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 context of early modern codes of behavior, the further I proceed with the project, the more I find myself having to work my way back through the play's long theatrical ancestry. The difficulty—appropriately enough for this comedy—lies in the mediation between its twin modes of historicity: one social and synchronic (its place within the early modern context), the other dramatic and diachronic (its theatrical ancestry). The problem of reconciling these not altogether compatible twins is especially acute in the case of Twelfth Night but is certainly not limited to this play and indeed raises certain issues regarding the historical reading of Renaissance drama in general. What follows is therefore offered, inter alia, as a contribution to the debate concerning the historical contextualization of Renaissance dramatic texts.

The particular site of this meeting or clash between different kinds of historicity is Viola's enigmatic reference to her transvestism on her first appearance in the comedy. Viola, in planning to take on a new identity, refers to her disguise not as a form of crossdressing or a change of gender roles but as an actual canceling of biological sexuality. She is to play the part not of a boy but of a castrate:

VIOLA
                                                                                                    I'll serve this duke;
Thou shalt present me as an eunuch to him.
It may be worth thy pains; for I can sing,
And speak to him in many sorts of music,
That will allow me very worth his service.
What else may hap, to time I will commit;
Only shape thou thy silence to my wit.
CAPTAIN
Be you his eunuch, and your mute I'll be:
When my tongue blabs, then let mine eyes not see.

(1.2.55-63)¹

Twelfth Night is a play full of enigmas. Some of these, such as Feste's riddles, take the form of local verbal games. Others, beginning with the play's title, are of a broader interpretative kind, posing questions about meaning or reference which the events of the comedy do little to resolve. Viola's “as an eunuch” statement belongs to this second category in that its referential force apparently fails to correspond to later developments within the plot: “No further reference,” we are told, “is made to this part of [Viola's] plan,” since “in fact, Viola disguises herself as a page.”² And if Viola explains her choice of role with “for I can sing,” the explanation itself has been considered problematical, as it makes “a proposal which is never realized in the play”³ given that Viola does not sing. What, then, is she referring to, or indeed talking about, in the earlier scene?

There are two broad ways of looking at Viola's statement, one literal and the other figurative. Both imply some kind of loss. If the statement is literal, paraphrasable as “in the guise of a eunuch,” then there seems to be something missing or “castrated” in the play itself. It has often been suggested that Viola's proposed mimesis of a castrate is merely the result of a Shakespearean change of plot or even simple absentmindedness, because no further mention is made—or so it is said—of her putative eunuchhood or of her musical ability: “Since this first idea is not picked up, some argue for a revision of the text.”⁴ But, as we will see, this may well not be the play's only allusion to the image of Viola as castrated male, and perhaps we should not be overhasty in assuming that Viola, or Shakespeare, merely abandons the announced role.

If we read the statement figuratively, as a species of simile—“as if I were a eunuch”—then we hypothesize not a missing plot but rather a notionally missing or castrated part, a part that Viola does not literally possess to begin with. But then why should she posit disfigurement and loss, in the form of castration, as a mode of gain, something to her advantage? From either point of view, the literal or the figurative, it remains one of the more intriguingly cryptic moments in the comedy. A moment that leads, I would argue, in the two quite different historical directions I mentioned: out to early modern society and back to the dramatic and theatrical past.

II. PRIVATE INHIBITIONS, PUBLIC EXHIBITIONS

Let us begin with early modern society. Recent criticism of Shakespeare's comedies has made considerable advances in recovering their historical sitedness. One of the more promising and still open areas of exploration is what we might term the plays' microhistorical matrix, that is to say, the modes and codes of early modern social intercourse insofar as they constrain interpersonal “behavior” in the plays.⁵ What seems to lend itself especially well to the investigation of social intercourse in the drama, and in Twelfth Night in particular, is the abundant body of recent enquiry into the forms and norms of conduct in Renaissance Europe, especially the (predominantly French) brand of microhistoriography dealing with what is variously known as the vie privée or the vie quotidienne,⁶ and focusing on the development of privacy, of intimacy, and of minimal or minimalist modes of behavior within the boudoir, the walled garden, and the studiolo.

A pertinent case in point is the third volume of the Philippe Ariès-Georges Duby History of Private Life,⁷ dedicated to the spaces, signs, and conventions of the early modern “civility” that found its chief expression precisely in new forms of exchange: the exchange of gifts, of letters, of love tokens but also of conversational formulae, courtesy rituals, and codified gestures. The development of such intimacy rites in the Renaissance is part of what Norbert Elias terms the Prozes der Zivilisation, the “civilizing process,”⁸ and of what Ariès calls “privatisation,” the privatizing process, which he defines as the “transition … from a form of sociability in which private and public are confounded to one in which they are distinct, and in which the private may even subsume or curtail the public.”⁹ The primary sign of this new civilized privacy is the formation of a mode of one-to-one symbolic exchange that encompasses both the verbal and the corporeal.

Twelfth Night, with its twin Renaissance domestic settings, its intricate plot of “private” passions, and its correspondingly intimate discursive mode, seems a particularly suitable case for microhistorical treatment in Ariès's terms for early modern civility—the more so as it is a comedy intensely and constantly preoccupied with the very business of one-to-one symbolic exchange. The giving and interpreting of letters (Sir Andrew's challenge to Viola, “Olivia's” cryptic billet doux to Malvolio);¹⁰ of money (Sir Andrew's financing of Sir Toby, Viola's reward to the Captain, Antonio's entrusting of his purse to Sebastian); and of gifts, the traditional exchange-objects of Twelfth Night celebrations (Olivia's ring to Viola, Orsino's jewels to Olivia, Olivia's pearl to Sebastian), constitute the main stuff of the dramatic action.

The first of the comedy's exemplary exchanges of civility in Ariès's terms for Renaissance minimalism occurs in the second scene, in which the shipwrecked Viola, having just escaped death by drowning, is comforted by the ship's gentlemanly Captain and, in exchange for his kindly and encouraging discourse, gives him money (“For saying so, there's gold” [1.2.18]). The courteous Captain proceeds to praise first Orsino's perfect nobility, then Olivia's perfect virtue; he, in turn, is complimented by Viola for his “fair behavior” (l. 47), his linguistic and gestural signs of gentility. This ultrapolite dialogue is as close as one can get, given the dramatic circumstances, to Ariès's “literature of civility [which] reveals how the chivalric customs of the Middle Ages were transformed into rules of conduct and etiquette.”¹¹

It is in this context of conversational etiquette or “fair behavior” that Viola announces her intention to assume a disguise, one that has itself been seen as an expression of early modern civility. “What enables Viola to bring off her role in disguise,” writes C. L. Barber, “is her perfect courtesy, in the large humanistic meaning of that term as the Renaissance used it, the corteziania of Castiglione. … [G]entility shows through her disguise as does the fact that she is a woman.”¹²

This brings us to the first possible interpretation of Viola's enigmatic reference. It is quite plausible to see Viola's “as an eunuch” allusion, in its figurative guise, as a manifestation of the corporeal decorum or inhibition that constituted an essential ingredient of early modern codes of civility: in Ariès's words, “A new modesty emerged, a new concern with hiding certain parts of the body and certain acts.”¹³ Viola intends to hide (“conceal me what I am” [1.2.53]) not only her innate sexuality but also her assumed masculinity, thereby ensuring a double barrier of chastity against potential sexual dangers in the world of Orsino's court and a doubled privatisation (through the self-privation of her “private” parts) in her personal dealings with the courtiers. “What I am, and what I would,” she tells Olivia, “are as secret as maidenhead” (1.5.218-19).

Barber's reference to Castiglione's corteziania is appropriate in this respect, since it is in the first great Renaissance courtesy book, The Courtier (1528), within the context of conversational exchange at the idealized court of Urbino, that both the rules of the new civility and the modes of female decorum are codified. As Michael Curtin suggests, “What was essential to courtesy-book conduct was the emergence of a pacified and orderly civil society out of the relatively violent and chaotic Middle Ages.”¹⁴ This pacified and orderly civil society in a sense “feminized” medieval militarism. It is fitting, therefore, that at the center of the courteous exchanges in The Courtier is a woman, the Countess Elisabetta Gonzaga, who exemplifies the virtues of wit and modesty, honesty (in the sense of chastity) and self-restraint. Cesare Gonzaga praises Elisabetta's selfless acceptance of the sexual importance of her husband, Duke Guidobaldo: the duchess “has lived with her husband for fifteen years like a widow, and … has not only steadfastly refused ever to tell this to anyone in the world but, after being urged by her own people to escape from this widowhood, chose rather to suffer exile, poverty and all kinds of hardship.”¹⁵ Elisabetta's heroic sexual self-denial is held up as a model of feminine honesty: if not “as an eunuch,” at least “like a widow.”

Other episodes in The Courtier confirm the virtues of female sexual abnegation. Cesare Gonzaga tells the “true” story of tragic self-sacrifice by a young girl who, being in love with a lord forced to marry another, pines from her unexpressed and unrealized desire,

“though the girl wisely concealed it and sought in every way possible to rid herself of desires which were now hopeless. All the while, she never faltered in her determination to remain chaste; and seeing that there was no honourable way in which she could have the one whom alone she adored, she chose not to wish for him in any way. … And with that firm resolve, the wretched girl, overcome by the most bitter anguish and wasted by her lingering passion, died after three years, preferring to renounce the joys and satisfaction for which she pined, and finally life itself, rather than her honour.”¹⁶

Gonzaga's story of death as erotic self-sacrifice is particularly pertinent to Viola's “as an eunuch” repression of her own sexuality, since it bears more than a generic resemblance to the story Viola later tells Orsino of her “sister”-self, who similarly wastes away from unexpressed desire:

VIOLA
My father had a daughter lov'd a man,
As it might be perhaps, were I a woman,
I should your lordship.
ORSINO
And what's her history?
VIOLA
A blank, my lord: she never told her love,
But let concealment like a worm i' th' bud
Feed on her damask cheek: she pin'd in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like Patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed? …
ORSINO
But died thy sister of her love, my boy?
VIOLA
I am all the daughters of my father's house,
And all the brothers too: and yet I know not.

(2.4.108-22)

Viola's celebrated “blank” suggests her emptied or castrated subjectivity through the cutting asunder of her desire for Orsino; it also suggests the virtual nature of her history, which remains to be written or performed, and in which her “concealment” might or might not end tragically, like Gonzaga's narrative. Moreover, the context of Viola's tale of female self-“castration” is analogous to that of Cesare Gonzaga's narrative: both stories are told in response to misogynistic affirmations of women's biological inferiority and incapacity for self-restraint. Gonzaga responds to Gaspare Pallavicino's argument that women are mistakes of nature, mere males manqués: “Nature … would, if possible, constantly bring forth men; and when a woman is born this is a mistake or defect, and contrary to Nature's wishes.” Such biological imperfection can be remedied, claims Pallavicino, only through sexual intercourse, whereby the woman receives what, thanks to nature's bungling, she lacks (the phallus): “because in the sexual act the woman is perfected by the man, whereas the man is made imperfect.” At the same time, the desperate search for the perfection that only intercourse can provide leads women to destructive promiscuity: “don't believe that men are more incontinent than women … countless evils arise from the incontinence of women which do not so from the incontinence of men.”¹⁷

Viola similarly responds to Orsino's contention that women are biologically and morally inferior because “they lack retention”—in the two senses that they lack the capacity for real love and that they lack self-restraint (with a possible third allusion to women's incontinence or uncontrollable menstrual flows¹⁸)—and are at the same time dominated by mere animal “appetite” (2.4.97, 98). The irony in Viola's situation, of course, is that in order to exercise the very capacity for love and restraint she attributes to women, she must dress as a man, albeit an imperfect or “castrated” man; her male disguise itself represents the self-punishing bridling of her sexuality. She is in danger of unwittingly confirming Pallavicino's contention that women aspire to be males in order to attain the perfection (or phallus) denied to them at birth: “every woman wants to be a man, by reason of a certain instinct that teaches her to desire her own perfection.”¹⁹ Viola's disguised entry into Orsino's court and her behavior once there seem, then, to embody, or perhaps disembody, the Renaissance codification of the feminine in her renunciation of exterior sexuality, or in her renunciation of self in favor of her lost male alter ego, her “dead” twin, Sebastian.

