The Castrator's Song: Female Impersonation on the Early Modern Stage,

by Dympna Callaghan. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, vol. 26, no. 2 (1996), pp. 321 - 353.

[The following is an excerpt from a fascinating article on female impersonation on the English stage, primarily in the Shakespearean age. During the course of analysis, various aspects of gender definition are discussed, including castration and the role of castrati. The entire article is highly recommended for anyone interested in the place of gender ambiguity in the theater, although it is written in "Academic," a language foreign to most normal folk. ---JA]

The operation

Barber-surgeon shops in early modern England, where fairly minor surgical procedures were usually undertaken alongside haircutting and beard trimming, were places of men's entertainment, offering music, drinks, gaming, and tobacco. Not only were these shops themselves places of diversion, but there was, in addition, a preponderance of all forms of surgical practice around places of vice and resort, such as theatres and brothels. This was the result of rampant venereal disease in the metropolis and accounts for a conceptual as well as a geographical proximity between the theatre and the surgical procedure of castration.

Syphilis reached epidemic proportions during the seventeen century, and there developed also a "new" disease, morbus Gallicus, or the French pox. In advanced cases of venereal disease, castration was often the only remedy. The actual removal of the penis (as opposed to the testicles) was not an uncommon last recourse, as instanced by this account from later in the period: "I knew a little old Man, whose Yard was cut off, for the Lues Venera by the ordinary Chryrugion."

The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries accordingly witnessed a rapid advance in medical technology. In "A note of particular ingredients for a Surgeons Chest," John Woodall, in The Surgeons Mate or Military and Domestic Surgery (1639), lists an array of sharp objects, including rather cumbersome saws for hewing off limbs, an assortment of knives, and that most delicate instrument of excoriation, the "dismembering nippers." The surgical performance of Renaissance refashioning quite literally entailed cutting (an art refined since the medieval era) with precision tools increasingly capable of careful incisions. Thomas Brugis's Vade mecum: or a Companion for a Chirugion Fitted for Sea, or land; Peace or War (1640), which reached seven editions by 1681, provides a comprehensive inventory of his instruments. For instance, the incision knife:

The use of this Instrument is to cut the Skin or Flesh upon needful occasions ... Let this Instrument be alwayes kept clean and bright, by being rubbed dry, after it hath been used, and sharp as any Razor. Let the Artist ever hide it from the Patient's sight with a Cloth, and also all other sharp Instruments, for divers Reasons.

The surgeon as "Artist" conveys a sense of pride and relish in the whetted tools of his trade. The necessity of their concealment betrays the understandably acute anxiety of patients about to be cut without benefit of anaesthetic.

That excision was a principal operation of surgical practice is perhaps evidenced by Woodall's remark, "If the Surgeons Mate cannot trimme men, then by due consequence there is to be a barber to the ships company." The cleaving, sawing, dissecting, severing, and slicing of animate human anatomy was performed not by those given the theoretical training in medical arts, the physicians, but by a new class of barber-surgeons, some of whom, like Ambroise Paré, the most famous surgeon in Europe, gained tremendous reputations for their treatments. Even Paré had humble beginnings in the quasi-butchery of barber-surgery before going on to become court surgeon to four French monarchs. Surgeons, like Paré, often garnered their experience on the battlefield, where their services were more in demand than ever as a consequence of the development of gunpowder. War, like syphilis, brought these members of the medical profession into direct contact predominantly with the male body.

Among its several objects of inquiry and excision, surgery took a fresh look at the organs of male vulnerability. Thomas Gale's translation of Vigo, for example, describes the penis (yard) as follows:

The yarde is a member verie full of sinnowie lacertes, with manie ligaments, veines, and arteries. It is hollowe, and that hollowness is full of ventositie or winde, engendered in the pulling veines, by which ventositie the elevation of the same commeth. This elevation proceedeth chiefelie of the arteries which come from the heart, for the heart giveth voluntarie motion to the sayd arteries. The ligamentes of the yarde proceede from the bonens of the thighes. And the sinnowes grow from the nether part of the Nuke, and by reason of those sinnowes the saide yarde is of great feeling.

Among the new articulations about male genitals, a discourse emerges that is curiously tantamount to a testicular aesthetic. Helkiah Crooke's A Description of the Body of Man (1615), an anatomical rather than a surgical text, describes the testicles as "like to a leather sachell." The testes "hang out under the belly at the rootes of the yarde, partly to abate lustful desires ... And because it was neither profitable nor handsome that they should hang bare; for the receiving and clothing of them, the scrotum or Cod was made as a purse or bagge." The divine plan for anatomy seems to have given way to certain aesthetic considerations in the fashioning of "handsome" testicles. Aesthetic concerns also motivate a moral objection to circumcision; "Circumcision, a strange and smart invention of man, is a very ancient device practised to the diminution of the naturall comelines of this part."

