Tamburlaine the Great: Parts One and Two

Abstract

The Elizabethan Bridewells were established, as has been suggested, to reform prisoners. They therefore provide an important qualification to Foucault’s neat polarisation between spectacle and surveillance. More specifically, the regime at the London Bridewell developed into a complicated mixture of spectacle and surveillance. Although it retained the original emphasis on correction, it was also used as a more conventional prison. Hacket spent some time there after his arrest and Kyd was taken there to be tortured. The punishment of masterless men and prostitutes often took the form of both a school and a festival. As Dekker and others indicate, the whipping of prostitutes could take place before an audience. Other punishments required the prisoners to be paraded through the streets. They were, for instance, escorted out of Bridewell on a regular basis to clear the sewage from the neighbouring streets. An account of this more public part of their punishment, which was published in 1629 and is quoted in E. D. Pendry’s Elizabethan Prisons and Prison Scenes (1974), describes how they piled ‘Dirt and Dung’ (I, p. 41) into a cart under the direction of the beadles. Some of them pulled the cart through the streets, while others had the task of filling it up. Those who pulled may have been yoked together like horses.