Bending Gender Through Repartee in The Twelfth Night .
"The Twelfth Night" is an example of how a play can function both as theatrical performance, and as literature. The Twelfth Night is a play based on gender impersonation and openly mocks the assumptions about feminine and masculine behaviour or expectation. This paper focuses on Viola, and Olivia, as they are so clearly designed to complement and contradict (even through the names, which are different arrangements of the same letters.) As Viola impersonates the young man with whom Olivia has fallen in love, the differences in how Viola manages to speak as a man are as varied as Olivia's relations for speaking as a woman in relation to men. 7 pgs. 5 f/c. 1b.