Gender and Cross-dressing in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night

Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is a comedy that explores gender and sexuality through the relationships of its main characters. Viola, an aristocratic woman, is shipwrecked on the shores of Illyria. Assuming her brother is dead, Viola assumes the identity of Cesario, becoming the page to the Duke Orsino. While serving Orsino as he attempts to court Olivia, Viola falls in love with him. Our performance focused on the end of the Act 2.4. Following the Feste’s sad love song, Orsino asks Viola to try to woo Olivia on his behalf once more. When Viola questions the Duke, they engage in a debate whether a woman’s love and passion could possibly be a strong and sincere as a man’s. In Twelfth Night, demonstrating various forms and levels of sexual attraction and homoerotic relationships become central to the play, found between Viola and Olivia, Orsino and Cesario, and Antonia and Sebastian. The motif of disguise is used throughout the play, crossing not only gender but also systems of class and status. Cross-dressing or androgynous performances of Viola and the men playing her upset restrictions of attraction within one subject. Viola’s breeches role prohibits her from acting on her own passions. However, it is Viola’s disguise as a youth that allows the characters to interact openly and intimately. In Illyria, love is not only celebrated but is satirized, rarely genuine and easily transferrable.

During the Elizabethan period female characters were predominantly played onstage by boys or young men. In England, it was not acceptable for a woman to appear on stage in public until after 1660 (Mann, 1). There is evidence, however, of women’s widespread use other European countries, predominantly in non-speaking or mime roles (Mann, 1). In Renais...

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...ely masculine” (qtd. in Mann, 223). Cross-dressing is a performance practice “in which the ‘sign’ of gender is parodically reiterated in a potentially subversive way” (Charles, 123). Cross-dressing in theatre is often exploited for “witty and comic and often disconcerting effect” (Shaughnessy, 120). This gender instability, as seen in Twelfth Night, is also used to further and direct the plot. However, cross-dressing within a performance can be disruptive, either by reflecting only “mundane impersonations by which heterosexually ideal genders are performed” or by exposing “the failure of heterosexual regimes ever fully to legislate or contain their own ideals” (Butler qtd. in Charles, 123). There are also dangers in fetishizing cross-dressed performances, “charging them with a disturbing eroticism that exploited the sensation of same-sex coupling” (Rutter, 141).