But the Freudian implications of the Courtier connection suggest that one can take the figurative reading of Viola's self-“castration” a good deal further. In her “as an eunuch” speech Viola prefigures her castrato performance as a musical mode of verbal persuasion: “I can … speak to him in many sorts of music.” On one level this is a precocious dramatic insight on Viola's part, predicting how her civilized discourse will prove fatally attractive first to Olivia and then to Orsino. But on a broader cultural level it can be seen as a precocious psychoanalytical insight, bearing in mind that, for post-Freudian psychoanalysis, the castration complex is, in the words of Laplanche and Pontalis, “the a priori condition that governs interhuman exchange as the exchange of sexual objects.”²⁰

In Freudian theory “castration” is an indispensable, if potentially snare-ridden, rite of passage towards adulthood: “The castration complex … is of the profoundest importance in the formation alike of character and of neuroses.”²¹ And it is a rite common to both sexes. In a 1920 footnote added to his 1905 essay on infantile sexuality, Freud affirms, “We are justified in speaking of a castration complex in women as well. Both male and female children form a theory that women no less than men originally had a penis, but that they have lost it by castration.”²² Freud's notion of castration anxiety as the founding moment of adult subjectivity and sociality becomes for Lacan the causative principle not only for gender differentiation but for the very possibility of intersubjective desire and interpersonal exchange.²³

Given that for Lacan “the phallus is a signifier,” indeed the signifier, it is only the symbolic interchange of the phallus that permits both signification and love; here lies the role of the woman in assuming or “becoming” the phallus, signifier of the Other's desire, through the castration of her femininity: “paradoxical as this formulation might seem, I would say that it is in order to be the phallus, that is to say, the signifier of the desire of the Other, that the woman will reject an essential part of her femininity, notably all its attributes through masquerade. It is for what she is not that she expects to be desired as well as loved.”²⁴ This is as close a description as one can find of Viola's eunuch role with regard to its effects on Olivia and Orsino: rejecting “an essential part of her femininity” through “masquerade,” Viola achieves precisely the paradoxical result of becoming the signifier of the Other's desire. She is loved for—or through—what she is not, as she hints in her teasing revelation / hiding of her “real” gender both to Olivia (“I swear I am not that I play” [1.5.185]; “I am not what I am” [3.1.143]) and to Orsino (“My father had a daughter loved a man. … I am all the daughters of my father's house, / And all the brothers too”).

At the same time, Lacan makes castration responsible for the institution of the Symbolic order, of the Law, of the Name of the Father, and thus of signification itself. “It is in the name of the father that we must recognize the support of the symbolic function which, from the dawn of history, has identified his person with the figure of the law.”²⁵ The castration threat, effecting the incest taboo, is anthropologically and historically responsible not only for the maturation of the child but for the acculturation of human society, replacing “natural” sexual exchange with symbolic exchange: “The primordial Law is therefore that which … superimposes the kingdom of culture on that of a nature abandoned to the law of mating.”²⁶

The castration complex is thus synonymous with the process of discursivization, which in turn constitutes the process of civilization. The “natural” law of coupling gives over to the law of symbolic interchange. Sexual relationships, says Lacan, do not exist, there being no real complementarity between the sexes. They are substituted for by discursive relationships. Love is exclusively an effect of language, a cultural event. This process involves a loss both physical—that is, the necessary diminution of natural libido—and personal—the loss of what Lacan terms “an essential part of [the woman's] femininity.”²⁷ Loss is the price paid for cultural gain, namely for language itself.

Here, then, is where Viola's own pre-announced loss becomes her potential gain: her participation in the intimate rituals of speech-, letter-, and gift-exchange—in a word, in the new amorous and “civil” symbolic order—is made possible only by her temporary assumption of a castrated or “blank” role. As Laurie E. Osborne writes, with reference to the deferrals and deviations of desire in the comedy, “The love tokens, letter or jewel, addressed to the beloved throughout this comedy establish the symbolic order linking the lover to the beloved creating two blanks or positions to be filled.”²⁸

In its figurative force, therefore, Viola's “eunuch” lends itself to both a historical and a psychoanalytical reading in terms of the privatizing and discursivizing of intercourse, within the bounds of Elias's “civilization” and Lacan's “kingdom of culture.” Given the close correspondence between behavior in Twelfth Night and the private-life codes of courtesy and intimacy, there is a strong temptation to make an unmediated leap from the civilized tête-à-têtes of the historians' Renaissance domestic interiors to the textualized interchanges of the comedy and back. There may, however, be hidden dangers in this direct move from the boudoir to the Globe (or Middle Temple). The first danger is what we might term the privacy fallacy, taking Shakespeare's representation of vie-privée intimacy for the real thing, as if the two spheres of exchange belonged to a single cultural common market with all customs barriers removed. This entails ignoring the mediation of that other set of early modern conventions which governed not domestic but theatrical interaction. The process of privatisation identified by Ariès, in which “the private may even subsume or curtail the public,” is in certain respects the opposite of what took place on the Elizabethan stage, which, in representing scenes of intimacy, enacted a publicization of the private sphere, taking it into a public arena where the collective subsumed the individual rather than the reverse. We should not be seduced into forgetting that the close encounters conducted within the courts of Orsino and Olivia are at the same time open displays obeying quite different rules of communicative transaction.

A second and related peril in passing from the whispered sweet nothings of the historians' Renaissance walled garden to the discursive delicacies of Olivia's hortus conclusus is the risk (run by some recent historical criticism) of naïve mimeticism. This annihilates another potent source of mediation, namely the conventions of comic drama, with their own vitality, their own longue durée that does not necessarily bend to every change in what Ariès and his colleagues term cultural mentalité. If Viola's ways of using, disguising, and describing her body are closely related to Renaissance conventions of corporeal and behavioral exchange, it is equally true that such verbal and bodily intercourse is a primary constituent of the dramatic and theatrical conventions the play inherits. The problem—a theoretical but also an eminently interpretative problem—is, therefore, how to place the comedy within the network of early modern social constraints without doing violence to its powerful theatrical and dramatic mediacy.

There is more to Viola's “eunuch” conceit, both historically and theatrically, than a civilized gesture of self-effacement or self-disembodiment. Her apparent private inhibition is also, in more ways than one, a public exhibition. And in order to understand both the full contemporary historicity and the full theatricality of her reference—in its literal as well as its figurative force—it is necessary to look at the comedy's use of dramatic history and, in particular, at its reworking of the castration topos that Viola brings into play.

III. THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES

In order to go ahead in this discussion, therefore, we need to go back in time some 1,762 years from the first performance of Twelfth Night. Viola's plan to become an unmanned man signaled to its more learned spectators the play's debt to the New Comedy prototype of all crossdressing drama, Terence's Eunuchus, revered by Shakespeare's contemporaries as a classical model and imitated in many Tudor and Jacobean plays, from Udall's Ralph Roister Doister to Jonson's Epicoene. Together with Plautus's plays of twins and doubles, it is also the primary model for the original version of the Viola story, the Sienese Ingannati, as well as many another sixteenth-century Italian comedy. Eunuchus has never been considered one of Shakespeare's sources, and it is not the primary purpose of this essay to demonstrate a direct derivation, although I believe that traces of such a derivation are present in Twelfth Night. What is at stake, rather, is the theatrical and cultural history of the eunuch trope itself and the ways in which Shakespeare reworks this history.

Viola's “present me as an eunuch” request finds two different kinds of parallel in Terence's comedy: the literal and the fictitious. The play offers a “real” castrate in the guise of Horus, a slave presented as a gift to the courtesan Thais. The main plot, however, hinges on the ploy of a young lover, Chaerea, who, in order to gain access to his beloved, the slave-girl Pamphila—likewise owned by Thais—takes Horus's place as castrate servant in the courtesan's household. Chaerea thus presents himself at Thais's court “as an eunuch” and so as his own negative image, a minus sign standing for what is in fact an emphatic plus, as he goes on to demonstrate when he finally gains access to Pamphila's bed and thus to her sleeping body.

Why this doubling of eunuchs, this redundancy of castration in Terence's play? Eunuchus, as Terence admits in the prologue, is itself a “double,” being largely derived from a lost play of the same title by Menander, who in turn inherited the castration topos from the Old Comedy. Indeed, castration might be said to be a founding trope of comedy as dramatic genre. This is probably due historically and anthropologically to the derivation of comic drama from the phallophoria, the fertility-invoking phallic procession,²⁹ for which castration represented a negative, fertility-threatening force.³⁰ Terence's Eunuchus revives this tradition, rendering the topic fully explicit and doubly central, and greatly elaborating its social and theatrical implications.

The immediate reason for the play's redundant emphasis on castration lies in the occasion of its first performance. As with symbolic castration rites in the Old Comedy, the performative context for Terence's “eunuch” was one of religious festivity. The comedy was first staged in 161 bc during the Megalensian games in honor of the Great Mother Cybele.³¹ The cult of the Asiatic goddess Cybele had been introduced into Rome by Elagabalus in 204 bc and was inextricably connected with castration rituals. Attis, the vegetarian god associated with the cult, died and was resurrected after castrating himself; Cybele's priests were traditionally eunuchs, while Elagabalus himself was notorious for having his friends' bodies symbolically shaved and his own testicles tied up when celebrating the rites of Cybele and Attis. In this ritualistic and surgical context, focusing on the literal or symbolic removal of the testicles rather than on the phantasmic missing phallus, the fruits of castration are direct: unmanning is synonymous with self-transcendence and with “rebirth” in the guise of regression to a pure infantile state.³² In offering the spectacle of an oxymoronically potent castrate, Terence seems to be dramatizing, and perhaps burlesquing, the Roman cult of self-mutilation as the supreme or “divine” form of sexual self-realization. “Self-denial,” as Carlin A. Barton observes with reference to Roman culture, “becomes the culmination of the spiral of desire. … As a result, self-castration, what we would think of as an extreme act of asceticism or self-sacrifice, is often categorized as a form of self-indulgence by the Romans, and the castrated as extreme libertines.”³³

Terence's eunuch play is thus an ambiguous homage to Cybele, and the kinds of transcendence celebrated in the comedy have less to do with religious rebirth than with the more worldly representation or realization of (masculine) desire. The extraordinary influence of Terence's play seems to lie largely in the vertiginous reversal at the center of the main plot, whereby what looks like the neutralizing of male sexuality turns out instead to be a triumphant assertion of virility. It is only by transcending his male identity through self-“castration” that Chaerea is able to realize his desire for the slave-girl. In narrating his offstage triumph, Chaerea relishes the ironic contrast between his assumed role and his actual performance:

CHAEREA
… I boult the dore.
ANTIPHO
What then? …
CHAEREA
Should I let goe such opportunitie & occasion offered mee, hauing so short time to doe it in, so greatly desired, so sudden, and nothing looked for? then was I hee indeede, whom I did counterfait.(34)

Admitted into Pamphila's bedroom as eunuch-guard, Chaerea “boult[s] the dore” (“pessulum ostium obdo”), a metonymy for the act that he is employed not to (be able to) perform.

Here lies the central dramaturgic tension within Eunuchus and an important legacy for later crossdressing comedies such as Twelfth Night. What Chaerea's account enthusiastically underlines is the irresistible theatrical competence of his performance, transforming his secret transgression into public display. Eunuchus sets up two antithetical performative modes in presenting the same scene: one enacted but hidden in the offstage bed chamber, the other narrated and publicized in Chaerea's onstage account. Chaerea's fictitious sexlessness thereby becomes not only a means to the fulfillment of personal desire but also an allegory for the boastful professional self-transcendence of the actor in playing his part, his capacity to become at will a man without qualities, able to conquer helpless and perhaps—like Pamphila—sleepy audiences by sacrificing his personal and physical attributes. It is in part this histrionic force of the eunuch device—neutered sign of an “empty” signifier (compare Viola's “blank”), namely the actor and his body—that contributed to its longevity as theatrical topos.

As he carries out his plan, Chaerea's performance takes on further theatrical implications, involving the role of the audience as witness. His main activity as eunuch, namely that of guarding or ogling his beloved in her toilette, becomes an unflattering icon of the male gaze³⁵ and thus of the (masculine) spectator as pornophilic voyeur:

CHAEREA
I looke a squint thus privily with the fanne, and I prie about to see to other things also, whether they were sure or no: I seeing them to be so, I boult the dore.(36)

As Paul Veyne notes in the first volume of A History of Private Life, voyeurism is the social condition not only of the eunuch-slave but of the slave tout court in ancient Rome: “With nothing else to guide them, slaves shared the values of their master, admired him, and served him jealously. Like voyeurs they watched him live his life with a mixture of admiration and scorn.”³⁷ There is more than a suggestion in the play that Terence's own audience is complicit in a scopophilic “enslavement” to vicarious sexual pleasure, ogling in turn the antics of Chaerea.

Eunuchus enacts, therefore, a movement from the bed chamber to the platea and simultaneously from individual sexuality to collective sociality. In addition to the doubling or splitting of the eunuch figure into the “real” castrate and his “fictional” other, nearly all the play's characters participate in the “as an eunuch” condition in its figurative sense: the miles gloriosus Thraso, presented as the reverse of Chaerea, a braggart about sex but lacking in actual sexuality; the somewhat androgynous parasite Gnatho; the raped Pamphila, “castrated” of her freedom, her subjectivity, and her virginity, not to mention her social status; even the prostitute Thais, deprived of citizenship and of political rights. Eunuchhood constitutes the play's “controlling metaphor,”³⁸ whereby the condition of sexual mutilation comes to stand for quite different forms of social and psychological dispossession. Castration thus becomes a kind of internal epidemic or contaminatio, spreading out from the play's neutered center. As the Pseudo-Servius observed in the ninth century, “This one as a eunuch who deflowered that virgin is the principal subject-matter in this comedy. If other persons are brought in, they are subordinated to the eunuch, and all parts of the fable in some way have reference to the eunuch.”³⁹ This contagion principle constitutes, as we will see, an important model for later “castration” plays.

