Title: The sartorial hermaphrodite
Author(s): Randall S. Nakayama
Source: ANQ. 10.1 (Winter 1997): p9. From Literature Resource Center.
Document Type: Article
Title
The sartorial hermaphrodite
In the opening scene of William Wycherley's The Country Wife (1674/75). Quack declares that when women hear that Homer is impotent, he will become to them as loathsome "as aniseed Robin of filthy and contemptible memory" (Wycherley 1981, 1.1.23-24). Modern editors follow the gloss provided by Montague Summers in the 1924 edition of Wycherley's works: "A famous hermaphrodite (temp. James I--Charles I), the hero of various indecent adventures" (287).(1) Summers concentrates upon the peculiar sexual abilities and inabilities attributed to the hermaphrodite; he cites an epitaph for aniseed Robin by Charles Cotton, which claims that Robin wedded and impregnated himself twice, giving birth first to a son and then to a daughter (Cotton 288), and then cites an incident from James Caulfield's 1794 Portraits, Memoirs and Characters of Remarkable Persons from the Reign of Edward III regarding the Revolution involving Robin and a figure called Mull'd Sack, whom Caulfield identifies as the London thief John Cottington:
One night drinking at the Devil tavern in Fleet-street a match was made up
betwixt him [Mull'd Sack] and one whom he took to be a real woman . . . he
found his co-partner to be a noted person called Anniseed-Water Robin, an
hermaphrodite, that is to say, a person of both sexes, he soon found
nature's impotency, by reason her redundancy in making the supposed bride
both man and woman, had in effect made the party neither as having not the
strength nor the reason of the male, nor the fineness and subtilty of the
female. (Quoted in Summers, 287-88)
The contradictory versions of what a hermaphrodite is--fecund and self-generating, neuter and therefore sterile--attest to the contemporary contentions surrounding this figure.(2)
However, the question arises of how aniseed Robin would have been recognizable to the citizens of London as a hermaphrodite. Although he might have simply promoted himself as one or had others do so--as Horner does in The Country Wife--another piece of existing evidence suggests what made him recognizable as a hermaphrodite. Mary Frith, better known as Moll Cutpurse, the eponymous heroine of Middleton and Dekker's The Roaring Girl, includes a paragraph about aniseed Robin in her autobiography, posthumously published in 1662:
There was also a fellow, a contemporary of mine as remarkable as myself,
called Aniseed-water Robin, who was clothed very near my antic mode,
being an hermaphrodite, a person of both sexes; him I could by no means
endure, being the very derision of nature's impotency, whose redundancy in
making him man and woman had in effect made him neither, having not the
strength nor reason of the male, nor the finesse nor subtlety of the
female, being but one step removed from a natural changeling, a kind of
mockery (as I was upbraided) of me, who was then counted for an artificial
one. And indeed I think nature owed me a spite in sending that thing into
the world to mate and match me, that nothing might be without a peer, and
the vacuum of society be replenished, which is done by the likeness and
similitude of manners; but contrariwise it begot in me a natural abhorrence
of him with so strange an antipathy that what by threats and my private
instigating of [my] boys to fall upon and throw dirt at him, I made him
quit my walk and habitation that I might have no further scandal among my
neighbors, who used to say, "Here comes Moll's husband." (45-46)
Frith's description of aniseed Robin focuses upon his attire, which she says is "very near [her] antic mode." Frith describes her own usual dress as a combination of male and female clothing--a man's doublet and a woman's skirt--though she says that on one occasion she donned full male garb on a wager (46-47);(3) aniseed Robin, therefore, must have worn either the clothing of both men and women or full female attire. What made aniseed Robin a hermaphrodite to the citizens of London was not what he was anatomically, as one could only speculate about what lay beneath his clothing, but what he was sartorially, something that was visible to all.
James T. Henke notes that the term "hermaphrodite" was used in the period to describe female cross dressers: "the term simply seems to mean a wench or perhaps a whore disguised as a am" (124). That the term could also be used to describe a man who is dressed like a woman is suggested by a 1599 example given in the OED for the second definition of "hermaphrodite," "an effeminate man or virile woman" (A. sb. 1. b.): Sardanapalus "who was neither true man, nor true woman, being in sexe a man & in heart a woman." Although the OED example seems to be about a disjunction between the inner self and outer body of this legendary ruler, the introduction to the autobiography of Mary Frith claims that Sardanapalus's most "extravagant debauchery" was that he dressed in female clothing (15). Hence, we should take Quack's reference to aniseed Robin as equating Homer not only to a hermaphrodite, but also to what we would today probably term a male transvestite. In the Restoration theater, in which female actors for the first time replaced male actors in female roles, Wycherley presents the male transvestite as no longer a figure of admiration and even identification for women but one odious to them.
