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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Writing from Dublin in February 1724, Jonathan Swift responded to some London gossip and joked about the ‘gallantry’ of the aged military hero the Earl of Peterborough, who had publicly commanded an apology from the castrato Senesino for his impugning the honour of the soprano Anastasia Robinson. This scandal set off a series of obscene, misogynistic, satiric epistles written to or about Mrs Robinson, Senesino, Faustina, Mrs Barbier, and Farinelli that accuse the female singers, British prudes, and others of a variety of deviant, sexually subversive practices. This article introduces and presents annotated texts of this group of epistles written between 1724 and 1736. Several have been discussed by historians of opera and literary scholars, but the whole corpus has not been identified or made readily available to opera scholars.
1 I borrow the concept from Ian Hacking, Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illness (Charlottesville VI, 1998), 81–2.Google Scholar
2 On these facets of the (generally hostile) reception of Italian opera and castrati in London, see Cervantes, Xavier, ‘“Tuneful Monsters”: The Castrati and the London Operatic Public, 1667–1737’, Restoration and 18th Century Theatre Research, 2nd ser., 13 (1998), 1–24; Todd S. Gilman, ‘The Italian (Castrato) in London’, in The Work of Opera: Genre, Nationhood, and Sexual Difference, ed. Richard Dellamora and Daniel Fischlin (New York, 1997), 49–70; Lowell Lindgren, ‘Critiques of Opera in London, 1705–1719’, Il melodramma italiano in Italia e in Germania nell’ età barocca, Contributi musicologici del Centro Ricerche dell' A.M.I.S.-Como, 9 (Como, 1995), 145–65; Thomas McGeary ‘“Warbling Eunuchs”: Opera, Gender, and Sexuality on the London Stage’, Restoration and 18th Century Theatre Research, 2nd ser., 7 (1992), 1–22; and idem, ‘Gendering Opera: Italian Opera as the Feminine Other in England, 1700–42‘, Journal of Musicological Research, 14(1994), 17–34.Google Scholar
3 I have adapted this concept from Hacking's term, ‘ecological niche’, in Mad Travelers, 81.Google Scholar
4 This point is made frequently in Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley, 1992), and in the essays in eadem ed., The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800 (New York, 1993); and eadem ed., Eroticism and the Body Politics (Baltimore, 1991). See also, Peter Wagner, Eros Revived: Erotica of the Enlightenment in England and America (London, 1988), 47–112; Robert Darnton, ‘The High Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature’, in The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge MA, 1982), 1–40; idem, Edition et sédition: L'Univers de la littérature clandestine au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1991), esp. 179–215; idem, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York, 1996), 137–66; and Jean-Pierre Guicciardi, ‘Between the Licit and Illicit: The Sexuality of the King’, in 'Tis Nature's Fault: Unauthorized Sexuality during the Enlightenment, ed. Robert P. Maccubbin (Cambridge, 1987), 88–97.Google Scholar
5 In general, see Katharine M. Rogers, The Troublesome Helpmate: A History of Misogyny in Literature (Seattle, 1966). For the Restoration and early eighteenth-century English version of this tradition, Katharine M. Rogers, Feminism in Eighteenth-Century England (Urbana, 1982), 160–84; Felicity A. Nussbaum, The Brink of All We Hate: English Satires on Women 1660–1750 (Lexington, 1984); eadem ed., Satires on Women, Augustan Reprint Society 180 (1976); Susan Gubar, ‘The Female Monster in Augustan Satire’; and Ellen Pollak, ‘Comment’, Signs, 3 (1977), 380–94 and 728–32. For earlier in the seventeenth century, Katherine U. Henderson and Barbara F. McManus, Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England, 1540–1640 (Urbana, 1985), 55–6. On the western philosophic tradition, Beverley Clack ed., Misogyny in the Western Philosophical Tradition: A Reader (New York, 1999), 1–131. For biblical and Renaissance sources that woman is more lustful and more easily debauched than man, Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Women: A Studv in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge, 1980), esp. 8–9, 16–17.Google Scholar
6 Other works in this tradition citing woman's lust include Mantuan English'd, and Paraphras'd: or, the Character of a Bad Woman [1679]; Female Excellence: Or, Woman Display'd, in Several Satyrical Poems (1679); [?Walter Harte], A Ternary of Satyrs. Containing, … 2. A Satyr against Woman (1679); John Oldham, ‘A Satyr Upon a Woman, Who by Her Falsehood and Scorn Was the Death of My Friend’ (1681), in Works (1684), 139–48; Thomas Brown, ‘A Satyr against Woman’ and ‘A Satyr on Marriage’, in Works, 3 vols., 2nd edn (1708–09), i, 71–6 and 76–8; Female Chastity, Truth and Sanctity (1734); and Woman Unmask'd, and Dissected (1740) (reissued as Female Qualifications: or Jilts and Hypocrites Portray'd (1741)). For a medical explanation for woman's greater lustfulness, see Venette, Nicolas, The Mysteries of Conjugal Love Reveal'd, 3rd edn (1712), 96–101.Google Scholar
