Twelfth Night (Vol. 62) - Michael Shapiro (essay date 1996)
Michael Shapiro (essay date 1996)
SOURCE: “Anxieties of Intimacy: Twelfth Night,” in Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages, University of Michigan Press, 1996, pp. 143-72.
[In the following essay, Shapiro investigates Twelfth Night's exploration of sexual identity within the context of Elizabethan theatrical portrayals of sexual and emotional intimacy between men and between women.]
Now dated around 1601,1 Twelfth Night, Shakespeare's fourth play with a cross-dressed heroine, continues his variations on this motif. Indeed, after Two Gentlemen each play of this type seems to be a deliberate variation on its predecessor(s). Three earlier plays stress the masculine side of the boy heroine's disguised identity. Two use pert Lylian pages and the third a doctor of the law. In part, the vigor of these male personas supports the assertiveness the heroine needs to...
[The entire page is 13390 words long]
Join eNotes
Over 3,500 study guides, question and answer forums, literature criticism, reference content, and much more!
Navigate
