Gender and Love Confusion

Act 2 of The Twelfth Night is full of events in which the behaviors of both the male and female characters seem quite odd. It is strange enough that a love triangle between Viola (Cesario), Olivia, and Orsino exists where Viola is both a male and a female, but to have Antonio and Sebastian’s relationship the way it is causes the play to challenge the role of gender within the play. Since women were not allowed to act in plays, the parts of females had to be played by young boys. Throughout history, there has been a connection between adult men and their relationships to young boys, so there may be a direct link to the fact that males who had a natural inclination to young boys could act on stage according to that feeling. Homosexuality was punishable by death during the Elizabethian Era, but two men on stage acting to be in love on stage was generally accepted by the audience. Perhaps Shakespeare uses this behavioral freedom to dive deeper into the confusion that these gender roles create, and saw the opportunity to create all sorts of wrong relationships. Besides the love triangle and Antonio’s questionable devotion to Sebastian, Maria pulls a prank on Malvolio by tricking him into believing that Olivia secretly loves him. The comedy in this play is predominately derived from the chaos of loving someone who does not love that person back.