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"favorite among Shakespeare's cross-dressers, the shorthand term for benign female-tomale cross-dressing in literature and culture" (Garber, 76). Rosalind is the favorite

precisely because she is (or can be read as) "benign," slipping roles on and off with ease,

displaying a gender that is an elaborate performance, but a performance entirely under the

performer's control. A reading of Viola that involves the repeated invocation of and

comparison to Rosalind thus becomes an attempt to make Cesario as innocuous and

easily dispensed with as Ganymede appears to be, and any discord caused by Cesario's

presence, more mischievous than subversive.

Whereas Ganymede is pure fantasy and myth, representative of a fantastical and

mythic concept of gender that is playful and teasing and infinitely malleable, Cesario,

modeled after Viola's twin brother Sebastian, is a myth which cannot be undone once

constructed. Viola is never again present as "Viola" after her first short scene. Sebastian's

appearance in Illyria engenders all sorts of re-sorting but no restoration-Viola remains

Cesario to the very end. In one of those moments often ignored by critics, the action of

the play concludes with Orsino walking off the stage hand-in-hand with a figure still

labeled and identified as Cesario: "Cesario, come; / For so you shall be while you are a

man" (TN, Y.i:384-5). If the final pairings of Olivia and Sebastian, and Viola and Orsino,

are to be seen as restoring the "natural" order, we must ignore not only Orsino's closing

remarks, but also the fact that originally, Olivia and Viola were played by young men,

and that "nature" itself is an unnatural force in this play.

.An unnatural nature is in some ways unavoidable within the artificial confines of

the stage, but Shakespeare takes further paill8 to disrupt any concept of a "natural"

gendering structure in the play. Nature precedes gender-or so the story goes. But this is

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not necessarily Shakespeare's story, and indeed, nature precedes gender in Twelfth Night

only in that the first is undermined before the second. In an oft-quoted passage in the

final act, Sebastian explains to a baffled Olivia that "you have been mistook. / But nature

to her bias drew in that" (TN, V.i.257-8). "Nature's" predilection for male-female pairs

marries Olivia to Sebastian and prevents her from partaking in an "unnatural" union with

the not-quite male Cesario, though s/he is its instigation. Critics tend to interpret

Sebastian's little speech as Shakespeare's way of saying that all is now well in the land of

Illyria. Towards the end of Shakespeare's Festive Comedy, Barber states that

Just as a satumalian reversal of social roles need not threaten the social structure,

but can serve instead to consolidate it, so a temporary, playful reversal of sexual

roles can renew the meaning of the normal relation. One can add that with sexual

as with other relations, it is when the normal is secure that playful aberration is

benign. (Barber, 245)

But in TwelfthNight this sexual reversal is not "temporary." Moreover, as Bray's

research on homosexual relations in early modem England shows, "the normal" was far

from secure. In fact, according to contemporary anti-theatrical tracts, "the normal" was

continually under siege by none other than the transvestite theater. Furthermore, a single,

simple idea ofwhat constituted "the normal" simply did not exist during Shakespeare's

time. There were multiple contradictory theories of gender differentiation and no agreedupon definition of what, exactly, amounted to sodomy. On such unfirm ground, the

"playful aberration" Barber sees (which only a deus ex machina prevents from tumbling

the play towards tragedy) does not "renew the meaning of the normal relation" but

instead exposes the uncertainty and artificiality that any sense of "the normal" (and its

moral synonym, "the natural") inevitably has.

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However, "normal" and "natural" are ultimately two very different terms. A

"normal relation" between genders and gendering selves is a societal construct; nature, as

Butler argues in Gender Trouble, has nothing to do with prescribing these interactions

and identifications. There is no nature prior to gender, and the nature of Twelfth Night is

indeed already gendered ("her bias") and described as playing a game of bowls-a game

whose rules are culturally inscribed rather than ahistorically unavoidable. The earlier

mentions of "nature" in the play further destabilize the authority that any final, "natural"

organizing force can summon. The first reference to "nature" disconnects it from an

inevitable interior reality: "There is a fair behaviour in thee, Captain," musesthe as-yet

uncross-dressed Viola, "And though that nature with a beauteous wall / Doth oft close in

pollution, yet of thee / I will believe thou hast a mind that suits" (TN, Lii.47-50).

"Nature"here is synonymous with "behaviour," and neither necessarily matches what lies

behind outward appearances, though they very well can. In the following scene, Sir Toby

defends Sir Andrew Aguecheek to Maria by protesting that the knight "hath all the good

gifts of nature" (TN, Liii.27-8), to which"Maria scathingly replies: "He hath indeed all,

most natural: for besides that he's a fool, he's a great quarreler" (TN, I.iii.29-30). The pun

is on the word "natural," which in early modern England also meant "foolish"-or, as the

editor explains~ "Sir Andrew has every quality of folly" (Lothian, 12). "Nature" is as

easily corrupted a word as any in Cesario's and Peste's banter in Act III. Before Cesario

even appears on stage, any "naturalness" that Viola's feminine interior could possess has

already been questioned, mocked, and turned inside-out.

After Cesario does enter the play, a feminine interior ultimately becomes a

meaningless construction--the dichotomies of interior/exterior and masculine/feminine

11Zoia Alexanian

are broken down, confused, and never rebuilt. When Orsino calls Cesario to him as

Cesario in the final scene, he is basing the figure's identity on an acquired outer

appearance, the uppermost layer of a series of surfaces. According to Butler, such a

layering is characteristic of a drag performance, which "exposes or allegorizes the

mundane psychic and performative practices by which heterosexualized genders form

themselves" ("Melancholy," 177). Echoing characters such as Vice and Envy in the

morality plays popular during Shakespeare's childhood, Cesario is in effect an allegory of

gender formation, an external imitation of the internal psychic process which Freud