Twelfth Night
Handout #6
English 231/231W
Spring 2008
Synopsis:
Viola has been shipwrecked in a violent storm off the coast of Illyria; in the process she
has lost her twin brother, Sebastian. She disguises herself as a boy and assumes the name
Cesario for protection. Thus disguised, Viola becomes a page in the service of Orsino, the
Duke. It seems that Orsino is having little luck courting Olivia, who is in mourning for
the deaths of her father and brother. As Orsino's proxy, Viola is sent to Olivia with love
letters. Viola refuses to budge until she is let in to see Olivia; Olivia, intrigued by the
impudent young "boy," contrives to get "Cesario" to return by sending her steward,
Malvolio, after her with one of Olivia's rings. Viola realizes to her dismay that Olivia has
fallen for her Cesario rather than Duke Orsino—further complicated by the fact that
Viola has had stirrings herself for Orsino.
In the two major subplots of the play, Sebastian (Viola's twin, presumed dead) comes
ashore in Illyria thinking that Viola has drowned in the shipwreck. A man named Antonio
rescued him from the surf, and continues to aid him—at some risk to himself, as Antonio
fought against the Duke at one time. Meanwhile, in Olivia's house, Sir Toby Belch (her
uncle) has hoodwinked a foppish Sir Andrew Aguecheek into supporting him by
convincing him that he could be a suitor to Olivia. There is a running feud between
Malvolio and Belch; with the help of Maria, Olivia's maid, and Feste, a clown, Belch
plots to make a buffoon of the steward. Maria writes a love letter to Malvolio that will
make him think Olivia has fallen for him.
Malvolio falls entirely for the sport, which eventually leads to his confinement as a
madman. All the while, Belch is egging Sir Andrew into a duel with Viola's "Cesario"
character as she departs from Olivia; Olivia is now entirely smitten with Cesario, even
though Viola continues to press Orsino's cause. As Viola and Sir Andrew prepare for a
duel that neither one wants, Antonio happens upon the scene. Believing Viola to be
Sebastian, he intervenes and is arrested. Viola, of course, does not recognize Antonio.
Later, Belch and Sir Andrew encounter Sebastian, who doesn't back down from
Aguecheek when challenged and resoundingly beats him. Olivia intervenes in the matter,
and—mistaking Sebastian for Viola/Cesario—presses her suit for him. A bemused
Sebastian agrees to marry her.
Antonio is brought before the Duke for questioning, and Viola relates the events of the
duel. Antonio tells everyone how he dragged "this man" from the surf, saving his life.
Then Olivia enters, searching for her new husband—which she thinks is Viola (as
Cesario). Adding to this confusion, Belch and Aguecheek enter claiming that
Viola/Cesario has violently assaulted them. In the midst of Viola's denials, Sebastian
appears. The brother and sister recognize one another and are reunited; Sebastian helps to
clear the confusion as to who fought and married who. At the end, Orsino and Viola
pledge their love, Olivia and Sebastian will remain satisfactorily wed, and Olivia rebukes
Belch and Maria for their abuse of Malvolio, who vows his revenge upon the whole lot.
Belch agrees to wed Maria to make up for getting her in trouble, and all—except the
disgruntled Malvolio—will apparently live happily ever after.
Glimpsing a "lesbian" poetics in Twelfth Night
By Jami Ake.
(Studies in English Literature: Spring 2003)
To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein1
During the last two decades, a growing body of historical, cultural, and literary criticism
has begun to explore the ways in which female homoeroticism was depicted in early
modern fictions.2 Most of this critical work, while acknowledging that a discrete
"lesbian" identity did not yet exist in the period, has nevertheless worked to recover
emergent and recognizable languages of female homoeroticism from early modern art,
poetry, and drama.3 Most recently, pioneering efforts in the field of gay and lesbian
studies by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Valerie Traub, and others have shifted critical
interest toward an investigation of the historical and ideological developments that helped
to constitute "homosexual" identity after the Enlightenment-developments that included
changes in early modern languages, tropes, and discursive logics that gave particular
shape to modern sexological categories.4
In examining how female eroticism begins to assume discursive shape and currency on
the early modern stage, I argue here that Shakespeare's Twelfth Night offers an often
overlooked opportunity to witness the dynamics by which a language of female-female
desire emerges from the materials of conventional heteroerotic discourses already in
circulation. Viola's performance of Orsino's poetic suit to Olivia creates a curious
dramatic space in which female characters negotiate and revise the scripts and
conventions of the elite, if increasingly cliched, Petrarchan poetry of Elizabethan
courtiers. In the interview scene, the inadequacy of Orsino's ostensibly heteroerotic
Petrarchan discourse, surprisingly enough, gives rise to a pastoral poetics of female desire
in Viola's conversation with Olivia. A close examination of the interplay of discursive
and erotic modes in this scene allows us to see both the ways that female desire finds
imaginative space outside the restrictions of a thoroughly masculine Petrarchan poetics
and how newly forged languages of female desire find their way into action. Viola's
successful wooing of Olivia in the interview scene affords us a glimpse of a tentative
"lesbian" poetics as one female character imagines and articulates the words that will
seduce another.
I
Viola. I pray you tell me if this be the lady of the house, for I never saw her. I would be
loath to cast away my speech; for besides that it is excellently well penn'd, I have taken
great pains to con it.5
It is now a critical commonplace to note Orsino's penchant for a particularly selfindulgent kind of Petrarchan language and to observe that his excessive speeches betray
his desire not for Olivia, but for love itself and for the poetry conventionally used to
profess it. Less remarked upon, however, is the duke's flawed belief in the
interchangeability of his particular Petrarchan fictions and lived experience and his
equally ridiculous notion that his Petrarchan text, once heard, will inspire his beloved's
passion. We find that the duke has populated his court, oddly enough, with attendants
whom he has fashioned as living Petrarchan figures, reducing courtiers to allegorical
representations of his own conceited desire. Curio (his "care") invites him to hunt the hart
(heart), the conventional pastime of Petrarchan wooers, and he sends his messenger,
Valentine, to his inaccessible sonnet mistress, presumably to effect the heart transplant
(usually a symbolic offering of one's heart) characteristic of Petrarchan verse. The duke's
Illyria, as its name playfully suggests, is a land of ill-conceived poeticizing, its
misdirected lyricism as the heart of its listlessness and willful ignorance of time's
passing.6
Viola's entrance into the duke's court disguised as the eunuch Cesario somewhat
unsurprisingly prompts yet another of the duke's efforts to assign Petrarchan roles.
