The Honest Whore
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The Honest Whore is an early Jacobean city comedy, written in two parts; Part 1 is a collaboration between Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, while Part 2 is the work of Dekker alone. The plays were acted by the Admiral's Men.
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[edit] Part 1
The Honest Whore, Part 1 was entered into the Stationers' Register on Nov. 9, 1604; the first quarto was published later the same year, printed by Valentine Simmes for the bookseller John Hodges. Subsequent quartos of the popular play appeared in 1605, 1606, and 1616; a fifth quarto was published without a date. Q6 was issued in 1635, printed by Nicholas Okes for the bookseller Richard Collins.
Scholars have debated the extent of Middleton's contribution to Part 1.[1] David Lake's analysis of the play gives most of it to Dekker, with Middleton's contribution strongest in Act I and the first scene in Act III, and with sporadic input elsewhere.[2]
[edit] Synopsis
The play, set in a Milan that is, in common Elizabethan fashion, mostly a thinly-disguised London, presents three plots. In the subplot, the Duke of Milan has feigned the death of his daughter Infelice; his goal is to thwart her love affair with Hippolito, the son of an old enemy. This plot follows the standard romantic formula: Hippolito remains constant to the supposedly dead beloved. The two are finally reunited when a doctor who had aided the Duke in the trick repents and informs Hippolito of the truth. He is reunited with and marries her at Bethlem Royal Hospital—the pretense at Italian color having been all but abandoned.
The second subplot concerns Candido, a citizen and linen draper. He is recently married, and his new wife is upset: her tongue, she says, "wants that virtue which all women's tongues have, to anger their husbands." In the play, she perpetrates various schemes to arouse her husband's ire. The last succeeds, not only angering him but driving him insane. He is taken to Bethlem, where his suddenly contrite wife hastens to recover him. This plot appears to have been the most popular during the period; it provided the subtitle and running title of many editions before 1635.
In the title plot, a prostitute named Bellafront falls in love with Hippolito. Devoted to the memory of his beloved, Hippolito spurns her. Bellafront is motivated to examine her sin, repents, and attempts again to woo Hippolito. He again rejects her. She announces that she is returning to her father in the country; however, in the next act she appears at Bethlem, seemingly insane. Finally, after playing a key role in the reconciliation of the Duke to his daughter and new son-in-law, she drops her madness, which she announces was feigned, and asks to be married to Matheo—a rake who was the first to seduce her. The Duke forces this marriage, and even Matheo assents, albeit rather cavalierly.
[edit] Context
In fairly standard Elizabethan fashion, Dekker and Middleton develop the plots along mutually inconsistent lines, and do not bother themselves about thematic or emotional unity. Hippolito's story is romantic; Bellafront's, homiletic; Candido's, comedic. What unity there is, is provided by the somewhat mechanical means of the tripartite ending in the madhouse and by a slightly developed theme of the virtues of constancy. To the extent that Candido's story is the least cliched and, particularly on the stage, the most memorable, the play may be called a citizen comedy; indeed, these scenes are reminiscent of Dekker's work in The Shoemaker's Holiday, and the presentation of citizens' life in Milan (i.e., London) are vivid and detailed.
In tone, the play fits well with the broad and celebratory style of Dekker's whole canon; it is as far as can be imagined from the decadent and sardonic milieu of Middleton's mature comedies. The play is fairly representative of the qualities Alfred Harbage associated with the "public" plays: despite a good deal of slightly racy humor, the ending offers a wholehearted endorsement of normative sexual morality. Indeed, it has been argued (by Robert Presson, for instance) that the private theaters offered a riposte to The Honest Whore in John Marston's The Dutch Courtesan, a viciously satirical treatment of the theme of prostitution produced at Blackfriars Theatre in 1606.
[edit] Part 2
Part 2 was most likely written in 1605 or 1606, and was entered into the Stationers' Register on April 29, 1608. Part 2 was not published, however, till 1630, in a quarto printed by Elizabeth Allde[3] for the bookseller Nathaniel Butter.
In this second part, Hippolito has conceived a violent lust for Bellafront, whose husband has (perhaps not surprisingly) returned to the life of a wastrel. Yet, despite her dire need, Bellafront refuses to surrender her new virtue. All ends well through the parallel machinations of Hippolito's wife and Bellafront's father.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Randee and Claire, pp. 11-12, 25-6.
- ^ Lake, pp. 44-65.
- ^ Elizabeth Allde was the widow of Edward Allde (ca. 1583–1624), the printer of Dekker's Satiromastix and other plays.
[edit] References
- Chambers, E. K. The Elizabethan Stage. 4 Volumes, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1923.
- Lake, David J. The Canon of Thomas Middleton's Plays. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1975.
- Logan, Terence P., and Denzell S. Smith, eds. The Popular School: A Survey and Bibliography of Recent Studies in English Renaissance Drama. Lincoln, NE, University of Nebraska Press, 1975.
