Free Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare

parts in plays like
Twelfth Night
and
As You Like It
were written to be played by boys … Boys dressed as girls, girls dressed as boys, and (on stage) boys dressed as girls dressed as boys, all apparently add to the delicious pleasure of the erotic chase. Outside the close confines of marital love, family and reproduction, gender-bending is the name of the game—“as you like it,” or “what you will.” 74
    The influential Polish critic Jan Kott asserted that “Illyria is a country of erotic madness.” 75 As evident as it may seem to a modern audience, this aspect had not been explored until the 1970s.
    Peter Gill’s sexually charged revival in 1974 was dominated by a large image of Narcissus—“a continuous reminder to the audience of the themes of ambiguous sexuality and erotic self-deception”: 76
    All are intoxicated with their own reflections, and the function of Viola and Sebastian is to put them through an Ovidian obstacle course from which they learn to turn away from the mirror and form real attachments. 77
    There is nothing at all equivocal about the physical relationships. Orsino hugs Cesario to his breast with rapturous abandon: Antonio is plainly Sebastian’s long time boy friend: and Viola all but tears her hair in anguish at Olivia’s unfulfilled passion for her. 78
    Demonstrative physical contact pointed to the nature of the developing relationships. As Orsino sat listening to music, lounging on cushions, Viola/Cesario sat between his legs. On his asking Cesario if he had ever been in love, they playfully rolled around:
    The Duke is young and lolls about panting and sighing, half-dressed, a sexy man, all male comradely affection with his courtiers, arms around them, head on shoulders on the huge Habitat cushions. And among them, Viola, small, white and utterly frozen as he fondles her/him while he talks about thisother love—frozen not just with horror but with tense, deliberately fraught repression. 79
    Jane Lapotaire played a very boyish Cesario. She said, “Viola takes her boyhood very seriously—she has to in order to survive.” 80 Olivia’s reaction to the reunion of Sebastian and Viola was comical. Wardle described her as “licking her lips at the sight of the interchangeably delicious twins”: “her ‘Most wonderful!’ brought the house down. On ‘Cesario, come!’ Orsino caught the wrong twin. Olivia as she moved away with Sebastian, looked back half wistfully at Viola, perhaps wishing that it were after all possible to have both.” 81
    It was not until 2001 that such an overtly sexual reading was revisited: Lindsay Posner “cleverly locates his production in the Edwardian age of uncertainty, when young feminists and suffragettes were derided as unwomanly and dandyish male aesthetes reckoned no better than effeminate”: 82
    Orsino’s caressing of Cesario’s head as they listen to the “food of love” seems far from blameless. When we first meet Sebastian, Viola’s long-lost twin, he’s getting himself together after a romp on a large bed with Antonio … the butch black sailor who’s plucked him from the waves. Can this really be the Sebastian who will resolve all by taking Cesario’s place in Olivia’s bed and maybe even in her affections? As for Matilda Ziegler’s simpering Sloane of an Olivia, the kiss she plants on Viola in the denouement suggests the root cause of her trouble was that her real taste had always been for laddish lasses in uniform. Much of this is amusing enough … but the rather tactless outing of sexual ambivalence undermines the subtlety of Shakespeare’s own games with the chemistry of love. 83

    3. Peter Gill production, 1974: John Price as Orsino (right) lolling on cushions as Jane Lapotaire as Viola is “small, white and utterly frozen … not just with horror but with tense, deliberately fraught repression.”
    Zoë Waites and Matilda Ziegler decided that on the line “Love sought is good, but given unsought is better”