By Nate Dolan
Though written over 400 years ago, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night continues to prove its relevance today with themes that include the refugee experience and gender identity, UC Irvine professor Julia Lupton argued at her recent talk When Life is a Shipwreck: Key Passages in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.
Julia Lupton is a professor of English at UC Irvine. She also co-directs the New Swan Shakespeare Center and is the author or co-author of five books on Shakespeare.
The English literature scholar was hosted by UC Santa Barbara’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Center (IHC) last month. Lupton cited the play’s prominent themes of transition, exile, and crisis, along with the role of dual identity in regards to queerness and the gender spectrum. She tied these Shakespearean themes to today’s identity politics and her own life.
“There are two areas that make the play relevant to modern audiences,” Lupton said, naming “exile, refuge, and hospitality” that derive from to the play’s initial shipwreck disaster. The second is the play’s exploration of gender identity. “All of the play’s romantic leads are gender outliers in some way,” Lupton said. “Their journey through different gender identities and forms of desire have stretched these character’s expressive capacities.”
Lupton is a professor of English at UC Irvine and the interim director of the UC Humanities Research Institute, as well as a five-time author on Shakespeare. She was introduced by Susan Derwin, the director of IHC.
Twelfth Night Characters, print, Thomas Rowlandson (Metropolitan Museum of Art).
Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night begins with a shipwreck, causing twins Viola and Sebastian to both believe the other is dead and start new lives. Lupton showed the shipwreck scene from Trevor Nunn’s 1996 film adaptation of the play, explaining that it can be seen as the birth of the twins, with the splitting of the ship symbolizing the opening of the womb.
Tying the play to the modern-day issues, Lupton presented political adaptations of Twelfth Night, including one production in Miami that featured the twins as Cuban refugees, and another in modern-day India, with the twins fleeing their home due to gunfire. On the prominence of gender exploration in the play she noted one of the female protagonists dresses up as a man in order to get a job working for the duke, and assumes the name Cesario. Comedic situations follow, but Lupton pointed out that Shakespeare’s experiments with gender ultimately confirmed convention.
“Although Twelfth Night is often praised for experimenting with gay, queer, and trans themes, everything is straightened out at the end,” Lupton said. The play’s finale wraps up with two heterosexual marriages, almost contradicting the experiments on gender identity.
She connected the ending of Twelfth Night to the 2020 miniseries We Are Who We Are, released on HBO. Although unrelated to Twelfth Night, the series parallels the play’s exploration of identity. With its shifting gender identities and evolving ideas of queerness, even the title of the series We Are Who We Are is “asking us to think beyond identities, and affirm experiment and contradiction,” Lupton said.
Julia Lupton was hosted by UCSB’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Center for a talk on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and its themes of transition, exile, and crisis, along with the role of dual identity in regards to queerness and the gender spectrum.
For Lupton, Twelfth Night is also relevant on a personal level. Not only is she an identical twin herself, but the mother of fraternal triplets — two of whom are nonbinary. “The play is very personal to me,” she said. “This play has helped me navigate their journeys, even when I'm not always a happy passenger.”
Nate Dolan is a third-year UCSB student majoring in Communication. He wrote the article for his Digital Journalism course.