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Gender as performance
Because female performers were banned from the English stage in Shakespeare’s day, all of
a play’s characters – be they male, female, or somewhere in between – were played by
men. While the audience would certainly suspend their disbelief over the actual gender
identity of the actors, the effects of this casting should not be underestimated. First of all, it
would have inevitably lent an extra frisson to the heterosexual relationships portrayed
onstage, which would only be further enhanced by a play like Twelfth Night, where you have
a boy actor pretending to be a woman pretending to be a man. But secondly, as Bruce R
Smith has noted, it implies that gender,
is more like a suit of clothes that can be put on and taken off at will than a matter of
biological destiny … However temporary such cross-dressing may be, it serves to remind
audiences that masculinity is a matter of appearances.[1]
Sebastian and Antonio
Let us turn now to the characters of Sebastian and Antonio, described by Stephen Orgel as
‘the only overtly homosexual couple in Shakespeare except for Achilles and Patroclus’.[7]
The Renaissance period was keen to promote the strong bonds of male friendships, but the
words exchanged between these two characters certainly moves beyond this into the
language of erotic love. Antonio says of Sebastian, ‘I do adore thee so / That danger shall
seem sport’ (2.1.43–44). The gulf of social status between the two could be one reason for
the language of servile devotion, which also occurs in the exchanges between Olivia and
Cesario, and Cesario and Orsino; but if the latter two relationships are noted for their erotic
charge, we must also consider the possibility of a romance between Sebastian and Antonio.
Productions such as Lyndsey Posner’s for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2001 emphasise
such readings, with the two men enacting Act 2, Scene 1 while getting dressed beside an
unmade double bed.
The alternate title for Twelfth Night is What You Will, a phrase which nods to a freedom of
agency in terms of both sexual orientation and gender identity, while also recalling the name
of the playwright himself. We may never know Shakespeare’s own sexual identity, but it
doesn’t matter. His works, such as Twelfth Night, remind us that identity itself is relative. If
music be the food of love – that is to say, gay love, straight love, queer love, trans love – play
on.
-Miranda Fay Thomas
Twelfth Night
The adjective most commonly applied to Twelfth Night captures its ambivalent tone:
bittersweet. It’s the salted caramel comedy, the Haribo sour of festivity. Death is always just
waiting in the wings. Illyria is in mourning for Olivia’s dead brother and father, and Viola
shares that grief for her own relatives. Olivia’s description of falling in love likens it to fatal
illness:
Even so quickly may one catch the plague?’ Act 2 Scene 1 line 199
just as Orsino imagines his own desires as ‘fell and cruel hounds’ (1.1.23) that, in the myth of
Actaeon, kill their own master for gazing on the naked goddess Diana. ‘Desire’, for Antonio, is
‘more sharp than filed steel’, digging into him like a rider’s spurs (3.3.4-5). Charged by Orsino
to sing a song dallying ‘with the innocence of love’, Feste embarks instead on the gloomy
lyrics of
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come away, come away, death.
And in sad cypress let me be laid
Act 2 Scene 4 line 48-54
Even Viola’s imaginary sister and projection of herself ‘let concealment, like a worm
i’th’bud,/Feed on her damask cheek’ (Act 2 Scene 4 lines 114-5).
At every turn, the business of comedy – youth, love, sexual desire – keeps tangling with the
business of tragedy – death. To love in this play is intimately bound up with the threat of
mortality. Twelfth Night thus understands, like seventeenth-century allegorical paintings by
Poussin or Guercino, that ‘et in Arcadia ego’ (literally ‘Even in Arcadia I, death, am still
present’).
Comic Heroines
Prominent, active roles for women are one of the defining features of comedy for
Shakespeare, which is part of what makes Measure for Measure so generically uncertain:
Isabella begins that play as a comic heroine but tails off in the play's second half, eclipsed by
the regenerated Duke. That's to say, in their representation of female agency, Shakespeare's
comedies challenge the social orthodoxy of their time.
Anything Goes
Furthermore, all these female characters were played by male actors. Preachers of the time
thundered that 'all men are abominations that put on women's raiment' (John Rainolds in
1599), and even suggested that cross-dressing undermined gender boundaries:
our apparel was given us as a sign distinctive to discern between sex and sex, and therefore
one to wear the apparel of another sex is to participate with the same, and to adulterate the
verity of his own kind- Philip Stubbes in 1583
Part of what is worrying to these moralists is that the performance of gender on the stage
shakes the very foundation of a social system that is based on the essential superiority of men
over women. Shakespeare's comedies have great fun with cross-dressing and flirt with the
homosexual desirability of the transvestite actor: Orsino and Olivia are both drawn to the
androgynously sexy Viola in Twelfth Night, giving the play's subtitle, 'What You Will', a saucy
hint of 'anything goes'.