Thus Terence's ambiguous eunuch is a figure for social as well as sexual and theatrical intercourse, the more so since Chaerea knowingly exploits a particular form of symbolic interchange (particularly prominent, as we have seen, in Twelfth Night), namely the giving of presents. In offering himself as a devirilized body, Chaerea becomes a literal exchange-object within the master-slave economy that governed second-century Republican Rome and that regulates the somewhat sordid world of the play. In an act of precipitous social self-relegation or -castration, Chaerea, at the suggestion of his own servant Parmeno, doubly depersonalizes himself as eunuch and slave, offering himself as one in a whole series of presents—jewels, money, as well as other servants such as Pamphila herself—that the bona meretrix Thais receives in exchange for her desired favors.

Gift-exchange becomes the play's central economic and semiotic paradigm. The governing social framework here would seem to be the one outlined in Marcel Mauss's classic 1925 essay on the gift, in which the French anthropologist states “that the spirit of gift-exchange is characteristic of societies which have passed the [archaic] phase of ‘total prestation’ … but have not yet reached the stage of pure individual contract, the money market.” In such postarchaic societies the gift is the primary symbolic token of a reciprocal system that includes the exchange of “courtesies, entertainments, ritual military assistance, women, children, dances, and feasts; and [participation] in fairs, in which the market is but one element.”⁴⁰

Here lies the dazzling success of Chaerea's self-election to the status of gift. In a “natural” exchange economy suspended between archaic rites and modern market negotiation (an economy that levels the distinction between subjects, physical objects, and symbolic objects), Chaerea-the-gift-item is able to exploit his zero subjectivity, his invisibility as persona, in order to fool the courtesan and her court. Terence figures the brutality of this economy in the violence of Chaerea's return to malehood, as he possesses the sleeping Pamphila, herself deprived of rights, personality, and volition:

PITHYAS
O what stirre hath the Eunuch made which thou gauest us! he hath deflowered the damsell which the Captaine bestowed on my mistres.
PHAEDRIA
Thou art out of thy witts. How could an Eunuch doe this thing?
PITHYAS
I know not who he was, this which he hath done, the thing it selfe will shewe.(41)

Chaerea, in turn, is rewarded for his pains by a social as well as sexual gift, since he nobly agrees to take Pamphila's hand, but only once her “good” blood has been proven.

Terence's “eunuch” is in all senses at the middle, albeit a surgically mutilated middle, of a paradoxical system of signification through opposition—minus for plus, loss for gain, private for public—and establishes himself as a successful dramatic topos precisely because he is already a disfigured figure for social and theatrical exchange as such, a metasemiotic vehicle that can be resemanticized and rehistoricized in later contexts. All of the personal, erotic, social, and theatrical implications of castration become part of the history of comedy. And the transmission of the topos from Roman New Comedy to Elizabethan comedy, via—as we will see—the Italian commedia, is itself a passing on of a model of mediation and exchange that is progressively modified within the different historical and theatrical conditions to which it is subjected. Each recontextualization of the topos in its various sexual, social, and theatrical aspects will bear the indelible traces of the eunuch's own stage history.

IV. “BEN SI CASTRA”: SIENESE RAPTURES AND MANTUAN RUPTURES

As a result of his versatility and indeterminacy, Terence's castrate turns out to be not only unexpectedly virile but also hyperbolically fertile, disseminating an almost interminable series of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century progeny. … Indeed, it is fair to say that comedy as dramatic genre is “reborn” in early modern Europe through the good offices of the castrate. When reworked within the Italian Renaissance commedia, however, the eunuch topos is drastically modified—or, in Freudian terms, further castrated—in that Terence's disguised male is more often than not transformed into a crossdressed female, the mimesis of the unmanned into the imitation of a (non)man. This change is in part due to altered theatrical circumstances, since in certain performances of erudite comedy in the Italian courts and academies, female roles were performed by actresses rather than boy-actors. But it is also a measure of a radically changed social context: just as the performative situation of Italian disguise plays is no longer that of religious ritual, so the exchange system within which the disguise operates is no longer the master-slave economy of Republican Rome but the mercantile economy of early modern Italy, with its burgeoning individualism, its power struggles between rival city-states, and its new codification of civility and courtesy, including, as we have seen, the rules of female decorum.

The Renaissance legacy of Terence's Eunuchus is twofold. It serves as a model for any number of disguise plots from which the real and/or feigned eunuch as such has disappeared. At the same time, the eunuchus survives as a powerful verbal and stage trope, or “theatergram,” within disguise comedy itself. This double legacy corresponds to Louise George Clubb's definition of Renaissance dramatic contaminatio as a mixture of borrowed plots and figures or topoi.⁴² As Clubb notes, the first Italian dramatist to make use of this mixed contaminatio is Ariosto, who proudly declares in the prologue to I suppositi (1509) his debt to Eunuchus, although it is mainly the secondary Thraso plot that Ariosto borrows and adapts. The castration topos is itself disguised and displaced to other parts of the play, notably Filogono's story of being robbed during his sea voyage from Catania to Ferrara. Here is George Gascoigne's 1566 version of Filogono's maritime mishap: “Jesus! How often they untrussed my male, and ransacked a little capcase that I had, tossed and turned all that was within it, searched my bosom, yea, my breeches, that I assure you I thought they would have flayed me to search between the fell and the flesh for farthings.”⁴³ Filogono's untrussed male and little ransacked capcase figure the robbery as a mode of rape (“searched … my breeches”) but also as a form of physical disfigurement (“flayed me alive”), which suggests the main metaphorical force that castration will assume in the Italian commedia, namely material deprivation. These details also suggest a significant shift in the primary icon of castration itself in Renaissance comedy: no longer the surgically removed testicles of the ancient eunuch-slave but the absent or truncated phallus of modern psychosexual fantasy. Perhaps for this reason Ariosto's emasculating sea voyage becomes a recurrent subtopos in comedy.

A key text in the transmission of the castration topic in its phallic guise—and indeed in the development of Renaissance comedy in general—is the first modern crossdressing play, La calandria. First performed at Urbino in February 1513 during a municipal festival, the comedy stands in a dialectical relationship with the development of the humanistic ideology of corteziania. Indeed its author, Cardinal Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, is one of the main speakers in Castiglione's The Courtier, set in the Urbino ducal palace where La calandria probably had its first performance. Castiglione is also credited with writing the prologue to the comedy.⁴⁴

The Urbino connection between the new Renaissance civiltà and the new Renaissance commedia is quite explicit. In the second book of The Courtier, Bibbiena offers a long defense of laughter as the distinctive feature of human nature and identifies theatrical performance as a legitimate source of mirth.⁴⁵ Bibbiena's speech makes explicit what Wayne A. Rebhorn describes as “the theatre metaphors structuring Castiglione's view of the world and of his ideal courtier,” who “produces an endless series of brilliant performances, pausing only long enough to exchange one mask for another.”⁴⁶ The relationship between court and theater is thus bilateral: if the ideal courtier is a performer, the performance of comedy becomes the court's public double.

In reality La calandria is far removed dramaturgically and discursively from Urbino's courtly civility. Derived from a contaminatio of Terence, Plautus, and Boccaccio, the comedy's plot centers on different-sex twins and two-way transvestism. The twins, Lidio and Santilla, separated at birth, grow up apart; and while Lidio spends his time searching for his sister, the latter, by way of self-defense, disguises herself as her brother, whom she believes dead. Crossdressing here combines with cross-desire: Lidio falls in love with Fulvia, wife of the foolish Calandro, and in order to gain entry into Fulvia('s house) dresses as a woman. This constitutes Bibbiena's most immediate debt to Eunuchus. Calandro, meanwhile, falls in love with the crossdressed Lidio. Fulvia likewise crossdresses in order to go to Lidio. Inevitably, Santilla is mistaken for her transvestite twin and is taken to the appointment with Fulvia. Thus a transvestite woman has an amorous encounter with another woman whom she takes to be the crossdressed man who at the same time is the object of her husband's desire.

It is Fulvia's erotic (dis)appointment with Santilla that brings the castration theme to the surface. Stunned at her discovery of Lidio's missing link, Fulvia blames the go-between necromancer, Ruffo: “Alas! you have transformed my Lidio from male to female. I've handled and touched everything; but cannot find any of the usual things except his external appearance [presentia] … restore to him the knife of my sheath, you understand?”⁴⁷

Fulvia registers the shock of the absent phallus, perceiving female sexuality, in classic Freudian terms, as a lack (her being dressed as a boy underlines the point).⁴⁸ Here lies the comedy's main ideological link with The Courtier. The play dramatizes relations not only between the sexes but between genders, defining the female primarily in terms of missing or lost masculinity. It also offers opposing models of female behavior in relation to this lack. The crossdressed Fulvia's frenetic search for the phallus is a perfect anticipation of Pallavicino's thesis regarding women's erotic overcompensation for their “imperfection.” Santilla, on the contrary, expresses her femininity through the self-abnegation that will be championed by Castiglione's Gonzaga, using her masculine disguise as a mode of self-protection and as a reinvocation of her lost brother.

Between the opposed extremes of gender lies an indeterminate middle ground, that of the eunuch (Santilla as unmanned Lidio) or, alternatively, of the hermaphrodite. Santilla's servant Fannio leads the necromancer Ruffo to believe his mistress is double-sexed, able to adopt whichever organ proves appropriate to the occasion:

FANNIO
You should know that my master Lidio is a hermaphrodite [hermafrodite].
RUFFO
And what does this flowering shit [merdafiorito] mean?
FANNIO
Hermaphrodite, I say. … Hermaphrodites are those that have both sexes … with Fulvia he will use only the female sex for that which, she having requested in form of a woman, and finding him a woman, will give such faith to the spirit that she will adore you.(49)

So, in a sense, it turns out: the revirilized Lidio takes the place of Santilla in Fulvia's bed; but when they are caught in flagrante by Calandro, Santilla saves her brother by re-substituting for (re-castrating) him. Like Aristophanes's hermaphroditic halves, the twins finally come together and recognize each other.

The threat or promise of castration is disseminated throughout the play. The gulling of Calandro is figured in the vivid “theatergram” of a trunk in which he is to hide in order, so he believes, to be conducted to his beloved Lidio-Santilla. In a surreal apocalyptic fantasy Calandro's servant Fessenio warns him that to fit a man into a trunk, certain bodily parts must be amputated.⁵⁰ Fessenio's sadistic surgical delirium imagines cuckoldry as eviration: Calandro's amputated organ will be replaced by “a member which is bigger than his own.” The servant underlines the point later when he takes his master to an appointment with a prostitute: “I'll go and unite the castrated sheep [castron = fool] with the sow [troia = whore].” And the gull himself is later forced to admit, “Oh what a simpleton/castrated sheep [castron] am I!”⁵¹

La calandria is at all its levels a comedy of the disappearing member. The question naturally arises as to why a cardinal and leading courtier should engage with such dubious material. One answer might be that it is precisely through the Terentian castration topic that Bibbiena attempts to mediate between the enclosed world of the court and the wider world of public intercourse, especially theatrical intercourse. The play's vigorous variations on the missing phallus stage a ritual subtraction of sexuality that enables the frank public representation of eros without, at least in theory, betraying the strict codes of the new civility. It also enables the new comic drama to negotiate its own representational rights within that new civility. But in (theatrical) practice the erotic verve of the play far exceeds any notional decorum or courtesy. In fact the comedy, in dramatizing and publicizing private sexual congress, takes on its own joyfully generative and liberatory life, independent of, and perhaps even in opposition to, courtly decorousness. Its life empowers later plays, such as Twelfth Night, to reap the fruits of castration.

It is evident that the Calandria story, with its separated twins (and the presumed death of the male twin), crossdressed heroines, and erotic confusions, contains the Twelfth Night story. It also contains the plots of the majority of Renaissance disguise comedies, such as Machiavelli's Clizia (1525), with its substitution of a crossdressed servant for the heroine in the bed of the lecherous old Nicomaco, and Pietro Aretino's transvestite plays, including what at first sight appears to be an “anti-Bibbienian” burlesque, La cortigiana (also 1525), in which the ingenuous Venetian Maco arrives in a corrupt and whore-ridden Rome, determined to become a courtier and cardinal (à la Bibbiena), and ends up being punished by symbolic castration and sodomization.⁵²

In Aretino's later Il marescalco (The Stablemaster [1533]), set at the ducal court of Mantua, the duke himself puts in motion a plot—contaminated from Eunuchus, Plautus's Casina, and Machiavelli's Clizia—in which his misogynistic, misogamistic (and probably pederastic) stablemaster is punished by being “married” to a crossdressed boy. The play is thus on one level an aristocratic entertainment at the expense of a lower-class figure and an assertion of the duke's absolute power as both director and principal spectator of the practical joke, forcing the stablemaster to make a public spectacle of his “deviant” private life. At the same time, the beffa against the stablemaster expresses anxieties concerning female sexuality and the assimilation of women within what is presented as a primarily homosocial community. The stablemaster's sense of relief and release at discovering he is a castrone and not a husband underlines the fact that, unlike Eunuchus, the play's dominant force is not desire but its specular image, namely revulsion. In this homosocial context women are perceived as a repugnant Other, heterosexual relations as perilous, and marriage as a perverse mode of self-punishment.⁵³ The stablemaster, the most virile character in the play because uneffeminized by contact with the opposite sex, represents matrimony as a form of financial as well as sexual loss and women as repulsive, leaky vessels (their sexual organs good only for devouring and urinating).

