SOURCE: "Shakespeare's Violation: 'One Face, One Voice, One Habit, and Two Persons'," in Reconsidering the Renaissance: Papers from the Twenty-First Annual Conference, edited by Mario A. Di Cesare, Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1992, pp. 327-38.

In the following essay, Green discusses the portrayal of love and gender in Twelfth Night, maintaining that while the play exposes the narcissism and self-centeredness of masculine love, its ending—with Viola still costumed as Cesario—reinforces the idea that men are the only trustworthy objects of desire.

However much we may argue about Shakespearean texts, we never doubt that they mean something—and they do, although not quite in the way the old introductory Shakespeare course descriptions once implied. Because "Shakespeare is," according to Alan Sinfield, "one of the places where ideology is made,"¹ we have lately had a proliferation of multiply explicated Shakespeares, deconstructing and deconstructed Shakespeares, Marxist Shakespeares, psychoanalytic Shakespeares, new...