The Dutch Courtesan by John Marston - They sell their bodies; do not better persons sell their souls?

MALHEUREUX  This lust is a most deadly sin, sure.

FREEVILL  Nay, ‘tis a most lively sin, sure.  (I.1, 9)

Now there is an efficient statement of a theme of John Marston’s A Dutch Courtesan (performed c. 1604, published 1605).  It is the most sexually explicit Elizabethan or Jacobean play I have come across, explicit in its talk, of course, it is all talk, what do you think was happening on the English stage.  And this was again first performed for a high-paying audience by a boys company.  That is also has more flatulence jokes than – or let’s say as many – as any period play I know tells us what about the six-penny audience compared to the famous vulgar one-penny groundlings in the Shakespeare audience.  The play is also full of tags in Latin.  Perhaps that was flattering.

Free Will is getting married to a quite nice young woman, so he is giving up his fiery, beautiful Dutch prostitute, Franceshina.  His friend Unhappy spends the first scene, as we see above, lecturing Freevill about his immorality, but as soon as he meets Franceschina in scene 3 he instantly falls for her.  Meanwhile she wants revenge on Freevill for dumping her, leading to a Much Ado about Nothing-like “Kill Claudio!” moment:

FRANCESCHINA  So long as Freevill lives, I must not love.

MALHEUREUX  Then he –

FRANCESCHINA  Must –

MALHEUREUX  Die!  (II.2, 40)

So now we have the A-plot.  Meanwhile there is a B-plot in which the chaos demon Cocledemoy plays, for no real reason but a pure spirit of comedy. a series of pranks on the stick-in-the-mud vintner Mulligrub.  Cocledemoy is where Marston really indulges in his joy of English, as in “A sign of good shaving, my catastrophonical fine boy.”  (II.1, 31)  Some great nonsense from Cocledemoy.

Afore the Lord God, my knavery grows unperegal [unequaled]!  ‘Tis time to take a nap…  (IV.5, 91)

My understanding is that in the 18th and 19th century The Dutch Courtesan was adapted a number of times, with the goofy Cocledemoy prankster plot eventually taking over the entire play.

Aside from this usual Marston fun, the earthy ethics of The Dutch Courtesan is worth seeing.  The semi-satirical “In Praise of Prostitution” passage, for example, delivered by libertine Freevill:

They [prostitutes] are no ingrateful persons; they will give you quid for quo: do ye protest, they’ll swear; do you rise, they’ll fall; do you fall, they’ll rise; do you give them the French crown, they’ll give you the French – O Justus justa justum!  They sell their bodies; do not better persons sell their souls?  Nay, since all things have been sold – honor, justice, faith, nay, even God Himself –

Ay me, what base ignobleness is it

To sell the pleasure of a wanton bed?

Why do men scrape, why heap to full heaps join? 

But for his mistress, who would care for coin?  (I.1, 11)

The switch from prose to verse is a little odd, but I am sure the actor can handle it.  Here is Malheureux monologuing, arguing with himself, about killing his friend for sex:

To kill my friend!  Oh, ‘tis to kill myself!

Yet man’s but man’s excrement, man breeding man

As he does worms, or this.                       He spits.  (II.2, 42)

There is a sour, unpleasant, taste to The Dutch Courtesan that is distinct, even compared to a complex semi-comedy like Measure for Measure.

Text and page numbers are form the 1965 Regents Renaissance Drama Series.  Getting to know Marston better has been a highlight of this last tranche of plays.

I will take a break from a schedule this summer, but return in the fall with a number of the best plays of the time: peak Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, early Thomas Middleton, some extraordinary revenge tragedies.  This past set of plays has perhaps been a bit like a graduate school – or let’s say advanced undergraduate – seminar – but the next stretch is full of crazy masterpieces.

What I Read in May 2026 – “These stories appeal to my sense of humor as well as my taste for formal constraints.”

