interactions between Viola and Olivia, but ultimately Rubin writes that ‘the suppression of the homosexual component of human sexuality, and by corollary, the oppression of homosexuals…is a product of the same system whose rules and relations oppress women’ (Rubin in Butler, p.2281). Female love is treated as comedic whereas male love is cut off entirely by the play. Olivia’s position as the head of an aristocratic household with the agency to turn down a powerful male suitor poses a threat to the patriarchal structures of Elizabethan society and she is therefore ridiculed by being made to fall in love with the cross-dressing Viola. As Howard argues, ‘the good woman, Viola, thus becomes the vehicle for humiliating the unruly woman in the eyes of the audience’ with the patriarchy using women as puppets to bring each other down without implicating their male superiors (Howard in Orgel, p.27). While some may argue that Olivia’s marriage to Sebastian at the end of the play ensures that she is subjected to the male rule, the end of Twelfth Night still results in resolution for Olivia, unlike Antonio who remains displaced. The messy layering of Orsino, Viola and Olivia’s desires are rectified by the heterosexual institution of marriage. Traub notes that their homoerotic energies are ‘displaced onto Antonio, whose relation to Sebastian is finally scarified for the maintenance of institutionalised heterosexuality and generational continuity’ (Traub in Orgel, p.28). While Antonio makes no overt and explicit declaration of romantic love towards Sebastian, subtle mechanisms of speech give his feelings away. Antonio expresses his adoration for Sebastian in verse, the syntax commonly used to express romantic love,

That his speech shifts from blocks of prose to iambic pentameter here, coupled with the rhyming couplet of ‘so’ and ‘go’, echoes the sonnet structure. As a corollary, to further drive home the existence of Antonio’s romantic feelings, Olivia’s switch from prose to verse in the scene that immediately precedes this, mirrors her falling in love with Viola/Cesario. Having thus insinuated his homosexuality, Antonio is subtly ostracised at the end of the play, forced to watch Sebastian marry Olivia, with Shakespeare offering no hope of a romantic partner for him. Antonio’s exclusion at the end of the play reminds the audience that not all configurations of masculinity can fit the mould of Byron’s canonical statement that all tragedies are concluded with a death, and all comedies by a marriage. Antonio’s melancholy and homoerotic masculinity highlights the complexity of desire and relations that the play consciously interrogates, but society ultimately silences.