth, but also the disgust with a whore’s acquiescence
to the indulgence of a male’s desire.
The intolerance of prostitution within the early modern England
society is evident in "The
Reign of the Whore Discovered and her Ruin Seen",
a transcript portraying judgment day in April 1659 of whores in
England. In this text, the Quakers of England proclaim, “…and
long hath her golden Cup
passed up and down the Nations, which is full of abominations of
her Fornication, whereby the Nations have been *corrupted,
and the inhabitants of the Earth made drunk: But now is the hour
of her Judgement come, and coming; now is her skirts lifted up,
and her secret parts discovered, and discovering and the Beast on
whom she rode and rides, is seen, and his colour is known, and her
secret Chambers of Imagery is found out, and her Sorceries and Witchcrafts
are made manifest, and many people on whom she fate, and over whom
she reigned, are redeemed from under her, and reigns over her in
Christ the Power of God, which redeems and which preserves in the
redemption…” [28].
The Quakers portray the whore as a representation of evil, luring
men under her reign through the temptations of her body. The interesting
part of this passage; however, is that the men who succumb to the
whore’s are redeemed by God, making them seem to be the victims
of the whore’s power. The whore’s sin though, is unforgivable,
for she is the wicked fiend who is thought to be the sole culprit
of this sin. The iniquitous portrayal of the whore in this text
is similar to Robert Greene’s description of a whore in his
article, “A Notable Discovery of Cozenage”. Alan Haynes
comments on Greene’s depiction of whores in Sex in Elizabethan
England, claiming that Greene’s prostitutes “are
rapacious professionals full of tricks to cozen any male lustful
enough or stupid enough to succumb to their performances”
[15].
Both the Quakers and Greene agree that a whore is a despicable woman,
who preys on men, enticing them to sin. The difference, however,
between the Quakers, claiming to be “Ministers of God”
and Greene, who seems to commend thieves of the underworld for their
witty trickery, is that Greene believes a prostitute, or any other
underworld inhabitant, can redeem herself of her sins, whereas the
Quakers find a whore’s sins to be inexcusable. However, seventeenth-century
England’s disallowance of prostitution became apparent through
government reform and punishment of whores.
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