Shakespeare’s Troubled Lover  — Tying Shakespeare’s Work to Judith Butler’s Theoty

In contemporary discourse of gender, many have reached a consensus that gender is a social construct. Some scholars, like Judith Butler, have further advanced the theory of gender performativity in which they argue that gender is created by repeated instruction of acts that are traditionally coded masculine or feminine – such as emotional stoicism or wearing lipstick. According to this view, gender is not an inherent attribute but a learned behavior that is perpetuated through such instructions.

Merriam-Webster defines “performativity” as “the state of being made or done for show (as to bolster one's own image or make a positive impression on others).” This term carries disapproving connotations, suggesting performative acts are often deemed ingenuine and untrue by the general public. Interestingly, although the very term “performativity” is a modern product, it is vividly illustrated in many of Shakespeare’s texts. In Twelfth Night and the Sonnets, Shakespeare not only corroborates the theory of gender performativity but also supplements this theory by arguing that gendered relationships can also become performative. In other words, he proposes that love is performative as it is often expressed through words, writings, and actions. People seek to declare their affection in a relationship, yet these expressions are designed to be observed by the spectators rather than their true voices and therefore inherently artificial and performative.

In Twelfth Night, Shakespeare portrays Duke Orsino’s love for Olivia as performative, exposing how self-centered desires and exaggerated declarations mask genuine emotion. This becomes apparent from the very beginning of the play when Duke Orsino confesses his love for Olivia:

O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first, 

Methought she purged the air of pestilence. 

That instant was I turned into a hart,

And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds, 

E’er since pursue me. (Twelfth Night 1.1.20-24)

It is evident through this quote that the noble heart Orsino desires when he pursues Olivia is his own (Slights 540). But more importantly, Orsino announces his love for Olivia to the audience in a dramatic way by exaggerating his feelings when he first meets Olivia. He uses heightened phrases such as “purged the air of pestilence” to exemplify the intensity of feeling he experiences, and he intends to convey this message of love and intimacy not to Olivia, but to his servant, therefore engaging in the performance of loving someone dearly. It is worth noting that the reason for the abovementioned intense pleasure rarely has anything to do with Olivia’s feelings or emotions; it has to do with his own pleasure and desire as Orsino says “And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds, E’er since pursue me.” This suggests that Orsino loves Olivia not for her beauty or power but because she awakens his own desires. Orsino loves Olivia because his desires, most likely sexual, are aroused. His speech deviates from the reality in which he puts his desire above anything else and he only loves the feeling of being chased by his sexual lust when he acts like he is deeply in love with Olivia.

Orsino’s obsession with his desires becomes more obvious in Act 2 when he compares the capacity for love between men and women:

There is no woman’s sides

Can bide the beating of so strong a passion 

As love doth give my heart; no woman’s heart 

So big, to hold so much; they lack retention. Alas, their love may be called appetite,

No motion of the liver but the palate,

That suffer surfeit, cloyment, and revolt;

But mine is all as hungry as the sea,

And can digest as much. Make no compare 

Between that love a woman can bear me

And that I owe Olivia. (Twelfth Night 2.4.103-112)

Here, Orsino elevates his love to be superior to women’s love as he describes their affection as “appetite,” a fleeting craving, while his love is “all as hungry as the sea.” His speech is a performance, made not to Olivia but to his servant Viola to depict the strength of the emotion he feels, boldly showing his personal feelings toward an individual who has no relation to Viola, highlighting the performative nature of his speech. Orsino’s words reveal his desire to be noble and profound, as he belittles the value of women’s agency by pointing out that “no woman’s heart so big, to hold so much” as he does. This again informs the reader that Orsino’s love is self-centered and he does not care about whether the love in a relationship is mutual. As Draper suggests, the intensified grief and suffering that Orsino expresses may indicate that he does not love Olivia as much as he thinks because if this desire is lasting, it must alter his entire manner and lifestyle, but his melancholy more likely resembles the instability of the mind that is common among the Dukes (1025). Draper’s analysis solidifies the idea that Orsino’s proclamations are ingenuine, and Orsino presents his feelings in front of others merely to release his emotions and seek others’ attention, not true love.

