Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Prefatory Note
- Introduction
- 1 Sparing the Rod and Hating the Son: Early Plays, 1513–77
- 2 The Sacred Wholsome Lore: Aristotle and Prodigality
- 3 London Prodigals: City Comedies, 1597–1613
- 4 Fathers of Destruction: The Villainous Usurer
- 5 Wasted Goods, Wasted Flesh: The Prodigal's Harlots and Mother Bawds
- Coda
- Bibliography
- Index
- Studies in Renaissance Literature
5 - Wasted Goods, Wasted Flesh: The Prodigal's Harlots and Mother Bawds
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 October 2019
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Prefatory Note
- Introduction
- 1 Sparing the Rod and Hating the Son: Early Plays, 1513–77
- 2 The Sacred Wholsome Lore: Aristotle and Prodigality
- 3 London Prodigals: City Comedies, 1597–1613
- 4 Fathers of Destruction: The Villainous Usurer
- 5 Wasted Goods, Wasted Flesh: The Prodigal's Harlots and Mother Bawds
- Coda
- Bibliography
- Index
- Studies in Renaissance Literature
Summary
But when this thy sonne was come, which hath deuoured thy good with harlots, thou hast for his sake killed the fat calfe.
Luke 15.30If, as their ends, their fruits were so, the same, Bawdry and Usury were one kind of game.
Ben Jonson‘Twas never merry world since, of two usuries, the merriest was put down, and the worser allowed by order of law.
Measure for Measure (III.i.275–7)I move now from one kind of usury to another, from moneylending to bawdry and, with bawds, the women they employ. The popular corollaries drawn between usurers and bawds by usury critics are commonly recognised, yet little analysed. The usurer and the bawd figure as gendered versions of the same anxiety: that in the absence of appropriate paternal authority and masculine self-restraint, disorderly concupiscence will deconstruct familial and gendered hierarchies. Both breed unnatural children, the one money and the other diseases, and in these plays the abandonment of appropriate familial structures and paternal authority results in sexual disease positioned as the inheritor of the family estate. But bawds and the women they employ do not only appear in these plays because of their corollaries with usury; they are, unlike usurers, rooted in the Lukan text, as seen in the epigraphic quote at the head of this chapter. These are ‘the prodigal's harlots’ and they are, even more than usurers, a mainstay of dramatic adaptations of the parable.
In this chapter, I have three main goals. The first is to chart the origins and interpretation of the prodigal's harlots and their evolution into the sex workers of early modern drama. My second is to advance an analysis of the early modern potential to understand bawds and usurers as the same kind of profession.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Prodigality in Early Modern Drama , pp. 221 - 256Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2019