The Dutch Courtesan is a much-discussed play, about which there is little agreement on key matters of substance. This part of our website is designed to host a scholarly conversation about it, which will, we hope, develop our understanding of this provocative and remarkable comedy further. We are deeply grateful to the scholars who have […]
Category: Research Essays
‘Such ungodly terms’: style, taste, verse satire and epigram in The Dutch Courtesan
§1 The Dutch Courtesan encompasses a wide range of styles and registers. This is a play whose supreme linguistic artefact is the dizzying, street-wise, fart-obsessed patois of Cocledemoy – a micro-language which repurposes scraps of Latin, bogus Greek, a dangerously satiric Scots accent, alongside seemingly meaningless cant phrases (‘Hang toasts!’ (I.ii.25, & passim)), terminology from […]
“Passionate man in his slight play”: John Marston’s prologues and epilogues
§1 One afternoon in 1604 or 1605, a young actor stepped on to the stage at the indoor theatre in the Blackfriars. He uttered eighteen lines of verse. In doing so, he made an appeal to the first spectators to witness a new comedy: The Dutch Courtesan. This is what the actor said: Slight hasty […]
Mapping The Dutch Courtesan
§1 The Dutch Courtesan divides opinion. For one scholar, it is Marston’s only “masterpiece in dramatic portraiture” (Bradbrook, 162), while, for another, it exemplifies the terminal “deliquescence of his talent” in the final phases of his playwriting career (Ure, 77). If views of the script’s quality diverge so radically, so do accounts of its major characters. […]
Franceschina’s Voice
§1 Scholarship on The Dutch Courtesan has been fascinated by its title character’s idiosyncratic and wayward accent and, with very few exceptions, has expressed decisive views about its likely effect on audiences. According to one observer, Marston has burdened Franceschina with a “grotesque foreign lingo”, which irreparably cuts her “off from normal life” (Hunter, 320). […]
The Dutch Courtesan, 1964
§1 In summer 1964 the newly established National Theatre made its first venture into the non-Shakespearean early modern repertoire with a production, by William Gaskill and Piers Haggard, of John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan. Across the preceding century those advocating the establishment of such a flagship enterprise had consistently featured in their propaganda a requirement […]
Prefacing The Dutch Courtesan
A preface may also be an act of direction, an act of misdirection, or both at the same time. §1 While John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan speaks for itself, this essay is concerned with the ways in which the play is also spoken for. As Marie Maclean points out, the prefaces attached to a printed […]
Age and Ageing in The Dutch Courtesan
§1 In the fourth act of The Dutch Courtesan, Sir Lionel Freevill comments to Beatrice of her sister, Crispinella, ‘I like your sister well; she’s quick and lively. Would she would marry, faith!’. Crispinella responds, ‘Marry? nay, and I would marry, methinks an old man’s a quiet thing’ (4.4.6-10). For a fleeting moment, Marston’s play […]
Marriage in The Dutch Courtesan
§1 Quite aside from the choice of not marrying at all, Marston offers three models for early modern marriage, as demonstrated by three couples who are about to marry or already married: Freevill and Beatrice, Crispinella and Tysefew, and the Mulligrubs. Each couple illustrates the drawbacks of the model they offer, especially for a modern […]
Marston’s Common Ground
§1 The first thing that somebody coming to The Dutch Courtesan for the first time might notice, either reading it on the page or hearing it in the theatre, is quite what a Eurodrama it is. The speech of its title character mixes French and Italian along with the imitation Dutch, and this is reflected […]