Shakespeare's 'Whores'

Erotics, Politics, and Poetics

K. Stanton

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137026323
• eBook ISBN: 9781137026330
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Shakespeare's 'Whores' studies each use of the word 'whore' in Shakespeare's canon, focusing especially on the positive personal and social effects of female sexuality, as represented in several major female characters, from the goddess Venus, to the queen Cleopatra, to the cross-dressing Rosalind, and many others.

1

Introduction: ‘Am I that name’?

I am NOT a whore, as it should be needless to say, being that, like many of my readers, I earn my living as a university professor, specialized in Shakespeare studies, not as a professional sex worker. Yet that fact has not prevented several men from calling me a whore at various points in my life. The lady doth protest too much, you think? Well, I introduce my experience as it iterates the comparable cases of Shakespearean women like unmarried virgin Hero in the comedy Much Ado About Nothing, newlywed Desdemona in the tragedy Othello, and wife and mother Hermione in the romance The Winter’s Tale – as well as the cases of countless other actual women, whatever their sexual and social status, similarly slandered with that or other sexually insulting names for centuries before and after Shakespeare wrote, including these current days of the twenty-first century.

At the risk of sounding like something even worse than a whore (at least to most contemporary literary critics), an essentialist,¹ I must assert as a reliable generalization that a woman not employed in the sex industry does not enjoy being called a whore, and probably most professional sex workers prefer other terms. Many women even dislike saying, or, like Desdemona, ‘cannot say “whore”’ as it ‘does abhor [them when they] speak the word’ (Othello IV. ii. 168–9; my emphasis). This further generalization is borne out in our author’s canon by the observation that (as will be discussed in Chapter 2) of the 59 instances of forms of the word ‘whore’ in Shakespeare’s works, 51 come from 21 male characters, leaving only 8 instances from a total of 5 female characters, and only 1 of these, professional sex worker Doll Tearsheet of 2 Henry IV, ‘owns’ the term by choosing to describe herself by it. But if only one Shakespearean female character calls herself ‘whore’, many others not only openly acknowledge, but are also delighted to express, their sexuality. Though they may be unjustly labeled by their society as ‘whores’, and shocked and confused by such names for them, their aim is simply to self-actualize in ways that include expression of their sexuality, and this book is devoted to their (and our) ongoing quest to do so without social condemnation. The appellation better suited for them is one that also, however, relates significantly (as this book will discuss) to the notion of whoredom: ‘Venus’.

No matter whether the culture depicted in a given play by Shakespeare is ‘pagan’ or Christian, the Bard habitually has both female and male characters reference elements of Greco-Roman mythology, including the concept of the goddess. Romeo, for example, definitely living in a Christian society, complains that his initial love object, Rosaline, will ‘not be hit / With Cupid’s arrow’, as she ‘hath Dian’s wit’ (Romeo and Juliet I. i. 208–9), and, after he has fallen in love with Juliet, he expresses his wish for Juliet, ‘far more fair’ than the goddess Diana, to ‘Cast [...] off’ Diana’s ‘vestal livery’ (II. ii. 6, 8–9). Similarly, in the Christian culture of All’s Well That Ends Well, Helena, in love with Bertram, son of the Countess of Rossillion, entreats the Countess to endorse her love by identifying with her as a woman. She asks the Countess to remember ‘if yourself’ ‘Did ever in so true a flame of liking, / Wish chastely and love dearly, that your Dian / Was both herself and Love’ as Helena does (I. iii. 206, 208–10). Later, when on the brink of expressing her desire to Bertram, Helena says, ‘Now, Dian, from thy altar do I fly, / And to imperial Love, that god most high, / Do my sighs stream’ (II. iii. 74–6). In both plays, within a Christian culture, the goddess Diana is nonetheless regarded as both a useful ‘poetic’ symbol and an archetype of female virginity, but one that can be replaced with a different image when a girl embraces transition into active sexuality. A difference does exist between these two examples, however: Romeo, operating from his own sexual frustration, himself casts the virginal Diana image onto both female objects of his desire and then asserts his wish personally to dislodge it, whereas Helena identifies the Diana archetype within herself, inquires whether another woman also has related to it, and herself determines the point when she wishes to self-actualize beyond it.

