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The Enigmatic Cesario
A Whiteheadian Appreciation of
Fluid Gender Identity in Twelfth Night
Imagine that you have been cast as a character in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. You will present a young and vibrant woman named "Viola" who dresses as, and presents herself as, a young man named "Cesario." You will be performing Viola's identity and Cesario's identity at the same time. You will be non-binary.
According to the story, you are stranded on an unfamiliar island and you, as Viola, adopt this disguise to gain a livelihood and protection. As Cesario, you serve Duke Orsino, who is deeply in love with Lady Olivia—or at least in love with the idea of being in love with her. Both Orsino and Olivia are melancholy figures, a bit lost inside their own longings. But things become complicated when Olivia falls in love with you—believing you to be a young man—while you, disguised as Cesario, find yourself falling for Orsino. To complicate matters even further, Orsino finds himself increasingly drawn to you as Cesario, experiencing an attraction that he cannot fully comprehend. A triangle of desire emerges - a love triangle between Cesario and Olivia and Orsino. You, as an actor, must help bring this all together.
Double Performance
So you are performing a female character who herself performs a male character, and who, as that male character, becomes an object of attraction for two others—Orsino and Olivia. This double performance means that you are not just acting as Viola but also embodying how Viola acts while pretending to be Cesario. It is a performance within a performance—a female character navigating her world by convincingly adopting a male identity. This complexity brings unique challenges and opportunities in acting. You must capture Viola's spirit—her intelligence, wit, vulnerability, and passion—while also portraying her masculine disguise convincingly.
The Ambiguity and Lure of Cesario
Your presence as Cesario is dynamic and enigmatic, affecting Orsino and Olivia in profound ways. You exude an energy that feels both familiar and mysterious to them, sparking a kind of attraction that neither fully understands. Olivia, drawn to your eloquence and sensitivity, finds herself captivated by someone she cannot quite categorize, while Orsino is both confused and fascinated by your uniqueness, unaware of the true nature of your disguise. This complexity of identity leads both Orsino and Olivia to fall in love with aspects of Cesario that reflect something about themselves—qualities that feel both similar and complementary.
Marjorie Garber, a leading Shakespeare scholar, captures the essence of Cesario in her analysis:
"Cesario possesses a powerful presence—eloquent, erotic, and elusive—that is not merely equivalent to the charms and power of the female character portraying him...Olivia and Orsino both fall in love with someone, something, they half recognize yet do not fully know—something both similar to and complementary to themselves."
Both Olivia and Orsino are each encountering something beyond a typical gendered identity—they are engaging with the complexity of human attraction, identity, and desire. Cesario, in this sense, is a symbol of the fluidity and richness of human experience.
Prehending Cesario: A Whiteheadian Perspective
From a Whiteheadian perspective, it is worth considering how Olivia and Orsino experience Cesario—how they "prehend" him. In Whitehead’s philosophy, "prehension" is a fundamental way in which entities perceive and feel the world, including each other. Prehension is an act of relational feeling that integrates both conscious and unconscious elements. When Olivia and Orsino prehend Cesario, they are responding to the qualities that Cesario embodies—qualities that go beyond traditional gender binaries.
Cesario’s presence is an interplay of masculinity, femininity, and something more—something elusive that resists simple categorization.
This presence embodies creativity and novelty, which are core aspects of Whitehead’s philosophy of process. Cesario is not a static identity but a dynamic energy that evolves moment to moment, shaping and being shaped by the relationships with Olivia and Orsino. The attraction that Olivia and Orsino feel is not just physical or based on traditional notions of gender but is a response to the novelty and ambiguity that Cesario embodies.
For Olivia and Orsino, falling in love with Cesario is a complex process that involves navigating the tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the known and the unknown. This tension—between what they "half recognize yet do not fully know"—is part of what makes their feelings so powerful. Cesario embodies a possibility that challenges and expands their preconceived notions of love and attraction, drawing them into a process of creative becoming.
