Master‟s Degree.

Cultural Landmarks in Elizabethan Drama

Conf. dr. Monica Matei-Chesnoiu

The Dutch Courtesan by John Marston

John Marston (1576–1634) was born in Oxfordshire, graduated Oxford, 1594. In accordance
with his father's wishes he studied law at Middle Temple, but his interests soon turned to
literature. His first published works, a licentious, satiric love poem entitled The
Metamorphosis of Pigmalion's Image and The Scourge of Villanie, a volume of coarse verse
satires, appeared in 1598. After both these works were burned in 1599 by order of the
archbishop of Canterbury, Marston began writing for the stage. His most notable plays are the
love story Antonio and Mellida (1599); its sequel, the revenge tragedy Antonio's Revenge
(1599); his masterpiece, The Malcontent (1604), a tragicomedy that derides aristocratic
behavior; and The Dutch Courtezan (1605), a bitterly anti-female comedy. Marston was
involved in the war of the theaters against Ben Jonson from 1599 to 1601, while both
playwrights were writing for rival companies of child actors. Later, the two men became
friends and collaborated with George Chapman in writing Eastward Ho! (1605). Marston
ended his literary career c.1607, and two years later he took holy orders.

Date: Early Jacobean play (1604)

First performance: Performed by the Children of the
Queen‟s Revels, one of the troupes of boy actors active at
the time, in the Blackfriars Theatre in London.
The play was revived in the following decade, and
performed at Court by the Lady Elizabeth‟s Men on
February 25, 1613.

The play tells the story of two friends, the relaxed, pleasure-
loving Freevill and the repressed Puritan Malheureux, and
the turbulent relationship that both have with the passionate
Dutch courtesan Franceschina. It explores the nature of
human desire and the problems involved with trying to lead
a "good," moral life when sexuality is so fundamentally a
part of man's nature. Critics have judged the play both anti-
Puritan and anti-Stoic, and have also seen it as a satire on Thomas Dekker's contemporary
play The Honest Whore.

Plot
Freevill is deeply involved with the "Dutch Courtesan" Franceschina but he is about to marry
Beatrice, daughter of Sir Hubert Subboys and decides to break with Franceschina. He
introduces her to his friend Malheureux who at once desires her. Humiliated, she promises to
submit to him if he kills Freevill and bring her a ring he has received from Beatrice. The two
friends pretend to quarrel, Freevill vanishes, the ring is brought to Franceschina. She goes off
to inform Freevill's father and Beatrice's father of what has happened. Malheureux is arrested
and condemned to die. At the last moment, Freevill appears and explains he has done this to
cure Malheureux of his passion. Franceschina is whipped and imprisoned.

Theme
Marston plots the theme of exposing passionate man's nature to enable him to achieve self-
mastery on a structural dialectic between lust and love. Franceschina is the incarnation of
what man becomes when his passions, like hers, run rampant. A "creature made of blood and
hell" (V.i.77), she is almost a mirror image of what Malheureux himself is becoming as his
"blood" gains ascendancy in him.

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Master‟s Degree. Cultural Landmarks in Elizabethan Drama
Conf. dr. Monica Matei-Chesnoiu

Franceschina
Franceschina merely threatens the comic world of the play; its basic sanity places her in
proper perspective. From beginning to end she appears as a grotesque, even an absurd, figure,
not as a symbol, ultimately, of overwhelming evil or even as a victim, as some critics have
seen her, of Freevill's pragmatic philosophy that "beauty is for use." The play does not ask, to
what extent is Freevill responsible for Franceschina's prostitution, especially since he so
eloquently defends her practice? Rather, it asks, to what extent does man so arrogantly and
pretentiously blind himself to his animal nature that he becomes foolish and even self-
destructive? Franceschina is, to be sure, vicious; but she is ridiculously vicious. Marston sets
his courtesan off from all his other characters with a ridiculous stage Dutch accent that serves
no purpose other than to alienate her from the audience's sensibility. The viciousness of her
nature is that latent in all human nature, but the especial strength of comedy is that it can
confront self-deceiving man with such a vivid image of himself that he can come to say, "I
am myself." The message of comedy is not always pleasant, for it shows what fools these
mortals be; but to know oneself a fool, it also argues, is a step on the road to wisdom.

