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II. "I am the man" (2.2.24)

If part of the problem with the recent criticism of Twelfth Night comes from a proclivity on the part of some to reduce the concerns of gender studies to the us-against-them binarism of traditional feminism, Shakespeare's play arguably introduces patterns of homo-erotic representation in order to disrupt that binarism and to show how gender identities that uphold such duality are staged, performed, and "playable" by either sex. Viola/Cesario is the primary performer: she is that strange androgynous "monster," that eunuch/castrato/page or "script" who, through her gender ambiguity, retunes the music of love that has fallen out of key under the belated courtly scripts that the Count and Countess banally reenact in Illyria. Like the drag queen Butler discusses in Gender Trouble, Viola/Cesario demonstrates a parodic awareness of the three contingent dimensions of her corporeality: her anatomical sex as a boy actor, her gender...

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1. Introduction
2. I. The Renaissance Context: "I, poor monster" (2.2.33)10
3. II. "I am the man" (2.2.24)
4. III. "I do adore thee so, / That danger shall seem sport" (2.1.46)
5. IV. "Thou hast put him in such a dream, that when the image of it leaves him he must run mad" (2.5.193-94)
6. Copyright