While surgery becomes a discourse about the fashioning of masculinity, there is an attendant trepidation about it as the scientific instrument of castration, which becomes explicit not in a surgical textbook but in John Bulwer's Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transformed (1650). Bulwer's treatise, a compilation of earlier sources, fulminates against human vanity, especially as manifested in bodily adornment and self-mutilation, and betrays its author's salacious pleasure in the catalog of behaviors he ostensibly condemns. Inveighing against the evils of castration, Bulwer concedes, "And verily a dispensation may be granted in case of these inexorable, and otherwise incurable diseases," but hastily adds:

But upon any other pretence whatsoever, to adultureate the coin and image of Nature by so grosse an allay as makes them not current for men, or willing to degenerate into the nature of women, suffering themselves to be transformed from the Masculine to the feminine appearance (a false copy) is to offer as great an Injury to nature as the malice of mans refractory wit can be guilty of: And it is so manifestly against the Law of Nature to tamper with the witnesses of mans virility that our Laws have made it Felony to geld any man against his will.

Bulwer's tone implies that "the witnesses of mans virility" are in some immediate danger. Once the testicles are cut away, the patient does not become a woman, but rather grows to embody a patently fake simulation of femininity: "a false copy." The implication is that there are men who (astonishingly) pose something of a social threat by willingly submitting themselves to castration, and, significantly, by opting out of reproduction. This would surely require a commitment to the rearrangement of conventional sexual identities and gender relations far in excess of any merely careless degeneration into effeminacy consequent upon a failure in vigilance about one's manhood. A marginal note to the text describes precisely the vulnerability to which physiological masculinity may succumb:

Two waies there are of this unnatural dilapidation of the body, one is performed by contusion, the other by excision, the last being more approved of; for they who have suffered the contusion of their Testicles, may now and then affect to play the man.

In the case of contusion (that is, where the testicles have been crushed by means of a heavy blow, without breaking the skin), the faint residue of virility produces natural resistance to unmanliness, and suggests the amorous possibilities that remained for some eunuchs in the simulation of a definitively masculine behavior. Bulwer's castration anxiety, however, may be traced not only to barbarous Continental practices, but also to the necessity to which his first sentence alludes, to the legitimate castration of surgical procedures.

For the symbolic threat of castration took on more literal dimensions as surgical operations with high risk of morbidity and mortality became routine. More people came under the surgeon's knife in the early modern period than ever before, and in particular, drastic measures were frequently administered to nonvenereal "griefs of the yard." Renowned surgeon Richard Wiseman advises:

In some of those who have the Prepuce very short, the fraenum is also so strait, that upon erection of the Penis, the Glans is pulled downwards so they cannot endure coition. The remedy is by cutting the fraenum in pieces. If you suspect that the divided end may be troublesome, clip them off at the same time.

However, it was not only a direct surgical assault upon the penis that might make a man fear for his virility. A number of other conditions also entailed a fearful proximity with the male organs of generation:

Seeing that wee cannot otherwise help such men as have stones in their bladders, wee must com to the extreme remedie, to wit, cutting. ... The patient shall bee placed upon a firm table or bench with a cloth manie times doubled under his buttocks, and a pillow under his loins and back, so that hee may lie half upright with his thighs lifted up, and his legs and heels drawn back to his buttocks. Then shall his feet bee bound with a ligature of three fingers breadth cast about his ankles, ...[and] both his hands shall be bound to his knees.

The patient thus bound, it is fit you have four strong men at hand; that is, two to hold his arms, and other two who may so firmly and straightly hold the knee with one hand, and the foot with the other, that hee may neither move his lims, not stir his buttocks, but bee forced to keep in the same posture with his whole bodie. Then the Surgeon shall thrust into the urinarie passage even to the bladder, a silver or iron and hollow probe, anointed with oil, and opened or slit on the outside, that the point of the knife may enter thereinto, and that it may guide the hand of the workman. ...He shall gently wrest the probe, beeing thrust in, towards the left side, and also hee who standeth on the patient's right hand, shall with his left hand gently lift up his cods.