7 Typical passages from works cited in text and note 6 may serve to provide antecedents for the epistles to be discussed. Gould (Love Given O're) describes woman's unnatural lust:Google Scholar
… when into their Closets they retire,Google Scholar
Where flaming Dil-s [Dildoes] does [sic] inflame desire,Google Scholar
And gentle Lap-d-s [Lap-dogs] feed the am'rous fire:Google Scholar
Lap-d-s! to whom they are more kind and free,Google Scholar
Than they themselves to their own Husbands be. (p. 5)Google Scholar
Echoed in Ames:Google Scholar
Lap Dogs and D-s [Dildoes] serve as much to cureGoogle Scholar
Their am'rous customary Calenture. (p. 8)Google Scholar
In Mantuan English 'd is described howGoogle Scholar
Whiles to allay, not quench her wanton Fires,Google Scholar
Sometimes she Dildoes, sometime Stalion hires. (p. 3)Google Scholar
In ‘A Satyr on Woman's Lust’, in Female Excellence, are catalogued her delights in love:Google Scholar
Missing her man, some ugly mungril mustGoogle Scholar
Give satisfaction to her raging lust. (p. 6)Google Scholar
And the poem ‘To Pretty, Celinda's Lap-Dog. By Mr. Sam. Phillips’, in the Diverting Post, No. 22 (17–24 March 1705), implies sexual relations between a lap-dog and its mistress.Google Scholar
8 John Dryden, ‘Argument of the Sixth Satire’; Dryden, though, registers his dissent from the content of the satire; The Works of John Dryden, Poems 1693–1696 (Berkeley, 1974), iv, 145–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
9 Susan C. Shapiro notes of male fear of effeminacy: ‘“Effeminacy” traditionally was associated with weakness, softness, delicacy, enervation, cowardice, delight in luxurious food and clothing—all those qualities which oppose the essential attributes of the warrior’ (400); see ‘“Yon Plumed Dandebrat”: Male “Effeminacy” in English Satire and Criticism’, Review of English Studies, 39 (1988), 400–12. An explicit statement of the double standard, whereby femininity lessens a male and masculinity improves a female, is provided by Margaret Cavendish, The Worlds Olio (1655), 84: ‘It is not so great a Fault in Nature for a Woman to be Masculine, as for a Man to be Effeminat: for it is a Defect in Nature to decline, as to see Men like Women; but to see a Masculine Woman, is but onely as if Nature had mistook, and had placed a Mans Spirit in a Womans Body’.Google Scholar
10 ‘A General Satyr on Women’, in Female Excellence: Or, Woman Display'd, in Several Satyrick Poems (1679), 3.Google Scholar
11 On these aspects of the Restoration theatre, see Fraser, Antonia, The Weaker Vessel (New York, 1984), 418–39; Elizabeth Howe, The First English Actresses: Women and Drama 1660–1700 (Cambridge, 1992), 30–55; Katherine E. Maus, ‘“Playhouse Flesh and Blood”: Sexual Ideology and the Restoration Actress’, ELH (English Literary History), 46 (1979), 595–617; Jacqueline Pearson, The Prostituted Muse: Images of Women and Women Dramatists 1642–1737 (New York, 1988), esp. 26–31, 70–6; Laura J. Rosenthal, ‘“Counterfeit Scrubbado”: Women Actors in the Restoration’, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 34 (1993), 3–22; Sandra Richards, The Rise of the English Actress (New York, 1993), 4–23; and Janet Todd, ‘Aphra Behn: The “Lewd Widow” and Her “Masculine Part”’, in Gender, Art and Death (New York, 1993), 11–31. For the related case of the response to Charles II's sexual misbehaviour, see Weber, Harold, ‘Charles II, George Pines, and Mr. Dorimant: The Politics of Sexual Power in Restoration England’, Criticism, 32 (1990), 193–219; idem, Paper Bullets: Print and Kingship under Charles II (Lexington, 1996), ch. 3; Paul Hammond, ‘The King's Two Bodies: Representations of Charles II’, in Culture, Politics, and Society in Britain, 1660–1800, ed. Jeremy Black and Jeremy Gregory (Manchester, 1991), 13–48, esp. 26–30; and Rachel Weil, ‘Sometimes a Scepter Is Only a Scepter: Pornography and Politics in Restoration England’, in The Invention of Pornography, 125–53. For actresses in the eighteenth century, Kimberly Crouch, ‘The Public Life of Actresses: Prostitutes or Ladies?‘ in Gender in Eighteenth-Century England: Roles, Representations and Responsibilities, ed. Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus (London, 1997), 58–78.Google Scholar
12 For court satires that cite Nell Gwynn, see John H. Wilson, Court Satires of the Restoration (Columbus, 1976).Google Scholar
13 See John H. O'Neill, ‘Sexuality, Deviance, and Moral Character in the Personal Satire of the Restoration’, Eighteenth Century Life, 2 (1975), 16–19, which also includes citations of sexual deviance.Google Scholar
14 See Straub, Kristina, Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology (Princeton, 1992).Google Scholar