Cesario as a Symbol of Process
In Whiteheadian terms, Cesario can be seen as an instantiation of "concrescence"—the process by which multiple influences are synthesized into a new unity. Cesario is a convergence of influences: Viola, her masculine performance, the expectations of those around her, and the evolving responses of Olivia and Orsino. The character of Cesario is not a fixed being but a process—a dynamic unfolding that embodies creativity, fluidity, and potential.
Olivia and Orsino's experience of Cesario is thus an encounter with the possibility of we in the process world call "creative transformation." They are drawn to Cesario not because of a rigid gender identity but because of the unique blend of qualities that Cesario embodies—qualities that invite them to see themselves and their relationships in new ways.
Cesario’s presence ultimately invites us, too, to consider the richness of identity beyond conventional categories. It is a presence that resonates with the relational and emergent nature of reality as understood in process philosophy. Through the complex and evolving interactions with Olivia and Orsino, Cesario becomes a symbol of the creativity inherent in human relationships—the potential for novelty, ambiguity, and deeper understanding that emerges when we engage with the world in open and relational ways.
Needless to say, we live in a world where fixed gender boundaries take their toll on all involved, creating boxes of hardened expectation difficult to navigate. Many suffer from these boxes. "Cesario" offers away out of the box.
- Jay McDaniel
* Marjorie Garber is an American professor and literary scholar renowned for her work in Shakespearean studies, cultural criticism, and gender theory. She teaches at Harvard University in the departments of English and Visual and Environmental Studies. Garber is the author of numerous influential books, including Shakespeare After All, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, and Symptoms of Culture.
According to the story, you are stranded on an unfamiliar island and you, as Viola, adopt this disguise to gain a livelihood and protection. As Cesario, you serve Duke Orsino, who is deeply in love with Lady Olivia—or at least in love with the idea of being in love with her. Both Orsino and Olivia are melancholy figures, a bit lost inside their own longings. But things become complicated when Olivia falls in love with you—believing you to be a young man—while you, disguised as Cesario, find yourself falling for Orsino. To complicate matters even further, Orsino finds himself increasingly drawn to you as Cesario, experiencing an attraction that he cannot fully comprehend. A triangle of desire emerges - a love triangle between Cesario and Olivia and Orsino. You, as an actor, must help bring this all together.
Double Performance
So you are performing a female character who herself performs a male character, and who, as that male character, becomes an object of attraction for two others—Orsino and Olivia. This double performance means that you are not just acting as Viola but also embodying how Viola acts while pretending to be Cesario. It is a performance within a performance—a female character navigating her world by convincingly adopting a male identity. This complexity brings unique challenges and opportunities in acting. You must capture Viola's spirit—her intelligence, wit, vulnerability, and passion—while also portraying her masculine disguise convincingly.
The Ambiguity and Lure of Cesario
Your presence as Cesario is dynamic and enigmatic, affecting Orsino and Olivia in profound ways. You exude an energy that feels both familiar and mysterious to them, sparking a kind of attraction that neither fully understands. Olivia, drawn to your eloquence and sensitivity, finds herself captivated by someone she cannot quite categorize, while Orsino is both confused and fascinated by your uniqueness, unaware of the true nature of your disguise. This complexity of identity leads both Orsino and Olivia to fall in love with aspects of Cesario that reflect something about themselves—qualities that feel both similar and complementary.
Marjorie Garber, a leading Shakespeare scholar, captures the essence of Cesario in her analysis:
"Cesario possesses a powerful presence—eloquent, erotic, and elusive—that is not merely equivalent to the charms and power of the female character portraying him...Olivia and Orsino both fall in love with someone, something, they half recognize yet do not fully know—something both similar to and complementary to themselves."
Both Olivia and Orsino are each encountering something beyond a typical gendered identity—they are engaging with the complexity of human attraction, identity, and desire. Cesario, in this sense, is a symbol of the fluidity and richness of human experience.
