This episode is all about how the various institutions conceptualised sexual activity in early modern England and what the rules were. It includes words like 'dildo', 'masturbation' and involves a copper wire up a private part - so if any of this sounds awful, this won't be for you!
This episode is all about how the various institutions conceptualised sexual activity in early modern England and what the rules were. It includes words like 'dildo', 'masturbation' and involves a copper wire up a private part - so if any of this sounds awful, this won't be for you!
[00:00:00] Anjna Chouhan: Welcome to Shakespeare's Pants, the podcast that explores the ins and outs of English domestic activity during the life and times of William Shakespeare. My name is Anjna and I'm a Shakespearian, which is a strange thing to do with one's life; but in my attempt to be useful for a change, I'm using my otherwise pointless superpower to make history and literature come together for you, my lovely listeners. And so without further ado, here with my podcast: Shakespeare's Pants.
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[00:00:37] Deep Voice: Shakespeare's Pants.
[00:00:41] Anjna: In this episode, I'll be exploring early modern understandings of sex and talking to historians and other scholars about attitudes towards conjugal activity within different institutions, notably the church and state. As usual, I'll be considering the extent to which this helps us to make some sense of Shakespeare's characters in their situations. Let's do it with Episode 4 of Shakespeare's Pants, Sex.
Shakespeare's plays seem to be fairly conservative when it comes to sexual relations in that conjugation only takes place within marriage, or at least with some intention of leading to wedlock and by extension, offspring.
There are exceptions of course Lucrece in Measure for Measure, for example, impregnates, a Lady of the night named Kate Keepdown, whom he has no intention of marrying until he's forced to do so, and Bertram in All's Well That Ends Well arranges a sexual rendezvous with a young lady to whom he is not married. Notwithstanding the general monogamy and advocation of marriage in the plays, there is rather a lot of filth knocking about, much of it pertaining to genitalia, male and female coitus, and on occasion, masturbation.
All of this tends to suggest that Elizabethans were not too different to their 21st-century counterparts when it came to sex and knob gags; but what about the realities, the actual hands-on practicalities of sex in the 15th and early 16th centuries? By the late 1500s, English attitudes towards sex were governed by three different and sometimes contradictory institutions: the church, the state, and medicine.
Let's start with the church. In the 1400s, marriage was officially recognized in church law as a sacrament, meaning that sex was effectively legalized. In order to avoid excessive sexual activity, the church slapped on some caveats. Let's hear from Leslie Smith, medical researcher and curator at Tutbury Castle.
[00:02:51] Leslie: You can't have sex on Friday, you can’t have sex on a Sunday. You could not even for the whole of lent which is 40 days. You can't have it for the whole of advent. You can't have it on some Holy Days of obligation, the church wanted really keep up a very firm grip on human behavior.
[00:03:08] Anjna: Here's Dr. Sara Read.
[00:03:10] Dr. Sara: The church had a lot to say about when you could and couldn't have sex with all these feast days and fast days and prayer days and things and Fridays, and it’s just this huge list of days in which you're just not allowed to have sex according to the church. They would claim precedent from biblical teaching, from Scripture and controlling people's lives was a huge part of what the church was up to at that time.
[00:03:35] Anjna: In controlling sexual activity, the church was able to promote and enforce the concept of moral and spiritual health in connection with resistance, with denial, and this coalesced neatly with the pre-Reformation emphasis on abstinence.
[00:03:53] Dr. Sara: In the Catholic faith, the veneration of the Virgin is the big thing. Celibacy is valued, above all, so monks and nuns in imitation of the Virgin Mary--
[00:04:06] Anjna: For this reason, sexual activity tended to be underground, and with the increase in prostitution came the spread of syphilis. Shakespeare's Measure for Measure from the early 1600s is based around the tussle between the law and the sex trade, with brothel owner mistress Overdone complaining about her profound sciatica brought about by syphilis. Her rather brazen pimp, Pompey Bum, upon his arrest, looks his judged in the eye and asks:
[00:04:39] Pompey: "Does your worship mean to geld and splay all the youth of the city?"