Il marescalco offers two further social variations on the castration topos: heterosexual bonding is represented as material deprivation and as political and military rape. While the stablemaster fears the complete erosion of his money, identified with his phallus, Ambrogio's comparison of marriage with “the devastation of Rome and Florence” reminds the audience of the most violent events in recent Italian political history: the Sack of Rome (1527) and the siege of Florence (1530), both perpetrated by the penetrative troops of Emperor Charles V.⁵⁴

Aretino's violent publicization of private sexuality, taking the castration topos into the contemporary political and economic sphere, can be understood only in terms of two crucial structural characteristics of early Renaissance Italy: the dominance of a monetary economy and the prevalence of rival city-states. Renaissance Italy was a society of mercatores⁵⁵ in which the circulation and accumulation of money created the first approximation of a modern consumer culture. What distinguished Italy from the rest of early modern Europe was, as Richard A. Goldthwaite has shown, the precocious rise of conspicuous consumption.⁵⁶ The distinctive objects of this newly fashioned consumption were luxury items, especially works of art and forms of entertainment, such as theater itself. The development of Italian Renaissance art, literature, and drama was directly related to the development of conspicuous consumption, which produced new sources of patronage. This was especially true in those city-states in which the mercantile economy and the circulation of money were most dynamic—Milan, Venice, Florence, and Genoa⁵⁷—and in the great centers of banking, above all Siena. Associated with this twin cultural flowering—the monetary and the artistic—was the rise of the academies which, in a sense, mediated between the two.

Siena, the birthplace of modern banking and thus one of the first great junctions of the circulation of capital, rivaled Florence as a venue for artistic endeavor, including drama, and as home to the new cultural academies, notably the Accademia degli Intronati, created around 1525. Among the Academy's activities, in addition to the cultivation of humanistic arts and civil conversation, was the writing and performing of plays.⁵⁸ The first of these was the unfortunate allegory Il sacrificio, performed as a dubious Twelfth Night offering to the ladies in 1531 and consisting in the male performers' ritual burning onstage of the Epiphany gifts received from their female audience. Such was the outrage among the spurned ladies that the academicians were obliged to present, two years later, a reparative offering, Gl'ingannati, a comedy with a winning female protagonist.

The Intronati's Gl'ingannati, prototype of the Viola story and source of Twelfth Night, is thus the product of the cultural mediation between money and art, between the warring sexes, and likewise between rival city-states. Set in Rome immediately after the Sack of 1527, Gl'ingannati probably marks the decisive shift in Renaissance comedy towards female transvestism as the dominant mode of dramatic crossdressing. The reasons for this shift, apart from the reparative circumstances of the original performance and the play's consequent dramatization of a putative female revenge on men, may also have to do with the make-up of the company itself. A retrospective 1572 account of the Academy's recruitment of actors suggests that female roles were assigned to women.⁵⁹ If this is the case, then the appearance of actresses in place of the more familiar boy-actors employed in the performance of early erudite comedy may have created the irresistible temptation to center a comedy on the plight of a crossdressed girl.

Gl'ingannati is a contamination of Terence's Eunuchus, Plautus's Menaechmi and Casina, and Bibbiena's Calandria, with a little help from Boccaccio. While borrowing the female-to-male-disguise device from Calandria, the play, unlike Bibbiena's comedy, places it at the center of the main plot, which is closer to Eunuchus. Indeed, Lelia, the Viola figure, might be said to merge the roles of Terence's lover, Chaerea, and his slave-girl, Pamphila, becoming simultaneously principal subject and principal object of desire and thus of the play's intricate series of physical and symbolic exchanges. Lelia, separated from her twin brother, Fabrizio—“lost” in the Sack of Rome—is desired by the old merchant Gherardo, to whom her merchant father, Virginio, has promised her in marriage. Lelia in turn loves young Flaminio, who, however, is enamored of Gherardo's daughter, Isabella. Lelia crossdresses—from her first appearance in the comedy—in order to enter Flaminio's service. Here lies the new protagonism of the transvestite woman, who pursues her desires while she is herself the target of aggressive heterosexual and homoerotic attention: the amorous quadrangle is completed when Isabella (the Olivia figure) falls in love with the crossdressed Lelia.

As in La calandria, the emphasis of Gl'ingannati remains on the phallus, here as instrument of financial as well as erotic transactions, which become more or less synonymous. The sexual potency of Lelia's twin is represented by his hyperbolic member: “he's male enough to make two men” says Isabella's envious and voyeuristic merchant father (and indeed in a sense it must make two men, Fabrizio himself and his transvestite twin sister). This potency translates directly into the financial reward of Isabella's conquered dowry. Fabrizio, substituting for his “eunuch” sister, reaps Chaerea's sexual and social (which here means pecuniary) reward. In this hyperphallic and monetary context, the eunuchus topos marks a castration anxiety that is above all an economic-dispossession anxiety.

The society represented in the post-Sack Rome of Gl'ingannati is a fierce merchandise system, populated by avid old mercatores who dispose of their children as goods, and in which intercourse of all kinds has a primarily financial goal. The castrato is no longer a gift but a deprivation, no longer the signifier of its opposite but a direct omen of material loss: loss of the kind that the merchant Virginio has suffered in the play's opening and that the merchant Gherardo, Isabella's pantaloon father, finally suffers at the hands (or other bodily parts) of the well-endowed Fabrizio. It is the same kind of loss that Rome suffers in the play's contemporary historical setting at the hands of the all-penetrating Emperor Charles V. Siena smirks while Rome loses its manhood.⁶⁰

The model of exchange embodied in Gl'ingannati is one of sexual, financial, and military assault disguised as conversational courtesy and gentility. This, perhaps, is the real inganno or deceit of Gl'ingannati: namely the (successful) attempt by the Intronati academicians to pass it off as an exercise in Sienese cultural refinement, offered, so they claim in the prologue, as a gift to the ladies in the audience, as if the exchanges it dramatizes were all part of that humanistic civile conversazione to which the academy was officially dedicated. But its tribute to feminine protagonism and subjectivity turns out to be questionable at best. Lelia's one “private” soliloquy, in which she confesses unease at playing her male role, seems to be an early instance of feminine interiority in the Italian drama.

Oh, how I would deserve it [come mi starebbe bene] if one of these young rakes took me by force and, dragging me into some house, tried to find out whether I am male or female! That would teach me to go outdoors at this hour. … Oh what a cruel destiny is mine!⁶¹

On closer inspection, Lelia's fantasy of having her gender verified through rape proves to be the projected desire of the salacious voyeurs in the play and the audience. In her one moment of apparent subjectivity, Lelia can define herself only as object of potential sexual violence.

Lelia's fantasy revisits from a supposedly female perspective Terence's dramatization of the pornographic gaze. The comedy likewise takes up the Terentian legacy of the slave as voyeur, although the servant role has been split from that of the lover and moved definitively to the margins, no longer central counter but envious spectator of these blatantly corporeal exchanges. The key episode—equivalent both to Chaerea's rape of Pamphila (with Lelia in the “passive” position) and to Viola's encounter with Olivia—is the frankly physical seduction scene between the passionate Isabella and the reluctant Lelia, which climaxes in a prolonged, passionate kiss between the two girls. The whole scene is framed by a grotesque mise-en-scène of the male gaze, as the couple is watched by two gaping servants who provide a running commentary on their own uncontrollable sexual response to the spectacle:

SCATIZZA
[Referring to Lelia] Kiss her, or may you get a cancer! …
CRIVELLO
[Seeing the girls kiss] Oh, oh, damn it, do the same to me. …
SCATIZZA
God's body, my leg is so swollen [m'è infiata una gamba = I have such an erection], I'm about to throw up [che par la voglia recere = I'm about to come].(62)

The servants' pornographic pleasure reworks Chaerea's slavish ogling of Pamphila's toilette and represents in turn a metonymy for the impossible phallic role Lelia has to perform: Scatizza's swollen “leg” acts out what Isabella supposedly desires but what Lelia cannot deliver until replaced by her twin brother. The dominant theatrical activity in Gl'ingannati is not performing but watching: it is male spectatorship as vicarious pleasure that determines the apparent freedom of the new female-to-male role-playing.

In later Italian versions of the story, the mercantile and mercenary nature of social conversazione is further accentuated by the restoration of Terence's courtesan figure and the consequent upscale bordello setting. The agents of exchange are no longer the lovers themselves but bawds and pimps, who manage a flourishing economy of present-giving and favor-selling in an open (street) market which travesties private amorous transactions. As Paul Larivaille has shown, the bawd was an indispensable figure of mediation, especially in Rome with its sixty-percent male population and its correspondingly vast numbers of prostitutes.⁶³ In the commedia the bawd's mediation becomes a degraded version of courtly politeness, allowing the lovers and clients to reach their sexual goals without having to discuss the subject directly.

Thus Niccolò Secchi's Gl'inganni (1547), first performed in Milan before the duke but set in a colorfully vice-ridden Naples, adopts “conversation” as a euphemism for bartered sex, as in the plea of young Gostanzo, in love with the upper-class whore Dorotea: “I'll do my best to find you sixty scudi, but on express condition that no one else be allowed to converse with Dorotea.” The obliging bawd responds: “And if that isn't enough, I'll have your rival castrated [io farò castrone] so you can be doubly sure.”⁶⁴ The bawd's threat to castrate Gostanzo's rival, a rich old dottore, is a reminder of the extreme penalties for unpaid conversazione in a world where verbal intercourse is a simulacrum of real sex and its dangers. For the play's libidinous signori there is really no way out of their dire destiny, given that the longed-for and bartered-for sexual engagement turns out to be nothing other than a means of removing male possessions. Despite her promise to Gonzago, the bawd encourages Dorotea to milk the rich dottore both sexually and financially, freeing him of all his worldly attributes:

Well castrated [ben si castra], well milked,
Old man, mad man, who pricks [pugne] for love,
It's time for the nails to strike
And cut off his lard [tagliarli giu le sugne].(65)

Here the connotations of castration change again: it is no longer an omen of financial loss but, on the contrary, a metonymy (effect for cause) for sex itself as a mode of scrotum(= pocket)-emptying and perhaps also for syphilis, one effect of which is the erosion of the genitals.⁶⁶

Similarly, in Gl'inganni (1592), the version by the Mantuan Curzio Gonzaga, the courtesan Doralice, referring to the old merchant who brings her gifts, brags of her castrating ability as a professional skill: “The castrated beef [il buò castronaccio] drinks it all.”⁶⁷ In Gonzaga's comedy castration is a risk that males run from birth. He doubles the story's doubles by having two sets of twins and by having one of each couple—one male and one female—crossdressed. The male twin's transvestism has been enforced since birth because of a bet between his father and a friend: whichever of them fathered a male child was to pay two thousand florins to the other if he in turn fathered a female. One of the friends fathered a boy, Leandro, while the other fathered different-sex twins, Scipione and Lucrezia; in order to win the bet, the twins' father cheated by disguising the male twin as a girl. Here the monetary implications of eviration are explicit: girls—luxury commodities—mean money, while boys risk surgery in the name of the father's wallet. The “losing” male child, Leandro, failing to distinguish between the real and the false Lucrezia, eventually falls in love with them both. The female twin in turn falls in love with Cesare, a refugee from Siena who is himself a crossdressed girl, Ginevra (the Viola figure).

The father figures in the comedy are also multiplied, there being three vecchi, all rich merchants, to be overcome by the young lovers. As a result, in Gonzaga's Rome there is among the younger males an understandable epidemic of castration anxiety, which begins to take on some Lacanian implications. The danger faced by Leandro is the knife-wielding wrath of Lucrezia's vengeful papà when he finds the young man “coupled” (a coppiati) with the biologically female twin: “Oh, poor Leandro,” exclaims Lucrezia's maid Filippa, “I think that old traitor, arriving at the wrong moment, will make a capon of him.”⁶⁸

Within this disconcertingly misandristic patriarchy, in which fathers mutilate boys and valorize girls, but only in terms of their cash value, it is not surprising that the crossdressed Viola figure has some difficulty in acting the part of either sex. Ginevra makes a hash of playing Cesare because she is constantly fearful of getting caught out on one side or the other, her choice of destinies being either unappealing prostitution or a biologically redundant emasculation. Finally she is caught in the middle, perceived by the go-between maid as either hermaphroditic or already castrated:

CESARE
Maybe you thought I was a woman?
FILIPPA
Look, Cesare, if I didn't believe you to be a girl, I judged at least from your behavior that you were double-sexed [facesti del doppio], or that you were a eunuch [megnuco].
CESARE
A eunuch? Ha, ha, you were really crazy, don't you think so now?
FILIPPA
I don't know what to think; if you let me touch it with my hand [seme'l farai toccar con mano], I'll know I'm not talking nonsense.(69)

In a sense this is Ginevra's salvation, since as a megnuco she avoids the dangers that await each sex. At the same time, however, the castrato topos, in contrast to its function in Terence, becomes a sign of the actor's failure, her inability to embody her chosen (phallic) role in a phallus-threatening community.

Ginevra's difficulties create the occasion, at least, for a more persuasive interiorization of the castration theme than Lelia's rape fantasy and thus for a more convincing mimesis of private passion. In the play's one ironically subjective moment Ginevra laments to herself that her financially ruined father, having forced her to play a masculine role, failed to provide her with the sexuality that would allow her to reciprocate Lucrezia's (homoerotic) desire: “[your father] made you dress as a man, without inducing you also to ardently love a female [una femina] such as this Lucrezia, victim of this wretched disguise [questo maledetto habito], while she, taking me to be a male, seems to pine for love of me.”⁷⁰ Ginevra defines both her gender and her sexuality in terms of the lack of masculinity and thus herself as ineluctably Other in the brutally penetrative world into which she has intruded.

