Through most of the sixteenth century Japan was torn apart by devastating warfare among its regional warlords, or daimyo, and many women were displaced as a result. Some of these were “wandering shrine maidens” and nuns who had been driven from shrines and temples and forced into prostitution. In the mid-sixteenth century a Bureau of Prostitution was created in order to capitalize on this development in the form of tax revenue, a first step toward full government regulation. When Japan was unified under Toyotomi Hideyoshi a walled pleasure quarter was constructed in Kyoto; it would be the model for the Yoshiwara, the “floating world” of pleasure in Edo (present Tokyo).
Under the Tokugawa shogunate Edo would house the government of the shogun, Japan’s military and civil leader, until well into the nineteenth century (the emperor, still residing in Kyoto, was limited to a more ceremonial function). Hideyoshi’s successor Ieyasu took the first steps toward instituting the practice of alternate-year residence, by which daimyo would be forced to leave their home regions and live every other year in Edo. Lower-ranking vassals and samurai, usually without wives, also gathered in Edo, along with merchants who, at least initially, considered other towns to be their true homes and tended not to bring their families with them. The result was a class of men without women companions, ensuring steady business for the Yoshiwara. Eventually, operating with government protection, the Yoshiwara would become a world onto itself, with its own customs, rules, and fashions.
The impetus for the district began in 1612 when a brothel owner named Shoji Jinemon called a meeting of his fellows. His two main concerns were the proliferation of houses of prostitution and the need for security. He proposed petitioning the government for exclusive rights to operate brothels in a defined, restricted area. The idea had a kind of precedent in the trade guilds related to specific types of merchandise that had flourished in Japan for centuries, but now women were the merchandise being handled. Over some dissent Shoji’s proposal prevailed among the owners of the houses, but the petitioners had to wait years for a response.
In 1616, before his death, the shogun Ieyasu set the policy on the path to approval, and official approval came the following year. Ieyasu had long been liberal on the issue of prostitution, and putting the district under government control fit with his overall plan of centralizing power. There was also widespread concern about homosexuality, since the congregation of warriors and their attendants in large all-male companies over the previous century had been accompanied by an increase in homosexual relations, and in pederasty. The ready availability of women as sexual objects would, the government felt, provide a check against this.
In March 1617 the brothel owners led by Jinemon were called to the Edo court where they were awarded about twelve acres of land on the outskirts of the city. No brothels were to be permitted outside this area. Besides brothels the district would be populated with tea houses and kabuki theaters. It would be surrounded by a river and moat, and there would be only one way in and out. To prevent dangerous ronin (masterless samurai) from hiding out in the district, no client would be allowed to stay there longer than twenty-four hours. In addition, unknown persons would be required to provide proof of their identity or they would be reported to the police. Even the architectural standards of the district were strictly regulated, much as they are in the gated communities of today. Near the end of 1618 the district opened for business, and it was an immediate hit. (It would burn down in 1657 and be rebuilt in a different location.)
Court Ladies Viewing Chrysanthemums, early seventeenth century, by Iwasa Matabei. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on paper, 55 × 132 cm. Yamatane Museum of Art, Tokyo.
Iwasa Matabei was initially influenced by classical traditions that looked to the literati of China as models, but he lived through a time of great social change and became one of the first painters of beautiful women in a style that would later become associated with ukiyo-e: images of the “floating world.” The eighteenth-century poet-painter Yosa Buson contributed to the identification of Matabei with, in the words of Sandy Kita, author of a book on the artist, “the courtesans, actors, playboys, rich merchants, and panderers of Edo.” Though lacking the bright colors seen in other of Matabei’s paintings, this charming painting of traveling court ladies pausing to enjoy a bed of chrysanthemums captures something of the spirit of the floating world.
The Yoshiwara flourished for centuries. In its heyday its revenues approached the equivalent of a million dollars a day. By the end of the seventeenth century two thousand or more women might work in the district at any time, a figure that later rose to three thousand. The women were strictly ranked, and priced accordingly. A high-level courtesan established in a personal suite cost more than $400 a day, a lower-level courtesan with just a single room about half that amount; the lowest-level sex workers cost from about $50 to as little as $18. High-level courtesans were expected to be accomplished conversationalists and skilled in music and the arts. Ukiyo-e, or images of the floating world (which featured higher-level courtesans), became a popular painting genre. One of the pioneers of the genre (though the range of his painting was actually quite wide) was Iwasa Matabei, who began painting images of worldly-wise women in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. “Beauty paintings” became a popular genre, and they promoted an image of the pleasure quarter as a place of glittering elegance and sophistication.
For many of the women who worked in the quarter, the reality was different. Some were sold as children to the brothels, where they would work as apprentices before coming of age. Most sex workers were bound by ten-year contracts, and few of the women ever acquired the means to escape the district, so becoming a worker there was usually a lifelong fate. A courtesan’s best chance at release was to beguile a wealthy client into buying out her contract, and women in general were dependent on men. Even a free woman was expected to respect the “three obediences”: as a child she had to obey her father, as a married woman she had to obey her husband, and as a widow she had to obey her eldest son. Would a comparatively comfortable high-level courtesan position be in some respects preferable to that of a toiling wife? Unfortunately, the women of the Yoshiwara left little record of their private feelings, and we can only imagine how they regarded their situations.