[00:04:45] Anjna: When the judge replies in the negative? Pompey responds.
[00:04:49] Pompey: "Truly, sir, in my opinion, they will do it then. If your worship will take order for the drabs and the knaves, you need not to fear the bawds."
[00:05:04] Anjna: Vulgar is it seems Pompey's logic is undeniable. No laws or legal structures can stop people from having sex, and so long as there are drabs and knaves, that's prostitutes and unscrupulous men, there will always be work for the bawds to broker their activities. After the Reformation, the narrative shifted somewhat.
[00:05:27] Dr.Sara: That changes with Protestantism in which marriage, happy marriage, and lots of children is prioritised over celibacy and virginity.
[00:05:35] Anjna: Protestant writers began to emphasize the importance of family of a mother and father running a microcosmic kingdom for the benefit of the realm and in God's name. It's important to counteract the myth that marriage occurred in teenage years. Records actually indicate that marital age in the lower and middling sorts, in the 16th and early 17th centuries, was mid to late 20s obviously, with some variations. Amongst the upper sorts, marital age had more variance, but it was unlikely for men within the Gentry to marry before the age of 25. I recommend a read of Martin Ingram's book, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England 1570-1640, if this sort of thing floats your metaphorical boat.
Rather than pubescent Juliet, the English, at any rate, were a bit more relaxed about settling down and starting families invariably after the men had completed their training or their apprenticeships and were by extension financially independent. Puritans also encouraged marital harmony and intercourse, and the notion of the family became something morally desirable. This is Puritan cleric William Walkley in his book published in 1619.
[00:06:59] Male Reader: For men and women that before were parts of some other family do therefore marry that they may be the chief of a new family, and begetting children and training them up together with servants according to their place, may stall the world with people and provide plots as it were, for the church, God's own vineyard.
[00:07:25] Anjna: This kind of chocolate-box vision of the good Christian family was all well and good assuming the object of one's procreation or energies was one spouse. Civil law student William Vaughan in his book, Natural And Artificial Directions For Health, probably 1600 offered this advice for what he called--
[00:07:48] Male Reader: Wifeless, bachelors and husbandless maidens to drive away their unclean dreaming of venery at nights. First, they must refrain from wine and venerous imaginations and not use to lie in soft-down beds. Secondly, they must addict themselves to read the Bible and moral philosophy. Thirdly, they must exercise often their bodies. Lastly, if none of these prevail, let them use the seed of Angus-Castus in English Park seed, and they shall feel a strange effect to follow.
[00:08:19] Anjna: Agnus-Castus, also known as Chasteberry, was touted since the Roman Empire as unaphrodisiac and was often used by monks to abate lust. Vaughan's advice was to snack on some of those, to read the Bible, avoid soft featherbeds, and perhaps less helpfully, not to have venorous imaginations. In short, abstinence was good, unless you're married, in which case enjoy but in moderation.
Now, adding the legal attitude of state and things start to look a little more confusing. In 1586 and 1604, the House of Lords debated the criminalization of adultery and incest. It wasn't until the 1620s that the subject made it to the House of Commons, and in 1650, the Adultery Act was officially passed. In other words, adultery was not illegal in state law, only in church law during Shakespeare's lifetime.
The problem was that the church had done such a good job of stigmatizing sex outside of marriage, that culturally speaking, there was a perceived social moral duty to condemn sexually aberrant behavior, and to do so very publicly. Guilty parties had to enact pennants through fines, public verbal confessions, or acts of public humiliation such as dressing in a white sheet.