In her Foreword to psychologist Jean Bolen’s book Goddesses in Everywoman: A New Psychology of Women (1984), renowned feminist Gloria Steinem identifies herself as one who had initially been ‘resistant to its theme’, because ‘After all, how can mythological goddesses from a patriarchal past help us to analyze our current realities or reach an egalitarian future?’ (ix). Yet, having been won over by the book, she determines, ‘At a minimum, these archetypal goddesses are a useful shorthand for describing and thus analyzing many behavior patterns and personality traits,’ and ‘At a maximum, they are ways of envisioning and thus calling up needed strengths and qualities within ourselves’ (xi). Bolen herself notes that ‘The Jungian perspective has made me aware that women are influenced by powerful inner forces, or archetypes, which can be personified by Greek goddesses,’ whereas ‘the feminist perspective has given me an understanding of how outer forces, or stereotypes – the roles to which society expects women to conform – reinforce some goddess patterns and repress others’, with the result that, she continues, ‘I see every woman as a “woman-in-between”: acted on from within by goddess archetypes and from without by cultural stereotypes’ (4; Bolen’s emphases). The Helena of All’s Well, then, easily may be seen to be such a ‘woman-in-between’ as she moves between archetypes and within a society quick to stereotype her.

Bolen’s book is one of many that emerged in the late twentieth century and that continue internationally in the twenty-first to attract readers, in both the scholarly and the general community, who find contemporary relevance in the goddess concept.² In her book Goddess: A Celebration in Art and Literature (1997), Jalaja Bonheim, addressing the question of why there has been an ‘immense surge of interest in the goddess’ in recent years, states, ‘The first and most obvious answer is that the goddess reveals to us the feminine face of God, long neglected in Western religion,’ and ‘Less obvious, but equally important, is the fact that unlike the transcendent Judeo-Christian God, goddesses are generally immanent powers who act within the world and are one with the world’ (7). In seeking to fly from Diana’s altar, Helena of All’s Well, living in a patriarchal culture, identifies ‘Love’ as ‘that god most high’ – a male deity – but she will only be able to achieve sexual consummation with Bertram through the agency of a Diana in the world, Diana Capilet.

Patriarchal Judeo-Christian culture’s identification of deity as solely male allows men to see themselves as partaking of divinity and determines women only to be dutiful, compliant objects of it, with both social and political negative impact upon the women. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example, Duke Theseus tells Hermia, ‘To you your father should be as a god – / One that composed your beauties’ (with her mother’s biological contribution entirely effaced), and, furthermore, Hermia is to think herself ‘but as a form in wax / By him imprinted, and within his power / To leave the figure or disfigure it’ (I. i. 47–51). The deified father-figure is to be regarded as solely creating the female and holding the power to imprint upon her as he sees fit, even if he disfigures her in the process. Such a ‘disfiguring’ of a daughter by her father transpires in Much Ado About Nothing, when, at the wedding altar, Claudio, wrongly accusing Hero of sexual transgression, claims, ‘You seem to me as Dian in her orb’ but he now believes her ‘more intemperate in your blood / Than Venus’ (IV. i. 56, 58–9), and Hero’s father, Leonato, is quickly convinced to join in smearing her: ‘she, O she, is fallen / Into a pit of ink, that the wide sea / Hath drops too few to wash her clean again’ (IV. i. 139–41). This idea of the female as a malleable form or blank surface for the male (be he father, husband, intended partner, or even any random man) to shape or inscribe is evident too in Othello’s irate question to his innocent wife, Desdemona: ‘Was this fair paper, this most goodly book [of her body] / Made to write “whore” upon?’ (Othello IV. ii. 73–4). Just as Claudio and Leonato cast their blots upon Hero, it is Othello himself, of course, influenced by Iago, who is inscribing the label upon the astonished Desdemona, who is left to ask the as yet unknown instigator himself, ‘Am I that name, Iago?’ (IV. ii. 124).

When analyzing the most horrific instance in Shakespeare’s canon of such male inscription of a female, the rape and mutilation in Titus Andronicus of Lavinia by Chiron and Demetrius, Evelyn Gajowski, building upon Susan Gubar’s essay ‘“The Blank Page” and the Issues of Female Creativity’ (1985) in her own essay ‘Lavinia as “Blank Page” and the Presence of Feminist Critical Practices’ (2007), argues that Lavinia ‘provides the best early modern stage representation, perhaps, of Gubar’s theory of “the blank page” upon which males in narratives and in history inscribe phallogocentric meaning’. ‘Shakespeare’, she continues, ‘dramatizes on the English stage the symbolic economy that Gubar theorizes in a patriarchal society: male inscription of meaning upon a female with the “pen-penis”’ (124). Yet ‘despite overwhelming odds’, Lavinia ‘manages to overcome formidable obstacles, adopt a subject position – and write’, naming the crime and identities of her rapists (125). The best means, then, of combating patriarchal victimization (even if, as for Lavinia, not escaping it) is to write, or otherwise to become a speaking subject, rather than allowing oneself to remain an objectified ‘blank page’.

