When life hands you a lemon, make lemonade. The repressive laws concerning women on the Elizabethan stage were lemons galore. Only men could act onstage in Shakespeare’s England. Lady Macbeth was played by a guy. So was Cleopatra. So was Juliet. Tom Stoppard made wonderful hay of that conundrum in his screenplay for “Shakespeare in Love.” But the playwright who made the most of it was Shakespeare himself. Faced with the necessity of using young men for his female roles, Shakespeare took charge of the situation in his comedies and had himself a ball with gender-bending.
And in no play is the gender-bend more dazzling than Twelfth Night. For my money it presents the most delectably intricate plot amongst the comedies, and certainly holds the prize for sheer number of gender-bending combos. Oh, it may not quite achieve the layers of As You Like It with the male actor actor portraying Rosalind who disguises herself as (male) Ganymede in the Forest of Aden and then play-acts as (female again) Rosalind to help her lovesick swain Orlando with his wooing—that is, if Orlando were ever to be able to woo Rosalind in person, since Orlando thinks that Ganymede is a guy. Well Ganymede is a guy, but actually that’s because he’s a guy playing a girl who dresses up as a guy and then play-acts as a girl. Surely that one character takes gender-bending about as far as it can go.
But while As You Like It might win the depth prize, Twelfth Night has got it in spades for the combos. Consider:
Viola (guy portraying girl) is shipwrecked on Illyria and takes on the protective guise of Cesario, a male. So that’s two levels of bend (male to female to male) right there.
Viola-as-Cesario (guy portraying girl dressed up as guy) enters the service of Duke Orsino (guy portraying guy).
Viola-as-Cesario quickly falls in love with Duke Orsino. Intriguingly, Duke Orsino begins responding to Viola-as-Cesario’s interest, although it never progresses all that far. Nonetheless, Duke Orsino (guy portraying guy) appears to be attracted to Cesario, who Orsino at least thinks is a guy. Well, he is I suppose: a guy portraying a girl who is dressed up like a guy. But Orsino (as a character) appears to be attracted to Cesario (as a character) who is also a guy. So we have some guy-guy stuff here. Except that Cesario (as a character) is actually Viola-in-male-drag, so it’s guy-girl stuff. But let’s keep our ducks in a row here: both Viola and Orsino are guys—at least insofar as their “real” selves, i.e., the actors playing the parts.
I hope you’re keeping all this lined up. It gets MUCH more complicated very quickly. Duke Orsino is in the throes of a mad passion for high-born neighbor lady Olivia, who won’t give him so much as the time of day. So Orsino decides to take another tack, which is to send Cesario—who is a softly attractive boy (so Orsino thinks, anyway)—to try his luck pressing Orsino’s suit with Olivia.
Keep clear who’s who and what’s what. Cesario (who is really Viola) is going to woo Olivia. That’s because Orsino thinks that Cesario is a guy, and Olivia will have no reason to think otherwise. But Cesario knows that he’s really a girl, and so this is going to be a girl wooing another girl. Right? Except that they’re both guys.
So off Cesario (male-to-female-to-male) goes to woo Olivia (male-to-female) for Orsino. And what do you know? Olivia starts falling for Cesario. Let’s get this clear, now. Olivia is a female character, but she’s being played by a guy. Cesario is a guy (at least so Olivia thinks) whose actually a girl (according to the script) who is actually played by a guy. So within this one pairing we have a little interesting touch of lesbianism (Olivia as female, Cesario as female underneath the male drag) along with the same frisson of male-male attraction that makes the Cesario-Orsino combo so enticing. At some level Cesario’s a soft young male and Olivia’s a slightly older female. But they’re actually both guys. So there you have it: one heterosexual combo and both flavors of homosexual pairings, all in the same couple. That’s kinky even by San Francisco standards.