The cost of being marked out for penance in this way depended on your perspective. If you were someone prone to guilt then it would have felt awful that there is so much evidence of individuals repeatedly committing adultery and repeatedly doing penance, which suggests that many people were not affected by this punishment. Calling out sexual infidelity willy-nilly or deliberately to cause harm was, however, not something that the church took lightly. The danger of falsely accusing people of adultery didn't escape anyone's attention. Record after record across every parish in the country, remains to tell of cases of adultery brought before local church courts.
One such case was Susanna Hall, daughter of William Shakespeare. In 1613, Susanna was accused of committing adultery with a haberdasher named Rafe Smith, by a young man by the name of John Lane, Jr. Now, lane spread rumors that Suzanna had in fact caught a venereal disease from Smith. So heinous was such accusations that the Hall's called lane to Consistory Court, which is the ecclesiastical court, for slander and Lane actually failed to show up. So he was found guilty of libel and excommunicated. Adulterous accusations were no trifling matter.
So it's not terribly surprising that any character in Shakespeare's plays who incorrectly accuses a woman of infidelity is either punished or cast out of normal society. Think, Iago, Don John, or even King Leontes in The Winter's Tale, who spent 16 years living in utter misery after having convinced himself that his late wife was carrying his best friend's baby. For his public accusations and the humiliation to which she's subjected, his heavily pregnant wife, Hermione, Leontes is punished with the sudden death of his son, and the loss of the newly born infant at his own hands.
So much for the church and legal attitudes, what about the medical approach to sex. The actual pragmatics of sexual activity were based around galenic humoral pathology, as well as medical understandings of male and female anatomies. Men were typically hot, and women cold, physicians acknowledge the connection between youth, notably male youth and sexual energy, all of which was associated with blood. Here is Amie Bolissian to explain more.
[00:12:44] Amie: The idea that excess and passion and lustliness' as well, not necessarily lust in the sense of sexual lust, but lustliness strength and passion for appetite and things like that, was so closely associated with young men, specifically, but anyone who wasn't a young man was immediately judged, or would even judge themselves for succumbing to these sorts of appetites and heading into to excess riot surfeit. These were all things that were sort of expected of young carousing men who had hot blood.
Blood was valued, was prized, and this was the main humor of young men in their prime and they were hot headed and sort of forgiven for that. Women, if they followed these hot headed almost masculine pastimes or appetites, were either accused of being masculine themselves, or somehow deviant.
[00:13:53] Anjna: Shakespeare's young men are inescapably linked to both heat and blood.
[00:13:56] Male Reader: A fever, she reigns in my blood. He hath fallen by the prompter of the blood, hot blood begets hot thoughts, and hot thoughts beget hot deeds and hot deeds is love. For now, these hot days is the Mad bloods stirring.
[00:14:19] Anjna So the excess heat and the youthful body needs to have a sensible outlet and often those are presented by Shakespeare in the forms of violence or sex, hence, the street brawls in Romeo and Juliet between Verona's, young, overly heated men and the fairly arbitrary war in All's Well That Ends Well, in which the French youth are told to burn off some energy during battle with the Italians.
[00:14:40] Male Reader: It may well serve a nursery to our Gentry. Who are sick for breathing an exploit.
[00:14:49] Anjna: In other words, the noble young courtier's are desperate for some exercise and activity. To pick up on Amie's point about women, it's interesting that Juliet talks about her own hot blood heated by youth and how the nurse's is cold in comparison. And then Claudio accuses Hero of being--
[00:15:11] Male Reader: More intemperate in your blood than Venus, all those pampered animals that rage in savage sensuality.
[00:15:18] Anjna: In Venus and Adonis, the narrative poem, The Goddess Venus is enamored with, and seduces a very reluctant Adonis. Her body and language are filled with desire and naturally a lot of heat.
[00:15:33] Female Reader: And low, I lie between that sun and thee. The heat I have from then doth little harm, thine eye darts forth the fire that burneth me, and were I not immortal, life were done between this heavenly and earthly sun.
