How Does Shakespeare Use Gender In Twelfth Night
On the Twelfth Day of Christmas your true love tells you that they are actually a girl pretending to be a boy! That is not exactly how the song goes, but Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare explores this very current concept. Shakespeare's early plays were written in the conventional style of the day, with elaborate metaphors and rhetorical phrases that did not always align naturally with the story's plot or characters. However, William Shakespeare was very innovative, adapting this traditional style to his own purposes, capturing a complete range of human emotion and conflict. Shakespeare primarily used a specific pattern consisting of lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter, or blank verse, to compose his plays. At the same time, there are passages in all the plays that deviate from this and use forms of poetry or simple prose.
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The relationship between gender and performance is particularly complex in Twelfth Night because the part of Viola is played by a boy actor, who is cross-dressed as a female character, who disguises herself as a young man.
A man plays a woman as a man and that is the major reason that there is a conflict in the story. Shakespeare blurs gender lines, love and creates convoluted relationships. The assumption of gender roles and the way different genders are viewed in a societal norm shape the way we live and interact in our everyday lives (Dodd). Society has stamped an image into the minds of people of how the role of each gender should be played out. There are two recognized types of gender: a man and a women, but Shakespeare blurs the lines in comedic ways throughout the play Twelfth Night to convey and explore the limitations of women in Elizabethan
society.
During Shakespeare’s time, female roles, were played by male actors. A substantially more confusing dynamic is caused when the main character in the play is a male actor who is trying to be a female in disguise as a male. Overall, gender is a socially constructed identity. The theme of gender can be especially explored through acting. Boys played the female roles since women did not perform in the theater during that era. Acting was not considered a reputable profession, and women typically stayed away from this type of work. Female cross-dressing was a highly controversial social practice in late sixteenth and early seventeenth century England, coinciding with the career height of the world’s most well known playwright, William Shakespeare.
Shakespeare did not shy away from the thorny issues of his time. Descriptions in the play’s dialogue tell us that Viola’s and Rosalind’s cross-dressing is not entirely convincing. Once accoutered in their male garb, both Viola and Rosalind are described as being somehow sexually indeterminate. For instance, Malvolio gives a description of Cesario’s physical appearance upon his questioning the Lady Olivia whether she would like to admit the youth sent forth to woo her on Orsino’s behalf. He describes “him” as, “Not yet old enough for a man, nor young enough for a boy, as a squash is before ‘tis a peascod, or a codling when ‘tis almost an apple. He is very well favoured, and he speaks very shrewishly. One would think his mother’s milk were scarce out of him” (1.5.152-157). In late sixteenth and early seventeenth century England, anxiety surrounding manners of dress and the clear differentiation of the two biological sexes, was paramount in society. These conversations intersected in the highly controversial social practice of cross-dressing. Interestingly, cross -dressing made frequent appearances in popular culture despite its stigmatized social reputation.
Elizabethan social conventions, in order to provide commentary on the arbitrariness of gender constructions and show the possibility of moving fluidly between them. The cross-dressing female characters in Shakespeare’s plays have fascinated scholars since the rise of feminist criticism in the 1980s. However, prominent writers of Shakespearean criticism have disagreed over the degree to which the inclusion of cross-dressing female characters can be read as a commentary on gender constructions and fluidity. Since the cross-dressing heroine undergoes a similar trajectory in both Twelfth Night and As You Like It, these works will be considered in relation to one another. In the beginning of both these plays, Viola and Rosalind initially resort to cross-dressing as a way to protect themselves (Jardine 71). Viola has been shipwrecked and washed ashore in an unknown country. In order to find work, she asks a sea captain to, “Conceal me what I am […] [and] present me as a eunuch” (1.2.50-54) so that she might obtain employment in the court of the Duke Orsino. Thus, Cesario is born.
The issue of cross-dressing in sixteenth and seventeenth century England becomes more complicated when combined with the consideration of Shakespeare’s contemporaries’ constructions of sex and gender. Legal, social, and religious writings from England in the sixteenth and seventeenth century seem almost exclusively concerned with cross-dressing women, because, women dressing as men, “[threatens] a normative social order based upon strict principles of hierarchy and subordination” (Howard). As historians have noted, “midway through the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (about 1580), women began to struggle against their traditional subordinate status on a scale that seemed large to their male contemporaries” (Shapiro 703). Such a “struggle for freedom and equality, which the adoption of men’s clothing encourages and proclaims, cannot accurately be called a movement since it was totally without organization, and its origins or causes cannot easily be explained” (703). Regardless that there were not staggering amounts of cross-dressing women roaming the streets of Renaissance England, Shapiro suggests, “there were enough of them to cause alarm” (704). Although cross-dressing was widely discouraged in everyday society, it was a frequent occurrence in English theatre during the time Shakespeare’s plays were being written and performed.