Besides Orsino’s performance, in this play, Viola also performs masculinity by the same token despite not possessing the male sex. Viola, being biologically female, participates in a gender performance by pretending to be a man. In a similar fashion, she attempts to demonstrate masculinity through her well-crafted lies:

A blank, my lord. She never told her love,

But let concealment, like a worm i’ th’ bud, 

Feed on her damask cheek. She pined in thought, 

And with a green and yellow melancholy

She sat like Patience on a monument,

Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed

   We men may say more, swear more, but indeed 

Our shows are more than will; for still we prove 

Much in our vows but little in our love. (Twelfth Night 2.5.122-130)

Viola invents her fictional sister to prove her knowledge of women's emotions, and she intentionally crafts a lie to maintain her masculine persona. Through this performance, she is not constrained by her femininity anymore but has invented fictional narratives that allow her to maintain and explore the multitude of relationships with other characters (Kietzman 263). As Viola says her sister “sat like Patience on a monument, Smiling at grief,” she actively chooses to become a man by telling a well-designed lie, an act often associated with masculine behavior in this play, substantiating the contention that ingenuity and dishonesty are core parts of masculinity. Moreover, Viola subsequently takes on the persona of a man by blending herself into the community of masculine identity in which Orsino is a part, as she speaks “We men may say more, swear more, but indeed our shows are more than will.” Her speech uses the pronoun “we” in an attempt to bring her closer to Orsino and to convey the connotation of their sharing of identities while acknowledging the defects of masculinity: ingenuity, dishonesty, and fakeness. Ironically, all of these characteristics are also embodied by Viola at this moment, and these traits and acts that are conventionally employed by men now make her a man.

Throughout Twelfth Night, gender is not only performed in the context of romantic love but also in friendships and any relationship that blurs the line between these two. Specifically, Orsino and Viola concertedly perform friendship in many scenarios when their relationship transcends the boundary of friendship:

Dear lad, believe it;
For they shall yet belie thy happy years

That say thou art a man. Diana’s lip

Is not more smooth and rubious, thy small pipe 

Is as the maiden’s organ, shrill and sound,

And all is semblative a womans part. (Twelfth Night 1.5.34-37)

In Act 1 Scene 5, when Orsino sends Viola to seek the love of Olivia, he expressly praises the appearance of Viola who has “smooth and rubious” lips and a “shrill and sound” pipe, drawing on feminine imagery. He compares Viola to a woman, a sexual object that he is intrigued by in this sever-master relationship. Because “pipe” and “organ” are “semblative a woman’s part,” these two things render Viola as a desired dependant, who can satisfy Orsino’s own sexual pleasure (Jardine 26). However, Orsino does not go on to say how much he loves Viola, for the woman he wants to pursue at the moment is Olivia. Nevertheless, Orsino has demonstrated that he likes Viola in a somewhat sexual way while trying to maintain a superficial friendship with Viola, representing the performativity of this relationship. Furthermore, Viola reciprocates Orsino’s affection explicitly despite they are in a professional courtier relationship:

I’ll do my best

To woo your lady. Yet a barful strife! 

Whoe’er I woo, myself would be his wife. (Twelfth Night 1.5.44-46)

Viola’s performance reveals the dual performance at play. She becomes extremely direct as she accepts the duke’s praise by saying that “myself would be his wife.” In disguise as a man, she transgresses the social norm by announcing that she, as a man, dares to show her love to the duke by telling him that she wants to be the wife of Duke Orsino although homoerotic relationships are not widely accepted at that time. The relationship between Viola and Orsino in this play may have established the pattern of homoerotic representation to challenge gender binarism and to exemplify how gender identities are often performed, staged, and playable by either sex (Charles 129). Shakespeare here uses the relationship between Viola and Orsino to describe how they concertedly construct a non-traditional gendered relationship in which they perform both friendship and romantic relationships. They are friends on the surface but the words they say often exceed the boundary of friendship, masking deeper, more complex dynamics. We know they are not just friends but each of them is performing a platonic relationship to conform to heteronormativity in which the only acceptable form of marriage is between a man and a woman.

The performativity within the relationship between Orsino and Viola culminates in the last act when Viola reveals her real gender identity, reaffirming the idea that the friendship between Orsino and Viola is most likely a performance:

Madam, I am most apt t’ embrace your offer.

[To Viola.]   Your master quits you; and for your 

service done him,

So much against the mettle of your sex,

So far beneath your soft and tender breeding, 

And since you called me “master” for so long,

Here is my hand. You shall from this time be

Your master’s mistress. (Twelfth Night 5.1.336-343)

Orsino immediately falls in love with Viola after she reveals to everyone that she is a woman. By continuing to use the phrase “your master,” Orsino maintains a master-servant relationship that has a reciprocal obligation, extending to his hope of the reciprocity of their erotic affection, while it is unclear if Viola possesses sexual desire or feigned devotion toward Orsino (Schalkwyk 95). The ambiguity in this relationship is conducive to analyzing the gender performance that each of them has. While it is unclear whether they are sexually attracted to each other from the start, we can infer that they get along well with each other. As Orsino says, “You shall from this time be your master’s mistress,” he performs the act of proposal, which is stereotypically associated with masculine behavior. But more importantly, the fact that Orsino proposes right after Viola’s reveal can be indicative that he may have already had erotic feelings for her before her transformation. Orsino has previously stated that women’s feelings are mere “appetites”. In contrast, his feelings are longer-lasting when he first desires to pursue Olivia. Yet, here he transfers this love almost seamlessly to Viola, ironically suggesting that his own emotions toward someone also may not last long, under the premise that he finds another woman to marry. This duplicity can be interpreted as one of Orsino’s many performances to maintain a gendered relationship, highlighting the malleability and ingenuity of his words when he is in love.

