The Castrato's Castration

Author(s): Thomas A. King

Source: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 , Summer, 2006, Vol. 46, No. 3,
Restoration and Eighteenth Century (Summer, 2006), pp. 563-583
Published by: Rice University

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3844521

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 SEL 46,3 (Summer 2006): 563~583 563
ISSN 0039-3657

The Castrato's Castration

THOMAS A. KING

To write about castrati?the male-bodied sopranos and

contraltos who became, under aristocratic patronage, the first
international stars?is to write about the historical place of the
voice. To have heard the sound of castration?remembered now
as the cry of subjectivity?was to have inscribed the priv
subjection. "[IJn Florence they are so given to the musiq
voice," noted the early physiognomer John Bulwer in 165
there the Great ones keep their CastratU whose Voices sca
their breeches."1 Reading the antecedents of "they" and
consistently across the sequence of clauses, one might think
that the voice of the castrato caused a scandal in the breeches of
his patron, as if aural penetration could transfer, scandalously,
corporeal subjection from the castrated youth to his keeper. And
this (admittedly wrenched) reading may not be far from the mark.
Although modern historians continue to be tantalized by the dis?
covery of scandalized breeches in earlier periods, the sexual or
otherwise corporeal penetration of subordinate by superordinate
men seemed rather commonplace in mid-seventeenth-century
England. What had to be brought to light was the power of the
favorite over his sovereign, his monopoly on access. In 1667 and
1668, the naval bureaucrat and diarist Samuel Pepys recorded
hearing castrati at the Catholic Queen's Chapel at St. James's
Palace and in a rare, much anticipated appearance at the King's
Playhouse.2 Twenty years later, on 19 April 1687, Pepys could in-
vite his friend the virtuoso John Evelyn to a private performance,
in Pepys's own lodgings, by Giovanni Francesco Grossi (1653-97),
called "Cifacca" (or "Siface"):

Thomas A. King is associate professor of Restoration and Eighteenth-

Century Studies, Performance Studies, and Gender Studies at Brandeis
University and author of The Gendering of Men, 1600-1750. Volume One:
The English Phallus (2004).

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 564 The Castrato's Castration

you might thinke it worth

hither about 8 this evening
will bee most wellcome to
Your most humble Servant
SPepys3

Recalling the event, Evelyn recorded in his own diary that Siface
"touch'd the Harpsichord to his Voice rarely well, & this was be?
fore a select number of some particular persons whom Mr. Pepys
(Secretary of the Admiralty & a greate lover of Musick) invited to
his house, where the meeting was, & this obtained by peculiar
favour & much difficulty of the Singer, who much disdained to
shew his talent to any but Princes[.]"4 Indeed, the musical evening
at Pepys's house had been arranged by Mary, Lady Tuke, as "an
divertion for your self and your frinds [sic]," among which number
Lady Tuke included herself (although it would turn out that she
herself could not attend, due to the death of her father).5 Two de?
cades before the appearance ofa castrato (Nicolo Grimaldi, called
Nicolini) in a commercial opera house in London, Siface's voice
could give bodily presence to a cultural elite. Presenting a castrato,
Pepys performed his membership in the circle of cognoscenti that
included the higher-placed Evelyn; but Evelyn?ever conscious of
his superior standing despite his real friendship with Pepys?set
it down that a wealthy and influential bourgeois like Pepys had
been favored with this voice for a single, if significant, night.6 The
castrati marked the status of the patrons who possessed them;
Evelyn's entry reiterated his and Pepys's occupations of distinct
positions made material by the space of Italian singing.
Through such narrative?and performative?tactics, the cas?
trati have been entered into the history of national and class-based
struggles that we call "gender." Many scholars now explain the
castrati's popularity in terms ofthe perennial fascination of gender
ambiguity or, conversely, a recurrent anxiety about the feminiza?
tion of elite society and the nation.7 Here I will argue instead that
the castrati?international celebrities inciting national formula?
tions of gender and gendered formulations of nation?marked
one locus of struggle between the public representativeness and
visibility of the English courtly aristocracy and the emergent
publicness of those propertied, privatized men making up the
political nation of spectators. In John Locke's famous critique, the
father or prince imagined in Sir Robert Filmer's backward-looking
Patriarcha (1680) "hath an Absolute, Arbitrary, Unlimited, and
Unlimitable Power, over the Lives, Liberties, and Estates of his

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 Thomas A. King 565

Children and Subjects; s

tates, sell, castrate, or u
all his Slaves, and he Lor
unbounded Will their La
that "every Man has a P
has any Right to but him
placement to personhood
an increase in "gender a
but a residual virtuosity
generate the discourse of
Consider the famous st
ofthe castrati, Carlo Broschi, called Farinelli (1705-82), cured
Spain's King Philip V of melancholy?a story already well known
when musicologist Charles Burney retold it in his 1776 General
History of Music.10 Farinelli, who possessed a range of nearly
three octaves and was famous for his messa di voce?his skill
(in Patrick Barbier's explanation) in "starting a note pianissi
gradually inflating the sound to a climax, then reducing it
letting it die away"?had sung for the Opera of the Nobil
London from 1734 to 1737, earning as much as 1500 guineas
per season; with gifts from patrons his income could have been
?5000 a year.11 At the end ofthe 1737 London season, Farinelli
traveled to Madrid at the invitation of Elizabeth Farnese, whose
husband Philip, in Burney's account, had been "seized with a
total dejection of spirits, which made him refuse to be shaved,
and rendered him incapable of attending council or transact-
ing affairs of state" (History, 4:415). Post-Cartesian theory held
that music cured melancholia by its mechanical vibration of the
body machine; the particular efficacy of the castrato's voice was
its power to penetrate. A surprise performance in an adjoining
room ravished the king: "Philip appeared at first surprised, then
moved; and at the end of the second air, made the virtuoso enter
the royal apartment, loading him with compliments and caresses;
asked him how he could sufficiently reward such talents; assur-
ing him that he could refuse him nothing. Farinelli, previously
instructed, only begged that his Majesty would permit his at-
tendants to shave and dress him, and that he would endeavour
to appear in council as usual. From this time the King's disease
gave way to medicine; and the singer had all the honour of the
cure" (History, 4:415). Surprise, Burney tells us, aroused wonder,
the first of the Cartesian passions and foundation of the body's
motions, its appetites and aversions.12 But the castrato voice in
itself was hardly a surprise to the Spanish king, who had required

