ABSTRACT
Eunuchs, mentioned at the end of the preceding section, have been deprived of their birthright. (And the same would apply to a woman whose ovaries have-for any reason other than that of the most imperative necessity-been removed.) The allusions
range from the figurative, as in ‘Lord Say hath gelded the commonwealth, and made it an eunuch’ (2 Henry VI, ii 161-163), and in Twelfth Night, ii 62-63; through the literal-allusive, as in ‘One that will do the deed, Though Argus were her eunuch and her guard’ (Love’s Labour’s Lost, i 195-196); to the direct, as in ‘I would send them to the Turk, to make eunuchs of ’ (All’s Well, iii 88-89), and to the very frank, as in Cleopatra’s ‘I take no pleasure1 In aught an eunuch has: ’tis well for thee, That, being unseminar’d, thy freer thoughts May not fly forth of Egypt’ ( v 8-11); and finally to the recondite pun in ‘The voice of unpaved eunuch’ (Cymbeline, iii 33), with reference to the fact that good alto singers were castrated in order that their voices should break much later or not at all, and with some such chain of association as ‘unpaved: uncobbled: unstoned, hence stoneless: deprived of stones, hence without testicles’.
