Asses and Wits: The Homoerotics of Mastery in Satiric Comedy

Abstract

This essay explores master-servant homoeroticism in three seventeenth-century satiric comedies: Ben Jonson\u27s Epicoene and Volpone and George Chapman\u27s The Gentleman Usher. Whereas sodomy always signifies social disorder, homoerotic useful for describing same-sex relations that are socially normative or orderly. Thus homoerotic master-servant relations become sodomitical only when they are perceived to threaten social order. In Epicoene, the character associated with the disorder of sodomy is neither Dauphine or Epicoene, but the unnatural Morose, even though he has not literally had sex with the boy he marries. The erotic master-servant relationship in Volpone is sodomitical because it transgresses against marriage, inheritance, and (once Mosca publicly cross dresses above his station) hierarchical authority. In Chapman\u27s The Gentleman Usher, Prince Vincentio achieves his goals by establishing a homoerotic friendship with a foolish gentleman; like Volpone, however, he is finally unable to control the ambitious servant he has sodomitically empowered. As the ambiguous figure of the gentleman usher suggests, the social and economic transformations destabilizing personal service during this period inform the anxious recognition that homoerotic power structures could be profitably manipulated by servants as well as masters