Calling ‘things by their right names’: Troping Prostitution, Politics and The Dutch Courtesan

Abstract

Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan, written in 1604–5, delineates a crumbling, phantasmagoric world of bewildering transformations in which stable points of reference are unavailable and in which persons are subject to violent alterations of manner and appearance. The opening scene stages a grotesque spectacle of distortion and disease, the characters being metaphorically reduced to the level of animals: grubs, sharks and cockles. Mulligrub is perceived as a ‘Shark’ (I.i.l), advancing his ‘snout’ (I.ii.2) to discover the theft of irrecoverable goblets; they will be ‘hammer’d out’ (I.i.5) into another form, Freevill tells him, their metal recast so as to be unrecognisable.¹ Or the play’s concern with metamorphosis shows itself in reflections upon the body corrupting, reifying and turning into an inanimate object. Every species of illness afflicts bodies in The Dutch Courtesan, which are plagued with decay and caught up in a self-destructive process. Teeth ache (II.ii.65); jaws syphilitically drop (I.i.39); and coughs announce the inescapability of the grave (IV.iv. 18–26). It is a fantastic vision of living and nonliving materials resolving themselves into the elements of which they are constituted