The relationship between gender and performance is particularly complex in Twelfth Night because the part of Viola is played by a boy actor, who is cross-dressed as a female character, who disguises herself as a young man.
A man plays a woman as a man and that is the major reason that there is a conflict in the story. Shakespeare blurs gender lines, love and creates convoluted relationships. The assumption of gender roles and the way different genders are viewed in a societal norm shape the way we live and interact in our everyday lives (Dodd). Society has stamped an image into the minds of people of how the role of each gender should be played out. There are two recognized types of gender: a man and a women, but Shakespeare blurs the lines in comedic ways throughout the play Twelfth Night to convey and explore the limitations of women in Elizabethan
society.
During Shakespeare’s time, female roles, were played by male actors. A substantially more confusing dynamic is caused when the main character in the play is a male actor who is trying to be a female in disguise as a male. Overall, gender is a socially constructed identity. The theme of gender can be especially explored through acting. Boys played the female roles since women did not perform in the theater during that era. Acting was not considered a reputable profession, and women typically stayed away from this type of work. Female cross-dressing was a highly controversial social practice in late sixteenth and early seventeenth century England, coinciding with the career height of the world’s most well known playwright, William Shakespeare.
Shakespeare did not shy away from the thorny issues of his time. Descriptions in the play’s dialogue tell us that Viola’s and Rosalind’s cross-dressing is not entirely convincing. Once accoutered in their male garb, both Viola and Rosalind are described as being somehow sexually indeterminate. For instance, Malvolio gives a description of Cesario’s physical appearance upon his questioning the Lady Olivia whether she would like to admit the youth sent forth to woo her on Orsino’s behalf. He describes “him” as, “Not yet old enough for a man, nor young enough for a boy, as a squash is before ‘tis a peascod, or a codling when ‘tis almost an apple. He is very well favoured, and he speaks very shrewishly. One would think his mother’s milk were scarce out of him” (1.5.152-157). In late sixteenth and early seventeenth century England, anxiety surrounding manners of dress and the clear differentiation of the two biological sexes, was paramount in society. These conversations intersected in the highly controversial social practice of cross-dressing. Interestingly, cross -dressing made frequent appearances in popular culture despite its stigmatized social reputation.
Elizabethan social conventions, in order to provide commentary on the arbitrariness of gender constructions and show the possibility of moving fluidly between them. The cross-dressing female characters in Shakespeare’s plays have fascinated scholars since the rise of feminist criticism in the 1980s. However, prominent writers of Shakespearean criticism have disagreed over the degree to which the inclusion of cross-dressing female characters can be read as a commentary on gender constructions and fluidity. Since the cross-dressing heroine undergoes a similar trajectory in both Twelfth Night and As You Like It, these works will be considered in relation to one another. In the beginning of both these plays, Viola and Rosalind initially resort to cross-dressing as a way to protect themselves (Jardine 71). Viola has been shipwrecked and washed ashore in an unknown country. In order to find work, she asks a sea captain to, “Conceal me what I am […] [and] present me as a eunuch” (1.2.50-54) so that she might obtain employment in the court of the Duke Orsino. Thus, Cesario is born.
The issue of cross-dressing in sixteenth and seventeenth century England becomes more complicated when combined with the consideration of Shakespeare’s contemporaries’ constructions of sex and gender. Legal, social, and religious writings from England in the sixteenth and seventeenth century seem almost exclusively concerned with cross-dressing women, because, women dressing as men, “[threatens] a normative social order based upon strict principles of hierarchy and subordination” (Howard). As historians have noted, “midway through the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (about 1580), women began to struggle against their traditional subordinate status on a scale that seemed large to their male contemporaries” (Shapiro 703). Such a “struggle for freedom and equality, which the adoption of men’s clothing encourages and proclaims, cannot accurately be called a movement since it was totally without organization, and its origins or causes cannot easily be explained” (703). Regardless that there were not staggering amounts of cross-dressing women roaming the streets of Renaissance England, Shapiro suggests, “there were enough of them to cause alarm” (704). Although cross-dressing was widely discouraged in everyday society, it was a frequent occurrence in English theatre during the time Shakespeare’s plays were being written and performed.