15 A pertinent contemporary definition of a prude: ‘[Their] Pride is to demolish every one's Character to set up their own, when at the same Time they themselves are most voluptuous private Libertines, sinning with the utmost Secresy and Security, and yet are maliciously prying and magnifying into Crimes every little unguarded Liberty taken by unwary Persons’; Plain Reasons for the Growth of Sodomy in England (?1730), 22. Also, John Arbuthnot, The Ball, Stated in a Dialogue betwixt a Prude and a Coquet (1724) and Richard Steele, The Tatler, No. 126 (28 January 1710). From the male point of view, the prude is unfeminine because, in feigning to resist male advances, she denies her role as sexually available. See also Ellen Pollak, The Poetics of Sexual Mvth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope (Chicago, 1985). 84–6.Google Scholar
16 The effects of castration before puberty caused eunuchs to grow extremely tall.Google Scholar
17 Letter to the Countess of Mar [?March 1724]; The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Robert Halsband, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1966), ii, 37–8. Halsband dates the letter March, but Swift noted the incident in a letter of 13 February 1724: ‘Ld Peterborows Gallantry is exactly of a Size with the whole Tenor of his Life, onely in complyance to his Age he seeks to make a Noise without the Fatigue of travelling, though he will be less able to perform his present Journy than any of his past. He neither moves my Joy Pity nor Sorrow’; The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold H. Williams, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1963), iii, 6–7. Biographies of Peterborough variously embellish the story, saying the episode occurred at Bath and adding that Peterborough caned Senesino: George D. Warburton, A Memoir of Charles Mordaunt, Earl of Peterborough and Monmouth, 2 vols. (London, 1853), ii, 192–6; William Stebbing, Peterborough (London, 1906), 197–201; and Colin Ballard, The Great Earl of Peterborough (London, [1929]), 281–2. On Mrs Robinson (as Countess Peterborough), J.C. Power, ‘Pope's Jesuit’, Notes and Queries, 214 (1969), 184–6; and Kathryn Lowerre, ‘Beauty, Talent, Virtue, and Charm: Portraits of Two of Handel's Sopranos’, Imago Musicae, 9–12 (1992–95), 206–23.Google Scholar
18 In Faustina: Or the Roman Songstress, a Satyr on the Luxury and Effeminacy of the Age (7 May 1726), Henry Carey had already linked Faustina with the effeminacy and corruption of British virtue; a slightly different version of Faustina is included in The Poems of Henrv Carer, 3rd edn (1729), 28–37, and The Poems of Henrv Carey, ed. F.T. Wood (London, 1930), 97–101.Google Scholar
19 Lines 34–5. Loeb Classical Library. Trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (London, 1926), 453.Google Scholar
20 John, Lord Hervey wrote on 13 June 1727 to Stephen Fox, ‘Senesino thinks it sounds so inglorious for him to have no share in these commotions in the State of Music [the feud between Cuzzoni and Faustina]…. I believe he takes it for a mark of contempt that he was not distinguished with a cat-call’; Lord Hervey and His Friends, 1726–38, ed. Earl of Ilchester (London, 1950), 18. The pamphlet The Devil to Pay at St. James's: Or, a Full and True Account of a Most Horrid and Bloody Battle between Madam Faustina and Madam Cuzzoni (1727) reports that ‘Senesino is disgusted to the last Degree to see himself neglected, and such a Bustle made about these two Madams; he curses the Directors, damns the Opera, sinks the Composers, and bids the Devil take the whole Town’ (6).Google Scholar
21 On Priapean herms, see Wrede, Henning, Die antike Herme, Trierer Beiträge zur Altertumskunde, 1 (1985), 28–9. Herms of Priapus brought the blessings of Priapean fecundity to gardens. Such herms are illustrated in Priapea: Poems for a Phallic God, intro., ed., and trans. W.H. Parker (London, 1988), plates 1–4. Prominent Priapean herms also contribute to the erotic context in Marcantonio Raimondi's engraving illustrating the first of Pietro Aretino's sonnets I modi (see plates D-1 & 2 in I modi: The Sixteen Pleasures, an Erotic Album of the Italian Renaissance, ed. and trans, with commentary by Lynne Lawner (Evanston, 1988); and figs. 2–4 in Bette Talvacchia, Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture (Princeton, 1999)).Google Scholar
22 The British Journal, No. 235 (25 March 1727). This source reports that ‘Senesino's Epistle to Faustina’ was said to be written by Pope, but there is no confirmation of this.Google Scholar
23 Advertisement dated 3 April 1727, in Mist's Weekly Journal, No. 103 (8 April 1727); the reward was offered by a Maximilian Drake, perhaps a partisan or patron of Faustina.Google Scholar
24 See Jacobson, Howard, Ovid's ‘Heroldes‘ (Princeton, 1974), 80–1.Google Scholar
25 Lewis Theobald, The Censor, No. 75 (April 13, 1717); in collected edition: iii, 86; and The Weekly-Journal, No. 226 (23 February 1723).Google Scholar
26 The advantages of castrati as illicit lovers are also made explicit in The Rake's Progress: or, the Humours of Drurr Lane (1735):Google Scholar
For tho' they [the castrati] lose the Pow'r of Harm,Google Scholar
The Women know they yet can charm.Google Scholar
The Footman, he may make 'em swell,Google Scholar
Or Beaux may all their Secrets tell:Google Scholar
