19Zoia Alexanian

of the twins' reunion: "Prove true, imagination, a prove true, / That I, dear brother, be

now ta'en for you!" (TN, llI.1v.384-5). Cesario's plea is that the fantasy "prove true"-

s/he thus approaches Sebastian as if his existence is as grounded in the imagination as

Cesario's is, and Sebastian does admit to being "a spirit"; one whose costume is no more

difficult to remove than Cesario's ultimately proves to be.

Central to the notion of bodies as costumes is the inherent problem in trying to

"read" any identity (regardless of cross-dressing), for what is read is never necessarily

what is truly there. The most prominent mis-reading of the play is Malvolio's firm belief

that Maria's note is indeed Olivia's: "It is in contempt of question her hand" (TN, lI.v.90-

1). The note,constructed by Maria in order to be mis-read in just this way, still requires

some "interpretation" on Malvolio's part: '''M.O.A.I.' This simulation is not as the

former: and yet, to crush this a little, it would bow to me, for everyone of these letters are

in my name" (TN, ILv.139-41). To make a reading fit with a notion of identity involves

some amount of "crushing," an exertion on the part of the reader to make it "bow" before

some name, be it Malvolio's, Viola's, or Cesario's.

And what's in a name? Danger, according to Feste. Verbally spaning with

Cesario, the Fool states that "a sentence is but a chev'ril glove to a good wit-how

quickly may the wrong side be turned outward!" (TN, lII.1.11-3). To Cesario's response

that "they that dally nicely with words may qUickly make them wanton" (TN, III.i.14-5),

Feste asserts that "I would therefore my sister had no name" as "her name's a word, and

to dally with that ward might make my sister wanton" (TN, 111.1.16-9). Feste's nameless

sister is resonant of Cesario's; and yet, Viola does have a name and has had the "wrong

side turned outward" through her external incorporation of her lost brother. As stated

20Zoia Alexanian

before, in the other prevailing theory of gender difference during Shakespeare's time,

"the female genitals were simply the male genitals inverted, and carried internally rather

than externally" (Orgel, 20). For a female to become male would then require an

externalization and a turning of "inside" genitalia "out."

But "the chev'ril glove" can only be "turned outward" ifit is empty, and is

nothing more than the two sides of a surface. If a gendered incorporation can be turned

inside-out, and if such an incorporation establishes a gendered identity, then that identity

is an empty enclosure as well. In Gender Trouble, Butler describes how this emptiness is

elided through the culturally established distinction between self and other.

Acts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but

produce this on the surface of the body, through the play of signifying absences

that suggest, but never reveal, the organizing principle of identity as a cause. That

very interiority is an effect and function of a decidedly pUblic and social discourse

[...J, the gender border control that differentiates inner from outer, and thus

institutes the 'integrity' of the subject. (Gender, 173)

Integrity is preserved only when the distinction between the "inner" self and "outer"

other is strictly maintained, but in cross-dressing "inner" and "outer" in relation to the

self become multivalent and ultimately meaningless categorizations. For a "male" crossdresser, the distinction is blurred "by declaring that the outside (the performer's clothing)

is feminine and his inside (the body inside the clothing) is masculine, and at the same

time, that the outside (the performer's body) is masculine and his inside (his 'essence' or

'self) is feminine" (Garber, 152). Viola has a masculine outside in Cesario and a .

feminine one in her "body"; she has a feminine inside in her desires and a masculine one

in the male actor performing her role.

If both outside and inside can be simultaneously masculine and feminine, then

such gendered terms and the spaces they attempt to define lose their power of signifying

21Zoia Alexanian

any ultimate truth (and imagination alone can never sufficiehtly "prove true"). A

gendered identity behaves much like language does in Derrida's conception of differance,

for in both there.is an endless play between signifiers that continually invokes but never

leads to the (nonexistent) original, organizing source. Just as a sentence "is but a chev'ril

glove to a good wit," so too is gender-and what wit could be better than Shakespeare's?

"To dally with that word might make my sister wan~on"-the endless play of

signifiers that surrounds Cesario turns "him" into the locus of desire in this play, the

figure around which the four lovers (Viola, Orsino, Sebastian, and Olivia) are organized.