Like other cross-dressed heroines, Viola never reappears in her female clothes and Orsino
continues to address her as 'Cesario' even as he acknowledges his love for her: heterosexual
gender norms are not reinstated. As in Rosalind's teasingly flirtatious epilogue to As You Like It,
the ending of Twelfth Night is reluctant to relinquish the erotic fun and possibility created by
Viola's sexually ambiguous persona. In terms of gender representation, therefore,
Shakespeare's comedies seem to challenge conservative orthodoxies and present
themselves as socially transgressive.
-Emma Smith
Feste – The Challenging Jester
As a jester, Feste would be expected to entertain his social superiors, but would also have
licence to tell them difficult truths. Like the Lord of Misrule in the Christmas celebrations of
which Twelfth Night was a part, he can temporarily reverse the social order through his comic
role. This is reinforced by his early exchange with Olivia, where he mocks her grief for her
dead brother. He uses a standard argument from the period, that the brother is now in
heaven, therefore happy, and not to be mourned. Olivia is therefore ‘The more fool’ (Act 1
Scene 5 l.66) for grieving so deeply. It may be read as a gentle tease, but also a valid
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criticism of Olivia’s lack of self-knowledge. Her love for her brother and sorrow for his loss are
sincere – but not as profound or lasting as she believes. Feste’s challenges to self-deceit are
directed even higher up the social hierarchy, to the Duke of Illyria. Feste effectively tells
Orsino that his love for Olivia is posturing,
the tailor make thy doublet of changeable taffeta (2.4.73-4)
suggesting it is both superficial and inconstant.
-Clare Jackson
Clothing and the social structure
These concerns resonated in Shakespeare’s time in ways which in ours – when public
transvestism is legal and almost commonplace, and when the idea of a man wearing yellow
cross-gartered stockings is suggestive of a golf tournament rather than of a come-on – have
definitely faded. For many in the Tudor establishment, however, proper social hierarchy was
perceived to be under threat, so that the Lady Olivia’s preference for a supposed page over
a count, never mind her steward’s fantasy of marrying her so as to become ‘Count Malvolio’
(2.5.33), would have carried a definite transgressive thrill for this play’s first audiences in 1601.
Although the existence of an increasingly influential merchant class had been complicating
matters of social status since the later middle ages, the Tudors continued to make last-ditch
attempts to enforce visible markers of rank. Sumptuary laws, designed to make a person’s
place in life legible at a glance by regulating how much the members of different classes
were allowed to spend on clothes, were reinforced by a series of proclamations throughout
the reigns of Henry VIII, Mary I and Elizabeth I: it was actually illegal to wear fabrics or colours
deemed inappropriate to one’s station. This was one reason some anti-theatrical writers
gave for wanting to close down the playhouses: not only did they provide an arena in which
spectators could show off their own inappropriately dressy outfits, but when not watching
each other they could enjoy the spectacle of mere common players dressed up as lords and
kings.
So when Malvolio imagines toying not with his steward’s chain – the badge of office which
labels him as an upper servant – but with ‘some rich jewel’ (2.5.59, all this while wearing a
‘branched velvet gown’, 2.5.45–46), during an extended daydream about how marriage to
Olivia will enable him not just to sleep with the woman who is currently his employer but to
rebuke her aristocratic uncle Sir Toby afterwards, the play is offering a glimpse not just of
comic sexual self-delusion but of a potentially subversive upward mobility. It is cruelly fitting
that the revenge of Sir Toby, Sir Andrew and their servant cronies involves tricking Malvolio
into a different inappropriate outfit, forging a letter by which he comes to believe that Olivia
wants him to wear yellow stockings, cross-gartered (2.5.148–49). Not only was cross-gartering
hopelessly outmoded by 1601, but wearing brightly-coloured hose was a badge of the
young, free and single (there was even an Elizabethan popular song, in which a husband
longs for his carefree bachelordom, called ‘Give Me My Yellow Hose Again’). The practical
joke turns Malvolio into a ludicrous and alarming fashion hybrid: sober steward above the
waist, satyr below.
- Michael Dobson
Androgeny & Homosexuality?