In the tragedy Titus Andronicus, besides amputating her hands, Lavinia’s rapists actually cut out her tongue to prevent her from communicating their guilt; in the comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost, written during the same early period of Shakespeare’s career, that identical gruesome act is ratified (though not enacted) by the King of Navarre and his three lords Berowne, Dumaine, and Longaville, in setting forth their planned academe. In order to ensure their concentration upon their studies, they are to agree to avoid the company of ladies, but as for enforcement, the onus is on the lady: ‘“no woman shall come within a mile of [the king’s] court,”’ with a transgressor’s penalty being ‘“losing her tongue”’ (I. i. 19–20, 23–4). A man, however, would only ‘“endure such public shame as the rest of the court can possibly devise”’ (I. i. 129–31). This double standard of punishment is truly astonishing, but it furthermore carries the irony that the female ‘offender’ is to be rendered speechless, while the male would suffer only the shaming speech of the rest of the male court – and it also seems to reflect a subconscious fear of the female and her speech.

When the king and three lords must honor a diplomatic commitment to meet with the Princess of France and her three ladies Rosaline, Katharine, and Maria, and the men promptly fall in love with them, each man displaces the blame for his failure to live up to the oath onto the lady who is the object of his desire. For example, in his poem-letter professing his love for the lady Maria, Longaville asserts, ‘“A woman I forswore, but I will prove, / Thou being a goddess, I forswore not thee”’, for ‘“My vow was earthly, thou a heavenly love; / Thy grace, being gained, cures all disgrace in me”’ (IV. iii. 60–3). A woman is called a ‘goddess’ to be not only the scapegoat, but simultaneously also the agent of absolution for the male. Furthermore, the men’s lust is projected upon the women to make them seem the sexually licentious ones, as is evident in Berowne’s response to overhearing Longaville’s poem-letter, which, he says, ‘makes flesh a deity, / A green goose [whore] a goddess’ (IV. iii. 70–1).

Each having been revealed as an oath-breaker/lover, the four men share a moment of unity but then quickly move into competition over whose lady is best – and whose worst. The King, Dumaine, and Longaville seem to agree that Berowne’s lady, Rosaline, is worst. As Berowne himself had privately expressed that same thought, he has to work particularly hard to make his case for Rosaline’s attractions. After Longaville likens Rosaline to his shoe, Berowne counters, ‘O, if the streets were pavèd with thine eyes, / Her feet were much too dainty for such tread’, only to have Dumaine remark, ‘O vile! Then, as she goes, what upward lies / The street should see as she walked overhead’ (IV. iii. 274–7): male eyes, covering the street, would see above them the lady’s vagina.³ Thus Shakespeare reveals that if these men put a woman on a pedestal as a goddess, it is to look up her skirt.

These ladies, however, maintain their tongues and their wit. After each man has sent his poem-letter, with a love-token, to his desired lady, the ladies are not impressed. What is apparent to the ladies from the men’s poem-letters is that the men are in love not with the actual beings of the ladies themselves, but with their subconscious projections of their own ideal love objects – emphasis on ‘objects’. The ladies demonstrate that awareness when they trade the men’s love-tokens and don masks prior to the men’s visit, and the men mistake their ladies, because of the exchanged tokens. Seeing his objectifying ‘marker’ of identity upon a particular lady is the distinguishing feature to each man to determine her as ‘his’, such that he woos ‘but the sign of she’ (V. ii. 470), and the ladies expose the men’s folly.

Far from becoming victims of male inscription and objectification as is Lavinia in the tragedy of Titus Andronicus, whose father ultimately kills her to obliterate the family shame of her rape, the ladies of the comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost depart for France upon hearing of the death of the Princess’s father, informing the men that if they can fulfill the vows that the ladies have tasked them with accomplishing, then maybe they might consider marrying them after a year’s trial (which the men are likely to fail, as indicated by the play’s title). Genre matters, and it is manifested largely through a play’s level of female independence and autonomy. Because the ladies of Love’s Labour’s Lost are so financially and politically independent, so knowledgeable about their own desires, so self-aware of their sexuality, and so skillful in communicating their will, they even manage to revise the genre of romantic comedy, as Berowne complains: ‘Our wooing doth not end like an old play; / Jack hath not Jill. These ladies’ courtesy / Might well have made our sport a comedy’ (V. ii. 864–6). In resisting the men’s version of themselves as goddesses, they actually manage to assert the ‘Venus’ qualities in themselves, in their own desired version.