"Desire," writes Garber, "is by definition that which cannot be satisfied: it is what is left

of absolute demand when all possible satisfaction has been subtracted from it And this is

another definition of the transvestite [...JThe transvestite is the space of desire" (Garber,

75). A cross-dressed performance such·as Cesario's "produces a field of heterosexual

love objects at the same time as it produces a domain of those whom it would be

impossible to love" ("Melancholy," 177). Orsino loves Cesario only so far as to take

"his" hand; Olivia's love for Cesario ends with a heterosexual union between herself and

Sebastian.

Yet this union, despite Sebastian'sspeech to the contrary, is "unnatural" in that

Olivia herself is a cross-dressed boy. Moreover, after making his famous proclamation,

Sebastian goes on to explain that "You would have been contracted to a maid; I Nor are

you therein, by my life, deceiv'd: / You are betroth'd both to maid and man" (TN, .

V.1.258-61). "Maid and. man" refers to Sebastian's virginal status; he IS not "maid" in the

same way that Cesario is "man"-his "mixed" gender is based on the performance of an

act rather than the performance of a self. But as Cesario shows, a "self' is nothing more

22Zoia Alexanian

than the performance of a series of acts. Cesario begins as Viola's "outer" self, but as the

boundary between inner and outer quickly collapses under pressure, she is Cesario as

long as she appears to be him-which includes the moment when Orsino proposes

marriage. Regardless of how the four lovers are paired up and organized, something will

always be somewhat off.

Critics such a.s Smith, whose analyses of Twelfth Night focus on how Viola's

cross-dressing successfully unsettles any preconceived notions of a concrete and coherent

gender identity, tend to end thererather than extend their argument further-that

Cesario's presence undermines the stability that any identity could have by disrupting

gendered "truths." Feste, convinced that Sebastian is Cesario, sarcastically rejects

Sebastian's repeated claims that he knows of no such person: "No, I do not know you,

nor am I sent to you by my lady, to bid you come speak with her; nor your name is not

Master Cesario; nor this is not my nose neither. Nothing that is so, is so" (TN, IV.i.5~9). It

is rare for Shakespeare's Fools not to be in on the joke; Feste's confusion highlights the

extent to which Cesario creates a world in which "nothing that is so, is so." Butler states

that "the replication of heterosexual constructs in non-heterosexual frames brings into

relief the utterly constructed status of the so-called heterosexual original" which then

"reveals the original to be nothing other than a parody of the idea of the natural and the

Oliginal" (Gender, 41). Cesario's "interior" femininity brings into stark relief the male

interior of the cross-dressed actor playing Olivia; at the same time, Cesario's "exterior"

masculinity, which mirrors Sebastian's, forces even this maleness to be regarded as no

more (and no less) than a costume of a sort. Nature is identified as feminine, but there are

23Zoia Alexanian

no "true" females on the stage, and nature herself becomes a type of artificial

construction.

And this artificial "nature's bias" leads only to more constructions, exposing the

"utterly constructed status" of heterosexual love as forever in the process of being

constructed. Love in Twelfth Night is figured as an appetite which is always either underor over-satisfied, and is thus in an unceasing process of filling up or emptying out. The

play opens with Orsino declaring: "If music be the food of love, play on, / Give me

excess of it, that, surfeiting, / The appetite may sicken, and so die" (TN, I.i.1-3). To

simply satisfy the appetite is never presented as an option; there must be an "excess" that

will destroy it. To love only oneself is no solution, as evident when Olivia scolds

Malvolio for disparaging Feste: "You are sick of self-love, Malvolio, and taste with a

distempered appetite" (TN, I.iv.89-90). Loving no one but himself, Malvolio is still too

full and "sick" with it; his appetite is not satisfied but "distempered." Similarly, Orsino

tells Cesario that women's love

may be call'd appetite

[...]

That suffers surfeit, cloyment, and revolt;

But mine is as hungry as the sea,

And can digest as much. (TN, II.iv.98-103)

He describes both his love and the love of women as appetites; the only distinction is in

their digestive capacity, which is never (to borrow a phrase from another tale of

consumption) "just right."

