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 1601,¹Twelfth 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 control the outcome of the play. In Twelfth Night, Shakespeare enlarged the male persona that the boy heroine assumed along with male disguise. At times, the actor playing Viola displays Ganymed's audacity if not Balthazar's commanding resourcefulness. At other times, the role calls for different aspects of boyishness—delicacy and shyness. The two sides of Cesario's personality represent Viola's tendencies toward assertiveness and vulnerability, modulated to suit a young male servant. Cesario's double nature is underscored farcically by his terror of dueling but more interestingly by his appearance in highly charged duet scenes both with the man he serves and has come to love and with a woman who has fallen in love with him. In Twelfth Night, more explicitly than in previous plays involving heroines in male disguise, Shakespeare exploited the play-boy's dexterous articulation of layered sexual identities by accenting the very sexuality of these identities. Some subsequent playwrights, such as Barry, Middleton, and Brome, picked up this variation and in turn modified it in characteristic ways, while Shirley alone surpassed Shakespeare in exploring the anxieties created by the homoerotic potentialities of the play-boy/female page.

THE STAGING OF INTIMACY

Although Viola plays a page who is at different moments both cheeky and shy, who attracts a woman and who is attracted to a man, the complex figure of male actor/female character/male disguise did not, I believe, fuse into a single androgynous entity. The young male performers who specialized in female roles were not genderless but boys or young men, not yet but potentially adult males. They were androgynous only in the sense that they might be sex objects both to some men and to some women. When they played romantic heroines, they must have been capable of representing sexually mature and responsive young women. In plays in which such women adopt male disguise, these same performers probably played female and male identities in contrasting ways. Indeterminacy of gender in disguised heroine plays occurred only when dramatists like Fletcher, Chapman, or Middleton wished to create uncertainty, if not actual surprise, in their audiences by withholding explicit knowledge of the page's female identity. As separate moments in a play highlighted the discrete layers of sexual identity belonging to actor, heroine, and disguised persona, various images of hetero- and homosexual intimacy crossed the consciousness of individual spectators, arousing types of anxieties peculiar to their own personal histories. Antitheatrical writers object to the images of women being represented on the stage, to the effeminization of the male performer, and to his use as an object of erotic excitement. Given the lack of reliable data and the probable heterogeneity of playhouse audiences, it seems impossible to specify which particular responses were elicited in which spectators by which types of theatrical combinations. Nor is it necessary to do so, for nearly any likely response to the representation of intimacy added excitement and risk to the form of play known as play going.

Some psychoanalysts suggest that spectators respond to theatrical representations of intimacy as primal fantasies, like children imagining that they are watching their parents in sexual intercourse. Such representation in Shakespeare's day might have included scenes of kissing, caressing, and embracing, as well as scenes depicting emotional relations implying or leading to sexual exchange. The psychoanalytic model suggests a rich mixture of responses, possibly including elements of desire, pleasure, jealousy, embarrassment, guilt, or fear. Because the precise components of this mixture vary widely among individuals, I refer to it by the general term anxiety.

As readers may recall from their own (early) experience, such moments of theatricalized intimacy may also test spectators' identification with protagonists. Juvenile audiences, one recalls, would snicker, hoot, and groan whenever their role models strayed into love scenes, even if these sexual exchanges were carefully stylized and stopped far short of implying intercourse, let alone representing it. Adult spectators may feel similar anxieties but rarely express them as open derision. Although the precise nature of the anxiety may vary with one's gender, social status, and personal experience, dramatized portrayals of sexual and emotional intimacy can be troubling because exciting and exciting because troubling. One adult defense against such anxieties is to dismiss what is happening on screen or stage as “only a film” or “only a play,” that is, to use aesthetic distance as a psychological barrier.

But one of the theater's most potent effects is precisely the blurring of boundaries between art and life, an effect easily created when spectators are in the physical presence of live actors who are publicly saying words and occasionally performing actions usually reserved for secluded situations. By means of conventions and codes, theater also blurs the distinction between physical and emotional intimacy, for what actors do and say onstage may be intended to imply far greater physical or emotional intimacy than what is being enacted.²

The codes and conventions of Shakespeare's day, more restrictive than those of the late twentieth century, implied what could not be shown or what one was to imagine might be about to take place offstage. Passionate scenes between lovers and would-be lovers that seem tamely decorous to modern spectators might well have evoked stronger responses in the period and might have served as the equivalent of theatricalized primal scenes. Often the language surpasses the stage action in emotional intensity, as in Robert Greene's James the Fourth, where a woman who falls in love with a female page speaks of her “insatiate lust” even though her behavior, to judge from the text, is chastely self-restrained. Because of its unusual reliance on intimate duet scenes, Twelfth Night, which even by Elizabethan standards is restrained in the ways it dramatizes sexual attraction, needs to be understood in a context of theatrical representations of both sexual and emotional intimacy.

In the Renaissance theater, cross-gender casting added another set of anxieties because of the culture's official condemnation of homosexuality and the obsessive focusing of Puritan antitheatrical attacks on theatrical transvestism. Scenes of heterosexual physical intimacy in the world of the play could be seen as involving homoerotic acts in the world of the playhouse. How pervasive this view was among actual audiences is debatable, for very few plays do anything to authorize a puritanical response, but it seems likely that many spectators were aware of the condemnation of theatrical cross-dressing expressed in antitheatrical treatises and elsewhere throughout the period.

Addressing just such anxieties over the plays he produced at Christ Church College, Oxford, between 1582 and 1592, William Gager denied that his staging of heterosexual love scenes involved any actions that could be construed as homoerotic:

As for the danger of kissinge bewtifull boyes, … it is untrwe, … that owre Eurymachus did kisse owre Melantho. I have enquyred of the partyes themselves, whether any suche action was used by them, and thay constantly denye it; sure I ame, no suche thinge was taught. If you conjecture there was kissinge because Melantho spake this verse, Furtiva nullus oscula Eurymachus dabit, … yet, therby no kissinge can be proved agaynst us, but that rather, that thinge only in wordes was expressed.³

If Gager's attitude is representative, university productions did not enact sexual passion but rather indicated it through words alone, perhaps accompanied by chastely stylized stage business, as in some scholastic productions today. Gager also differentiated academic productions, ostensibly done for pedagogic purposes, from those of the commercial theater.⁴

Unlike Gager's pupils, Elizabethan professional troupes did not hesitate to dramatize moments of physical intimacy, and apparently did so with greater naturalism and intensity. J. G. B. Streett's catalog of examples suggests that English Renaissance plays call for considerably more kissing, caressing, and fondling than earlier scholars wished to acknowledge.⁵ One example comes from Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1588-90), a play written long before the alleged decadence of the late Jacobean and Caroline periods. In the famous bower scene, Horatio and Bel-Imperia sit down (“for pleasure asketh ease”) and then graphically describe their progression from hand-holding to footsie, kisses, close embraces, and finally—just before his killers interrupt them—to Horatio's plea that Bel-Imperia “stay a while, and I will die with thee.”⁶ Gager's argument, that verbal expressions of emotional and physical intimacy need not necessitate physicalization, would not seem to apply to so explicit a listing of gestures.

It is hard to imagine the actors not doing what the characters say they are doing. By our standards, the actors might have seemed detached, but even if stylized or coded the physical gestures represent the sexual expression of passionate love, in this case a clandestine tryst rather than the simple kiss of Gager's example. Moments like this one aroused the ire of William Prynne, who was hardly an objective source and who probably relied on secondhand reports. Nevertheless Kyd's play provided a graphic example of what a Puritan like Prynne, in his antitheatrical tract entitled Histrio-Mastix (pub. 1633), called “those immodest gestures” or “those reall lively representations of the actors of venery, which attend and set out Stage-playes.”⁷

Such representations of heterosexual sexual activity, however naturalistically staged, probably evoked or accented the presence of the male actors, especially if, as Heywood claims, they were easily recognized by spectators. The aesthetic defense against anxiety caused by scenes of heterosexual intimacy—“it's only a play”—led to another source of anxiety by activating audiences' dual consciousness of play-boys and female characters and so evoking concern over (and sometimes interest in) what the male actors were doing with their own bodies.

Although most plays do not activate dual consciousness by explicit allusions at such moments, boy-bride plays do so by incorporating female impersonation into the world of the play, so that the audience finds itself in the position of those characters who are in on the joke, that is, watching a boy make other men believe he is a woman. If consciousness of the play-boy was accented by the reflexive effect of male disguise, then any intimate scenes involving a female page may have further underscored the homoerotic nature of the relationship at the metatheatrical level.

