I move now from one kind of usury to another, from moneylending to bawdry and, with bawds, the women they employ. The popular corollaries drawn between usurers and bawds by usury critics are commonly recognised, yet little analysed. The usurer and the bawd figure as gendered versions of the same anxiety: that in the absence of appropriate paternal authority and masculine self-restraint, disorderly concupiscence will deconstruct familial and gendered hierarchies. Both breed unnatural children, the one money and the other diseases, and in these plays the abandonment of appropriate familial structures and paternal authority results in sexual disease positioned as the inheritor of the family estate. But bawds and the women they employ do not only appear in these plays because of their corollaries with usury; they are, unlike usurers, rooted in the Lukan text, as seen in the epigraphic quote at the head of this chapter. These are ‘the prodigal's harlots’ and they are, even more than usurers, a mainstay of dramatic adaptations of the parable.

In this chapter, I have three main goals. The first is to chart the origins and interpretation of the prodigal's harlots and their evolution into the sex workers of early modern drama. My second is to advance an analysis of the early modern potential to understand bawds and usurers as the same kind of profession.