Puritan writers who attacked the immoralities of theatre-going thundered against stage
transvestism with particular vigour. Admittedly, Puritan preachers tended to predict that all
'masking players' were destined for eternal destruction. Philip Stubbes (writing 1583-91)
objected to
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the flocking and running to Theatres and Curtains, daily and hourly, night and day [... to see]
such wanton gestures, such bawdy speeches, such laughing [...] such kissing [...] such
winking and glancing of wanton eyes.
What's particularly interesting, though, is that these early critics see the boy actors as titillating
homosexual desires in the (male) audience. Dressed as women, speaking female parts, yet
concealing youthful maleness, is altogether damnable and leads audiences astray:
'homeward [...] they play the sodomites, or worse' (Smith, 275). Modern critics such as Lisa
Jardine also argue that these 'heroines' are sexually enticing as 'transvestied boys' and that
the plays 'encourage the audience to view them as such'. Another perspective, argued by
Catherine Belsey, is that the cross-dressed boy is neither fully male nor female but an
androgynous figure 'disrupting sexual difference' and thereby a challenge to the established
patriarchy of the time…
Sebastian's Gender Roles
Sebastian also contributes to the complexity of gender and sexuality in the play. It is not until
the beginning of Act 2 that the audience know of his survival, although the Captain's
imagery is resolutely hopeful. Thereafter the audience can enjoy all the comic irony of Viola's
situation and happily anticipate comic resolution. Sebastian is the means for unravelling the
play's deceptions and confusions. But Shakespeare questions gender expectations in
Sebastian's first scene, creating a forceful contrast with Viola. Recovering from the shipwreck,
she laments the loss of her brother but is resourceful in seizing on the scheme of disguise,
recruiting the Captain's assistance. Sebastian is accompanied by Antonio, an older man who
declares his desire to protect him; indeed, he 'adores' him. Unlike his more practical sister,
Sebastian desires to be alone and weeps as he tells his story:
I am yet so near the manners of my mother that upon the least occasion more mine eyes will
tell tales of me. (Act 2 Scene 1 l.37-8)
Later Sebastian will fulfil - perhaps exceed - gender stereotypes when he lays about him with
his sword, wounding Toby and Andrew. In this respect Viola lacks the required gentlemanly
training
-Pamela Bickley
Questions of Gender
In Twelfth Night, with its central deployment of mistaken identity and cross-dressing,
Shakespeare is more concerned with broader questions of gender than with specific ideas
about proper roles for men and women within marriage. In the case of Orsino and Viola, the
wistful nature of Orsino's language towards his newly-acquired 'male' servant perhaps
suggests something more than Cesario's appropiateness for wooing Olivia on his behalf:
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.
(Act 1 Scene 4, lines 30-33).
The potentially homoerotic quality of this speech is added to by the fact that an Elizabethan
audience would have heard these words addressed to a boy actor playing the part of a
young woman dressed as a young man. Moreover, Orsino's regard for Viola retains the sense
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of a male-male relationship virtually until the end of the play: following the revelation that
Cesario is in fact Viola, Orsino still addresses her as 'Boy' (Act 5 Scene 1, line 260), and a little
later he refers to her as 'Your master's mistress' (Act 5 Scene 1, line 314), a paradox that plays
upon the idea of Viola as both an object of love and as a woman with power over him.
Through the relationship of Orsino and Cesario/Viola, the play suggests a kind of social order
via marriage, but it might well have been a rather unsettling one for Shakespeare's audience
given that, at the time, homosexual relations between men were punishable by death. In
terms of contemporary social attitudes towards male-male relationships, the surviving
evidence is very difficult to interpret, as Stephen Greenblatt (1997) has suggested. In
addition, the extreme tone of a legal statute of 1553, which spoke of 'the detestable and
abominable vice of buggery', might reflect either a common view of male homosexuality or,
conversely, a case of defensiveness that reveals widespread sexual practices.
More openly homoerotic, if we take the meaning of love in the play to mean more than
affection or spiritual connection, is the language of Antonio in relation to Sebastian. In the
middle of the play, he speaks of why he has remained with Sebastian in Illyria, telling him that
'My desire/ More sharp than filed steel, did spur me forth', and moments later, he offers
Sebastian his 'willing love' (Act 3 Scene 3, lines 4-11). This is significant in terms of the resolution
of the play because this love is not expressed in a final union between the two characters. At
the end of the play Antonio remains on stage to see the union of Sebastian and Olivia, a
woman the twin barely knows suggesting perhaps a specific rejection of male-male
relationships here, but one that is not without its poignancy. In this sense, Shakespeare is
arguably ambivalent about the kind of order that marriage brings, in away that seems more
explicit than the ambiguities that exist in the marriages in Much Ado About Nothing.