STAGING MALE HOMOSEXUAL INTIMACY: FARRANT'S THE WARS OF CYRUS

This complex of anxieties over the presentation of intimacy at both mimetic and theatrical levels can be illustrated by the subplot of The Wars of Cyrus. The play was probably written by Richard Farrant for the Chapel Children and performed in the first Blackfriars theater in the late 1570s, although it was not published until 1594. Both the subplot, adapted from Xenophon's Cyropaedia, and the main plot are variants of the captive-heroine motif often used in plays performed by the children's troupes in the 1570s and 1580s.⁸ Alexandra, the heroine of the subplot, escapes from captivity by exchanging clothing and identities with her page, Libanio. Both mistress and page are played by two young male actors capable of depicting boys or women equally well. One plays a woman impersonating a boy, a female page; the other a boy impersonating a woman, a boy bride.

Libanio impersonates his mistress well enough to excite Dinon, their guard. As Alexandra, Libanio initially protests that “I am too young to love” (l. 894), while Dinon offers to buy her favors, but she then coyly implies that it is not the offer of wealth but passion itself that makes her “blush to say I love my Lord” (l. 935). When Dinon presses further—“And when thou blushes[t] Dinon's heart is fired; / Therefore to quench it give a gentle grant” (ll. 936-37)—Libanio parries by seeming to redefine “grant” in purely verbal terms: “My honor being preserved, my grant is given” (l. 938).

It is not clear from the text exactly how Dinon understands Libanio's ambiguous reply, nor whether he understands “honor” to mean reputation or virginity. Perhaps verbal capitulation is enough to satisfy him, or perhaps it is intended as a symbolic indication of sexual submission. In either case, he quickly falls into a state of lassitude, asking Libanio to “lull me asleep with sweetness of thy voice” (l. 942). In the context of this play, the song might have functioned as a symbolic indicator of sexual intimacy—the equivalent of the closing of the bedroom door in films of an earlier day. Although the song seems to put Dinon into state of repose, in describing this encounter to other men later in the play, Libanio disingenuously attributes the guard's sleepiness to other causes: “long continued talke, / And heate of sunne reflecting on the bankes, / Or happlie with the ratling harmonie / [of] Euphrates his gliding streames” (ll. 1112-15).

Whether or not the page's sexual submission was symbolically indicated, the boy bride immediately resumes his male identity. Having compromised his manliness by the assumption of female disguise and by allowing Dinon to see and perhaps to use him as a woman, Libanio now moves to redeem his own virility. The moment Dinon falls asleep, Libanio prepares to kill him with the guard's own sword, “the sworde that hangde loose dangling by his side” (l. 1120), but which he appropriates as his own in the soliloquy preceding the murder:

Sleep, Dinon! Then, Libanio, draw thy sword
And manly thrust it in his slumbering heart!
… Now Dinon dies! Alas, I cannot strike!
This habit makes me over pitiful.
Remember that thou art Libanio—
No woman, but a bondman! Strike and fly!

(ll. 944-57)

To reaffirm his own masculine identity, Libanio rejects both compassion and self-pity as feminine attributes induced by his wearing of women's garments, and he commits an act of “manly” violence. Only such an act will cleanse him of the shame of being “taken” as a woman, and permit him to accept the title that other men later bestow on him, “president of manly fortitude” (l. 1128), in which there may have lurked a further irony depending on the age of the play-boy cast in the role.

This subplot betrays considerable uneasiness about the risk to male sexual identity when boys or young men impersonate women too successfully. Within the world of the play, Libanio's impersonation of Alexandra reflects exactly what young male actors often did in the world of the playhouse—portray women who aroused the sexual interest of male characters and, so it was said, of male spectators as well. In most plays, such anxieties are unacknowledged and remain confined to the metatheatrical level. Boy-bride plays like this one, however, bring such concerns to conscious attention. Most of them, like Epicoene, focus ridicule on the man who mistook the boy bride for a woman. The Wars of Cyrus, however, sees the “mistake” from the point of view of the boy, dramatizing underlying concerns about the effects of cross-gender casting on male sexuality. That concern was brought to the surface more subtly in plays like Twelfth Night, where, instead of reinscribing female impersonation within the world of the play, cross-gender disguise reflexively underscored the presence of the male actor in the female role.

STAGING INTIMACY BETWEEN WOMEN: GREENE'S JAMES THE FOURTH

Unlike The Wars of Cyrus, which dramatizes the attraction of a man to a boy bride, Greene's James the Fourth (Queen's? c. 1590)⁹ depicts a woman's infatuation with a female page. As such it is a precursor of Twelfth Night, the only one of Shakespeare's disguised heroine plays to explore the relationship between the protagonist and another woman. Greene makes far more of Lady Cuthbert Anderson's desire for the disguised Dorothea, queen of Scots, than Cinthio did in the source (Hecatommithi III.i). Cinthio's novella denies any sexual basis to the relationship between Arenopia and her rescuer by informing the reader that “the wife of the knight [who nurses the female page back to health] liked her very much indeed, not lasciviously but … as a brother.”¹⁰ Greene devotes parts of two scenes to Lady Anderson's “insatiate lust” for the disguised Dorothea, yet does so with restraint. In V.i., the presence of Nano, Dorothea's dwarf, prevents Lady Anderson from wooing her patient too ardently. Six lines before the end of the scene, Dorothea sends Nano away and Lady Anderson is finally alone with the object of her affections for the first time. Their brief dialogue is formalistically intensified by rhymed stichomythia but nevertheless gives intimacy a very wide berth:

L. And. Now, sir, what cheer? Come, taste this broth I bring.
Dor. My grief is past, I feel no further sting.
L. And. Where is your dwarf? Why hath he left you, sir?
Dor. For some affairs; he is not travelled far.
L. And. If so you please, come in and take your rest.
Dor. Fear keeps awake a discontented breast.

(ll. 94-99)

In another context, Lady Anderson's invitation might sound seductive; here it resembles the professional solicitude of a hospital nurse.

In V.v, Nano is again present and forces Dorothea to reveal her identity by offering to wager with Lady Anderson that “My master here will prove a married wife” (l. 21). Blushing but relieved, Dorothea verifies Nano's claim, while Lady Anderson, deeply stung, modulates from anger to shame and does so not in asides or soliloquy but in conversation with Nano and Dorothea:

L. And. Deceitful beauty, hast thou scorned me so?
Nano. Nay, muse not, madam, for she tells you true.
L. And. Beauty bred love, and love hath bred my shame.
Nano. And women's faces work more wrongs than these;
Take comfort, madam, to cure your disease.
And yet she loves a man as well as you,
Only this difference, she cannot fancy too.
L. And. Blush, grieve, and die in thine insatiate lust!

(ll. 46-53)

Then, in response to Dorothea's offer of friendship, still referring to the queen as “my lord,” she expresses her continued love (“although not as I desired”), acknowledges her “false heart,” and asks “pardon [of her] most gracious princess” (ll. 56-60). These rapid transitions skate quickly over Lady Anderson's complicated emotional states.¹¹ Her reactions result from her having made amorous advances toward a character she has discovered to be of her own sex, a situation inversely reflected in the fact that both actors were male, as Dorothea's cross-gender disguise would have reminded the audience.

SHAKESPEARE'S STAGING OF INTIMACY BETWEEN WOMEN: VIOLA AND OLIVIA

In Twelfth Night, Shakespeare puts greater pressure on the relationship between mistress and female page than either Lyly or Greene had done. In his earlier disguised-heroine plays, he did not allow any of his female pages to play intimate scenes with female characters, even though the source for Two Gentlemen had explored just such a relationship. In Twelfth Night, Shakespeare keeps Olivia and Viola together alone on stage three times in order to dramatize Olivia's deepening passion.

Each of these encounters begins by announcing a private rendezvous. In their first meeting, I.v, Olivia finds herself intrigued by this stranger, who had been saucy at her gates but who now seems respectful, if resolute.¹² Her interest piqued, Olivia dismisses her attendants: “Give us this place alone, we will hear this divinity” (ll. 218-19). Olivia's scorning of Orsino's suit, coupled with her pride and vanity, drive Cesario to declare what he would do “If I did love you in my master's flame” (l. 264), a declaration that for the first time in the scene diverts Olivia's attention away from her own role as the “cruel fair” and on to the person standing before her: “Why, what would you?” (l. 267). Cesario's answer, the energetic (and perhaps urgent) “willow cabin” speech, keeps Olivia's attention riveted on this audacious youth: “You might do much. / What is your parentage?” (ll. 276-77). In Olivia's next speech, she abruptly modulates from haughtiness toward Orsino to seductive charm toward Cesario:

                                                                                Get you to your lord.
I cannot love him; let him send no more—
Unless (perchance) you come to me again
To tell me how he takes it.

