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...