In French, the words tasse ‘teacup’ and théière ‘teapot’ also denote a public rest room where men have sex—a “tearoom” in English—and prendre le thé ‘to have tea’ means “to have homosexual sex.” Most of the narrative of Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu is said to result from having tea with a madeleine. This essay examines the possibility that the passage in which Charlus engages in tearoom sex may imply that there are other such tea parties in the novel. More broadly, I consider the importance of coded or secret languages in the production of sexual knowledge. Revealing the tearoom's secret opens up a Trojan horse (to use Monique Wittig's term) of interpretive uncertainties in the novel, as well as a contagion of doubt concerning heterosexual masculinity and male subjectivity.

Critics of sex and gender in Tudor-Stuart theater generally subordinate the polymorphic eroticism of Jonson' plays to the rigor of his finales. But his meantimes and endings are dialectically intervolved. Delay, embodied in boy actors, is vital to his dramaturgy. For example, wooing Celia, Volpone imagines that he is playing young Antinous, retarding phallic threat with feminized display. In Volpone's deferrals and sartorial excitements, early modern spectators beheld a pattern of their own pleasures, in which sexual and social lusts commingled. Proposing that Jonson was more flexible than many have supposed, I analyze the convergence of homo- and heteroerotic desire on the figure of the pretty youth. Arguing that Epicoene's versatile appeal illuminates the charms of boy actors, I suggest that female spectators may have enjoyed boys, and the female roles the boys performed, without disturbing men's territorial enjoyments. In this way boy actors were crucial to the construction of an erotic community in the playhouse.

Historians and literary critics alike have emphasized the obsolescence of the antiusury doctrine in the transition in England from a precapitalist to a capitalist society. Instead of viewing the scholastic opposition to usury solely as an impediment to the development of a capitalist ethos, this essay stresses the continuing relevance of the antiusury tradition to an evolving theory of capital increase in the early eighteenth century. Moll Flanders and Roxana are the central texts for a discussion of how the analogies between monetary and biological generation that the antiusury writers developed to regulate capital increase provide the foundation for the naturalization of capital, for the transformation of capitalism from an external to an internal economy. At the center of this metamorphosis is the figure of the woman, whose body becomes the body of capital.

Milton scholarship has long regarded chaos in Paradise Lost as hostile to God and creation. This judgment identifies Milton with traditional Western attitudes toward matter and material disorder—evident as early as the Babylonian creation epic, the Enuma elish. In contrast to such attitudes, modern science conceives of chaos as dynamically productive of order, and postmodern cultural studies sees chaos as a relevant principle of ironic indeterminacy. Milton anticipates the postmodern endorsement of chaos in his theology of matter and in the symbolic reflections and allegorical representations of chaos in Paradise Lost. Appreciation of chaotic disorder and of indeterminacy and disapproval of the tyrannical suppression of these qualities distinguish Milton's idiosyncratic theology, political theory, and aesthetics. Even Milton's God contains the potency of chaotic matter, a womblike virtue essential to God's creative power.