The Homoerotic Representations in As You Like It and Twelfth Night

Abstract

I propose that Shakespearean comedies, As You Like It and Twelfth Night display a homoerotic circulation of desire which is elicited, exchanged, negotiated, and displaced when it confronts the pleasures and anxieties of its meanings in early modern culture. The circulation of homoerotic desire in As You Like It and Twelfth Night occurs when Rosalind and Viola are cross-dressed. There are some differences between the representations of As You Like It and Twelfth Night. The homoeroticism of As You Like It is playful in the terms of her breaking into the dual mode of desire. As long as Rosalind/Ganymede is such a dual sexual object as simultaneously heterosexual and homoerotic one, Orlando’s effusion of desire toward her/him prevents the stable reinstitution of heterosexuality, on which the patriarchal marriage plot depends. By interrupting the arbitrary binarism of the heterosexual contract, male homoeroticism transgresses the erotic imperative of patriarchism. In spite of the temporal transgression, Hymen in the end concludes the play in terms of the “mock” marriage, which enacts only an ambivalent closure. On the other hand, the homoeroticism of Twelfth Night is anxious and strained. This paper explores a diversity of desire: Viola/Cesario’s dual desire for Olivia and Orsino; Orsino’s ambivalent interest in Viola/Cesario; Sebastian’s responses to Olivia and Antonio; and finally, Antonio’s exclusive erotic wish for Sebastian. Though the play proceeds with erotic plurality as far as it can, it fixes the homoerotic interest onto a marginalized figure, Antonio in the face of anxiety generated by various desires. Antonio is sacrificed for the maintenance of institutionalized heterosexuality. The erotic pleasure in Twelfth Night is explored and sustained until it collapses into fear of erotic exclusivity. In conclusion, the ways Shakespearean patriarchal subjects negotiate for erotic agency within a social, political, and aesthetic field of constraints imply the possibilities and limitations of our own erotic negotiations.