Intro
There’s lots of gender-bending in Shakespeare’s comedy Twelfth Night. The heroine of the play, Viola, dresses up as a man (Cesario) after she’s shipwrecked on the coast of Illyria. Her disguise manages to fool everyone, including a Countess named Olivia, who falls in love with the Cesario version of Viola, and the Duke of Illyria, Orsino, with whom the Viola version falls in love.
Stephen Greenblatt wrote a famous essay on this play called “Fiction and Friction” in his book Shakespearean Negotiations. In the essay he talks about how Twelfth Night challenges Elizabethan gender and sexual norms, and also affirms those norms at the same time.
So, let’s look at this excerpt below. In it, Duke Orsino is addressing Viola (who is disguised as Cesario). At this point the Duke doesn’t know that Cesario, who has become his page, is actually a woman. The Duke is in love with the Countess Olivia (or he thinks he is). He decides to send Viola/Cesario to Olivia with messages of his love for Olivia.
Quote
DUKE ORSINO : …unfold the passion of my love,
Surprise her with discourse of my dear faith:
It shall become thee well to act my woes;
She will attend it better in thy youth
Than in a nuncio's of more grave aspect.
VIOLA: I think not so, my lord.
DUKE ORSINO: Dear lad, believe it;
For they shall yet belie thy happy years,
That say thou art a man: 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.
Analysis
If we analyze the Duke’s words from a New Historicist perspective, we see that there’s a bunch going on gender-wise here. First of all there’s quite a bit of homoeroticism. The Duke is supposedly in love with Olivia. But look at how he admires Cesario’s “smooth and rubious” lip and his high voice—it’s even "semblative a woman’s part.” Semblative? You can’t get much more sensual than that. Clearly there’s some kind of sexual desire for Cesario (otherwise why the heck is Orsino paying attention to how “smooth and rubious” Cesario’s lips are?).
Greenblatt argues that the homoerotic desire that’s all over this play (and all over the passage above) challenged Elizabethan ideas about “heterosexual” norms. The Elizabethans were a pretty conservative bunch. It wasn’t exactly cool for men to fall in love with one another (or for women to do so, for that matter). So by reflecting homoerotic desires, Shakespeare’s play challenged those norms about sexuality.
But Greenblatt also argues that, ultimately, the play actually upholds Elizabethan values about sexuality. After all, at the end of Twelfth Night, “Cesario” reveals that he is actually a woman (Viola) and Viola and Duke Orsino get married and live happily ever after. So, by the end of the Twelfth Night all that titillating homoerotic stuff gets neatly swept under the carpet: men marry women, women marry men. Take that, DOMA.
But the passage above becomes even more interesting when we put it within the context of Elizabethan theatre. During Shakespeare’s time, women characters were played by boys. That’s right—no women actors allowed onstage. So when this play was performed back in Shakespeare’s day, Orsino would have been addressing a boy actor who was playing a woman disguising herself as a man.
Like a riddle wrapped in a puzzle wrapped in an enigma, we know. But also kind of cool. So Orsino’s words about Cesario’s “small pipe” and his “shrill” voice would have been calling attention to the fact that the actor who is playing Viola (disguised as Cesario) is a boy.
So see? Without understanding Elizabethan ideas about heterosexuality and homosexuality, and without knowing about the theatrical conventions of Shakespeare’s time, we could easily miss all of this really interesting stuff going on in the passage above. Thanks a lot, Mr. Greenblatt!