(ll. 279-82)

This first exchange, ending with Olivia's realization that she has caught the “plague,” compresses and dramatizes what Shakespeare's probable source, Riche's “Of Apolonius and Silla,” reports took place only after Julina (Olivia) had “many tymes taken the gaze of this young youth.” Julina is straightforward in revealing her feelings to the duke's emissary: “it is enough that you have saied for your maister; from henceforthe, either speake for your self or saie nothyng at all.”¹³ In two other duet scenes, Shakespeare dramatized Olivia's growing infatuation, and her attempts both to conceal and expose enough of it to extract a reciprocal response from Cesario.

Privacy is again stressed in the second meeting, when Cesario returns to woo on Orsino's behalf. He asks to speak alone with Olivia, who sends the other characters off: “Let the garden door be shut, and leave me to my hearing” (III.i.92-93). Her next words imply a desire for even closer contact: “Give me your hand, sir.” She asks the servant's name but becomes angry when Cesario reopens Orsino's courtship, and then—as tactfully as she can—points out that she has virtually thrown herself at Cesario:

                                                                      To one of your receiving
Enough is shown; a cypress, not a bosom,
Hides my heart.

(ll. 119-21)

Unable to make Cesario acknowledge her feelings, let alone reciprocate them, Olivia orders him to leave but then abruptly orders him to “Stay!” (l. 137). In one of the most reflexive moments in the play, each character accuses the other of not being “what you are” (l. 139). In their first meeting, Cesario had denied being a “comedian” but admitted “I am not that I play” (I.v.184), alluding both to the female character and metatheatrically to the performer. Here the line is repeated in revised form—“I am not what I am” (l. 141)—and underscores both of those layers of identity, as well as seeming to point beyond them to more profound ontological realms. But the dialogue returns abruptly to the mimetic level with Olivia's wish that “you were as I would have you be” (l. 142), Viola's “contempt and anger” (l. 146), and Olivia's aside, followed by her formal Petrarchan declaration of passion in rhymed couplets:

Cesario, by the roses of the spring,
By maidhood, honor, truth, and every thing,
I love thee so, that maugre all thy pride,
Nor wit nor reason can my passion hide.

(ll. 149-52)

In matched rhymed couplets, Cesario refuses to accept any woman's love, and the scene ends with one last plaintive appeal from Olivia—“Yet come again.” But the urgent command is retracted, seemingly restated in less imperious but passionate terms (“for thou perhaps mayst move”), until it is masked by the duplicitous hint of her receptivity to Orsino's suit (“The heart which now abhors, to like his love” [ll. 163-64]). Olivia's entreaty to a social inferior plus her sudden abandonment of her vow of mourning, however lightly held, is a sure sign that powerful forces of sexual attraction are stirring in her.

More than in any of the possible sources and analogues, the scene emphasizes the desperation of Olivia's wooing, however restrained by decorum, as well as stressing Viola's confused mixture of embarrassment and anger. An Italian dramatic treatment of the same source material, Gl'Ingannati, avoided such delicate feelings in favor of franker physicalization of the mistress's “insatiate lust” framed by coarse onstage commentary.¹⁴ In II.vi, the only duet scene between Isabella (Olivia) and Lelia (Viola) in her disguise as Fabio (Cesario), the lady reveals her attraction to the page by inviting him to “Come into the doorway a little” (2:308). She kisses him, just offstage, according to two voyeuristic servants, after which Lelia returns to offer her own cynical and self-absorbed appraisal of the situation: “On the one hand I am having fun at the expense of her who believes me a man, on the other I should like to get out of this scrape” (2:309). Viola is never approached as directly as this, nor is she amused by Olivia's plight: “Poor lady, she were better love a dream” (III.ii.26). Instead of Isabella's advances and Lelia's mockery, Shakespeare offers Olivia's enthrallment by the mysterious servant, an enthrallment she barely checked by her upper-class self-restraint. Less physically explicit than Gl'Ingannati, Twelfth Night suggests deeper wells of sexual passion and adds Viola's empathy with one she finds no less a victim of this bizarre triangle than herself and Orsino.

The third duet scene between Olivia and Cesario, embedded in III.iv, compresses their encounter into fifteen lines. Olivia does not need to demand privacy, as Fabian sees her coming with Cesario and warns Maria and Sir Toby to “give them way” (ll. 196-97). Jettisoning aristocratic reserve, Olivia complains that she has acted dishonorably in flinging herself at Cesario in order to bind him to her, while Cesario tries to make her empathize with Orsino's feelings of rejection so that he can renew Orsino's courtship. In each of these encounters, insistence on privacy leads one to expect physical intimacy, as in Gl'Ingannati, but Shakespeare dramatizes the emotional entanglements—Olivia's desire, vulnerability, and humiliation; Viola's bewilderment, irritation, and embarrassment. As in James the Fourth, the audience witnesses an intense interaction between two women, while the theatrical level involves the interaction of two male performers.¹⁵

MALE DISGUISE AND THE REPRESENTATION OF HETEROSEXUAL INTIMACY

Shakespeare's willingness to explore the problems of intimacy in scenes between a heroine in male disguise and the man she loves is all the more remarkable considering how few precedents he had to draw on in narrative or dramatic treatments of the material. In many narrative versions, particularly those in the chivalric tradition, the disguised heroine serves as faithful page or squire to her lover or husband. The emotional pressure of such proximity is rarely explored, even though she may sleep in the same room or bed, or on the same plot of ground, although Boccaccio and other writers of novelle develop the erotic possibilities of such scenes of intimacy.¹⁶

Until the Jacobean period, even when English playwrights dramatized moments of heterosexual intimacy, they rarely did so in scenes involving a heroine in male disguise, probably because of the reflexive power of the assumed male identity to call attention to the gender of the play-boy and so raise the kinds of anxieties alluded to by Gager and exorcised by Farrant in The Wars of Cyrus. Before Twelfth Night, stage heroines in male disguise are denied scenes of emotional intimacy with their husbands, lovers, or other men. Neronis, disguised as a page in Clyomon, meets her beloved, the title character, alone in the woods, but, as he too has concealed his identity, they fail to recognize each other. Once Dorothea, the heroine of James the Fourth, dons male disguise, her only private encounter with a man, the assassin Jacques, is violent but is not sexual. Once Julia and Portia don male disguise, they have no duet scenes with Proteus or Bassanio. As Ganymed, Rosalind has one such moment with Orlando, but, as was noted, it was broken off in part because it suggested more intensity of feeling than either of them wished.

When Italian dramatists brought the disguised heroine and her beloved onstage, they usually sought broad comic effects, just as they did when the disguised heroine is wooed by another woman. In Gl'Ingannati, for example, Flamminio (Orsino) tells Fabio (Cesario) that he once loved “one named Lelia who I have often wished to say is the very image of you” (2:303). But when Flamminio repudiates Lelia in another duet, he fails to grasp the significance of the page's visible reaction:

Flamm. You have lost your colour. Go home; have a hot cloth on your chest and a rub behind the shoulders. … What strange accidents befall us men! … he seems to love me so much that if he were a woman I should think him lovesick for me.

(2:310)

Whereas the author of Gl'Ingannati stresses the comic effects of Flamminio's inability to see through Lelia's disguise, Shakespeare achieves quite different effects in Twelfth Night, in part because he stresses the female page's femininity rather than her boyishness. Alexander Leggatt observes that such stress on the female page's femininity is unusual: “Normally, when another character describes one of these disguised heroines, the emphasis is on the pert boyishness one imagines as a quality of the boy actor himself.”¹⁷ Viola is also less self-assertive than Julia, Portia, or Rosalind. Although she initially displays a brisk resolve to take control of her life, as the play unfolds she feels herself trapped by events she cannot subdue to her will, and she soon throws herself on the mercy of Time to untangle the knot that is too hard for her to untie.