But here each Night the am'rous MaidGoogle Scholar
Securely Sins, of nought afraid. (p. 18)Google Scholar
27 The notion of amorous eunuchs occurs sporadically in English sources; see Sedley, Charles, Bellamira, or the Mistress (1687), Act 4, i; Ogier Busbecq, The Four Epistles … Concerning His Embassy into Turkey (1694), 181; and Thomas Cooke, The Eunuch, or, the Darby Captain (1737), 26–7.Google Scholar
28 Page 8. A similar comparison was made of Farinelli in a manuscript poem, ‘On Farinelli’, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. Misc. e. 240, p. 278:Google Scholar
This singer has the CommendationGoogle Scholar
Of all the Ladies in the Nation:Google Scholar
For if a Husband can but ill do,Google Scholar
Then Farinelli serves for a Dildo.Google Scholar
29 Iago, protesting his love and sense of duty, plants seeds of suspicion in Othello about his wife's fidelity and recalls her known deviousness:Google Scholar
I know our country disposition well;Google Scholar
In Venice they do let God see the pranksGoogle Scholar
They dare not show their husbands. Their best conscienceGoogle Scholar
Is not to leave't undone, but keep't unknown. (Act 3.iii, 201–4)Google Scholar
30 On same-sex female sexual activity in the eighteenth century, see Donoghue, Emma, Passions between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668–1801 (New York, 1993) (the poem is discussed on pp. 216–19); Elizabeth S. Wahl, Invisible Relations: Representations of Female Intimacy in the Age of Enlightenment (Stanford, 1999); and Tim Hitchcock, English Sexualities, 1700–1800 (New York, 1997), 83–8. Randolph Trumbach argues that not until the last quarter of the eighteenth century does a true lesbian identity appear: ‘London's Sapphists: From Three Sexes to Four Genders in the Making of Modern Culture’, in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (New York, 1991), 112–41 (also in Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History, ed. Gilbert Herdt (New York, 1994), 111–36); and see his ‘The Origin and Development of the Modern Lesbian Role in the Western Gender System: Northwestern Europe and the United States, 1750–1990’, Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques, 20 (1994), 287–320; and ‘Sex, Gender, and Sexual Identity in Modern Culture: Male Sodomy and Female Prostitution in Enlightenment London’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 2 (1991), 186–203. Sexual relations between females seem never to have been prosecuted in eighteenth-century Britain and barely noticed; hence, less is known from legal and other sources than about same-sex male relations (Trumbach, ‘Sex, Gender, and Sexual Identity’, 191).Google Scholar
31 Trumbach, ‘Sex, Gender, and Sexual Identity’, 192.Google Scholar
32 The traditional Christian argument proscribes marriage with eunuchs because procreation is the principal goal of marriage. The canon and civil law arguments were developed at length in Charles Ancillion, Traité des eunuques, dans lequel on explique toutes les différentes sortes (1707), trans, as Eunuchism Displav'd. Describing all the different Sorts of Eunuchs (1718), 138–60 and 181–204.Google Scholar
33 ‘On Mrs. C- P–‘, London Medley (1731), 22; also in The Merry Thought: or, the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany (after 1730), 22.Google Scholar
34 An Apology for the Conduct of Mrs. Teresia Constantia Phillips, 3 vols. (1748–9), i, 314. In addition to Phillips' own autobiography, her amours, marriages, and divorces are told in Lawrence Stone, Uncertain Unions: Marriage in England 1660–1753 (Oxford, 1992), 236–74; and Lynda M. Thompson, The ‘Scandalous Memoirists’: Constantia Phillips, Laetitia Pilkington and the Shame of ‘Publick Fame‘ (Manchester, 2000), 19–79.Google Scholar
35 In The Court Parrot. A New Miscellany (1733), 3–6. Phillips' reputation is reviled and turned to characteristic English anti-papist use in ‘To Mrs. C- P-s, on her turning Papist and retiring to Rome’, in The Literary Courier of Grub-Street, No. 5 (2 February 1738): since Con, ‘the flesh of all Faiths and all Country's [has] try'd’, she will be at home at Rome, which has enrolled as saints many of her trade.Google Scholar
36 Alexander Pope, Sober Advice from Horace (1734), lines 11–15; Henry Fielding, Amelia (1752), bk. 1, ch. vi; Horace Walpole, letter to Horace Mann, 2 September 1774, The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole's Correspondence, ed. W.S. Lewis (New Haven, 1937–1983), xxiv, 35.Google Scholar
37 Joseph Dorman, The Curiosity: Or, Gentleman and Lady's Library (1739), 142–3.Google Scholar
38 In The St. James's Register: or, Taste a-la-mode (1736), 36–8; excerpts reprinted in Dorman, Curiosity, 138–40, where in other letters, several noblemen supposedly take action on Farinelli's behalf against the printer of ‘F-LI's Labour’.Google Scholar
