1982 ard2

1776 a Nunry] Jenkins (ed. 1982): "The evidence that a nunnery might be a house of ill-fame had better be examined. It hardly establishes that this use of nunnery was ’common’ (Dover Wilson) or ’well-known’ (Adams). Passages relied on for such a meaning afford dubious authority for it here. When the Gray’s Inn Revels of 1594 (cited N&Q, CCX, 332) refer to a brothel as a nunnery, this is a part of an elaborate joke: ’Lucy Negro, Abbess de Clerkenwell, holdeth the Nunnery of Clerkenwell . . . of the Prince of Purpoole, by Night-Service in Cauda, and to find a Choir of Nuns, with burning Lamps, to chaunt Placebo to the Gentlemen of the Prince’s Privy-Chamber’ (Gesta Grayorum, MSR, p. 12). The woman referred to as the abbess was well known for a brothel-keeper, and wit depends on presenting her establishment in the guise of its contrary.

“The same is basically the technique of the passage from Nashe’s Christ’s Tears cited in OED (as one of the only two examples before 1700). For though Nashe is explicitly speaking of bawds who give gentlemen admission to ’their nunnery’, he has already told us that it is ’a trick amongst all bawds, they will feign themselves to be zealous Catholics; and . . . if they be imprisoned or carried to Bridewell for their bawdry, they give out they suffer for the Church’ (Nashe, ii. 151-2). Hence the use of the word ’nunnery’ simply sustains the pretense.

“These two instances, the only ones recorded earlier than Hamlet, do not entitle us to infer that a nunnery meant a brothel outside carefully controlled contexts. But a passage from The Black Book (pupb. 1604) (cited by R. Levin in N&Q, CCXIII, 249) is rather different. There Pierce Penniless greets the idea that he might become a usurer with a jest at what he might then do with his unaccustomed wealth: ’I would build a nunnery in Pict-hatch was, as The Black Book tells us, ’the very skirts of all brothel-houses’. A nunnery there would be an incongruity, which may of course be the point. But it does not appear that Pierce proposes to convert the local women ; his other projects are rather concerned with increasing facilities for the town’s disreputable sports: he would ’turn the walk in Paul’s into a bowling-alley’ and ’have the Thames leaded over, that they might play at cony-holes with the arches under London Bridge’. Hence I incline to agree with Levin that the full effect of this joke lies in its ambiguity; for while a literal nunnery in Pict-hatch would have its comic point, the context is likely to suggest to us a ’nunnery’ of another kind. Yet although the context can evoke this meaning, it cannot easily create it, as in the previous instances, if it does not already exist.

“The use of ’nunnery’ for its opposite, aided by the witticism of calling an unchaste woman a nun (e.g. The Alchemist, V. v. 20), might well develop into a stock joke; and we can see from Fletcher that it did. The Mad Lover (c. 1616) supplies the second of OED’s two instances and the one chosen by Dover Wilson for his illustration : ’There’s an old nunnery at hand. --What’s that? --A bawdy house’ (IV. ii. 43-4). In Rule a Wife and Have a Wife (1624) Fletcher repeats the joke. A husband interjects sardonic comment on a message delivered to his wife : ’Madam, the Lady Julia--That’s a bawd . . .--Has brought her coach . . . to be inform’d if you will take the air this morning--The neat air of her nunnery’ (III. i. 63-7). Fletcher, unlike Nashe and the Gesta Grayorum, needs no religious context to justify his usage. He expects us to accept quite simply that a ’nunnery’ can be a brothel, which helps to confirm our supposition that Middleton had already done the same. But Fletcher does not trust the word to be clear if it stands alone. We know his nunnery for what it is when he explains the joke for us or when its owner has been already (three times) called a bawd.

“Can we assume that without such precise indications - and twenty years or so before - the word nunnery would be so understood? The example of The Black Book makes it conceivable that it might. Yet even there, with less unmistakable direction, it is the context that guides us to an ironic meaning : the nunnery is placed in Pict-hatch, where the amenities are to be improved. Hamlet gives no such guidance. On the contrary, its nunnery is consistently presented as a refuge from marriage. Hence to depose the literal meaning here in favour of the brothel is, in Kitto’s word, ’inept’ (Form and Meaning in Drama, p. 280; cf. A.L. French in ES, XLVI, 141-5). It is true that as Hamlet goes on to tax Ophelia with the sins of womankind, he describes the arts of a courtesan (ll. 144-8). But it does not follow that he is ironically bidding Ophelia go where she many practice them. What the context most requires the nunnery to be is a place of renunciation. I do not think we are meant to suppose (as in Adams, pp. 78, 259-60; Coghill, pp. 22-3) that with a sudden change of tone after the question about her father (ll. 130-1) Hamlet goes on repeating the word nunnery while switching its meaning to the converse. I doubt if an actor could convey this, and the text would support him if he could. The dialogue would need to give some warning of such a change of meaning, and conspicuously does not. How easily it could have done so we may see from Wiv. II. ii. 16, where Falstaff bids Pistol ’Go . . . to your manor of Pict-hatch; go’. Instead it moves to a climax in which the final injunction to the nunnery follows immediately upon the most emphatic proscription of marriage (ll. 149-51).

“Yet additional evidence of the word’s ironic usage has made me less persuaded than I once was (HO, p. 144) that we can altogether dismiss an inherent ambiguity. As the five-times-repeated nunnery re-echoes through Hamlet’s exhortations, if its ironic use is familiar to us, it may bring to mind, along with the nunnery where the wiles of women are renounced, another kind of ’nunnery’ where they flourish. It is possible that it was for this that Shakespeare chose to reiterate the word. And a degree of ambivalence would not be out of keeping with the baffling behaviour of the ’antic’ Hamlet as exhibited already - in the ambiguous visit to Ophelia’s chamber (II. i. 77-100), the riddling talk with her father (II. ii. 171-217, 399-416), and the contradictions of this very scene (ll. 95-6, 115-9). But the contrary elements of meaning need not be and are not equal. The fear that Ophelia might be a fishmonger’s daughter makes it more urgent that she shall be Jephthah’s (see nn. on II. ii. 174, 399). The nunnery she is to go to has its ordinary literal sense; and whatever ambiguity we may hear in it, this meaning dominates from first to last. The nunnery Hamlet insists on for Ophelia is a sanctuary from marriage and from the world’s contamination.

“Some confirmation of this interpretation is perhaps afforded, as far as anything can be by so debased a version, by Der Bestrafte Brudermord (BB). There Hamlet tells Ophelia (in Furness’s translation), ’Go to a nunnery, but not a nunnery where two pairs of slippers lie at the bedside’. This is at least confirms what a 17th-century ’nunnery’ could be, though it also confirms our impression, derived from other examples, that if a ’nunnery’ referred to a bawdy-house this was likely to be made explicit. More significantly it shows, despite Dover Wilson’s contrary assertion (WHH, p. 134), that, as stage tradition understood him, a bawdy-house was not what Hamlet meant. The naughty meaning, even while it is dragged in for the sake of a cheap joke, is specifically rejected. Yet the very dragging of it in suggests that there was something in the episode in Hamlet which evoked it. BB, like Fletcher, rules out any ambiguity. Shakespeare perhaps did not."