SOURCE: “Gender and Eloquence in Dekker's The Honest Whore, Part II,” in English Studies in Canada, Vol. XV, No. 3, September 1989, pp. 249-62.

In this essay, Comensoli argues that in the second part of The Honest Whore, “Dekker has included women in the Renaissance dictum that the practice of eloquence is ‘the practice of power’.”

In Part I of The Honest Whore (1604), which Dekker co-authored with Middleton, the courtesan Bellafront tries to seduce the Count Hippolito, whose oration on the evils of her trade converts her to virtue (II.i.321-456).¹ Hardin Craig has noted that Hippolito's formal diatribe, which effects Bellafront's conversion, “is in the form of the forensic declamations” written by young men “in schools and universities” during the sixteenth century: “The force of persuasion establishes remorse of conscience in her [Bellafront's] heart by presenting to her a true picture of her trade, and her conversion follows...