[In the following excerpt, Kiberd comments on the masculine and feminine qualities portrayed by Shakespeare in characters of both sexes.]

It was only with the advent of Shakespeare that a major writer offered a recognition of the male and female elements in all rich personalities. In Richard II the king unfit to rule his people paradoxically discovers the androgyny of the full self only when it is too late—after he has reverted to the status of ordinary citizen. Confined within his prison cell, the disgraced male rediscovers elements of his absent queen in himself:

I have been studying how I may compare
This prison where I live unto the world:
And for because the world is populous,
And here is not a creature but myself,
I cannot do it. Yet I'll hammer it out:
My brain I'll prove the female to my soul,
My soul the father, and these two beget
A generation of still-breeding thoughts;
And these same thoughts people this little
 world,
In humours like the people of this world,
For no thought is contented.

In Shakespeare's own life, this same shock of recognition is recorded most poignantly by his sonnets:

Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still,
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman coloured ill.
To win me soon to Hell, my female evil
Tempteth my better angel from my side,
And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,
Wooing his purity with her foul pride.

Shakespeare's love for the handsome Earl of Southampton is platonic and noble, whereas his obsession with the dark lady is lustful and corrupt—and he is happy to indulge in such cosy traditional divisions. However, when at last he encounters his two lovers in one another's arms he knows that he has not just learned something new about the world but that he has also discovered the truth about his inner self. Good and evil are not so easily distinguished, nor male and female either. Leslie Fiedler has argued that this recognition had been implicit in the sonnets from the outset, for the handsome youth had been compared to Helen, as well as to Adonis, as far back as Sonnet 53. Like the Gaelic bards of Ireland and Scotland, Shakespeare transferred the images of female beauty from the mistress of amour courtois to the young nobleman whom he loved and praised. Moreover, the epicene beauty of the youth seems to find an answering echo in the poet's own soul, as if he seeks in him the delicate beauty of a woman and the constancy of a man:

A woman's face with Nature's own hand
  painted
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my
 passion,
A woman's gentle heart, but not
 acquainted
With shifting change, as is false woman's
 fashion,
An eye more bright than theirs, less false
 in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth,
A man in hue, all hues in his controlling,
Which steals men's eyes, and women's souls
 amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created,
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell
 a-doting,

And by addition me of thee defeated
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
 But since she pricked thee out for women's
  pleasure
Mine be thy love, and thy love's use their
  treasure.

In the final distinction between love and its physical embodiment, Fiedler sees Shakespeare arguing for the superior integrity of his own passion, which is innocent of lustful desire. Hence the sharpness of his disappointment to find his noblest love in the arms of his own lusty whore. Disinterested friendship between males proves just as impossible as a pure love for a woman. Even more notable is the way in which a failed friendship between males becomes the basis for a disclosure of the androgyny of the full personality, a point to be developed over three centuries later by Lawrence and Joyce.

Fiedler sees Sonnet 144 as Shakespeare's admission that the seed of corruption was in his friend from the start, in the female element of Southampton's personality, and that 'since there is no pure masculine principle, no male is immune to the evil represented by the female.' But Shakespeare's disclosure that human motives are as mixed as human sexuality does not permit so clearcut an equation of 'evil' and 'female'. His whole art is to question such stereotypes. Those who continue to endorse them in his plays are, like Posthumus in Cymbeline, written off as jealous victims of self-defeating emotionalism, prissy men who actually believe all that they read in books:

            Could I find out
The woman's part in me! For there's no
 motion
That tends to vice in man but I affirm
It is the woman's part. Be it lying, note it
The woman's; flattering, hers; deceiving, hers;
Lust and rank thoughts, hers, hers

That is Shakespeare's description of the art of his precursors in Europe, but his own work is a generous celebration of the woman's part in man, and even more notably of the man's part in woman.

