Abstracts
The following abstracts describe papers presented at the 'Strangers and Aliens in London and Toronto: Sex, Religion, and Xenophobia in Marston's The Dutch Courtesan' conference that ran 22-23 March 2019. Read more about our Conference Discoveries here. Revised versions of these papers are published in Early Theatre 23.1 (June 2020). These abstracts and the Conference Discoveries page provide an archive of work-in-development before and following the conference. Scholars without access to ET prior to 2021 will be able to consult the overviews and abstracts on this website.
Keynote
Speaker — Martin Butler (University of Leeds):
‘The Dutch Courtesan and the Oxford Marston’
This paper situates the play in the context of the ongoing Complete Works of John Marston, under preparation for Oxford University Press, the first such collected critical edition ever to have been created. It will discuss the edition's aims and working practices, and the new picture of Marston which we expect to emerge from it. The Dutch Courtesan is often encountered in isolation, as Marston's single best-known and most-read play. This paper approaches the play in the context of Marston's career and publication history as a whole, and the textual and theatrical relationships which work on the edition is gradually coming to disclose.
Respondent — Jeremy Lopez (University of Toronto)
Read more about the keynote in our Conference Discoveries.
Panel Presentations
Meghan C Andrews (Lycoming College): ‘Freevill the Pimp and Beatrice’s Ring: Circulation and Commodification in and out of The Dutch Courtesan’
This paper re-situates The Dutch Courtesan in the theatrical landscape of 1604-05. I argue that examining its debts to Shakespeare’s suburban comedies, particularly The Merchant of Venice and Much Ado About Nothing, helps us better understand not just the play but also Marston’s navigation of the post-Poets’ War theatrical landscape and his move to the Queen’s Revels. Merchant’s influence is difficult to trace on the phrasal level, but I suggest that the symbolism of the circulation of rings, Freevill’s orchestration of Malheureux’s near-execution, and the partial scapegoating of Franceschina were inspired by Shakespeare, who also views critically xenophobia and the commodification of individuals. Further, Freevill’s control over bodies and sexualities and his mercenary attitude towards marriage characterize him as a combination of Portia and Bassanio’s worst qualities, making explicit and uniting in one (male) figure the uneasy relationships Merchant often leaves implicit. Similarly, Marston’s repurposing of “Kill Claudio” for Franceschina and Malheureux (instead of Beatrice and Benedick’s descendants Crispinella and Tysefew) highlights male anxiety over female sexuality as empowering, and relative to Much Ado makes clear that London’s societal problem is not (male anxiety over) female chastity, but predatory male sexuality. Ultimately, I suggest that Shakespeare influenced Marston’s city comedy more than critics have recognized. But by extending Shakespeare’s critique of male attitudes, Marston created for himself a more moderate, mature position as a critic of sexual vice than he had previously inhabited, and helped his drama better fit the Queen’s Revels and that company’s relationship to the King’s Men’s repertory. Read more about Andrews's work in our Conference Discoveries.
Tom Bishop (University of Auckland): ‘“La bella Franceschina”: Italian traces in Marston’s Dutch Courtesan’
As editors of the play routinely note, Marston’s Dutch Courtesan does not have a Dutch name, but an Italian one, familiar to Continental theatre-goers as that of a 'servetta' character in commedia dell’arte troupes and scenarios. This paper asks what the background to this choice of name might have been, offering a history of the commedia Franceschina, her standard plots, her antecedents, and her known exponents. Closer acquaintance with these details of theatrical history throws interesting light on Marston’s choice of name, and possibly on his attitude, and that of his cultural moment, to Anglo-Italian theatrical relations. Read more about Bishop's work in our Conference Discoveries.