The circumstances of Viola's disguising also accentuate her relative helplessness. The other three heroines arrange their disguisings. Viola's depends on the cooperation of the captain, and she sees in male disguise no possibilities for parodying male folly. By the end of II.ii, she regards “disguise” as “a wickedness / Wherein the pregnant enemy does much” (ll. 27-28). Neither a doctor of law nor the saucy lackey, Viola instructs the captain to “present me as an eunuch” (I.ii.56).¹⁸

Viola is also more isolated than Shakespeare's other heroines in male disguise. Her confidant, the captain, never returns after his initial appearance, leaving her with no Celia or Nerissa on stage through whom she can activate her identity as a woman. She therefore speaks in riddles to the other characters—“I am not that I play” (I.v.184), “I am not what I am” (III.i.141), and “I am all the daughters of my father's house, / And all the brothers too” (II.iv.120-21), and she frequently turns to the audience for soliloquies and asides, as neither Portia nor Rosalind need to do. While these moments establish a strong rapport with the audience, they do not “mock or undermine others, as comic asides conventionally do,” but rather express her feelings of impotence and evoke pathos. She may take over the play, but she cannot control the plot.¹⁹

Intimate moments between the disguised heroine and the man she loves are lightly sketched in Riche's “Of Apolonius and Silla,” where the page rises to the status of trusted valet: “Silvio [Cesario] pleased his maister so well that above all the reste of his servantes aboute hym he had the greatest credite, and the Duke put him moste in trust” (2:350-51). Leslie Hotson suggested that Shakespeare amplified and intensified Riche's narrative to make his Duke Orsino resemble Elizabeth's visitor of the same name from Italy.²⁰ Whatever the reasons, Shakespeare deviated not only from his source, but also from contemporary theatrical treatments of the heroine in male disguise and from his own previous treatments of the motif. He placed Viola, disguised as Cesario, in two scenes (one of them divided into two subscenes) with Orsino; and he dramatized the duke's growing attachment to his new “male” servant.

These scenes necessarily included material Riche had already narrated in earlier episodes. Silla had fallen in love with the duke when he visited her father and travels by sea to the duke's court so that “she might againe take the vewe of her beloved Apolonius” (2:348). Viola, shipwrecked by fortune, recalls hearing of Orsino when the captain mentions him as the local ruler. By denying Viola any previous involvement with Orsino, Shakespeare had to dramatize her falling in love with him at some point after she had taken on the identity of Cesario.

In fact, Orsino's attraction to Cesario is presented first. In the opening lines of their first scene together, I.iv, Valentine, one of Orsino's servants, paraphrases Riche's description of their rapidly developing intimacy:

If the Duke continue these favors towards you, Cesario, you are like to be much advanc'd; he hath known you but three days, and already you are no stranger.

(ll. 1-4)

He then dramatizes this relationship directly. Orsino's entering line, “Who saw Cesario, ho?” (l. 10), implies a sense of urgency, and his order to his other servants when he notes Cesario's presence—“Stand you awhile aloof”—is a demand for privacy that emphasizes the intensity of the bond that has suddenly grown between them. His next lines make the point explicitly:

                                                                                                    Cesario,
Thou know'st no less but all. I have unclasp'd
To thee the book even of my secret soul.

(ll. 12-14)

The text inscribed in this book is Orsino's self-induced love for Olivia, which Shakespeare parodies as Petrarchist narcissism. In this mode, Orsino three times urges Cesario to plead “the passion of my love” (l. 24) to Olivia, while each time the page tries to point out the futility of the errand. Cesario's appeal to his youth and immaturity calls forth from Orsino a protest that plays reflexively across the various layers of Viola's identity:

                                                                                                    Dear lad, believe it;
For they shall yet belie thy happy years,
That say thou art a man. Diana's lip
Is not more smooth and rubious; thy small pipe
Is as the maiden's organ, shrill and sound,
And all is semblative a woman's part.

(ll. 29-34)

No less a victim than Olivia of Viola's cross-gender disguise, Orsino may without knowing it be responding to the woman beneath the disguise, but he takes Cesario to be what the audience knows the performer is—a pubescent male, or as Malvolio puts it, “not yet old enough for a man, nor young enough for a boy” (I.v.156-57).

As several critics observe, Cesario has the same effect on Orsino that he has on Olivia, drawing both characters out of self-absorption by riveting their attention onto himself.²¹ But whereas Olivia was attracted by the audacity of one who dared to be “saucy at my gates” (I.v.197), Orsino finds himself drawn to the feminine qualities of his page. By making Cesario appear both as an effeminate boy and as a saucy lackey, Shakespeare guided the boy actor toward a fresher treatment of the heroine's male disguise. Based on the view expressed by Rosalind that “boys and women are for the most part cattle of this color” (III.ii.414-15), Cesario's feminine male persona, like the image of the master-mistress of sonnet 20, must have made Orsino's attraction to him both more understandable and more troubling.²²

But unlike the speaker at the end of the sonnet, Orsino never explicitly dissociates himself from a sexual relationship with Cesario, and the actor can choose whether or not to make the duke self-conscious about his attachment to the youth.²³ As elsewhere in the play, the text gives him several opportunities to shift his focus away from Cesario by redirecting the conversation to his “love” for Olivia. Here, the transition from intense focus on the page to the resumption of Petrarchist posturing may occur gradually through the next line and a half—“I know thy constellation is right apt / For this affair”—or may be abruptly signaled by the phrase that follows, an imperiously vague command to his servants—“Some four or five attend him”—which in turn is followed by more Petrarchist self-dramatization—“All, if you will, for I myself am best / When least in company” (I.iv.35-38). After a short exhortation to Cesario, he leaves, allowing Viola an aside, a rhymed couplet that ends the scene and that is the first time the audience knows she has fallen in love with her master: “Yet a barful strife! / Whoe'er I woo, myself would be his wife” (ll. 41-42).

Cesario and Orsino are once again in intimate conversation in II.iv, a scene that has no equivalent in Riche's tale. Riche simply announces that the duke has chosen Silvio [Cesario] “to bee his messenger to carrie the tokens and love letters to the Ladie Julina [Olivia].” In Twelfth Night, this second conversation is interrupted by Feste's song and then resumed with even greater intensity. Both parts of the conversation, moreover, repeat the rhythm of I.iv: they begin with Orsino's insistence on privacy with Cesario, they require him to oscillate between his self-indulgent passion for Olivia and his troubled but intense absorption in Cesario, and they present that absorption in terms that reflect and activate the spectators' sense of Viola's multiple identities and hence of desire's possibilities.

In the first part of II.iv, Orsino sends Curio away to seek Feste and then summons Cesario to “Come hither, boy” (l. 29).²⁴ But again, the message he offers in this private moment is in fact a self-indulgent gesture toward himself as the model for “all true lovers” (l. 17), and again it is Viola/Cesario whose genuinely wistful response to the music attracts his focus on to him/her rather than on his own alleged passions:

Duke. Thou dost speak masterly.
My life upon't, young though thou art, thine eye
Hath stay'd upon some favor that it loves.
Hath it not, boy?
Vio. A little, by your favor.
Duke. What kind of woman is't?
Vio. Of your complexion.
Duke. She is not worth thee then. What years, i'faith?
Vio. About your years, my lord.
Duke. Too old, by heaven. Let still the woman take
An elder than herself.

(ll. 22-30)

Orsino's interest in Cesario's melancholy response to the music initiates an inquiry into the experience that underlies it. Dale Priest notes how that experience reaches out to implicate Orsino himself, as when Cesario implies to Orsino that the “favor” that his eye lingers lovingly upon is the duke's countenance.²⁵ Cesario's concentration on Orsino's complexion and years causes the duke to assume an avuncular tone, as if he is evading or resisting this deepening involvement with this mysterious creature “That can sing both high and low” (II.iii.40-41).

After Feste's song, Orsino again demands to be left alone with his page: “Let all the rest give place” (II.iv.79). Once more, his first words are a Petrarchist exhortation to “get thee to yond same sovereign cruelty” (l. 80), which lead again to an insistence on the preciousness of his feelings:

                                                                                                    Make no compare
Between that love a woman can bear me
And that I owe Olivia.

(ll. 101-3)

Viola's incomplete response “but I know—” may be deliberately unfinished or broken off by Orsino. The choice determines whether his question, “What dost thou know?” (l. 104) indicates rapt curiosity or scornful dismissal. Viola's next speech introduces herself in thinly veiled form:

My father had a daughter lov'd a man
As it might be perhaps, were I a woman,
I should your lordship.