NOT SHAKESPEARE

Poems and a Defence of Ryme (1592-1605), Samuel Daniel – Author of the “Delia” sequence of fifty sonnets, a genuine sequence, with for example lines ending one poem and beginning the next.  For some reason Thomas Campion, a writer of the most beautiful songs, wrote an essay arguing that English poetry should exclude rhyme, inspiring Daniel’s great defense of rhyme.  Rhetorically great – the argument as such is something like rhyme sounds great and English poetry should sound like English no matter what the Romans did and isn’t poetry wonderful?  Simplifying a bit.

The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry (1604?), Elizabeth Cary – This one is over here.

All Fools (1604?), George Chapman – And this one over there.  One more play coming up soon, John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan, and I take a break for the summer.

 

FICTION

Tales of Hulan River (1942), Xiao Hong – A year ago I read Xiao Hong’s earlier novel The Field of Life and Death (1935).  Both her novels are quite short, so they are published together in English, and I assumed I would scoot through both of them, but The Field was so relentlessly violent and miserable that I took a break.  This later, superior, novel is about the author’s childhood in a small town, presumably fictionalized.  The child’s point of view vitiates the grimness to a small degree, yet the penultimate part of the book is I think the most awful child abuse story I have ever read in a novel.  It is not the narrator who is abused, but the twelve-year-old child bride purchased by a neighbor family.  Terrible, terrible stuff.

The Family Moskat (1948), I. B. Singer – And then for a month I read Singer’s great, Tolstoyan family saga about Jewish Warsaw, beginning in 1913 and ending the minute before the Germans set foot in Warsaw. How to describe my sense of dread as 1939 approached, and then as September approached.  I tried to imagine the emotions of the original audience, reading The Family Moskat as a serial in the Forward, just a couple of years after the catastrophe, after the total destruction of almost everything in the novel, but I do not think I succeeded.  It is a bleak, bleak novel, and what else could it be?

Festival (2011), César Aira – So for a while I plan to read a lot of short, jolly nonsense, like another of Aira’s amusing explorations of the meaning of conceptual art, this time at a film festival.

Papa Bach & Other Stories (2026), Doug Skinner – The line in the title of the post is from “The Market for Typos,” p. 114.  Doug is a Friend of the Blog, often featured here, at one point, for his valuable translations of Alphonse Allais.  This is the first time I read his short fiction, and, well, see that line I quoted.

 

POETRY

Pigeons and Moles: Selected Writings (1945-72), Günter Eich – Damaged by Nazi ideas, striving for the mystic, a curious follow-up to Doctor Faustus.

Things My Grandmother Said (2026), Amit Majmudar – Perhaps a bit goopy and too wisdom-driven for my tastes, but this must be, formally, in its range, and perhaps even in its wisdom, this is an outstanding collection.  Majmudar is also a radiologist.

 

ARTY

Snapshots in Sound (2026), Tony Schwarz – More conceptual art.  Documents about an obsessive New York City tape recorderist.  The sample from his catalogue become a prose poem:

Holdup witness

Homage to New York

Home Remedies

Horse Sounds  (35)

The Fate of the Animals (2022), Morgan Meis – Here Meis writes about, or takes leaps from, a Franz Marc painting.  One more book to go in his trilogy before I write something about them.

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

L'homme révolté (The Rebel, 1951), Albert Camus – Too abstract for my tastes, but does Camus ever capture his moment, or perhaps the later rebels, Vonnegut’s hero ending Cat’s Cradle with a permanently frozen obscene gesture at the universe, are just cribbing from Camus.  Good literary criticism, anyway, even if the history has likely been superseded.  Go to Gary Saul Morson’s Wonder Confronts Certainty (2025), for example, for a better treatment of the Russian rebels.

Momentos de aqui (Moments from, or of, Here, 2001), Ondjaki – An early book by the Angolan writer, more difficult than some of the later ones I read, more slippery.  A number of the stories for my tribute to a story-telling grandmother, so with Majmudar’s poems that was two grandmother-centered books this month.  The grandfathers dominated he Xiao Hong and Singer novels.  What does it mean?

Next month: shorter, sillier books.