[00:15:51] Anjna: All of this was, of course, aberrant sexual behavior in women. But if heat was equated with sexual and physical energy encapsulated in youth, how did medical discourse conceptualize sexual activity in older people? Now, before we get into this, let's clarify what old age actually meant in the early modern period.
[00:16:15] Female 1: Yes, this is such a good question and it's actually quite tricky to answer because as far as we can discern, there were no major official milestones or celebrated thresholds into old age. So some historians have said, "I think that shows that people were thought to be officially in old age by 16," so that's a boundary, but others have pointed out that in personal writings and medical works, it all tends to cite 50 as the boundary. People start mentioning their old age in diaries and letters around this time.
[00:16:50] Anjna: Okay, now that's out of the way, sort of, let's talk about sex.
[00:16:54] Female 2: It was definitely something that caused consternation any association with old people and sex in the medical world, they just out now, said it was unhealthy, because basically, it was an excess of something. I think they're mostly worried that it's this dangerously excessive activity, and that old people would be overcome with it and they wouldn't have the strength, and they might fall down from an apoplexy or something.
[00:17:25] Anjna: Hamlet is mortified by the mere notion that his mother is sexually active and conjured some pretty explicit images in his vicious speech to or rather at Gertrude in her closet.
[00:17:38] Male Reader: You cannot call it love for at your age, the heyday in the blood is tame. It's humble and waits upon the judgment. O shame, where is thy blush? [chuckles] Rebellious hell, if thou canst mutine a matron's bones, to flaming youth let virtue be as wax, and melt in her own fire, proclaim no shame when the compulsive order gives the charge since frost itself was actively doth burn and reason panders will. Nay but to live in the rank sweat of an enseamed bed, stew'd in corruption, honeying and making love, over the nasty sty.
[00:18:24] Anjna: Like Gertrude, the sexual energy of Antony and Cleopatra is winced at by their onlookers. Octavius refers to it in terms of indulgence, surfeit, voluptuousness, sport, pleasure, all things that he considers immature, things that belong to the youthful body.
[00:18:43] Male Reader: If he filled his vacancy with his voluptuousness, full [unintelligible 00:18:50] and the dryness of his bones call on him forward, but to confound such time that drums him from his sport and speaks as loud as his own state and ours, tis to be [unintelligible 00:19:03]. As we rate boys who being mature and knowledge, pawn, their experience to their present pleasure, and so rebel to judgment.
[00:19:14] Anjna: In literature and culture, generally, all the characters who married or had relationships with younger people, men or women, were often the subject of ridicule. However, Amie suggests that there might have been some good medical reasons to advocate sexual activity in older years.
[00:19:32] Amie: There are a couple, and I'm sure they were extremely popular among old people, a couple of physicians who's-- who went the other way. They actually said, "Well, no, sex is warming, it's heating, and old people are cold." So actually, as long as it's not to access them, as long as it's in a marriage, it's a really healthy thing to do. I'm guessing that his book was extremely popular gift for older people.
It was Thomas Brugis, the Civil War surgeon, B-R-U-G-I-S, and he published The Marrow Physic and he really thought it could benefit the cold, older bodies. There was also an Edinburgh physician, James Hart, and he suggested that while sex would be pernicious in a feeble-- that was his word, pernicious in a feeble old age, he also warns that carnal copulation, as he calls it, wasn't that connected to chronological age and chronological age was not always an indicator. In his words, some old men of four score, are abler than others at 50. I'm assuming, I haven't checked, but I'm assuming he was older when he wrote that. [laughs]
[00:20:42] Anjna: I assume that [unintelligible 00:20:43] would have been a fan of James Hart. He does, after all, expend a great deal of energy attempting to get both mistresses Ford and Page into bed. Not at the same time, I hasten to add.
[00:20:57] Male Reader: You are not young, nor more am I. Go to then, there's sympathy. You are married, so am I. [smirks] Then there's more sympathy. You love sex and so do I. Would you desire better sympathy? Let it suffice the mistress page, at the least if the love of a soldier can suffice. That I love thee, I will not say, "Pity me," It is not a soldier-like phrase, but I say, "Love me." By me, thy known true night. By day or night or any kind of light with all his might for thee to fight John Fullstaff.
