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COPYRIGHT 1993 Johns Hopkins University Press
subjugation by the gaze. I wish to thank Professor Hodgdon for allowing me to read an early draft of her article and for generously sharing some of her research with me.
47 For a careful reading of the issue of masculine identity in the play, see Linda Charnes, "'So Unsecret to Ourselves': Notorious Identity and the Material Subject in Shakespeares Troilu's and Cressida," Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 413-40.
48 Agnew (note 4), 107, is here speaking of how the professional player "was beginning to entertain the thought of A predominant metaphor for the practice of the theater in Shakespeare's age was prostitution, an image the professional actor, playwright, and theater-owner helped to define and were defined by and to which they responded with ambivalence. From the beginning of the professional theater in the 1570s until its prohibition in 1642, its opponents--Stephen Gosson, Robert Greene, William Prynne, among many other--consistently associated the theater with prostitution. "Poets in theatres wound the conscience," wrote Gosson in 1579, "they arrange comforts of melody, to tickle the ear; costly apparel, to flatter the sight; effeminate gesture, to ravish the sense; and wanton speech, to whet desire to inordinate lust."(1) At particular risk are the young, whom the theater preys upon for profit: at the "mercenary" theaters "Good Citizens Children under Age, were inveigled and allured to privy and unmeet Contracts" John Stow reports in A Survey of London.(2) Even as late as 1729 John Disney condemned the sexually provocative example of romantic comedy, "whose Argument is generally some lewd Intrigue of Fornication or Adultery; the Wit and Language made up of Profaneness, Double Entendres of obscenity, and the contempt of whatever is grave and serious; the main drift, to instruct people in the Arts of debauching and the opportunities of being debauched."(3) Like a brothel, the theater houses "some lewd intrigue of Fornication"; like a bawd, it advertises its product with effeminate gesture and costly apparel; like a prostitute, the motive is the same--money. Thus, the theater is a brothel, a pander, a whore, a way toward debauchery and a site for it.
While accusations of this kind are nothing new (Gosson's fears about the seductive powers of illusion obviously echo Plato), we have not sufficiently examined the reality behind the rhetoric that sees the Elizabethan stage as prostitution, nor have we scrutinized the shaping influence the analogy had for the theater or, for that matter, the role the theater played in shaping the analogy. The fears of Gosson and his confederates may strike us as quaint, particularly in light of the honored place Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists have in our literature, but, precisely because of that "place," the historical and cultural significance of the theater's former environs has been lost on us. Certainly the work of Steven Mullaney, Jean-Christophe Agnew, Laura Stevenson, and Theodore B. Leinwand has done much to restore that significance.(4) Still, two sets of questions need to be examined, one having to do with the effect the analogy to prostitution had on the theater, the other on the causes of that association in the first place. Simply put, what does it mean for the theater to be thought of in terms of prostitution?
This essay is divided into two sections. In the first I will examine the intercourse, if you will, between the theater and prostitution, looking at the causes, both circumstantial and ontological, that led them to be associated in the minds of their spectators. In the second, I will glance at Troilus and Cressida as a representation of the theaters problematic connection to prostitution, a troubled and troubling exposition on the "base" nature of any exchange or transaction, whether sexual, economic, or aesthetic.
I
It is the constructive power of association that is the topic of this essay. Of course, other essays have addressed this topic in a far more theoretical way than mine will. Clifford Geertz, for instance, illustrates "Blurred Genres" with sociology's habit of describing social behavior through various metaphors--as a game, as drama, as text. As Geertz argues, "social behavior" is a complex, abstract, and ambiguous concept; seen as a game, however, with a specified set of rules, behavioral codes, uniforms, and conflicts, it becomes familiar and concrete. But the beauty of the analogy is also its danger. The conceptual model can slide too easily into a working model, and business or marriage or politics become games, with no "real world" consequences. The instructive analogy thus becomes both restrictive and reductive, and the only way to escape it is to invent a new one, so drama gets substituted for game, and text for drama.(5) In short, we will almost always see the unfamiliar or abstract in terms of something else. This inescapability of "seeing-as" has become a favorite topic for Stanley Fish. When he identifies a list of names as a devotional poem, his students "see" and read it accordingly, construing inventive interpretations that would make any teacher proud: "It is not that the presence of poetic qualities compels a certain kind of attention but that the paying of a certain kind of attention results in the emergence of poetic qualities. As soon as my students were aware that it was poetry they were seeking, they began to look with poetry-seeking eyes, that is, with eyes that saw everything in relation to the properties they knew poems to possess."(6) As business becomes a game, so too a list of names becomes a poem, because each is identified and recognized as such. One wonders, then, whether, when told that theater was prostitution, an Elizabethan audience looked upon the theater with prostitution-seeking eyes "that saw everything in relation to the properties" they knew prostitutes to possess? What properties did brothels and theaters share that may have led not only Puritans but patrons and players alike to see the stage as prostitution in the first place? And, informed that their practice was prostitution, how did playwrights and players see themselves? Let me begin with the easiest of these questions, the shared properties.
The first common ground upon which prostitution and the theater traded was, quite literally, common ground. As Steven Mullaney has pointed out in The Place of the Stage, the theater and prostitution occupied the same place in London, outside the city, in the Liberties that housed "marginal spectacles" ranging from "hospitals and brothels to madhouses, scaffolds of execution, prisons, and lazar-houses."(7) This locale indicates the status of the theater in the culture: it is something kept apart, a distrusted alien that threatens the civil, moral, and social order. Given that the public, professional theater was a relative newcomer on the block, it was bound to be associated with, to be seen in terms of, these other, more familiar spectacles. As it turned out, the theater came to be linked with disease and prostitution, not only in the minds of the theater's Puritan opponents but to almost everyone who witnessed these spectacles.
For Mullaney, the more iconographically contaminating of these spectacles was leprosy, which, he writes, "entered into the moral imagination of medieval culture at an early date, such that it altered and determined not only the lives of those afflicted but also the metaphors, customs, and institutions that shaped the lives of those otherwise untouched by the disease."(8) The "disease" metaphor, no doubt revived by periodic outbreaks of the plague, continued to shape social policy long after the last lepers were ferried to Southwark in 1557, an event Mullaney carefully describes. In fact, the initial attempts to control the theaters were made on the basis of public health. The letters between the Lord Mayor of London and the Privy Council during the period between 1580 and 1600 testify to the changing perspective on the theater and to the supersession of one kind of vision by another. Throughout the 1580s, the Lord Mayor repeatedly petitioned Elizabeth's government to discourage public plays as a means of curbing the danger of infection:
It may please your honor According to our dutie I and my brethren have had care for staye of infection of the plague and published orders in that behalf |w.sup.ch~ we intend god willing to execute with dilligence. Among other we find one very great and dangerous inconvenience of people to playes, beare bayting, fencers, and pphane spectacles at the Theatre and Curtaine and other like places to |w.sup.ch~ doe resorte great multitudes of the basist sort of people; and many enfected with sores runing on them.(9)
It is the sight of open sores, a disfigurement historically associated with leprosy and now attributed to the plague and to syphilis, that one sees at "the Theatre and Curtain"--not the plays, bear baiting, or fencing that are performed there. The Liberties themselves become a kind of running sore, infected by "the basist sort of people" and threatening the body of London.
In the 1590s, the Lord Mayor is no less anxious about the diseased theaters, but the danger of infection changes from physical to moral corruption. In 1592, the Lord Mayor writes to the archbishop of Canterbury that London's youth "is...
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