-Jakub Lund
Topsy-turvydom
‘What You Will’, the play’s alternative title, might refer to the festive ‘misrule’ of Twelfth Night,
5–6 January, the traditional last day of Christmas festivities and thus the final party before the
return to a wintry workaday world. It is easy to see in the drunkenness and rowdiness of Sir
Toby Belch and his companions a desire for the party never to stop – he is always calling for
another ‘stoup of wine’, and observing that ‘not to be abed after midnight is to be up
betimes’ (2.3.1–2). This rumbustious scene sets up the play’s popular secondary plot, the
gulling of Malvolio, Olivia’s house steward. The play does not mention Christmas, or
Candlemas (the February feast on which Manningham saw the play), but Maria does label
Malvolio a ‘Puritan’, which was a strong term in the politics of religion in 1600. Puritans were
anti-theatre, anti-drinking and feasting, and anti-Catholic. Such winter feasts as Christmas,
Twelfth Night (commemorating the visit of the three Wise Men to the baby Jesus) and
Candlemas (the feast of the presentation of the Christ Child in the temple) were strongly
associated with the ‘Old Religion’, Roman Catholicism, which had caused such conflict in
16th-century England.[1] Twelfth Night’s ‘wassailing’ is in fact an even older, folk and pagan
tradition, with the Lord of Misrule (here embodied in the rowdy English knight Sir Toby Belch)
signifying that the ‘normal’ world and its behaviour were turned upside down for the duration
of the feast. In this light it can also be argued that Viola’s dressing in male clothes, and
Malvolio’s fantasy that he (a servant) can become the husband of his lady Olivia, are also
examples of the world turned upside down.
Endings
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The action of the play is, in Viola’s words, an ‘untangling’ of this topsy-turvy situation of ‘what
you will’: ‘O Time, thou must untangle this’, she says in soliloquy (2.2.40). The play is full of
references to time passing; the audience is being primed to recognise unconsciously that the
two hours of confusion will come to a satisfactory resolution. Or will it? Sir Toby and Maria’s
revenge on the ‘madly-used Malvolio’ (5.1.311) for stopping their party has culminated in his
appearing in yellow stockings, cross-gartered, ‘a fashion she [Olivia] detests’ (2.5.200), and
attempting to woo Olivia with most inappropriate language and gestures. Yet when he is put
in the ‘dark house’ (a treatment for mad persons in the period), and desperately calls out for
‘light’ so that he can write his justification of his behaviour, the scene (Act 4, Scene 2) in
which Maria and Feste tease him is one in which it is impossible to ignore the cruelty to an
innocent (if deluded) person. Manningham thought the Malvolio story ‘a good practise’, and
it was undoubtedly the most famous role in the play throughout the 17th and 18th centuries,
but productions of the play in recent decades have recognised and explored the bullying
behaviour by a dominant group of characters, and Malvolio has more often than not
become a distressingly abused and tragic figure. His situation is certainly not resolved by the
play’s end: in a chilling moment after the revelations, recognitions, and romantic unions of
Act 5, he is brought on to make his complaint of mistreatment, and when the clown laughs
at him, he exits with the threat, ‘I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you’ (5.1.378). It is
almost as though Shakespeare had a premonition of the triumph of the English Puritans in the
first half of the 17th century. A certain melancholy for the passing of a merrier Old England of
‘cakes and ale’ (2.3.116) and of life and young love underpins this festive comedy, and
seems to be evoked in Feste the clown’s final song, with its very English chorus, ‘The rain it
raineth every day’ (5.1.369).
-Penny Gay
Plural Sexual Identities
If these ideas about gender and love are relevant to the ending of Twelfth Night, then even
though it is true that Olivia ends up not marrying the same person she fell in love with, that
part of her love which is composed of her sexual desire for him is not necessarily
compromised by Sebastian having a different gender to Viola. Similarly with Orsino. He was
aware of Cesario’s love (5.1.276-7). The apparent change of gender makes no difference to
that love. It appears that not all the original audience would have found these unions
implausible from the perspective of gender division.
