“But She Woulde Not Consent”: Women’s Narratives of Sexual Assault and Compulsion in Early Modern London

Abstract

Act 4 of William Shakespeare’s romance Pericles (1607–8) depicts a scenario in which an idealized chaste woman, Marina, daughter of Pericles, avoids the threats of prostitution and then rape through her assertive chastity and through the effectiveness of her eloquence. Marina has been sold into prostitution in Mytilene by pirates who seized her and transported her from Tharsus, and she subsequently finds herself penniless, friendless, and the object of much speculation. The brothel keepers (Pander and Bawd and their servant Boult) advertise her virginity and beauty in the town marketplace and intend to sell the opportunity to deflower her to the highest bidder. Their venture is unsuccessful, however, because, every time a client approaches Marina, she refuses to consent, admonishes him, and thereby repulses him. Some clients are converted from the very practice of visiting bawdy houses, such as the Gentleman who asserts, “I am out of the road of rutting for ever.”¹ Through her assertions of her own chastity and through her appeals to the clients’ pity and to the gods, Marina “would make a puritan of the devil,” according to the Bawd (4.6.9). Marina’s “quirks, her reasons, her master reasons, her prayers, her knees” (4.6.7–8) even affect Lysimachus, the governor of Mytilene and a regular customer of the brothel, who swears off whoring and rebukes the brothel keepers after encountering Marina for the first time.