For all its subterranean violence, Gonzaga's play does display psychological insight and a dialogic agility that bring it close to Bibbiena's Calandria and also to Twelfth Night: among all the Italian analogues it is the play that most resembles Shakespeare's comedy in its discursive verve. If Bibbiena's play, and indeed Shakespeare's play, are dialectically related to The Courtier, Gonzaga's has genetic links both with Castiglione (who was himself related to the Gonzaga family and three of whose speakers, Cesare, Elisabetta, and Margherita, are Gonzagas) and with the later classic of Renaissance courtesy literature, Stefano Guazzo's La civile conversatione, published in 1574 and dedicated to Guazzo's patrons, the Gonzagas.⁷¹

Like Castiglione, Guazzo posits as his discursive ideal the combination of courtesy and witty affability: “curteous language multiplieth friendes, and mitigateth enemies. … And as that is a signe of curtesie, so this is a token of wit”;⁷² and like Castiglione, he represents courtly conversazione in terms of the performance of comedy and, vice versa, defends comedy as one of the possible manifestations of “civility.”⁷³ Thus La civile conversatione seems to take up all the courtly behavioral ideals of The Courtier, cast once more in a dialectical relationship with comedy as their cultural double. Gonzaga's play, both culturally and geographically, seems to be the closest theatrical alter ego of Guazzo's Mantuan conversazione.

In reality, Guazzo's late-sixteenth-century Mantua was quite different from Castiglione's nostalgically reconstructed Urbino. Guazzo had to mediate between the court and the powerful mercantile middle classes, and his behavioral rules were directed less towards the cortegiano than towards the gentiluomo.⁷⁴ Gonzaga's play similarly mediated between the aristocracy—written for a courtly elite and dedicated to the Mantuan Donna Marfisa da Este—and the wider society of mercatores represented in the comedy itself. Gonzaga's “conversational” reworking of the eunuchus topos seems to have allowed this social mediation to take place. But as in the case of La calandria and—as we will see—Twelfth Night, the play took on a frank erotic vitality of its own that far exceeded any merely decorous or conciliatory “diplomatic” function.

V. “I LACK YET AN HEADPIECE”: NO SEX, WE'RE ENGLISH

The intimate, if conflictual, Italian dialogue between courtesy books and comedy about the representation of a new “civilized” culture was transmitted to Renaissance England, and the link between the two discursive genres remained the eunuch. The first and most important English courtesy book, Thomas Elyot's The Boke named the Gouernour (1531), in keeping with its recommendations of sexual abstinence and constancy, cites Terence's Eunuchus as a prime example of the educative and civilizing value of comedy:

First, comedies, which they suppose to be a doctrinal of ribaldry, they be undoubtedly a picture or as it were a mirror of man's life, wherein evil is not taught but discovered; to the intent that men beholding the promptness of youth unto vice, the snares of harlots & bawds laid for young minds, the deceit of servants. … And that by comedies good counsel is ministered, it appeareth by the sentence of Parmeno, in the second comedy of Terence. …⁷⁵

Between Elyot and Castiglione lie the effects of the Reformation. Elyot here follows Melanchthon's moralistic defense of Terence's comedy, whereby the vicious behavior represented in the play becomes an antidote to similar temptations in life.⁷⁶ This homeopathic theory of comedy in a sense restores Terence's system of signification by opposition but reverses its terms: not eviration for lust but lust for the repudiation of desire. It also reverses responsibilities for the events: it is not Chaerea's rapist libido that is to blame but the snares of harlots and bawds.

This moral rehabilitation of the play as neutered source of the dulce et utile prepared the way for imitations in the vernacular. It may not be an exaggeration to claim that whenever comedy emerges as a genre within a given Western culture, it does so courtesy of castration. Not incidentally, the first “regular” comedies in English are all directly or indirectly derived from Terence's play: Nicholas Udall's Ralph Roister Doister (c. 1553) is based on Terence's secondary plot (Thraso's wooing of Thais);⁷⁷ John Jeffere's The Bugbears (c. 1566) derives partly from Gl'ingannati and thus indirectly from Terence; and George Gascoigne's Supposes (1566) adapts Ariosto's Terentian commedia.

But where Italian comedy fully exploits, albeit with sprezzatura, the sexual energy of the Terentian model, post-Reformation English comedy allegorizes and domesticates it. Udall's prologue promises “under merry comedies secrets” the disclosure of “very virtuous lore” of a kind that “neither Plautus nor Terence did spare.”⁷⁸ Symptomatically, the object of Ralph Roister Doister's desires is not Thais or her Italian cortigiane equivalents but the English morality-play widow Dame Christian Custance. The traces of Eunuchus, apart from the braggart wooer himself, are the rituals of present-giving (Doister's rejected ring), the activities of go-between servants, a possible isolated and futile threat of rape, and the mild questioning of Roister Doister's capacity to “play the man's part.”⁷⁹ Playing the man's part is what Roister Doister is constitutionally unable to do. “I lack yet an headpiece,” he confesses prior to the “women's war” in which he is definitively routed.⁸⁰

Ralph Roister Doister rewrites Eunuchus as a moral allegory on the vanity of male desire and the Elyotian value of female “custance,” or chastity. But not all sixteenth-century English readings of Terence's play were so benevolent. The Oxford moralist and antitheatrical polemicist John Rainolds, in one of the most incisive critical commentaries ever written on the play, takes the opposite view, namely that The Eunuch represents the dangerous sexual potency or potentiality of transvestism; and that, far from encouraging private virtue, it is an exhibition of, and incitement to, public vice:

If you can; then ought you beware of beautifull boyes transformed into womẽ by putting on their raiment, their feature, lookes and facions. For men may be ravished with the loue of stones, of dead stuffe, framed by cunning grauers to beautifull womens likenes; as … Chaerea, araied like an Eunuch onley, did moove the beastlie lust of him who was lasciviouslie giuen in the Comedie.⁸¹

Rainolds, writing in 1599 with the professional all-male theater companies in mind, makes the valid point that it is Chaerea's very disguise that releases his “beastlie lust,” a metatheatrical interpretation Rainolds develops in his acute analysis of the rape scene:

For let malefactours bee never so ready to practise any wickednes of their owne corrupt and lewde inclination: the circumstances of maner, season, place, and so foorth, commodious to performe it doe more entise them therevnto. Weapons them selves (saith Homer) doe draw men to fight: and opportunitie maketh theeves. … as Chaerea could not haue defiled Pamphila, no not in Thais house, without his Eunuches raiment.⁸²

Chaerea's supposed lack of “weapon” becomes his tool: the actor's crossdressed performance creates the occasion for the representation and transmission of desire, the moving of beastly lust in performer and spectator alike.

Here, then, are two opposing views of the Terentian castration legacy: as private moral purification or as public erotic provocation. However unpleasant Rainolds's conclusion to avoid the theater, there is little doubt that he has understood better than Renaissance apologists for Terence the potentially transgressive force of the castrate ploy, which he rightly identifies as a trope for performance in general. Rainolds's Th'overthrow of stageplays appeared the year after Bernard's English translation of Eunuchus and two years or so before the first performance of Twelfth Night, a comedy that did not, perhaps, altogether assuage his qualms regarding the perilous ambiguities of the “Eunuches raiment.”

VI. SMALL PIPE, BIG VOICE

Viola's fleeting “as an eunuch” allusion thus bears the unsuspected weight of a cultural history in which, according to the social context and ideological values of the drama, castration comes to figure by turns the threat or exorcism of infertility; the crossing of gender boundaries; the transcendence or realization of sexual desire; the condition of slavery; the “archaic” economy of total prestation; the modern economy of symbolic exchange; financial, political, or military dispossession; the practices of sodomy or prostitution; the effects of venereal disease; the perils of matrimony and the humiliation of cuckoldry; the virtues of female chastity; the sociosexual development of the adolescent; and the hierarchical separation or vertical mobility between the social classes. At the same time, the stage castrate takes on more strictly theatrical or performative values within the history of comedy itself: the performance of a fictional role; the professional skills of the actor; the voyeuristic gaze of the audience; and the seductive eroticism of histrionic crossdressing. Above all, the eunuchus is a point of tension or mediation between these two competing and sometimes conflicting histories, the social and the dramatic.

The final mediation of the castration topos on its journey towards Twelfth Night comes about through the narrative versions of the Viola story, particularly Barnaby Riche's romance “Of Apolonius and Silla” in Riche His Farewell to Militarie Profession (1581), perhaps the play's most immediate source. Riche, via Bandello and Belleforest, provides two variations on the castration topos. The first revisits the Ariostan scenario of dismemberment during a maritime voyage by narrating the failed rape of Silla by the Sea Captain. The Captain's unfulfilled infatuation with Silla is first figured in the familiar trope of disarmament: “My captaine … was like to bee taken prisoner aboard his owne shippe, and forced to yeeld hymself a captive without any cannon shot.”⁸³ The planned rape is then thwarted through the deus ex machina intervention of a storm, in which Silla is saved from drowning by a floating “cheste that was the captaines.”⁸⁴ The “dismembering” of the captain saves both Silla's honor and her life.

Riche's second, more explicit re-elaboration of the eviration topos takes the opposite form—the attribution of improbable powers of penetration and impregnation to Silla herself. Charged with impregnating Julina (the act of her twin brother, Silvio), Silla reflects bitterly on the “impediment” that disables her from doing so in fact: “was not this a foule oversight of Julina, that would so precisely sweare so greate an othe that she was gotten with childe by one that was altogether unfurnishte with implements for suche a tourne?”⁸⁵ Silla, accused of being a fertile eunuch, seems to regret being “unfurnishte with implements” as much as she does Julina's accusation.⁸⁶ Ironically, by way of revenge against her accuser, it is she—or rather “he,” the false “Silvio”—who delivers the narrative's equivalent of the misogynistic Pallavicino-Orsino speech on female sexual incontinence: “… halfe in a chafe he [sic] saied. What lawe is able to restraine the foolishe indiscretion of a woman that yeeldeth herself to her owne desires? … with what snaffell is it possible to holde her backe from the execution of her filthinesse?”⁸⁷ The narrator himself subscribes to the same view, recounting how Julina receives from the real and suitably “furnishte” Silvio “a surfet whereof she could not bee cured in fourtie weekes after, a naturall inclination in all women whiche are subjecte to longyng, and want the reason to use a moderation in their diet”; Silla herself, a model of self-control, is praised by the duke as “the braunche of all vertue and the flowre of curtesie it self.”⁸⁸

Revelation of the phallus's absence is comically explicit in Riche, whose Silla-Silvio performs a striptease for Julina to show her what he both possesses (“his breastes”) and lacks (the guilty “partie”): “And here with all loosing his garmentes doune to the stomacke, and shewed Julina his breastes and pretie teates … saiyng: Loe, Madame! behold here the partie whom you have chalenged to bee the father of your childe.”⁸⁹ For Julina this display is disconcerting; if Silla perceives herself/himself as merely “unfurnishte,” or furnished only with pretty teats, Julina, who has already verified Silvio's virility, finds herself in the embarrassing position of Bibbiena's Fulvia, convinced that her lover is a hermaphrodite: “Julina did now thinke her self to be in a worse case then ever she was before.”⁹⁰

In Twelfth Night, by contrast, there is no striptease, since Viola remains dressed as a “boy” until the play's end; no dismembered predatory sea captain (transformed into the chivalric Captain of the “as an eunuch” exchange); no Ariostan trunk;⁹¹ and no imprisoning of the fertile eunuch (this fate is reserved for Malvolio). Twelfth Night similarly does away with sodomitic fireworks, vengeful voyeuristic merchant fathers, erectile scopophilic servants, devouring whores, busybody bawds, and the whole commedia apparatus of more or less brutal physical engagement and crude sexual bartering.

So what remains of this cultural history beyond Viola's single cryptic allusion? What appears to remain is discourse. Twelfth Night seems to enact a discursivizing—one is tempted to say a “civilizing”—of the often violent sexual and social intercourse of its antecedents. Indeed, from this point of view, Twelfth Night might be said to be more Italian than its Italian models, closer to the ideal of “civil conversation” as the interplay of ironical and persuasive wit. The relation of the play's discourse to the conversational and ideological texture of The Courtier is in many ways more direct than that of La calandria or its commedia offspring.

As a result the comedy's mimesis of intimacy is more persuasive than that of its Italian analogues, especially because it greatly extends the interiorization or privatisation of desire sketched out in Gl'ingannati and developed in Gl'inganni. Viola's dismay at the erotic effects of her disguise in 2.2 echoes the moments of confessional solitude in which her predecessors reveal their unease at playing their disguise role (Lelia's rape fantasy and, more closely, Ginevra's complaint at her maledetto habito):

I am the man: if it be so, as 'tis,
Poor lady, she were better love a dream.
Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness,
Wherein the pregnant enemy does much.

