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Keir Elam (essay date spring 1996)

SOURCE: Elam, Keir. “The Fertile Eunuch: Twelfth Night, Early Modern Intercourse, and the Fruits of Castration.” Shakespeare Quarterly 47, no. 1 (spring 1996): 1-36.

[In the following essay, Elam uses Viola's reference to her cross-dressing, in which she states she will play the role of a eunuch, as an entry point for discussing the cultural history of castration as it appears in literature and the theater.]

I. FORWARD TO THE PAST

This essay is like Hamlet's crab: it goes forward only by going backward. Or, to put it another way, it is a work in progress that has turned irresistibly into a work in regress. A work in progress because the historical and textual ground I cover here is too vast to allow anything resembling definitive results. And a work in regress because, while my original aim was to investigate the representation of social intercourse in Twelfth Night within the...

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1. Introduction
2. Criticism: Overviews And General Studies
   1. Roger Warren and Stanley Wells (essay date 1994)
3. Criticism: Character Studies
   1. David Willbern (essay date winter 1978)
4. Criticism: Production Reviews
   1. Donald Lyons (review date February 1997)
   2. David Patrick Stearns (review date 17 July 1998)
   3. Robert Brustein (review date 7 September 1998)
   4. Ted Merwin (review date 1999)
   5. Marla F. Magro and Mark Douglas (essay date 2001)
   6. Laurie Osborne (essay date 2002)
5. Criticism: Themes
   1. Elias Schwartz (essay date April 1967)
   2. Keir Elam (essay date spring 1996)
   3. John Kerrigan (essay date 1997)
   4. Angela Hurworth (essay date 1999)
   5. Paul Dean (essay date 2001)
6. Further Reading
7. Copyright