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III. "I do adore thee so, / That danger shall seem sport" (2.1.46)

In counterpoint to the ironies and ambiguities that closet the lesbian subtext in the main courtship of Twelfth Night, the representation of male homoeroticism in this comedy is by contrast glaring and ultimately inexplicable. Metaphors of adoration, devotion, and passionate oblation saturate the heated but highly stylized rhetorical interactions between Sebastian, the twin brother of Viola, and Antonio, the erstwhile pirate, who redeems Sebastian "[f]from the rude sea's enrag'd and foamy mouth" and gives his life back to him, adding thereto his "love, without retention or restraint / All his in dedication" (5.1.76-80). Neither the Ciceronian tradition of male friendship nor attention to the intensity of homosocial male bonding in the Renaissance can explain away Antonio's melancholia. He is prepared, we learn, to spend three months with his foundling after rescuing him, prepared to risk his...

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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