Who Counts in Farquhar?

Abstract

Le Nozze di Figaro opens with a man counting, as Figaro contentedly measures out the dimensions of his and Susanna's bedroom, only to have his contentment disturbed when she explains the real sexual geography of the place: its proximity to the Count's apartments. Complacently reciting the statistics of the bedroom (his first twelve utterances are numbers), Figaro functionally identifies counting with the exercise or illusion of male control, and in Don Giovanni the identification is renewed, and taken to unsurpassed heights, in Leporello's catalogue aria, which features what is probably the most celebrated of all theatrical acts of counting: Ma in Espagna son gia mille e tre. But the association between ordered enumeration and male mas-

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 17 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.