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566 The Castrato's Castration

Francesco Pistocchi to sing f

Holy Week in 1702, despite t
in church elsewhere.13 Harm
singing achieved an aural exc
king's and his eunuch's joint r
and patronage. Farinelli's cur
a homeopathic exchange betw
tempt, already merely anecdo
ment of authority through
Such a semiotics of favoritism
for an English opera poised b
publicity: the one defined by
other by an expanding press
Pursuing the historical record with impeccable precision,
Thomas McGeary has noted that "Farinelli's cure was far from
complete"; but it would be a mistake to reduce the rhetorical
efficacy of the anecdote accordingly.14 Burney's re-narration
highlights Philip's ability to determine the place of the castrato,
not for a single performance as Pepys had done, or even for a
season as in the commercial English opera, but, as Sacheverell
Sitwell has calculated, for an excessive "three thousand six hun?
dred" performances, singing (as the story has it) the same four
arias nightly in a command performance lasting ten years, unti
the monarch lightened the castrato's duties by requiring him
instead to supervise the Buen Retiro opera company in Madrid.
Nevertheless, Farinelli never sang in public.15 In Burney's words,
"his performance was thought too exquisite for subjects; it was
instantly appropriated to royalty" (History, 4:414-5). Sweet, ab?
solutist excess: Farinelli and Philip performed nightly a mimetic
repetition making material the circulation of social desire toward
the place of sovereign presence. The castrato's submission to
patronage was later rewarded by Philip's successor Ferdinand
VI with the Cross ofthe Order of Calatrava (1750); yet Farinelli's
maintenance of his position at court from 1737 to 1759, Burney
thought, was "extraordinary" (History, 4:416). In a parenthetical
comment elsewhere, Burney stated the problem more precisely:
it was surprising that Farinelli "continued so long to be the king's
chief favourite, a distinction odious to every people."16 For this
English writer, Farinelli's occupation of the place of royal favor,
his location proximate to sovereign power, could not remain a
monopoly without acquiring the odium of tyranny. The king's
body was meant to circulate openly among those competing for
his favors; such particularity of favoritism, by contrast, inverted

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 Thomas A. King 567

the king's public and p

mapping of opera, as i
ism?the indiscipline o
Philip V of Spain was the grandson of the Sun King Louis
XIV, whose performative embodiment, simultaneously, of self
and state was reiterated in his motto "L'Etat, cfest moi." But the
king's public body was being revised during Philip's reign. An
increasing inability of the courtly body to bear publicity would
be the visible sign?if not vehicle?of the aristocratic crisis of the
long eighteenth century, and Philip was not the only European
king who found himself unable to be Louis XIV. Since the turn of
the seventeenth century, melancholy had turned the loss of the
aristocracy's bodily legitimacy into its own embodied spectacle.17
Melancholic, the aristocrat used spectacle to reinstate distinc?
tion; conversely, aristocratic melancholy would be represented,
resistantly, as a symptom of debilitation and psychic lack. Con?
ventional characters remarked the courtier's, fop's, and fribble's
failure to separate self from spectacle, portraying the residually
mimetic body?that body deriving its identity from its imitation of
an increasingly anachronistic courtly publicity and its repetition
of an increasingly illegitimate desire to be placed by the courtly
gaze?as insipid, useless, and void of depth. In his Satirical View
of London at the Commencement ofthe Nineteenth Century (1801),
John Corry described the eighteenth-century aristocratic taste for
Italian opera as an effect of the "dangerous diseases invad[ing]
their repose:?remorse for time and treasure misspent; splenetic
vapours generated by luxury; and the imbecility of indolence,
requir[ing] the temporary anodyne of music."18 Aristocratic mel?
ancholy?the nostalgic aesthetic attributed by the courtly class to
their own loss of embodied utility?became melancholic madness,
marking the aristocrat as unfit to rule, haunted by the Gothic
ruin of legitimate succession.
The story goes that King Philip Vs melancholy manifested
in his sitting on a stool and pretending to be a clock.19 To figure
the body as a clock, properly or improperly wound?a favorite
conceit of the eighteenth century (think of Laurence Sterne's
Walter Shandy in Tristram Shandy)? was to employ mimesis to
discipline the irregularities ofthe mimetic body. Cartesian moral
philosophy had described the attentiveness defining selfhood as
an imitative effect to be achieved against the soul's characteristic
state of subjection to its passions, its receptiveness to wonder; to
recall Burney's words, "Philip appeared at first surprised, then
moved."20 Just as mimesis might remake the body as an object

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568 The Castrato's Castration

of knowledge and instrumen

its functional parts, so the c
izing the reason necessary t
cure of mimesis required th
and Philip had not existed, t
to invent them, locating otherness and absence at the place of
power itself. Enacting and becoming, himself, the representa?
tive of discipline and reason, Philip turned Cartesian moral
philosophy inside out, recuperating what Michel Foucault has
described as the normalized, specialized, and individuated body
of the Enlightenment bourgeoisie to the public distinctiveness
of his own personal body.22 If Farinelli's cure failed, it may have
been because the castrato provoked mimesis: "the King himself
imitates Farinelli some times air after air, and sometimes after the
musick is over," wrote the British minister to Madrid, Benjamin
Keene, "and throws himself into such Freaks and howlings, that
all possible means are taken to prevent people from being witness
to his Follies."23 And which do we choose to remember today as
the sound of castration?the Orphic miracle or the freaks and
howlings of the mimetic body?
The public sphere countered spectacle with "sense," a disci-
plining ofthe corporeal senses meant to contain their capacity to
alter the bodily frame. The actor-manager and memoirist Colley
Cibber argued in his 1740 Apology that "the sweet Pipe ofan Eu-
nuch" had no more "Enchantment" than "the well-govern'd Voice
ofan Actor" and characterized Italian opera as "an Apostasy from
Sense" and "an Idolatry of Sound."24 In his Life ofMr. Thomas Bet-
terton (1710), Charles Gildon caricatured opera as "perpetually
the same UNMEANING Motion," signaling that the penetrating
power of music should be contained by a more meaningful set of
motions, specifically the rational gestures characteristic of eigh?
teenth-century dramatic acting.25 The danger of music, and Italian
opera in particular, was that its effect on the individual listening
body could not so easily be rationaUzed; music was "but a sensual
Pleasure, and deriving no part from Reason, nor directing any
part to the Gratification ofthe rational Soul."26 Italian recitative
led inevitably to castrated or "empty musings": 'The Soul tir'd out
with a long Attention to that, in which it can find nothing affecting,
retires into it self to find some secret Emotion, by which it may be
touch'd; and the Mind, having in vain expected Impressions from
without, has Recourse to empty Musings, or grows dissatisfy'd
with it self for being so useless to its own Satisfaction."27 Gildon
figured the opera lover as narcissistic, lacking sociability, and,

