'Nunnery' in 'Hamlet' and Middleton. (Thomas Middleton and nunnery as brothel)

Five uses of nunnery to mean |brothel' have been noted, in support of the idea that Hamlet, in exhorting Ophelia to |Get thee to a nunnery' (Hamlet III.i.121), either intends or plays on this sense. They occur in Nashe's Christ's Tears over Jerusalem (1593), the Gesta Grayorum (1594), Middleton's The Black Book (1604), and Fletcher's The Mad Lover (c. 1616) and Rule a Wife and Have a Wife (1624).(1) The Middleton example, in which Pierce Penniless proposes to |build a nunnery in Pict-hatch',(2) is potentially the most significant: it is not only the closest in date to Hamlet, but is the only one not to make the bawdy sense immediately clear from the context or by means of an accompanying gloss. As those …