Drama

Psychologist Niobe Way’s work on friendships between boys figures prominently in the episode, which itself connects loneliness among American men with norms of masculinity. As Way’s 2011 book, Deep Secrets: Boy’s Friendships and the Crisis of Connection [Harvard UP], notes,

When male friendships are discussed in scholarly or popular literature, they are often relegated to the superficial category of “buddies” and described as “loose collections that offer very little sharing or emotional support.” Male friends are framed as back-slapping pals more interested in playing, competing, and boasting about various types of conquests than in talking together or sharing the details of their inner lives. These relationships are, in essence, defined by their simplicity rather than by their complexity, emotional nuance, and depth. In our twenty- first-century American culture, in which vulnerable emotions and same-sex intimacy are perceived as girlish and gay, heterosexual boys are described as uninterested in having intimate male friendships, and the stereotype that boys are “only interested in one thing” is perpetuated. (3-4)

Your task is straightforward: show, based on the evidence in the play you choose, how what is true for contemporary American men was also true for either Edwardian or early modern English men, too. Pick either Higgins and Pickering or Orsino and Antonio and respond to the following: How do the characters composing either pair signal their desire or need for intimate same-sex friendships? None of them says, "I need close, emotionally fulfilling male friendships," so how do they achieve some approximation of that type of relationship with another male character? What heteronormative imperatives (i.e., insistence on male-female relationships) do we find in the characters' play? What form does the play allow those homosocial (i.e., same-sex, though not necessarily homoerotic*) relationships to take? Conclude by returning to contemporary American society to provide some insight into how these two plays contribute to the way our culture currently discourages close same-sex friendships for men. It'd be even better, once you've done that, to continue on by considering briefly how future study and performance of these plays might help rememdy what appear to be unhealthy gender norms. (That last bit is always a good move a paper. Pointing to solutions is better than simply pointing out problems. But it's okay if your paper doesn't go quite that far.) Your essays, which are to follow MLA format.

*Homosocial = Same-sex relationship

Homoerotic = Same-sex relationship + sexual desire

Texts to use: Twelfth Night by Shakespeare, Pygmalion by George Shaw