William Shakespeare s Twelfth Night - 3153 Words

Throughout Twelfth Night, or What You Will, Shakespeare challenges the notion of the heteronormative social standard of 1601, when the play was performed. The comedy is Shakespeare’s only play to have two titles, and is titled in reference to the Elizabethan nativity, or the twelfth night of the Christmas celebration. Circa 1600 during the reign of Elizabeth I, this holiday was celebrated as a festival in which everything was turned upside down, much like the innately chaotic world of Illyria, in which the play takes place. The main character and protagonist, Viola, is continuously met with instances of mistaken identity, romantic frustration, homosexuality, and the overall foolishness that the play is intended to exude. In implicating†¦show more content†¦However, this exhibition of gender ambiguity in Twelfth Night was not the first time the issue of a gender gradient was explored. Twelfth Night is one of Shakespeare’s transvestite comedies, along with his pl ays As You Like It and The Merchant of Venice. These plays all have in common that they include female protagonists who, each with their own reason, must disguise themselves as young men. Casey Charles notes, in his Gender Trouble in Twelfth Night, that â€Å"critics have struggled recently to determine the degree to which such theatrical gender trouble affected the social fabric of Renaissance England†. While Catherine Belsey and Phyliss Rackin argued first that stage illusion radically subverted the gender division of the Elizabethan world, new historicists like Stephen Greenblatt and Howard have more recently made claims that the Globe operated as a universe in itself, a place where comedy and theatre and breaking rules was acceptable, and had little to no effect on the diminishing power of women in Renaissance England. Shakespeare’s strongly feminist plays may not have coincided with social change for women in sixteenth century England, but the theatre also did not necessarily warrant a conclusion that the Elizabethan plays were socially ineffective on gender roles. â€Å"If the relative power of woman was diminished in Renaissance England, the causes of that reduction were as much due to religious and political forces as they were to