Gender Trouble in Twelfth Night | I. The Renaissance Context: "I, poor monster" (2.2.33)10
I. The Renaissance Context: "I, poor monster" (2.2.33)10
The early modern English theatre, unlike its counterparts in other European countries, maintained the practice of using all-male acting companies to perform the parts of both men and women. Thus, an element of what Butler calls the "denaturalization" of gender difference is built into the structure of Elizabethan stage convention, and Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, like many other plays of the period, dramatizes the consequences of this ambiguity by casting its heroine Viola, played by a boy, as a character who cross-dresses as the male page Cesario.11 In the doubly androgynous role of male actor playing a woman playing a man, Viola/Cesario must literally perform the role of the male; her success before the aristocratic Orsino and Olivia consequently points to the constructedness and performative character of gender itself. In other Renaissance critical venues, the concept of...
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