The Empress of Babylon ’ s ‘ carbuncles and rich stones ’ : The Metaphorizing of the Pox in

Thomas Dekker’s religious, political, and anti-catholic imbroglio, The Whore of Babylon (1605–6),2 written on the heels of the Powder Treason of 5 November 1605, teems with images of contagious disease, pollution, and porousness. Dekker maps these images onto the body of the Empress of Babylon,3 the whore of the play’s title, a ‘freckled face queane’, ‘speckled toade’, and ‘villanous drab’, who dons ‘carbuncles and rich stones’ (‘those red pimples’ of syphilis as a result of harboring False Truth) and who copulates with multiple ‘Nations’ (4.1.58, 62, 70, 65, 72, 65). Her body, and those she manipulates, thus function in the drama to metaphorize anxieties and fears of the strange that exist both from within and from beyond Fairyland’s (England’s) geographical boundaries. The mapping of these anxieties onto the Empress of Babylon’s body creates a female-gendered other, a construction pathologized through repeated descriptions of syphilis, the result of which is the pathologization not only of her corporeal body but also of those individual bodies with whom she comes in contact and those socio-political bodies she represents. Dekker’s metaphorizing reflects the widely held early modern belief that the pox was first generated and transmitted by women to men and that illicit female behaviour is the prima facie cause of social ills. In The Whore of Babylon, the Empresse embodies what L. S., in the medical treatise, AD@NL8"6J46@< [‘Prophylacticon’], OR, Some Considerations OF A Notable Expedient To Root out the FRENCH POX From the English Nation. With Excellent Defensive Remedies TO Preserve Mankind from the Infection of POCKY Women (1673), describes as an ‘aggregative Evil [that] is like A"<*TD" (sic) [Pandora’s] Box, out of which all other Diseases and Mischiefs issue’, a comparison arising from his observation that ‘When a man is attaqu’d with the Pox, he has not one single Disease alone, but a Legion of Maladies [that] presently after seize his miserable Body’ (13).4 In Dekker’s play, the Empress of Babylon’s body is the Early Theatre 7.1 (2004)