Glimpsing a "Lesbian Poetics" in Twelfth Night

This essay argues that the interview scene between Olivia and the disguised Viola in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (I.v) offers an often overlooked opportunity to witness the dynamics by which a language of female-female desire emerges from the materials of conventional heteroerotic discourses. Viola's successful wooing of Olivia in this scene allows us a glimpse of tentative "lesbian" poetics as one female character imagines and articulates the words that will seduce another and inspire her to erotic action.