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 Thomas A. King 569

like the castrati themse

excessive, masturbatory pleasure unable to realize increase or
profit ("useless to [his or her] own Satisfaction"). Like masturba-
tion, opera's pleasures dangerously unmanned the male body.
John Dennis argued in his "Essay on the Opera's [sic] after the
Italian Manner" (1706) that no opera could be written with enough
"Force" "as to inspire us with an Affection for the Publick": "es?
pecially in so masculine a Language as ours; for Force, in our
Language, cannot be express'd without a great many Consonants,
and Words that terminate in Consonants; but a great many Con?
sonants, and especially Consonants terminating Words, cannot
be pronounc'd without very frequently shutting the Mouth, which
is diametrically opposite to the expressing of Musick."28 English
manliness disclaims sounds produced by an open throat, but
the rage for Italian singing in England suggested propertied (and
famously taciturn) Englishmen?soon to be Mr. Spectators?with
their mouths uncharacteristically open.
It would be more accurate to see this anxious writing about
operatic pleasures not as a containment ofthe other (the feminine,
the foreign, the sodomitical) but as a policing ofthe proximate: the
problems of male enfranchisement and the powers of pleasure.
Criticizing the perversions of opera, the representatives of a new
political nation wrote into being their own pleasures of embodi-
ment. Dennis's attack on opera rejected (what I have called else?
where) an elite economy of residually pederastic desire, which had
tied pleasure and placement and linked male empowerment in
one sphere to sexual receptivity in another: "The Pleasure that ef?
feminate Musick gives," argued Dennis in "An Essay upon Publick
Spirit" (1711), "is a mere sensual Pleasure, which he who gives and
he who receives in a supreme degree, must be alike unmann'd."29
Invoking legal debates as to whether both participants in an act
of sodomy?"he who gives or he who receives"?were "alike" pun-
ishable (given the construction of capital sodomy as an abuse of
power, the receptive partner, generally the boy, was not generally
considered culpable), Dennis described the lover of Italian operas
as electing his own degradation (unmanning). The castrato's voice
would scandalize the patron's breeches. Effeminacy and public
spirit could never be joined because effeminacy was an inaptitude
for withstanding the imagination and the senses, a submission to
all that threatened the autonomy ofthe self and the externality of
alterity. "[A]n Englishman is deservedly scorn'd by Englishmen,"
urged Dennis, "when he descends so far beneath himself, as to
sing or dance in publick; because by doing so, he practises Arts

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570 The Castrato's Castration

which Nature has bestow'd

cal commentary published
that Farinelli would not ret
at Philip's command, made t
subjection particularly clea
the Ingagement he was und
England, and how Inconsola
for the Loss of their darlin
I will, thus I command], in
ad hominem, that will not
demonstrates, such satires
nelli to the attacks by Spanish privateers on British merchant
ships that had led to the War of Jenkins' Ear; the lamentations
ofthe beau monde for Farinelli, in these satires, signal its lack of
attention to merchant interests and point to the emergence of a
political nation, aligning commercial and traditional interests, in
opposition to courtly subjection.32 "[W]arbling Eunuchs," warned
Samuel Johnson in the famous lines from his Juvenalian satire
ofthe modes ofthe town (London, 1738), would "lull to Servitude
a thoughtless Age."33
Sodomy provided an obvious figure for this turning away from
English manly liberty. Jonathan Swift wrote in The Intelligencer
(1728), "An old Gentleman said to me, that many Years ago, when
the practice ofan unnatural vice grew so frequent in London, that
many were Prosecuted for it, he was sure it would be a Fore-runner
of Itcdian-Opera's, and Singers."34 So too Dennis argued that Italian
opera would drive a wedge between women's ostensibly innate,
and men's tenuously normalized, cross-sex desires: "The Ladies,
with humblest Submission, seem to mistake their Interest a little
in encouraging Opera's; for the more the Men are enervated and
emasculated by the Softness of the Italian Musick, the less will
they care for them, and the more for one another. There are some
certain Pleasures which are mortal Enemies to their Pleasures,
that [passed] the Alps about the same time with the Opera; and
if our Subscriptions go on, at the frantick rate that they have
done, I make no doubt but we shall come to see one Beau take
another for Better for Worse, as once an imperial harmonious
Blockhead did Sporus."35 Such cautionary tales of the origin o
the opera queen?and of same-gender marriage, imagined here
as a threat to women's "interest" in domesticity?depended on
the long-standing allegation that Italians had been responsible
for introducing sodomy to England, even before they had intro?
duced castrati, as well as the traditional association of idle and
absolutist aristocrats with sodomy.

