Shakespeare's Twelfth Night- Gender Roles

When reading Twelfth Night, the most interesting aspect, to me, was the role of gender in love. Many of the characters fall in love with characters, despite their sexes. Orsino declares his love for Viola in the end, even though she has just now revealed that she is a woman. Throughout the play, Orsino commonly comments on Cesario’s beauty, even though he is unaware that Cesario is actually a woman. This suggests the homoerotic nature of Shakespeare’s play. Another relationship that conveys this idea is Olivia’s love for Cesario, who is actually a woman.  Antonio, though only a minor character, further illustrates Shakespeare’s implication that love has no boundaries, including gender, because Antonio clearly loves his new friend, Sebastian.

Though love obviously has no internal boundaries, as these characters allow themselves to fall in love with people of the same sex, which were impossible relationships at this time, external obstacles still provide difficulties for lovers. These external obstacles often develop in the form of other characters. Malvolio and Sir Andrew love Olivia, yet she falls in love with Cesario and eventually marries Sebastian, so they can not succeed in their pursuit of Olivia. Concerning the homoerotic theme, society plays an integral role in preventing the lovers from marrying their loves. These obstacles that prevent the characters’ happiness suggest that love, or at least unreturned love, causes pain.

Other than the disguises and love triangles, my favorite part of the play involved Maria’s prank with Malvolio. Her wit and cleverness amused me because she analyzes Malvolio’s character and knows  Olivia so well that she could convince Malvolio, a man of pride, to blindlessly follow Maria’s instructions. This subplot was extremely entertaining, even if it really had nothing to do with the central plot and love conflicts. Still, even though these characters are amusing, few of them achieve happiness in the end. Maria and Sir Toby marry, but Shakespeare ignored the other characters of the lower class when he created his happy ending.

I loved Viola, or Cesario’s, character. When she encounters new men, she often shocks them with her witty language, and I love the power this gives her, as a woman. I loved the fact that Shakespeare centered this play around a female character. Still, even Shakespeare had to disguise his female lead as a male, which conveys the transition audiences still needed to make to fully appreciate a story centered around a female character.