Twelfth Night offers especially rich opportunities for analysing gender on the Early Modern stage. All the female characters transcend their social roles in unusual ways: Viola cross-dresses and works as a boy in a nobleman’s court, while Maria, a ‘waiting-gentlewoman’ or ‘chambermaid’, outwits her professional superior, Malvolio, and orchestrates her own marriage into the aristocracy. The Countess Olivia, meanwhile, is able to ‘sway her house, command her followers / Take and give back affairs and their dispatch’ with ‘a smooth, discreet and stable bearing’ (4.3.17–19), ruling her household staff, and handling problems and decision-making calmly and consistently. She proposes marriage to a young man beneath her social rank, and uses her last lines in the play to insist on paying for her own wedding and that of her sister-in-law.
All three women, furthermore, have more lines than Viola’s twin, Sebastian. Unseen until Act 2, Scene 1, and appearing in only five of Twelfth Night’s 18 scenes, it’s easy to see Sebastian as merely a catalyst for the beloved staples of Shakespearean comedy. He’s the lost boy who inspires Viola’s cross-dressing; the comic cause of mistaken identity from Act 3, Scene 4 onwards; and the convenient husband who untwists the protagonists’ love triangle. Yet close-reading Viola and Sebastian against each other reveals how complex Shakespeare’s portrayal of gender actually is, and how Sebastian’s characterisation ends up rejecting gender binaries altogether.
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