ARTICLE:
Peter Womack
John Marston, “The Dutch Courtesan, Children of the Queen‟s Revels, Blackfriars
(1605),” in English Renaissance Drama (London: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), pp. 168-173.

For modern readers and audiences, John Marston‟s London comedy The Dutch Courtesan is
his most accessible play – urbane, argumentative and funny. It is also pitilessly sexist, achieving
its resolution by scapegoating the courtesan of the title. Altogether, then, it is an instructive case
in the politics and poetics of revival. Should we do plays like this, or would it be better to
consign them to the dustbin of cultural history? The main plot concerns two
gentlemen of the town, Freevill and Malheureux. Freevill keeps a mistress called
Franceschina; Malheureux is tensely disapproving. Freevill is about to marry a perfect bride
called Beatrice, and needs to end his disreputable liaison. Perhaps cunningly, he introduces
Franceschina to Malheureux, who falls in love with her. Furious at being dumped, Franceschina
promises Malheureux that she will sleep with him if he kills Freevill. The two friends
agree to fake a quarrel; Freevill will hide out for a few days, and Malheureux will claim to
have killed him in order to enjoy Franceschina. However, Franceschina is lying too: as soon as she
hears that Freevill is dead, she turns Malheureux in for his murder, hoping to destroy both of
them. Freevill decides to stay dead until Malheureux is literally under the gallows, then
reveals himself in a coup de theatre which saves his friend, revives his mourning bride, and
dispatches Franceschina to jail.
Like most tragicomedies, the play offers various motives for the pretences required
by its plot, not all of them convincing. If we stand back from these pretexts, though, we
can see that the purpose really served by the whole structure of deceptions is Freevill‟s
transition from libertinism to marriage. At the beginning he is in a false position: he is
attached to both Franceschina and Beatrice, and neither of them knows about the
other. How is he to consolidate his identity by bringing them into a single world? If the
whore were a rapacious grotesque and the bride simply delightful, then the duality
would be easy to convert into a stable hierarchy. And if the whore were charming, the hero
penniless, and the bride an uninteresting heiress, that would be straightforward in a different way. But
Marston is being more ambitious than that. Both Franceschina and Beatrice are beautiful and
intelligent; both of them love Freevill, and he loves both of them. Their coexistence in the
same dramatic world is a contradiction, which it is the business of the comedy to resolve.

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Master‟s Degree. Cultural Landmarks in Elizabethan Drama
Conf. dr. Monica Matei-Chesnoiu