But in the end the way people in 1601 may or may not have understood the play is less
important than the way we read it now. In this past a more liberated future may be
intimated. Kiernan Ryan, in his book Shakespeare (2002) shows how what matters is the vision
of the possible future, not of the past, that the plays hold out:
the escalating androgynous confusions of Shakespearean comedy suggest that sexual
identity is more plural, discontinuous and volatile than the official definitions and approved
models can afford to submit.
That ‘suggestion’ is an important part of the joy at the end of Shakespeare’s final comedy.
-Sean McEvoy
Bakhtin’s Fool
The Russian writer and theorist Mikhail Bakhtin shows that the figure of the fool has been
important in folk culture for thousands of years, emerging from classical antiquity and the
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ancient Orient. Fools, he writes, occupy ‘their own special world’ and should not be
understood as psychologically realistic figures. Instead, they inhabit a role which has only ‘a
metaphorical significance’; because ‘they are not what they seem’, they cannot be taken
literally. Fools
are life’s maskers, their being coincides with their role, and outside this role they simply do not
exist.
They insist on
the right to be ‘other’ in this world, the right not to make common cause with any single one
of the existing categories life makes available.
Fools function, Bakhtin says, to lay bare ‘any sort of conventionality’ and expose ‘all that is
vulgar and falsely stereotyped in human relationships’; they are ‘life’s perpetual spy and
reflector’; their language has ‘a time-honoured bluntness’; they parody, hyperbolise, refuse
to understand, rage at others, and rip off the masks we depend on to live in the world. I want
to see how helpful Bakhtin’s paradigm is in making sense of Feste’s role in Twelfth Night.
Truth-teller and Debunker
The ability to speak bluntly and to expose human frailty and hypocrisy are central to the
fool’s role and Shakespeare uses Feste as a means to debunk the follies and delusions of
other characters. Travestying the role of the priest (and perhaps anticipating his later
appearance as Sir Topas), he catechises Olivia:
Feste: Good Madonna, why mourn’st thou?
Olivia: Good fool, for my brother’s death.
Feste: I think his soul is in heaven, madonna.
Olivia: I know his soul is in heaven, fool.
Feste: The more fool, madonna, to mourn for your brother’s soul being in heaven.
Feste reveals her mourning to be a self-contradictory sham, something the subsequent
action underlines when Olivia abandons her nun-like isolation for erotic infatuation as soon as
Cesario appears. Likewise, he sees through Orsino’s capricious self-indulgence, skewering his
egotism:
Now the melancholy god protect thee, and the tailor make thy doublet of changeable
taffeta, for thy mind is very opal.
Although seeming to pay Orsino a compliment by comparing him to valuable cloth and a
gemstone, Feste is commenting ironically on the Duke’s inconstancy because both taffeta
and opals can seem to change colour in different lights. (Interestingly, so too does topaz
stone, one of many puns in the naming of Sir Topas.) Similarly, though a part of the belowstairs misrule at Olivia’s house, Feste is sceptical about Sir Toby, telling Olivia her uncle has ‘a
most weak pia mater’, exposes Sir Andrew’s gullibility by speaking total gibberish which the
obtuse knight takes to be the height of wit, and subverts their hedonistic faith in ‘eating and
drinking’ by reminding them in song that while
Present mirth hath present laughter
What’s to come is still unsure
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and
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.
A Semantic Saboteur
It is also possible to argue that Feste sees through Viola’s disguise at the start of Act 3 when
he implies that, just as a witty person can change the meaning of a sentence, so Viola has
turned ‘the wrong side’ outward, and he calls on Jove to ‘send thee a beard.’ When he tells
Viola that
in my conscience, sir, I do not care for you. If that be to care for nothing, sir, I would it would
make you invisible
he perhaps suggests that, as Cesario, she is nothing (Viola has already described her history
as ‘a blank’) and refers to her ‘real’ gender through a pun on ‘nothing’ which in early
modern English could mean ‘vagina’.
This exchange between Viola and Feste is a vital moment in the play and shows most
emphatically Feste becoming, in Kiernan Ryan’s phrase, ‘a linguistic terrorist, a semantic
saboteur’. Elsewhere in the text, Feste talks nonsense, uses puns, and misconstrues
deliberately what people say to him; here the dialogue centres explicitly – both in form and
content – on the volatility of language. Words, Feste contends,
are very rascals since bonds disgraced them.
They seem to mean one thing but then break their promises.
