ABSTRACT
Since the Velvet Revolution of 1989, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night has become one of the popular staples in Czech theatres, offering Czech audiences a variety of productions in venues ranging from student stages to outdoor festivals to the National Theatre. Among the multiple contemporary foci generated by recent Czech interpretations of the play, masculinity stands out as perhaps the most complex and yet unexamined site of convergence between the Renaissance text and the current socio-political context. In my analysis, I am interested in post-communist Czech interpretations of the discourse of masculinity this play emphasizes in the keen competition between various masculine models for prominence and partnership. I foreground the practices of staging Antonio and Sebastian, two characters who simultaneously exhibit the most traditional masculine traits and affection for each other, presenting contemporary directors with the challenge of representing a complex and socially acceptable Renaissance bond to a subtly and subversively homophobic audience likely to read the characters’ desires, if their speech is unedited, as evidence of emasculating homosexuality.