39 The epistle is discussed briefly by Jill Campbell, ‘“When Men Women Turn”: Gender Reversal in Fielding's Plays’, in The New 18th Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York, 1987), 68–9; James P. Carson, ‘Commodification and the Figure of the Castrato in Smollett's Humphrey Clinker’, The Eighteenth Century, 33 (1992), 28; and Patrick Barbier, Farinelli: Le castrat des lumières (Paris, 1994), 82–4. Campbell accepts as genuine the (spurious) attribution to Con Phillips; but this is quite impossible, as Howard D. Weinbrot demonstrates in ‘The New Eighteenth Century and the New Mythology’, The Age of Johnson, 3 (1990), 384. In response to Weinbrot's comments, Campbell modifies some points in a later version in Natural Masques: Gender and Identity in Fielding's Plays and Novels (Stanford, 1995), 30–2 and 260–3, but still seems confused about the difference between castration and emasculation. Given the context of other writings about Phillips and Farinelli explored here, it is unlikely, as suggested in Stone, Uncertain Unions, 262, that the epistle was written by one of her husbands and his attorney to discredit her.Google Scholar
40 The engraving is included in Ronald Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works, 2 vols., rev. edn (New Haven, 1970), No. 283. The exemplar illustrated there bears the subscription ‘W: Hogarth inv’ G Vdr Gutcht sc'. Apparently the only copy of the engraving known to Paulson was excised from the title-page of this poem. Knowing the source of the engraving, several points of Paulson's description can be corrected: the figure on the table is a woman, not a man; and ‘London’ is not the title of the print, but the place of publication.Google Scholar
41 Earlier examples of the dissection of a woman's heart to reveal her character are found in the Spectator, Nos. 281 and 587 (22 January 1712 and 30 August 1714).Google Scholar
42 On the tune, see Cyrus L. Day and Eleanore B. Murrie, English Song-Books 1651–1702 (Oxford, 1940), No. 3453; and W. Chappell, The Ballad Literature and Popular Music of the Olden Time, 2 vols. (London, 1859), 507–9. The only similarity in the two ballads occurs in the first stanza. In ‘To You, Fair Ladies’, sailors at sea address their ladies on land; in ‘The Fate of Courtezans’, the author addresses the ‘fair Nymphs of Venus’ Train'.Google Scholar
43 The title-page epigraph from Martial (Epigrams, 6.29.7) anticipates the moralist's theme: To unwonted worth comes life but short, and rarely old age. (Loeb Classical Library translation)Google Scholar
(Immodicis brevis est aetas, & rara Senectus.)Google Scholar
44 Phillips, An Apology, 2:91–2. The letters mentioned are probably those in Dorman, Curiosity, 142–3.Google Scholar
45 The poem is briefly discussed in Campbell, Natural Masques, 33–5, and Carson, ‘Commodification’, 27–8.Google Scholar
46 That is, the sexually ambiguous Farinelli could be considered an hermaphrodite that could impregnate itself.Google Scholar
47 ‘The Secret Nexus: Sex and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in The Sexual Dimension in Literature, ed. Alan Bold (London, 1982), 83. On the sexually charged associations of lap-dogs, see also Wagner, Eros Revived, 305–6, and Nussbaum, Brink of All We Hate, 140–1. See also the excerpts quoted in note 7. Even if the relation is non-sexual, as The Rival Lap Dog and the Tale (1730) shows, males can be jealous of lap-dogs because of the favours and intimacies they enjoy from their mistresses. In ‘An Epitaph upon my Lady M–'s Lapdog’, the deceased canine ‘once possess'd a warmer Place / Between his Lady's T-hs’; in The Grub-Street Miscellany, in Prose and Verse (1731), 45. And in The Secret History of Clubs (1709), Ned Ward describes Lady Fizzleton, a member of the ‘Scatter-Wit Club’, who has a lap-dog:Google Scholar
A Mouth whose Tongue my Lady's Wants supplies,Google Scholar
But never tells the Freedom it Enjoys;Google Scholar
Pleases much better than the Spanish Art,Google Scholar
Tickles at once, and mundifies the Part.Google Scholar
[Miss] Kindly rewards the little Four-Leg'd Beau,Google Scholar
For secret Service he performs below;Google Scholar
Hug'd in the Lap of Pleasure by the Fair,Google Scholar
As if God Priapus himself was there:Google Scholar
And with thy icy Nose presum'st to kiss,Google Scholar
Without Offence, the very Gates of Bliss. (p. 250)Google Scholar
In the realm of visual pornography, an illustration from an edition of Andréa de Nerciats, Le diable au corps (1803), shows a loosely clad woman cavorting in her bed with a small dog; see plate 103 in Peter Wagner, Lust & Liebe im Rokoko/Lust & Love in the Rococo (Nordlingen, 1986). Also widely known (through at least four versions and engravings) was a painting by Jean-Honoré Fragonard on the same subject, ‘Young Girl Making Her Dog Dance on Her Bed’, c.1768 (Alte Pinakothek, Munich); see Daniel Wildenstein and Gabriele Mandel, L'opera completa di Fragonard (Milan, 1972), Nos. 298 and 299. Illustrated in Jean Montague Massengale, Jean-Honoré Fragonard (New York, 1993), color plate 25.Google Scholar