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 Thomas A. King 571

But it would be a mistake to describe the response of male

audiences to castrati as "aural homosexuality," as Joke Dame
has done, for the legal and religious categories of sodomy, un?
like modern hetero- and homosexuality both, lacked personal or
political privacy, providing instead a public sign of an inverted
household.36 For this reason, the castrati represented in satirical
and hostile representations appear (to modern readers) to lack a
single sexuality, attracting?and producing?both effeminate men
and voracious women, figuring twin failures of the patriarchal
household. Elite women's erotic response to the castrati was given
paradigmatic expression in Charles Ancillon's demonstration of
the incivility and illegality of marriage to a eunuch. "Eunuchs, who
contract Marriage, are Cheats, and as such ought to be punish'd.
1. For in the first Place, it is certain, they are guilty of a notori-
ous act of Falshood [sic], for they put on the Appearance of Men,
when they are not so in Reality . . . 2. In the second Place, they
promise that which they cannot perform."37 As an imposter, the
castrato deprives his female lover of the end of marriage, which
is not simply procreation (the end of the patriarchal marriage)
but a procreative potential realized as pleasure and enabling the
companionship of husband and wife. As Ancillon insisted, "[a]
Woman that lyes by the Side of such a Man (if I may call him so)
would languish and pine away; in vain does she try to excite him
to render what's her Due; all her Efforts are vain and useless, she
never can succeed; So that having not tasted the Joys of Marriage,
nor having any Appearance She ever shall, she pines and afflicts
herself in Secret."38 Rather than arguing for a reinstatement of
patriarchal sex difference, which did not require cross-sex com?
panionship and domesticity for its efficient functioning, writers
such as Ancillon sought instead to make gender complementari-
ness, recognized in the "joys" of reproductive sex and the openness
between husband and wife, the standard ofthe English political
nation. Such representations reconstructed male and female
desires both such that what Dennis called "manly pleasures,"
"vigor," and "public spirit" in men would be naturalized not only
through men's reproductive (that is, testicular) but also their
sensible and domestic relations with women, just as the natural
class of women would be produced through their biological and
domestic labor on behalfof men's civic interests.39 Such resistant
rhetoric, consequently, cannot provide analytic tools for lay
bare the voice of the castrati as an appropriation of femininit
a feminization of the political nation.
Although Pepys would later arrange the private recital by
Siface noted above, when he had heard a castrato singer in th

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 572 The Castrato's Castration

Queen's Chapel twenty year

voices ofthe Eunuches I do not like like our women, nor am more
pleased with it at all then with English voices, but that they do
jump most excellently [gesture fittingly] with themselfs and their
instrument?which is wonderful pleasant; but I am convinced
more and more, that as every nation hath a perticular [sic] accent
and tone in discourse, so as the tone of one not to agree with or
piease the other, no more can the fashion of singing to words;
for that the better the words are set, the more they take in of the
ordinary tone ofthe country whose language the song speaks."40
Writing in 1667, Pepys had heard the castrato in terms both of
gender and nation, comparing "the ordinary tone" of England to
the alterity of an Italian performer in a Catholic cathedral and in
these terms refusing the neoclassic universal. As his wealth and
status increased, however, he would use the castrato to mark
the distinction of (his) place. The question of how the castrato
sounded, of what one would have heard, cannot be considered
independently of the question of what relations (spatial, polit
cal, economic, erotic) his voice could signify. Having remarke
the connection of castrati and courtly servitude, Johnson's Ju
venalian speaker Thale called attention to his own political (an
spatial) independence: "Mark whom the Great caress, who fro
on me!"41
The tendency of modern critics to hear an appropriated femi?
ninity within the male body of the castrati, like Pepys's initial
response, is a resistant reading?one based on our own assump?
tions about gender, privacy, and self-possession. Staging their
own resistances, some among the castrati's contemporary audi?
ences, by contrast, might have heard effeminacy, on the one hand,
and a penetrating, ravishing power on the other?the doubled,
pederastic economy of placement and mimetic agency. In his
Eunuchism Display'd, Ancillon described Pauluccio ("indeed the
Wonder of the World") as having a voice with "all the Warblings
and Turns of a Nightingal[e], but with only this difference, that it
was much finer, and did not a Man know the contrary, he would
believe it impossible such a Tone could proceed from the Throat
of any Thing that was human."42 The singing of Jeronimo was "so
soft, and ravishingly mellow, that nothing can better represent it
than the Flute-stops of some Organs." His was not an unnatural
voice, but a voice that might be heard in the natural world of a
(mimetic) imagination; Ancillon had "sometimes almost imagined"
the "soft Strains of Jeronimo" to "have been not unlike the gentle
Failings of Water I have somewhere in Italy often heard."43 Bur-

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 Thomas A. King 573

ney celebrated Farine

all Farinelli's excellen
singers, and astonished the public, as his messa di voce, or
swell; which, by the natural formation of his lungs, and artificial
oeconomy of breath, he was able to protract to such a length as
to excite incredulity even in those who heard him; who, though
unable to detect the artifice, imagined him to have had the la-
tent help of some instrument by which the tone was continued,
while he renewed his powers by respiration" (History, 4:380).
Neoplatonism, which had proposed a correspondence between
high ("treble") musical tones and the sound produced by the
movement of the outermost celestial sphere, may have informed
the assignment of higher vocal lines, in the opera, to characters
of high status.44 Just as Neoplatonic theories of pitch, interval,
and harmony continued to provide a metaphor for the necessity of
social degree and decorum, and accordingly a way of figuring the
embodiment of status, during the baroque period, the Italianate
opera stage offered the high, pure, and piercing voice of the boy
soprano or castrato as signifier of the divinity and heroic stature
of nobility.45 The social meaning of the castrato voice lay not in
its appropriation ofthe feminine but in its technologization ofthe
highest portion of the vocal range.
The procedure of castration produced not a woman's voice
but a hyperbolic boy singer whose training could continue
through puberty and the typically lost years when the boyish
voice "changed" and his desirableness ended. According to an
early eighteenth-century account by Charles De Brosses, 'Their
timbre is as clear and piercing as that of choirboys and much
more powerful; they appear to sing an octave above the natural
voice of women. Their voices have always something dry and
harsh, quite different from the youthful softness of women; but
they are brilliant, light, full of sparkle, very loud, and with a very
wide range."46 The penetrating power of the spectacle, neither
heterosexual nor homosexual but the power ofthe wanton boy to
ravish his lover through eyes and ears: the social drama of residual
pederasty provided terms and figures for aristocratic physiology
and aesthetics in the early modern period. One wants to experi?
ence the spectacle as passionately as did even Dennis: "There is
no Man living who is more convinc'd than my self of the Power
of Harmony, or more penetrated by the Charms of Musick."47 As
part of his Grand Tour, Evelyn had seen a castrato perform in
a public opera house in Venice in 1645, where he was "held . . .
by the Eyes and Eares til two in the morning"; and Burney said

