Gender In Shakespeare's Twelfth Night?

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On the surface, Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night may seem like to the run of the mill Shakespearean comedy. It has loads of the ingredients you would typically see in a Shakespeare play; love being the be all end all, revenge, and yes, cross-dressing. Aside from dramatics, this comedy embodies the fundaments of the battle of the sexes; the age-old conflict is reminiscent to how gender roles are to this day. Man vs. Woman, or the main ingredient as it is, sets the ball rolling for the tone and the social construct of the comedy. Viola, disguised as Cesario, says, “Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness wherein the pregnant enemy does much. How easy it is for the proper-false in women 's waxen hearts to set their forms!” (Twelfth Night, II.ii 27-30.) This quote alone expresses not only the ambiguity of gender through identity, but also the way men portray female’s inferiority and deceitfulness. Despite the male protagonists ' view on women 's incapability to love, Viola 's …show more content…

This shows that femininity and masculinity in itself is an identity, not just physical and biological. This makes Viola’s disguise even more difficult to overcome. Biologically she can relate to a woman’s folly and weaknesses, while being able to exert her newly found masculinity. She is not between these two worlds, they are now glued together and she is right in the middle of it. As a result, she has a heavy crown because of this, and it consists of all of the accumulated deceit. It also puts her in situations where she has to pick between her femininity while she appears to be in a man’s body. She understands that a woman’s heart can be weak and fickle when it comes to finding love, but while she is in a new identity, she finds that some characteristics between the two sexes do not add

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