While the lovers are in the process of consuming, the objects of their love are at

risk of being consumed. Orsino's depiction of his love, "as hungry as the sea," becomes a

haunting echo in the final scene, when Sebastian first mentions the existence of a

24Zoia Alexanian

"Viola": "I had a sister, / Whom the blind waves and surges have devour'd" (TN,

V-i.226-7). If "Viola" is somehow regained, it seems as though she has no choice but to

fall victim to another type of drowning. But because consumption is an unending process

in Twelfth Night, its objects are never fully absorbed: "Do not embrace me," Cesario tells

Sebastian in the final scene, "till each circumstance / Of place, time, fortune, do cohere

and jump / That I am Viola" (TN, V.1.249-51). The words need not be directed at

Sebastian alone-according to the rules of "nature's" game, Orsino cannot consume

Cesario as such; he must wait until the female identity of his page is certain-a certainty

which is precluded by the instability of any notion of identity in this play. The

"heterosexual construct" is continually being constructed because the identities of those

involved (which must be gendered opposites in such a formulation) are also continually

in process.

Everyone in this play plays at being other than themselves. Sebastian is Roderigo

before arriving in Illyria; Antonio attempts to convince Orsino's troops that they "mistake

[him]" (TN, III.iv.336) as the Antonio they seek to arrest. Maria plays the part of Olivia

in writing Malvolio a letter using her lady's seal; Malvolio in tum plays the part of the

smiling, cross-gartered lover. Olivia hides her features behind a veil and, upon first

showing her face to Cesario, presents it as a portrait. Even Orsino plays at being the "true

lover [...] unstaid and skittish in all motions else, / Save in the constantimage of the

creature / That is belov'd" (TN, II.iv.17-20), for in fewer than fifteen lines he goes on to

admit that "[Men's] fancies are more giddy and unfirm, / More longing, wavering, sooner

lost and worn / Than woman's are" (TN, II.iv.32-35). He is from the beginning in love

25Zoia Alexanian

with nothing more than an "image," and this love is an act which he luxuriates in but

nqnetheless fails to convincingly perform.

Orsino is not only unconvincing as a lover, but fails' to embody a "true"

masculinity as well. Men in Shakespeare's time were meant to be active, full of heat;

,

Ofsino, however, is only full of sweeping orations. And while Hamlet at least despairs of

th~ fact thathe "must, like a whore, unpack [his] heart witl~ words" (R, ILii.592), Orsino

is icompletely unconcerned by it. Sebastian also, despite being Cesario's "ideaL" is not

mtlCh of a man. He admits to Antonio that "I am yetso near the manners of my mother,

that upon the least occasion more mine eyes will tell tales of me" (TN, III.iv.323-4).

Antonio is the only character in Twelfth Night who is forcefully masculine-the only one

who "for his love dares yet do more / Than you have heard him brag to you he will" (TN,

III.iv.323-4). His love for Sebastian does not detract from his masculinity; as Orgel

explains, ineady modem England "women are dangerous to men because sexual passion

fqr women renders men effeminate: this is an age in which sexuality is itself

misogynistic, as the love of women threatens the integrity of the perilously achieved male

identity" (Orgel, 26). While Orsino's love for Olivia feminizes him, Antonio's love for

I

Sebastian only enhances his virility-and yetis a bit too ardent to be defined as strictly

homosocial: "I could not stay behind you: my desire, / More sharp than filed steel, did

sBur me forth" (TN, III.iii.4-5). In the end, the ideal man in, Twelfth Night is one who

unashamedly-and quite convincingly-loves another mal and against whom "nature"

I

holds no sway. He is therefore left out of the happy coupling, serving to unbalance what

should be a perfect symmetry of pairs even further and challenging any notion that a

"n'ataral" gender leads to "natural" desires. And if nature cannot beget nature, what can?

