A comparable kind of dramatic irony is produced by Shakespeare’s use of disguise in comedy – particularly the disguising of women as young men. In As You Like It there is a delicious comedy in Orlando’s enacted wooing of Rosalind, who prompts him in the guise of a young man to whom he can speak without reticence. In Twelfth Night, Olivia who, mourning her brother’s death, has sworn to be ‘a cloistress’  and keep herself a veiled recluse for seven years, finds herself smitten by Cesario, a young man sent with messages from Duke Orsino. Cesario is, of course, the disguised Viola, and the comedy of Olivia’s mistakenly amorous responses to him/her is all the funnier because it corrects Olivia’s self-denying and impossible mournfulness. As ever in Shakespeare’s comedies, it takes mistakes to teach characters the truths of their own hearts. Olivia bumps into Viola’s twin brother, Sebastien, and proposes marriage to him. He is hilariously puzzled but compliant; it is as if he knows that he is in a comedy, where accident and error will mysteriously produce happy consequences. The apparent restraint placed upon a playwright of Shakespeare’s day – all women must be played by young male actors – becomes a kind of artistic freedom, enabling the characters to switch their sexual identities.