Bawdy-Houses Bawdy-Houses Author Brock Burns Supervising Editor Kate McPherson Editor Kate McPherson Copy Editor Leah Hamby Senior Encoder Leah Hamby Encoding and Metadata LEMDO Team Copyright Holder (Content) Kate McPherson Copyright Holder (XML and interface) University of Victoria Early Modern England Encyclopedia EMEE

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.

 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globalink Research Internship Utah Valley University

Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a

 University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform

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Early Modern England Encyclopedia

By Brock Burns, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions

Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines

This document uses Canadian English spelling

 Document Types All documents in LEMDO are either born-digital documents or primary documents. Within those two general categories, LEMDO offers additional ways to categorize a file. Born-digital Born-digital documents are anything other than primary texts Critical Critical material, such as a general introduction or a textual introduction. Responsibilities Responsibilities Author A person, family, or organization responsible for creating a work that is primarily textual in content, regardless of media type (e.g., printed text, spoken word, electronic text, tactile text) or genre (e.g., poems, novels, screenplays, blogs). Use also for persons, etc., creating a new work by paraphrasing, rewriting, or adapting works by another creator such that the modification has substantially changed the nature and content of the original or changed the medium of expression. LEMDO uses the term author in two contexts: (1) to indicate the author of a primary work or document (such as Hamlet), and (2) to indicate the author of a secondary text (such as the Critical Introduction to <title level="m">Hamlet, by David Bevington). Editor A person, family, or organization contributing to a resource by revising or elucidating the content, e.g., adding an introduction, notes, or other critical matter. An editor may also prepare a resource for production, publication, or distribution. For major revisions, adaptations, etc., that substantially change the nature and content of the original work, resulting in a new work, see author. LEMDO uses the general term editor only in edition metadata and only to indicate when a person is responsible for editing all parts of an edition. Otherwise, use the more granular terms to describe the precise nature of the editorial role. Supervising Editor An editor who supervises the work of a student editor. Copy Editor LEMDO uses the term owner for the person who checks facts, quotations, and citations; may make formatting changes; may convert from one citation style to another; may suggest wording changes; and enforces conformity with the project style guide. Markup Editor A person or organization performing the coding of SGML, HTML, or XML markup of metadata, text, etc. Gloss needed. Copyright Holder A person or organization to whom copy and legal rights have been granted or transferred for the intellectual content of a work. The copyright holder, although not necessarily the creator of the work, usually has the exclusive right to benefit financially from the sale and use of the work to which the associated copyright protection applies. Normally the editor is the copyright holder for an LEMDO edition. EMEE Keywords Culture Learn about the customs, beliefs, and daily lives of people in early modern England. Daily Life Adultery Crime Punishment Sexually Transmitted Infections Published file. Updated metadata proofed Review of article finished. updated author respStmt. updated figure desc and figDesc. Added image and image source. Added date, pubPlace, and publisher tags to sources Created File. Michael Best Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

 Brock Burns Brock Burns

Brock Burns was a student at Utah Valley University.

 Leah Hamby Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

 Navarra Houldin Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

 Kate McPherson Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

 LEMDO Team The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors. University of Victoria https://www.uvic.ca/
Joachim Beuckelaer’s Brothel 1562. Walters Art Museum 37.1784. Public domain. Joachim Beuckelaer’s Brothel 1562, a painting depicting several men and women participating in risque activities in a bawdy-house. Walters Art Museum 37.1784. Public domain.
Definition

A bawdy-house was a brothel, whorehouse, or a house of prostitution, sometimes called a stew. As a standalone building or attached to a tavern or playhouse, a bawdy-house was the site of considerable vice, crime, and disease in early modern England. Bawds (the individuals who ran the bawdy house, whether they were male or female) and their establishments were not welcome inside the walls of The City of London and mostly inhabited outer suburbs such as Southwark and Smithfield. Despite their existence on the margins of society, bawdy-houses were a part of everyday life throughout the period.

Inside the Bawdy-house

In a brothel, men gathered to smoke, eat, drink, hear or sing lewd songs, and pay for sex. The cost to hire a prostitute in Elizabethan England ranged from sixpence to half a crown (between 4 and 20 pounds in 2023). The pervasive presence of bawdy-houses challenged England’s attitudes about morality and class separation because they flouted these conventions.