(ll. 107-9)

As if enchanted, Orsino is drawn further into the story: “What's her history?” Viola tells how “she pin'd in thought” and how “she sate like Patience on a monument, / Smiling at grief” (ll. 109, 112, 114-15). Like Rosalind, she breaks the spell herself by abruptly altering her tone, speaking as Cesario, himself “in standing water, between boy and man” (I.v.159), on behalf of “we men.” But Orsino remains spellbound: “But died thy sister of her love, my boy?” Viola's riddling answer alludes to her layered genders:

I am all the daughters of my father's house
And all the brothers too—and yet I know not.

(II.iv.119-21)

She then once more assumes the brisk tones of Cesario—“Sir, shall I to this lady?”—and this time Orsino follows her lead, ending the scene by resuming his Petrarchist guise:

                                                                      Ay, that's the theme,
To her in haste; give her this jewel; say
My love can give no place, bide no denay [sic].

(II.iv.221-24)

In the modern theater, the audience's knowledge of Cesario's identity, which gives it the advantage of dramatic irony over Orsino in these duet scenes, is reinforced by the “theatrical irony” of the presence of a female performer in the role of the disguised heroine. Orsino found Cesario “semblative [of] a woman's part” (I.iv.34), but his failure to perceive Viola's female presence often makes him a more absurd figure than he was originally. On the Elizabethan stage, however, where Viola's assumption of male disguise blended with the play-boy's resumption of male identity, Orsino was protected from such ridicule. But the play then generated anxiety about homoerotic intimacy at the metatheatrical level, between an adult male actor and one of the troupe's apprentices.

Similar anxieties were evoked at its mimetic level by Antonio's selfless and reckless passion for Sebastian, which Shakespeare added to the material he adapted from Riche's tale. Antonio echoes Orsino's eroticized friendship with Cesario, and for some spectators probably evoked the homoeroticism that enemies of the stage associated with the playhouse.²⁶ Although most critics claim that Antonio, like his namesake in The Merchant of Venice, loses his friend to marriage, enabling the play to create “a context in which sexual ambiguity presages fulfillment rather than damnation,” Joseph Pequigney argues that Sebastian never casts off Antonio's love and that a homosexual liaison is consistent with “the diverse bisexual fictions that make up Twelfth Night,” as well as an even more explicit replication of alleged homoeroticism within the acting company.²⁷

TWELFTH NIGHT: THE FINAL SCENE

The intimate scenes between Orsino and Viola contrast sharply with the crowded, bustling farce of the low-comic scenes, as Jean Howard has observed in her study of the play's varying tonalities.²⁸ They also help to prepare the spectator for the violence of Orsino's outburst when he hears that Cesario has married Olivia. That outburst was anticipated by Antonio's reaction to Sebastian's evident duplicity, in which he compared “that most ingrateful boy” to “a witchcraft” (V.i.76-77).

The strength of Orsino's outrage indicates a wound deeper than his alleged affection for Olivia. When she enters, he observes her presence (instead of greeting her) in a single line of Petrarchan cliché, “Here comes the Countess, now heaven walks on earth” (V.i.97). Abruptly resuming his interrogation of Antonio, he then fails to answer her direct question addressed to him (“What would my lord … ?” [l. 101]), a failure that would be either the result or the cause of her immediately turning to Cesario. His first direct address to her in the play, “Gracious Olivia—” (l. 105) either runs out of steam or is cut short by Olivia. By contrast, his discovery of Cesario's apparent betrayal of him elicits an explosion of homicidal vengefulness nominally addressed to Olivia but in fact aimed primarily at his page: “Why should I not (had I the heart to do it), … Kill what I love?” (ll. 117-28).²⁹ While Olivia remains the “marble-breasted tyrant” she has always been in his Petrarchist fantasy, Cesario, whom he tendered dearly, has shocked him with an act of betrayal. He then turns to the page, whom he orders to the slaughter:

Come, boy, with me, my thoughts are ripe in mischief.
I'll sacrifice the lamb that I do love,
To spite a raven's heart within a dove.

(ll. 129-31)

Viola/Cesario's reply, matching Orsino's concluding couplet, meets the duke's homicidal threats with a martyr's eagerness:

And I most jocund, apt, and willingly,
To do you rest, a thousand deaths would die.

(ll. 132-33)

Turning to Olivia, the page explains himself in couplets that are the most direct sentiments Viola has uttered about Orsino since the brief soliloquy following their first meeting:

                                                                                                    After him I love
More than I love these eyes, more than my life,
More by all mores than e'er I shall love wife.

(ll. 134-36)

Accentuated by rhyme, these impassioned speeches articulate in public the nature of the relationship Orsino and Viola have played out in and between the lines of their intimate scenes together. As John Russell Brown has noted, Orsino's agonized sense of betrayal arises more from the loss of Cesario than from the loss of Olivia, a reaction that permits the audience to accept his love for Viola when her true sex is revealed.³⁰

Even after that revelation, Orsino twice refers to her as if she were male. On the theatrical level she still was and always would be male, but on another level Orsino wants to establish continuity with their earlier moments of intimacy:

Duke. Boy, thou hast said to me a thousand times
Thou never shouldst love woman like to me.
Vio. And all those sayings will I over swear,
And all those swearings keep as true in soul
As doth that orbed continent the fire
That severs day from night.
Duke. Give me thy hand,
And let me see thee in thy woman's weeds.

(V.i.267-73)

A few lines later, he speaks to her in her female identity, and then offers his own hand (“Here is my hand”) to “your master's mistress” (ll. 325-26).³¹ Orsino ends the scene by announcing that “a solemn combination shall be made / Of our dear souls” (ll. 383-84) and turns once more to his beloved:

                                                                                          Cesario, come—
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.

(ll. 385-88)

Although using the page's name may represent a wish to retain the relationship with his male servant, the final couplet restates the desire to see Viola dressed “in her woman's weeds” and can therefore define Orsino's final attitude more as impatience or relief than as uncertainty or disappointment about her gender.³²

Whether Viola removes a hat or releases bound-up hair, like Julia, she remains in male attire despite her resumption of female identity and the performer's resumption of whatever mannerisms, if any in this case, were used to signify it. Her page's apparel may in fact now accentuate her feminine identity, but Orsino's comment on the gender specificity of her clothing and his use of the name Cesario, whatever his own attitude, underscored the presence of the boy actor for the audience.

Such reflexive allusion to the actor's maleness generated emotional crosscurrents counter to the play's drive toward heterosexual union. This prospect is always potentially present in the world of the playhouse when heterosexual intimacy is portrayed by an all-male company, but usually remains dormant unless something reflexive—like continued verbal reference to the abandoned but still visible cross-gender disguise—calls attention to the principle of layers of gender identity and so keeps spectators alert to all of the layers involved.

In modern productions, the allusions to Viola's male identity are comic rather than reflexive or metatheatrical, and the marriages that end the play seem “natural”; that is, the genders of the characters match those of the performers. But in the original production, these final allusions to the male component of Viola's identity actually underscored the existence of another level of pretense, in which the two brides-to-be in the play were young male actors. Calling attention to that pretense, which the audience had thought it had agreed to accept without question, now threatened to undercut the conventional ending in heterosexual union. For some spectators, the play's exposure of its own artificiality might even have implied another and very different ending based on the gender of the actors, and perhaps on suspicions that boy actors served as catamites within all-male companies. For other spectators, the stress on the play-boy's presence simply demonstrated with more explicitness than usual what they “always knew” a play to be—a theatrical illusion they had paid to see and could see again, along with others like it, whenever they sought diversion from “the wind and the rain.”

In As You Like It, a similar movement toward the world of the playhouse, which also stresses the gender of the boy actor, is delayed until the epilogue. In Twelfth Night, by contrast, Viola remains in male attire, is still referred to as “boy” by Orsino—either out of habit or with self-conscious irony or possibly both, seriatim. In the absence of an epilogue, the audience's final impression of Viola includes her still contending with disguise as “a wickedness.”³³ G. K. Hunter's summation of the general differences between the heroines also applies to the boy actresses in their final appearances: “Rosalind is able to use her disguise as a genuine and joyous extension of her personality; Viola suffers constriction and discomfiture in her role.”³⁴ Hunter may be right about Viola, but not about the performer, for in the absence of sequential off-layering, the male garb proclaims the simultaneous presence of all three layers of identity. The movement from play to playhouse negotiated by the epilogue in As You Like It occurs in Twelfth Night in Feste's final song. Alone onstage, Feste sings a kind of autobiographical sketch, tracing a few stages in a life cycle to suggest that pain and suffering are as inevitable and relentless as the “rain it raineth every day,” and have been so since “the world begun” (V.i.405). With its surprisingly self-referential third line—“But that's all one, our play is done—” the last stanza sets the song's darker vision in the context of yet another vision—one that redefines the play just performed as a compassionate even if commercial effort to provide solace for the gloominess of the human condition: “And we'll strive to please you every day.”³⁵

FEMALE PAGES AND SENSATIONALIZED INTIMACY: FOUR VARIATIONS

Most other English dramatists who took up the heroine in male disguise followed James the Fourth rather than Twelfth Night in that female pages appear in intimate scenes only with female characters. Within the world of the play there is never any suggestion of lesbianism (evidently too threatening or incredible an idea for the commercial stage of the period), so that the pursuing women are simply foolishly mistaken about the object of their affections. Unlike Shakespeare, other English dramatists not only ridicule the lady's obsessive infatuation with the shy page, but frequently heighten the farcical effects by multiplication and “surprise,” as well as by coarsening the tone of intimate scenes. Four of these plays rework intimate moments or relationships found in Twelfth Night.

