twelfth night act 3 questions

This dismissal of queerness in canonical works of literature, particularly from this period, is not only disappointing and intellectually dishonest; it is also simply inaccurate: labels such as homosexual or heterosexual ‘did not exist as conceptual categories’ at the time Shakespeare was writing. 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. 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. But of course, that is the whole point of Cesario’s transformation: Twelfth Night depicts one’s gender as essentially a performed role, a simple change of costume marking a change in identity. It is a beautifully genderqueer moment, and different productions of the play may interpret Viola’s gender presentation in a number of different ways. Directed by Tim Carroll. In addition to her thesis, she is starting work on a new project on the history of the Renaissance history play, and will teach on summer schools at both King’s and Oxford University this summer. We may never know Shakespeare’s own sexual identity, but it doesn’t matter. Your views could help shape our site for the future. The Tiger Who Came to Tea by Judith Kerr: sketches and original artwork, Sean's Red Bike by Petronella Breinburg, illustrated by Errol Lloyd, Unfinished Business: The Fight for Women's Rights, The fight for women’s rights is unfinished business, Get 3 for 2 on all British Library Fiction, Discovering Literature: Shakespeare & Renaissance, Why you need to protect your intellectual property, Gender, sexuality, courtship and marriage. Although James I eventually published a ‘Book of Sports’ soon after Shakespeare’s death declaring certain pastimes, even maypole dancing, definitely legal on Sundays, the playhouses would in time be closed down during the rule of a puritan Parliament (1642) and James’s son Charles I deposed and executed (1649). The Italian play Gl’Ingannati has also been noted as a possible source for Twelfth Night. Finding queer love and identity in Shakespeare’s plays would not have been defined as queer back then, but the practice of censoring same-sex relationships in Shakespeare, from Benson and beyond, is still in the process of being righted and re-explored by both critics and performers. Twelfth Night Introduction + Context. Its similarities of plot were first noted by John Manningham in 1602, whose diary records a performance of Twelfth Night he saw: he commented that it was ‘most like a neere to that Italian called Inganni’, given that the plays share a set of identical twins who are confused with each other. Malvolio finds the letter, assumes that it is addressed to him, and ... Next section Five Key Questions. 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. Arguably, the whole of Twelfth Night debates the very nature and morality of comedy, in a manner informed by contemporary arguments about the religious politics of mirth. Cesario is both beloved of Olivia and infatuated with Orsino: gender fluidity, then, serves as the play’s central dramatic irony. [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. [2] When Olivia falls for Cesario, she does so in the full belief of the servant’s masculinity. (5.1.223–25). NB Achilles and Patroclus are from the play Troilus and Cressida. With Samuel Barnett, Liam Brennan, Paul Chahidi, John Paul Connolly. Composed at the end of the Elizabethan era, its plot is thought to spring from a number of possible sources, many of which influence Twelfth Night… ART File P718 no.1 (size M) Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. A book of puritanical invective against various festivities, pastimes and practices. The play centres on the twins Viola and Sebastian, who are separated in a shipwreck.Viola (who is disguised as Cesario) falls in love with Duke Orsino, who in turn is in love with Countess … Miranda Fay Thomas is writing up her PhD at King’s College London and Shakespeare’s Globe, where she works on gender and performance in Early Modern drama. Twelfth Night Act 5, scene 1 Summary & Analysis | LitCharts. Why not take a few moments to tell us what you think of our website? In connection with the themes of deception, disguise, and performance, Twelfth Night raises questions about the nature of gender and sexual identity. [4] Madhavi Menon, ‘Queer Shakes’, pp. At the opening of the comedy, he is desperately in love with Lady Olivia, who spurns his romantic overtures in spite o Barnaby Riche’s Riche his farewell to his military profession (1581), contains a number of stories, the second of which is a source for Twelfth Night: ‘Apolonius and Silla’, a tale of two twins and their respective love interests. Viola goes into service with Count Orsino of Illyria, disguised as a young man, "Cesario." Some of these pairs were both male, some both female, and some partnerships contained a male and a female. In her introduction to Shakesqueer, Madhavi Menon describes queerness as a concept which, ‘recognizes the absurdity of limits and interrupts the ways in which we live our lives and write our texts’. However, unlike Twelfth Night, Gl’Ingannati would have featured women on the Italian stage. Twelfth Night—an allusion to the night of festivity preceding the Christian celebration of the Epiphany—combines love, confusion, mistaken identities, and joyful discovery.. After the twins Sebastian and Viola survive a shipwreck, neither knows that the other is alive. What are the ... Twelfth Night. Through a series of questions, Sebastian and Viola identify each other and rejoice: they are reunited! It could be interpreted as a new lifestyle choice, reflecting a truer version of the person that Viola/Cesario is but has never before had the opportunity to present; or more simply, it could be a plot device and part of the means to an end for the play’s storyline of confused lovers. Mark Rylance plays Olivia in a modern return to the original practice of all-male casting. 