Our Questions

In choosing scenes starring The Dutch Courtesan’s central foreigners, Franceschina and the Mulligrubs, we set ourselves up to explore questions of xenophobia and religious intolerance in this modern production of an early modern comedy. We wondered:

• Who are the Mulligrubs in their own community and in ours?
• Does the play suggest they deserve the mockery and punishment they receive from Cockledemoy?
• Is the play simply punishing them for being ‘other’ (and why? What anxieties does the play reveal about religious and ethnic minorities?)

We thought about the intersections of religion, ‘foreignness’ and misogyny in the play’s into demonic characterization of Franceschina:

• Where does the text offer possibilities to play her sympathetically?
• What can the play teach us about contemporary attitudes towards sex workers?

We additionally explored the duality of Beatrice and Franceschina as ‘chaste wife’ and ‘whore’ figure and asked:

• How can we play that duality on stage to offer a critique (of Freevill)?

We also explored the play’s prison and arrest scenes – some of Lior’s initial interests in the play were:

• How does it invite us to look more closely at contemporary practices around incarceration?
• What does it have to say about intersections of race, gender, power, and punishment in our own culture?

A running theme of our day-long discussion was how the play’s humour worked:

• Is The Dutch Courtesan a funny play (was it then and is it still)?
• What is the tone of its humour – satirical? critical? built on a foundation of genuine xenophobia and sexist violence?

Finally, we spent a lot of time helping the cast to think through questions they had about their individual characters, helping them to find ways to make Marston’s unfamiliar text work on the modern stage. Read on to learn more about some of our discoveries around these questions.