(2.2.24-27)

But in fact her reflection on the incongruity of her role goes much further than Lelia's ambivalent wish to be found out or Ginevra's lamented deficiency of male desire. As her “male” performance begins to vacillate—appropriately enough, when she is faced with the phallic task of fighting a duel (albeit with the scarcely macho Sir Andrew)—Viola wittily signals her inadequacy in terms of the absent phallus: “Pray god defend me! A little thing would make me tell them how much I lack of a man” (3.4.307-9). Viola's gentle allusion (“little thing”) suggests the sophisticated self-awareness of her discourse compared to the heavy sexual allusions of the play's forebears, just as her symbolic substitution by her twin (who takes her place as sword-wielding duellist⁹²) is far subtler than the appearance, say, of the literally hyperphallic Fabrizio in Gl'ingannati.

Twelfth Night may therefore be said to effect the definitive Lacanian passage from the “natural” law of coupling to the law of symbolic interchange. And yet this may not be the whole story of Viola and her eunuch, whose impressively Castiglionian credentials may themselves disguise more public, less polite aspects of her role and its cultural history. First, the social and ideological implications of Viola's performance extend far beyond the restricted confines of courtly civility. Indeed, the very closeness of the play's relations with The Courtier and later courtesy books such as La civile conversatione has a negative social fallout regarding Viola's own social position. Castiglione's concept of feminine corteziania is strictly limited to the class of people present at the Urbino conversations, namely the aristocracy or, at the least, the highest of the landed or clerical classes, just as Guazzo's “civility” is restricted to the gentry. Viola, instead, enters Orsino's court not as his social peer—not as an Elisabetta Gonzaga or indeed as an Olivia—but as a servant (“I'll serve this duke”). Although her own social origins are somewhat fuzzy, there are clear indications that she and Sebastian, as Olivia suspects, are of “gentle” blood, and that her disguise is thus a dressingdown rather than a dressing-up, a form of cross-class as well as cross-gender transvestism; as Barber puts it, “gentility shows through her disguise.”

In a play dominated by the compulsive drive towards upward social mobility (the efforts of Malvolio, Sir Andrew, Maria), Viola knowingly, if necessarily, steps down on the social scale at the very moment in which she approaches its apex, the court of Illyria. It is this act of social self-disguising that most immediately realizes her “as an eunuch” plan, the eunuch being by tradition a (usually low) servant within a (usually high) household. It is also Viola's closest “political” link with Terence's Chaerea, who makes the same temporary move down the social scale.

The implications of Viola's downward mobility are accentuated by the dramatic history of her inherited story. For all its “Italian” discursive wit, the play, unlike many other Shakespearean comedies, is not set in Italy. As has often been noted, and frequently translated into stage practice, the mythical Illyria unmistakably resembles the rural England of landed gentry and country mansions far more than it does any Mediterranean court society. We are even further removed from the mercantile society of the city-states that in the Italian analogues gives the castrato trope its energy and its peculiar monetary coloring. Shakespeare eliminates the commedia merchants and their frenetic sexual-financial transactions: in Cristina Malcolmson's words, “the play relentlessly excludes the figure of the merchant, although in the sources, the father of Viola and Sebastian is almost always a merchant, and frequently the father of Olivia is so as well. … The play cannot afford the figure of the merchant because such a social role does not fit clearly enough into the traditional hierarchical order of servant and master.”⁹³

The world of Twelfth Night is a society not of Italian mercatores but of thinly disguised English possessores,⁹⁴ a rigidly hierarchical order dominated by landowners (specifically, Orsino and Olivia) that reflects the far more static socioeconomic reality of early modern England compared with that of early modern Italy. As Richard A. Goldthwaite comments, “Italian society was subject to a dynamic of change unlike that of any other in Europe. Elsewhere, wealth was predominantly in land and therefore less subject to instability; it was largely in the hands of a closed caste that experienced less mobility.”⁹⁵ “Elsewhere” means England above all. Thus Viola's self-enrollment in the ranks of the “English” servant classes is more restricting and more dangerous—because potentially more permanent—than the interclass comings and goings of Lelia and Ginevra within their more mobile social contexts. If the stakes of the disguise game are higher, so are the rewards: as in Eunuchus, self-relegation translates, finally, into self-promotion, since Viola is presumably destined to become “duchess” or “countess” of Orsino's Illyria.

Within this relatively static hierarchy of actual and would-be possessores, however, Viola is not alone in her dispossession. In addition to the focusing of the eunuch topos on Viola, there is in Twelfth Night, as in Eunuchus, a dissemination or contaminatio of the castration topic outward from the center, involving particularly the comedy's gulls. Thus the financial milking and fall from illusory social grace of Sir Andrew Aguecheek—a specular image of Viola's movement from self-relegation to social promotion—is figured in a series of insinuations regarding his impotence and effeminization, from Maria's “dry jest” and “now I let go your hand, I am barren” (1.3.75, 78) to Sir Toby's ambiguous description of Sir Andrew's lank hair (1.3.99-101), which seems to evoke an erotic encounter but in fact equates the flaccid Aguecheek with the distaff, symbol of the female. Sir Andrew confirms these innuendoes in his “thrasonical” reluctance to use his masculine weapon in the duel with Viola-Sebastian.

As for Malvolio, the clues to his “castrate” status are more cryptic, like the letter in which they are hidden. As John Astington has recently pointed out, the “some are born great” passage in the false billet doux from Olivia (2.5.145-46) seems to be modeled on Christ's speech to his disciples on marriage, with its distinction between three kinds of “eunuch,” that is, three kinds of impotence or celibacy.⁹⁶ The implicit suggestion is that Malvolio himself—who, like Sir Andrew, will fail to marry Olivia and thus to achieve social promotion—belongs to this category, and indeed his public humiliation can be read, in Astington's words, as “a displaced gelding.”⁹⁷

Castration therefore takes on in Twelfth Night some of the broader significance that marks its dramatic career and that establishes it as a point of contact and attrition between opposing social forces. But the comedy also bears traces of that other, more strictly theatrical or metatheatrical history of the eunuchus as triumphant self-transcending performer, as shameless seducer of audiences, as ambiguous object of the desiring gaze. And these traces are present from Viola's first appearance in her male disguise. Viola's second scene, 1.4, in which she has already successfully established her place in Orsino's court and Orsino's affections, is usually taken to indicate her immediate abandonment of her “eunuch” role, since Orsino addresses her as “good youth” (l. 15) and “dear lad” (l. 29), just as he later calls her “boy” (2.4.14 and passim) and treats her as a young male servant: “The Duke's attitude to Cesario … shows that Viola has not entered his service in this [eunuch] character but as a page.”⁹⁸ This raises the question, however, as to how Orsino, or for that matter the audience, is to distinguish between a young woman dressed as a young boy (or, on the Elizabethan stage, a boy dressed as a woman dressed as a boy) and a young woman dressed as a young castrated boy. What signs might mark out one from the other? And why, in any case, should Orsino not treat Cesario as a male servant, which—whether as page or as eunuch—is what he is? Should he address Viola as “good castrate” or “dear eunuch”?

But Orsino's, and our own, perception of Cesario as fully “male” is open to question on more than negative grounds (lack of contrary evidence); in fact Orsino does refer quite overtly to Cesario's dubious manhood, calling our attention to the very ambivalence of the “good youth's” appearance:

For they shall yet belie thy happy years,
That say thou art a man; Diana's lip
Is not more smooth and rubious: thy small pipe
Is as the maiden's organ, shrill and sound,
And all is semblative a woman's part.

(1.4.30-34)

Orsino's description of Viola's corporeal and vocal ambiguity is itself strikingly ambiguous. His questioning of her manhood is stated initially in terms not of gender but of age (“belie thy happy years”): it is Cesario's transitional adolescent state that belies his manhood: “Not yet old enough for a man, nor young enough for a boy,” as Malvolio puts it in the following scene (1.5.158-59). A great deal of recent critical commentary, however, has stressed Orsino's barely disguised interest in the androgyny of Viola-Cesario's body as object of his charmed gaze.⁹⁹ And yet what is most prominent in Orsino's depiction of his servant is not so much the object of his fascinated gaze, Cesario's body, as the object of his enchanted audition, Cesario's voice: “Thy small pipe … shrill and sound.” This brings us back once more to Viola's earlier speech.

Although, as we are constantly being told, it is never put literally to the test, Viola's claim “for I can sing” associates her eunuch role with a specific early modern performative (not to mention surgical) practice. Viola's musical concept of her disguise suggests that what she has in mind is not, as is sometimes supposed, an eastern slave but rather a contemporary Western evirato, a category of soprano singer much in vogue in turn-of-the-century Europe,¹⁰⁰ as, for example, in the Sistine Chapel, where the castrati singers had by 1600 virtually replaced all the old falsettisti or male sopranos. The “sacred capons” had arrived in church choirs in Spain, Portugal, Germany (at the Munich chapel), and possibly in England, although officially banned.¹⁰¹

Castrato singers were operated on before puberty, thereby preventing both the thickening of the vocal cords and the development of the primary sexual organ. This cultural and medical phenomenon was due originally to the fact that women—following a restrictive interpretation of St. Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians enjoining women to be “silent” in church—were prohibited from singing in places of worship and later, by extension, on the early operatic stage. It then rapidly became a fashion, thanks in part to the castrato's unique combination of wide vocal range with greater volume and agility than women or boy sopranos could rival; and thanks especially to the undoubted fascination that the androgynous singer, endowed with male/female body and voice, exercised over auditors of both sexes. Given the spectacular success of the castrati, it is fair to suppose that Viola's goal of self-elected unsexed “singer” is not a form of impotence but a mode of power, an irresistible appeal for her dramatic and theatrical audiences.

It is at this point that Viola's disguise as a metaphor for the privé becomes, on the contrary, a mode of public exhibition. As well as focusing attention on her voice and offering a plausible explanation for its unmasculine highness,¹⁰² Viola's self-unfashioning as castrato foregrounds her role as a particular and novel form of theatrical performance. The evirato was practically synonymous with operatic theater, which arose partly in order to put the new professional castrato singers on public display. Iacopo Peri's Euridice, for example—first performed at the Pitti Palace in Florence on 6 October 1600 to celebrate the marriage of Maria de' Medici to Henri IV of France—was composed for and around two castrati, pupils of the opera's music director, Emilio del Cavalieri: one (probably “Fabio”) in the roles of Venus and Persephone, the other (“Giovannino”) in the role of Tragedy.¹⁰³ What Viola seems to be laying claim to, in any case, is a similarly important role in what is, in effect, an intensely musical piece of entertainment.¹⁰⁴

Orsino, duly captivated by Viola's discursive music, comments on her body and voice in appropriately musical terms, playing, in a series of stunning multilayered puns, on Viola/Cesario's state of suspension between the conditions of prepubescent male (as actor), fully grown female (as dramatis persona), and castrato singer (her disguise role): Cesario's “small pipe” is at once the treble voice and undeveloped member of the boy actor, which is simultaneously “as a maiden's organ,” female vocality and genitality together; and the overall effect (“all”) is that of a woman's “part,” that is, sex, voice, and dramatic role. But at the same time, the peculiar combination of small pipe (Viola's “little thing” revisited from an anatomical rather than psychological viewpoint¹⁰⁵), shrill voice, and “semblative” a woman's part or maiden's organ—an absence of other visible male appendages—is precisely the somatic and professional privilege of the evirato singer.

Orsino's punning infatuation with Viola's small pipe recalls, or perhaps anticipates, the many sexual legends that grew up around the castrati as much sought-after heterosexual and, still more, homosexual fetish objects.¹⁰⁶ The fact that Olivia is equally captivated by Cesario's corporeal and vocal charms (“Thy tongue, thy face, thy limbs …” [1.5.296]) doubles the stakes of the game and confirms the spectacular triumph of Viola's “musical” seduction. The very scenes in which Viola puts into effect her abnegation and self-mortification—concealing her desire for Orsino or acting as go-between for Orsino's desire towards Olivia—are the scenes in which she achieves erotic dominion over both as captivating castrato. Her eviration is simultaneously an act of sexual self-denial and an exercise in irresistible sexual allure.

The evirato allusion not only rehistoricizes the emasculation topos in terms of early modern performance but restores something of its Terentian force, shifting our perspective from the figurative to the literal, from the imaginary missing phallus of the castration complex to the surgically removed testicles of the unmanned servant. Moreover, it recuperates the full theatricality and centrality of the eunuch role itself with all its paradoxical erotic force. Viola, like Chaerea, becomes an exchange or gift-object, expression of another's desire—Chaerea's eunuch-gift is the expression of Thraso's supposed desire for Thais—but she is able to use her “sexless” servant role to realize her own desire towards her master. Not by chance, Twelfth Night is the first comedy after Eunuchus whose protagonist declares explicitly and voluntarily at the outset her intention to adopt this challenging and dangerous “part.”

Thus Shakespeare presents two apparently opposed behavioral and performative models in Twelfth Night—one private, polite, disembodied, the other public, theatrical, and erotically corporeal—which come together, courtesy of Viola's castrate, to form a single, extraordinarily dense piece of role-playing. The two kinds of historicity mediated by Viola's “eunuch,” the social-synchronic and the dramatic-diachronic, prove to be reciprocally enriching dimensions of symbolic exchange. To collapse one into the other, and thereby reduce the problematic complexity of the comedy's intercourse, would surely be an act of critical castration.

