Twelfth Night By William Shakespeare

All throughout Illyria, there is romance, passion, royalty, and an immense amount of gender stereotypes. William Shakespeare imagines the kingdom of Illyria to have very traditional norms for both women and men in his play Twelfth Night. In Scene 2 of Act 1, Viola, recently rescued from a shipwreck, hears about a duke named Orsino and instantly comes up with a plan to get closer to him. Her plan is to disguise herself as a boy who she will name Cesario and become one of Orsino's’ attendants. Right off the bat, we begin to see gender stereotypes. Why must Viola become a man in order to work for the duke? Elizabethan society “molded women into the form of the dutiful wife and mother” (Elizabethan Women). Viola could not have served duke Orsino as a woman because as a woman she was expected to work at home and be either a “dutiful wife [or a] mother”. Scene two prepares the audience for the idea of gender throughout the rest of the play. Shakespeare's Twelfth Night is very traditional play due to its ideas of gender stereotypes in Elizabethan society.

Twelfth Night is a very feminist play once readers have been reading it. The story’s protagonist is a woman, Viola. Viola displays herself as a rational, strong, witting woman, who has to disguise herself as a man to be able to become a faithful attendant of Orsino. With Viola doing this it creates a big sexual mess as Viola falls in love with Orsino but cannot tell him since he still thinks she is a man. While Olivia, who is the object of Orsino’s affection, falls for Cesario, the disguise for Viola. Once Viola’s true identity is revealed Orsino declares his love for Viola which suggest that he may really just loved the masculinity she possessed. Orsino says to Viola, even after seeing her true identity, “Cesario, come; For so you shall be, while you are a man; But when in other habits you are seen, Orsino's mistress and his fancy's queen” (Shakespeare, Twelfth Night 5.1.2599-26001). After everything has been reveled Orsino still calls Viola by her disguise name…her boy name, Cesario. The readers can only wonder is Orsino truly loved Viola for her or if he was in love with the male persona she gave.

In Act 2 Scene 4 of “Twelfth Night” Duke Orsino was claiming that women were incapable of having feelings as strong as those of a man, Viola did not hesitate to disagree: “Too well what love women to men may owe: In faith, they are as true of heart as we. My father had a daughter loved a man, As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman, I should your lordship.” (Shakespeare 94). Though she was disguised as Cesario at the time Viola showed no shame in expressing her opinion, and not only did she explain her point she also admitted her love for Orsino without him realizing. When she says “My father had a daughter loved a man, As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman, I should your lordship”, she is saying that if she were a woman, which she is, she would love him immensely. Viola is not your typical Elizabethan woman; she does not shy away from arguments, and is willing to dress as man to achieve her goals. However, Viola isn’t the only bold, untraditional woman is “Twelfth Night”; Olivia, Orsino’s main love interest, seems to be anything but bold but in Act 4 Scene 3 she makes a bold, unexpected move toward Sebastian, Viola’s twin brother and her (Olivia’s) love interest at the end of the play, that showcases her character: “Blame not this haste of mine. If you mean well, Now go with me and with this holy man Into the chantry by: there, before him,

Through comedy, Shakespeare bends the rules for the gender in the play Twelfth Night. Viola and Olivia are two women who complicate the relationships they have. Viola dresses as a man who she calls Cesario, while her double life has her learning the roles of both male and female. She meets Olivia, who struggles with her own relationships and looks to Viola as Cesario for help. Both these women go through the same struggles of the gender roles, but because Shakespeare created by Viola to play both male and female her roles allow her to push the role of the female gender in society. These roles that they face are heteronormative verse binary gender, use of male and female communication, male power verse female power, relationships and identity.

In William Shakespeare’s, Twelfth Night, gender is presented in the form of Viola crossdressing and women going after their desires. For example, when Viola is planning to disguise herself as her brother she says, “O, that I served

Twelfth Night is one in few of the female reversal conflicts that is so detailed however not creating conflict with the readers. Shakespeare is brilliant when changing up the gender roles to have the readers question stereotypes made by society and describing how females and males were supposed to be in Renaissance society, women portrayed obedience, mute, virginity, and modesty; the males were to be in charge, protect and provide for the family. However gender attributes are socially established and socially accepted in certain situations to be switched making it easier for writers to switch female and masculine characteristics to both genders. This allows Shakespeare to play on the characteristics of his characters and not have too much of an up roar from the

William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night explores gender differences of the characters to cause problems. After Viola becomes a man, after surviving a shipwreck, her gender starts causing problems when Olivia, the duke’s love interest, falls in love with her. Another problem with gender is with Sebastian, Viola’s twin brother, because people confuse the two for each other. A third issue gender causes is the love triangle between Orsino, Viola, and Olivia. Gender causes issues in this play because Viola uses her gender as a disguise, when she becomes a male servant to find her twin brother in the country of Illyria.