Prehending Cesario: A Whiteheadian Perspective
From a Whiteheadian perspective, it is worth considering how Olivia and Orsino experience Cesario—how they "prehend" him. In Whitehead’s philosophy, "prehension" is a fundamental way in which entities perceive and feel the world, including each other. Prehension is an act of relational feeling that integrates both conscious and unconscious elements. When Olivia and Orsino prehend Cesario, they are responding to the qualities that Cesario embodies—qualities that go beyond traditional gender binaries.
Cesario’s presence is an interplay of masculinity, femininity, and something more—something elusive that resists simple categorization.
This presence embodies creativity and novelty, which are core aspects of Whitehead’s philosophy of process. Cesario is not a static identity but a dynamic energy that evolves moment to moment, shaping and being shaped by the relationships with Olivia and Orsino. The attraction that Olivia and Orsino feel is not just physical or based on traditional notions of gender but is a response to the novelty and ambiguity that Cesario embodies.
For Olivia and Orsino, falling in love with Cesario is a complex process that involves navigating the tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the known and the unknown. This tension—between what they "half recognize yet do not fully know"—is part of what makes their feelings so powerful. Cesario embodies a possibility that challenges and expands their preconceived notions of love and attraction, drawing them into a process of creative becoming.
Cesario as a Symbol of Process
In Whiteheadian terms, Cesario can be seen as an instantiation of "concrescence"—the process by which multiple influences are synthesized into a new unity. Cesario is a convergence of influences: Viola, her masculine performance, the expectations of those around her, and the evolving responses of Olivia and Orsino. The character of Cesario is not a fixed being but a process—a dynamic unfolding that embodies creativity, fluidity, and potential.
Olivia and Orsino's experience of Cesario is thus an encounter with the possibility of we in the process world call "creative transformation." They are drawn to Cesario not because of a rigid gender identity but because of the unique blend of qualities that Cesario embodies—qualities that invite them to see themselves and their relationships in new ways.
Cesario’s presence ultimately invites us, too, to consider the richness of identity beyond conventional categories. It is a presence that resonates with the relational and emergent nature of reality as understood in process philosophy. Through the complex and evolving interactions with Olivia and Orsino, Cesario becomes a symbol of the creativity inherent in human relationships—the potential for novelty, ambiguity, and deeper understanding that emerges when we engage with the world in open and relational ways.
Needless to say, we live in a world where fixed gender boundaries take their toll on all involved, creating boxes of hardened expectation difficult to navigate. Many suffer from these boxes. "Cesario" offers away out of the box.
- Jay McDaniel
* Marjorie Garber is an American professor and literary scholar renowned for her work in Shakespearean studies, cultural criticism, and gender theory. She teaches at Harvard University in the departments of English and Visual and Environmental Studies. Garber is the author of numerous influential books, including Shakespeare After All, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, and Symptoms of Culture.
A Scholarly Discussion
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of Shakespeare’s great comedies, which plays in the space between marriage, love and desire. By convention a wedding means a happy ending and here there are three, but neither Orsino nor Viola, Olivia nor Sebastian know much of each other’s true character and even the identities of the twins Viola and Sebastian have only just been revealed to their spouses to be. These twins gain some financial security but it is unclear what precisely the older Orsino and Olivia find enduringly attractive in the adolescent objects of their love. Meanwhile their hopes and illusions are framed by the fury of Malvolio, tricked into trusting his mistress Olivia loved him and who swears an undefined revenge on all those who mocked him.