26Zoia Alexanian

The alternative title of the play-What You Will-captures how none of these

characters (Antonio included) are what they are; they are instead what they will be and

what they will to be; what Will (Shakespeare) wills them to be. Perhaps, as Greenblatt

and Orgel contend, in As You Like It all are either male or reflections thereof and there is

no true "other." However, in Twelfth Night what is absent is any sense of "self'-the self

is always divided and always other. Viola as Cesario maintains that "1 have one heart,

one bosom, and one truth" (TN, IILi.160), but this singularity is undone by the

appearance of Sebastian, when Orsino exclaims: "One face, one voice, one habit, and two

persons! / A natural perspective, that is, and is not!" (TN, V.i.214-5). To be reflected is in

some way to be negated (by something "natural," no less); a reflection is not a

stabilization of the self but a splitting: "How have you made division of yourself? / An

apple cleft in two is not more twin / Than these two creatures" (TN, V.i.220-2). A

"doubling" becomes a violent rending, and though there is hope of restoration-the play

ends as the characters set off to find Viola's original clothes and thus her "original"

identity-this hope is never fulfilled by Shakespeare himself. Shakespeare instead

stresses the difficulty of such a restoration, for Viola's clothes have been hidden in an

unknown location by the Captain who has been locked away somewhere by Malvolio,

and Malvolio's final vehement avowal-"I'll be reveng'd upon the whole pack of you!"

(TN, V.i.377)--implies that the difficulty might indeed be an impossibility. Without him,

Viola cannot regain her "self," and neither can any of the others who have been made

"not so" by Cesario's presence. Malvolio's "revenge" would then be the disillusion of the

hope of restoration, for without his help Viola must remain as Cesario, as one half of "an

apple cleft in two"-a partial and inevitably "other" self.

27Zoia Alexanian

The difference between one play that is What You Will and another that is As You

Likelt is contained within the concept of will-of agency. Viola has no agency over how

her cross-dressing affects those around her, or even how it affects her "self." Love in

Twelfth Night is not only consumptive but willful, though what is willed is nothing more

than fantasy. "I would you were as I would have you be" (TN, lII.i.144), Olivia tells

Cesario, in response to Cesario's repeated warnings that "I am not what I am" (TN,

III.i.143). Cesario undermines the stability and coherence of the term "I" and thus

undermines the "kind of reasoning [which] falsely presumes agency can only be

established through recourse to a prediscursive '1''' (Gender, 182). Cesario's "I" is

always context and discourse-dependent, shifting uneasily between genders. As such,

Cesario reveals Olivia's "I" as also depending on discourse, as s/he tells her that "you do

think you are not what you are" (TN, IILi.141). According to Butler, such shifting ''I's''

are representative of all uses of that pronoun, for there is no "prediscursive 'I'''-one

does not decide to be a male "I" or a female "I;" one cannot be an "I" that chooses

without already being an "I" gendered through language.

But what sort of agency do these non-prediscursive characters have? In

Shakespeare's view, it is a fantastical agency, for it is (only) in terms of fancy and

imagination that it has any effect. Cesario observes that Olivia "were better love a dream"

(TN, II.ii.25) than "him," and indeed it is a dream (and dreamer) that Olivia manages to

marry-the dream of Cesario, as embodied by the dreaming Sebastian: "If it be thus to

dream, still let me sleep!" (TN, IV.i.62). Orsino promises Cesario that once s/he is Viola,

she will be "Orsino's mistress, and his fancy's queen" (TN, V.i.387). Love is itself a

fantastical force, forever in the process of constructing and satisfying itself. "So full of

28Zoia Alexanian

shapes is fancy," Orsino declares, i'That it alone is high fantastical" (TN, V.i.14-15).

Ultimately, Viola's "natural" femininity and Sebastian's "natural" masculinity result only

in fantasies and dreams-a far cry from the concrete heterosexual, normalizing

conclusions that critics such as Ho~ard, Frye, and Barber argue are present in the final

scene.

To be Orsino's "fancy'sq~een," moreover, depends on Cesario's return to Viola,

a return that is figured as highly improbable. One fantasy thus depends on the fulfillment

of another. The play ends not with an undressing but with a tangling of layers until all

becomes surface-a surface that i~ reflective, but whose reflections are as fanciful as the

"original." If the "original" Viola were to be restored, she would disappear into Orsino's

fancy, and her "original" name would be a repetition of Olivia's and Malvolio's. "Olivia"

is "Viola" rearranged and with an extra "I"; Malvolio's name implies a "bad" Viola, and

indeed his attempted transgression-of class as opposed to gender-is viewed much

more harshly than hers. Butler writes that "in a sense, all signification takes place within

the orbit of the compulsion to repeat; 'agency,' then, is to be located within the

possibility of a variation on that repetition" (Gender, 185). Viola's agency, it seems,

comes from her being a variation on a theme, and yet out of all of Shakespeare's

heroines, she has the least amount of control over her life. Her decision to cross··dress as

Cesario is the only decision she makes; for the rest of the play she is a victim of

circumstance, and acknowledges her own lack of power over her fate: "0 time, thou must

untangle this, not I, / It is too hard a knot for me t'untie" (TN, ILii.39-40). Her decision to

cross-dress is an act of agency, but one which then causes an absolute loss of agency.