Orsino's newest courtier becomes his page-both his messenger and his poetic textassigned to avow his love in a witty fashion to his mistress Olivia and to win the affection
of his beloved as his Valentine alone could not. Viola's inevitable failure fully to embody
his poetic text, however, instigates a series of deviations both from the duke's Petrarchan
script and from the courtly social scripts that provide for the possibility of Petrarchan
poetry.7 Although she is initially reluctant to throw away her memorized speech, Viola
refuses simply to recite the duke's "excellently well penn'd" text when Olivia disdains to
listen to it. Viola's unwillingness to surrender her agency completely to the duke's poetic
text gradually exposes the inadequacies of Petrarchan language not only as a
performative text, but also as a poetry capable of either voicing or eliciting female desire.
Moreover, Viola's decision not simply to recite or "become" the duke's assigned script,
but rather to treat it as a role merely to be acted, allows her to disrupt Petrarchanism's
equally prescripted social economy-the context of poetic circulation of which Orsino
remains willfully (and comically) unaware. As the poetic material of an elite manuscript
culture, English Petrarchan poetry encoded the class and gender relationships of those
who organized, and were organized by, its circulation. Petrarchanism, particularly
because of its apparent mode of direct address to a beautiful woman, as Nancy Vickers
observes, is a specifically "motivated discourse" designed primarily by and for the
interests of men, part of "the canonical legacy of description in praise of beauty" that is
"in large part . . . a battle between men that is first figuratively and then literally fought
on the fields of a woman's 'celebrated' body."8 Although much Petrarchan sonnet writing
in England was ostensibly addressed to women, its primary readers were men and its
chief purpose was to solidify elite, male homosocial bonds. English Petrarchan poetry
had found a place among courtiers as a route to social promotion.9 According to Arthur
Marotti, Petrarchanism's focus on the powerful mistress afforded would-be gentlemen of
the 1580s and 90s a way to encode appeals for political preferment within a court milieu
headed by its own, self-eroticized maiden, Queen Elizabeth. The Petrarchan love sonnet,
Marotti suggests, became one literary means of "courtly striving for the rewards available
in hierarchical societies that functioned according to systems of patronage and that
allowed (at least limited) forms of social mobility."10
At the same time, however, as Wendy Wall reminds us, implicit in the conventions of
coterie verse exchange was a recognition that women, more than symbolic objects of
exchange (as Vickers observes), also figured as powerful readers of men's Petrarchan
verses.11 Coterie poets playfully troped on the similarity between the poet's anxiety
about the openness and contingency of favorable literary reception and the lover's
apprehension about favorable erotic reciprocity. Shakespeare had capitalized on the erotic
and dialogic potential of sonnet exchange in his earlier play Romeo and juliet, where the
two lovers, speaking together for the first time, engage in witty conversation that takes
shape on the page as a Petrarchan sonnet (I.v.94-107).12 But whereas Romeo and juliet's
mutually and improvisationally composed love sonnet establishes the wit and
compatibility of the young lovers, the Petrarchan text that Orsino sends to Olivia via his
page is comparably fixed and betrays his unwillingness to imagine wooing as true erotic
exchange with his mistress.
Viola's apparent "success" in gaining admittance to the countess constitutes a significant
disruption in Orsino's particularly limited understanding of Petrarchan practices.
Although Valentine, Viola's predecessor, whom Olivia refused to admit, did not succeed
in relaying the duke's exact message, he had actually fulfilled his Petrarchan mission
even as he seemed to fail; the sonnet mistress's scornful rejection of the lover's heart is an
already-scripted event in the duke's poetry of perpetually unfulfilled desire. Viola's
breech in Petrarchan convention, in turn, frees Olivia from her own scripted role as
inaccessible sonnet mistress-one she has seemed passively to accept-and stirs her interest.
Olivia is initially more interested in the page's transgression than his/her predictable
message: "I heard you were saucy at my gates, and allow'd your approach rather to
wonder at you than to hear you" (I.v.197-8). As critics have often noted, as the interview
begins, it is Viola's spontaneity and her improvisational ability, not the duke's banal
praises, that keep the conversation going and that ultimately help to inspire Olivia's
passion.13 Simply by insisting on and then sustaining an audience with Olivia alone,
Viola already begins to revise the context of a manuscript form that, in spite of
Shakespeare's use of it in Romeo and juliet, was not designed for face-to-face erotic
interchange-or for dialogue between women.
Viola's exchange with Olivia dramatizes the inability of Orsino's Petrarchan language on
its own to engender erotic relationships and the need for a new kind of poetic
performance in order to do so. Viola's audience is not the silent Petrarchan mistress
Orsino's script assumes, but rather a fully embodied woman who not only speaks, but
who also already seems to know the lines of the messenger's script:
Viola. Tis beauty truly blent, whose red and white
Nature's own sweet and cunning hand laid on.
Lady, you are the cruell'st she alive
If you will lead these graces to the grave,
And leave the world no copy.
Olivia. O, sir, I will not be so hard-hearted; I will give out divers schedules of my beauty.
It shall be inventoried, and every particle and utensil labell'd to my will: as, item, two
lips, indifferent red; item, two grey eyes, with lids to them; item, one neck, one chin, and
so forth. Were you sent hither to praise me?
