As Barber notes, ‘holiday for the Elizabethan sensibility implied a contrast with “everyday” … the release of that one day was understood to be a temporary licence, a misrule which implied rule’ (Barber, p.10). Thus, while Twelfth Night creates a space for the discussion of sex and gender, the patriarchal and heterosexual institution of marriage ensures that all misrule is, on paper, banished from Illyria by the time the curtain closes, offering no opportunity for a continuation of the carnivalesque.

Simone de Beauvoir famously stated that, ‘one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’, an argument fitting to Twelfth Night which, on a ‘transvestite stage’, implies that the differences between men and women are socially enforced and culturally inscribed. The ascribing of gender to material items, in particular clothing, led Smith to argue that, ‘clothing is fetishized from start to finish: it is invested with transformative powers’ (Smith in Stanivukovic, p.32). As soon as Viola dresses up as a man, she assumes the trappings and costume of that role in society and is given access to ‘the book even of my [Orsino’s] secret soul’ (1.4.14). This inclusion of Viola’s in amity, the highest form of friendship between men, is an implicit challenge to Montaigne’s argument that women were incapable of forming such intense friendships, and gives credence to the larger argument that differences between the two sexes are to do with the cultural psyche rather than the fundamental biological makeup. Given that traditional Elizabethan casts were comprised of solely men, they relied on the audience’s sufficient immersion in cultural conventions to accept gesture, makeup and crucially attire as indicators of gender. This ‘transvestite stage’ breaks the Brechtian fourth wall and Butler argues that ‘drag fully subverts the distinction between inner and outer psychic space and effectively mocks both the expressive model of gender and the notion of a true gender identity’ (Butler, p.2385). Having the character of Viola be played by a male actor who adopts the traditional male costume for the majority of the play despite fundamentally playing a female character is a double inversion. His outside appearance is masculine, but his character is feminine, however this can be reversed, in the fact that he is playing a female character on the outside, yet he is, fundamentally, male. Thus, this interplay between what is happening in relation to character, but also of the body of the performer, naturally leads one to view gender as a culturally constructed performance rather than a natural and essential repertoire of traits associated with anatomical sex. Mark Rylance, speaking as both artistic director and as the actor playing Olivia, insisted that having an all-male cast for the Globe’s