Notes

1. Quotations of Twelfth Night follow the Arden edition (ed. J. M. Lothian and T. W. Craik [London: Methuen, 1975]).

2. Lothian and Craik, eds., 1.2.56n; Twelfth Night, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985), 1.2.56n.

3. Lothian and Craik, eds., xxiii.

4. Donno, ed., 1.2.56n.

5. On the relationship between interchange in the comedies and early modern social exchange, see Lars Engle, “‘Thrift is Blessing’: Exchange and Explanation in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): 20-37; Karen Newman, “Portia's Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice,” SQ 38 (1987): 19-33; Ronald A. Sharp, “Gift Exchange and the Economies of Spirit in The Merchant of Venice,” Modern Philology 83 (1986): 250-65; Katharine Eisaman Maus, “Transfer of Title in Love's Labor's Lost: Language, Individualism, Gender” in Shakespeare Left and Right, Ivo Kamps, ed. (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 205-23; and Mark Thornton Burnett, “Giving and Receiving: Love's Labour's Lost and the Politics of Exchange,” English Literary Renaissance 23 (1993): 287-313.

6. The most authoritative history of everyday life in early modern Europe is Fernand Braudel's The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible, trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper and Row, 1981).

7. Passions of the Renaissance, Roger Chartier, ed., Vol. 3 of A History of Private Life, Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, gen. eds., trans. Arthur Goldhammer, 5 vols. (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard UP, 1987-91).

8. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott, 2 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978-82), esp. 1:53-59 and 70-84.

9. Philippe Ariès, Introduction in Ariès and Duby, gen. eds., 3:1-11, esp. 9.

10. Orest Ranum's comments on the exchange of coded love letters have some bearing on Malvolio's attempts to decipher “Olivia's” epistle: “Such letters might be written in secret ciphers or in readily comprehensible signs such as ‘S,’ an enigmatic symbol of fidelity and love known since the fourteenth century but increasingly common after 1550” (“The Refuges of Intimacy” in Ariès and Duby, gen. eds., 3:207-63, esp. 246).

11. Ariès in Ariès and Duby, gen. eds., 3:4.

12. C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Customs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1959), 248.

13. Ariès in Ariès and Duby, gen. eds., 3:5.

14. Michael Curtin, “A Question of Manners: Status and Gender in Etiquette and Courtesy,” Journal of Modern History 57 (1985): 395-423, esp. 398.

15. Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (1528), trans. George Bull (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1967), 253.

16. Castiglione, 246-47.

17. Castiglione, 217, 220-21, and 241.

18. See Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1993), 23-112.

19. Castiglione, 221.

20. Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967), 78, my translation.

21. On the castration complex, see in particular Freud's Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy and Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, both in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74), 10:5-147 and 20:87-175. The quotation here comes from Freud's An Autobiographical Study in Strachey, ed., 20:7-74, esp. 37.

22. Freud, Three Essays on Sexuality: II. Infantile Sexuality in Strachey, ed., 7:195.

23. Jacques Lacan considers “the moment of castration … the moment … [of] the very instigation of the subject in the confrontation with the real of sexual difference” (“The Phallic Phase and the Subjective Import of the Castration Complex” in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, trans. Jacqueline Rose [London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982], 99-122, esp. 110).

24. Lacan, “The Meaning of the Phallus” in Mitchell and Rose, eds., 74-85, esp. 79 and 84. On the “prevalence of castration,” see also “The phallus and the meteor” in Lacan, The psychoses: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book III, 1955-1956, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (London: Routledge, 1993), 310-23.

25. Lacan, “The function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis,” Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 30-114, esp. 67.

26. Lacan, “The function and field of speech and language,” 66.

27. As Barbara Freedman says, “What Lacan refers to as ‘castration’ is the loss in sexuality resulting from the inevitable mediation of desire by signification” (“Frame-Up: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, Theatre,” Theatre Journal 40 [1988]: 375-97, esp. 377).

28. Laurie E. Osborne, “Letters, Lovers, Lacan: Or Malvolio's Not-So-Purloined Letter,” Assays 5 (1989): 63-89, esp. 79.

29. See Kenneth J. Reckford, “Dionysus and the Phallus” in his Six Essays in Perspective, Vol. 1 of Aristophanes' Old-and-New Comedy (Chapel Hill and London: U of North Carolina P, 1987), 457-60.

30. See, for example, Aristophanes's literary burlesque Thesmophoriazousae (411 bc), which includes what is in effect a farcical symbolic castration rite: the protagonist Euripides has his own kinsman Mnesilochus ritualistically depilated so that he may impersonate a woman at the thesmophoria (festival of women) and thus rescue the playwright from a death sentence imposed for his misogynistic treatment of women in his tragedies. The Thesmophoriazousae sets up a conflict between the phallophoria, dedicated to Dionysus, and the thesmophoria, dedicated to Demeter and Persephone, who preside over a “carnival” parenthesis of female power. And indeed the women gathered for the religious festival take up the castration theme in a mocking assertion of their superiority: while they have kept their distaff (kanõn), the men have lost their spear shaft (kanõn) and shield (skiadeion). Here the “castrate” becomes an object of political mediation and of cultural exchange. What the comedy, and in particular its unmanning trope, seems to enact is a mode of social transformation that foreshadows the early modern process of Zivilisation or privatisation. At the same time, the castration topos takes on clear theatrical implications, representing the actor's surrender of his subjectivity in taking on a role, especially a female role in an all-male mode of performance such as that of the Greek stage: “The play with castration,” as Froma I. Zeitlin puts it, “is appropriate enough to the inversion of roles, but the ambiguities of role-playing involve both this and that, even for Mnesilochus, who plays so ill and, by his misplaying, exposes, when the women expose him, the limits of mimesis” (“Travesties of gender and genre in Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazousae” in Reflections of Women in Antiquity, Helene P. Foley, ed. [New York and London: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, 1981], 169-217, esp. 179).

31. See The Eunuch, trans. Douglass Parker, in The Complete Comedies of Terence, ed. Palmer Bovie (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1974), 147-225, esp. 153.

32. See Aline Rousselle, Porneia: On Desire and the Body in Antiquity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 122.

33. Carlin A. Barton, The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans: The Gladiator and the Monster (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993), 72-73. Compare Quintilian's proverb “Libidinosior es quam ullus spado”: “You are more libidinous than any eunuch” (quoted in Barton, 72). Basil of Ancyra in the fourth-century De virginitate warns virgins not to trust eunuchs, saying that those castrated in adulthood “burn with greater and less restrained desire for sexual union, and … not only do they feel this ardour, but they think they can defile any woman they meet without risk” (quoted in Rousselle, 123).

34. Quotations of Terence follow Richard Bernard, Terence in English. Fabvlae comici facetissimi et elegantissimi poetae Terentii (Cambridge, 1607), 152, hereafter cited as “Bernard.”

35. On the male gaze, see Laura Mulvey's classic essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16 (1975): 6-18; and for an excellent discussion of the Lacanian gaze in relation to theater and feminism, see Freedman, passim.

36. Bernard, 152.

37. Paul Veyne, “Slavery” in From Pagan Rome to Byzantium, Paul Veyne, ed., Vol. 1 of A History of Private Life, Ariès and Duby, gen. eds., 51-69, esp. 63.

38. Cynthia Dessen, “The Figure of the Eunuch in Terence's Eunuchus,” forthcoming in Helios. I am very grateful to Professor Dessen for the opportunity to read her important article in manuscript and to exchange ideas with her about the play and its heritage.

39. Quoted in T. W. Baldwin, Shakspere's Five-Act Structure: Shakspere's Early Plays on the Background of Renaissance Theories of Five-Act Structure from 1470 (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1947), 80.

40. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1967), 45 and 3. For discussions of Mauss's prestation theory, see Burnett, esp. n. 4; and Patricia Fumerton, “Exchanging Gifts: The Elizabethan Currency of Children and Poetry,” ELH 53 (1986): 241-78, esp. 246.

41. Bernard, 156.

42. Louise George Clubb, Italian Drama in Shakespeare's Time (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale UP, 1989), 6. The term theatergram is Clubb's.

43. George Gascoigne, Supposes (1566) in Five Pre-Shakespearean Comedies, ed. Frederick S. Boas (London: Oxford UP, 1934), 272-341, esp. 313. On the theme of castration in Gascoigne's own poetry, with reference to his career as courtier poet, see Richard McCoy, “Gascoigne's ‘Poëmata castrata’: The Wages of Courtly Success,” Criticism 27 (1985): 29-55. Ariosto's I suppositi, together with the same author's La cassaria (1508), is the first example of “regular” vernacular comedy.

44. Giorgio Padoan has suggested that “Castiglione's” prologue is really by Bibbiena himself; see Clubb, “Castiglione's Humanistic Art and Renaissance Drama” in Castiglione: The Ideal and the Real in Renaissance Culture, Robert W. Hanning and David Rosand, eds. (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale UP, 1983), 191-208.

45. Castiglione, 154ff.

46. Wayne A. Rebhorn, Courtly Performances: Masking and Festivity in Castiglione's Book of the Courtier (Detroit, MI: Wayne State UP, 1978), 23-51, esp. 25. On drama and performance in The Courtier, see also Clubb in Hanning and Rosand, eds. On courtesy as a behavioral role that can be learned and performed, see Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: U of California P, 1984).

47. Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, La calandr[i]a (Venice, 1526), 12^v, my translation.

48. See Freud's account of the little boy who discovers his mother's or sister's lack of a phallus: “It is self-evident to a male child that a genital like his own is to be attributed to everyone he knows, and he cannot make its absence tally with his picture of other people” (Three Essays on Sexuality: II. Infantile Sexuality, trans. and ed. James Strachey [New York: Basic Books, 1979], 60).

49. Bibbiena, k1^v-k2^r.

50. “Fessenio: … they don't fit if you don't cut off their hands, arms, and legs according to need. … Then once you get into the port, anyone who wants to takes back his member and screws it back on. It often happens that, inadvertently or maliciously, someone takes another's member and puts it where he likes best; and sometimes it doesn't work out because he takes a member which is bigger than his own” (Bibbiena, e4^r).

51. Bibbiena, g2^v and k4^v.

52. “Maco: I'm dead. Escape, escape, the Spaniards have made a hole in my behind with their sword: where shall I go? where shall I flee? where shall I hide? … The Spaniards have cut me to pieces” (La cortigiana in Tutte le commedie, ed. G. B. De Sanctis [Milan: Mursia, 1968], 113-223, esp. 207 and 219, my translation). Aretino's closest adaptation of Eunuchus is La Talanta (1537), in which the courtesan Talanta—directly modeled on Terence's Thais—is courted by three innamorati: the earnest young Orfinio (the Phaedria role), the miles gloriosus Captain Tinca (Thraso), and the old Venetian miser Vergolo (Aretino's addition), receiving gifts from each suitor. The play's derivation and departures from Terence are raised explicitly by Orfinio's disclaimer to Talanta: “I who am not Thais's Phaedria …” (La Talanta in De Sanctis, ed., 335-462, esp. 365, my translation).

53. Ben Jonson's Epicoene (1609) revisits Eunuchus via The Stablemaster, reworking the duke of Mantua's prank against his stablemaster in the form of the marrying-a-boy trick played by Dauphine on his uncle, Morose. From Terence, via Aretino, Jonson inherits the trope of castration as social epidemic: not the political corruption of Rome or the universal sodomy of Mantua but the generalized gender reversal that afflicts contemporary London. The play's transvestite plot, presided over by the omniously named Cutbeard, who finds Morose a silent “wife,” enacts such reversals through the exchange of the play's floating signifier, the phallus. Like the stablemaster, Morose is obliged, in order to be free of his wife, to make a public confession before the “Ladies” of his congenital (or perhaps nongenital) lack of attributes (Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-52], 5:141-271, esp. 264-65). Jonson might be said to extend the castration trope to the audience, keeping his spectators in the dark regarding Dauphine's trick until the very end and thereby leaving them as disarmed as Morose himself; see Laura Levine, Men in women's clothing: Anti-theatricality and effeminization, 1579-1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), 76-77.

54. The Sack of Rome, in which German soldiers besieged the Papal stronghold of Castel Sant'Angelo before being forced to withdraw due to the plague, was perhaps the most traumatic event in early modern Italian history and is described by Aretino himself in the Sei giornate (1534) precisely as the mass rape of nuns by invading soldiers, caused by the pope's sodomistic predilections. As James Grantham Turner has commented with reference to the Sei giornate, “The ‘public’ realm of the Sack and the ‘private’ realm of sexuality encode one another. The violated woman became a figure for the devastation of the city, while the Sack itself was conceived in sexual terms; before and after the event, Rome was represented as a new Sodom destroyed on account of the pope's affairs with men” (“Introduction: A history of sexuality” in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, texts, images, James Grantham Turner, ed. [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993], 1-9, esp. 2).

55. See Philip Jones, “Economia e società nell'Italia medievale: la leggenda della borghesia” in Dal feudalesimo al capitalismo, Vol. 1 of Storia d'Italia, Ruggiero Romano and Corrado Vivanti, eds., 10 vols. (Turin: Einaudi, 1978-86), 187-364, esp. 200-229.

56. See Richard A. Goldthwaite, “The Renaissance economy: the preconditions for luxury consumption” in Aspetti della vita economica medievale (Florence: Università di Firenze, Istituto di Storia Economica, 1985), 659-75, esp. 659-60. See also Peter Burke, The Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society in Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1986), 228.