Whew. Shakespeare could have stopped there, but he was Shakespeare and not some Joe Blow who took the easy way out. Oh, no. Shakespeare had to create a Viola who is a close twin to her brother Sebastian—whom she assumes has perished in the shipwreck, as Sebastian assumes of her. Now remember that they’re actually both guys, right—at least the actors are. If the director has been able to cast a pair of male twins in the roles of Sebastian and Viola, so much the better, but least the actors should be spitting images of each other. Give them both long hair and few other distinguishing characteristics, except for some minor costume differences, and you’ve got it made. It should take some concentration for the audience to distinguish Sebastian-as-himself from Viola-as-Cesario.
So (male-male) Sebastian happens to chance upon Olivia (male-female). She still thinks that he’s Cesario (male-female-male), and so she presses her love for him and he—a casually opportunistic chap, it would appear—agrees to marry her right then and there. So now note that you have a normal boy-girl relationship. Except that Olivia thinks that Sebastian is Cesario, who is also a female somewhere in there. Except, of course, they’re both actually guys. There are no simple gender relationships in this play.
Breathe for a moment before continuing, OK? All right now? We continue: Sebastian was rescued from the sea by Antonio, who has healed him, coddled him, and loved him. I suppose we aren’t supposed to read too much into Antonio’s love for Sebastian, but with modern audiences it plays a lot better to give Antonio a bit of the love-sick swain aspect in regards to Sebastian. Antonio is a career sailor, after all, and Sebastian is a spectacularly pretty youth, just as his twin sister Viola-as-Cesario is a spectacularly pretty youth. And Sebastian owes Antonio his very life. And Antonio’s kinda lonely. So come on, now: I’m perfectly capable of putting two and two together and no doubt Shakespeare expected an Elizabethan audience to perform the same very simple arithmetic.
Anyway. I submit that there has been a love affair, however brief and however around the edges, between Sebastian and Antonio. And that one’s the only non-bender in the show: they’re both guys as characters, and they’re both guys in real life as actors. But wouldn’t you know it: that’s the only love affair that doesn’t work out and isn’t consummated, as they say, as the curtain falls? Antonio, a saintlike character and the very soul of generosity, is the only major character who is uncoupled at play’s end. Several productions I’ve seen end with him sitting alone on the stage, looking forlorn. Of all the characters in the play he most deserves to get his heart’s desire, and he doesn’t. Dammit. You kinda want Olivia’s young servant Fabian to go over and sit in his lap as the curtain falls.
Then there’s Maria, Olivia’s lady-in-waiting. She has been having an on-again, off-again affair with Sir Toby Belch, Olivia’s uncle who is on an extended visit to his niece. I guess Shakespeare recognized that Twelfth Night’s cast of mostly young, beautiful, and emotionally sincere people needed at least one negative character for balance. Shakespeare, never one to fart around, created in Toby Belch one of the most unpleasant characters in all the comedies. Sir Toby is matched only by dastardly Prince John in Much Ado About Nothing, but whereas John is warped by envy of his golden-boy older brother, Toby Belch is just your basic asshole, an ugly drunk and callous freeloader. Maria—part comic sidekick, part spiteful bitch—winds up marrying Toby before the final curtain falls. They’re both guys, remember.
To appreciate Twelfth Night in all its gender twists, you really must see the glorious all-male production from Shakespeare’s Globe in London. With a dream cast headed up by the sublime Mark Rylance as the most dazzling Olivia imaginable and Stephen Fry as a perfectly-pitched Malvolio, this is the Twelfth Night that dreams are made on. Olivia’s solo scene immediately after her first meeting with Cesario is worth the DVD price alone. Hell, it would be worth flying to London, popping for a hotel room, and getting tickets to the Globe for this one scene, in which the oh-so-frozen Olivia goes momentarily, and hysterically, unglued as she realizes that she has developed a near-instantaneous and hormone-erupting yen for Cesario. And it’s only one marvelous moment amongst many. I can’t keep wondering what old Will himself would have to say about Rylance’s performance: perhaps something along the lines of Zounds, I had no idea that character could be so incredibly funny, and so heartbreakingly real. Bravissimo!