Shakespeare's Whore: Language, Prostitution, and Knowledge in Early Modern England.

Abstract

Shakespeare’s Whore examines how prostitution operates like a language in early modern England: informed by seemingly incommensurable presences and absences, and conspicuously implicated in problems of signification, materiality, and knowledge production. My dialectical historical epistemology foregrounds the cultural effects wrought when certain knowledges, understandings, or meanings prove opaque, if not impossible, in historical contexts. Chapter one examines how early modern lexicographers like John Rider (Bibliotheca Scholastica) experimented with the range of meanings enabled by an inchoate mise-en-page. Positing over 250 “terms of whoredom,” these dictionaries, lexicons, and word lists constitute an alternative archive for English prostitution and reveal a broader field of sexual and lexical meanings than previously acknowledged. Chapter two examines three representations of Joan of Arc – in medieval Rouen, in Shakespeare’s 1 Henry VI, and in scholarly accounts of that play – to identify a cross-cultural impulse to constrain Joan of Arc’s social and gendered excess through acts of naming. While “heretic,” “witch,” and “whore” emerge as historically contingent modes of knowing women who exceed culturally prescribed roles, questions of embodiment in each setting undermine the stability such naming practices seek to enact. Chapter three explores the “melancholy of prostitution” in Pericles, Prince of Tyre, where the brothel scenes enact a form of cultural mourning for prostitution as necessary to legitimate – precisely by rendering invisible – a marital traffic in women. Reviewing works by Aquinas, Augustine, Castiglione, Freud, Robert Burton, and Jacques Ferrand, I further describe this cultural condition and explain how its logic pervades twentieth-century editions of the play. Chapter four argues that studies of cultural memory have largely forgotten the conspicuously sexual aspects of the medieval and early modern ars memoria. Reading Shakespeare’s Measure of Measure alongside royal proclamations, urban topographies, and memory treatises by John Ridevall and Albertus Magnus, I position Lucio as a figure of sexual memory who articulates what Vienna works to forget. Throughout, Shakespeare’s Whore illustrates how evidentiary problems – rather than lacks to remedied or voices to be reclaimed – serve as evidence in their own right, pointing to cultural impasses that constitute meanings and incur potent cultural effects.