Volume 44, Number 10 · June 12, 1997
Maid, Man, and Jew
By Peter Holland
Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare's England
by Steven Orgel
Cambridge University Press, 179 pp., $15.95 (paper)
Shakespeare and the Jews
by James Shapiro
Columbia University Press, 317 pp., $29.50
How does a girl become a boy? In his recent film version of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Trevor Nunn shows us the shipwrecked Viola transforming herself into Cesario in order to be employed by Orsino. Her long hair is cut into a pageboy's bob; she binds her breasts tightly against her body; she dons trousers, not forgetting to stuff a handkerchief down the front to hint at a penis; she sticks on a false mustache. Then she learns how to move like a man, imitating the sea captain who is helping her: walking with her legs swinging from the hips, finally yawning in an extravagant manner with her arms thrown wide and her mouth open wider. The visible and concealed body, costume, and movement: these are, for Nunn and Imogen Stubbs (Viola), the three features that provide the code for gender. When Viola is reunited with her brother, it is, for Nunn, the mustache that becomes the means of redefining Viola as a woman. Apparently nothing that Shakespeare gives Viola to say is half as convincing as peeling away the false mustache from her upper lip.
Review, 4853 words
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