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Within John Milton’s Paradise Lost and William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, themes of gender and sexuality can be ascribed into three discrete categories, the masculine, the feminine, and the androgynous, rather than just two presupposed binaries. Two gendered hierarchies become clear within the texts: Milton’s later assertion of a highly defined and explicit gender dynamic that holds beyond contemporary belief into divine ontological status, and Shakespeare’s earlier version, which offers more social fluidity as a result of gender ambiguity created by his metatheatrical convolution of gender dynamics onstage. Both views promote the steadfast notion of women’s innate inferiority, ideals of male hegemony, and the human rejection of the androgynous, the unified intersection between such classifications which transgresses prerequisites and definitions. Throughout both narratives, intrinsically non-conforming individuals are ‘othered’ by heterosexuality, whilst gender norms are weaponised and wielded as oppressive instruments of control against characters, corralling them towards period-prescribed notions of identity. As we begin to dissect the nature of outlying characters - such as Sin and Satan in Paradise Lost and Viola’s assumed identity as Cesario - in relation to these notions, we begin to further complicate the notions of gender and sexuality as set out in texts from the Renaissance and Restoration periods.
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