Glimpses of town courtship among humble citizens are found in Thomas Dekker's The Seven Deadly Sins of London. Dekker chooses to indict candlelight for the opportunities it affords to serving-men and their wenches, in fie pursuit of furtive amours. He draws a spirited picture of the bellman peering through the window at the candlelit carousals of apprentices and kitchen maids, and in indignation banging on the door 'like a mad man', thus inspiring the wenches with green-sickness and their swains with cold agues at the thought of their master 'starting out of his naked bed' to investigate.
Couples propped up the shop doors at night even in Dekker's day, to judge from the following:
How many lips have been worn out with kissing at the street door, or in the entry (in a winking blind evening), how many odd matches and uneven marriages have been made there between young premises and their masters' daughters, whilst thou (O Candlelight) hast stood watching at the stair head, that none could come stealing down by thee, but they must be seen?
Dekker accuses the middle classes of taking more pains to match the horses in their coaches than in pairing their children.
He into whose bosom three-score winters have thrust their frozen fingers, if he be rich (though his breath be ranker than a muck-hill, his body more dry than mummy, and his mind more lame than ignorance itself) shall have offered unto him (but it is offered as a sacrifice) the tender bosom of a virgin, upon whose forehead was never written sixteen years; if she refuse this living death (for less than a death it cannot be unto her) she is threatened to be left an out-cast, cursed for disobedience, railed at daily, and reviled hourly; to save herself from which baseness she desperately runs into a bondage, and goes to church to be married, as if she went to be buried. .. .
Dekker at least admits the existence of virgins, whereas Thomas Nashe, author of The Anatomy of Absurdity and Christ's Tears Over Jerusalem, declared: 'Go where you will in the suburbs and bring me two virgins that have vowed chastity and I'll build a nunnery'. He complains of the way in which women 'embusk up on high' their breasts, 'and their round roseate buds immodestly lie forth to show at their hands there is fruit to be hoped'. From 'want of wisdom', women think nothing of deliberately crossing the street to obtain a glimpse of some gallant, 'deeming that a man by one look of them should, be in love with them'. Woman is man's worst bargain, says Nashe, and quotes with relish from the Golden Book of Theophrastus:
.. . even as she comes so we must take her; if teatish, if foolish, if deformed, if proud, if stinking-breathed or whatsoever other faults she hath we know not till we be married. A house, an ox, or an ass, or whatsoever other vile merchandise are first proved, and then bought, a man's wife alone is never thoroughly seen, lest she displease, before she be married.
Alexander Niccholes, author of A Discourse on Marriage and Wiving, says that the 'forward virgins of the day' believe that chastity is something to be shed early-'fourteen is the best time if thirteen be not better than that'- He concedes-and this is an important item on the credit side of courtship-that 'woman hath much starched up man from his slovenry, but demands to know why all this sexual allure is necessary:
Doth the world wax barren through decrease of generations and become like the earth less fruitful than heretofore? Doth the blood lose his heat, or do the sun beams become more waterish, and less fervent, than formerly they have been, that man should be thus inflamed and persuaded on to lust?
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