According to Butler, "Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts

29Zoia Alexanian

within a highly rigid regilatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance

of substance, of a naturalI sort of being" (Gender, 44). Viola's decision to be a "variation

on that repetition" by CrOrS-dreSSing is her one instance of agency because throughout the

rest of the play she attempts to keep the repercussions of this variation as "natural" as

possible, allowing her ro~e to solidify around her while refusing Olivia and hiding her

I

love for Orsino. I

And solidify it dO~S. For all that Shakespeare's play exposes the artificiality of a

"natural" gender, it does ~ot imply that this "appearance of substance" is one that can be

easily undone-and any rOderately successful undoing, as Cesario's fmal exit from the

stage portrays, becomes ts diffIcult to dIsmantle. CesarIO does not wholly upend the

constraints of "nature"; t~e monolithic, repetitive aspects of the "natural" are still present

after s/he leaves. The play opens with a summons for music, with the belief that music

I

can indeed kill love's ap~etite once and for all. It ends with a song, unasked for and

unheard by the play's ch<;tracters, centered on the melancholy construction of a life, a

I

construction based arounr the repetition of "natural" phenomena: "With hey, ho. the wind

and the rain / ... / For the rain it raineth every day" (TN, V.i.389-91). Rain that "raineth

I

I

every day" is not natural,:but it is the only nature allowable in the rigid rhythmic

framework of the song. +is "natural" unnaturalness is removed in the final stanza, and is

replaced with a recognition of the artifice of the preceding action, one that implicates the

spectator in its construction: "But that's all one, our play is done, / And we'll strive to

please you every day" (TN, V.i.406-7). Feste's song ends the play (it is now "done") and

the process of consumption with which it was engaged-the song does indeed put this

appetite to rest. At the same time, the song illuminates the relationship between the

30Zoia Alexanian

spectator and the actor. The play is meant "to please" the spectators, linking them with

what has just occurred onstage. The "you" of the song shifts uneasily to the "You" of

What You Will: what has been willed by the audience has been both an exposure of the

artificiality of nature, and its necessary repetition in order to "end" the ceaselessly

shifting, continually consumptive desires and identities that result without its organizing

frame.

31Zoia Alexanian

III. Gender and Desire in As You Like It: And (I) for No Woman

Take the frame away-allow nature to remain a setting rather than an organizing

force-and desire can playas it likes, while gender identities twist and tumble with little

heed to structure and coherence. In the melancholic Twelfth Night, Viola constructs

Cesario over a loss; grounded in absence, the desires of both disappear into the void and

surface briefly only in asides and curiously ambivalent soliloquies. Not so with Rosalind

and Ganymede-both want Orlando, and make little attempt to hide their desire; and

Orlando, quite clearly, wants both in return. Here, desire becomes the only constant of a

constantly changing identity; indeed, desire negates identity, multiplies and exceeds it,

until all that remains is want; pleasure; excess-a feminine discourse of desire. This

discourse is based upon a language which does not enforce or police gender but allows

RosalindfGanymede to easily move from one sex to the next or else frolic somewhere inbetween. Which is not to say that As You Like It is entirely (or even primarily) free of the

constraints of patriarchy, hierarchy, and the heterosexual gender dichotomy. Instead,

these constraints are shown as bordering at every location a strange shadow-land, where

dichotomies collapse, order topples, and gender is put on and slipped off with ease. If the

feminine discourse can never be free from the masculine, then the masculine can never

sever itself from the feminine. Indeed, in Arden, the masculine emerges from the

feminine; it is its structured, masquerading negation, whereas the feminine is able to

transform into whatever it chooses to desire as.

This unending transformative ability, so boldly and overtly staged, would have

startled early modem audiences. The play exists as an anomaly along the Shakespearean

timeline: "Unlike the contemporary praise for Shakespeare's recent successes in history