Andrew Fleck (University of Texas at El Paso): ‘“To Creep Into the Bowels of Our Own Kingdom”: Familism, Disease, and the Body Politic in John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan’
John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan has recently been read within the context of broad Protestant Apocalypticism, at the expense of the national interests of an English playwright writing a London city comedy for a primarily English audience. And yet, The Dutch Courtesan does blur the boundaries of national identity, with both English and non-English characters who profess adherence to the heterodox sect known as the Family of Love. Familism, as it is sometimes called, had its origins in the Low Countries and came to England, as many unorthodox religious outlooks did, with migration spurred by Continental Catholic persecution. Such imported religious views were often described as an “infection” by those who sought to maintain the Church of England’s hierarchical control over the spectrum of belief and practice in early modern England. In this paper, taking the play’s references to disease and health of the body as a way of thinking about the larger body politic, I argue that despite the blurring of differences that seems to occur with the introduction of Familism into a brothel in London’s liberties, Marston’s play does eventually demarcate national differences that preserve a sense of English identity by the end of his comedy. Read more about Fleck's work in our Conference Discoveries.
Liz Fox (University of Massachusetts Amherst): ‘Seductive Performance and Cosmopolitan Desire in The Dutch Courtesan’
As targeted ads and phishing scams exploit our desires in the information age, The Dutch Courtesan offers twenty-first century audiences, as it did seventeenth-century audiences, a reflection on the uses of seduction and desire in commercial culture. Although some early modern economists narrowly viewed the global marketplace in binary terms of native and foreign markets, The Dutch Courtesan offers a more nuanced encounter with the expanding web of demands, performances, goods, services, and values that defined the early modern world as London transformed into a centre of mercantilism. First and foremost, Marston’s play displays a range of cosmopolitan types and performances: the eponymous courtesan, Franceschina, circulates among a variety of foreign clientele, performing suggestively on her lute; the native conman, Cockledemoy, obscures his national identity with a range of foreign accents and costumes, accumulating wealth through his tricks. Their hybrid appeal to a diverse set of consumers shows us the dangers of excessive desire as the fashion for foreign commodities intensified in the period. But at the same time, the play is itself a commodity in London’s emerging marketplace. First on stage and then in print, Marston and his collaborators capitalize on similar fascinations of their audience members. Franceschina’s and Cockledemoy’s explicitly theatrical performances, then, invite us to consider the ways in which salesmanship –seduction and trickery –preys on consumer interests to fuel industry in a global market. The play thus both displays and satirizes the precise desires that structure the cultural marketplace in which it first emerged. Read more about Fox's work in our Conference Discoveries.
Erin Julian (University of Toronto, Duch Courtesan project RA/dramaturge): ‘“Our hurtless mirth”: What’s Funny about The Dutch Courtesan?’
Given its themes of misogyny, xenophobia, and religious violence, The Dutch Courtesan is an unpromising vehicle for laughter. This paper draws from observations and discussions about the play's humour that took place during the rehearsal to articulate how the 2019 Dutch Courtesan harnessed the play's humour to expose the fractures in the play's London community, and to suggest the fatalism of city comedy competition. The production pushed plots and characters to ever greater extremes of absurdity and laughter, right up to the breaking point of audience laughter, to the point of anxiety and pain. In these moments the production opened a critical eye to the worst of the city’s practices, spotlighting, in the process, those who are most vulnerable to urban violence: women, sex workers, and religious and ethnic 'others'. Read more about Julian's work in our Conference Discoveries.
Noam Lior (University of Toronto): ‘Performing the City: Marston’s London 1605 and Toronto 2019’
Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan, like many city comedies, presents a paradoxical view of London. On the one hand, the city is proudly cosmopolitan and international, multi-cultural and multi-linguistic. On the other hand, the city is deeply anxious about its identity, and which influences are to be seen as invasive or corrupting. Franceschina, the eponymous courtesan, is othered through her nationality and accent, while other characters are othered through affiliation with a minority religion. Identity and otherness form the framework of the comedy, in which laughter often signals a distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’. This paper sketches out the play’s concerns with identity and otherness as a link between 17th-century London and 21st-century Toronto, a link which forms the basis for our production. Read more about Lior's work in our Conference Discoveries.