[00:21:45] Anjna: So people of all ages were having sex both in and outside of marriage and Shakespeare had a lot of fun with innuendos and euphemism for intercourse including--
[00:21:56] Female Reader: Filling a bottle with a tundish.
[00:21:59] Male Reader: The body and the dial is now upon the brink of new, the rebellion over court piece.
[00:22:07] Female Reader: A game of tick-tack.
[00:22:09] Male Reader: Groping for trouts in a peculiar river.
[00:22:12] Anjna: The loose tongued Mercutio probably has some of the most sexually outrageous language and images. For instance, he teases Romeo with explicit language about Rosalind.
[00:22:25] Male Reader: Rosalind's bright eyes. By her high forehead and her scarlet lip, by her fine foot straight leg and quivering thigh, and the demeans that there adjacent lie. It would anger him to raise a spirit in his mistress circle of some strange nature letting it there stand still she had laid it and conjured it down. That was some spite. My invocation is fair and honest and in his mistress' name, I conjure only but to raise up him.
[00:23:02] Anjna: Mercutio also he makes a joke about medlar fruits being employed by masturbating ladies. Medlar fruits, rather famously, were said to look like bottoms.
[00:23:14] Male Reader: Now, will he sit under a medlar tree and wish his mistress were that kind of fruit as maids call medlars when they laugh alone? Romeo, that she were, oh that she were an open ass. Thou a poperin pear.
[00:23:34] Anjna: That's a rather large medlar fruit tree in the garden of Shakespeare's birth place which often causes much amusement. The word dildo pops up as it were in The Winter's Tale.
[00:23:47] Male Reader: He hath songs for man or woman, of all sizes, no milliner can so fit his customers with gloves. He has the prettiest love-songs for maids; so without bawdry, which is strange; with such delicate burthens of dildos and fadings, jump her and thump her; and where some stretch-mouthed rascal would, as it were, mean mischief and break a foul gap into the matter, he makes the maid to answer, "Whoop, do me no harm, good man." Puts him off, slights him, with "Whoop, do me no harm, good man." [chuckles]
[00:24:35] Anjna: I asked Sarah about its etymology.
[00:24:38] Sarah: I think it's very much an innuendo. It's a normal word for things like lido dido. He's using it perfectly legitimately and fadings is a dance, therefore, it's in context and it's perfectly legitimate. Interestingly we are at [unintelligible 00:24:53] crossing over, so the word does become around the mid of Shakespeare's career, start to be used as a dildo. I'm quite sure he was using it on purpose for that reason to make us think of the rude thing.
It might get a bit of a ripple of a laugh, at the double entendre there. That doesn't mean that they haven't been used from forever. It just means that the word that was used to describe these objects became that word around this point in time, yes, the 1590s.
[00:25:24] Amie: On the subject of naughty objects, masturbation was dismissed both by the church and medicine as an excess because it was a waste of seed as both male and female seed. Here is Vaughan.
[00:25:38] Male Reader: Immoderate venery weakeneth strength, hurteth the brain, extinguisheth radical moisture, hasteneth on old age, and death. Sperm or seed of generation is the only comforter of nature which willfully shed or lost, harmeth a man more than if he should bleed 40 times so much.
[00:25:58] Amie: So wary were people of wasting precious sperm, that self-pleasuring was not actually condemned unless the perpetrator reached climax. Here is Lesley again.
[00:26:11] Lesley: Interestingly, St. Augustine of Hippo, he's the one who said Lord [unintelligible 00:26:15], but not right now. He says that masturbation is fun, but so you don't release the seed, it was considered to be weakening. Weakening to the [unintelligible 00:26:24] it was considered to be [unintelligible 00:26:25] looking, and it was a bad habit.