(I.v.239-49)
Olivia wittily anticipates her blazon, the clichd Petrarchan convention which, as Vickers
has observed, attempts to master the threat of female erotic power by means of a poetry
that dismembers the female body and silences her voice.14 As she defies the
fragmentation of female speech and bodies upon which such Petrarchan poetic
subjectivity relies, Olivia dismembers the Petrarchan rhetoric in prose even before it can
dismember her in verse. As David Schalkwyk suggests, Olivia's response illustrates "the
way in which the sonnet's conventional blazon may be out-faced by the deliberate
facelessness that the [onstage] women assume towards it."15 Her anti-Petrarchan speech
does more than counter Petrarchan conventions demanding female silence by exposing its
nonreferentiality with her own embodied speech; it also forecloses the continued
expression of the residual male voice that Viola has been assigned to re-present. Olivia's
parodie rendition of the blazon thus exposes the inadequacy of this particular conventionat least as Orsino uses it-to represent female beauty. At the same time, it manages to
subvert the male social and erotic prerogatives that Orsino's fixed text attaches to the
circulation of Petrarchan discourse.
In staging Elizabethan conventions of a Petrarchan poetry rhetorically addressed to an
elusive yet powerful woman, Twelfth Night lays bare the sociopolitical scaffolding
supporting the gendered conventions of erotic verse. Orsino, the consummate Petrarchan
poet, is so enraptured by his own poeticizing that he remains quite blind to
Petrarchanism's (homo)social underpinnings. Even more ridiculous, he remains as
ignorant of Petrarchan poetry's imaginative possibilities as an actual dialogue between a
man and a woman as he is willfully unaware that Viola and his other attendants are not
simply impersonations of his own desire. At the same time, however, Olivia, like Viola,
eludes the duke's efforts to reduce her to a symptom of his love-sick Petrarchan universe,
and resists the tendency of Orsino's Petrarchan poetics to transform women from pretexts
for verse into poetic texts under masculine control.
II
Subverting the text she has been assigned to inhabit, Viola transforms Orsino's monologic
Petrarchan verse into a performance that allows for actual conversation. As she deviates
dramatically from her assigned Petrarchan text, Viola must rely upon her improvisational
abilities to maintain her repartee with Olivia. Without the duke's script, she is left to draw
upon her own intuitions and imagination, and presumably her own experience, inventing
words that exhibit a knowledge of-and can elicit-female desire:
Viola. If I did love you in my master's flame,
With such a suff ring, such a deadly life,
In your denial I would find no sense,
I would not understand it.
Olivia. Why, what would you?
Viola. Make me a willow cabin at your gate,
And call upon my soul within the house;
Write loyal cantons of contemned love,
And sing them loud even in the dead of night;
Hallow your name to the reverberate hills,
And make the babbling gossip of the air
Cry out "Olivia!" O, you should not rest
Between the elements of air and earth
But you should pity me!
(I.v.264-76)
It is important to note that Viola, in imaginatively situating herself as Olivia's wooer,
does not conceive of herself as simply substituting for the duke, but as loving "in [her]
master's flame"-that is, with the same sort of erotic intensity as Orsino. She reaches not
for another, similar version of Orsino-like pronouncements, but for a language that she
believes would seem appealing to a woman much like herself.16 Her improvised account
of desire invents a pastoral poetics quite removed from the duke's Petrarchan rhetoric and
the courtly conventions it encodes; she evokes a realm where neither Petrarchan
conventions nor their social objectives mean much at all. Rather than calling upon a
masculine Petrarchan poetics whose traditional aim was public acknowledgement or selfpromotion symbolized by the laurel, Viola articulates a poetics more faithfully
symbolized by the willow, whose logical end, it seems, is private, dialogic, and naturally
reciprocal desire.17
Specifically, Viola spontaneously produces a poetry that undermines the courtly logic of
Petrarchan circulation, establishing a space for female desire, and resisting
Petrarchanism's silencing of women's voices in part by rejecting writing itself, even in its
residual form as a "well penn'd" text. She affirms that in place of a kind of verse
circulated on paper, she would sing "cantons of contemned love," thus avoiding the
possible distortions endured by poetry as it is passed through the hands of others. Viola's
song would depend on no pages-neither messengers nor manuscripts-for its success.18
Her "text," orally improvised and thus more ephemeral than a sonneteer's, would circulate
only through "the babbling gossip of the air" rather than among the tongues of the court.
Furthermore, Viola's poetry, unlike Orsino's, does not rely at all upon Olivia's physicality,
and instead appeals to her "soul," an interiority that remains unfragmented in her verse;
she would not reduce Olivia to a written text designed to represent, replace, and circulate
her. Rather, Olivia remains whole, identified, present, and unambiguously the object of
the poet's desire-but no less a desiring subject in her own right.
It is in her articulation of a specifically pastoral poetry created out of and designed for a
woman's desire that Viola's improvisational performance allows us to glimpse an
alternative poetics of female homoeroticism. Gregory Bredbeck has examined early
modern uses of the pastoral as a site of male homoeroticism, focusing especially on the
classical models that early modern poets emulated, noting that "in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries one of [pastoral's] primary interests is its participation in fields of
sexual deviation and, by extension, its encoding of social responses to deviation."19 As
Viola appropriates the pastoral as a space for female, rather than male, homoerotic desire,
she imagines a realm for Olivia that promises real erotic reciprocity as its end-a union
unrestricted by the social arrangements of rank and gender to which Olivia carefully
conforms. Moreover, her performance employs a strategic grammatical indirection that
allows her to situate her promised pastoral realm in an imaginary, conditional space (set
apart by "if"), even as she renders it momentarily present to Olivia.20 Viola's poetic
performance thus provides a fragile emblem for "lesbian" desire in the play: privatized
and textually untraceable.
