Of course, I’m speaking relatively. Even though much of my work goes back to the seventeenth century — Newton was, after all, born in 1642 — when I find myself reading older writers, it’s sometimes rather painful. I just finished Jonson’s The Alchemist as research for this chapter and, even though I find it wonderful, I can’t imagine how those early seventeenth centuriers (centurions?) do it. I think I was halfway through the play when I deciphered that “Dol.” was female. She is referred to as “a colleague” in the Dramatis Personae. Perhaps I should just blame the edition, which had some lousy footnotes.
Late seventeenth and eighteenth century plays were nothing if not distinct about these matters, listing the men separately from the ladies. And of course anatomical distinctions in these plays are quite…pronounced.
Even though it’s not terribly embarrassing to mistake someone’s gender in print today, especially when there are girls named Mitch out there, I still feel like somehow I should have known.
But old people from back in the early 17th don’t make that much sense anyway. 1610? That’s so old. They wrote poems about farts back then. Give me the 1670s when they wrote about wandering dildos.