48 The phrase had been so used in 1715 in Nicholas Rowe's poem, ‘The Game at Flats’, in his Poetical Works (1715), 26–7. The phrase appears again several years later in Pretty Doings in a Protestant Nation (1734), where Sappho, ‘Not content with our [male] Sex, begins Amours with her own, and teaches the Female World a new sort of Sin, call'd the Flats, that [is] … practis'd frequently … at Twickenham at this Day’ (23). The passage is reprinted in Satan's Harvest Home: Or the Present State of Whorecraft, … Sodomy, and the Game of Flatts (1749), 18, and also quoted in Peter Wagner, ‘The Discourse on Sex—Or Sex as Discourse: Eighteenth-Century Medical and Paramedical Erotica’, in Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment, ed. G.S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Chapel Hill, 1988), 59; and Wagner, Eros Revived, 39.Google Scholar
49 Several sources cite ‘smock-fac'd’ (i.e., pale) boys as being given to sodomy. See [Robert Gould], ‘A Satyr on the Players’, reprinted in John Downes, Roscius Anglicanus, ed. Montague Summers (London, 1928), 55–9:Google Scholar
You Smockfac'd Lads, Secure your Gentle BumsGoogle Scholar
For full of Lust and Fury See he comes!Google Scholar
'Tis B– Nokes, whose unwieldy — [Yard]Google Scholar
Weeps to be buryed in his Foreman's — [Arse], (p. 56)Google Scholar
See also The Town Display'd, in a Letter to Amintor in the Country (1701), where the ‘new-improved’ vice is imported from Italy:Google Scholar
In Italy, Poor Sodom's fatal ViceGoogle Scholar
Of Loving Smock-Fac'd Boys, first took it's Rise:Google Scholar
Pleas'd with the new-found Sin, we soonest prove,Google Scholar
Our selves as fit as They for Beastly Love:Google Scholar
Now ev'ry Rakish Debauchee can BoastGoogle Scholar
An Hylas, or Adonis, for his Toast. (p. 4)Google Scholar
In ‘The Smock-fac'd Boy’, in A New Miscellany (1730), a verse imitation of Ausonius,Google Scholar
… Nature sadly was perplex'd,Google Scholar
Should Miss, or Master, be the Sex,Google Scholar
And neither would the Cause surrender. (p. 5)Google Scholar
50 For other accounts of castrati serving as catamites, see McGeary, ‘“Warbling Eunuchs”‘, 13.Google Scholar
51 For accounts of the fable and sources for its transmission, see Johann J.I. von Döllinger, Die Papst-Fabeln des Mittelalters. Ein Beitrag zur Kirchengeschichte, 2nd edn (Munich, 1863), 30–3; and Emmanuel Rhoïdis, Pope Joan (the Female Pope): A Historical Study, trans. Charles H. Collette (London, 1886), 87–90. The fable of the coronation ceremony was well known in Britain; see Cooke, Alexander, Pope Joane. A Dialogue between a Protestant and a Papist (1610), 3, 7–9; A Present for a Papist: or the Life and Death of Pope Joan (1675), 18–23; Baptista Platina, The Lives of the Popes, 2nd edn (1688), 165; and [Robert Ware], Pope Joan: Or, an Account Collected out of the Romish Authors (1689), 10–11, 13, 21; and Archibald Bower, The History of the Popes, 7 vols. (1748–66), iv, 257–9. The controversy of the truthfulness of the ecclesiastical accounts of Pope Joan is reviewed in Pierre Bayle, A General Dictionary, Historical and Critical, 10 vols. (1734–41), iv, 725–40.Google Scholar
52 Reprinted as Appendix A in T. J. Walsh, Opera in Dublin, 1705–1797: The Social Scene (Dublin, 1973), 313–16.Google Scholar
53 Letter of 12 June 1724 from the Countess of Hertford to Mrs Thynne; in The Gentle Hertford: Her Life and Letters, ed. Helen S. Hughes (New York, 1940), 86. Other accounts of women in love with, marrying, or desiring castrati as lovers are found in Henry Carey, Mocking Is Catching; Or, a Pastoral Lamentation for the Loss of a Man and No Man (1726) (reprinted in Poems (1729), 62–5, and Poems (1930), 108–9); and ‘The Eunuch. A Tale’, in Apollo: or a Poetical Definition of the Three Sister-Arts, Poetry, Painting and Musick (1729), 19–26. The most famous (apparently actual) case was of Dora Maunsell who in 1766 eloped with the castrato Tenducci; see (?Dora Maunsell), A True and Genuine Narrative of Mr. and Mrs. Tenducci (1768); Angus Heriot, The Castrati in Opera (London, 1956), 185–9; and Carson, ‘Commodification’.Google Scholar
54 On how early castration produces the effects of castrato singers, see Enid R. Peschel and Richard E. Peschel, ‘Medicine and Music: The Castrati in Opera’, Opera Quarterly, 4/4 (Winter 1986/87), 21–38.Google Scholar
55 According to Meyer M. Melicow, ‘Loss of both testes during adulthood does not necessarily result in impotence, but their complete removal or destruction in childhood should result not only in sterility but also prevent potency’. The author surveyed urologists, and concluded, ‘There was consensus that bilateral orchiectomy properly performed on boys between the ages of five to seven years should result in permanent sterility and impotence’; ‘Castrati Singers and the Lost “Cords”’, Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, 59 (1983), 749. One source suggests how it could be believed eunuchs could be fertile: ‘And yet it is the opinion of some, That when the Testicles are forced away, there is such a remainder of Seed stored up in the Glandules of Generation which be spermatique, that it is possible for Eunuchs to generate'; Thomas Herbert, Some Yeares Travels into Africa & Asia the Great, 3rd edn enlarged (1677), 306.Google Scholar