-George Norton
Feeding the eyes and ears
'Music’, Orsino claims, is ‘the food of love’ (1.1.1); Antonio instructs Sebastian to ‘feed’ his
‘knowledge with viewing of’ Illyria (3.3. 41-2). Orsino and Sebastian’s remarks, claiming that
something intangible and without physical substance like music, actually possesses
substance and texture on a par with actual food, seems metaphorical to us but, in fact, to
an early modern person, this was no mere metaphor. The early modern body was
considered to be a ‘liquid container’ of four humours (blood, yellow bile, black bile and
phlegm) that could be altered by what one saw and heard. It was a fact of existence that
sight and sound possessed matter that could alter the balance of these four humours and
transform people’s bodies.
Playwrights: drug pushers?
For William Prynne (1633) sights in the theatre are ‘apt to poison... the eyes’. To Anthony
Munday (1580) ‘the sight’ of actors, especially cross-dressed ones, can bring ‘confusion both
to our bodies and soules’. These anti- theatricalists viewed ‘theatre as a drug’ and ‘as a site
of addiction’: ‘plays are drugs, actors are drug-peddlers' (Lemon, Addiction and Devotion in
Early Modern England, 2018). The primary way playwrights delivered these ‘drugs’ was
through the eye. It is really not so different to modern complaints about young people being
‘addicted to screens’ but because their understanding of the body was so different to ours,
the effects were seen as even more drastic as evident in the quotes above.
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Twelfth Night - Transformation via the eye
In Twelfth Night Shakespeare immediately foregrounds the transformational nature of sight:
Orsino claims when his ‘eyes did see Olivia first’ he was ‘that instant turned into a hart’ (1.1.
18-20). She has infected him through sight alone and now his ‘desires, like fell and cruel
hounds/ E’er pursue’ him’ (21-22). Orsino, having personally experienced the eye’s
vulnerability, then acknowledges the best way for him to ensnare Olivia is via the eye: he will
entrance her with ‘the rich golden shaft’ that will remove all other ‘affections.../ That live in
her’ (1.1. 35). The ‘golden shaft’ he refers to belongs to Cupid. According to antitheatricalists, this weapon is put to deadly use by playwrights and actors: theatres are used
by ‘Cupid’ to ‘set traps’ so they can deliver ‘venomous arrows to the mind(s)’ of spectators
(Gosson). Orsino clearly believes, through sight alone, he can essentially ‘supply and fill’ (1.1.
36) Olivia’s body with his own amorous arrows. This will transform her from someone with an
‘addiction to a melancholy’ (2.5.196) to someone with an addiction to him, the ‘one self
king’ (1.1. 38).
Olivia’s Sensory Vigilance
Some characters in the play are highly conscious of the danger of sight and sound’s ability to
invade and penetrate. The cross-dressed Viola is told by Orsino to ‘unfold the passion of his
love’, to ‘surprise’ Olivia ‘with discourse’ and ‘act’ his ‘woes’ (1.4. 24-6). When Cesario arrives
at her ‘gates’, Olivia shows sensory vigilance, clearly cautious about what and whom she
allows to enter: when about to recite something ‘poetical’, Cesario is warned to ‘keep it in’
(1.5.190-191) and Olivia is angry someone has the temerity to be ‘saucy at [her] gates’ (1.5.
192). The senses were commonly understood as ‘gates’ to the body and I suspect this usage
is implied by Shakespeare here – I can certainly see it being acted on stage as a bawdy
double entendre! Olivia’s sensory fearfulness is made more evident when she presumes
Cesario has ‘some hideous matter to deliver’ (1.5. 201). Cesario comments he does have
verbal matter to deliver to her ‘ear’ but his words are ‘as full of peace as matter’ (1.5. 205).
‘Ourselves we do not ow[n]’
Olivia’s cautiousness is justified when, despite her sensory vigilance, Cesario’s ‘perfections/
With an invisible and subtle stealth/ Creep in’ at her ‘eyes’ (1.5. 288-90). Such is the strength
of her infection she violates social decorum and gets Malvolio to ‘run after’ (1.5.293) Cesario,
inventing a story about a ring that was left behind. She has been ‘charmed’ after she
unveiled herself and ‘made good view of’ Cesario; via the permeable orifice that is the eye
her ‘passion’ has been aroused and she is now addicted to him. She is described in a
narcotized state like someone who has ingested a drug: ‘her eyes’ ‘lost her tongue’ and she
did ‘speak in starts, distractedly’ (2.2. 20-1). This drug or ‘enchantment’ has led her to ‘abuse’
herself (3.1. 110-11) and such a penetration of the eye causes her to confess she no longer
has self- control: ‘ourselves we do not ow[n]’ (1.5.302).
-Smithers