Speaking in Many Sorts of Music: Traveling Singers as Agents of Embassy in Shakespeare’s <i>Twelfth Night</i>

Viola’s adopted persona “Cesario” has posed problems for generations of Shakespeare’s readers. While at first she plans to present herself at Orsino’s court as a castrato singer, in later scenes, she acts primarily as her patron’s servant and messenger, and she never performs a song onstage. This essay reevaluates the problem of Viola’s occupation with reference to recent scholarship tracing the role of early modern singers and musicians as agents, emissaries, and intelligencers. Professional vocalists were a distinctively mobile class of entertainer who frequently developed wide-ranging transnational networks of contacts and at times participated in informal diplomacy. Viola’s singing abilities carried a social currency in the realm of early modern court culture that contributes to her advancement in Orsino’s service and her appointment as her patron’s emissary. I read Viola as a “cultural broker” who strategically employs musical knowledge to negotiate new forms of social, professional, as well as transnational mobility. [E.G.]