AMONG the body of theatrical scholarship treating Ben Jonson's 1606 play Volpone—hailed as one of the most produced non-Shakespearean plays from the early modern period since its re-entry into the Western theatrical repertoire in 1921—a handful of characters are frequently, unfortunately, overlooked. These are the particular constellation of minor characters often labeled by directors and reviewers as “the freaks”: Castrone, the eunuch; Androgyno, the hermaphrodite; and Nano, the dwarf, who together make up Volpone's family of grotesque servants. Critics have for the most part seemed content to dismiss their position in the larger trends of Volpone's modern performance with the mere acknowledgment that “[i]t is … relatively common to cut, or radically reduce, the role of Volpone's trio of fanatics.” While this is certainly the case, I believe it worthwhile to consider why these characters might be removed, reduced, or altered in modern productions of a play known for its enduring relevance. A key to the problem may perhaps be found in the characters’ specificity: two of these characters, Castrone and Androgyno, are a particular kind of grotesque— the sexual grotesque. Their genital ambiguity makes their bodies abnormal and exotic in the world of Jonson's imagined 1606 Venice; when the play is recontextualized in production, however, their ambiguity may be accompanied by an uncomfortable set of associations. We can perhaps begin to understand the changes made to Castrone and Androgyno in “updated” twentieth- and twentyfirst- century productions of Volpone by considering the differences between the protean conceptions of castration and hermaphroditism in early modern England and their still-evolving meanings in the contemporary Western world. The definitions and uses of these two words have changed over time, and the socio-cultural perception of castrated men and so-called hermaphrodites has changed along with them. Androgyno and Castrone, then, become theatrical reflections of our understanding of sexual otherness.

In the early modern period, the eunuch bore two primary connotations. First, he was known as the εύνούχος [eunoukos], the guardian of Mediterranean and Asian harems and marriage beds. As early as the fourteenth century BCE, servants were castrated for the express purpose of protecting the legitimacy of marital sex.