Restoration Drama (Social Background): Attitudes to Sex

Not only was the Court of Charles II vulgar in its behaviour, it was also vulgar in its speech. Even the "well bred" King used many vulgar words and Lord Rochester's works mirrored the language and behaviour of his fellow courtiers.

This knowledge was now being spread by the numerous broadsheets, the first gossip publcations...

Normal middle-class behaviour before the nineteenth century is exemplified by Samuel Pepys, who can be taken as the prototype of middle-class behaviour and language. He frequented whore-houses and ale-houses and sang the bawdy songs of his peers--a particular favourite was a ballad which contained the stanza "Shitten-come-Shite the Way to Love is!" His sense of humour was lavatorial and his attitude towards the women who "obliged" him was cavalier--he haggled over payment of the smallest sums...

The new coffee-houses were beginning to be places of assignation, provoking a spate of pamphlets and petitions against coffee. One of the best is that of 1674, The Women's Petition Against Coffee! It complained that, "it eunuched our Husbands' because of the "heathenish abhominable liquor called coffee...crippled our Gallants...men come with nothing Stiff except their Joints..."

A bandstring-seller sold maidenheads--demonstrating that the legal fraternity preferred maidens--what Ivan Bloch later described as "the defloration mania--an English Vice!." Maidenheads were frequently restored--astringents were known from earliest times.

Elizabethan Times to the Regency (published by Hale)

[When, in 1688, Queen Mary returned to her home country after her long sojourn in calm, sedate Holland, she] thought England was full of debauchery and profanity. As regent [in William's absence] she issued proclamations ordering the proper observance of the sabbath and urged magistrates to clamp down on drunkenness and swearing...The moral tone of the Court improved dramatically after the open sexuality of Charles II's time...The 1690s saw a reaction agianst the easy-going obscenity of the Restoration period, which found expression in the numerous societies for the reformation of manners and in tracts like Jeremy Collier's Short View of the Immorality and Prophaneness of the English Stage (1698).

Prostitutes in an infinite variety of forms were omnipresent in seventeenth-century England, something taken for granted even by a Puritan counsellor like William Gouge, who suggested that a husband might be driven to visit them if a wife did not perform her marital duties. Cases of prostitution and scandalous lewdness, having been in the control of the church, gradually developed into indictable offences under the common law as the century progressed...

Half-crown-chuck-office:
The practice of a prostitue who would stand on her head "with the vulva gaping wide, and allowing the assembled gentleman to chuck in half-crowns...." Burtford points to The Wandering Whore, "a series of broadsheets published in 1660," as the source for this description. He is obviously citing the first pamphlet in the series:"...a Cunny being the deerest piece of flesh in the whole world, witness Priss Fotheringham's Chuck-office, where upon sight thereof, French Dollars, Spanish Pistols, English Half-crowns are as plentifully pour'd in, as the Rhenish wine was into the Dutch wenches two holes till she roar'd again, as she was showing tricks upon her head with naked buttocks and spread legges in a round ring, like those at wrestling neer the Half-crown-chuck-office, call'd Jack-a-newberries-six windmills."