56 For an example of the latter, see the account ‘The Eunuch's Child’, in William King, Useful Transactions in Philosophy, and Other Sorts of Learning (March-April 1709), 1–14.Google Scholar
57 Cf. Enid R. Peschel and Richard E. Peschel, ‘If androgens had been present to give the great castrati normal male sexual function, those same hormones would also have made their vocal cords enlarge, and they would not have had the high voices that epitomized their glory—and their deformity’; ‘Medical Insights into the Castrati in Opera’, American Scientist, 75 (1987), 583.Google Scholar
58 Dryden's translation, lines 485–8, 489–93. On English awareness of the various types of castration and emasculation, see Taylor, Gary, Castration: An Abbreviated History of Western Manhood (New York, 2000), 52–8.Google Scholar
59 Cited in Wagner, ‘The Discourse on Sex’, 52; and idem, Eros Revived, 27–8. The most notorious evidence for use of dildoes in Britain are several widely reprinted poems: (1) ‘Signior Dildo’ (1673), usually attributed to John Wilmont, Earl of Rochester; in The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. David M. Vieth (New Haven, 1968), 54–9; The Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. Keith Walker (Oxford, 1984), 75–8; and Wilson, Court Satires, 14–19; (2) Samuel Butler, Dildoides. A Burlesque Poem (1706); and (3) Monsieur Thing's Origin: or Seignior D-o's Adventures in Britain (1722). Also in the poem, ‘The Members to their Sovereign’, in The Gentleman's Miscellany, 2nd edn (1730), 45. On ‘Signior Dildo’, see Love, Harold, ‘A Restoration Lampoon in Transmission and Revision: Rochester's(?) “Signior Dildo”’, Studies in Bibliography, 46 (1993), 250–62. See also Wagner, ‘The Discourse on Sex’, 53–4, or Eros Revived, 29–30; Iwan Bloch, Sex Life in England (New York, 1934), 175–6 (a trans, of Englische Sittengeschichte (1912)); Roger Thompson, Unfit for Modest Ears: A Study of Pornographic, Obscene and Bawdy Works Written or Published in England in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century (Totowa NJ, 1979), 121, 124, and 131 n.40; John Atkins, Sex in Literature: The Erotic Impulse in Literature, 2 vols. (London, 1970–82), i, 391–6; and Paul-Gabriel Boucé, ‘Aspects of Sexual Tolerance and Intolerance in XVIIIth-Century England’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 3 (1980), 180–2. In addition to the poems cited by Boucé, see the poems cited in note 7 above.Google Scholar
60 See for example, Aristotle's Compleat Master-Piece, 19th edn (1733), 46; Aristotle's Master Piece Completed (1698), 16–17, and 40; and The Problems of Aristotle (1682), D4r, D8v, and E1r. The conventional opinion is challenged in Venette, Mysteries of Conjugal Love (1712), 304–18; J.A. Blondel, The Strength of Imagination in Pregnant Women Examin'd (1727); idem, The Power of the Mother's Imagination over the Foetus Examin'd (1729); and Isaac Bellet, Letters, on the Force of Imagination in Pregnant Women (1765). See also, Paul-Gabriel Boucé, ‘Imagination, Pregnant Women, and Monsters, in Eighteenth-Century England and France’, in Sexual Underworlds, 86–100.Google Scholar
61 The castrati also participate in the corruption of males; see An Epistle to John James H-dd-g–r, Esq; on the Report of Signor F-r–n-lli's being with Child (1736).Google Scholar
62 On the traditional role of the chaste, modest woman, her expected sexual submissiveness to males, and the absolute necessity of chastity for a female's reputation, see Rogers, Feminism in Eighteenth-Century England, 7–51 and 239–48; and Pollak, Poetics of Sexual Myth, 22–76. Representative contemporary exhortations on the virtue of chastity can be found in Jeremy Taylor, ‘Of Chastity’, in The Rule and Exercise of Holy Living (1654; twenty-five editions through 1739): ‘I call all desires irregular and sinful that are not sanctified, 1. By the holy institution, or by being within the protection of marriage; 2. By being within the order of nature; … Against the first are fornication, adultery, and all voluntary pollutions of either sex. Against the second are all unnatural lusts and incestuous mixtures’ (18th edn (1700), 66). Also Jean Frédéric Ostervald, ‘A Discourse Concerning the Nature of Chastity, and the Means of Obtaining It’, in The Nature of Uncleanness Consider ‘d (1708), 173–280; James Bland, An Essay in Praise of Women (1733), 70–90 (Bland describes his book as a ‘Defense of the Fair Sex, against base and satyrical Authors’ (viii-x)); and Daniel Defoe, Conjugal Lewdness: Or, Matrimonial Whoredom (1727).Google Scholar
63 The image of normative sexuality represented in the epistles is consistent with another prominent realm of early eighteenth-century sexual discourse, the sex manuals such as Aristotle's Problems and Cabinet of Venus. As Roy Porter has demonstrated, these manuals reflect a concern with guaranteeing proper sexual fecundity; see his ‘“The Secrets of Generation Display'd”: Aristotle's Master-piece in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Tis Nature's Fault, 1–21; Roy Porter and Lesley Hall, The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650–1950 (New Haven, 1995), 33–64; and Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science: The History of Attitudes to Sexuality, ed. Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich (Cambridge, 1994), 146–7.Google Scholar
