‘I am not that I play’ – Twelfth Night and the Comedy of Cross-dressing
Dr Pamela Bickley considers the subtleties of gender-swapping in Shakespeare’s play.
In Twelfth Night Shakespeare exploits the complexity of the situation to the full; disguise is part of the play’s carnivalesque confusion. Attention is frequently drawn to the falseness of Viola’s disguise. In her first scene with Orsino, she is already ‘Dear lad’ and close confidante:
‘I have unclasp’d
To thee the book even of my secret soul.’
Orsino himself comments that Cesario is still physically far from manhood:
‘Diana’s lip
Is not more smooth and rubious. Thy small pipe
Is as the maiden’s organ, shrill and sound,
And all is semblative a woman’s part.’
Act 1 Scene 4 l.31-34
His language (as well as conveying sexual innuendo) emphasises Viola’s androgyny: the attractive young man who resembles a woman. Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 20’ praises masculine beauty in similar language:
A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion
Disguise and the Love Triangle
Viola’s situation is unique in two respects: first, she is a twin consciously using her disguise to keep her brother alive:
‘I my brother know
Yet living in my glass. Even such and so
In favour was my brother, and he went,
Still in this fashion, colour, ornament,
For him I imitate.’
Act 3 Scene 4 l.370-4 to a maid and man’. Equally, when Orsino claims his ‘share in this most happy wreck’, he still addresses Cesario as ‘Boy’. The physical gesture of courtship, ‘Give me thy hand’, presents, on stage, a picture of the older male embracing the youthful boy. This too, then, could be seen as conveying homoerotic suggestion. Gender is certainly fluid and unstable in this love triangle.
Sebastian’s Gender Roles
Sebastian also contributes to the complexity of gender and sexuality in the play. It is not