The Honest Whore

by Thomas Dekker

A Globe Quarto co-published with Shakespeare's Globe marking their rediscoveries of forgotten plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries.

A play in two parts, following the lives of a princess and a whore. Although set in Italy, this passionate tale of paternal disapproval and sexual deceit savours more of the underworld of Jacobean London with its asylums and prisons, gambling and prostitution.

This edition presents both parts of the play, which was revived in a condensed version at the Globe Theatre in 1998.

Genres: Drama, Plays

Paperback

First published January 1, 1603

About the author

Thomas Dekker (c.1572 - 1632) was an Elizabethan dramatist and pamphleteer, a versatile and prolific writer whose career spanned several decades and brought him into contact with many of the period's most famous dramatists.

Reviews

[M.L. Rio · Rating 4 out of 5]

This play is BONKERS in the best way

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a review of The Honest Whore Part I, a play which reveals exactly how different Jacobean notions of morality were from our own, and I suspect the comedy is built quite heavily on these notions. It's quite clearly not a tragedy (though it veers that way on a couple of occasions) but its three intermingling plots reveal behaviour that (to me, at least) are completely baffling.

1. The Duke of Milan so doesn't want his daughter Infelicae marrying Hippolito that he fakes her death, then tries to have him poisoned. When they turn the tables on him, the Duke tries to attach a Friary-madhouse, but is distracted by a few (comedy?) madmen.
Hippolito then reveals he is already married to Infelicae, and the Duke welcomes him with open arms. What?

2. Candido's wife is so frustrated by her husband's lack of aggression (is this a euphemism for impotence? it doesn't seem to be) that she sets up situations that will anger him. He refuses all of them, so he has him locked up in the above-mentioned madhouse. Why is it not better to have a husband who isn't aggressive? See just about every Jacobean tragedy.

3. The whore of the title, Bellafront, who entertains lots of "amusingly bantery" young men, who are all a bit disgusting, until she falls in love with the grief-stricken Hippolito, in a kind of impossible love situation, until she is finally forcibly married to the man who took her virginity, Mathaeo.

The play reads like a mash up of Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night and Measure for Measure (with which it is roughly contemporaneous), but with more sexist banter about visiting brothels, which is presumably meant to be funny. There's also a lot of stuff about smoking tobacco and gambling, which again probably meant more in 1604.

The play was successful enough to warrant a sequel, so again I am possibly over-judging it. Perhaps it would be hysterical in performance.