Izabella Scott at the Paris Review:
The first dildo named in English literature appears in a brothel on Valentine’s Day. Thomas Nashe’s The Choise of Valentines, an erotic farce written in the early 1590s, follows Tomalin, an impatient lover visiting a sweetheart in the bordello where she works. He pays the hostess (a “foggy three-chinned dame”) and hurries upstairs through the building’s “crankled wayes.” But his reunion with Mistress Francis is urgent and disastrously brief. “I faint! I yeald!” he cries. Left unsatisfied, Francis briskly reaches for her “little dildoe.”
Francis makes the device’s advantages ruthlessly clear. She prefers it to Tomalin’s “sillie worme”: it is always stiff, cannot make her pregnant, and does not fail through haste or fatigue. The dildo is not a sad substitute, but a youthful “knave”—a mischievous lover and jaunty sexual performer who “playes at peacock,” soon becoming Francis’s true valentine. “Behold! how he usurps in bed,” she cries. For Tomalin, that is precisely the problem; he angrily dismisses the dildo as a filthy, “dasht” toy and “senceless counterfet.” But the violence of the complaint betrays his true feelings. The dildo becomes an antagonist: an obscene rival, a bedroom interloper, one that should be “whipt with nettles,” as one might another man.
more here.
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