Like Olivia's love for Cesario/Viola, Antonio's love for Sebastian partakes in a psychological enactment of fantasy that functions as an inward performance of gender trouble. Mistaking Viola for her twin brother in act 3, "even in a minute" Antonio has his faith undermined by the confused Cesario (3.4.370-72), who is unable to return Antonio's purse because he does not have it. In his crestfallen state, Antonio announces that he has done "devotion" to Sebastian's "image" with a "sanctity of love," but that this "god" has proved a "vile idol" unworthy of Sebastian's handsome features (3.4.374-75). Antonio's passionate disenchantment—reminiscent of Othello's—is based on a mistaken interpretation of objective reality, and like the amorous image-making that preceded it, his recasting of Sebastian into the image of a deceiving "devil" partakes of the same process of transference that marked his process of falling in love. He turns his lover into something more than he is through a mentality that seeks finally the attention of the idol that he has created, fashioned, and enacted in the realm of his imaginary fantasy. Although his bitterness is played out within the comedic context of his mistaking a "girl" for his "boy," his virulent disappointment stands in marked contrast to his unexplained silence in the play's final act, when his beloved Sebastian has cavalierly married and when, from a contemporary point of view, Antonio would seem to have more reason to protest. Silence is often the most telling form of disappointment.

Antonio and Olivia's transformation of their lovers into something more than they are is indicative of a larger pattern in Twelfth Night that employs the process of love as an agency in the disruption of gender binarism and social hierarchy. The internalized fantasy of the lover—whereby an Orsino turns Olivia into a Petrarchan goddess or a Malvolio turns her into a Duchess of Malfi—lays the foundation for the legitimization of a social and gender upheaval under the rubric of what Antonio calls the "witch-craft" of love (5.1.74). Orsino sets the stage for this disruption in his opening words:

O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou,
That notwithstanding thy capacity
  Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there
  Of what validity and pitch so'er,
But falls into abatement and low price,
  Even in a minute! So full of shapes is fancy,
That it alone is high fantastical.

[1.1.9-15]

At once capacious and enveloping, love is at the same time ephemeral and destined to disappointment, primarily because of its dependence on an internal fantasy for its sustenance. In Shakespeare's usage, "fancy" connotes both the operation of "love" and "fantasy" or imagination. The quick and giddy shapes that the lover's imagination generates and transfers on to the object of affection render that object vulnerable to the "abatement and low price" that the realities of compulsory heterosexuality and diverging desire reaffirm in the proverbial fifth act of Shakespeare's comedies. Yet the capacity to create and "perform" those "shapes"—the ability of Olivia to turn Cesario into the perfect lover, of Antonio to idolize Sebastian—remain the fragile but crucial catalysts for the promotion of gender trouble.

Few who read this final scene, upon which much criticism depends, are not troubled by the solutions to the erotic problems that the plot has engendered. For Traub, Twelfth Night's conclusion seems "only ambivalently invested in the 'natural' heterosexuality it imposes," while Pequigney challenges the accepted interpretation that Sebastian has rejected his male lover because he has taken a wife.⁵⁹ Olivia's ready acceptance of her beloved's twin as her husband and Orsino's equally mercurial capitulation to his male page who awaits her change of attire add to the delightful but troubling improbability. These unlikelihoods, whether explained as dramatic plot convention or a return to normalcy, expose "the failure of heterosexual regimes ever fully to legislate or contain their own ideals."⁶⁰

