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1. Circulating Arguments: The "Single Sex" Body

I shall focus my argument on Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, a play which, for all the curiously metaphoric, even disembodied nature of the language in which it articulates the desires of its protagonists, has nevertheless become the touchstone of this "body" criticism within Shakespeare studies. Yet it is worth remarking that the current critical interest in Twelfth Night as a play about the indeterminacy of gender and the arbitrary nature of sexual desire actually began with the contemplation not of the materiality of the body, but with that of the signifier. In much earlier twentieth-century criticism, Shakespeare's comedies have been appreciated as temporary aberrations from an established sexual and social order for the purposes of a thoroughly conservative "self-discovery" and return to the status quo.⁴ Saussurian linguistics, alerting critics to the way in which meaning in language...

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1. Introduction
2. 1. Circulating Arguments: The "Single Sex" Body
3. 2. "Nor are you therein, by my life, deceiv'd": Twelfth Night and Gl'Ingannati
4. Copyright