"'I am not that I play': Questioni di genre, gender e sessualità in Twelfth Night"

The line of research that a few decades ago set out to identify the hallmarks of theatrical communication has contributed much to our understanding of the ways in which theatre and drama operate in comparison with other world-creating forms of art. To the extent that the dramatic action relies, to be carried on, upon the pragmatic and the deictic potential with which the actors’ words and gestures are endowed, a preliminary analysis of Twelfth Night will be directed at detecting cases of “pointing via language” (deictic elements), and examples of performative utterances (direct speech acts), as well as instances of metatheatrical lines which, by revealing the fictitious character of the stage spectacle, will certainly prove instrumental in fostering a reading of the play from the perspective of gender studies. If it is true that the acting conventions of Shakespeare’s time became the substance of his drama, then there is enough evidence to assert that the boy actor’s double disguise was one of the artifices on which he capitalised the most, profiting from the temporary confusion caused by the transvestism of the theatre to unsettle gender assumptions. More specifically, the crossing of gender and sexual boundaries occasioned by Viola’s disguise gives rise to erotic situations that involve same-sex individuals, allowing queer desires to be brought to light and explored. Furthermore, the heroine’s dress-swapping exposes gender as a dramatic role that having no connection whatsoever with one’s sex, can be played by any-body. It is clear, therefore, that the notion of gender as a form of role-playing finds in the theatre an ideal place where to spot its workings and insubstantiality, and no better place, in fact, than the English Renaissance transvestite stage.