[00:26:29] Anjna: It goes without saying that plays are about, are filled with, and sometimes obsessed by sex. Entire passages are packed with titillating imagery. One such is Juliet's wedding night speech which is essentially a narration of her arousal.
[00:26:47] Female Reader: Come, civil night, thou sober-suited matron, all in black, and learn me how to lose a winning match, play'd for a pair of stainless maidenhoods. Hood my unmann'd blood bating in my cheeks with thy black mantle, till strange love grown bold think true love acted simple modesty. Come, night, come, Romeo, come, thou day and night; For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night whiter than new snow on a raven's back. Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow'd night, give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars, and he will make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay no worship to the garish sun. O, I have bought the mansion of a love, but not possess'd it, and, though I am sold, not yet enjoy'd.
[00:27:52] Anjna: Like most things in the early modern period, anxieties existed around over indulgence including in people's sex lives. Which is why contraception wasn't advocated because the idea was to abstain rather than to indulge, but to take precautions. But that's not to say that people weren't taking precautions.
[00:28:17] Lesley: There's been quite a lot of talk over the years about the tops of [unintelligible 00:28:20] being used as [unintelligible 00:28:23]. I did some experiments myself with it proved that lemons and limes and limes can indeed work as conception because they kill sperm, candida and most forms of venereal disease. Now, I suspect quite a sophisticated [unintelligible 00:28:37].
[00:28:41] Anjna: Lesley undertook this experiment under the guidance of a leading gynecologist and published the findings of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. She doesn't recommend that you replicate this experiment at home. However, she did explain that she found evidence in ecclesiastical court records on sex crimes and statements under oath of withdrawal masturbation, oral sex, and abstention all used as contraceptive methods.
[00:29:09] Lesley: But people tried other methods. Certainly in the islands of Scotland, some of the remote areas, right up a until the late 1800s. Some of the shepherds were using [unintelligible 00:29:22] pushing it into the testicles which forced an inflammation in such a nature that they could still succeed in having intercourse, but sterile.
[00:29:32] Anjna: Often, household manuals gave advice on what not to do in order to conceive and so logically, women may have been tempted to ignore the advice on the understanding that doing the opposite would prevent rather than encourage pregnancy. Engaging in sexual activity without the desire to procreate, suggested that sex had a connection to pleasure, and pleasure had a very significant role in conceiving which we'll explore in the next episode, but it was a topic of great controversy, notably within religious contexts.
It was widely known that Italian engraver, Marcantonio Raimondi, was imprisoned in Rome for publishing 16 erotic images, showing different sexual positions, fragments of which are now housed at the British museum. In Venus and Adonis, the connection between pleasure and sexual activity perhaps its strongest in Shakespeare's works. With every line fraught with lustful energy emanating from let's face it very horny Venus.
[00:30:35] Female Reader: "Fondling," she says. Since I have hemmed thee here within the circuit of this ivory pale, I'll be a park and thou shalt be my deer. Feed our welt on mountain or in Dale. Graze on my lips and if those hills be dry, stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.
[00:31:00] Anjna: Tempting as it is to assume that Elizabethans were a bit frigid, nothing could be farther from the truth. From chart records, to art and literature, sex was very much on the agenda, both within and outside of marriage. So remember to abstain on Holy days, don't get carried away with all your youthful heat. If you're over 50, probably just pop some of that agnus castus down you, sharpish. [music] That's the end of this episode of Shakespeare's Pants.
Thank you for listening and join me next time as I explore the realities of pregnancy and childbirth for our early modern sisters. In this episode you heard from Dr. Sara Read, Lesley Smith, Amie Bolissian and me, Dr. Anjna Chouhan. You also heard the voices of Tim Atkinson, Sarah Horner, Lucy Aarden, and Richard Bunn. Thank you for listening. Adios.
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[00:31:57] Deep Voice: Shakespeare's Pants.
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