Twelfth Night attempts to resolve this trouble by playing on the concept of identity in so far as it means sameness as opposed to individuality. If the major portion of Shakespeare's plot employs the tropes of performance to show how gender is a melodramatic act rather than an inherent trait of the individuated ego, the ending of the play reaffirms this conclusion by producing a male that is, for all intents and purposes, the same or identical to a female.⁶¹ Viola/Cesario is not only a female successfully playing a male, but her success is confirmed by her fungibility with her twin brother. The reunion of Viola with Sebastian comes after he opportunely is betrothed to an Olivia who mistakes him for Cesario. Seeing Cesario and Sebastian on stage together for the first time, Orsino exclaims "one face, one voice, one habit, and two persons / A natural perspective that is, and is not!" (5.1.214-15). The identity of this twin brother and sister does more than provide a convenient Terencian plot device to untie the erotic knot that the play has created up to this point; this sameness also points to the way in which the essentialism of a "natural perspective" is not always divided into gendered binarism. Nature herself has produced an unnatural perspective that reveals the constructedness of essentialist notions of gender by depicting the collapse of difference. Echoing Troilus's famous speech during his eavesdropping of a Cressida that is and is not, Orsino sees a nature that is capable of copying itself exactly in spite of the natural sex difference between brother and sister that we expect. In the identity of Sebastian and Viola, the play's denouement stages a critique of binarism, a parodic subversion of the dichotomies between female and male, homo- and heterosexual.⁶² The result of the appearance of these identical twins in the final act is a decided disruption of the stability of sexual and gender difference and the sense of individuated identity it fosters. Sebastian tells Olivia that even though she would have been contracted to the maid Viola if he had not fortuitously appeared, she is now "betroth'd both to a maid and a man" (5.1.261). He is not only assuring her that he is himself a virgin, but he is also making wanton with the meaning of the word "maid" as a young woman. Sebastian is a character whose similar appearance to his sister gives him a decided resemblance to a maid, but whose identity with Cesario allows him to play the part of a man. Even in this concluding marriage scene, therefore, the play's language produces destabilizing configurations of gender.

The prosthetic nature of gender's supposed inherency is dramatized even further by the role that costume plays in this concluding scene. Once Cesario discloses herself as Sebastian's twin sister, Orsino decides he wants a share in the "happy wrack" of this collapse of gender identity by capitalizing on Cesario's previously proclaimed love for a woman like him; but he continues to address her as "boy" and "Cesario":

For so you shall be while you are a man;
But when in other habits you are seen,
Orsino's mistress and his fancy's queen.

[5.1.385-87]

Like Clerimont in Jonson's Epicoene, who uses his "ingle" at home when his mistress is unattainable, Orsino settles for a marriage with his male page. For Orsino, Viola can only establish her true identity by recovering her maiden's weeds from the captain she left in act 1, who now for some reason is under arrest at the behest of Malvolio. Consistent with the import of Renaissance sumptuary laws that regulated dress among classes as well as sexes—laws championed by Malvolian moralists like Gosson and Stubbes—Orsino's final statement indicates, albeit playfully, that Viola will be a man until she adopts the "habit" of female attire, until her appearance conforms to the mundane trappings that are the foundations of gender identity. Her gender is dependent upon a factor as easily changeable as her weeds are pret-a-porter. Ironically, that attire is still unrecovered at the close of this final scene, as Orsino walks off stage with his Cesario.

While the wonderful discoveries of act 5 make for a tidy if contrived romance ending, below the surface of these marriage knots, with their diluted flavor of androgyny, lies an entanglement that transcends the freedom these characters may gain from a mild subversion of normative gender relations. What is particularly troubling about the ending of Twelfth Night—and particularly important from a perspective beyond the necessary upheaval of entrenched gender politics—are the ways in which gender performance in this play, although successful in questioning identity, does not necessarily give these characters what they want.⁶³ The dismantling of the automatic collapse of sex and gender in this play, even when successful, does not bring the subject to a new metaphysical substance, to a new place of performative stability. Although Viola achieves her goal of marrying Orsino, the man she is betrothed to has, minutes before, agreed to sacrifice her for the love of Olivia. Arguably Sebastian is satisfied with his surprise catch of the Countess, but his reaction to the appearance of his friend Antonio on the scene gives the audience pause: "Antonio! O my dear Antonio, / How have the hours rack'd and tortur'd me / Since I have lost thee!" (5.1.216-18). How can Olivia have satisfied her desire by mistakenly marrying the enchanting Cesario's seeming copy, a stranger as passionately attached to a pirate as herself? The homoerotic element of the play, while troubling and disruptive in its dramatic development, may not have the power in this final scene to overcome fully the symbolic dictates of compulsory heterosexuality, at least from a perspective of formal kinship relations. Yet even if homoeroticism triumphed in Twelfth Night and Viola walked off stage arm-in-arm with Olivia and Sebastian with Antonio, the problems of the irrationality of desire and the instability of identity would not vanish. Desire is not erased by the successful disruption of gender boundaries; it continues to haunt the subject despite the performance of the most fantastic of love's imaginings. Yet the interminable nature of desire and the fantasies of love that are desire's dialectical counterpart serve as important catalysts for the subversion and displacement "of those naturalized and reified notions of gender that support masculine hegemony and heterosexist power" through strategies of gender trouble.⁶⁴

