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IN HIS FAMOUS DISCUSSION of family resemblances, Ludwig Wittgenstein argues that we arrive at such concepts as language, game, or number by naming not a class of phenomena having one thing in common but, rather, a network of similarities or relationships among those phenomena. "We extend our concept of number," writes the philosopher, "as in spinning a thread we twist fiber on fiber. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fiber runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibers."1 In the essay that follows, I weave a single thread through a series of texts. The thread is twisted out of various fibers, overlapping with each other in many different ways. It is continuous, but as it runs, the stitch appears and disappears, vanishing beneath the fabric, then surfacing again to describe new patterns. The materials I pass through-which include New Comedy, Hellenistic oratory, biblical narrative, and Renaissance drama from England and the Netherlands-are dense, and I interlace rather than unravel them. Nor does the essay trace a straight line through the texts. Instead, it leads into dark corners and unexpected intersections: at best, it helps the reader map a labyrinth from the inside.
Wittgenstein provides a necessary caveat to this essay's topic, which, baldly stated, is a chronological account of a hitherto-unremarked cultural trope: the pairing of a eunuch and a blackamoor. My termini are Terence's Eunuchus (The Eunuch) and a seventeenth-century Dutch adaptation of this epochal play by Gerbrand Bredero entitled Moortje (The Little Moor). Bredero replaces the eponymous castrate of Terence's comedy with the figure of a Moorish woman, an intriguing substitution that in fact derives from the source text: Terence's castrate first appears onstage in the company of a female slave from Ethiopia. Although the pairing of these figures in Eunuchus may seem incidental, a survey of ancient and early modern literature reveals the opposite to be true: wherever we find a eunuch, we nearly always find a black character as well. While its details may vary-the eunuch can be a foreigner or a native, his impotence real or feigned; the black character can be African or Indian, female or male, royalty or a slave-the dyad is so persistent that...