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574 The Castrato's Castration

that Farinelli possessed "pow

must have subdued every h
castrati to boys and boy pr
been known as il ragazzo) s
become a displaced vehicle o
in popularity among elite a
period that the political nat
tronage and electoral syste
pederastic abuse in schools.
object of women's desire in
origin of the very republic
castrato celebrated?ideals transferred via the opera in London
from aristocratic to capitalist aesthetics?the political nation
disassociated itself from pederastic desire and power. The man
possessing the franchise should neither be the subject nor the
object of relations of dependence and submission.
Was not this looking through the spectacle of pederasty to see
an appropriated femininity the very strategy offered against it?
Note the 1770 anonymous "Essay upon the Unfortunate Charms
and Power of Music": "O! hapless England; thou who gavest laws
to the world, declareth this italick madness. Will not the soft trans-
porting voice of our beauteous countrywomen, captivate the soul,
without raking among the nerveless sons of Italy for eunuchs!
Shall all the advantages of a tour be centered in a catamite, a
fiddler, and a voice! Shall we, by travel, give up our reason, give
up the Hebes of this isle, for turpitude and Ganymedesl"50 To
malign the castrati as substitutes for women singers, to make
rivals of Ganymede and Hebe, is to naturalize the binary that the
eighteenth-century public sphere was then promulgating as the
grounds of its legitimacy.
To claim that the severing of a boy's vas deferens imposed a
loss of masculinity would be to locate the idealized equivalency,
or fraternity, ofthe liberal public sphere in individual male bodies
rather than in the political field located among adult, property-
owning males and interpellating them as embodied subjects of free
manhood. While patriarchy and patrilineal descent have undoubt?
edly continued to exist alongside the modern gender formation, it
is no longer the case that a mapping of social hierarchy depends on
the testicular potency of particularly placed, visible, and therefore
representative adult male bodies. If modern masculinity consists
in the substitution of normative for particularized male embodi-
ments, castration no longer is the (material) loss ofa man's place
at the head of a household or line of patrilineal descent but the

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 Thomas A. King 575

(symbolic) trade of th
duce privacy through gendered pleasures. Testicular potency,
in other words, is no longer particularized but normalized and
sentimentalized.51 Male sexuality, directed toward domesticity
rather than patrilineal duty, has as its aim no longer the getting
of an heir but the reproduction of the privatized and capitalist
family. The testicles and ejaculate became the biological ground
ofthe adult man's sociable feelings?not his particularity but his
generality?so much emphasized in the later eighteenth century.
Theater critic Thomas Wilkes wrote in 1759, "It is impossible for
an Actor to move his audience, unless he feels; and we know it is
out ofthe power of these wretches to feel, because they are made
incapable."52 Through its enactment of conjugal affection, the
white, property-owning, educated male body had come to signify
the public interest in privacy; thus, the later eighteenth century
made castration a more serious affront to the liberty of private men
than the enslavement of Africans. As a contributor calling himself
"Humanitas" wrote to the Saint James Chronicle in 1789, 'The
strongest reason why Italian operas should be entirely prohibit
is, that they encourage that scandalous mutilation ofa conside
able number of male infants; a practice infinitely more inhum
than our traffick in African slaves, which at present seems so
violently to wound our tender feelings."53 The castrati could not
be private men for another reason: their own dependence on the
spectacle of patronage. Qualifying these men for their public roles
as the looking glasses of sovereign authority and enabling their
proximity to the center ofthe visual field, castration disqualified
them for the private autonomy on which bourgeois masculinity
was founded. Burney was uncomfortable with the trade off and
defended Farinelli, sentimentally, as "designed by nature for fam?
ily attentions and domestic comforts."54
It was finally the castrati themselves, and not their fashionable
audiences, who were represented as melancholic. Thus Frances
Burney singled out Gaspar Pacchierotti as exceptional among the
castrati, writing to Hester Thrale, "he is not only the first, most
finished and most delightful of singers, but an amiable, ratio?
nal, and intelligent creature, who has given to himself a literary
education, and who has a mind superior to his own profession,
which he never names but with regret, in spite ofthe excellence to
which he has risen, but he has also, I will venture to say, talents
and an understanding which would have fitted him for almost
any other, had they, instead of being crushed under every pos?
sible disadvantage, been encouraged and improved."55 Frances

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576 The Castrato's Castration

Burney revised Pacchierotti

potential, a projection of m
have learned from her mus
had written of his interview
some desire to write his lif
in my history?ah, says he,
if you have a mind to comp
counts of such despicable b
This displacement of melan
represented?and mimetically cured?onto the castrato himself
was crystallized in Honore de Balzac's story Sarrasine (1830), in
a portrait linking the fictive castrato Zambinella's exaggerated ef?
feminacy?a spectacular form of male court dress that for Balzac
could only be read as an appropriation of "feminine coquetry"?to
the melancholy, decay, and death-in-life of the ancien regime.57
Balzac's text required a castrato whose body was consumptive,
a mimetic body punishing itself for its own moral decrepitude.
Zambinella's voice is "worn out," his speech and gestures are frib-
blish, his eyes are "dull," and his ears fail him.58 Marking the final
displacement of authority from the courtly erotics of pederasty
to the hetero-erotics of the political nation, under the banner of
sensibility, it was now the castrato who was in need ofa cure. This
has remained the dominant attitude in modern discussions ofthe
castrati. Angus Heriot emphasized the loneliness and unhapp
of castrati, who, "mutilated in the name of art," had sacrificed
not only adult reproductive sexuality but also their youth to the
rigors and isolation of training; and Patrick Barbier has followed
suit. Daniel Heartz has noted that Farinelli's "melancholy was
perhaps not totally overcome by the sure knowledge that he was,
in all the annals of the soprano castrato, the most brilliant."59
In his 1994 film Farinelli, Gerard Corbiau located the singer's
melancholy in his inability to satisfy his own erotic longings and
those he aroused in his female audiences, feminine longings that
only his virile, and autonomous, brother could satisfy.60
The displacement of melancholy onto a spectacular, sexually
suspect, and vaguely aristocratic male body has helped mystify
those struggles against subjection through which private men
articulated, contested, and sought access to the category of
manliness, eventually naturalizing private masculinity as outside
history. Suspense narratives from Gothic novels to Oscar Wilde's
The Picture ofDorian Gray (1890) to the recent American films
American Beauty (1999) and Mystic River (2003) have turned on
the disclosure of a melancholic and incapacitated queerness.61

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 Thomas A. King 577

The melancholy of th
condition of the discu
the liberal public sphe
these altering articulat
gemony ofthe private
the fundamental quee
poration of the specta
the place of the deferr
have argued, has been gendered. The castrato's castration?his
emergence from the pleasures of the ear into the discursive eye
of history?staged the potency of private bodies.