Lucy Munro (King’s College London): ‘Marston, The Dutch Courtesan, and Theatrical Profit’
This paper will explore the place of The Dutch Courtesan within the traditions and conventions of all-boy performance and the structures of its original playing company, the Children of the Queens Revels. We have known for over a century that John Marston held a share in the Queens Revels company, but the effects of this knowledge for our understanding of his plays have still to be fully explored. Drawing on fresh documentary evidence, I will revisit what we know about the company’s shareholding, management, personnel and properties in order to shed new light on the ways in which The Dutch Courtesan draws on the resources of the company to create both theatrical pleasure and profit. Read more about Munro's work in our Conference Discoveries.
Sophie Tomlinson (University of Auckland): ‘Reading Lording Barry, The Family of Love, with The Dutch Courtesan: Bodies, Spirits, Scatology, and Society’
Facets of The Dutch Courtesan and The Family of Love suggest that the plays were written in dialogue, considering the proximity in their dates of composition, their performance by boys companies, and their interest in the religious fellowship stigmatized by King James I as ‘that vile sect called the Family of Love’. Both plays offer a plethora of female characters, but while Marston’s plot requires the expulsion of the Dutch courtesan and the erotic disappointment of the Familist Mistress Mulligrub, by contrast, in Barry’s The Family of Love, the sole woman upbraided in the denouement is Mistress Glister, the doctor’s wife, whose flaws rate no larger than anger at her husband’s disloyalty and a fixation on cleanliness. I will also attend to the preoccupation with the humoral, excretory body, as I address the question of whether Barry’s play attempts something quite different from Marston’s. Read more about Tomlinson's work in our Conference Discoveries.
Rachel Warburton (Lakehead University): ‘“be not so passionate”: Whorish Anger in Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan’
Despite The Dutch Courtesan’s opening defense of prostitution, the play’s titular courtesan is the only character punished at the end of the play, indicating that 'misogyny [is] a structural principle in city comedy' (Rose 1988, 49). This paper will argue, however, that Franceschina is not punished for monetizing sexuality. Indeed, Courtesan exhibits an anxiety surrounding the overlap between prostitution and marriage familiar to readers of early modern city comedy. And Franceschina participates in early modern hierarchies of sex work that place Continental, learned Courtesans above (English?) street sex workers: she performs music for her clients, falls in love with one client, and refuses to take on new clients when he jilts her. That is, despite Freevill’s final condemnation of prostitution and his rescue of Malhereux from Franceschina’s clutches, Franceschina’s sex work is rendered (almost) respectable on a couple of fronts. Ultimately, I will argue, it is her vengeful anger, an emotion denied to the idealized Beatrice, that threatens the social order. I will also explore the intersections of illicit female sexuality and excessive emotions in The Insatiate Countess and Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore. Although Ford’s play is not a contemporary of Courtesan’s early performances, it is a near contemporary of Marston’s (disavowed) 1633 collection of plays. Moreover, ‘Tis Pity’s Putana appears indebted to both Franceschina and Beatrice’s nurse, Putifer. Certainly, both plays feature a spurned, vengeful adulteress who is ultimately tricked and punished at a wedding masque and whose non-standard language acts both as a register of her threatening anger and as dramatic justification for her violent expulsion from each play’s resolution. The idea that female emotional restraint and linguistic conformity demonstrate sexual propriety resonates today. Even in the wake of the #MeToo movement’s righteous anger, Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee was notable for her continued equanimity and rhetorical control. Brett Kavanagh, on the other hand, appeared almost unhinged in his testimony. While masculine anger is still not exactly endorsed it remains tolerated. Moreover, female anger continues to be inextricably linked to illicit sexuality. Read more about Warburton's work in our Conference Discoveries.
Roundtable
Speakers — Michael Cordner and Oliver Jones (York University):
‘A Conversation about The Dutch Courtesan York 2013 and Toronto 2019’
Cordner and Jones address the performance values of the 2013 production in terms of successful City Comedy (Cordner) and the website developed by Oliver Jones to disseminate the research behind the production. How effective were both, in retrospect?
Respondent — Peter Cockett (McMaster University)
Read more about the Production Roundtable in our Conference Discoveries.