The Whore of Babylon: Language and Identity in John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan

Abstract

This article examines the issue of national and linguistic identities with regard to the perplexing punishment of the whore in John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan. At the end of the comedy, Franceschina is sentenced to the gallows while other characters forgive each other and it seems her banishment from the stage world has a parallel with the punishment of Shylock in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Such a problematic ending defines the play as a Jacobean problem comedy or a tragic-comedy. The play was written just after James I’s accession to the English throne and was performed at the Inns of Court in 1605. It was a time when London, as a center of global commerce in early modern Europe, acted as a locus of multi-nationalism in which national identity was constantly questioned in affiliation with language and its standardization. In particular, the accession raised the establishment of one particular language because both English and Scottish were used in the court, and ultimately betrayed the anxieties of the Jacobeans and their concers about linguistic corruption and the consequent issue of language as a barometer of national identity. In this context, Franceschina is a true embodiment of monstrous hybridity in language, which is clearly materialized on stage by her helter-skelter accent. Even from her first appearance, she is set apart from the other characters that use English without much in the way of strange accent. The corruption of her language is related to the abuse of her body by her male customers, which undermines the binary world view of Freevill who attempts to preserve his own domestic household far from a common public world of prostitution. In the body politic of early modern England, Franceschina is not only a being that is constantly conscious of her otherness due to the monstrous hybridity of her tongue but also the other who is victimized in the anxiety of national, cultural and linguistic identities.