NOTES

1 John Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transform'd: Or, the A

ciall Changling, rev. edn. (London: William Hunt, 1653), p. 355.
2 Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and
William Matthews, 10 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California
Press, 1983), 8:154 (7 April 1667), 9:326-7, 329 (12/14 October 1668). A
French castrato reportedly served in England in the Spencer family from
the 1590s (John Rosselli, 'The Castrati as a Professional Group and a So?
cial Phenomenon, 1550-1850," Acta Musicologia 60, 2 [May-August 1988]:
142-79, 147nl6).
3 Samuel Pepys to John Evelyn, [19] April 1687, in Particular Friends: Th
Correspondence of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, ed. Guy de la Bedoyere
(Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 1997), p. 176; hereafter "de la Bedoyere." For
Giovanni Francesco (Siface), see Angus Heriot, The Castrati in Opera (London
Secker and Warburg, 1956), pp. 129-35.
4 John Evelyn, Kalendarium, 1673-1689, vol. 4 of The Diary ofJohn
Evelyn, ed. E. S. De Beer, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), p. 547
(19 April 1687).
5 Mary, Lady Tuke to Pepys, 2 March 1687, in de la Bedoyere, p.
176n4.

6 For the friendship of Pepys and Evelyn, see "Introduction," in d

Bedoyere, pp. 7-11.
7 Heriot considered the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century preju
"against the sound ofthe tenor and bass voices, which were accused of
intolerably rough and coarse," to be an index of an increasingly femin
society (p. 32). 'Their gender hovered in suspense," wrote Joseph R. Ro
in a dazzling and highly influential article, "transcended by the aston
power and silvery sweetness of their voices" ("Power's Body: The Inscr
of Morality as Style," in Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the
riography of Performance, ed. Thomas Postlewait and Bruce A. McCon
[Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press, 1989], pp. 99-118, 103). Beth Kowaleski-
Wallace has noted in an otherwise persuasive analysis that the castrati "put
gender categories into play," while for Todd S. Gilman "the castrato's exces?
sive, uncontainable gender exposed the contingent nature of gender and

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 578 The Castrato's Castration

sexuality" (Kowaleski-Wallace, "Shunning the Bearded Kiss: Castrati and

the Definition of Female Sexuality," PSt 15, 2 [August 1992]: 153-70, 154,
see also 161; and Gilman, "The Italian [Castrato] in London," in The Work
of Opera: Genre, Nationhood, and Sexual Difference, ed. Richard Dellamora
and Daniel Fischlin [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1997], pp. 49-70, 58).
For other provocative accounts based on similar assumptions, see Valeria
Finucci, The Manly Masquerade: Masculinity, Paternity, and Castration in
the Italian Renaissance (Durham NC and London: Duke Univ. Press, 2003),
p. 230; and Jill Campbell, "'When Men Women Turn': Gender Reversals in
Fielding's Plays," in The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English
Literature, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York and London:
Methuen, 1987), pp. 62-83, 68. While he refutes such claims ofthe gender
or sexual ambiguity of the castrati, Sam Abel nevertheless associates the
castrati with "monstrous transgressiveness" {Opera in the Flesh: Sexuality in
OperaticPer/orrnance [Boulder CO: Westview-HarperCollins, 1996], pp. 136-7,
131). If, as Patrick Barbier has suggested, young castrati debuted in female
roles as "a kind of transition period before the big heroic roles to which they
were destined," crossdressing by castrati, as with the earlier boy actors in
England, may have foregrounded more the appeal of youth and boyishness
than the culture's ambivalence about adult, complementary genders. See
Barbier, The World ofthe Castrati: The History of an Extraordinary Operatic
Phenomenon, trans. Margaret Crosland (London: Souvenir, 1996), pp. 87-8.
Nevertheless, Barbier has also emphasized the "sexual ambiguity" of the
castrati (pp. 17, 88, and 92).
8 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett, 2d edn.
(London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 166 and 305. For the "[p]aternal
power" to castrate sons, see Finucci, p. 254.
9 Other scholars have read the hostile and satirical representations of
castrati in relation to the emergence of a masculinist and rational English
nationalism; but, by assuming the transhistoricalness of gendered polarities,
they have missed the alternative histories those very terms occlude. See, for
example, Gilman, pp. 49 and 58-60; Thomas McGeary, "Opera, Satire, and
Politics in the Walpole Era," in The Past as Prologue: Essays to Celebrate the
Twenty-FifthAnniversary ofASECS, ed. Carla H. Hay with Syndy M. Conger,
AMS Studies in the Eighteenth Century 28 (New York: AMS Press, 1995),
pp. 347-71; McGeary, "'Warbling Eunuchs': Opera, Gender, and Sexuality on
the London Stage, 1705-1742," Restoration and Eighteenth Century Theatre
Research 2d ser. 7, 1 (Summer 1992): 1-22; and Gary C. Thomas, "'Was
George Frideric Handel Gay?': On Closet Questions and Cultural Politics,"
in Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, ed. Philip Brett,
Elizabeth Wood, and Thomas (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), pp.
155-203, 186.
10 Charles Burney cited the London Daily Post for 26 September [ 1737?]
"Advices from Madrid inform us, that his Catholic Majesty has settled a pen
sion of 14,000 pieces of eight on Signor Farinelli, to engage him to stay at th
court, besides a coach, which the king will keep for him at his own charge
(A General History of Music, From the Earliest Ages to the Present Period. T
Which is Prefbced, A Dissertation on the Music ofthe Ancients, 4 vols. [1776
rprt. London, 1789], 4:414). Subsequent references to this text, hereafter His
tory, will be cited parenthetically in the text by volume and page number.