Anthony Taylor has argued that verbal allusions to Arthur Golding's translation of Ovid's
Echo and Narcissus myth, which resonate throughout the interview scene, deliver an
implicit Shakespearean condemnation of Olivia's newfound attraction to the disguised
Viola. Taylor points out that Golding's 1567 translation of the Metamorphoses treats
Echo's ill-fated desire for Narcissus and her subsequent metamorphosis into a
disembodied echo as a cautionary tale of excessive female desire. Thus, according to
Taylor, the Ovidian subtext of Twelfth Nights interview scene, heard perhaps most
audibly in Viola's allusion to "the babbling gossips of the air" heightens the satire
inevitable in a scene depicting a woman falling in love with another woman.21 Because
Viola's words recall those of Golding's Echo, Taylor argues, Shakespeare's scene issues a
moralizing critique of yet another "female inclined to idle chatter."22 The punishment
meted out for Echo's excessive female speech in Ovid serves as a quiet reminder of the
unfortunate ends of a too-proud female desire lurking behind Viola's false declarations of
love. According to Taylor:
It was perhaps Golding's approach to the tale of Echo and Narcissus that caused it to
come to Shakespeare's mind as he worked on the scene in which Viola first meets Olivia.
For Golding, as he states in his moralizing preface to his translation, the tale revealed an
illustration of the folly of "scornfulnesse and pryde" and was an example of "beawties
fading vanitee" . . . And when he translates the tale in Book Three, Golding has cause to
remark on "impotent desire," on the irony of a "sweete boy belovde in vaine," and on a
figure of "pryde" who is eventually brought to the realisation that "The thing I seeke is in
my selfe."23
Taylor reads Shakespeare's subtle use of the myth as a satirical comment upon the futility
of an ultimately selfish (and apparently unmentionable) female homoeroticism, an
assessment no doubt derived from a much more modern notion of homosexuality as a
kind of misdirected narcissism.24 Olivia does seem, at least initially, to find
Cesario/Viola's youthful, feminine demeanor intriguing, but their interview reveals the
extent to which Olivia's desire for Cesario/Viola emerges not from similarity (in speech
or conduct), but precisely from the differences s/he embodies and the poetic alternatives
s/he offers.
The movement and energy of the scene between Viola and Olivia, in fact, reverses the
particular metamorphic effects evinced by the Ovidian tale of Echo and Narcissus and its
admonition pronouncing the annihilating consequences of erotic self-absorption. As the
scene progresses, Viola resorts less and less merely to echoing the duke's Petrarchan text,
and the more Viola/Cesario is "out of [her] text" in wooing Olivia, the more attracted
Olivia seems. Moreover, in contrast to previous scenes, where the duke issues orders, or
where Olivia's hangers-on banter with words that almost escape into meaninglessness,
Olivia and Viola engage in a kind of communication that seeks relentlessly to signify. Far
from reenacting the diminishment of female bodies and speech, the two women begin to
escape the traps of male discourses and to articulate their own desires in a language that
(unlike the duke's verse) requires actual bodies for its deployment. Both Viola's wooing
and Olivia's response, in fact, avoid the idolatrous narcissism embedded in the duke's
Petrarchan poetics by aggressively accommodating one another's speech and desires in
constant negotiation and conversation. The dialogue between Viola and Olivia ends not
in annihilating self-absorption, but in volubility and assertive female agency. Their
interview thus stages a tentative escape from Petrarchanism's familiar threats of
narcissism and erotic failure.
III
When Olivia fervently responds to Cesario/Viola's performance, it is impossible for us-or
for Olivia herself-to distinguish among his/her words, physical appearance, and actions in
searching for the source of her passion. Traub and others, as I have already mentioned,
have suggested that Olivia responds to the spontaneous fashion in which Viola exceeds
her "text." But we must also attend to the particular actions and languages Viola chooses
to employ in performing her improvisations. Both Viola's language choices and her
performance of those choices play equally crucial roles in the generation of new
imaginative and discursive possibilities for Olivia.
Olivia's impassioned soliloquy immediately following Viola's departure from her court
illustrates the impact of these new possibilities as Olivia enacts a kind of Petrarchan
escape of her own. Although Olivia's speech echoes the words the page him/herself has
used, Olivia's verbal repetition, unlike that of Ovid's Echo, animates rather than
diminishes the power of female erotic agency. Whereas Echo's erotic desire ultimately
disembodies her and allows her only the passive recapitulation of masculine voices,
Olivia's desire actually takes shape with the rehearsal of her wooer's words. Olivia's
response to Cesario/Viola, once alone, is to replay their interchange out loud, but with a
difference, for she revises her own dialogue to speak of her desire:
"What is your parentage?"
"Above my fortunes, yet my state is well:
I am a gentleman." I'll be sworn thou art;
Thy tongue, thy face, thy limbs, actions, and spirit
Do give thee fivefold blazon. Not too fast! soft, soft!
Unless the master were the man. How now?
Even so quickly may one catch the plague?
Methinks I feel this youth's perfections
With an invisible and subtle stealth
To creep in at my eyes. Well, let it be.
(I.v.289-98)
In much the same way that Viola manipulates and revises the duke's Petrarchan text to
emerge as a wooer independent of her given script, Olivia's re-membering of
Cesario/Viola's words allows for the countess's own, enabling improvisation: in Olivia's
revised script, she is no longer the recipient of praise, but a wooer herself. Viola's
linguistic creation of a pastoral space, however imaginary, has produced real desire in
Olivia and has provided her with the linguistic material with which to conceive of her
own role differently-as more initiatory, more erotic.25 She rehearses Cesario/Viola's
words, but imagines a new response-one that, like Viola's own rhetorical gesture toward a
pastoral world, imagines a space for previously unscripted female desire. Olivia's speech
registers on a linguistic level the extent of the erotic self-surrender she has experienced,
incorporating and improvising upon Cesario/Viola's words, rather than merely reacting to
them or cynically tearing them apart, as she has done to the duke's blazon. Olivia's
soliloquy marks her metamorphosis from a world of Orsino's Petrarchan definitions,
where she has stood as the stainless lady left only to dismantle poetic definitions of her,
to a theatrical presence in her own right, improvisational and inspired to act. She
negotiates her escape from Orsino's Petrarchan language with a theatrical medium
urgently reliant upon female presence and action, articulating a subjective space in which
to define and act on her desire.
