Bedlam and Bridewell in the Honest Whore Plays

Abstract

Following Elizabeth I’s death, Dekker responded quickly to the growing fashion for staging the dynamics of city life in the Honest Whore plays (1604–5). It was a fascination which also marked Shakespeare’s only full-scale intervention into the contemporary milieu of the metropolis; into what the Duke in Measure for Measure calls ‘The nature of our people,/Our city’s institutions, and the terms/For common justice’ (I.i.9–11). With Middleton, Dekker began to chart the same tense relationship between people and government by throwing into relief certain institutions which characterized that tension. One such place was Bedlam, England’s first asylum for the insane. At the beginning of the seventeenth century this hospital, with its thirty or so inmates, had become symptomatic of the many changes which wrought London during this period.³ By staging the asylum so meticulously in The Honest Whore, part I the writers theatricalized the social vision and governmental forces which constituted it. Obviously, it was a popular play because a year later Dekker returned to the Fortune theatre with a sequel, The Honest Whore, part II. In this play Bedlam was replaced with the infamous Bridewell, the first workhouse or ‘house of correction’.

The walls of confinement actually enclose the negative of that moral city which the bourgeois conscience began to dream in the seventeenth century; a moral city for those who sought, from the start, to avoid it, a city where right reigns only by virtue of a force without appeal — a sort of sovereignty of good, in which intimidation alone prevails and the only recompense of virtue (to this degree its own reward) is to escape punishment.¹