Shakespeare's Twelfth Night is a comedy that explores gender and sexuality through the relationships of its main characters. Viola, an aristocratic woman, is shipwrecked on the coast of Illyria. Assuming her brother is dead, Viola assumes Cesario's identity, becoming Duke Orsino's page. While serving Orsino while attempting to woo Olivia, Viola falls in love with him. Our performance focused on the end of Act 2.4. After Feste's sad love song, Orsino asks Viola to try to woo Olivia once again on his behalf. When Viola questions the Duke, the two begin to discuss whether a woman's love and passion can be as strong and sincere as a man's. In Twelfth Night, the demonstration of various forms and levels of sexual attraction and homoerotic relationships becomes central to the play, found between Viola and Olivia, Orsino and Cesario, and Antonia and Sebastian. The motif of cross-dressing is used throughout the work, crossing not only gender but also systems of class and status. Disguises or androgynous performances by Viola and the men who interpret her upset restrictions of attraction within a subject. Viola's pants role prevents her from acting on her passions. However, it is Viola's disguise as a young woman that allows the characters to interact openly and intimately. In Illyria love is not only celebrated but is the object of satire, rarely genuine and easily transferable. During the Elizabethan period female characters were played predominantly by boys or young men. In England, it was not acceptable for a woman to appear on stage in public until after 1660 (Mann, 1). There is evidence, however, of widespread use by women in other European countries, predominantly in non-speaking or mime roles (Mann, 1). In Renais......middle of paper......ely masculine” (qtd. in Mann, 223). Cross-dressing is a performative practice “in which the 'sign' of gender is reiterated parodically in a potentially subversive way” (Charles, 123). Cross-dressing in the theater is often exploited for “witty, comic, and often disconcerting effect” (Shaughnessy, 120). This gender instability, as seen in Twelfth Night, is also used to advance and direct the plot. However, cross-dressing within a performance can be disruptive, either reflecting only “banal impersonations through which ideal heterosexual genders are represented” or exposing “the failure of heterosexual regimes to legislate or contain their ideals” (Butler qtd. in Carlo, 123). There are also dangers in fetishizing cross-dressing performances, “charging them with a disturbing eroticism that exploited the sensation of same-sex coupling” (Rutter, 141).