A PIQUANTLY prejudiced picture of amatory habits in the late Elizabethan age is to be found in the works of those industrious 'anatomists' and pamphleteers, misogynists all, who were carried on the rising tide of Puritanism-though not all were Puritans. Some were humourless denunciators, some tongue-in-cheek moralists, others were scandalously amused observers. All had an alert eye for 'embared breasts', 'turgent paps' and similar anatomical immodesties.
In The School of Abuse Stephen Gosson professes to be shocked by the picking-up which goes on at the theatre, that "market of bawdry'. There is far too much 'wallowing in ladies' laps', he complains; and the attentions lavished on women by their escorts are Ovidian in their assiduity.
You shall see such heaving and shoving, such itching and shouldering, to sit by women; such care for their garments that they be not trod on; such eyes on their laps that no chips lie in them; such pillows to their backs that they take no hurt ... such giving them pippins to pass the time ... such ticking, such toying, such smiling, such winking and such manning them home. . . .
Philip Stubbes is more worried about goings-on in gardens, especially those with high walls around. Some gardens, he says in The Anatomy of Abuses, are 'no better than the stewes'. They contain banqueting houses with galleries, turrets 'and what not else ... sumptuously erected; wherein they may (and doubtless do) many of them play the filthy persons. And for that their gardens are locked, some of them have three or four keys apiece, whereof one they keep for themselves, the other their paramours have to go in before them, lest haply they might be perceived. . . .'
Although he admits there are well-regulated gardens frequented by well-behaved women, Stubbes seems convinced that most men who meet their sweethearts in gardens do so in order to 'receive their wicked desires'.
The sight of young couples courting clearly nauseates Stubbes. He deplores how 'every sawcy boy of ten, fourteen, sixteen or twenty years' is intent to catch a woman and marry her, with no fear of God. Nothing matters except that each shall have 'his pretty pussie to huggle withal', even if the result is beggary ever afterwards.
In May Day celebrations Stubbes sees only an excuse to ‘blow up Venus coale'. Out of the scores of maidens who go into the woods on these occasions only a third (he estimates) return home undefiled. As for the scenes round the maypole on the village green: '. . . what clipping, what culling, what kissing and bussing, what smouching and slabbering one of another, what filthy groping and unclean handling is not practised in these dancings?' And not less demoralizing than dancing is music:
If you would have your son soft, womanish, unclean, smooth-mouthed, affected to bawdry, scurrility, filthy rimes and unseemly talking; briefly if you would have him, as it were, transnatured into a woman or worse and inclined to all kinds of whoredom and abomination, set him to dancing school and to learn Musick, and then you shall not fail of your purpose. And if you would have your daughter whezith, bawdy and unclean and a filthy speaker and such-like, bring her up in music and dancing and, my life for yours, you have won the goal.
|