How Does Shakespeare Use Gender In Twelfth Night

On the Twelfth Day of Christmas your true love tells you that they are actually a girl pretending to be a boy! That is not exactly how the song goes, but Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare explores this very current concept. Shakespeare's early plays were written in the conventional style of the day, with elaborate metaphors and rhetorical phrases that did not always align naturally with the story's plot or characters. However, William Shakespeare was very innovative, adapting this traditional style to his own purposes, capturing a complete range of human emotion and conflict. Shakespeare primarily used a specific pattern consisting of lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter, or blank verse, to compose his plays. At the same time, there are passages in all the plays that deviate from this and use forms of poetry or simple prose.
A man plays a woman as a man and that is the major reason that there is a conflict in the story. Shakespeare blurs gender lines, love and creates convoluted relationships. The assumption of gender roles and the way different genders are viewed in a societal norm shape the way we live and interact in our everyday lives (Dodd). Society has stamped an image into the minds of people of how the role of each gender should be played out. There are two recognized types of gender: a man and a women, but Shakespeare blurs the lines in comedic ways throughout the play Twelfth Night to convey and explore the limitations of women in Elizabethan