One of the great writers of the European Renaissance may have been a courtesan. She was Gaspara Stampa, who lived in the mid-sixteenth century. Born in Padua to a dealer in gold and precious gems, she enjoyed a privileged childhood and was trained in music, Greek and Latin language and literature, and the arts. After the death of her father the family moved to Venice, where she later found herself left to her own devices by the death of more members of her family. In Venice a long, unsatisfactory love affair with a count inspired her verses (later praised by Rilke, among others) — and led her, many say, to become a cortigiana onesta (a “reputable courtesan”). Her name, along with that of another noted poet, Veronica Frano, appears in a directory of courtesans, although this was published after her death.
The cortigiana onesta was an established figure in Venetian society. Serving men from the highest levels of society, she was expected to be beautiful, artistic, cultivated, and skilled in the art of conversation. Sustained by patronage, she chose her own lovers based on mutual attraction and generally maintained her affairs over long periods of time. The work of Gaspara Stampa, directly or indirectly, may have influenced Mary Wroth. Like Wroth she wrote sonnets from the perspective of an abandoned lover and favored pastoral themes and settings.
The cultivated courtesan continued to be a fixture of European society through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A woman named Ninon de Lenclos, who was born in Paris in 1616, would become famous as the “Queen of Courtesans.” Molière was among those who visited her popular salon. She founded an institution called the School of the Love Arts, which offered advice on seduction and lovemaking (men paid a fee but women attended lectures and classes free of charge).
But the privileged classes — nobili
ty, gentry, wealthy merchants, and yeoman farmers — made up only a small fraction of society. Faced with increasing urbanization, crop failures and resulting high food prices caused by the “Little Ice Age,” infectious diseases causing the evacuation of entire regions, and frequent warfare, many persons suffered severe economic stresses (this was one cause of overseas adventurism and migration). These stresses usually hit women harder than men, and women had a shorter life expectancy, not just in Europe but throughout the world. Somewhere between 2.5 and 10 percent of women died in childbirth (a much higher percentage than in subsequent centuries). Fewer than half of all children survived to adulthood — children were particularly vulnerable to plague — and women were often advised not to get overly emotionally invested in their offspring for that reason. Widowhood and abandonment were leading causes of destitution. Unmarried mothers were another vulnerable group — women in this situation were often the victims of rape or had been promised marriage and then abandoned. Such women often lacked the means of providing for infants, and were forced to resort to infanticide or to abandonment — children “found” on upper-class doorsteps might, if fortunate, be raised as servants. Foundling “hospitals” were created where wet-nurses were available for abandoned infants, but the survival rate in them could be as little as 10 percent. Girls were given up more often than boys because of the dowry system that made daughters a financial liability. Even married women were often left to manage on their own for long stretches; both Cervantes and Shakespeare spent much more time living away from their wives than they did living with them.
In his eye-opening study of illicit sex in early seventeenth-century England, based on data from court records, G. R. Quaife claims that “the promiscuous/prostitute activity of many wives, widows and experienced spinsters was widespread and regarded with much less opprobrium than Puritan publicists would like us to believe.” At the lowest level were “vagrant whores,” who wandered from town to town. Better situated were those who operated out of inns and bawdy houses. There were also private whores, some of whom, Quaife believes, may have operated “as part of a circuit servicing the clergy of the diocese.” Some husbands encouraged their wives in prostitution; marriage was, after all, largely an economic partnership. One court case relates how a wife of an innkeeper was the subject of complaints from many drinkers that she “put her hand into his breeches to feel what he had,” several of the witnesses complaining that this same wife “indecently would force an honest man to occupy her, spreading of her legs abroad and showing her commodity.” Another case concerned a man who invited a lodger to join him and his wife “all three in one bed,” a practice that became habitual for the threesome; this case landed in court not because of the sex but because the wife encouraged her lovers to steal things from their masters in order to continue the relationship.
Ladies of Venice, ca. 1490, by Vittore Carpaccio, oil on wood, 61 × 94 cm. Museo Correr, Venice.
This painting was long thought to document the Venetian tradition of the cortigiana oneste: the refined courtesans who charmed their elite clients with their elegance, sophistication, and artistic skills. That presumption is probably the legacy of the Victorian writer John Ruskin, who dubbed the painting The Courtesans. Thanks to the discovery of a companion painting, it now seems likely that these women are not courtesans at all, but that the point was argued for nearly a century indicates the degree to which some European courtesans adopted the style of upper-class ladies.
Although this image was painted long before the period that is the subject of this book, the association of Venice with courtesans in the minds of many Europeans had not dimmed over the intervening century. The English traveler Thomas Coryate described a visit to such a courtesan (though not, he assured his readers, as a client) in his entertaining book of travels called Coryate’s Crudities (p. 343).
