Sebastian and Antonio's hidden queer lives

Photo by Sarah M. Lee

Will Tosh’s book Straight Acting: The Hidden Queer Lives of William Shakespeare moves beyond the question, “Was Shakespeare gay?” to explore how sex, intimacy, and identity were more complex—and more queer—in Elizabethan England than that question suggests. In this biography, he portrays Shakespeare as a queer artist who drew on his society’s nuanced understanding of gender and sexuality to create his extraordinary works.

The excerpt below comes from Chapter 2, “The Third University,” which explores Shakespeare’s life in London and his exposure to the queer classical canon. In it, Tosh uses lines from Twelfth Night to trace Shakespeare’s description of the relationship between Sebastian and the sea-captain Antonio, which Tosh describes as “the most overt depiction of a same-sex romantic couple that he would ever put in a play.” 

The third university—London itself—was Shakespeare’s prompt to remake himself as a worldly man-about-town, part of the homosocial swell of the big city among a bookish, ambitious crowd of playwrights and actors. Men involved in the commercial theatre industry had more reason than others to think of themselves as active participants in the process of classical rediscovery: James Burbage had reached for the ancient languages (Greek, theatron; Latin, theatrum) when naming his new purpose-build playhouse the Theatre in 1576. The wonky wood and plaster polygons that rose in the northern and southern suburbs, echoing the stately stone amphitheatres of the Roman Empire, were the Renaissance in real estate, an homage gratifyingly recognised by foreign observers: ‘its form resembles that of a Roman work,’ said a Dutch commentator of the Swan playhouse, built in 1595 at Paris Garden on the Bankside. Let’s allow ourselves the possibility that during his ‘lost years’ of youthful self-discovery Shakespeare also came to know something of the queer classical Renaissance, the storehouse of Latin and Greco-Roman literature that gave cultural expression to the feelings of same-sex desire ineffectually outlawed by Elizabethan society.

Shakespeare certainly understood the dynamics of a queer male relationship that went well beyond the tenets of amicitia perfecta, although it wasn’t until Twelfth Night (1602) that he wrote a queer couple in the classical mould, embedding in an already decidedly fluid story the most overt depiction of a same-sex romantic couple he would ever put in a play. The shipwrecked Viola transforms herself into the young man Cesario in order to serve Duke Orsino—who promptly falls in love with his new servant. Cesario is sent to woo Countess Olivia on Orsino’s behalf, and the lady is smitten with the young man too, unaware that she has fallen for a woman. Threaded through the comedy of queered misapprehension—Orsino desires Viola but believes she is a man; Olivia thinks she has feelings for a man who is actually Viola—is the story of Viola’s identical twin brother Sebastian, the plot device who will resolve the hetero-romantic confusion by supplying Olivia with a husband and freeing Viola to marry Orsino. But Sebastian is very much more than a deus ex machina fiancé for Olivia. He is also the adored younger lover of the sailor Antonio, a privateering enemy of Orsino. Teasing Sebastian and Antonio’s relationship from the convoluted plot of Twelfth Night allows us to see the classical building blocks Shakespeare used to construct his most fully-formed queer couple: a strong dose of Corydon’s yearning desperation in Antonio, plenty of Alcibiades’s irresistible beauty in Sebastian, and a resounding echo of the ancient world’s understanding of sexual relationships between older and younger men in the candour and intensity with which Antonio articulates his feelings for Sebastian. As the play unfolds in the Mediterranean setting of Plutarch’s Moralia and Lucian’s ‘The Loves’—Illyria (the Croatian coast), ‘Candy’ (Crete), and ‘Messaline’ (Marseilles), Viola and Sebastian’s hometown—we come to understand that the Antonio-Sebastian plot is a crucial third strand in the story, alongside the Viola-Orsino-Olivia triangle and the gulling of Olivia’s steward Malvolio. We can reconstruct the chronology of the men’s affair from the recollections dotted throughout the play, resuscitating the narrative of their meeting, falling in love, parting, reunion—and the final unresolved conflict between their queer love and the marriage Sebastian contracts with Olivia.

Sebastian and Antonio’s meet-cute is dramatic: the former clinging to a piece of flotsam, the latter happening to sail past in his ship. Antonio plucks the younger man from ‘the rude sea’s enraged and foamy mouth’ (5.1.78), a rescue he frames as a stunning encounter with almost sacred beauty:

[I] [r]elieved him with such sanctity of love;
And to his image, which methought did promise
Most venerable worth, did I devotion. (3.4.361-63)

Antonio’s instant adoration puts him in the same category as Olivia and Orsino: he is a victim of the preternatural erotic power wielded by the Messaline twins. Viola and Sebastian have the capacity to strike onlookers with immediate and lasting love. Olivia is likewise smitten after only a few minutes’ interaction with Viola: ‘How now? / Even so quickly may one catch the plague?’ (2.1.294-95) she marvels. For Antonio, Sebastian’s bewitching looks shine out as the boy battles to stay afloat in the choppy waters of the Adriatic Sea.

It’s quickly made apparent that whatever religiose sentiments Antonio might utter when speaking of Sebastian, the feelings he is describing are just as carnal as those produced by Viola in Olivia and Orsino. Following his deliverance from the shipwreck, Sebastian lives with Antonio for nearly three months, hiding his elite status and his name. He goes by ‘Roderigo’ and spends all his time—‘No interim, not a minute’s vacancy, / Both day and night’ (5.1.95-96)—with his rescuer, who soon harbours for him a rampaging love ‘without retention or restraint’ (5.1.81). And no mystery: informed by descriptions of Viola, Sebastian’s precise clone, we know that the young man possesses a spectacularly epicene appeal, all smoothly ‘rubious’ lips and youthful effeminacy that is thrillingly ‘semblative a woman’s part’ (1.4.32, 34). Sebastian’s beauty sinks deeply into Antonio, nourishing his conviction that the youth possesses a soul as rare as his appearance.