William Shakespeare’s play, Twelfth Night, explores many different themes, the most notable being that you may take another character to be seen as your true self. To start, the male character, Cesario, is truly a female named Viola, who has presented herself as a eunuch to serve the Duke of Illyria, Orsino. As Cesario, Viola falls for Orsino but cannot pursue her desires as she is thought to be male. Before Cesario reveals to be a women, “he” gives hints that he has feelings for Orsino. In Act Two, Scene Four, Orsino quizzes Cesario as to what women he has fallen in love with.

The main focus of Shakespeare’s romantic comedy The Twelfth Night is, fittingly, love. Despite the fact that the play ends in happiness, and marriage, the characters are not always this happy throughout the entire play. Love seems to be a curse in this play rather than a blessing, and it may seem that love causes more problems than it solves most of the time. All of the characters in Twelfth Night are affected by love in some way, and most of the time it is not the “right” love. For example, the main plot of the play is the love triangle between Olivia, Violet, and Duke Orsino. This love triangle causes mass chaos and confusion for the characters, mainly because of the misunderstandings. At the start of the play, Orsino is in love with Olivia, who is mourning her brother, and has no interest in the duke. In turn, Viola, who is in disguise as eunuch named Cesario is in love with Orsino. To round out the triangle, Olivia is in love with Viola, who she believes is really Cesario. The misunderstandings love causes for Orsino, Olivia, and Viola may even cause more suffering than happiness, despite the fact that the play ends in marriages.

One of the many comedic plays written by William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, or What You Will, was produced into a film. The key actors within this film are Frances Barber, Chris Hollis, Caroline Langrishe, Christopher Ravenscroft, and Richard Briers. The 1988 film, directed by Paul Kafno, kept an almost perfect faithfulness to the text and it was very easy for me to follow along in the book. Although the film was not the most entertaining one, it did a great job of portraying the famous Shakespeare play.

Twelfth night moves its audience with many cases of mistaken identity, intentional gayness, sexual tension between disguised characters. Viola as Cesario demonstrates that gender is a fluid identity and not a role assigned when we are born. At some point,

However, this exhibition of gender ambiguity in Twelfth Night was not the first time the issue of a gender gradient was explored. Twelfth Night is one of Shakespeare’s transvestite comedies, along with his plays As You Like It and The Merchant of Venice. These plays all have in common that they include female protagonists who, each with their own reason, must disguise themselves as young men. Casey Charles notes, in his Gender Trouble in Twelfth Night, that “critics have struggled recently to determine the degree to which such theatrical gender trouble affected the social fabric of Renaissance England”. While Catherine Belsey and Phyliss Rackin argued first that "stage illusion radically subverted the gender division of the Elizabethan world," new historicists like Stephen Greenblatt and Howard have more recently made claims that the Globe operated as a universe in itself, a place where comedy and theatre and breaking rules was acceptable, and had little to no effect on the diminishing power of women in Renaissance England. Shakespeare’s strongly feminist plays may not have coincided with social change for women in sixteenth century England, but the theatre also did not necessarily warrant a conclusion that the Elizabethan plays were socially ineffective on gender roles. “If the relative power of woman was diminished in Renaissance England, the causes of that reduction were as much due to religious and political forces as they were to

Female characters, whether they are mothers, sisters, daughters, or lovers, are used as essential roles in every play written by William Shakespeare. In the beginning of both plays, Twelfth Night and Othello, we see strong-willed ladies. Shakespeare enjoys giving women powerful minds and hearts in his works. I think that the female character development between these two plays is that women have the ability to be dominant in a man’s world, but can also lose themselves by becoming submissive to men. While Shakespeare wrote the later play with concepts about consequences of jealousy and not trusting a loved one, he used Twelfth Night to be an example to men to have more compassion for women.

Two of Shakespeare’s works, The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night, both have a parallel plot structure which involves a woman disguising herself as a man in order to accomplish some goal. In the former, Portia disguises herself as a lawyer so as to enter the Duke’s court and help her husband’s friend, Antonio, avoid having a pound of his flesh cut off. In the latter, Viola disguises herself as Cesario so she can enter Duke Orsino’s court and work as a page. This parallel structure is further strengthened by the fact that in both plays, the woman in disguise has to perform some task that (during Shakespeare’s time) was usually performed by a man. Portia has to defend her husband’s friend, Antonio, in court, while Viola has to engage in a sword fight with Sir Andrew. Despite the many similarities, there is a subtle difference: Portia seems much more confident in her role as a man when compared to Viola. We see when Portia is effective and confident as a lawyer but Viola is reluctant to spar with Sir Andrew in a sword fight, and also when she is weary that the Fool has caught on to her disguise. This difference reflects the theme of challenging prejudice in The Merchant of Venice, and also reflect the theme of highlighting gender difference in Twelfth Night, which reveals a lot about both plays as a whole.

With Shakespeare being born in the sixteenth century, there were still three centuries to go before women started the feminist’s movement. However, with his storyline in both The Merchant of the Venice and Twelfth night, the females leads disguised themselves as males to accomplish what needs to be done. Both plays, shows the heroine choices which challenges the characters they interact with. These endearing characters shows similar and different traits. The focus of these plays was based on Portia’s and Viola’s ambition which showed Shakespeare’s respect for women.