64 For a comprehensive discussion of the hierarchical gender system, see Fletcher, Anthony, Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England, 1500–1800 (New Haven, 1995), esp. 1–98. Through the mid-eighteenth century, sex differentiation was based not, as at present, on the biological facts of two separate, incommensurate sexes, but on a continuum from manhood to effeminacy; females were a lesser, weaker, defective version of the male (this is the biological ‘fact’ that validates misogynist satires). On the biological basis for gender hierachy, see Laqueur, Thomas, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge MA, 1990). In their youth, males were surrounded by females, and manhood, something learned and acquired (but not possessed by boys, slaves, eunuchs, and sexually passive males), could always degenerate into effeminacy (which could include excessive love of women). Male domination, especially in the light of ‘woman's assertiveness and independence in speech and action’, based ‘in terms of hierarchy rather than incommensurable difference, gave [males] an insufficiently competent means of imposing a patriarchal order rooted in nature’, an order which instead ‘rested on nothing but the compulsive strength of men's own manhood’; hence, the constant need, as in the epistles, for ‘prescription and internalisation’ of woman's proper gender role (Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination, 401–2 and 407). As Carole Pateman summarizes, ‘Men's domination over women, and the right of men to enjoy equal sexual access to women’ is at the centre of the original patriarchal/sexual contract; The Sexual Contract (Stanford, 1988), 2. On the origins of the modern system in Britain, Michael McKeon, ‘Historicizing Patriarchy; The Emergence of Gender Difference in England, 1660–1760‘, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 28 (1995), 295–322.Google Scholar
65 Straub, Sexual Suspects, 22.Google Scholar
66 The classic discussions are Mary Mcintosh, ‘The Homosexual Role’, Social Problems, 16 (1968), 182–91; Alan Bray, ‘Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England’, History Workshop, 29 (1990), 1–19; idem, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London, 1982), 81–114; Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the 19th Century to the Present (New York, 1977); see also idem, ‘Movement of Affirmation: Sexual Meanings and Homosexual Identities’, Radical History Review, 20 (Spring/Summer 1979), 164–79; and Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (London, 1981), 96–121. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1978), 42–4, provides this terse formulation: ‘Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species’ (43). For a study of sexually charged poetry that keeps this distinction in mind, see Weber, Harold, ‘“Drudging in Fair Aurelia's Womb”: Constructing Homosexual Economies in Rochester's Poetry’, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 33 (1992), 99–117. Weeks puts the emergence of the full male homosexual role and subculture in the second half of the nineteenth century. In a number of essays, Randolph Trumbach has argued for and described the emergence of a distinctive subculture in the eighteenth century: ‘Sodomitical Assaults, Gender Role, and Sexual Development in Eighteenth-Century London“, in The Pursuit of Sodomy: Male Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe, ed. Kent Gerard and Gert Hekma (New York, 1989), 407–29 (also published as Vol. 16, Nos. 1–2 (1988) of the Journal of Homosexuality); ‘The Birth of the Queen: Sodomy and the Emergence of Gender Equality in Modern Culture, 1660–1750’, in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin B. Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr. (New York, 1989), 129–40; ‘London's Sodomites’, Journal of Social History, 11 (1977), 1–33; ‘Sodomitical Subcultures, Sodomitical Roles, and the Gender Revolution of the Eighteenth Century: The Recent Historiography’, in 'Tis Nature's Fault, 109–21; and ‘Gender and the Homosexual Role in Modern Western Culture: The 18th and 19th Centuries Compared’, in Homosexuality, Which Homosexuality? Essays from the International Scientific Conference on Lesbian and Gay Studies (London, 1989), 149–69. The most detailed study of the subculture is Rictor Norton, Mother Clap's Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England 1700–1830 (London, 1992). Useful surveys of this literature are provided by David F. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality (Chicago, 1988), 327–38; and Hitchcock, English Sexualities, 58–75.Google Scholar
∗ I am grateful to the Newberry Library, Chicago, and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles, for research fellowships that assisted in the preparation of this edition.Google Scholar
