Troping Prostitution: Jonson and "the Court Pucell" (Ben Jonson‪)‬

Sometime in 1609, Ben Jonson penned "An Epigram on the Court Pucell," a satirical poem in which he rails against Cecilia Bulstrode (c.1584-1609), Gentlewoman of the Queen's Bedchamber and kinswoman and friend of Lucy Harington Russell, the Countess of Bedford. Apparently responding to some critique of his person ("Do's the Court-Pucell then so censure me" [1]), Jonson proceeds to label Bulstrode a "Pucell." (1) Not surprisingly, many critics have interpreted the poem as a denunciation of Cecilia as a whore, the word 'pucell' constituting an early modern term for a prostitute. Indeed, A. C. Swinburne in 1889 commented upon the "virulent ferocity" of what he identified as the epigram's "personal attack on a woman." (2) He went on to assert: "no man has said coarser (I had well-nigh written, viler) things against the sex to which these exceptionally honoured patronesses belonged." (3) This interpretation of Jonson's epigram as a slur on Cecilia Bulstrode's sexual morality seems to have held sway for more than half a century, with C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, the Oxford editors of Jonson, echoing the sentiments given voice to by Swinburne: "Certainly few men in his day, or in any day, have assailed a woman with the foul-mouthed ferocity of his lines to 'The Court Purcell' ... Jonson impatiently flings aside the dignity of just rebuke ... in order to outdo her in ribald abuse." (4) In an essay which considered the place of "Epigram on the Court Pucell" among the other poems contained in Jonson's The Underwood (a collection of his verse published posthumously in 1640), Jongsook Lee in 1989 interrogated the "personal" nature of the poet's attack on Bulstrode as identified by the Oxford editors and Swinburne before them. Lee concluded that: "The charges levelled against Cecilia Bulstrode are too stylized to be taken as personal. In this epigram, she becomes a generic court pucelle, and by that means, an image of the false world." (5) Though, she does go on to concede that Bulstrode nevertheless functions in Jonson's epigram as an "exemplary picture of vice." (6)