The Honest Whore
Thomas Dekker
 The play, set in a Milan that is, in common Elizabethan fashion, mostly a thinly-disguised London, presents three plots. In the subplot, the Duke of Milan has feigned the death of his daughter Infelice; his goal is to thwart her love affair with Hippolito, the son of an old enemy. This plot follows the standard romantic formula: Hippolito remains constant to the supposedly dead beloved. The two are finally reunited when a doctor who had aided the Duke in the trick repents and informs Hippolito of the truth. He is reunited with and marries her at Bethlem Royal Hospital—the pretense at Italian color having been all but abandoned. The second subplot 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. At last she manipulates him into wearing an apprentice's clothes in his own shop. He tolerates an assault without complaint, and she succeeds in having him taken to Bethlem, which he also tolerates calmly. Seeing that he cannot be roused to anger, his suddenly contrite wife hastens to petition the Duke to free him. This plot appears to have been the most popular during the period; it provided the subtitle and running title of many editions before 1635. In the title plot, a prostitute named Bellafront falls in love with Hippolito. Devoted to the memory of his beloved, Hippolito spurns her. Bellafront is motivated to examine her sin, repents, and attempts again to woo Hippolito. He again rejects her. She announces that she is returning to her father in the country; however, in the next act she appears at Bethlem, seemingly insane. Finally, after playing a key role in the reconciliation of the Duke to his daughter and new son-in-law, she drops her madness, which she announces was feigned, and asks to be married to Matheo—a rake who was the first to seduce her. The Duke forces this marriage, and even Matheo assents, albeit rather cavalierly.