Olivia's new script for female desire, unlike Cesario/Viola's pastoral yearnings,
incorporates a revised Petrarchanism, reinvigorating its masculine poetics with an active
female eroticism. Olivia's erotic assertions, rather than "a curious reinscription of
Petrarchanism,"26 move beyond the gendered restraints of Orsino's particularly cliched
use of Petrarchan poetry. The vestiges of Petrarchan language that remain are not the
predictable, cliched conventions of male-authored texts. Unlike the duke's conceits,
Olivia's response arises from an actual encounter and works to include her beloved in
ways that counteract Orsino's Petrarchan strategies. She does not fall victim to the same
blazoning rhetoric she has dismembered moments ago, but instead refocuses her praise
away from conventional measure of physical beauty: "Thy tongue, thy face, thy limbs,
actions, and spirit / Do give thee fivefold blazon." Her insistent inclusion of her beloved's
speech-beginning her praise of Cesario with his/her "tongue"-rearranges the selfreferential logic of the English Petrarchists that Orsino had badly imitated in his own
poetic text. Not only do Olivia's pronouncements emerge from Viola/Cesario's actual
words, but her rhetoric also steadily moves from her beloved's physical appearance
outward to his/her "actions" and "spirit." She refuses to enact poetically the ritual of
dismemberment of the beloved's body in verse, attempting instead to encompass the very
aspects of Viola/Cesario's identity that elude the most conventional Petrarchan
prescriptions. Above all, Olivia falls in love with Viola's theater-a performance that
includes more than her body or words alone, but his/her speech, actions, and the "spirit"
that informs them.
Olivia's soliloquizing response to Cesario/Viola's poetic performance recalls the fears of
contemporary antitheatricalists, whose virulent attacks on the popular stage characterized
playgoing as a threat to social and moral stability. Even ardent defenders of the stage
seemed to assume that spectacle possessed the power to shape the actions and moral
sensibilities of theater audiences. Olivia's words, in fact, look forward to the theatrical
apologist Thomas Heywood's account in An Apology for Actors of the strange effects of
the spectatorial experience: "so bewitching a thing is lively and well spirited action, that
it hath power to new mold the harts of the spectators and fashion them to the shape of any
noble and notable attempt."27 Much like the play audiences described by these early
modern pamphleteers, Olivia molds her heart to Cesario/Viola's performance, moved by
Viola's own well-spirited action to devise action of her own.
Olivia's response, moreover, recalls yet another anxiety pervading the antitheatricalist
tracts, namely the fear that spectators-and female spectators in particular-might be moved
to replicate the licentious actions of the crossed-dressed actors on stage. The countess's
response seems to corroborate the widely perceived notion that onstage energies circulate
to play audiences-a circulation that in the antitheatricalist tracts is tantamount to a kind of
moral infectiousness.28 Indeed, a language of contagion infects Olivia's own selfconscious assessment of her state: "Even so quickly may one catch the plague?" (I.v.295).
As we have already witnessed in Olivia's rehearsal of Cesario/Viola's phrases, the page's
words and actions seem somehow to be "catching." Yet Olivia's response is not simply
that of a victimized audience whose moral agency has been absorbed by spectacle. Aware
of Cesario's influence on her, Olivia consciously accepts it-"let it be" (I.v.298)-and thus
retains subjective control over her actions in spite of the theatrical pull she feels. She
remains cognizant of her deception as she actively participates in spectacle's power,
wielding theater on behalf of her own desires, and initiates a theatrical performance of
her own as she dissembles defiance to Malvolio and orders him to "return" Cesario's ringa prop that she, not Cesario, has provided. A self-conscious theatricality becomes a way
to pursue newly released female desire where a thoroughly masculine and decidedly
untheatrical kind of Petrarchanism has failed. Even beyond its theatrical value as a prop,
the ring Olivia sends after Viola is a sign of Olivia's burgeoning awareness of her own,
embodied sexuality. Elsewhere in Shakespeare's plays, and most notably in All's Well
That Ends Well and The Merchant of Venice, the exchanging of rings emblematizes a
kind of yet-to-be-consummated marital union in which the ring itself is metonymically
representative of the woman's sexualized body. In any case, Viola's performance at
Olivia's court has moved the countess enough to reject her life of widow-like abstinence
and to pursue actively her desires by manipulating events rather than simply reacting to
others' empty promises of devotion.
The language of contagion that marks Olivia's participation in a self-motivated, theatrical
performance sharply contrasts with the language of absence governing the duke's
Petrarchan poetics. The duke, too, has spoken of disease in his protestations of love:
O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first,
Methought she purg'd the air of pestilence!
That instant was I turn'd into a hart,
And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds,
E'er since pursue me.
(Li. 18-22)
In the duke's description of desire, pestilence and the contagious presence it implies have
been replaced by a salutary distance with Olivia's presence. Keir Elam, arguing that
contemporary medical treatises are "the primary intertexts of Shakespeare's bodies,"
identifies the characters of Twelfth Night as symptoms of the playwright's
metacommentary on "the Puritan aesthetic, or anti-aesthetic, of the drama as
pathology."29 Elam contends that Olivia's apparently curative presence refutes Puritan
antitheatricalist charges that equated theatrical representation with moral contagion
communicated alongside actual bodily diseases such as the plague. According to Elam,
the play itself, like Olivia, offers "an anti-epidemiological act of resistance, pitching the
life of the comedy, of the playhouse, of the actor and his performance against the mortal
enemies of the theatre, whether they be virological or ideological."30 Elam's account of
the countess and the comedy as a kind of antidote to theatrically communicated
contagion, however, unwittingly aligns him with Orsino's Petrarchan perspective, which
gets satirized in the play. The Olivia the audience sees, after all, is hardly the same
woman the duke imagines.