With
Pascale Aebischer
Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Performance Studies at the University of Exeter
Michael Dobson
Professor of Shakespeare Studies and Director of the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham
And
Emma Smith
Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, University of Oxford
Produced by Simon Tillotson, Victoria Brignell and Luke Mulhall
Reading list:
C.L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedies: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (first published 1959; Princeton University Press, 2011)
Simone Chess, ‘Queer Residue: Boy Actors’ Adult Careers in Early Modern England’ (Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 19.4, 2020)
Callan Davies, What is a Playhouse? England at Play, 1520-1620 (Routledge, 2023)
Frances E. Dolan, Twelfth Night: Language and Writing (Bloomsbury, 2014)
John Drakakis (ed.), Alternative Shakespeares (Psychology Press, 2002), especially ‘Disrupting Sexual Difference: Meaning and Gender in the Comedies’ by Catherine Belsey
Bart van Es, Shakespeare’s Comedies: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2016)
Sonya Freeman Loftis, Mardy Philippian and Justin P. Shaw (eds.), Inclusive Shakespeares: Identity, Pedagogy, Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), especially ‘”I am all the daughters of my father’s house, and all the brothers too”: Genderfluid Potentiality in As You Like It and Twelfth Night’ by Eric Brinkman
Ezra Horbury, ‘Transgender Reassessments of the Cross-Dressed Page in Shakespeare, Philaster, and The Honest Man’s Fortune’ (Shakespeare Quarterly 73, 2022)
Jean Howard, ‘Crossdressing, the theatre, and gender struggle in early modern England’ (Shakespeare Quarterly 39, 1988)
Harry McCarthy, Boy Actors in Early Modern England: Skill and Stagecraft in the Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 2022)
Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare's England (Cambridge University Press, 1996)
William Shakespeare (eds. Michael Dobson and Molly Mahood), Twelfth Night (Penguin, 2005)
William Shakespeare (ed. Keir Elam), Twelfth Night (Arden Shakespeare, 2008)
Emma Smith, This is Shakespeare: How to Read the World's Greatest Playwright (Pelican, 2019)
Victoria Sparey, Shakespeare’s Adolescents: Age, Gender and the Body in Shakespearean Performance and Early Modern Culture (Manchester University Press, 2024)
With
Pascale Aebischer
Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Performance Studies at the University of Exeter
Michael Dobson
Professor of Shakespeare Studies and Director of the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham
And
Emma Smith
Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, University of Oxford
Produced by Simon Tillotson, Victoria Brignell and Luke Mulhall
Reading list:
C.L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedies: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (first published 1959; Princeton University Press, 2011)
Simone Chess, ‘Queer Residue: Boy Actors’ Adult Careers in Early Modern England’ (Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 19.4, 2020)
Callan Davies, What is a Playhouse? England at Play, 1520-1620 (Routledge, 2023)
Frances E. Dolan, Twelfth Night: Language and Writing (Bloomsbury, 2014)
John Drakakis (ed.), Alternative Shakespeares (Psychology Press, 2002), especially ‘Disrupting Sexual Difference: Meaning and Gender in the Comedies’ by Catherine Belsey
Bart van Es, Shakespeare’s Comedies: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2016)
Sonya Freeman Loftis, Mardy Philippian and Justin P. Shaw (eds.), Inclusive Shakespeares: Identity, Pedagogy, Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), especially ‘”I am all the daughters of my father’s house, and all the brothers too”: Genderfluid Potentiality in As You Like It and Twelfth Night’ by Eric Brinkman
Ezra Horbury, ‘Transgender Reassessments of the Cross-Dressed Page in Shakespeare, Philaster, and The Honest Man’s Fortune’ (Shakespeare Quarterly 73, 2022)
Jean Howard, ‘Crossdressing, the theatre, and gender struggle in early modern England’ (Shakespeare Quarterly 39, 1988)
Harry McCarthy, Boy Actors in Early Modern England: Skill and Stagecraft in the Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 2022)
Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare's England (Cambridge University Press, 1996)
William Shakespeare (eds. Michael Dobson and Molly Mahood), Twelfth Night (Penguin, 2005)
William Shakespeare (ed. Keir Elam), Twelfth Night (Arden Shakespeare, 2008)
Emma Smith, This is Shakespeare: How to Read the World's Greatest Playwright (Pelican, 2019)
Victoria Sparey, Shakespeare’s Adolescents: Age, Gender and the Body in Shakespearean Performance and Early Modern Culture (Manchester University Press, 2024)