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 Thomas A. King 579

11 Barbier, p. 95. See Her

of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie
lan; New York: Grove's Dictionaries of Music, 1994), 1:767, s.v. "castrato";
and Barbier, pp. 93-9. McGeary has most thoroughly documented Farinelli's
career in London and Madrid, discussing the historical record of Farinelli's
alleged cure of Philip V ("Farinelli in Madrid: Opera, Politics, and the War of
Jenkins' Ear," The Musical Quarterly 82, 2 [Summer 1998]: 383-421).
12 See Thomas A. King, 'The Eye's Castration, the Subject's Plentitude,"
in The Gendering ofMen, 1600-1750, vol. 1, The English Phallus (Madison:
Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2004), pp. 132-66.
13 John Rosselli, Singers of Italian Opera: The History of a Profession
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), p. 43.
14 McGeary, "Farinelli in Madrid," p. 388.
15 Sacheverell Sitwell, Southern Baroque Art: A Study of Painting, Ar?
chitecture and Music in Italy and Spain of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth
Centuries (London: Grant Richards, 1924), p. 213. The patent appointing
Farinelli musico de camara (chamber musician) specified that he not sing
in public (McGeary, "Farinelli in Madrid," p. 390). Barbier (among others)
doubts that the virtuoso Farinelli would have limited himself to singing the
same four arias (p. 204). For Farinelli's management of the Buen Retiro
opera, see Barbier, p. 205.
16 Charles Burney, The Present State of Music in France and Italy: Or, The
Journal ofa Tour through Those Countries, Undertaken to Collect Materials for
A General History of Music, 2d edn., corrected (London: T. Becket, J. Robson,
and G. Robinson, 1773), rprt. in An Eighteenth-Century Musical Tour in France
and Italy, Being Dr. Charles Burney's Account ofHis Musical Experiences as
It Appears in His Published Volume with Which Are Incorporated His Travel
Experiences according to His Original Intention, vol. 1 of Dr. Burney's Musical
Tours in Europe, ed. Percy A. Scholes, 2 vols. (London, New York, and Toronto:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1959), p. 155.
17 See Roy Strong's analysis of Anthony Van Dyck's portrait Charles I on
Horseback, which shows the king as fashionably melancholic, in Van Dyck:
Charles I on Horseback, Art in Context (New York: Viking Press, 1972), p.
96.

18 John Corry, Satirical View of London at the Commencement ofthe

Nineteenth Century (1801), quoted in Frederick C. Petty, Italian Opera in
London 1760-1800, Studies in Musicology 16 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research
Press, 1980), p. 33.
19 Sitwell, p. 204.
20 Rene Descartes, The Passions ofthe Soul (1649), trans. Stephen H. Voss,
HPC Classics Series (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1989), articles
7-16, 50, 53, 75, 144, and 152. For a discussion, see King, pp. 150-2.
21 Allan Ingram, Boswell's Creative Gloorru A Study of Imagery and Melan?
choly in the Writings of James Boswell (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1982), p. 33.
22 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth ofthe Prison, trans.
Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), pp. 182-4, 191-4, 210, and 223.
23 Benjamin Keene to the Duke of Newcastle, Segovia, 2 August 1738,
quoted in McGeary, "Farinelli in Madrid," p. 410.

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 580 The Castrato's Castration

24 Colley Cibber, An Apologyfo

torical View ofthe Stage during
S. Fone (Ann Arbor: Univ. of M
25 [Charles Gildon], The Life o
Tragedian. . . With theJudgeme
Italian and French Music and Op
(London: R. Gosling, 1710), p. 14
26 Gildon, p. 157.
27 Gildon, p. 161.
28 John Dennis, "An Essay on
which Are about to Be Establish
tions on the Damage which The
Works ofJohn Dennis, ed. Edwa
Hopkins Univ. Press, 1939-43), 1:382-93, 389.
29Dennis, "An Essay upon Publick Spirit," in Hooker, ed., 2:394. For
residual pederasty, see King, pp. 20-63.
30 Dennis, "Essay on the Opera's," 1:391.
31 "To the Author of Common Sense," Common Sense 10 September 1737;
quoted in McGeary, "Farinelli in Madrid," p. 397.
32 McGeary, "Farinelli in Madrid," pp. 394-409; see also McGeary, "Opera,
Satire, and Politics," p. 366.
33 Samuel Johnson, "London: A Poem in Imitation of the Third Satire of
Juvenal" (1738), in The Poems of SamuelJohnson, ed. David Nichol Smith
and Edward L. McAdam, 2d edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 67-81,
71, lines 59-60.
34 Jonathan Swift and Thomas Sheridan, The Intelligencer, ed. James
Woolley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 65.
35 Dennis, "Publick Spirit," 2:396.
36 Joke Dame, "Unveiled Voices: Sexual Difference and the Castrato," in
Brettetal., pp. 139-53, 147.
37 [Charles Ancillon], Eunuchism Display'd. Describing All the Different
Sorts of EUNUCHS: The Esteem They Have Met with in the World, and How
They Came to Be Made So (London: E. Curll, 1718), pp. 148-9.
38 Ancillon, pp. 166-7.
39 In the most important analysis of women's desire for and identification
with the castrati, Kowaleski-Wallace argues, "the imagined sexual liaison of
the castrato and the woman introduces the possibility of a non-phallic, fe?
male sexual pleasure which is not linked to reproduction" (p. 158). See also
Finucci, p. 278; Gilman, pp. 54-7; McGeary, "Opera, Satire, and Politics," pp.
361-3; and McGeary, "'Warbling Eunuchs,'" p. 14. For another eighteenth-
century treatise arguing that women despised eunuchs because they lacked
fully functioning genitalia, see John Marten, A Treatise ofAll the Degrees and
Symptoms ofthe Venereal Disease (1708), in Secret Sexualities: A Sourcebook
of Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Writing, ed. Ian McCormick (London
and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 15-8, 15.
40 Pepys, 8:154 (7 April 1667).
41 Johnson, p. 73, line 92.
42 Ancillon, pp. 30-1.
43 Ancillon, p. 31.