It does it by means of fiction. The four principals perform a scenario which

brings their real situation to an imaginary crisis (Malheureux‟s murder of Freevill) and then
resolves it by a miracle (Freevill‟s resurrection). The degree to which the participants are
deceived varies: Beatrice almost entirely, Freevill hardly at all, the other two somewhere in between.
This unevenness makes it hard to conclude that the action is really happening, or that it is
not; it has the ambiguous character of a game, or an acting out. The point of this is
clearly visible in the scene where Freevill and Beatrice are reunited. Beatrice is distraught
at Freevill‟s death, and Freevill visits her in disguise. He sings to her, and she faints with
emotion; terrified that he may have pushed her too far, he throws the disguise aside. She therefore
returns to consciousness to find her lover in front of her. At first, she thinks she has died and
met him in heaven; and, indeed, the meeting is a resurrection for both of them – hers
from the „death‟ of the faint, and his in terms of the plot. There is, then, an
ingeniously contrived sense in which Freevill dies to Franceschina and lives anew in the love of
Beatrice. Freevill‟s initial contradictory position has been resolved with the aid of theology:
the illicit love is death and hell, the respectable marriage is life and heaven, and Freevill‟s transition
is a w o r k o f g r a c e .
M alheureux‟s function in this sacred drama is to take over Freevill‟s place in hell. It is not
simply that he replaces Freevill as Franceschina‟s lover. It is also that because of his rigid
moralism, his infatuation with her takes the form of self-division: that he should be in love
with a whore is for him at once impossible and undeniable, so he effectively goes mad. His
rhetoric sets love against friendship, virtue against nature, beauty against salvation, knowing
against doing – he is „malheureux‟ not accidentally but essentially, irreconcilably at war with
himself. In other words, he internalizes, as a dilemma, the duality which marked Freevill‟s
external situation between his two women. Comically and cruelly, he lives the antinomy on
Freevill‟s behalf; Freevill transfers the guilt and shame of his lechery to Malheureux and
steps, „free‟, into Beatrice‟s arms. In the next move, however, he can rescue Malheureux as well,
by offloading Malheureux‟s guilt, in turn, on to Franceschina. She is the only one who is
punished at the end.
Indeed, that is her function in this moral economy. It is spelt out by Freevill in the
opening scene:

Malheureux:
I fear the warmth of wine and youth will draw you to some common house of
lascivious entertainment.
Freevill:
Most necessary buildings, Malheureux. Ever since my intention of marriage, I do
pray for their continuance.
Malheureux:
Loved sir, your reason?
Freevill:
Marry, lest my house should be made one. I would have married men love the stews as
Englishmen love the Low Countries: wish war should be maintained there lest it should
come home to their own doors. (1.1.76–87)

Brothels guarantee the order of the respectable home by being the place where disorder is put:
it is chaste because they are lascivious, it is private because they are „common‟, Beatrice is
above us because Franceschina is under us. As the unpleasant half-metaphor of
„necessary buildings‟ suggests, the stews are a sewer, helping to keep the streets clean; at the end
of the play, Freevill and Malheureux are both restored to wholeness when everything that has
compromised or negated them is removed via the soiled channel of the whore. The play is

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Master‟s Degree. Cultural Landmarks in Elizabethan Drama
Conf. dr. Monica Matei-Chesnoiu