Notes

¹ See for example, Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men's Press, 1982); Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Gregory W. Bredbeck, Sodomy and Interpretation: Marlowe to Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992); Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: The Circulation of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (New York: Routledge, 1992); Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994).

² Some important scholars find the subversive elements of the play to be contained within patriarchal structures: see Stephen Greenblatt's conclusion in "Fiction and Friction," in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 66-93; Jean E. Howard, "Crossdressing, The Theatre, and Gender in Struggle Early Modern England," Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988): 418-40; and most recently Michael Shapiro, Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1994). Other scholars find the play more transgressive: see Catherine Belsey, "Disrupting Sexual Difference: Meaning and Gender in the Comedies," in Alternative Shakespeares (New York: Methuen, 1985); and Phyliss Rackin, "Androgyny, Mimesis, and the Marriage of the Boy Heroine on the English Renaissance Stage," PMLA 102 (1987): 29-41.

³ Joseph Pequigney, "The Two Antonios and Same-Sex Love in Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice, " English Literary Renaissance 22 (1992): 201, 209.

⁴ For a discussion of the implications of crossdressing see, Howard, "Crossdressing"; Rackin, "Androgyny"; Belsey, "Disrupting Sexual Difference"; and Lisa Jardine, "Twins and Transvestites: Gender, Dependency, and Sexual Availability in Twelfth Night," in her Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage (New York: Routledge, 1992), 27-36, as well as her more complete study, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Brighton: Harvester, 1983).

⁵ Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety, 130, 141.

⁶ See C[esar] L[ombardi] Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959).

⁷ Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 7.

⁸ Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993), 9-10.

⁹ See Butler, Bodies That Matter, 12.

¹⁰ Shakespeare, The Arden Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare: Twelfth Night, ed. J[ohn] M[aule] Lothian and T[homas] W[allace] Craik (London: Routledge, 1975).

¹¹ In Gender in Play (221-23), Shapiro lists eighty-one English dramas during a period from 1570 to 1642 that portray heroines in male disguise.

¹² See Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Frank Wigham, "Interpretation at Court: Courtesy and the Performance-Audience Dialectic," New Literary History 14 (1983): 623-39. For the concept of performativity in Shakespeare generally, see Emily C. Bartels, "Breaking the Illusion of Being: Shakespeare and the Performance of Self," Theatre Journal 46 (1994): 171-85.

¹³ My argument here and elsewhere is indebted to Catherine Belsey's discussion of the play's questioning of conventional models of gendered interaction in "Disrupting Sexual Difference," 16-17.

¹⁴ See Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, "Fetishizing Gender: Constructing the Hermaphrodite in Renaissance Europe, in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julian Epstein and Kristina Straub (New York: Routledge, 1991), 80-111.

¹⁵ Thomas Lacquer, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 8-10.

¹⁶ Weyer, Johann, Witches, Devils, and Doctors in the Renaissance: De praestigii daemonum (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1991), 345-46.

¹⁷ Greenblatt, "Fiction and Friction," 78.