RAM ALLEY

Lording Barry's Ram Alley (King's Revels, 1607-8), is one of the first plays to multiply intimate moments by having the female page interact with more than one female character. The heroine, Constantia, who has donned male attire to follow the man she loves, enters his service as a page and beholds him wooing the wealthy Widow Taffeta. Like Orsino, Boutcher does not pursue his intended with genuine fervor, but instead of serving as his emissary, as Viola does, the page, presumably adopting a man-about-town air, advises him to approach the mistress by way of her servant, “for you must know / These waiting-maids are to their mistresses / Like porches unto doors: you pass the one / Before you can have entrance at the other.”³⁶ The equivalent in Twelfth Night would be to have a suavely urbane Cesario urge Orsino to make love to Maria in order to obtain Olivia. The page recoils, however, when the Maria figure, of course depicted by another play-boy, attempts to seduce him:

A pretty knave, i'faith! Come home tonight,
Shalt have a posset and candi'd eringoes,
A bed if need be too. I love a life
To play with such baboons as thou.

(ll. 817-20)

The bawdy tone of these passages typifies the coarseness of the play. For example, Barry makes Constantia fear not that she will be shamed if discovered wearing male attire but that her own sexual excitement at seeing male apparel will give her away:

Lord, how my feminine blood stirs at the sight
Of these same breeches! Methinks this codpiece
Should betray me.

(ll. 7-9)

Writing for a minor boy company when the vogue for children's troupes was ending, Barry burlesqued the conventions of cross-gender disguise by turning tactful scenes of intimacy into sexual farce.³⁷

NO WIT, NO HELP LIKE A WOMAN'S

For the main plot of No Wit, No Help Like a Woman's (Lady Elizabeth's? c. 1611), Middleton adapted an Italian academic comedy, Porta's La Sorella,³⁸ but the subplot, which is entirely his invention, is a farcical reworking of the Viola-Olivia relationship in Twelfth Night. It is also a female version of his own early city comedies, in which a “prodigal daughter,” Kate Low-water, outwits a greedy widow, Lady Goldenfleece, who, together with her late husband, had bilked Kate and her husband of their estate. Early in this play, Kate enters the widow's house disguised as “a gallant gentleman, her husband like a serving-man after her” (II.i.169). As a swaggering gallant, Kate drives away the rival suitors and hopes to regain her property by winning the widow's heart. The plan goes beyond the verbal audacity with which Viola unintentionally arouses Olivia's love. Kate will “put her to't, i'faith” (II.iii.94), that is, gain the widow's heart by all but conquering her body. Kate instructs her husband to stand by, ostensibly to rescue the widow from rape but really to prevent the disclosing of Kate's gender. But the widow is taken with Kate's exhibition of macho bravado and declares that she will marry this “beardless youth”: “with this kiss / I choose him for my husband” (ll. 186-87). As in Twelfth Night, a twin brother, split off from the heroine, arrives to provide a match for the widow and to facilitate Kate's undisguising: “You can but put me to my book, sweet brother, / And I've my neck-verse perfect, here and here” (ll. 343-44). Exactly where the performer locates his “neck-verse” is not clear from the text. The editor of the Regents edition here adds a stage direction, “Removes her disguise, revealing her bosom,” along with a note to the effect that “Mistress Low-water's neck-verse … is her breasts” (125), without explaining how this effect might have been created by a young male actor.

Far coarser than Shakespeare's duets between Cesario and Olivia, Middleton here achieves broad comic effects: one play-boy oscillates between Kate's feminine modesty and a brazen male persona, while the other depicts the tension between the widow's feigned coyness and her genuine sexual excitement. Kate's impersonation of a brash youth evokes the presence of both male performers, again articulating the separate layers of gender identity in the enactment of both roles, highlighting the artistry required to negotiate them, and exaggerating the well-worn roles of cheeky female page and lusty, avaricious widow into opportunities for theatrical virtuosity.

ANYTHING FOR A QUIET LIFE

Further elaboration of situations first found in Twelfth Night is illustrated by Anything for A Quiet Life (1619), where Middleton used an intimate scene between mistress and page in a drastically abbreviated subplot. To make the page's revelation of gender a surprise to the audience, or at least to cloud it in uncertainty, Middleton does not reveal that Selenger, Lord Beaufort's servant, is Mistress George Cressingham.

Selenger, who is pursued by Mistress Knavesby, is a shy rather than a saucy version of the page, a mere pawn of the clever wench in control of the intrigue. Unlike Olivia, who is truly infatuated with Cesario, Mistress Knavesby is merely using the page to discourage Lord Beaufort from trying to seduce her. She literally entangles Selenger in her intrigue by asking the page to hold a skein of yarn for her to unwind and then grasping it in such a way as to hold him her “prisoner”:

for, look you, you are mine now, my captive manacled, I have your hands in bondage.

(III.i.42-44)

Both characters use the stage business as a conceit for sexual entrapment and resistance that threatens at one point to become more than a conceit:

Mis. G. Cres. … pray you, release me now.
Mis. Kna. I could kiss you now, spite of your teeth, if it please me.
Mis. G. Cres. But you could not, for I could bite you with the spite of my teeth, if it pleases me.

(ll. 47-51)

They spar until Lord Beaufort enters, seeking his prey. He takes in the sight with exquisite politesse, simply observing that “you are busy” (l. 85), and offers to withdraw. Mistress Knavesby frees her captive, who leaves with a smutty masculine retort: “I'll ne'er give both my hands at once again to a woman's command; I'll put one finger in a hole rather” (ll. 92-93).

In the final scene, when Beaufort tells Knavesby that his wife has slept with the page, Mistress Knavesby confesses that “we lay together in bed” (V.ii.218), but Middleton then directs the audience's attention to the presence of “Mistress George Cressingham in female attire” (l. 214), to use the words of the stage direction. The revelation may or may not have surprised the audience, but her undisguising was either cut from the text or, given the audience's familiarity with the motif, could have been assumed to take place offstage.

A MAD COUPLE WELL MATCHED

Richard Brome's A Mad Couple Well Matched (Beeston's Boys? 1636?) involves the heroine in male disguise with three different women. Although Brome never informs the audience that “this beardless Bellamy” is a woman, enough hints are furnished to arouse suspicion.³⁹ In a scene reminiscent of the first meeting between Olivia and Viola, a citizen's wife named Alicia Saleware is the first woman to fall for Bellamy. She receives this “handsome youth,” an emissary of his employer, Lord Lovely, willfully misinterprets his remarks, kisses him, and fawns over him. In a subsequent scene, Lady Thrivewell, who has also fallen for young Bellamy, is seen in intimate conversation with the page. Mistress Crosstill, a widow, is the third woman to fall for Bellamy and tries to woo him even at the same time she herself is being wooed by a widow-hunting gallant.

Toward the end of the play, her brother, Fitzgerrard, suddenly appears, demanding that Lord Lovely produce his sister Amy, who left home two years ago to attend his Lordship. Bellamy then enters “in a woman's habit” and explains that she adopted “a masculine boldness” to be near the man she loved but feared she could never marry (V.ii.246-47). Unlike Orsino, Lovely did not find himself attracted to Bellamy, but he is as quick as the duke of Illyria was to propose to his former page.

MALE HOMOSEXUALITY SENSATIONALIZED: SHIRLEY'S THE GRATEFUL SERVANT

Not until Shirley's The Grateful Servant (Queen Henrietta's, 1629) did another playwright explore the anxieties that an Orsino might feel about his attraction to his page. To stress the point, Shirley made the audience wait until IV.iii for explicit revelation of the gender of the page, a delicate lad named Dulcino, who attracted not one but two adult males and appeared in duet scenes with each of them.