Efforts to Suppress Prostitution

Prostitution was technically against both religious and civil law, but officials often looked the other way because they profited from it. in the 16th and 17th centuries, governments and the Church of England had concerns over rising crime and disorder, some of which was tied to the sex trade. They also worried about sexually transmitted infections, particularly syphilis which ravaged huge swaths of Europe after its spread from the New World. Finally, the rise of Puritanism prompted new urgency in efforts to close brothels due to the focus of Puritans on enforcing morality. In 1506, eighteen bawdy houses were closed along the Bankside of the Thames River (twelve would reopen not long after). By 1546, crime and disorder had grown so much than Henry VIII issued a proclamation aimed at a final closing of all stews.

These efforts did little to curb the spread of prostitution. In fact, the closure of licensed bawdy-houses had the opposite effect, for many prostitutes were scattered inside of London and became much harder to police. Unrestrained population growth during Queen Elizabeth I’s reign, when London doubled in size between 1550 and 1600, dramatically increased the rate of the poorer classes moving into the swelling slums. Relative economic prosperity brought more upscale travelers who could afford the services of sex workers.

Punishments for Prostitution

Even though bawdy houses were very much an open secret, prostitutes and their customers were subject to public scorn, shaming, and punishment. Up until Elizabeth I’s ascension, the Church held jurisdiction over sexual offenses of common people in England. Officials called summoners were sent to each parish to find offenders and bring them to bawdy court. Elizabeth I broadened enforcement when she created a Court of High Commission, which held concurrent and superior jurisdiction over moral offenses. Both systems were ineffective and highly susceptible to corruption.

People found guilty of moral crimes could be subjected to various punishments that typically involved public humiliation: Whipping Flogging Carting (paraded about town behind a cart with a paper explaining the offense) Penance (being forced to stand clothed only in a sheet before a church congregation) Fines Imprisonment

Bawdy-houses in Early Modern Literature

In Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem (1593), Thomas Nash ironically calls a brothel a Nunnery. This is the first instance of using nunnery as slang for a brothel or bawdy-house, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Shakespeare also repeatedly alludes to bawdy-houses in his work. Hamlet famously implores the innocent Ophelia to get thee to a nunn’ry several times (3.1.120; 128–29; 136-37; 139). Critics have debated whether these are straight-forward commands to Ophelia to escape the corruption of the world by entering a convent, or whether Shakespeare implies, like Nash, that there is no escape from the world’s corruption and that Ophelia might as well go to a brothel.

Falstaff, a comedic character in several of Shakespeare’s plays, embodies the revelry and hedonism found in bawdy-houses. Inside the Boar’s-Head Tavern in the London neighborhood of Eastcheap, Falstaff is unashamed as he talks about his lifestyle: Why, there is it: come sing me a bawdy song; make me merry. I was as virtuously given as a gentleman need to be; virtuous enough; swore little; diced not above seven times a week; went to a bawdy-house once in a quarter—of an hour; paid money that I borrowed, three of four times; lived well and in good compass: and now I live out of all order, out of all compass. (Henry IV, Part 1, 3.3.220-227)

In Measure for Measure, Lord Angelo embodies the strict, moralistic impulse of the Puritans to contain vice and sexual impurity. His proclamation to close the brothels and end unlawful sexual activity echoes Henry VIII’s final edict regarding closure of houses of prostitution. In the play, the young nobleman Claudio is arrested for impregnating Juliet, his fiancee, but he is sentenced to death to serve as an example against fornication. Such a harsh sentence would have been viewed as excessive and cruel to Shakespeare’s audience, and it shows the social tensions involved with the sex trade in early modern England.

Key Print Sources Muenchrath, Anna. Decapitation, Pregnancy, and the Tongue: The Body as Physical Metaphor in Measure for Measure. Early Modern Literary Studies, vol. 20, no. 1, 2018, pp. 1–19. Partridge, Eric. Shakespeare’s Bawdy: A Literary and Psychological Essay and a Comprehensive Glossary. E.P. Dutton and Co., Inc., 1969. Salkeld, Duncan. Shakespeare among the Courtesans: Prostitution, Literature, and Drama, 1500–1650. Ashgate Publishing, 2012. Shugg, Wallace. Prostitution in Shakespeare’s London. Shakespeare Studies, vol. 10, 1977, pp. 291–313.
Key Online Sources Best, Michael. A Bawdy-House. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/society/city%20life/bawdy-house.html. 7 Feb. 2023. Open Source Shakespeare. George Mason University, 2003–2018, https://opensourceshakespeare.org/. Accessed 14 Sep. 2018.
Image Source Beuckelaer, Joachim. Brothel. Walters Art Museum 37.1784, 1562, https://art.thewalters.org/object/37.1784/.