Pericles (Vol. 51) | Lorraine Helms (essay date 1990)
Lorraine Helms (essay date 1990)
SOURCE: "The Saint in the Brothel: Or, Eloquence Rewarded," in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 3, Fall, 1990, pp. 319-32.
[In the following essay, Helms traces the literary precedence of Pericles's Marina, discussing subtle differences in attitudes towards the commodification and patriarchal control of a woman's sexuality.]
The fifty-third declamation in Lazarus Piot's 1596 translation of Alexander Silvayn's The Orator tells a tale "of her who having killed a man being in the stewes, claimed for her chastity and innocencie to be an Abbesse." The narrative is prefaced by an imperative statement in the guise of a law: "The order of the religious women is such, as they must be pure, chast, and free from all crime, but the Abbesse must be the chastest of all the rest." The declamation that follows subjects this fictive law to a narrative that challenges its implicit definitions of chastity...
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