The performative nature of gendered relationships sometimes leads to good results as we see in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night where the main characters all seem to procure a partner they desire. But in Sonnets, Shakespeare uses his experience to inform us that performance in a gendered relationship can often be forced and unhappy in reality – people engage in these performances not because they want to, but because it is the sole act they can do when their love is unrequited or unrecognized.  An examination of Sonnet 18 may help illustrate this point:

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;

Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade, 

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, 

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. (Sonnet 18 9-14)

Shakespeare solemnly expresses the poet’s faith and ends Sonnet 18 with a doxology of eternal love (Poisson 149). This sonnet is a love letter demonstrating Shakepeare’s affection for the fair youth who possesses “that fair” and “eternal summer.” Shakespeare uses an illogical statement claiming that this fair youth’s beauty will never fade as time goes by because he lives in “eternal lines” that Shakespeare composes. Shakespeare moreover elucidates that he is the performer in this situation. As the author of these “eternal lines,” he employs this poem to express his feelings and document the relationship he and the fair youth are experiencing. Neither their love is recognized by the society they have lived in, nor are they physically able to produce children. However, Shakespeare constructs an illusion for himself by contending that this poem is the offspring of him and the fair youth, and he invites all readers to join him in recognizing the authenticity of his love as he writes “so long as men can breathe or eyes can see,” in a way resemblant to how Orsino expresses his love for Olivia. But the scenario he faces is quite different as he lives in a real world in which he cannot swiftly transform to another gender as Viola does. Shakespeare’s performance in Sonnets is also more caring of the other partner, as made evident by his repetitive use of “thee” and “thy,” which roughly translates to “you” in modern English. He differentiates his kind of love from Orsino’s, which exclusively focuses on his own desire instead of the other partner. This differentiation is a way Shakespeare intends to demonstrate the uniqueness of the nature of their relationship. Nevertheless, it is still a performance because the main point of this rhetorical language is still him valorizing his love and proving its significance.

Shakespeare continues to perform the role of a sorrowful lover whose love is unrequited in the latter part of Sonnets where the theme he often invokes is grief and a sense of unfulfilled desire. This phenomenon is most palpable in Sonnet 20: 

By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.

But since she pricked thee out for women’s pleasure, 

Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure.

But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, 

All losses are restored and sorrows end.  (Sonnet 20 12-16)

Here, Shakespeare portrays himself as someone who has fallen in love with the wrong person by saying “by adding one thing to my purpose nothing.” He potentially refers to the sexes of him and the fair youth that render this relationship inappropriate. The “one thing” Shakespeare writes can be interpreted as fair youth’s male anatomy, which makes Shakespeare’s “purpose nothing.” This not only suggests the homophobic nature of the society that they live in but also is indicative that it may not be possible for them to have the kind of sex that Shakespeare wants to have. According to Distiller, Sonnet 20 enables us to observe at work a crucial point regarding the interplay between sexuality and desire, as well as between the forces of the will and the social structures that channel and contain them (118). This sonnet is particularly intriguing because Shakespeare’s choice of language underscores his internal misery in making these compromises that he would not have made if he had the power to choose. As he writes, “Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure,” he first shows us that his love is purer than other people’s love – his love is not usable in the same way as these women’s love; his love is freer and less driven by the sexual desire that “uses” love. But he also calls those women’s use of love “treasure,” which proves to us that it is not that he does not desire the use of this love, it is more about difficult reasons like societal pressure, physiological differences, and the nature of this unrequited love that prevent him from using this love. We have no information on whether this fair youth loves him back, and it is also conceivable that Shakespeare, like Orsino, only chases after his own desire while ignoring the other person’s feelings toward him. In the last sentence, Shakespeare describes that when he thinks of the fair youth, “all losses are restored and sorrows end.” Superficially this sentence conveys a simplistic idea that the fair youth is someone who brings Shakespeare joy when he is unhappy, but a careful reader may sense that the “losses” and “sorrows” that Shakespeare feels can also be attributed to the fair youth himself when we relate this sentence to previous sentences describing Shakespeare’s inability to procure the use of this love, yet Shakespeare purposefully employs a tone that positions himself in the bright side of things to the extent that he persuades himself that this simple joy he feels when he thinks of the fair youth can outweigh the impure sexual pleasure enjoyed by other women. We may legitimately question the authenticity of this statement that Shakespeare fantasizes because of the intensity of emotion that Sonnet 20 manifests. Shakespeare performs to be happy in this supposed friendship, where sexual feelings should not be present. The hopefulness that Shakespeare uses to conclude this sonnet can not wholly encapsulate the complexity of the relationship between Shakespeare and the fair youth, it nevertheless is yet another performance Shakespeare uses to legitimize this feeling and lie to himself, despite we can distinguish that Shakespeare views the fair youth to be more than just a friend through his sorrow and grief in this sonnet.