¹⁸ Jones and Stallybrass, "Fetishizing Gender," 105-6.

¹⁹ Greenblatt, "Fiction and Friction," 92-93.

²⁰ Edward Coke, quoted in Randolph Trumbach, "London's Sapphists: From Three Sexes to Four Genders in the Making of Modern Culture," in Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History, ed. Gilbert Herdt (New York: Zone, 1994), 119.

²¹ In her speech to the troops at Tilbury, Elizabeth states, "I have the body but of a weak and frail woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king" (The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume One, 6th ed. [New York: Norton, 1993], 999). James's romantic letters to his favorites Somerset and Villers are evidence of his homoerotic tendencies; see his Letters of King James VI and I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). In this regard, note the Renaissance popularity of the story of Edward II and his fateful attachment to Gaveston in works such as Marlowe's Edward II and Michael Drayton's Piers Gaveston (1593).

²² See Vern L. and Bonnie Bullough, Cross-Dressing, Sex, and Gender (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993); Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992).

²³ See Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), 212-14.

²⁴ Jardine, Still Harping; Stephen Orgel, "Nobody's Perfect: Or Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for Women," South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (1989): 26.

²⁵ Bullough, Crossdressing, 98.

²⁶ Stephen Gosson, The School of Abuse, quoted in Laura Levine, "Men in Women's Clothing: Anti-theatricality and Effeminization from 1579-1642," Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 28 (1982): 131.

²⁷ John Rainoldes, Th ' Overthrow of Stage-Playes (Middleburgh, 1599), quoted in Jardine, Still Harping, 9.

²⁸ William Prynne, Histrio-mastix: The Player's Scourge or Actor's Tragedy (New York: Garland, 1974), 75-76.

²⁹ See Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).

³⁰ For another dramatization of the controversy over theatrical cross-dressing, see the puppet show in the final act of Jonson's Bartholomew Fair.

³¹ See Ambroise Paré, Of Monsters and Prodigies, in The Workes of Ambrose Parey, trans. Thomas Johnson (London, 1634). For the eunuch controversy, see Keir Elam, "The Fertile Eunuch: Twelfth Night, Early Modern Intercourse, and the Fruits of Castration," Shakespeare Quarterly 47 (1996): 1-37.

³² See Lothian and Craik's Introduction to the Arden Edition of Twelfth Night, 26-27.

³³ See Rackin, "Androgyny," 58; Howard, "Crossdressing," 439.

³⁴ Prynne, Histrio-mastix, 208-14.

³⁵ Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon, 1992), 26; see also Butler, Gender Trouble, 115.

³⁶ Barber, Festive Comedy, 245.

³⁷ Alan Bray, Homosexuality, 74; Jardine, "Twins," 28.

³⁸ See James M. Saslow, "Homosexuality in the Renaissance: Behavior, Identity, and Artistic Expression," in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncy, Jr. (New York: Meridian, 1989), 95.

³⁹ See Judith C. Brown, Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Louis Crompton, "The Myth of Lesbian Impunity: Capital Laws from 1270-1791," in Historical Perspectives on Homosexuality, ed. Salvatore J. Licata and Robert P. Peterson (New York: Haworth, 1981), 11-25.

⁴⁰ For recent scholarship, see Brown, Immodest Acts; Lillian Faderman Surpassing the Love of Men (New York: Morrow, 1981) and Playing with Gender: A Renaissance Pursuit, ed. Jean R. Brink, Maryanne C. Horowitz, and Alison P. Condert (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991).

⁴¹ For an even more developed lesbian subplot in La Diana than the analogue to Twelfth Night, see the story of Selvagia and Ismenia in Book One (Jorge de Monte-mayor, A Critical Edition of Yong's Translation of George of Montemayor's Diana and Gil Polo's Enamoured Diana, ed. Judith M. Kennedy [Oxford: Clarendon, 1968]).