The illustration accompanying this passage [Figure 1] is an astonishing revelation of masculine vulnerability in that the man occupies a position, which we, in the twentieth century, have come to associate primarily with gynecological procedures. Thomas Laqueur remarks that in the nineteenth century, "There are no pictures ... in which instead of men, scalpel in hand, seen poised over the body of a woman, men (or more inconceivably yet, women) surgeons are preparing to castrate a man." In early modern England almost the reverse is true. English-authored surgical texts are silent on the subject of female castration. The German, Johnannes Scultetus, lists "pincers to cut off the clitoris both streight and bent" in his inventory of surgical implements, though he provides no record of the operation itself. Bulwer, however, whose encyclopedic compilation of all manner of what he regards as human depravity, finds space to condemn female eunuchism discovered in foreign parts, though it is difficult to discern exactly what this entails:

The extravagant invention of man hath run out so far as the Castration of women; Andramistes the king of Lydia, as the report goes, was the first that made women Eunuches, whom he used instead of Male Eunuches, after whose example the women of Egypt were sometimes spaded.

Bulwer's meaning, in this instance, is something of a puzzle. Since the inference is that Andramistes' predilection is for anal copulation, it is possible that eunuchism here refers to ovariotomy, or hysterectomy, rather than clitoral and labial excision. Our author is more specific about an alleged English instance of female sexual mutilation, which clearly entails the removal of the womb and ovaries rather than the clitoris. He informs us that unlike spaying a sow, drawing out the womb in a woman, or castrating "by avulsion of their testicles," leads to grave endangerment of the woman's life:

For he must necessarily cut both the Flankes who would Castrate a woman, a work full of desperate hazard; yet it may be done with little or no danger, if it be attempted in an Artfull hand. And a Friend of mine told me he knew a maid in Northampton-shire that was spaded by a Sow-gelder, and escaping the danger grew thereupon very fat.

In this apocryphal tale (completely unsubstantiated by criminal and gynecological evidence from the period), the same man allegedly repeated the practice in Lincolnshire on one Margaret Brigstock: "But the Judges were much confounded how to give Sentence upon an Act against which they had no Law; for although the Castration of men was Felony by the Law, yet there was nothing enacted against spading of women." As a result, the perpetrator, one "Clearke," was hanged, not for castrating his victim but for stealing "two penniworth' of Apples from her apron.""

On balance, the evidence indicates that female castration was exceedingly unusual, and that male sexual organs were far more likely to be excised than female ones. Indeed, while he takes emasculation (whether veterinary or human is ambiguous) as a cultural commonplace, Ambroise Paré waxes incredulous at the apparently alien phenomenon of clitoral excision: "Leo Africanus writes about it, assuring us in another place that in Africa, there are people who go through the city like our castrators ... and make a trade of cutting off such caruncles."

Recent scholarship has advanced the importance of Galenic theory, that is, the "one-sex" (paradigmatically male) model of sexual difference, in which women were understood to have inverted male sexual organs, and therefore could, in certain circumstances such as vigorous exercise, turn into men. (The reverse, however, appears to have been impossible.) Yet, even within the one-sex model, the overwhelming cultural emphasis is on the genital sufficiency and deficiency of men, rather than on female lack. The one-sex model is supported by Paré's fascinating tale of a woman, Marie, who one day developed the requisite genital equipment to shed her female identity and become the male, Germain. The story is tantamount to a compensatory fantasy about castration and reminds us that while the deprivation of male genitals through the surgical treatment of disease was a regular occurrence, suddenly sprouting them as a result of violent exertions, in accordance with Galenic precept, was not.

Surgical procedures previously used only on animals were in early modern England routinely applied to humans, and specifically to men. Indeed, surgeon Thomas Gale (1507 - 87) was alarmed to find during an outbreak of venereal disease in the metropolis, "sowgelders," among others usurping the title and function of surgeons. The Husbandman, Farmer and Grasiers Compleat Instructor, written in the late seventeenth century, describes veterinary castration as it must have been practiced for hundreds of years:

In Gelding, having slit the Cod, draw out the Stones with their sinews, as far as you can, without over-straining; clap the sinews into a cleft Stick, and so seer them off with a hot Iron, anoint them round with fresh Butter, and sow it up with very fine Silk, taking up no more than the outward Rim or Edge.

This reminds us that, though surgical procedures for male genitals were newly refined, they were not entirely remote from rural experience, and that the craft of "sowgelding" (and for that matter, butchery and barbery) might have been alarmingly similar to the skills of human surgery. The Act of 1540 uniting the Barbers and Surgeons resulted in part from the crisis in the organization of medicine provoked by outbreaks of pox and syphilis, and included the telling reservation that, in London, surgeons were not to "practice barbery, nor barbers surgery, except for toothdrawing."