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. As famously declared by the gender theorist Judith Butler, ‘there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender … identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results’. Twelfth Night was written around 1601 and first performed in 1602. Originally, he says, humans were conjoined, with each pair making a complete person. Galleries, Reading Rooms, shop and catering opening times vary. But the film introduces us to one of the key elements of Twelfth Night: the way in which gender can be constructed, or performed, by anyone with the means to do so. ‘Is there no respect of place, persons, nor time in you?’, demands Malvolio (2.3.88–89), roused in the middle of the night to complain about Sir Toby’s drunken singing of, among other things, a carol (‘O’ the twelfth day of December’, possibly a misquotation of ‘On the twelfth day of Christmas’ 2.3.81). Than these two creatures. The practical joke turns Malvolio into a ludicrous and alarming fashion hybrid: sober steward above the waist, satyr below. Michael Dobson is Director of the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon, and Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Birmingham. Act IV Questions and Answers. by R S White (Hampshire and New York: Palgrave, 1996), p. 135. Please consider the environment before printing, All text is © British Library and is available under Creative Commons Attribution Licence except where otherwise stated. Twelfth Night study guide contains a biography of William Shakespeare, literature essays, a complete e-text, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. If music be the food of love – that is to say, gay love, straight love, queer love, trans love – play on. Her writing on Shakespeare has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement and The Independent, and last year she convened Gesture Lab at the Globe: a public engagement workshop exploring shaming gestures in Shakespeare’s plays. But, as Valerie Traub notes, ‘it is as object of another woman’s desire that Cesario finds her own erotic voice’. Choose Yes please to open the survey in a new browser window or tab, and then complete it when you are ready. The first of these sources is Plato’s Symposium, where Aristophanes describes the origin of love. ... act haughtily, smile constantly, and refuse to explain himself to anyone. Please consider the environment before printing, All text is © British Library and is available under Creative Commons Attribution Licence except where otherwise stated. Twelfth Night was written around 1601 and first performed in 1602. However, while Shakespeare in Love toys but briefly with the queerness of Shakespeare having a relationship with a person who dresses as a man, the plot ultimately reinforces heteronormativity (that is, traditional expectations of gender and sexuality) in a way that Twelfth Night more actively questions. Usage terms STC 20996.8. [4] While it is true that straightness (either in terms of sexual orientation or gender identity) as a category did not fully exist in Shakespeare’s day, some were outspoken against what would now be described as cross-dressing. Usage terms ART File P718 no.1 (size M) Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Your views could help shape our site for the future. 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]. Twelfth Night—an allusion to the night of festivity preceding the Christian celebration of the Epiphany—combines love, confusion, mistaken identities, and… Act 1, scene 1 At his court, Orsino, sick with love for the Lady Olivia, learns from his messenger that she is grieving for… A short summary of William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night This free synopsis covers all the crucial plot points of Twelfth Night. Orsino, Viola as Cesario, and Olivia. Of course, the plot of Shakespeare in Love is fictional: there is no evidence that Shakespeare based the character of Viola upon a real person. Usage terms © Robbie Jack / Robbie Jack / Corbis. Orsino The Duke of Illyria and its ruler. 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. 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. Twelfth Night—an allusion to the night of festivity preceding the Christian celebration of the Epiphany—combines love, confusion, mistaken identities, and… Act 1, scene 1 At his court, Orsino, sick with love for the Lady Olivia, learns from his messenger that she is grieving for… With music as the bittersweet "food of love," all converge and conspire in this comic journey. In 1601, then, Sir Toby’s famous retort carried a topical edge as well as a grossly snobbish one: ‘Art any more than a steward? Antonio says of Sebastian, ‘I do adore thee so / That danger shall seem sport’ (2.1.43–44). 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. [6] As such, looking for LGBTQ identities in plays such as Twelfth Night enable us to rediscover approaches to gender and sexuality that defy the binaries imposed on Western society since the introduction of the terms ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’ in the late 19th century. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. At the end of the film Shakespeare in Love, a heartbroken Shakespeare bids farewell to his lover and immortalises her in a new play that he begins to write as the film credits roll. The text in this article is available under the Creative Commons License. Shipwrecked twins are lost among love-sick aristocrats, unruly servants, mischievous pleasure seekers, clowns, and a puritan. 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. Plato, whose vision of love is both homosexual and heterosexual. Setting Shakespeare's music – and the music of Shakespeare settings, Benedick and Beatrice: the 'merry war' of courtship. In this tale, Silla disguises herself as her brother Silvio to work for and win the love of Apolonius, the duke. [3] Cesario dresses as a man, and therefore for all intents and purposes is a man in the eyes of the other characters. 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. 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’. An apple cleft in two is not more twin Stephen Fry as Malvolio in yellow, cross-gartered stockings. See a complete list of the characters in Twelfth Night and in-depth analyses of Viola, Orsino and Olivia, Malvolio, Sebastian, and Antonio. Unlike Viola, Silla takes the name of her lost brother, Silvio, when she presents as a different gender. Twelfth Night, Act 3, Scene 4, by Johann Heinrich Ramberg. 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. He is currently researching the role of the Shakespeare canon in the emergence of national theatre institutions worldwide. 1–27 in Shakesqueer: a Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare (Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 7. How were the Jews regarded in 16th-century England? Usage terms © Colin Willoughby / ArenaPal. His works, such as Twelfth Night, remind us that identity itself is relative. [3] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York and London: Routledge, 2007 [1990]), p. 34. Last Updated on May 5, 2015, by eNotes Editorial. Why not take a few moments to tell us what you think of our website? About Twelfth Night; Twelfth Night Summary; Character List; Act 1 Summary and Analysis; About Shakespearean Theater: Read the Study Guide for Twelfth Night… Malvolio (with stockings cross-gartered), Maria and Olivia. 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. An outline of what garments and fabrics could be worn by men and women of different ranks. Shakespeare writes his lady into a plot where, once again, she must disguise herself as a man, only to fall in love and be unable to declare it due to her newly assumed gender.

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