The first of these Orsino figures is Foscari, whom the page serves out of gratitude for having been “rescued … from the Banditti.” Although Foscari claims to love Cleona, he is so strongly attached to Dulcino, this “sweet-faced thing, … [with whom] some ladies / Might change their beauties” (21). In a scene that recalls Orsino's avuncular advice about women to Cesario, Foscari warns Dulcino against the wiles of “some wanton lady [who] hath beheld thy face” (19), and, fearing that this “boy, so young and beautiful, / [is] apt to be seduced” by some court lady, he promotes him from his servant to “my companion” (20). Dulcino carries Foscari's messages to Cleona, who never becomes infatuated with the messenger as Olivia does with Cesario, and Shirley even has Cleona's comic servant spy upon the lady and the page in order to keep their duet at the level of farce. When Foscari decides to take monastic vows, he insists that Dulcino accompany him. The page agrees and is later extricated from this plight not through the removal of disguise but through the intervention of Father Valentio, who recognizes him as Leonora, the missing princess of Milan.

The second Orsino figure is the duke of Savoy, who had fallen in love with Leonora from her picture and hoped to marry her, but hearing of her father's plans for another match half-heartedly decides to court Cleona, Foscari's beloved. While visiting Cleona, however, he first sees Dulcino and is lovestruck by the sight: “What boy is that? … It is no common face” (31). Shirley points up the contrast between the duke's perfunctory wooing of Cleona and his excited discovery of Dulcino with an abrupt midline shift:

There is a virtuous magic in your eye,
For wheresoe'er it casts a beam, it does
Create a goodness; [to Cleona] you've a handsome boy.

(32)

In act III, when told that Cleona is ill, he first inquires for “the pretty boy I told thee of” before announcing that “we are resolv'd to comfort her” (50-51).

In the opening soliloquy of IV.ii, the duke tries to deny any sexual interest in the missing Dulcino but recognizes the nature of his “foolish passion”:

Our hot Italian doth affect these boys
For sin; I've no such flame, and yet methought
He did appear most lovely; nay, in his absence,
I cherish his idea; but I must
Exclude him while he hath but soft impression;
Being removed already in his person,
I lose him with less trouble.

(64)

Only in Dulcino's absence can the duke maintain a platonic attitude toward the page. Shakespeare hinted at such anxieties in Orsino but never allowed him to pine for Cesario so explicitly nor to express relief when the page he loves turns out to be a woman. Shirley's duke is more direct:

I'll do my heart that justice to proclaim
Thou mad'st a deep impression; as a boy
I loved thee too; for it could be no other,
But with a divine flame; fair Leonora,
Like to a perfect magnet, though enclos'd
Within an ivory box, through the white wall
Shot forth embracing virtue: now, oh now,
Our destinies are kind.

(90-91)

Foscari is astonished—“This is a mystery, Dulcino!”—but resumes his courtship of Cleona, the second choice to Dulcino of both men throughout the play. One almost wishes that Leonora's twin brother would wander on stage to provide a match for Foscari.

In The Grateful Servant, as in Twelfth Night, adult male characters feel themselves attracted to a shy and delicate page whom they discover to be a female character, played as always by a male actor. Although reflexive allusions to the performer's gender are, as we have seen, inherent in virtually any play with a cross-dressed heroine, these two plays, and some of the others surveyed in this chapter, are exceptional. Their uniqueness lies in their linking the intimacy between characters in the world of the play to possibilities of intimate homoerotic relations between performers in the world of the playhouse.

In Shakespeare's previous disguised-heroine plays, we noted fleeting glances at male homoerotic behavior involving play-boys as cross-dressed female characters, as in the use of the name Ganymed, or in Nerrisa's offstage success while disguised as a clerk in obtaining Gratiano's ring. Given the allegations that play-boys were catamites, such glancing allusions must have produced a modicum of resonance. In Twelfth Night, Shakespeare brought these extradramatic resonances more fully into the world of the play than he had in previous works, and he was followed in this regard, albeit in different ways, by such dramatists as Barry, Middleton, and Brome. Shirley went further than Shakespeare by doubling the Orsino figure and by making one of the two worry about his sexual inclinations, thus articulating what in Twelfth Night had been confined to a possible subtext of the master-page relationship.

It was at least seven years before Shakespeare wrote another play with a heroine in male disguise, and that work, Cymbeline, moved in yet another direction. There the short-lived relationship between eroticized female page and master, that is, between Fidele and the Roman general, Lucius, is treated more explicitly than in the plays before Twelfth Night, even if it has less structural and thematic centrality than the mutual infatuation between Cesario and Orsino.

Notes

1. For discussions of the date of Twelfth Night, see the introductions by Elizabeth Story Donno, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 1-3; and J. M. Lothian and T. W. Craik, eds. (London: Methuen, 1975), xxvi-xxxv.

2. Performers too feel anxiety when performing scenes that involve or suggest sexual intimacy. In an interview with Leslie Bennetts published in New York Times, November 17, 1987, C 11, both Kenneth Welsh and Kathy Bates describe anxieties they felt when performing in Terrence McNally's Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, “a two-character play which begins in Frankie's bed with the frenzied sounds of lovemaking, requiring some discreetly handled nudity.” Mr. Welsh attributed his fear to the fact that “the play demands so much intimacy, not only physical but emotional,” while Ms. Bates ascribed her initial reluctance to take the role to “fear of intimacy … a big one for me.”

3. I quote from William Gager's letter to John Rainoldes, as quoted by Frederick S. Boas, University Drama in the Tudor Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1914), 217-18. I discuss the Gager-Rainoldes controversy in chapter 2; see also Binns, “Women or Transvestites,” 137-39. In the 1880s, by contrast, the vice-chancellor of Oxford, Benjamin Jowett, permitted the society to perform in public only on the condition that “the female parts … be taken by lady amateurs,” as noted in Humphrey Carpenter, O. U. D. S.: A Centenary History of the Oxford University Dramatic Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 27. Smith, Poetics of Homosexual Desire, 81-86, describes schools, colleges, and inns of court as “the all-male social institutions that nurtured sixteenth- and seventeenth-century males from boyhood to manhood” (82).

4. Boas, University Drama, 235, 241.

5. John G. B. Streett, “Some Aspects of the Influence of the Boy-Actress Convention on the Plays of Shakespeare and Some of His Contemporary Dramatists” (Ph.D. diss., Oxford, 1973), chap. 3. Andrews, Scripts and Scenarios, 107-8, suggests commercial troupes were more willing than academic troupes to involve female characters in explicitly sexual stage business because the roles were played by “full time professional apprentices, not gentlemanly youths dragooned into acting just once or twice in their lives.”

6. Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. Philip Edwards (London: Methuen, 1959), II.iv.23, 34-48. On the date of the play, see xxi-xxvii.

7. Prynne, Histrio-Mastix, 386, 166. The general problem of equipping male actors to display female breasts is discussed by June Schlueter, “‘Stuffed, as they say, with honorable parts’: Female Breasts on the English Renaissance Stage,” ShY 3 (1992): 117-42. She also cites the ending of John Day's Law Tricks (Queen's Revels, c. 1604), ed. John Crow, Malone Society Reprints 89 (London: Malone Society, 1949 [1950]), V.ii, where a female character's “bosome bare” (l. 2168) is supposedly exposed to the view of another character, but not necessarily of the audience, to verify her female identity. (I am grateful to Alan Dessen for supplying both Schlueter and me with this example.) There are also examples of stage business involving “petting”: in Fletcher's Love's Pilgrimage, a woman nursing the wounds of a lecherous man pretending to have been injured in battle, asks him, “What do you mean, why do you kisse my breasts?” (IV.iii.62); in Middleton's Women Beware Women (1613-22), ed. Roma Gill (London: Ernest Benn, 1968), the duke tells Bianca that he can “feel thy breast shake like a turtle panting / Under a loving hand that makes much on't” (II.ii.322-23); in Jonson's The Devil Is an Ass, the stage direction describes Wittipol's “playing with her [Mrs. Fitzdottrell's] paps” (II.vi.70).

8. James Paul Brawner, ed., The Wars of Cyrus, Illinois Studies in Language and Literature 28, nos. 3-4 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1942), 10-20, 27-28. All references to the play are to this edition.

