“Old Sodom” and “Dear Dad”: Vanbrugh's Celebration of the Sodomitical Subject in The Relapse

Abstract

Although the sodomitical discourse of the early-eighteenth century was fraught with competing ideologies and significations, this did not preclude the formation and expression of a sodomitical identity founded upon male same-sex desire. Orvis takes the case of Coupler, the sodomite staged in Sir John Vanbrugh's play The Relapse; or, Virtue in Danger (perf. 1696; pub. 1697). Vanbrugh's portrayal of this unabashed, unapologetic sodomite—a sodomite, moreover, who is accepted by the dramatis personae of the play he inhabits—suggests not only that the possibility of a sodomitical desiring subject was widely acknowledged by the theatergoing public of early-eighteenth-century England, but also, and perhaps more importantly, that sodomites were not always understood as monstrous Others against which normative identities were constructed.