The Honest Whore

The Honest Whore is an early Jacobean city comedy, written in two parts; Part 1 is a collaboration between Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, while Part 2 is the work of Dekker alone. The plays were acted by the Admiral's Men.

The Honest Whore, Part 1 was entered into the Stationers' Register on 9 November 1604; the first quarto was published later the same year, printed by Valentine Simmes for the bookseller John Hodges. Subsequent quartos of the popular play appeared in 1605, 1606, and 1616; a fifth quarto was published without a date. Q6 was issued in 1635, printed by Nicholas Okes for the bookseller Richard Collins.

Scholars have debated the extent of Middleton's contribution to Part 1. David Lake's analysis of the play gives most of it to Dekker, with Middleton's contribution strongest in Act I and the first scene in Act III, and with sporadic input elsewhere.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography reports, under Thomas Middleton, that Part I was performed outside at the Fortune Theatre by Prince Henry's Men. This London premier in 1604 of The Honest Whore, Part I is verified in the Annuals of English Drama.

The play presents three plots in a Milan that is, in common Elizabethan fashion, a thinly-disguised London. In one plot, the Duke of Milan has feigned the death of his daughter Infelice in order to thwart her love affair with Hippolito, the son of an old enemy. This plot follows the standard romantic formula and Hippolito remains constant to his supposedly dead beloved.

The second plot concerns Candido, a citizen and linen draper. He is recently married, and his new wife is upset: her tongue, she says, "wants that virtue which all women's tongues have, to anger their husbands." In the play, she perpetrates various schemes to arouse her husband's ire. Ultimately her schemes result in his unjust incarceration for madness. The contrite wife hastens to Bethlem, and the duke frees Candido. This plot appears to have been the most popular during the period; it provided the subtitle and running title of many editions before 1935.

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