Antonio’s absolute devotion explains the actions that bring him to Illyria. Sebastian’s foreboding soul prompts him to shed his identity as ‘Roderigo’, leave Antonio and head for Orsino’s court. Antonio is shattered, not just by the loss but by the revelation of Sebastian’s aristocratic heritage, which places the equality of their relationship in jeopardy: given such disparity, Antonio bleakly re-interprets their months together as the ‘bad entertainment’ (2.1.33) offered by a social inferior to a superior. Both men are unmoored by the recalibration of their relationship:

ANTONIO. If you will not murder me for my love, let me be your servant.
SEBASTIAN. If you will not undo what you have done – that is, kill him whom you have recovered – desire it not. (2.1.35-39)

For Antonio, losing Sebastian is fatal and the blow to his status that comes with service is a price worth paying for continued proximity to his lover. Sebastian in turn claims that the abjection Antonio would feel in waiting on him will lead to his own death, a fear that forces his departure, almost in tears as he takes his leave.

Sebastian’s independence doesn’t last long. Antonio considers the danger he faces in Orsino’s territory, after a career preying on Illyrian shipping, and resolves to follow Sebastian regardless: ‘I do adore thee so / That danger shall seem sport, and I will go!’ (2.1.47-48). Sebastian offers the most token of resistance when they meet up again but Antonio’s invocation of the ‘desire, / More sharp than filed steel’ (3.3.4-5) that spurred him on erases the awkwardness of reunion. And any irregularities in their relationship are solved in the relocation to Illyria: Antonio now takes the role of cossetting older lover, protecting the naïve and ‘skill-less’ (3.3.9) Sebastian from the hazards of travel: he recommends an inn, promises to arrange their meals, advises on sightseeing and presses on Sebastian some money in case his ‘eye shall light upon some toy’ (44-45) he wishes to buy. Such servant-like activity as facilitating bed and board is drained of shameful servility for Antonio by the fact that it is he who provides both physical and financial protection for Sebastian. Amid all this lovers’ domesticity, the sexual puns in this scene pass almost un-noticed: ‘There shall you have me’ (42), Antonio promises Sebastian when they arrange to meet at a nearby tavern; ‘I’ll be your purse-bearer’ (47) says Sebastian as he takes Antonio’s money – ‘purse’ being slang for scrotum.

It’s from this position of contented intimacy that things unravel for Antonio. The consequences of two identical, seemingly male, Messaline twins abroad in Illyria begin to blossom out of control. Antonio is arrested while protecting the disguised Viola—whom he takes for Sebastian—from assault by Andrew Aguecheek. Antonio is astonished when ‘Sebastian’ does not immediately return his money for prison expenses, and suffers an agonising sense of betrayal that his lover has spurned him. The real Sebastian also finds himself threatened with violence by Aguecheek and Sir Toby Belch, but he is saved by Olivia who —thinking him Cesario, Viola’s male alter ego—bundles him into her house as fast as she can. Sebastian, misty with confusion but willing be to ‘ruled’ (4.1.64) by the assertive Olivia, complies, as he does shortly afterwards when Olivia proposes marriage. Somewhat adrift without Antonio—‘His counsel now might do me golden service’ (4.3.8)—Sebastian nonetheless goes with the flow of ‘this accident and flood of fortune’ (4.3.11). His new wife is, after all, a fabulously wealthy countess.

Antonio must go through one more painful confrontation with Viola, the un-Sebastian who has unwittingly broken his heart. Brought into the throng of Act 5 and presented to Orsino and Viola as the ‘notable pirate’ (5.1.69) responsible for attacks on richly-loaded vessels, Antonio justifies his foolhardy visit to Illyria as a result of ‘witchcraft,’ the irresistible love he felt towards the ‘ingrateful boy’ (76-77) by Orsino’s side. The only interpretation Antonio can place on this ‘Sebastian’s’ bafflingly cruel rejection of him is that the boy sought to evade his own imprisonment through ‘false cunning’ (86) by denying all knowledge of the man to whom he owed his life.

Antonio’s sanity seems in danger of slipping entirely off its axis when Orsino reveals that for ‘[t]hree months this youth hath tended upon me’ (99), calling into question the reality of everything that has passed between Sebastian and him. His salvation comes with the real Sebastian’s entry, bringing on stage both Messaline twins for the first time in the play and striking Orsino, Olivia and Antonio—the twins’ three lovers—with amazement. Although Antonio learns of Sebastian’s marriage with Olivia, his loss is partly remedied by the fact that he receives in Sebastian’s greeting some of the most passionate language of all the various unions and reunions that make up Act 5:

Antonio! O my dear Antonio!
How have the hours racked and tortured me
Since I have lost thee! (5.1.218-20)

We leave Antonio in much the same position of open-ended intimacy that characterises the other Antonio’s situation at the end of The Merchant of Venice: a spouse-without-portfolio, or floating lover, within a conventional heteroerotic marriage between a wealthy heiress and a somewhat useless charmer. Antonio’s ambiguous resolution is captured in his final words, delivered fresh from the shock of the twins’ identicality: ‘Which is Sebastian?’ (224). He means, of course, ‘how can one tell the two siblings apart?’ But is there also a lingering question of which way his Sebastian will swing—lover, friend or husband, or all three? Amid the deferred conclusions at the end of Twelfth Night—Viola and Orsino’s marriage must wait until she has retained her women’s clothes, the wronged and vengeful Malvolio must be placated – the question of what to do with Antonio’s powerfully affectionate and erotic feelings for Sebastian is left hanging.