sexist not only because it performs, without anxiety, the „necessary‟ vilification of
the courtesan, but also because the subjects of its ideological system are definingly male.
The women do not have moral experiences; they merely constitute the moral experiences of the
men.
So to return to my opening question: what are the issues for a theatre company which
revives a play like this? We can take some hints from an explicitly feminist production by Vivienne
Cottrell in London in 1990. Clearly deciding that a radical move was required, the director
arranged for the actresses playing Beatrice and Franceschina to swap roles, irregularly but
quite often, in the course of the show. After momentary confusion, the audience learned to
accept either performer as either character: distinguishing between them was easy since, obviously,
they dress differently, and one of them has a foreign accent.
This bold and clever device helps us because it was, in my view at least, a half success. The
successful half was that it established a gap between the bodies of the women and the
roles they were playing in the drama, and so resisted precisely the inscription (of the
ideological meanings upon the women‟s bodies) which Freevill‟s scam is designed to accomplish.
The audience saw the goodness and happiness of Freevill with Beatrice, and the badness and
misery of Malheureux with Franceschina, but it saw this opposition as readily reversible; heaven
and hell appeared as social positions into which the women were put, rather than expressions of
their essential being. Because neither actress could be regarded as embodying the woman she
played, both appeared to the audience as variable representations rather than unconditional
individuals. So the masculine viewpoint of the script was itself dramatized, and a script
whose performance could easily be an oppressive ratification of male identities was tricked,
as it were, into becoming a study o f t h a t p r o c e s s .
In this aggressive appropriation of the script there is an echo of its earliest
performances. It was written for boys of between 10 and 15 – that is, the gap between
the performers‟ bodies and their roles, which the modern production engineered with militant
ingenuity, was also a feature of the original show. Probably Freevill and Malheureux were
played by teenagers, and the women by smaller boys whose voices and faces suited female
roles better. In 1605, then, no less than in 1990, the stage images of the bride and the
prostitute were alienated and abstracted. Making the play into a feminist show turned out
to be easier than you would expect, because of an ironic overlap between the two viewpoints.
The production wanted to insist that these figures with female names are not women in their
own right but women as defined and represented by men; the script precisely
substantiated that proposition because it was so literally true of its original
production. The masculinism of the play created the conditions for the feminism
of the performance: the good thing about misogyny is that it fails to obscure the question of
gender.
I said the device was half successful. To suggest the unsuccessful half, I must briefly
point to the rest of the play, outside the main plot which has been the focus so far. Beatrice
has a sister called Crispinella, who does little more than tease and then accept her suitor, but
whose conversation, in two relaxed and almost plotless prose scenes, plays wittily and irreverently
with many of the values which the main plot secures. And a neatly stitched-on subplot
features the demolition of a London vintner at the hands of a trickster called
Cocledemoy – full of disguises and sight-gags, it is almost pure clowning, whimsically
reversing the status difference between citizen and knave.
Both these sideshows are interesting in their own right, but also, with their different
kinds of playfulness, they constitute a comic environment for the main plot. Take for
example the „gallows scene‟ at the end. Not only is Malheureux brought to the verge of
execution by Freevill; at the same time, the vintner, Mulligrub, is brought to the same point
by Cocledemoy. What is the point of this psychological torture? My own account of the

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Master‟s Degree. Cultural Landmarks in Elizabethan Drama
Conf. dr. Monica Matei-Chesnoiu

main plot suggests two quite serious answers: the mock-execution is part of a ritual
„dying to sin‟; and the victim‟s fear and shame are imposed upon him to „cure‟ his
infatuation. But neither of these interpretations covers the case of poor Mulligrub. Rather, he
is tormented for fun; the genre here is not so much ritual as practical joke. In this context,
Freevill‟s scam is less bizarre and machiavellian than a cold summary makes it sound: comic
trickery is as it were the language of his theatrical homeland, and he speaks it naturally.
The problem with our 1990 production, then, is that, precisely because it was so
sensitive and intelligent, it could not integrate the play‟s cruel and irresponsible gaiety.
Marston himself introduces it as an „easy play‟ (Prologue, line 1), and this ludic character is
hard to combine with a reasoned critique of male hegemony. The point here is not that the
play was written to amuse and therefore should not be taken seriously. Its lightness is not triviality;
like most interesting comedies, it chooses serious issues to be funny about; it is playing, all
the way through, but with fire as well as toys. Rather, the problem is that joking is the
structural principle of the whole show: it sails under the flag of „just for laughs‟. So to
engage in responsible discussion, to use the play to say something that matters, is to
restrain the scope of the writing and tamper with the sources of its energy. Intelligent
interpretation then comes at the expense of theatrical vitality – which is better than the other
way round, but still an unhappy trade-off. At that point, the question of The Dutch Courtesan
is this: can we have the play‟s harshly liberating laughter without its punitive ideology? Or
does it all hang together?

Further Reading

Susan Baker, „Sex and Marriage in The Dutch Courtesan’, in Dorothea Kehler and Susan
Baker (eds.), In Another Country: Feminist Perspectives on Renaissance Drama
(Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1991), pp. 218–32.
Michael Shapiro, Children of the Revels: The Boy Companies of Shakespeare’s
Time and their Plays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977).
Garrett A. Sullivan, „“All Thinges Come Into Commerce”: Women, Household Labor, and the
Spaces of Marston‟s The Dutch Courtesan’, Renaissance Drama 27(1996), 19–46.