Panel 3: Sexual Worlds of Marston’s Theatre
11:15AM-1:00PM | Chair: Deanne Williams (York, CA)
Andrews set The Dutch Courtesan alongside Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Much Ado About Nothing, reading Freevill as the 'love child of Portia and Bassanio in Merchant’ (with the worst qualities of each). Andrews drew several similarities between Merchant and Courtesan – both plays include a ‘foreigner’ who has been wronged and seeks revenge, and men (Freevill and Bassanio) who treat their lovers’ rings with great casualness. Freevill and Bassanio also seek marriage for mercenary gains – Portia and Beatrice’s fortunes and ownership of their chaste sexuality. While Merchant ends with Portia confronting Bassanio with her traded ring, and the pair re-exchanging rings, Andrews noted that in The Dutch Courtesan, Beatrice’s ring disappears from action in the play’s final scene – the ring in this play would serve as nothing but a reminder to Beatrice, and to the audience, of Freevill’s deceit. And unlike Merchant’s Portia, Beatrice does not equally participate in the games of disguise and trickery, so cannot confront her fiancé as Shakespeare’s heroine does.
Andrews additionally read Franceschina’s condition that Malheureux kill Freevill, the man who has deceived and abandoned her, as a repurposing of the ‘kill Claudio’ plot in Much Ado, which ultimately critiques Freevill’s behaviour by aligning him with Claudio and Franceschina with the suffering Beatrice and Hero in Shakespeare’s play. Ultimately, Marston’s reworkings of Shakespeare’s plots allow his plays to works as critical vehicles of men’s abuse of power.
Fox’s presentation highlighted the various pleasures and risks that early modern London afforded. In The Dutch Courtesan, prostitution is at once a source of pleasure and financial, moral, and physical risk. The theatre is another such place. While Malheureux and Freevill visit Franceschina’s brothel in search of ‘lascivious entertainment’ they can purchase, the play audience watching Malheureux and Freevill have also exchanged money for such an entertainment. Marston thus tempts the audience with the same lure Freevill uses to tempt Malheureux. But he also appears to warn his audiences of the dangers of such temptations: consider Malheureux’s fearful reaction to Freevill’s news that he goes to visit courtesans, whom Malheureux sees as potentially deadly sirens.
Hybridity might offer a way of surviving the city, but is an uncertain mode of survival. Cockledemoy and Franceschina are the play’s two hybrid characters, who have mastered cosmopolitan performance, taking on various roles and disguises to survive and flourish in the city. But Cockledemoy has far more control over his hybridity – performing on his own whims and for his own pleasure – while Franceschina is dependent on her customers’ desire for her performance. And by the end of the play, of course, Franceschina is no longer a desirable luxury, but has become a devil whose sexual performance is nothing but a threat to urban consumers.
Warburton presented a fiercely feminist reading of Marston’s play alongside Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore. She argued that Franceschina’s sex work is not itself condemned in Marston’s play – rather, it is her anger that is the problem. While Beatrice cautions Freevill, ‘be not so extreme’, Francheschina’s extreme moods – and the rapidity with which she moves from one extreme to another – is a major source of comic humour in the play (here Warburton reflected that the Toronto production seized precisely this comic potential, especially in the moment when Franceschina, alone in her brothel, seethes at Freevill and delights in his imagined torture, but abruptly swings into sweet flattery when Freevill arrives mid-line).
While women’s anger in both ‘Tis Pity and Dutch Corutesan is justified, both plays condemn excessive displays of that anger. Warburton hypothesized that the real problem with Ford’s Annabella and Marston’s Franceschina is their decision to take vengeance into their own hands rather than asking a man to do it for them the way that the mythical Lucretia does. Warburton closed her talk by grimly reminding us that we are not ourselves free of holding women to a double-standard when it comes to displays of anger, recalling how Christine Blasey-Ford was required to maintain a composed equanimity throughout her testimony for the Kavanaugh hearing, lest a show of anger be read as a sign of illicit sexuality and deceit.