The play, in fact, invites comparison between Orsino's absence-based eroticism and the
kind of desire produced by presence in the interview scene. As far as Orsino understands
it, love depends on chaste remoteness free from the mutual infection of words or actions;
his Petrarchan verse, as we have seen in Viola's attempt to recite it for Olivia, actually
suffers from Olivia's participatory presence. Even in terms of the structure of the play
itself, Orsino's desire, espoused in the opening lines of the play, seems to come out of
nowhere, and not until the final scene of the play does the audience witness an actual
meeting (and an attempt at dialogue) between Orsino and the embodied Olivia.
Throughout the play, it is Olivia's absence and the duke's pasttense constructions of her
that inspire his passion. In addition, his poetry evinces the customary but inevitably futile
Petrarchan effort to fill the space of absence with erotic language. By contrast, for Olivia
and Cesario/Viola, it is presence rather than absence, along with the immediacy of
theatrical desire, which incites a (paradoxically) nourishing contagion. Pestilence and
plague in Olivia's scheme of things are far from debilitating; they, in fact, motivate action
and help to produce a language that escapes self-absorption.
Catherine Belsey has argued that absence on the English Renaissance stage "constitutes
an emblem of desire, its material analogue, its figure."31 Because "the signification of
desire" is always " an impossible project,"32 any attempt to satisfy desire-including
consummation with the beloved-is necessarily only a substitution, always merely
compensatory. In Twelfth Night, the duke's heteroerotic desire emerges from absence and
willingly indulges in efforts to achieve the kind of substitution Belsey describes,
including the misguided attempt to replace embodied female sexuality with a kind of
disembodied, male-authored textuality.33 The female desires articulated by Viola and
Olivia, by contrast, originate in presence and derive their power from, rather than finding
a replacement in, language and contagious theatricality. While the play ultimately
satirizes Orsino's version of desire as a form of narcissistic authorship, it privileges
female desire to the extent that it escapes the (manu)scripted masculine logic that
struggles to contain female linguistic and theatrical performance.
IV
The truly "impossible project" (to echo Belsey) seems to be the attempt to distinguish
precisely among the various sexualities and erotic desires that propel the action of a play
such as Twelfth Night. In the same way that we cannot identify a discrete, early modern
category of "the lesbian"-or, for that matter, of "the heterosexual"-we cannot locate a
distinct "lesbian poetics" in Viola's willow song without considering the necessary
influence of other discourses and desires simultaneously at work. We cannot forget, for
example, that although Viola's poetic performance seems to arise from a personal
knowledge of female desire and is designed to elicit another woman's passion, her words
are ultimately in the service of her own heteroerotic desires for the duke. We cannot
ignore, either, the fact that the possibility of a female homoerotic poetics arises from
Viola's unsuccessful attempt to perform a textually based heteroerotic Petrarchan
language, that it is the inadequacy of the duke's original script that allows for the
opportunity to improvise a counterdiscourse of female-female desire. Orsino's
particularly languid Petrarchanism is, in turn, fraught with its own (masculine)
narcissistic desires and conventions that inscribe its social uses in solidifying male
homosocial bonds. Framing all these logics of desire is, of course, a transvestite theater,
which contemporary and modern critics have alternately feared and celebrated for its
male homoerotic energies and its potential to corrupt the moral foundations of its
spectators. These frames can only compound the difficulties of critics who attempt to
detect a specifically lesbian desire within fictional texts, for even as a lesbian poetics is
glimpsed, it immediately enables and gives way to other modes and to other desires. But
if we remember that in a period when discrete "heterosexual" and "homosexual"
identities were still under construction, it should not be too surprising that we should
witness the discursive entanglements of homoerotic and heteroerotic languages and
practices of desire. As Sedgwick and Traub argue, homosexuality and its discursive
expressions could only emerge alongside and as nearly inextricable from heterosexuality;
Traub reminds us that "in order to signify, a desire must be posited in opposition to other
desires."34
Twelfth Night dramatizes the very process by which female-female desire emerges into
discourse and begins to signify within these competing and overlapping modes of desire
before closing off the official routes for the expression of such desire with the play's
fairly conventional comic ending, and its expected celebration of "heterosexual"
marriage. Viola's seduction of Olivia demonstrates the difficulty of inventing the terms
for a female desire supplied only with the inadequate linguistic tools of masculine erotic
expression and, at the same time, suggests the imaginative possibilities in eluding those
limits. As a theatrical improvisation that becomes significant only in so far as it performs
its difference in the ephemeral spaces beyond the masculine page and the fantasies it
encodes, female desire in Twelfth Night embodies its own discursive untraceability, its
own refusal to signify in conventional textual or evidentiary terms. But if we characterize
emergent female homoerotic desire in Twelfth Night as dialogic and theatrical and in
competition with a largely monologic and textual heteroerotic desire in the play, we may
begin to argue for the possibility of an early modern language of "lesbian" desire that
often fails to signify at the level of the printed word alone. The play itself, after all,
insistently reminds us that any reading of texts that does not include an equally rigorous
reading of contexts will result in unstable meanings and mistranslations. In a play where
women are unquestionably the superior readers of both, Viola's submerged willow song
performs an invitation to a kind of desire that does not yet have a fully developed poetry
of its own. The song literally gestures toward the kinds of desires and pleasures that
masculine textual forms simultaneously help to produce and fail fully to represent.
[Sidebar]
This essay argues that the interview scene between Olivia and the disguised Viola in
Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (I.v) offers an often overlooked opportunity to witness the
dynamics by which a language of female-female desire emerges from the materials of
conventional heteroerotic discourses. Viola's successful wooing of Olivia in this scene
allows us a glimpse of tentative "lesbian" poetics as one female character imagines and
articulates the words that will seduce another and inspire her to erotic action.