In the forest, where all repressed instincts are liberated, Shakespeare's young lovers discern their deepest selves. The pansexuality of the couples in A Midsummer Night's Dream as they fall in and out of love with one another at a bewildering pace, is a sign that they are still experimenting with roles in an adolescent fashion. It is also a mark of the adolescent to reject the absolute differentiation of male and female, for this is a period in life when the identity is as yet unresolved and could go either way. Disguised as Ganymede in the forest of Arden, Rosalind discovers and savours the male element in herself, not merely as a trick, but in order that her lover may learn to see that she is a person before she is a woman. Moreover, in her male disguise, she has the opportunity to see Orlando as he really is in the company of other men, and not simply in his assumed role as a gallant theatrically seeking his lady's love. She has already parodied such swaggering performances in her role as Ganymede, so there is nothing left for Orlando but to offer himself, as he is, to another honest person. By way of contrast, the courtship of Phoebe and Silvius is factitious and jagged, precisely because it is a set of clumsy performances, based, in the words of Juliet Dusinberre, on 'the artificial exaggeration of masculine and feminine difference.' Dusinberre wryly adds that Rosalind, always acting the part of Ganymede, presents her real self, while Phoebe, lamentably herself, is always acting. It is interesting, too, that, like an adolescent girl with a crush on an older friend, Phoebe should isolate those feminine qualities in Ganymede as the traits which make him worthy of her love. In the end, it is left to Rosalind to explain the true nature of Phoebe and Silvius as opposed to their romantic self-deception. This is something which Rosalind has known for herself all along. Her intimate awareness of the opposite sex is matched by a corresponding ability to see that there are two sides to every story. So, even as she submits to her lover Orlando, she does so in the knowledge that 'men are April when they woo, December when they wed' and she knows that such a relationship, if based on true love and bonding, must be able to survive its own self-questioning. All good marriages, no less than all good artistic conventions, must contain the essential criticism of the morality to which they adhere. Hence T. S. Eliot's praise of the play might be applied with equal justice to Rosalind, for he saw in it the intelligent 'recognition, implicit in the expression of every experience, of other kinds of experience which are possible.'

Rosalind is simply the most striking example of those resourceful and charming heroines for whom Shakespeare can find no better destiny than the love of a passive and featureless man. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, a vibrant girl finally weds herself to a somewhat girlish man, simply because he is honest enough to accept himself for what he is. It is clear that Shakespeare was fascinated by such heroines long before they put on those male garments which are the ultimate symbols of their intellectual daring and emotional versatility. These figures normally appear in the comedies, not because the genre is more trivial than tragedy, but because it is the real medium for the fate of the self in society. In this context, Dusinberre valuably recalls for us George Meredith's observation, in his Essay on Comedy, that the comic poet 'dares to show us men and women coming together to this mutual likeness; he is for saying that when they draw together in social life their minds grow liker; just as the philosopher discerns the similarity of boy and girl, until the girl is marched away to the nursery' [Shakespeare and the Nature of Women, 1975].

In Twelfth Night this androgynous vision is made flesh in the scene where Viola is mistaken for her identical twin brother Sebastian. The amazed Orsino exclaims:

One face, one voice, one habit, and two
  persons!
A natural perspective, that is and is not.

Viola has disguised herself as Cesario, page to the Orsino whom she loves. She is forced, however, to carry his highflown professions of passion to Olivia, who promptly falls for the attractive page. Only when the missing Sebastian reappears is all set to rights, as Viola wins her man and Olivia falls in love with the new arrival, who tells her:

So comes it, lady, you have been mistook.
But nature to her bias drew in that.

Nature, like the bowler who casts his ball with due deference to its bias, has seen to it that Olivia went wrong in order to go right. In her flirtation with Cesario, she was prepared for her true love Sebastian, just as Orsino, having been educated in the nature of real love by Cesario, is thereby prepared to love Viola. Throughout these discussions Viola was hard put to hold back her true identity and deepest feelings, but she did so, and therefore taught Orsino that his fancy for Olivia was scarcely the basis for a lasting commitment. Like Posthumus, Orsino rehashes the bookish protests against the fickleness of woman, but Viola strongly demurs:

My father had a daughter loved a man,
As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman,
I should your lordship. She never told her
 love,
But let concealment like a worm i' the bud
Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in
  thought
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like Patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief. Was not this love, indeed?
We men say more, swear more—but indeed
Our shows are more than will; for still we
 prove
Much in our vows, but little in our love.

In those scenes where Viola woos Olivia on behalf of a man whom she herself adores, we are given the measure of her selfless personality, just as in her response to physical danger we witness the extent of her courage. As C. L. Barber has observed: 'Her constant shifting of tone in response to the situation goes with her manipulation of her role in disguise, so that instead of simply listening to her speak, we watch her conduct her speech, and through it feel her secure sense of proportion and her easy, alert consciousness.' As a disadvantaged woman who must live on her wits, she makes common cause with the clown and becomes a past master of his professional techniques: 'he must observe their mood on whom he jests.' At various stages, she runs the risk of exposure, or even death by duelling: 'Pray God defend me! A little thing would make me tell them how much I lack of man.' But, like Rosalind, she holds back the tears and puts on a brave front. Her boldness inspires a love in Olivia, which will find its resting-place in the peerless Sebastian; just as her male apparel simply serves to set off her deep-seated feminine appeal to Orsino. As Cesario, she combines the finest traits of Viola and Sebastian. Walter King has written that 'Viola and Sebastian, both of whom are Cesario, are emblems of a metaphysical possibility—that oneness cannot be so easily distinguished from twoness as human beings like to think; and of a psychological reality—that Olivia and Orsino fell in love with given human potentialities far more than with given human bodies.'

