Panel 2: Religion as Foreign Invasion
11:30AM-1:00PM | Chair: Melinda Gough (McMaster)
Tomlinson presented a reading of The Dutch Courtesan alongside Lording Barry’s The Family of Love. The two plays were written at relatively the same time – with Marston’s printed in 1605 and Barry’s in 1608. Barry’s play also seems to make direct reference to a new ballad recorded in the Stationer’s Register in 1605, about the newly founded Company of Porters. Not only does Barry’s play echo phrases from the ballad (i.e. ‘love is free’), but the disguised Gerardine’s porter’s costume in Barry’s play closely matched those depicted in a woodcut heading the Porters’ ballad.
The two plays can be further linked together by similar phrases. (And Tomlinson reminded us of Darren Freebury-Jones’ characterization of Barry as an ‘inveterate borrower who knew Marston’s work intimately’.) She also observed several similarities between the Glisters and Mulligrubs, including the wives’ fastidiousness about housekeeping (Mrs Mulligrub is offended by the smell of tobacco and her ‘arsy-varsey’ servants; Glister by ‘rheumatic’ visitors’, which leads to her being taunted by Gerardine cross-dressing as the phlegmy ‘Nicholas Nebulo’, whose name is reminiscent of Hendrik Niclaes, founder of the Family of Love). Both plays are full of scatological humour, and both plays connect the female Familists with hypocrisy.
But Barry’s play seems more accepting of the Family of Love, referring to them casually as ‘The Family’ or ‘Familists’ rather than the more formal ‘Family of Love’ of Marston’s play – a repeated use which seems to want to give the audience no room to forget that the Mulligrubs and Mary Faugh belong to a very specific, radical, and foreign sect to English Protestantism. Although Barry’s play satirizes the Family, it also finally embraces the familists into the play’s community. The Family of Love ends in a ‘tone of ... riotous merriment’, the celebration of marriage, and ‘the death of melancholy’ (5.3). Marston’s text nominally ends in a similar vein – Beatrice and Crispinella are married to their new husbands, Cockledemoy and Freevill take off their disguises and save Mulligrub and Malheureux from death – but the tone of Marston’s final scene is more troubling. Freevill blames Franceschina entirely for his behaviour, and she is taken off to ‘severest prison’ (5.3.49); nothing similar happens in Barry’s play. And because Freevill’s action leave the audience troubled and question how patriarchy abuses its power in the play, Tomlinson observed that ‘notwithstanding Cocledemoy’s invocation of “merry nuptials and wanton jigga-joggies”, recent productions of the play forego a concluding dance’.
Fleck’s paper positioned Franceschina as a body in which early modern English fears of foreigners, religious difference, and sex workers meet. The Dutch Courtesan references plague and pox frequently as a kind of 'gallows humour' in the face of Apocalyptic fears. Within this setting, Franceschina is cast as the Whore of Babylon. Not only is she frequently associated with the devil and hell, but herself deploys violent apocalyptic rhetoric: for example, in calling Mary Faugh 'reprobate woman!’ (2.2), or when she tells Malheureux to ‘bid de flesh, de world, and de devil farewell’ (5.3). Her national status as a Dutch courtesan further links her to the extreme apocalyptic Protestant sects like the Family of Love, in which her bawd Mary Faugh claims membership. Franceschina and Mary Faugh at once represent fears of sex and sects which threaten the health of English bodies, the English body politic, and the Church of England. (Fleck additionally connected the play’s anxieties around Franceschina’s radical Dutch Protestantism, and its fears of Catholicism, while also observing that these anxieties mirrored wider intolerant attitudes towards religious difference in early modern England – particularly England’s widespread and legally sanctioned antisemitism).
Overlaying venereal and spiritual disease (and plague was commonly viewed as a sign and punishment of spiritual corruption) in the figure of Franceschina, The Dutch Courtesan suggests that the ‘strangers’ who bring both pox and heterodoxy across national borders have already infected English/Anglican identity. The Mulligrubs’ connections to the radical Netherlands are intimated by their use of salt butter (butter being a famously Dutch export), and their following the guidelines of the Family of Love (in not using tobacco, for example); and while the Mulligrubs are considerably less threatening than Franceschina, they are still unruly. They violate English law by cutting their wines and cheating their customers, and they are unhealthily interested in frivolous cosmopolitan trade and fashion. Lacking an obviously foreign accent, taking up at least the appearance of culturally legitimate jobs, and possessing Anglicized names, they – unlike Franceschina – cannot be easily identified as ‘other’. The same is true of those who may have practiced heterodoxic faith in England. Just how many Familists were there in London? English members of Dutch heterodoxic sects could refuse to identify themselves through the open practice of their faith – they might even attend the Church of England to conceal their true worship elsewhere. Ultimately, The Dutch Courtesan fears that the disease of foreign religion may have already taken hold of the English body.
Overlaying venereal and spiritual disease (and plague was commonly viewed as a sign and punishment of spiritual corruption) in the figure of Franceschina, The Dutch Courtesan suggests that the ‘strangers’ who bring both pox and heterodoxy across national borders have already infected English/Anglican identity. The Mulligrubs’ connections to the radical Netherlands are intimated by their use of salt butter (butter being a famously Dutch export), and their following the guidelines of the Family of Love (in not using tobacco, for example); and while the Mulligrubs are considerably less threatening than Franceschina, they are still unruly. They violate English law by cutting their wines and cheating their customers, and they are unhealthily interested in frivolous cosmopolitan trade and fashion. Lacking an obviously foreign accent, taking up at least the appearance of culturally legitimate jobs, and possessing Anglicized names, they – unlike Franceschina – cannot be easily identified as ‘other’. The same is true of those who may have practiced heterodoxic faith in England. Just how many Familists were there in London? English members of Dutch heterodoxic sects could refuse to identify themselves through the open practice of their faith – they might even attend the Church of England to conceal their true worship elsewhere. Ultimately, The Dutch Courtesan fears that the disease of foreign religion may have already taken hold of the English body.