Impotence Made Public: Reading Sex on the Stage and in the Courtroom

This essay argues that a dynamic exchange among legal, medical, and theatrical works codified a new visual vocabulary of sexual health. In the sensational divorce trials transcribed in A Case of Impotency (1715) and A Case of Insufficiency Discuss'd (1711), the potency of husbands and the virginity of wives were examined by way of minute physiological features, including facial expression and genital shape. Both the courtroom and the stage valued external evaluation over self-assessment, and between them they taught their audience that future satisfaction must be assured by a committee and an archive of documentation. In The Anatomist, or the Sham Doctor (1697), an old man's plans for marriage are confounded by the interference of his household staff. Similarly, Three Hours After Marriage (1717) follows an elderly doctor's increasingly strange attempts to force his young wife's body to display her sexual history. Even as they cast doubt upon the sexual forensics of the courts, the evidentiary procedures of these plays comically demonstrate the power of bureaucratic interventions in the sexual lives of their subjects.