The equating of cross dressing and hermaphrodism also makes sense of Caulfield's claim that Mull'd Sack took aniseed Robin "to be a real woman"; despite Sack's drunkenness, something must have caused Sack to err. Caulfield could have taken the story of Mull'd Sack's marriage from the introduction to Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, in which the inebriated Sly is told that a boy dressed as a woman is his wife, an imposture that Sly readily accepts, in the same way that Caulfield transfers Mary Frith's account of aniseed Robin to Mull'd Sack. That Caulfield knew about Frith's autobiography is evident, as his account of Mull'd Sack is largely made up of incidents from Frith's work;(4) deeds that she performed or attributes to others are in Caulfield ascribed to John Cottington/Mull'd Sack. The identification of Cottington and Mull'd Sack may also be an invention of Caulfield; these figures appear in the same paragraph in Frith's work but are clearly different people: she writes of her "boon and pleasant companions, Mul-sack the chimney sweeper and Cottington the cheat" (50). In its depiction of the marriage of Mull'd Sack and aniseed Robin, Caulfield's account tends to deemphasize the sartorial in favor of the anatomical, suggesting that what counts is the body rather than the vestment; Caulfield confirms this notion by giving Moll Cutpurse's deeds of boldness and wit to Mull'd Sack, changing the body of the performer from female to male, and, in this transfer, creating something like a literary transsexual.
NOTES
(1.) See Wycherley 1967, 258; Wycherley 1973, 7; Wycherley 1975, 10; Wycherley 1981, 233; Wycherley 1991, 10.
(2.) Thomas Laqueur in Making Sex (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard UP, 1990) notes that although there was generally a consensus in the seventeenth century that hermaphrodites existed, there was much debate about what constituted a hermaphrodite and what one could do sexually (135-42).
(3.) Mary Frith is generally described as a woman who wore men's clothing. The illustration on the title page of The Roaring Girl (1611) depicts her in men's clothing carrying a sword and smoking a pipe.
(4.) Caulfield includes a brief and generally unflattering description of Mary Frith in Portraits.
WORKS CITED
Anon. The Life and Death of Mistress Mary Frith, Commonly Called Moll Cutpurse. 1662. Ed. Randall S. Nakayama. New York and London: Garland, 1993.
Cotton, Charles. Poems of Charles Cotton: 1630-1687. Ed. John Beresford. London: Richard Cobden-Sanderson, 1923.
Henke, James T. Courtesans and Cuckolds: A Glossary of Renaissance Dramatic Bawdry (Exclusive of Shakespeare). New York and London: Garland, 1979.
Summers, Montague. "Explanatory Notes: The Country Wife" in The Complete Works of William Wycherley. New York: Russell and Russell, 1964.
Wycherley, William. The Complete Plays of William Wycherley. Ed. Gerald Weales. New York: New York UP, 1967.
--. The Country Wife. Eds. David Cook and John Swannell. London: Methuen, 1975.
--. The Country Wife. Ed. John Dixon Hunt. London and Tonbridge: Benn, 1973.
--. The Country Wife. Ed. James Ogden. London: Black. 1991.
--. The Plays of William Wycherley Ed. Peter Holland. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981.
William Wycherley's 17th century novel 'The Country Wife' refers to a character, aniseed Robin, identified as a hermaphrodite possibly due to transvestite cross dressing. Another account of aniseed Robin by Mary Frith says he dressed similar to her, and she mixed men's and women's clothes. Aniseed Robin may have been a man or a woman instead of a biological hermaphrodite, since the term was applied to cross dressers.
Source Citation
Nakayama, Randall S. "The sartorial hermaphrodite." ANQ 10.1 (1997): 9+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 13 July 2011.
Document URL
http://go.galegroup.com.ezproxy.middlebury.edu/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CA19313581&v=2.1&u=vol_m58c&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w
Gale Document Number: GALE|A19313581