57. See C. H. Wilson, “Trade, Society and the State” in The Economy of Expanding Europe in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Vol. 4 of The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, E. E. Rich and C. H. Wilson, gen. eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1967), 487-575, esp. 492.

58. The Academy was devoted to “exercises in vulgar as well as Greek and Latin letters, reading, disputing, composing, interpreting, writing, and doing everything one usually does in order to learn. … And with the firm resolution to pretend not to understand or care about anything else in the world, they were pleased to take the name Intronati” (Prologue to the constitution of the Academy, quoted in Teatro del Cinquecento, Vol. 2 of Il teatro italiano, Guido Davico Bonino, ed., 19 vols. [Turin: Einaudi, 1977-91], 444, my translation).

59. “[The academicians] said that this woman would have imitated well the part of a servant, this other a matron, that young man a parasite, that other a lover, and so went around distributing all the parts that are required in a comedy” (G. Bargagli, Dialogo dei Giuochi che nelle vegghie senesi si usano di fare [Siena, 1572], 84-85, quoted in Bonino, ed., 445).

60. It might be noted that the Intronati performed Piccolomini's comedy L'amor costante for the “invader” Charles V on his visit to Siena in 1536.

61. Gl'ingannati in Bonino, ed., 87-183, esp. 104, my translation.

62. Gl'ingannati in Bonino, ed., 131.

63. See Paul Larivaille, La vie quotidienne des courtisanes en Italie au temps de la Renaissance: Rome et Venise, XV^e et XVI^e siècles (Paris: Hachette, 1975), 27-32. On courtesans in Renaissance Rome, see also E. Rodocanachi, Cortigiane e buffoni di Roma: Studio dei costumi del XVI secolo (1927), trans. Nino della Casa (Milan: Edizioni Pervinca, 1983).

64. Niccolò Secchi, Gl'inganni (Florence, 1562), 10, my translation. The play on the two senses of “conversation”—the verbal and the sexual—anticipates Stefano Guazzo's courtesy book La civile conversatione, in which “Guazzo” (Cavaliere in the original Italian version) misunderstands the term used by his interlocutor, Anniball: “Pardon mee I pray you, I mistooke you then, for so soone as you began to speake of the Conversation of women: I thought you had ment of those with whom men trie their manhood withall in amorous incounters” (The Civile Conversation of M. Steeven Guazzo (1581), trans. George Pettie, ed. Edward Sullivan, 2 vols. [London: Constable; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925], 1:234).

65. Secchi, 29.

66. On the syphilis epidemic and its effects, see Larivaille, 149-58; and Anna Foa, “The New and the Old: The Spread of Syphilis (1494-1530)” in Sex and Gender in Historical Perspective, Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, eds. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990), 26-45.

67. Curtio Gonzaga, Gli inganni (Venice, 1592), 36^v, my translation.

68. Gonzaga, 56^r.

69. Gonzaga, 20^v.

70. Gonzaga, 21^r.

71. Guazzo was “secretary” to Ludovico Gonzaga; see John Leon Lievsay, Stefano Guazzo and the English Renaissance (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1961).

72. Guazzo, 1:158.

73. “Another used likewyse to say, that this world was a stage, wee the players whiche present the Comedie, and the gods, the lookers on. … I will propose unto you a kinde of conversation, not to stande us chiefly in steede in markets, Comedies, and other outwarde things subject to fortune, but to the ende wee may thereby learne good manners and conditions, by meanes whereof, the giftes of fortune are distributed and conserved, and the favour and good will of others obtained” (Guazzo, 1:118-19). On this passage and the “performance” of civility, see Maureen Quilligan, “Staging gender: William Shakespeare and Elizabeth Cary” in Turner, ed., 208-32, esp. 210.

74. On Guazzo and the discourse of the gentleman, see Emilio Speciale, “Il discorso del gentiluomo” in Stefano Guazzo e la Civil Conversazione, Giorgio Patrizi, ed. (Rome: Bulzoni, 1990), 25-45; Amedeo Quondam, “La ‘forma del vivere’: Schede per l'analisi del discorso cortigiano” in La corte e il ‘cortegiano’, Adriano Prosperi, ed., 2 vols. (Rome: Bulzoni, 1980), 2:15-68; and Daniel Javitch, “Rival Arts of Conduct in Elizabethan England: Guazzo's Civile Conversation and Castiglione's Courtier,” Yearbook of Italian Studies 1 (1971): 178-98.

75. Thomas Elyot, The Book named The Governor (1531), ed. S. E. Lehmberg (London: Dent, 1962), 47-48. For Elyot's remarks on sexual abstinence and constancy, see pages 200-203 and 205-8.

76. See Baldwin, 386-93.

77. On Udall's use of Terence, see Baldwin, 380-401.

78. Nicholas Udall, Ralph Roister Doister in Boas, ed., 113-206.

79. Udall in Boas, ed., 4.3.83; 3.3.46-48; and 3.4.16 and 87-90.

80. Udall in Boas, ed., 4.7.60 and 4.3.41-43.

81. John Rainolds, Th'overthrow of stage-playes (Middleburg, 1599), 34. Compare William Camden: “An Eunuch, for whom wee haue no name, but from the Greekes, they could aptly name Vnstana, that is, without stones” (Remaines concerning Britaine [1605; London, 1614], 27). Rainolds may deliberately pun on stones in the Elizabethan meaning of testicles.

82. Rainolds, 87.

83. Barnaby Riche, “Of Apolonius and Silla” in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, 8 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957-75), 2:344-62, esp. 348-49.

84. Riche in Bullough, ed., 350.

85. Riche in Bullough, ed., 359.

86. Compare Rosalind's equivocation in her/his epilogue: “I am not furnished like a beggar” (As You Like It, ed. Agnes Latham [London: Methuen, 1975], 5.4.206-7).

87. Riche in Bullough, ed., 359.

88. Riche in Bullough, ed., 354 and 362.

89. Riche in Bullough, ed., 361.

90. Riche in Bullough, ed., 362. There is a probable pun here on case in the Elizabethan slang sense of female sex organ. Compare Mistress Quickly's “Vengeance of Ginny's case” in The Merry Wives of Windsor (ed. H. J. Oliver [London: Methuen, 1971], 4.1.53) and Rosalind's “What a case am I in … ?” in As You Like It (5.4.204); see Eric Partridge, Shakespeare's Bawdy: A Literary & Psychological Essay and a Comprehensive Glossary (London: Routledge, 1947).

91. The trunk is discursivized in Viola's implicit reference at the end of the play: “The captain that did bring me first on shore / Hath my maid's garments” (5.1.272-73). Kemble introduced the trunk as stage property, adding the lines “That trunk, the reliques of my sea-drown'd brother, / Will furnish man's apparel to my need” to Viola's “as an eunuch”—which Kemble changed to “as a page”—speech (John Philip Kemble Promptbooks, ed. Charles H. Shattuck, 11 vols. [Charlottesville: UP of Virginia for the Folger Shakespeare Library, 1974], 9:6).

92. According to Barbara Freedman, Sebastian “replaces her as the ultimate possessor of the maternal object” (“Separation and Fusion in Twelfth Night” in Psychoanalytic Approaches to Literature and Film, Maurice Charney and Joseph Reppen, eds. [Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1987], 96-119, esp. 115).

93. Cristina Malcolmson, “‘What You Will’: Social Mobility and Gender in Twelfth Night” in The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, Valerie Wayne, ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1991), 29-57, esp. 50.

94. See Jones in Romano and Vivanti, eds., 200-229.

95. Goldthwaite, 671.

96. “For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother's womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake” (The Holy Bible [Oxford: University Press, 1970], Matthew 19:12). See John Astington, “Malvolio and the Eunuchs: Texts and Revels in Twelfth Night,” Shakespeare Survey 46 (1994): 23-34.

97. Astington, 26. Compare Laurie E. Osborne's Lacanian reading of the letter, which arrives at a similar conclusion from a quite different perspective: “In possessing the letter, Malvolio is feminized, losing his masculine attributes without knowing it while taking on himself the mystery of the signifier” (74).

98. Lothian and Craik, eds., 1.2.56n.

99. Stephen Greenblatt interprets Orsino's description in terms of “hermaphroditism” (“Fiction and Friction” in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England [Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1988], 66-93, esp. 91). See also Phyllis Rackin, “Androgyny, Mimesis and the Marriage of the Boy Heroine on the English Renaissance Stage,” PMLA 102 (1987): 29-41; and Lisa Jardine, “Twins and travesties: Gender, dependency and sexual availability in Twelfth Night” in Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance stage, Susan Zimmerman, ed. (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 27-38, esp. 33. On homosexual desire in Twelfth Night, see also Janet Adelman, “Male Bonding in Shakespeare's Comedies” in Shakespeare's “Rough Magic”: Renaissance Essays in Honor of C. L. Barber, Peter Erickson and Coppélia Kahn, eds. (Newark: U of Delaware P, 1985), 73-103; Stephen Orgel, “Nobody's Perfect: Or Why did the English Take Boys for Women?” South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (1989): 7-29; Joseph Pequigney, “The Two Antonios and Same-Sex Love in Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice,” ELR 22 (1992): 201-21. Jean E. Howard contests both the “androgynous” and the “homosexual” readings, arguing that the play figure of the crossdressed Viola is “used to enforce a gender system that is challenged in other contexts by that figure,” while Orsino “shows no overt sexual interest in the crossdressed Viola until her biological identity is revealed, though his language often betrays an unacknowledged desire for the Diana within the male disguise” (“Crossdressing, The Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England,” SQ 39 [1988]: 418-40, esp. 432).

100. Among other explicit Shakespearean references to eunuchs, there are two allusions to the castrated singer, one in A Midsummer Night's Dream (ed. Harold F. Brooks [London: Methuen, 1979], 5.1.44-46): “Theseus: [Reads.] ‘The battle with the Centaurs, to be sung / By an Athenian eunuch to the harp’? / We'll none of that”; and the other in Cymbeline (ed. J. M. Nosworthy [London: Methuen, 1955], 2.3.27-31): “Cloten: So get you gone: if this penetrate, I will consider your music the better: if it do not, it is a vice in her ears, which horse-hairs, and calves'-guts, nor the voice of unpaved eunuch to boot, can never amend.” Note, in this context, the probable pun on penetrate.

101. On the evirati singers, see in particular Angus Heriot, The Castrati in Opera (London: Secker and Warburg, 1956), and Patrick Barbier, Histoire des castrats (Paris: Éditions Grasset et Fasquelle, 1989); other relevant studies include E. Celani, I cantori della Cappella Pontificia nei secoli XVI-XVIII (Turin: Bocca, 1909); G. Monaldi, Cantanti evirati celebri del teatro italiano, secoli XVII-XVIII (Rome: Ausonia, 1920); Fedele D'Amico, “Evirato (o castrato)” in Enciclopedia dello spettacolo, 9 vols. (Rome: Casa Editrice Le Maschere, 1957), 4:1719-23; A. G. Bragaglia, Degli ‘evirati cantori’ (Florence: Sansoni, 1959); Rodolfo Celletti, “Sopranisti e contraltisti,” Musica d'Oggi 2 (1959): 245-50; A. Milner, “The sacred capons,” The Musical Times 14 (1973): 250; Thomas Walker, “Castrato” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Stanley Sadie, ed., 20 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1980), 3:875-76.

102. As Roger Warren and Stanley Wells observe in their recent Oxford edition of the play, “Viola chooses this disguise partly to account for her high-pitched voice” (Twelfth Night [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994], 1.2.53n).

103. Claude V. Palisca, “The first performance of ‘Euridice’” in Twenty-fifth Anniversary Festschrift (1937-1962), Albert Mell, ed. (New York: Queens College of the City University of New York, 1964), 1-24. On the first performance of the opera, see also Howard Mayer Brown's preface to his edition, Euridice: An Opera in One Act, Five Scenes (Madison, WI: A-R Editions, 1981), vii. On Peri and the castrati singers, see Barbier, 61; Walker, 875; and Angelo Sollerti, Le origini del melodramma (Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1903).

104. It may be merely historical coincidence that among the aristocratic auditors present at this performance was Orsino, Duke of Bracciano, who shortly thereafter set out for the court of Elizabeth I, and whose relationship to the Orsino of Twelfth Night has long been the subject of controversy; see Leslie Hotson, The First Night of Twelfth Night (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954), 47-49. Hotson's suggestion that Twelfth Night was performed on the occasion of Orsino's visit to Elizabeth has not been widely accepted.

105. Compare Sonnet 20, in which the poet blazons the fair youth as a woman—“And for a woman wert thou first created”—to whom Nature has added “one thing to my purpose nothing.” Stephen Booth glosses “thing” as “(2) generative organ” and “nothing” as “vulva” (Shakespeare's Sonnets [New Haven, CT, and London: Yale UP, 1977], 21 and 164). There may also be a pun on “Gilding/gelding” (l. 6). The poet, as it were, mentally “castrates” the youth, whose situation—as simultaneous object of the desiring male gaze and of female passion (“Which steales mens eyes and womens soules amazeth”)—recalls Viola's two-way “seduction.”

106. See Barbier, 125-44. The (continuing) sexual as well as musical fascination exercised by the evirati is attested to by Gerard Corbiau's recent film Farinelli (1995).