The ladies might not be courtesans, but the pomegranate on the balastrade by a dove is a symbol of love, as is the kerchief the younger woman dangles. And the stylish but uncomfortable looking shoes in front of the peacock might bring to mind Leonard Michaels’s maxim that “bad girls have the coolest shoes.”
Some writers felt that such behavior reflected a general worsening of standards of morality. It had formerly been traditional for family and servants to share a common bed. According to a French noble this practice did not present problems. He wrote:
Do you remember those big beds in which everyone slept together without difficulty? All the people, married or unmarried, slept together in a big bed made for the purpose, three fathoms long and nine feet wide, without fear or danger of any unseemly thought or serious consequence; for in those days men did not become arroused at the sight of naked women. However, since the world has become badly behaved, each has his own separate bed, and with good reason.
By the early seventeenth century, servants tended to have separate quarters, and houses were increasingly compartmentalized by rooms fitted with doors that closed.
Mary Frith, the “Roaring Girl,” 1611, from the title page of a play by Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton. Woodblock print.
Mary Frith — “Moll Cutpurse” or the “Roaring Girl” — was a notorious transvestite carouser whose exploits were to some degree street theater. To Londoners she was a source of both entertainment and scandal.
Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s play The Roaring Girl also suggests that rowdiness at the lower levels of society may have been more common than the decorous silence of women implied by sermons and respectable texts. In a prologue, the authors claimed that there were many kinds of “roaring girls”:
… One is she
That roars at midnight in deep tavern bowls,
That beats the watch, and constables controls;
Another roars i’ th’ daytime, swears, stabs, gives braves,
Yet sells her soul to the lust of fools and slaves.
Both these are suburb roarers.
Then there’s beside
A civil city roaring girl, whose pride,
Feasting, and riding, shakes her husband’s state,
And leaves him roaring through an iron grate.
The particular Roaring Girl of the play is modeled on a woman named Mary Frith — better known as Moll Cutpurse. In his Book of Scoundrels (1897), Charles Whibley (a mentor of T. S. Eliot) introduced her with a richly textured paragraph that is worth quoting:
The most illustrious woman of an illustrious age, Moll Cutpurse has never lacked the recognition due to her genius. She was scarce of age when the town devoured in greedy admiration the first record of her pranks and exploits. A year later Middleton made her the heroine of a sparkling comedy. Thereafter she became the favourite of the rufflers, the commonplace of the poets. Newgate knew her, and Fleet Street; her manly figure was as familiar in the Bear Garden as at the Devil Tavern; courted alike by the thief and his victim, for fifty years she lived a life brilliant as sunlight, many-coloured as a rainbow. And she is remembered, after the lapse of centuries, not only as the Queen-Regent of Misrule, the benevolent tyrant of cly-filers and heavers, of hacks and blades, but as the incomparable Roaring Girl, free of the playhouse, who perchance presided with Ben Jonson over the Parliament of Wits.
The Roaring Girl was most likely written in 1611, with the two authors, who had previously collaborated on The Patient Man and the Honest Whore, working as a team on most scenes. The story concerns a young man who tries to persuade his reluctant father to approve a marriage with the woman he loves by pretending to be in love with the disturbingly butch Moll Cutpurse — “a scurvy woman … nature hath brought forth to mock the sex of woman…. woman more than man, man more than woman … a monster” — hoping by this means that his father will view the real object of his affection as a less undesirable alternative.
The name “The Roaring Girl” comes from the carousing and brawling young gentlemen known as roaring boys, upon whom Frith seems to have modeled herself. She dressed in men’s clothes and smoked a pipe (her cross-dr
essing was considered the most scandalous of her actions; dressing in men’s clothes was thought to signify sexual looseness). She is said to have earned a living as a fence and a pimp. She first appears in the court records in 1600 and shows up there from time to time for the next quarter century.
An epilogue promises that “the Roaring Girl herself, some few days hence, / Shall on this stage give larger recompense.” Apparently her performance took place as promised, for shortly afterward Moll was brought to court, where she confessed that she had appeared on the stage of the Fortune Theatre. She testified “that she had long frequented all or most of the disorderly & licentious places in this Cittie as namely she hath vsually in the habite of a man resorted to alehowses Tavernes Tobacco shops & also to play howses there to see plaies & pryses & namely being at a playe about 3 quarters of a yeare since at the ffortune in mans apparell & in her bootes & wth a sword by her syde, she told the company there p[re]sent that she thought many of them were of the opinion that she was a man, but if any of them would come to her lodging they should finde that she is a woman & some other immodest & lascivious speaches she also vsed at that time.”
Because she “sat there vppon the stage in the publique viewe of all the people there p[rese]nte in mans apparrell & playd vppon her lute & sange a songe,” Moll Cutpurse was duly sentenced to serve time in Bridewell Prison.
Catalina de Erauso, 1630, by Francisco Pacheco. Oil on canvas.
Upon the revelation of her identity as a woman Catalina de Erauso had her portrait painted twice. Francesco Crescenzio’s version is lost; this image was done by Francisco Pacheco, who was the great court painter Diego Velázquez’s father-in-law.
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