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 Thomas A. King 581

44 In his poem 'The Invocation," Francis Quarles exhorted his soul to

tune itself

foure notes higher,

And higher yet; that so the shrill-mouth'd Quire
Of swift-wing'd Seraphims may come and joyne,
And make thy Consort more than halfe divine."
('The Invocation," in Emblemes [London, 1625],
quoted in Gretchen Ludke Finney, Musical
Backgrounds for English Literature: 1580-1650
[New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, n.d. [1962], p. 11)

For additional philosophical and literary examples of the Neoplatonic align-

ment of the high tones produced by the treble string (the highest in value)
and the movement of the outer celestial sphere, spanning fourth-century
commentary on Cicero through John Donne to Thomas Tryon's Pythagoras,
His Mystick Philosophy Reviv'd (1691), see Finney, pp. 2-3, 7-8, and 12;
John Hollander, The Untuning ofthe Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry,
1500-1700 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 29-30. For musical
harmony as an emblem of the orderly maintenance of social statuses, see
Finney, pp. 29-30. Although Pythagorean and Neoplatonic theories of musi?
cal order and the correspondence of human and celestial harmony had been
refuted through empirical investigation of the production and perception of
sound, notably in England by Francis Bacon's Sylva Sylvarum (published
posthumously in 1627), and Cartesian mechanism, represented in England
by Lord Brouncker's 1653 translation of Descartes's Musicae compendium
(written 1618, first published posthumously in Utrecht, 1650; trans. Lord
Brouncker as Renatus DesCartes Excellent Compendium of Musicke [Lon?
don, 1653]), Neoplatonic and Pythagorean thought nevertheless continued
to inform the kinds of questions that English empiricists and philosophers
asked of sound into the eighteenth century (Finney, pp. 17-8; Enrico Fubini,
The History of Music Aesthetics, trans. Michael Hatwell [London: Macmillan,
1990], pp. 159-200). For an example, see Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum:
Or, A Natural History, in The Works of Francis Bacon, Baron ofVerulam, Vis-
count St. Alban, and Lord High Chancellor of England, ed. James Spedding,
Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, 14 vols. (London: Longman,
1857-74), 2:331-680, article 114, 2:389-90. In the early seventeenth cen?
tury, Bacon, in experimental investigations of the magnitude, volume, and
spatial projection of sounds produced by various objects (paralleling the
Pythagorean discovery of the proportionate relation between the length of a
vibrating string and the pitch ofthe sound it produces, or, in modern terms,
the dependence of pitch on the frequency of vibrations ofa sounding body),
noted that treble strings, while striking "less air" do so "with a sharper per-
cussion" and therefore "will be heard much further off than bass sounds,
thus providing a physical explanation ofthe ability ofthe small, shrill sound
to penetrate at a distance (article 163, p. 403; see also article 173, p. 406;
and articles 178-80, pp. 407-8).
45Yvonne Noble has made a similar point in "Castrati, Balzac, and
BartheS/Z," CompD31, 1 (Spring 1997): 28-47, 35-6. Although Roger Covell
has documented the most frequent assignment of the soprano or contralto

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 582 The Castrato's Castration

range to heroic lovers, he has off

of heroic lovers should be repre
to the composer. While at one p
naturalistic association of youth
since this argument would requi
whose voice had not yet deepene
est status figures onstage), his s
figures experiencing "reciprocat
vocal registers available" confuse
("Voice Register as an Index of A
Vivaldi, ed. Michael Collins and Elise K. Kirk [Austin: Univ. of Texas Press,
1984], pp. 193-210, 203 and especially pp. 194-5 and 202).
46 Charles de Brosses, Lettres familieres sur I'ltalie (1931), quoted in
Heriot, p. 14.
47 Dennis, "Essay on the Opera's," 1:385.
48 John Evelyn, quoted in Eric Walter White, History of English Opera
(London: Faber and Faber, 1986), p. 51; Charles Burney, Present State, p.
154.
49 See King, pp. 107-12.
50 "An Essay upon the Unfortunate Charms and Power of Music" (1770),
quoted in Petty, pp. 3-4. According to Petty's note, this essay is signed "An?
drew Marvel" and dated "Elysium, Nov. 7, 1769."
51 Where medical discourse before the seventeenth century pointed to
the yard, stones, and seed as three among many signs of adult male status,
none necessarily definitive, between 1650 and 1750, as Raymond Stephan?
son has recently shown, the invention of microscopes and discovery of the
"homunculus" encouraged anatomists to locate male identity as inherent in
male seed. This new attention to the link between men's consciousness and
their production of sperm located puberty, and the onset of the capac
produce and emit semen, as the threshold of masculinity ("Aspects of
Brain/Male Genitalia Correspondences ca. 1650-1750, with Remarks on
Sterne," paper given at Body Projects I: Incarnations, Inscriptions, Adhe-
sions, Invasions, University of Saskatchewan, Canada, 18 September 1997.
See also Finucci, pp. 260-71).
52 Thomas Wilkes, General View ofthe Stage (1759), pp. 67-8, quoted
in Petty, p. 81.
53"Humanitas," Saint James Chronicle (1789), quoted in Petty, p. 81.
54 Charles Burney, Present State, p. 156.
55 Frances Burney to Hester Thrale, quoted in Kowaleski-Wallace, p.
162.
56 Charles Burney, Music, Men, and Manners in France and Italy, 1770,
ed. Herbert Edmund Poole (London: Folio Society, 1969), p. 93.
57 Honore de Balzac, Sarrasine, in Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard
Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), pp. 221-54, 230. See generally pp.
229-31, 233, and 246-8. See also Noble, p. 34. For a stunning account ofthe
melancholy of (modern) heterosexuality, unable to mourn the loss of being
resulting from the very splitting across the poles of sexual difference that
brings it into existence, see Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive
Limits of"Sex" (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 233-6.

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 Thomas A. King 583

58Balzac, pp. 227-31.

59 Heriot, pp. 21 and 45; Barbier, p. 15; Daniel Heartz, "Farinelli and
Metastasio: Rival Twins in Public Favour," Early Music 12, 3 (August 1984):
358-66, 364.
60 Farinelli, II Castrato, directed by Gerard Corbiau (1994; Sony Pict
Classic, 1994). For a critique of this film's psychologization of history,
Katherine Bergeron, 'The Castrato as History," Cambridge Opera Journa
(July 1996): 167-84. Abel (drawing on Anne Rice's novelistic treatment i
to Heaven [New York: Ballantine Books, 1982]) likewise presents the cast
as melancholic (p. 131), as does Peter W. Vogelaar in "Castrati in Western
Art Music, Part 2: Selection and Musical Training: Physical and Psychosocial
Implications," Medical Problems of Performing Artists 13, 4 (December 1988):
146-54, 152-3.
61 American Beauty, directed by Sam Mendes (1999; DreamWorks SK
Jinks/Cohen Company, 1999); Mystic River, directed by Clint Eastwood
(2003; Malpaso Productions Village Roadshow Pictures Warner Bros. Pic?
tures, 2003).

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