Once again, the strong ties of honour that bind man to man are jeopardised and broken against the backdrop of an androgynous love, as Antonio is left to fend for himself in the belief that Sebastian has betrayed him. Sebastian conducts himself with a feminine delicacy, just as Olivia pursues Cesario with a positively masculine aggression. It is no wonder that the clown's song promises her a true love 'that can sing both high and low'. The fact that Cesario is played by Viola, who was herself played by a boy, added to the jest for Shakespeare's original audience, who would have had far less difficulty believing in Cesario's boyhood than in Viola's girlishness. Dusinberre has argued that the fact that boy actors would always look like boys, however effective their apparel and make-up, forced Shakespeare to create a femininity deeper than mere costume and closer to the real nature of woman. The acquired trappings of femininity are replaced by a flesh-and-blood woman of high spirits; and the all-male cast frees Shakespeare to record the racy dialogue of Rosalind and Celia, the dialogue of women as they are in company together rather than as men would believe them to be. Moreover, by his use of the boy-actors, Shakespeare can give added point to his conviction of how little substance there is in the conventional notions of 'masculine' and 'feminine.' Portia can outwit male lawyers at their own game, while Richard II weeps like a woman. More subtly, a woman like Imogen is praised by different men for widely discrepant qualities, forcing Dusinberre to the conclusion that 'femininity is all things to all men—what a man finds feminine defines not the nature of women, but his own nature.' Polonius, looking at a cloud, says it is very like a whale, because Hamplet has told him so; and the same fanciful subjectivity governs most of Shakespeare's men in their dealings with women. Dusinberre marvels at how Imogen is a housewife to one, a gentle singer to another, and a traitor to a third. As Stanislaus Joyce wryly observed, in the end women are always blamed by men for being precisely what men themselves have made them.

It has always seemed charming and arresting when women become boyish as Ganymede and usurp male functions, but the reverse is not always true, even for the open-hearted Shakespeare. Men who become effeminate are often suspect, unless like the hero in The Two Gentlemen of Verona they impress their lovers by the honesty with which they accept their own passivity and weakness. Perhaps all this is merely to say that the weak one who seeks power is always admirable, while the strong one who yearns for weakness (like Lear) is not. The woman who can ape the man seems to add an exciting dimension to her personality, but the man who grows passive and womanly seems to subtract an important dimension from his. 'No man can ever be worthy of a woman's love,' wrote James Joyce to his wife, and this is certainly true of the effete and overelegant males who win the hands of Rosalind, Viola and Portia. Dusinberre has gone so far as to suggest that the audience is truly disappointed when Viola settles for Orsino, because her other self is not the man she loves but her brother. She sees the real marriage of the play as the magical reunion of the separated twins, by which 'Shakespeare soothes the mind with an illusion of concord between the masculine and feminine only to dispel the illusion by separating Viola from the second self with whom she has learned to live.' The liberated woman must become a fetish of the pallid male imagination, Orsino's mistress and (most suspiciously) his fancy's queen, after she has thrown away her male clothes. True androgyny has been achieved at the start of Act 5, only to be lost at the very conclusion.

Even Shakespeare's androgyny must pay its respects to social convention and so the high spirits of his heroines cannot survive their return to female clothing. Coming from a skirted lady, the probing comment might seem shrewish, and self-confident demeanour might seem like aggressiveness. For a brief spell, male disguise freed Rosalind and Viola to be more irreverently sparkish with men than they normally dared, but even then their wit was exercised only within the traditional female domain of love. For all their sharp criticisms of romantic posturing, the ultimate joke on Rosalind and Viola is that they themselves are hopelessly in love with forgettable nonentities. Clara Claiborne Park has shown in an essay [in American Scholar 42, No. 2, 1973] that they are devotees of a tradition which finds its most spectacular exponent in Kate—the male fantasy of the high-spirited woman who will ideally tame herself.

