The Eunuch’s Body and Neoplatonic Masculinity in Twelfth Night

This article argues that the figure of the eunuch in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night props up the integrity of Neoplatonic masculinity of humanist England. At the time, eunuchs, though absent from the everyday reality of England, were frequently seen on the stage, acting as a cultural imaginary resurrected from the classical past or imported from contemporary foreign lands. Scholars of history and literary studies have inquired into how such representations of the eunuch probe the delimitations of normativity with regard to gender, sexuality, and ability in early modern England. With its heroine Viola disguised as the eunuch Cesario, Twelfth Night has often been regarded as a play of gender subversion. This article turns away from this critical tradition and reads Cesario’s eunuchry as an anatomical reality, as the play’s hero Orsino does, rather than merely a question of provocative gender performance. Only by doing so can we better understand the religio-philosophical concerns that underlie the problems of love and masculinity in the play. As a key school of thought of Renaissance humanism, Neoplatonism had a significant bearing on many aspects of life. As it inscribes masculinity as chiefly a man’s spiritual integrity which could only be achieved through the union with another man’s soul, it simultaneously demotes femaleness and physicality. Against this gender structure, this article proposes that the play presents the eunuch as the remedy for the problems of Neoplatonic love and masculinity.