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Essay / Dekker's smallpox pamphlets and co-authorship of the two Honest Whore plays with Thomas Middleton may give us insight into a potential catalyst for the association of discriminatory attitudes toward foreigners. body and diseases. Selected extracts from the pamphlets The Belman of London, Lanthorne and Candle-light and The Honest Whore play are the focus of this first chapter because they are set in the aftermath of the bubonic plague of 1603, coming from a very disease-conscious environment. and the fear of the contagiousness of one's neighbor and thus offering a first modern response to venereal diseases from a moralist point of view. In the case of Dekker and his Puritan values, the anger that came with living in the aftermath of the plague manifested itself as a hatred of prostitution, of those who engaged in it, and of those he saw as responsible for the spread of the plague's sister disease, French pox. – large pox, or syphilis. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”?Get the original essayIn the case of The Belman of London, published between 1608 and 1609, the pox is used to highlight the hypocrisy in the upper echelons of society, “by highlighting the most notorious villainies which are practiced in the Kingdom today”, with the aim of “awakening” the “eyes” of its readers to the “common abuses” which they are presented daily. Dekker's narrative voice for revealing this hypocrisy is that of the Belman himself who, Dekker proposes, represents the "Owl (which is the emblem of wisdom)" and serves the moralistic purpose of shedding light on "the brood of misdeeds, which is generated.” in the belly of darkness”, it is London. An understanding of Dekker's intentions in publishing the pamphlet can be established by his clarification that "I do not particularly strike the breast of man, but only the body of vice in general." This suggests that when it came to vice (here, vice equals disease), moral discrimination for once had no class-based differentiation, although, of course, the spread of disease in working class slums would have been comparatively higher. Likewise, the tone of his writings encourages us to believe in the need for collective resilience of the city against the instigators of this vice: “So be second adventurers and provide men armed with justice” for the benefit of “the Republic in which you life. (4) Although it is not exactly xenophobia, Dekker's invocation of Londoners against the disease forms a divide between "us" and "them" – a divide which, as we will see, is will also reveal a national divide. presented by Robert Burton, “Anatomy of Melancholy” talks about the physical effects on the body and the relationship between excessive emotions and aggressive, physical, outward reactions such as illness. (T. Roberts?) These excessive emotions, or disturbances, evoked in the same breath as Vice, have been shown to lead directly to physical manifestations of the disturbances through (among other physical responses, but in this case most importantly ), of the disease. As we consider studying Dekker, this model of "excessive emotion = vice = outwardly manifested disease" will be used, so that Dekker's discussion of vice is considered alongside questions of health, disease, and plague. As we have seen so far, Dekker's pamphlets exhorted readers not only to beware, but also to actively arm themselves against disease-creating vice. Returning now to the second part of Belman's travels, of Dekker, we have evidenceadditional information regarding defect and infection. “Lanthorne and Candlelight,” which continues to follow Belman as he denounces the evil of vice and offers insight into the “strange Villanies” (2) that Dekker claims to have witnessed in 1609. The ninth chapter, which bears the title “ The infection of the suburbs", specifically considers the plague through the brothels of the suburbs which are, above all, noted as distinct from the city itself: "the City not being able to keep him in freedom, because he was a foreigner, the the gates were wide open for him to pass through, and he entered the suburbs. (32) Dekker's choice to make Belman a foreigner was probably a deliberate reference to the French pox. The doors of the suburbs, universally known as a hotbed of disease, were wide open to the stranger, knowing that his position as a foreigner (geographically speaking, probably French) entailed preconceived ideas about a body already suffering from smallpox. While Dekker's pamphlet discusses the bubonic plague of 1603 and France conversely was famous for its smallpox, the two different diseases may seem thematically incompatible. However, we can see in another pamphlet by Dekker that he connects the two. In “Graues-ende,” Dekker sardonically notes that the “painted prostitutes […] smile at the [French] plague” because they know that their:[…] the dead come from France: It is not their season now to die, Two gnawing poisons cannot reside together in one corrupt flesh. ( )The invocation of French versus English diseases alongside the “gnawing poison” of disease that affects the physical body of the individual shows us a link between a literary representation of disease and an engagement with ideas of national identity . The smallpox of France and the plague of England are both identical in their common character of complete weakening of infected people and clearly different in their incompatibility. The French pox may have crossed the Channel, but the poisons of both nations cannot reside in “one corrupt flesh.” Dekker proposes national ownership of the disease ravaging London, which requires commitment to fighting the disease as a national unit rather than on an individual level. Prostitutes gain knowledge of their own mortality because they understand and differentiate between what the infection means for them and their sense of geographic unity, as opposed to what it means for those infected with French pox . This emphasis, although probably written by Dekker for comedic comparison purposes, perhaps also begins to offer us a glimpse of the responses he was trying to elicit from his audience. Returning to “The Infection of the Suburbs,” we can further explore Dekker’s wish, or existing understanding of a national collective response to the disease. After a lengthy description of “What armor wears a prostitute coming from the suburbs to besiege the city within the walls” (33), Dekker (the belman) chastises those in positions of political and social power for failing to curb the spread of the contagiousness of prostitution. lamenting “…how did you become a blind Asse?” because you have only one eye to see with everything: Don't be so brilliant, don't be so boring in understanding" and concludes that the guardians of the city do not care enough about its inhabitants: You, the Guardians of such a great princess as the eldest. daughter of King Brutus: you, twice twelfth fathers and governors of the noblest city, why do you take so much care to plant trees to beautify your walks outside, and yet leave you the most beautiful garden (inside) to be invaded.
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