Yet, for all that, these girls are a great deal more vivacious and forceful than the sighing, ultrafeminine heroines of Shakespeare's tragedies. They attain a personal authenticity unknown to the simpering Ophelia or the suffering Cordelia, just as they achieve an inner harmony impossible to the unbalanced and self-divided Hamlet or Lear. In the great tragedies, Shakespeare seems to have shifted the focus of his investigations from the manly woman to the womanly man. That androgyny which was an enrichment to the comic heroine now becomes a dangerous liability for the tragic male. Hamlet is passive to a fault, not just in politics but in love. He is callous in his treatment of Ophelia, in hopes that he will provoke her to treat him more harshly. His demeanour is more that of the sighing lovelorn woman of tradition than of the aggressive all-conquering man. As Ophelia herself reports:

He took me by the wrist and held me hard;
Then goes he to the length of all his arm;
And, with his other hand thus o'er his brow,
He falls to such perusal of my face
As he would draw it. Long stayed he so;
At last a little shaking of mine arm
And thrice his head thus waving up and down
He raised a sigh so piteous and profound
As it did seem to shatter all his bulk
And end his being.…

The female element in Hamlet is attracted by the boy-actors, whose voices are still unbroken. That same element is defeated by an Ophelia who has been trained to suppress all traces of masculinity in herself. Hamlet's problem is that he is too feminine, 'passion's slave,' and so he despises feminity when he finds it exaggerated in Ophelia, whom he would prefer to be more coarse and masculine. At the play, he goads her into a response with his obscene innuendoes, but she merely observes that he is 'keen' in both senses. As a woman she has trained herself to be submissive to elders and gentlemen, so her slender wit can operate only within stark constraints. In performing the role of an obedient and delicate girl, she has colluded with her father in the attempt to deceive Hamlet. So, when he unmasks the deception, he sees in her mincing femininity the key to her falseness:

I have heard of your paintings too, well enough; God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another: you jig, you amble, and you lisp, and nickname God's creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance. Go to, I'll no more on 't; it hath made me mad. I say we will have no more marriage. Those that are married already, all but one, shall live; the rest shall keep as they are. To a nunnery, go.

So the androgynous hero, who says that 'man delights me not, nor woman neither', is forced to turn to the players for entertainment. Yet, at the same time, it is the actress in Ophelia, the performer of femininity, who so enrages Hamlet.

Like Viola, like the clown, the woman of Shakespeare's tragedies must live on her wits, by pleasing elders and superior males. Men have made women their dependants and yet, as Marianne Novy notes, they are the first to complain when this leads to the insincere role-playing of which women like Ophelia are so often accused. The reason male actors played women so successfully in Shakespeare's theatre, according to Novy, is that the very precariousness of their profession enabled them to identify with the traditional dependence of women and 'the need to please.' The Hamlet who loves male actors and hates female acting is himself fatally in thrall to the histrionic temperament. As androgynous as any actor, as soft as any woman, as ambitious as any man, he is an exponent of multiple selfhood at a time when he needs to act with a single will. He, too, would like to cut out the woman's part in himself, but that is not so easily done, as even the manly Laertes discovers after his sister's death by drowning:

Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia,
And therefore I forbid my tears: but yet
It is our trick; nature her custom holds,
Let shame say what it will: when these are
 gone,
The woman will be out.

Shakespeare's sharp awareness of the hollowness of traditional notions of 'masculinity' and 'femininity' is the basis of his lifelong attempt to define where true manliness and womanhood reside. The Lady Macbeth who is so ashamed of her woman's part that she all but denies her own sexuality is not a resourceful heroine but a monster. She is ashamed of her androgyny and her craving for complete manliness constitutes a parody of the very notion. Instead of honestly confronting the masculine element within herself, she projects it onto her husband and asks him to live out her own repressed masculinity. She steels herself for a deed of murder, asks the spirits to unsex her, and would resolutely repudiate her own motherhood, if that proved necessary to the success of her enterprise. Her husband, by contrast, she berates for his unmanly irresolution and remorse of conscience. She who would pluck the nipple from a sucking babe fears that he is too natural, 'too full o' the milk of human kindness,' to be a true man, whom she defines as one who acts on his desires. But Macbeth subtly redefines the concept of manhood:

I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares do more is none.

Dusinberre acutely points out that in denying that masculinity ordains brute power in action, Shakespeare 'undermines the logic which declares women to be weak and ignoble because incapable of fighting.' Moreover, in his portrait of Lady Macbeth, he depicts a woman who cultivates male attributes only at the cost of her female virtues, thereby getting the worst of both worlds, the squeamishness of a woman who fears blood allied to the callous indifference of a man. Through her Shakespeare warns women that liberation will not be found in emulating the brutality and egotism of incomplete men, but rather in a joint attempt by the sexes to discriminate true authority from false power, strength from force, conviction from self-assertion, and sensitivity from squeamishness. Those women who deny the virtues of their own sex are the ultimate slaves to the male principle and so they mistake an intelligent sensitivity in men for a feminine weakness. 'I pray you father, being weak, seem so,' says Regan to Lear, despising in him the female element which she has already suppressed in herself. As Lear's dutiless daughters grow more manly, he himself becomes more womanly, a development common in most of Shakespeare's doting old fathers, who seem as emotional and androgynous as babies. Polonius is the most credible old woman Shakespeare ever created, just as Joan is the most martial man.