[Footnote]
NOTES
I would like to thank Mario Digangi, Judith H. Anderson, Stephen Yandell, Kathy Gehr,
Heather Frey, Alan Ambrisco, and Joe Loewenstein for their suggestions for this essay.
1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosopical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), sec. I,
para. 19.
2 See Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean
Drama (New York: Routledge, 1992); Traub, "Desire and the Difference It Makes," in
The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Valerie
Wayne (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), pp. 81-114; Traub, "The (In)Significance of
'Lesbian' Desire in Early Modern England," in Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance
Stage, ed. Susan Zimmerman (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 150-69; Traub, "The
Perversion of 'Lesbian' Desire," History Workshop Journal 41 (Spring 1996): 23-49;
Theodora A. Jankowski, "Pure Resistance: Queer(y)ing Virginity in William
Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and Margaret Cavendish's The Convent of Pleasure,"
ShakS26 (1998): 218-55; Jankowski, "'Where There Can Be No Cause of Affection':
Redefining Virgins, Their Desires and Their Pleasures in John Lyly's Gallathea," in
Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture, ed. Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna
Callaghan (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 253-74; Douglas Bruster,
"Female-Female Eroticism and the Early Modern Stage," RenD 24 (1993): 1-31 ; Jane
Farnsworth, "Voicing Female Desire in 'Poem XLIX,'" SEL 36, 1 (Winter 1996): 57-72;
Hariette Andreadis, "The Sapphic-Platonics of Katherine Phillips, 1632-1664," Signs 15,
1 (Autumn 1989): 34-60; and Janel Mueller, "Troping Utopia: Donne's Brief for
Lesbianism," in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts,
Images, ed. James Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 182-207.
3 I follow Traub in my use of scare quotes around the terms "lesbian," "heterosexual,"
and "homosexual" as a visual reminder of the historical contingency and constructedness
of these categories.
4 See esp. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: Univ. of
California Press, 1990), and Traub, "The Perversion of 'Lesbian' Desire," "Desire and the
Difference It Makes," and "The Psychomorphology of the Clitoris," GLQ 2 (Winter
1995): 81-113.
5 Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, or What You Will, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G.
Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), I.v. 171-4. All Shakespeare
citations are from this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text by act, scene,
and line number.
6 John Saunders argues that the close proximity of the names Illyrian and Elysium in the
opening lines of I.ii, "taken together . . . suggest a third word, 'delirium,' which might be
defined as 'an excited state of mind, bordering on madness'" ("What's in a Name?: Games
with Names in Twelfth Night," in Critical Essay on"Twelfth Night," ed. Linda Cookson
and Bryan Loughrey [London: Longman, 1990], pp. 28-38, 29).
7 Cf. Elizabeth Pittenger's study of the roles of pages in The Merry Wives of Windsor
("Dispatch Quickly: The Mechanical Reproduction of Pages," SQ 42, 4 [Winter 1991[:
389-408). Pittenger argues that the "errancy" of women's language and desires interferes
with the masculine effort to reproduce desire through textual means, so that "the
investments in the ideal of pure transmission and reproduction are countered by moments
of dispersal and resistance" (p. 408). But whereas the resistance of the women in Merry
Wives-according to Pittenger-is largely accidental or involuntary, female linguistic
resistance in Twelfth Night seems to me to be deliberate and calculated performance.
8 Nancy Vickers, "The Blazon of Sweet Beauty's Best': Shakespeare's Lucrece," in
Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, pp.
95-115, 96.
9 Arthur Marotti, '"Love Is Not Love': Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social
Order," ELH 49, 2 (Summer 1982): 396-428. Even in its Italian form, Petrarchan verse
had its origins in a similar kind of self-promotion. John Freccero has elucidated the
complexities of Petrarch's search for a wholly autonomous poetics in which the poet
creates a self-enclosed subjective circle and gradually defines himself as synonymous
with his own art (see "The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch's Poetics," Diacritics 5, 1
[Spring 1975]: 34-40). In creating a figure such as Laura, who in turn creates the poet's
reputation or public identity as poet laureate, the sign system of the sonnet sequence
closes off extraliterary referentiality and ultimately serves to assert a (male) poetic
identity quite irrelevant of actual female agency or desire.
10 Marotti, p. 398.
11 Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English
Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 31-50. Wall emphasizes "what it
meant for the mistress to be represented specifically as a reader," especially in poems
where "the speaker portrays himself as unfulfilled in desire and hence incomplete, thus
analogous to his incomplete text, which is unfinished because it lacks her response" (p.
42).
12 See also Wall's discussion of these lines, pp. 35-6.
13 See Traub, Desire and Anxiety, p. 132; see also Jean E. Howard, Shakespeare's Art of
Orchestration: Stage Techniques and Audience Response (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press,
1984), pp. 173-4.
14 Vickers, "Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme," CritI 8, 2
(Winter 1981): 265-79. See also Louis Montrose's "The Elizabethan Subject and the
Spenserian Text," in Literary Theory /Renaissance Texts, ed. Parker and David Quint
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 303-40. Montrose writes that "The
Petrarchan lover worships a deity of his own making and under his own control; he
masters his mistress by inscribing her within his text, where she is repeatedly put together
and taken apart-and, sometimes, killed" (p. 325).
15 David Schalkwyk, "'She Never Told Her Love': Embodiment, Textuality, and Silence
in Shakespeare's Sonnets and Plays," SQ 45, 4 (Winter 1994): 381-407, 389.
16 Cf. Cristina Malcolmson's assertion that "Olivia in fact only becomes interested in
Cesario's parentage after she is impressed with his linguistic potency" ('"What You Will':
Social Mobility and Gender in Twelfth Night," in The Matter of Difference, pp. 29-57,
33). Malcolmson, who is concerned primarily with the possibilities for social mobility
that such "verbal agility" (p. 34) might allow, says nothing about the particular poetic
choices Viola makes in speaking to Olivia in this scene.
