Shakespeare Among the Courtesans: Prostitution, Literature, and Drama, 1500-1650 by Duncan Salkeld (review)

As part of Ashgate's Anglo-Italian Renaissance Studies series, Duncan Salkeld's Shakespeare Among the Courtesans: Prostitution, Literature, and Drama, 1500-1650 looks at how early modern English dramatists drew upon Italian literary and cultural representations of prostitutes and courtesans, adapting them to appeal to English attitudes about sex workers. Following a brief overview of concubines in classical antiquity, Salkeld documents the appearance of courtesans in early modern Italian and English literary and dramatic texts, contrasting them with their real-life counterparts as seen through London court records and Anglo-Italian accounts of tourist encounters with prostitutes in Rome and London. "In classical literature," Salkeld argues, "courtesans are exclusively characters that belong to comedy. The Elizabethans turned them into figures of tragedy, and the Jacobeans re-absorbed them by marriage into city comedy" (20).

The first chapter lays the contextual foundation regarding prostitutes in classical culture and drama, focusing on the "meretrix" as a stock character in Roman comedy. In the sixteenth century, the comedies of Plautus and Terrence came to be a staple in the university curriculum at Oxford and Cambridge, where students studied and acted out the plays in their original language. Some English writers, however, were ambivalent, if not outright hostile, to dramatic performances of any kind, while others were more generally skeptical of the supposed value in presenting as negative exempla what Roger Ascham termed "sotle bawds" and "wilie harlots" (14). Courtesans also figure in English texts of this period as evidence of Italian depravity and inferiority. William Thomas's The Historye of Italye (1549), for instance, claims that the city of Rome maintained 40,000 courtesans primarily for the clergy's use.

Chapter 2, "English Prototypes and the 'foul disease,'" shows how early modern English writers transform the meretrix of the classical comedies into a symbol of civic malaise, one spectacularly afflicted with the social and spiritual effects of "venereal infection" (21). Using sexually transmitted infection as a metaphor for social, moral, and religious corruption, mid-sixteenth-century playwrights present the courtesan as endangering not only herself and the singular foolish young man but the entire society. The early English stage courtesan, Salkeld argues, represents the threat of contamination and engages in topical anxieties concerning England's youth, heresy and the split between Catholicism and Protestantism, and England's public health and economy. Salkeld also links the early modern theatrical and brothel industries through his inclusion of archival materials from Bridewell Hospital regarding charges of illicit sexual activities against inhabitants and the owners of the Bell and the Cross Keys inns, both early theatrical performing spaces.

"Travellers and the Sex Trade in Early Modern London" is the focus of chapter 3. Counterbalancing English xenophobia about the sexual dangers faced by English travelers in Italy, accounts by Italian visitors to England as well as the writings of Thomas Nashe provide evidence of an equally thriving sex industry in and around London. Not only could sex work be purchased through the city's broad network of brothels and prostitutes, but Salkeld documents what seems to be a somewhat common—and therefore extremely unsettling, if not surprising—trade in children. Victim-blaming appears to have been de rigueur, as court archives record the punishments meted out to children for being "whores" since the age of ten or eleven.

Chapter 4, "In Between Renaissance Sheets: Making Contact," seeks to recover a sense of sexual practice among early modern Italians and English people. Here, the focus is on the Zoppino dialogue attributed to Pietro Aretino, who also created sonnets to accompany the sexually explicit engravings of Marcantonio Raimondi's 1524 I Modi ("postures" or "positions"), Pierre de Bourdeille's Les Vies des Dames Gallantes, Thomas Nashe's "The Choise of Valentines," and "scandalous case details recorded in legal prosecutions" (69). Here Salkeld uncovers what he describes as a "scopophobic fascination with women as objects of hate" in Aretino's writings...