Among the goddess figures of Greco-Roman mythology, the ‘pagan’ system primarily referenced by Shakespeare, Aphrodite/Venus, goddess of love and sexuality, invokes the most ambivalence, in his time and ours, as critical attitudes toward Shakespeare’s representation of her in his narrative poem Venus and Adonis reflect. Since Judeo-Christian religious thought took hold in Western sensibility, the divinity of Aphrodite/Venus has been befouled – and with it, female expression of sexuality generally. Paul Friedrich (1978) notes that the ‘avoidance of Aphrodite and her associations reflects deep cultural and religious biases’, as typically ‘one has few adjustments to make when coming from the Old or New Testament to Zeus or Athena but a great many with respect to Aphrodite if she is to be taken seriously as a religious figure symbolizing profound values and great ambivalences and who, for the Greeks, merited the epithets “revered” and “awe-inspiring”’ (2). Contemporary women and men would do well to recapture some of this reverence and awe, which could help to undo some of the wrongs against women committed in the name of patriarchal religions’ misogyny that have lingering impact on women’s free expression of and open enjoyment of sexuality, the ‘erotics’ of this book’s title.

Although I believe that contemporary religious doctrines should be critically scrutinized and the slanders and unjust treatments of women encoded within them be exposed and challenged, I am not suggesting that we need go so far as to cast away any religious affiliation that we might hold and instead build temples for worship of the goddess.⁴ For one thing, it would be unnecessary, as the temples have already been built – the patriarchal versions of them anyway. We encounter them every day in twenty-first-century culture, as they are all around us, in the form of print, film, digital, and especially internet pornography, ‘men’s magazines’, phone sex services, strip clubs, massage parlors, escort services, brothels, etc. Any time a man responds to an embodiment or representational image of a sexualized female perhaps with his money but especially with his erotic attention and ejaculatory release, he is making an offering at a shrine of Venus, though usually he is regarding her only as Venus porne and probably doing so in a spirit not of reverence but of blasphemy. Of course, patriarchal culture infuses him with that attitude. As Jennifer and Roger Woolger (1989) state, ‘The patriarchy can’t live without [Aphrodite/Venus] and they can’t live with her either, as the old cliché goes,’ so, since ‘the time when men first wrested patrilineal control from women’ – exactly the moment that, I believe, Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis enacts (as discussed in Chapter 6) – ‘they have mistrusted Aphrodite’s [/Venus’s] liberal polygamous spirit’, doing ‘everything possible to confine and restrict her, by making her either a concubine, a prostitute, a courtesan, or a mistress’; yet, ‘in their longing for her ecstatic, almost mystical gifts of love and pleasure, men have never been able to banish her entirely’ (168). So where does that leave women – both the women who involve themselves in the generating and sale of such images and enactments of Venus porne and the women who do not and are frightened, troubled, insulted, or intimidated from free heterosexual⁵ expression by them?

As I already have been suggesting, one place could be The Complete Works of Shakespeare. Our author analyzes the forces that inhibit women’s full self-actualization and provides to discerning readers means for understanding and combating these issues, not only in our culture’s past, but also in our present and future, if we peruse his canon with the sensibility that our present informs and our future can manifest. Many of Shakespeare’s characters, when pondering a problem, look to and then empathize or identify with various figures in similar situations from myth and/or earlier literature, and surely Shakespeare is inviting us to do the same.⁶ Just as historical and archaeological scholarship helps in our gaining a sense of the past, so do feminist, political, psychological, and archetypal approaches to Shakespeare enable us to trace our present from that past, noting continuities as well as differences. As presentist Shakespeare critic Hugh Grady (2007) states, ‘The past continually changes its shape and meaning for us as we move further into the future, gain new experiences and new perspectives, and research, re-think, and re-evaluate the past’ (143). Kiernan Ryan (2007) observes that it is ‘not so surprising to find Sha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: ‘Am I that name’?
• 2 ‘Made to write “whore” upon?’: Male and Female Use of the Word ‘Whore’
• 3 ‘Enough to make a whore forswear her trade’: Prostitution as Woman’s ‘Oldest Profession’
• 4 The Heroic Tragedy of Cleopatra: The ‘Prostitute Queen’
• 5 Female Erotic Passion: Toward Sex As You Like It
• 6 Venus: Mother of All ‘Whores’
• 7 Stripping Shakespeare’s ‘Whores’
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index