9. Sanders, ed., James the Fourth, xxv-xxix.

10. I quote from a translation of Chappuy's French translation (pub. 1583-84) of Cinthio's Hecatommithi, III.i by Sanders, ed., James the Fourth, 139. For a sensationalized, xenophobic treatment of the relationship between the lady and the female page, see Robert Daborne, A Christian Turned Turk, ed. A. E. H. Swaen, Anglia 20 (1898): 234 (l. 1530), where Alizia, disguised as her lover's brother, inflames the lust of a Turkish woman named Voada, who promises to help the lover escape on condition that “this night I shall enjoy thee.”

11. Sanders, ed., James the Fourth, xliv; and Berry, Shakespeare's Comic Rites, 82.

12. Harold Jenkins, “Shakespeare's Twelfth Night,” Rice Institute Pamphlets 45, reprinted in Stanley Wells, ed., Twelfth Night: Critical Essays (New York: Garland, 1986), 171-89.

13. Bullough, Sources, 2:351-52. All citations refer to this edition.

14. On the relationship of Twelfth Night to Gl'Ingannati and related plays of the commedia erudita, see Robert C. Melzi, “From Lelia to Viola,” RenD 9 (1966): 67-81; Helen Andrews Kaufman, “Niccolo Secchi as a Source of Twelfth Night,” SQ 5 (1954): 271-80; L. G. Salingar, “The Design of Twelfth Night,” SQ 9 (1958): 120-22; Rene Pruvost, “The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Twelfth Night, et Gl'Ingannati,” EA 13 (1960): 4-9; and Muir, Shakespeare's Sources, 1:66-77. Quotations from Gl'Ingannati are from excerpts in Bullough. Shakespeare may have heard from John Hall or John Weaver of the Cambridge production of Laelia, a Latin version of the play produced at Cambridge in 1595; see Gras, “All Is Semblative,” 179.

15. Clifford Leech, “Twelfth Night” and Shakespearian Comedy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), 50, has stressed the affective implications of the audience's awareness of the performers' gender in the scenes between the two boy heroines: “we must remember that in a modern production the use of actresses for the women's parts materially lessens the disturbing quality.” Some modern spectators of either gender might disagree. For example, Sue-Ellen Case, Feminism and Theatre (New York: Macmillan, 1988), 25-26, speculates on the detachment of women spectators from scenes of intimacy between female characters played by female impersonators. Matthew H. Wikander, “As Secret as Maidenhead: The Profession of the Boy-Actress in Twelfth Night,” CompD 20 (1986-87): 352, suggests still another dimension: “What in the first exchanges between Olivia and Viola seems sexual rivalry might … also be construed as professional rivalry, for both ‘ladies’ enjoy the same marginal status in the company of which they are apprentice members.”

16. A late chivalric narrative like The Famous History of Parismus (1598) by Emanuel Forde can titillate the reader by savoring erotic possibilities it never actually develops. See Bullough, Sources, 2:367.

17. Leggatt, Shakespeare's Comedy of Love, 235. See also Howard, “Crossdressing,” 430-33.

18. J. Dennis Huston, “‘When I Came to Man's Estate’: Twelfth Night and Problems of Identity,” MLQ 33 (1972): 275, notes that despite this line Cesario is always described as a page and never as a eunuch.

19. Gary Taylor, To Analyze Delight: A Hedonist Criticism of Shakespeare (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 86. See also Hyland, “Shakespeare's Heroines,” 35; F. H. Mares, “Viola and Other Tranvestist Heroines in Shakespeare's Comedies,” Stratford Papers: 1965-67, ed. B. A. W. Jackson (Hamilton, Ontario: McMaster University Library Press, 1969), 100; and Dale G. Priest, “Julia, Petruchio, Rosalind, Viola: Shakespeare's Subjunctive Leads,” MSE 9 (1984): 45ff.

20. Leslie Hotson, The First Night of “Twelfth Night” (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954), 63, identified one of the traveling companions of Don Virginio Orsino, Duke of Bracciano, as “a Spanish youth, Don Grazia de Montalvo” (emphases added).

21. E.g., Berry, Shakespeare's Comic Rites, 106.

22. Joseph Pequigney, Such Is My Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 30-41, regards sonnet 20 as an attempt by the speaker to deny what he is also in the process of acknowledging as homoerotic attraction.

23. As Wikander observes, “As Secret as Maidenhead,” 350, activating the audience's awareness of the gender of the boy actress threatens to make “Orsino's interest in Viola's mouth and throat … not merely bawdy but obscene.” Jan Kott, “Shakespeare's Bitter Arcadia,” in Shakespeare Our Contemporary, trans. Boleslaw Taborski, 2d ed. (London: Methuen, 1967), 202ff., reads Orsino's description of Cesario as that of an “ephebe”—what Jardine, Still Harping, 17, quoting the opening lines of Marlowe's and Nashe's Dido (Chapel Children, c. 1586), calls a “female wanton boy.” In a more recent work, “Twins and Travesties: Gender, Dependency, and Sexual Availability in Twelfth Night,” in E.P., 27-38, Jardine modifies her views significantly by stressing the real or presumed sexual availability of young household servants of either sex, but in my view she again somewhat overstates her case: “Eroticism, in the early modern period, is not gender-specific, is not grounded in the sex of the possibly ‘submissive’ partner, but is an expectation of that very submissiveness” (34).

24. Alexander Pope's insertion at this point of a stage direction, “Exit Curio,” makes sense of “Enter Curio and others” two dozen lines later.

25. Priest, “Shakespeare's Subjunctive Leads,” 38. See OED for the range of meanings of “favor,” which also includes trinket, beauty, permission, and graciousness, as well as face.

26. Philip C. McGuire, Speechless Dialect: Shakespeare's Open Silences (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 19-37, discusses Antonio's attraction to Sebastian. See also Helene Moglen, “Disguise and Development: The Self and Society in Twelfth Night,” L&P 23 (1973): 17-18.

27. Joseph Pequigney, “The Two Antonios and Same-Sex Love in Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice,” ELR 22 (1992): 201-21. See also Nancy K. Hayles, “Sexual Disguise in Cymbeline,” MLQ 41 (1980), 234, and “Sexual Disguise in As You Like It and Twelfth Night,” 63-72.

28. Jean E. Howard, Shakespeare's Art of Orchestration: Stage Technique and Audience Response (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 172-206.

29. Taylor, To Analyze Delight, 93, finds Orsino's agony deepened by allusions to Abraham's intended sacrifice of Isaac, as well as by the folio punctuation of two other passages.

30. John Russell Brown, Shakespeare's Plays in Performance (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969), 226.

31. Jörg Hasler, Shakespeare's Theatrical Notation: The Comedies (Berne: Cooper Monographs, 1974), reprinted in Stanley Wells, ed., Twelfth Night: Critical Essays (New York: Garland, 1986), 296-97, as “The Dramaturgy of the Ending of Twelfth Night.”

32. Worthen, The Idea of the Actor, 52.

33. Adelman, “Male Bonding,” 85-90, sees the addresses to Viola as if she were male as evidence of Orsino's wish for union with an androgynous figure, either to legitimize his bisexuality or to integrate love and friendship. Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women, 267, laments Viola's loss of the androgyne's freedom.

34. G. K. Hunter, William Shakespeare: The Late Comedies (London, Longmans Green, 1962), 45.

35. Philip Edwards, Shakespeare and the Confines of Art (London: Methuen, 1968), 65; see also William C. Carroll, “The Ending of Twelfth Night and the Tradition of Metamorphosis,” in Shakespearean Comedy, ed. Maurice Charney (New York: New York Literary Forum, 1980), 59-60. For a discussion of similar strategies used in other plays, see Jacqueline Pearson, Tragedy and Tragicomedy in the Plays of John Webster (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), 40-49.

36. Lording Barry, Ram Alley, ed. Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge (Nottingham: Nottingham Drama Texts, 1981), 5, ll. 1-6. All references to the play are to this edition and are cited in the text.

37. For the history of the Children of the King's Revels, see Harold N. Hillebrand, The Child Actors (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1926), 220-36.

38. The date is established by Johnson, ed., No Wit, No Help Like a Woman's, xi-xiii. All references to the play are to this edition and are cited in the text. On the source, see D. J. Gordon, “Middleton's No Wit, No Help Like a Woman's and Della Porta's La Sorella,” RES 17 (1941): 413-14; and Rowe, Thomas Middleton, 114-30.

39. Richard Brome, A Couple Well-Matched, in Six Caroline Plays, ed. A. S. Knowland (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), II.i, p. 185. All references to the play are to this edition.