17 The willow appears in at least two other Shakespeare plays as a distinctly female
emblem of unrequited or lost love; compare, for example Desdemona's willow song in
Othello, learned from her mother's maid (IV.iii), and reports of the jailer's daughter's
willowed poetry in The Two Noble Kinsmen (IV.i.79-93).
18 This distrust in writing is corroborated elsewhere in the play by two forged letters of
the subplot, one to Malvolio designed to elicit his misguided advances toward Olivia, and
another to Cesario, made deliberately ambiguous by Sir Toby, challenging him to a duel
with Sir Andrew.
19 Gregory Bredbeck, Sodomy and Interpretation: Marlowe to Milton (Ithaca: Cornell
Univ. Press, 1991), pp. 199-200. Bredbeck also observes that "an important facet of these
sexualized pastorals" is that "they are as much concerned with displaying prurience as
they are with containing it; and the pastoral becomes not a simple narrative of rural purity
but, rather, a genre constantly titillated by transgression" (p. 200). Bruce Smith, who like
Bredbeck focuses exclusively on male homoeroticism, similarly argues that pastoral
tropes allow for the exploration of homoerotic relationships between men; Smith
suggests, however, that the pastoral landscape represents in part the temporal scene of
"homosexual initiation into manhood, a physical passing along of adult secrets"
(Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England: A Cutural Poetics [Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1991], p. 115.)
20 On the importance of the conditional mode of Viola's speech, cf. Traub's argument
about female bonds in a number of Shakespeare's comedies in her "The (In)Significance
of 'Lesbian' Desire," where she writes that "[t]he relative power of each woman is aligned
according to her denial of homoerotic bonds," and that as a result, "[f]emale
homoeroticism is thus figurable not only in terms of the always already lost, but the
always about to be betrayed" (p. 158).
21 Anthony Taylor, "Shakespeare and Golding: Viola's Interview with Olivia and Echo
and Narcissus," ELN 15, 2 (December 1977): 103-6. Taylor suggests the possibility of
verbal echoes to Arthur Golding's translation in Viola's use of the word "hallow" and in
Olivia's use of the expression "indifferent red" (I.v.250), which recalls Golding's
description of Narcissus in book 3 of his translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses (lines 52930).
22 Taylor, p. 105.
23 Taylor, p. 106.
24 Traub has interrogated such assumptions (most fully articulated in Freudian
psychoanalytic writing) of a link between homosexuality and narcissism, asking, "is there
a connection between narcissism and homoerotic desire beyond the rather obvious
banality of gender similitude?" ("Desire and the Difference It Makes," p. 93). Her query
is part of her larger critique of approaches that assume that gender determines erotic
identity. Traub argues instead that "[e]rotic arousal is preeminently (but not exclusively)
a function of power differences-of exchanges, withholdings, struggles, negotiations.
Because of the institutionalised character of heterosexuality, gender has appeared as the
sole determinant of arousal, but I suggest that gender is only one among many power
differentials involved: arousal may be as motivated by the differences within each gender
as by gender difference itself (p. 93). She adds wryly, "How comforting for a dominant
ideology predicated on opposltional genders to relegate homoerotic desire to an endless
immersion in the self-same, rather than to acknowledge those differences within desire
that are not heterosexual" (p. 93).
25 Here I take issue with Schalkwyk's suggestion that "Olivia's desire for Cesario is
wholly consequent on her reading correctly the submerged blazon of 'noble blood' in
Cesario's carriage and bearing, and the ease with which Sebastian takes Cesario's place
on revelation of the latter's sexual difference confirms the overriding significance of the
difference signaled by parentage" (p. 402). Viola's nobility, in as much as it is a
constitutive part of her "well spirited action," does indeed appeal to Olivia; but I want to
emphasize that in the exchange between Olivia and Cesario/Viola, verbal performance
and physical bearing are indistinguishable.
26 Schalkwyk, p. 395.
27 Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors (London, 1612), B4 (my italics).
28 See Katharine Eisaman Maus's discussion of antitheatricalist rhetoric in her
Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1995), pp. 74-85. On theatrical representation and the spread of moral corruption, see
Jonas A. Barish, The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press,
1981), pp. 79-130.
29 Keir Elam, '"In What Chapter of His Bosom?': Reading Shakespeare's Bodies," in
Alternative Shakespeares, Vol. 2, ed. Terence Hawkes (London: Routledge, 1996), pp.
140-63, 153.
30 Elam, p. 157.
31 Catherine Belsey, "Desire's Excess and the English Renaissance Theatre: Edward II,
Troilus and Cressida, Othello," in Erotic Politics, pp. 84-102, 85. Betsey's argument, in so
far as it proceeds along Lacanian lines of analysis and takes into account desire in tragedy
to the exclusion of comedy, somewhat unsurprisingly connects desire to loss and absence.
32 Belsey, p. 86.
33 I would suggest that this assessment of male desire applies to Malvolio as well in his
willingness to substitute Maria's letter for Olivia, to read the letter as if it were a female
body. By contrast, Maria, like Viola and Olivia, manipulates masculine sexual/textual
expectations to her advantage, actively forging (so to speak) a route to her own desire.
34 Traub, "The Perversion of 'Lesbian' Desire," p. 42. See also Sedgwick. Traub has
contended elsewhere that "The inauguration of 'the heterosexual' as the original,
normative, essential mode of erotic behavior is haunted, from its first recognizably
'modern' articulation, by an embodiment and practice that calls the analytical priority of
'heterosexuality' into question . . . 'lesbianism' is less an alternative to female
'heterosexuality' than its transgressive twin, 'born' into discouse at the same ambivalent
moment" ("The Psychomorphology of the Clitoris," p. 98).
Jami Ake is an assistant dean in the College of Arts and Sciences and a lecturer in
English and Women's Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She is working on a
project that explores the relationship between female heroism and generic change in early
modern tragedy.