  In his work Twelfth Night and Sonnets, Shakespeare reveals that love and gender are intricately tied to performance, enabling us to ponder the prevalence of gender performance in our relationships. Shakespeare explores how societal norms shape our expressions of love and identity through his narration of the relationship between Orsino and Viola, and his relationship with the fair youth. These performances, while inauthentic, reflect universal struggles with desire, conformity, and selfhood in a relationship. Shakespeare tells us that love is never an easy topic: Sometimes people who love each other cannot be together because of the societal expectation they have to conform to, sometimes people love someone who does not reciprocate their love, and sometimes people who used to love each other start to drift away by the passage of time. 

As Nordlund observes, “Love is often a source of joy, but it can also be a source of shame or suffering if it is felt for the wrong person, if it is not returned, or if the emotion itself is deemed socially unacceptable (23).” The idea of true love remains elusive, but just as each of us acquires our gender identity through repeated instructions, Shakespeare indicates love is an act that each of us learns to do – We are told how to pursue someone as a man or as a woman. We are told to perform gendered stereotypes in a relationship to demonstrate masculinity or femininity. We are told that we should closely follow the social norm of how marriage should be between a man and a woman. As we internalize these doctrines we observe, we start to perform these fixed gender dynamics in a relationship in which love is scripted and contrived. 

Yet how can love be so restrictive that it precludes any deviation from these rigid standards? As Judith Butler critiques in Gender Trouble, the very idea of gender is troubled because it is socially constructed and we should create gender troubles that dismantle this oppressive system. Similarly, Shakespeare's works suggest that the concept of true love is equally troubled, as he portrays relationships that transcend conventional boundaries between romantic and platonic love. However, Shakespeare reveals an inherent nature of love that differentiates it from gender, that love is troubling per se: It forces people to perform, not merely because it is learned through repetitive instructions but also because love’s intrinsic contradictions force us to laugh, cry, and suffer, even when we do not wish to.

Works Cited

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 2nd ed., Routledge, 1999.

Charles, Casey. “Gender Trouble in ‘Twelfth Night.’” Theatre Journal, vol. 49, no. 2, 1997, pp. 121–41. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3208678. 

DRAPER, JOHN W. “THE MELANCHOLY DUKE ORSINO.” Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine, vol. 6, no. 9, 1938, pp. 1020–29. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44438530. 

Distiller, Natasha. “Shakespeare's Perversion: A Reading of Sonnet 20.” Shakespeare, vol. 8, no. 2, 2012, pp. 137–153. Taylor & Francis Online, https://doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2012.679299.

Greenblatt, Stephen, and M. H. Abrams. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. W.W. Norton & Co, 2012. 

Kietzman, Mary Jo. “WILL PERSONIFIED: VIOLA AS ACTOR-AUTHOR IN ‘TWELFTH NIGHT.’” Criticism, vol. 54, no. 2, 2012, pp. 257–89. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23267740. 

Nordlund, Marcus. Shakespeare and the Nature of Love: Literature, Culture, Evolution. Northwestern University Press, 2007. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv47w37r. 

Poisson, Rodney. “Unequal Friendship: Shakespeare’s Sonnets XVIII–CXXVI.” ESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 1, no. 2, Summer 1975, pp. 144–159. Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English, https://doi.org/10.1353/esc.1975.0013.

Schalkwyk, David. "Love and Service in Twelfth Night and the Sonnets." Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 56 no. 1, 2005, p. 76-100. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/shq.2005.0049. 

Shakespeare, William, et al. Twelfth Night, or, What You Will. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2019.

Slights, Camille. “The Principle of Recompense in ‘Twelfth Night.’” The Modern Language Review, vol. 77, no. 3, 1982, pp. 537–46. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3728062.

Jardine, Lisa. “Twins and Travesties.” Erotic Politics, edited by Susan Zimmerman, 1st ed., Routledge, 1992, pp. 21–30. eBook, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203977101. 

“Performativity.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/performativity.