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Literary notes about Strumpet (AI summary)

The term "strumpet" in literature is deployed as a potent epithet that interrogates a character's morality and sexual propriety. Writers often use it to denigrate women by portraying them as untrustworthy or licentious, a usage apparent in charged declarations and bitter reproach. Its employment ranges from expressions of personal betrayal, as in the disdainful remark “I am your latest strumpet[1], to broader indictments of fate and fortune, seen when fate itself is dubbed “strumpet Fortune” [2]. Even celebrated dramatists like Shakespeare and Webster wield the word to layer their characters with ambiguity and moral complexity [3][4], while modern authors extend its abrasive imagery to critique contemporary societal attitudes [5].
  1. Harry will be suspecting that I am your latest strumpet.
    — from Plays by Susan Glaspell
  2. (9) The idea of 'strumpet Fortune' is common: e.g. Macb.
    — from Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth by A. C. Bradley
  3. It were not fit I should bestow so main a piece of wrong Upon my friend; 'tis a gratification Only due to a strumpet, for it is injustice.
    — from The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster
  4. But I will chastise this high minded strumpet.
    — from The Complete Works of William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare
  5. By word and deed he frankly encouraged a nocturnal strumpet to deposit fecal and other matter in an unsanitary outhouse attached to empty premises.
    — from Ulysses by James Joyce

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