⁴² See Dale B. J. Randall, "The Troublesome and Hard Adventures in Love: An English Addition to the Bibliography of Diana," Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 38 (1961): 154-58.

⁴³ Traub, Desire and Anxiety, 121.

⁴⁴ Shapiro, Gender in Play, 151-54.

⁴⁵ Traub, Desire and Anxiety, 130.

⁴⁶ In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1981), Jacques Lacan remarks that narcissistic gratification is love's primary motivation. Comparing the processes of analysis to the interaction of lovers, he concludes that the lover turns the beloved into a subject supposed to know, someone who can answer all his questions about what he wants (267). This transference is actually undertaken by the lover as a strategy of narcissism, in which the beloved, flattered by the lover, eventually recognizes and pays attention to the beloved (253). This imaginary and narcissistic fantasy called love necessarily seeks to close off the unconscious and the lack that is desire. The motto of the lover in approaching the beloved is always "in you more than you," a phrase that summarizes this process of imaginary overestimation for purposes of avoiding desire (263).

⁴⁷ See Howard, "Crossdressing," 431.

⁴⁸ Butler, Bodies, 231.

⁴⁹ "Despite her masculine attire and the confusion it causes in Illyria, Viola's is a properly feminine subjectivity; and this fact countervails the threat posed by her clothes and removes any possibility that she might permanently aspire to masculine privilege and prerogatives" (Howard, "Crossdressing," 432). For Howard the truly transgressive female in the play is Olivia, but she is "punished, comically but unmistakably" by her love for Viola/Cesario (432). But what characters do not fall into "abatement and low price" because of their erotic attraction in this play? Howard's reading of Twelfth Night usefully illustrates one way in which the concerns of feminism can collide with the aims of gender studies, in so far as the latter attacks power through parodic deconstruction of its categories while the former seeks to work within those categories of power by searching for women who gain masculine "privilege."

⁵⁰ See Smith, Homosexual Desire, 151; Pequigney, "The Two Antonios," 207.

⁵¹ B[arry] R[ichard] Bury, "Ho-Hum, Another Work of the Devil: Buggery and Sodomy in Early Stuart England," in Historical Perspectives on Homosexuality, ed. Salvatore J. Licata and Robert P. Peterson (New York: Haworth, 1981), 69-78.

⁵² See Trumbach, "London's Sapphists," 133; Traub, Desire and Anxiety, 134.

⁵³ Pequigney, "The Two Antonios," 204.

⁵⁴ Alan Bray, "Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England," History Workshop Journal 29 (1990): 10-11.

⁵⁵ Admittedly, one of the historian's main points is that these clues were growing more and more ambiguous at the end of the sixteenth century.

⁵⁶ Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, 74.

⁵⁷ See Saslow, "Homosexuality," 94.

⁵⁸ The "homoeroticization" of St. Sebastian is evident in Renaissance art and carried forward in Derek Jarman's recent film. See, for example, Antonio and Piero de Poliamolo, The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian (1496?), National Gallery, London.

⁵⁹ Traub, Desire and Anxiety, 138; Pequigney, "The Two Antonios," 206.

⁶⁰ Butler, Bodies, 237.

⁶¹ See Karen Grief, "Plays and Playing in Twelfth Night," Shakespeare Survey 34 (1981): 121-30.

⁶² Although Greenblatt ("Fiction and Friction") argues that the sameness is a maleness since both characters are dressed as men at the end of the play, Viola's central performance throughout the play has already shown that clothes do not necessarily make the man, that masculinity is a role played most successfully by a woman.

⁶³ See Barbara Freedman, "Separation and Fusion in Twelfth Night" in Psychoanalytic Approaches to Literature and Film, ed. Maurice Charney and Joseph Reppen (Cranbury: Associated University Press, 1978), 96-119.

⁶⁴ Butler, Gender Trouble, 34.

Source: "Gender Trouble in Twelfth Night" in Theatre Journal, Vol. 49, No. 2, May, 1997, pp. 121-41.