Samuel Pepys' account of his kidney stone operation, recorded in his diary for March 26, 1660, registers both the benefit and jeopardy of surgery in what can only be described as an instance of justifiable concern about his mortality: "This day is two years since it pleased God that I was cut for the stone at Mrs Turner's in Salisbury Court. And did resolve while I live to keep it as a festival, as I did the last year at my house." Despite its success, the operation, performed by Thomas Hollyer, ruptured the sperm ducts and rendered the diarist sterile, a common sequel to this operation at the time. The incidental damage to Pepys' reproductive organs demonstrates the ever-present threat that the surgeon's hand might slip, causing the patient to die or lose his organs of increase, a possibility betrayed by the somewhat cavalier comments of surgeon John Vigo: "The wounds of the stones and the yard be not mortall, if it be not through the error of the Chyrurgio. Nevertheless, because they are necessarie to generation, they must be healed with all diligence."

For all the persistent dangers of mortality in surgery of any sort, male genitals were both substitutable and dispensable - something the patient, however reluctantly, could live without. Johannes Scultetus's The Chyrurgeons Store-House (1674) includes the chapter heading "Of the taking off of a yard," while Bulwer laments those who are "not only gelt but have their Yards also cleane cut off." We are in the realm here, not of the excision of the testicles - the most common understanding of castration, and the one to which Freud pays negligible regard - but to that of the penis itself. Scultetus instructs:

In the Month of July 1653, a certain Citizen of Ulme, having his Yard mortified, I cut it off near the live part with a knife, ... and to stop the Blood touched the Veins and Arteries with hot Irons till I had taken off all the Gangrene, and the Patient was sensible of the fire: the Operation being done, and a pipe ... Put into the passage of urine: I applied to the burnt place, the Egyptiacum Oyntment of Masue, to make the Eschar: which being taken away: I soon Consolidated the Ulcer with the ceratum divinum: and the patient was healed

Scultetus's patient was fitted with the device invented by Ambroise Paré, the "artificiall yard," to alleviate the suffering occasioned by urination in those who had been deprived, whether by surgery or accident, of their natural members [Figure 2]:

Those that have their yards cut off close to their bellies, are greatly troubled in making of urine, so that they are constrained to sit down like women, for their eas. I have devised this pipe or conduit, having an hole through it as big as one finger, which may be made of wood, or rather of latin.

Deprived of his genitals, the man urinates like a woman, but he does not become one, in part because the penis here literally becomes substitutable with a prosthetic.

This potential for phallic metonymy is, as we saw in the induction to Antonio and Mellida, a source of humor. The interchangeability of the penis and power provides the comedy in the following anecdote about eunuchs of Persia and the Levant who gain great social advancement and "who therefore thinke they have a good bargaine in exchanging the naturall Conduit of their Urine for a Quill, which they weare in their hats in a way of a jolly orientation." Jokes such as this one may well be a defensive reaction against the actual pain of venereal disease and the threat of castration as much as social satire on the follies of masculine ambition.

The potential loss of one's genitals was not merely a remote and foreign danger. Richard Wiseman, who has, ironically, been called the father of English surgery, provides a catalog of the putrid penises he encountered belonging to men of all ages and in all walks of life:

A young fellow came to me with the Prepuce inflamed, and a mortification on the upper part of it, which had spread the compass of a broad Shilling on that part over the Glans. In scarifying the Eschar I found it had penetrated through: upon which consideration I made the separation of the prepuce with a pair of Scissors cutting it off round ... In making the extirpation of the Prepuce I had permitted him to bleed freely.

Given the excruciating pain that accompanied this standard operation, it seems entirely plausible that castration was not as purely symbolic in early modern England as it is for us today. Whatever, the statistical probability of losing one's penis (possibly on a par with a woman losing her breast today), as the techniques and instruments of surgery sharpened, anxiety about the loss of one's privy members likely became more acute, even as hopes against the loss of one's life increases. Although the surgical excision of male genitals was not literally used as a means of subjection, that is, as a threat, the history of surgery can be linked to the discipline of the human subject we have learned from Foucault, in that the Barber-Surgeons had the right to claim annually four bodies of persons executed for felony. Bodies cut down from the gallows and penises cut close to the belly established a visceral connection between social and sexual subjection, and a concrete sense in which castration was located not only in the realm of the symbolic but in the ordinary business of surgical practice. pp. 325 - 334]