References in this discussion are to the Penguin edition of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, edited by M. M. Mahood and introduced by Michael Dobson (1982).
TWELFTH NIGHT: COMPOSITION
Harley Granville Barker, a leading twentieth-century theatre producer and writer, refers to Twelfth Night as “the last play of Shakespeare’s golden age,” which he probably wrote in late 1601 or early 1602. Shakespeare was then thirty-seven and at the height of his popularity as a playwright. Twelfth Night is often regarded as the culmination of his comic writing for the stage. It followed a series of comic “hits,” made up of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595), The Merchant of Venice (1596), the Falstaff scenes in Henry IV (1596-1598), Much Ado about Nothing (1598), and As You Like It (1599-1600).
For Twelfth Night Shakespeare drew on Barnaby Riche’s prose romance, Apolonius and Silla, in Riche His Farewell to Militarie Profession (1581); on three sixteenth-century Italian comedies entitled Gl’Ingannati and Gl’Inganni (“The Deceived”); and/or on on French adaptations of these. His ultimate source was the Menaechmi, a farce about identical twins by the Roman playwright Plautus, a work which he had adapted once before in The Comedy of Errors (1594).
The script survives as one of eighteen plays not published in Shakespeare’s lifetime but included seven years after his death in the collected edition known as the First Folio (1623). You can view a facsimile of the Twelfth Night title page in the First Folio at https://www.folger.edu/twelfth-night [left]; or at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Twelfth_Night_F1.jpg
A FUNNY PLAY
I first studied Twelfth Night in high school, at a time of life when I dreamed deliciously over the romance and collapsed into helpless giggles at the comedy. Though so many years have passed since then, I know that I still haven’t penetrated the play’s depths of meaning. However, perhaps in the hope of understanding, I’ve always treasured the Oxford student edition (1959) that we used as teenagers. The editor, George H. Cowling, explains Twelfth Night’s unique appeal:
[Shakespeare] did not merely scoff at folly: he wisely knew that mankind is imperfect, and that people, even the wisest of men, are not entirely creatures of reason….He found men a little less than angelic, but was content to have them so. And so he laughed at affectation and egoism, not merely with the rational intellectuality of the satirist, but with delight, because human nature is what it is.
Shakespeare was never more romantic, more comic, more wise, than in Twelfth Night. Each of Shakespeare’s comedies has its own beauties; but for wit and humour (and surely it is the function of a comedy to be comic) this in my opinion is the best of them all. (pp. 19-20)
Forty years later, Harold Bloom recorded a similar response:
Despite my personal preference for As You Like It, which is founded upon my passion for Rosalind, I would have to admit that Twelfth Night is surely the greatest of all Shakespeare’s pure comedies….I think the play is much Shakespeare’s funniest. (Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. London: Fourth Estate, 1999: 226; 228)
Bloom further contrasts the directness of Twelfth Night with Shakespeare’s problem comedies such as Measure for Measure (1603), and late romances such as The Winter’s Tale (1609) and The Tempest (1611).
STUDY EXERCISE ONE: THE SETTING OF TWELFTH NIGHT
Michael Dobson describes Illyria as “this self-indulgent lover’s territory” (Introduction xxii). He points out: “we find ourselves in Illyria at the outset, and we stay there…the world beyond comes to us as nothing more substantial than a succession of rumours” (xxiii); and that for both Viola and Sebastian “getting washed up on Illyria may turn out to be rather like dying and going to heaven” (xxiv). “Illyria is a sunlit never-never land of love and poetry, outside the ordinary historical time in which we mere mortals are trapped” (xxiv). However, “the choice of Illyria as a setting places love and escapism alongside danger and death” (xxvi).
How far do you agree with the various parts of Dobson’s account of Illyria?
Which features (if any) of the account seem inappropriate to you?
In your view, what further features of Illyria (if any) are worthy of attention?
The first documented performance of Twelfth Night took place on 2 February 1602, at Candlemas, the Church’s feast celebrating the baby Jesus’ Presentation in the Temple. Shakespeare’s company, the Chamberlain’s Men, performed before an audience of law students and lawyers in the Middle Temple Hall, one of the Inns of Court (law colleges) in central London. John Manningham, a barrister, noted in his diary his pleasure at the gulling of Malvolio.
The title, “Twelfth Night,” nevertheless refers not to Candlemas but to the Feast of the Epiphany, which always falls twelve days after Christmas and commemorates the Wise Men’s “epiphany,” or sight of the Christ Child.
EARLY PERFORMANCES
In The First Night of Twelfth Night (London, 1954), Leslie Hotson argued contentiously that the play’s first performance in fact took place at the royal court’s Epiphany celebration, on January 6, 1601, when Don Virginio Orsino, Duke of Bracchiano, who visited Elizabeth’s court in 1600-1601, was in the audience. Despite these associations with the Church calendar, Twelfth Night is not a religious play, unless you consider optimism and joy to be religious feelings.
Shakespeare seems to have designed Twelfth Night for transport between professional staging at the Globe Theatre, which was the home of the Chamberlain’s Men from 1599, and amateur venues like colleges and great halls. In contrast with many of Shakespeare’s plays, performance does not require an upper stage. The two upstage entrances in the public theatre or a great hall could stand for Orsino’s and Olivia’s houses, while a central inner stage or an onstage tent might be Malvolio’s prison. A few judicious words at the beginning of scenes and elsewhere transmute the central playing area—the apron stage in the public theatre—from the sea coast of Illyria, to either of the noble households, to the route between them, to a city street. This fluidity of locale encourages speedy scene changes and a fast-flowing, lively presentation. (See further, Michael Dobson’s discussion of “The Play in Performance,” Penguin Edition, lxiii-lxx.)
GENRE
A. Festive Comedy
In Christian Europe, Christmas and the Feast of the Epiphany are winter solstice festivals corresponding with the ancient Roman festival of the Saturnalia, “a period of general festivity, licence for slaves, giving of presents, and lighting of candles” (OCCL). The Saturnalia takes its name from the Italian agricultural deity, Saturn (Greek Chronos). It originally celebrated the sowing of crops in preparation for spring. Both the pagan and the Christian festivals celebrate the turning of the earth away from winter, toward the light and warmth of the sun.
In Shakespeare’s England Christmas revelry reached a peak on Twelfth Night, which was the last day of the holidays. Activities included feasting, drinking, games, joking, riddles, music, dancing, the singing of catches and rounds, and, as in the Saturnalia and the preceding medieval Feast of Fools, a reversal of roles between servants and masters. The term, “Twelfth Night,” does not occur in Shakespeare’s text, but What You Will, the subtitle in the First Folio, captures the spirit of the Saturnalia and its Christian successors: “The sanguine Will [Shakespeare] gives us What You Will” (Bloom 229). In 1958 L. G. Salingar wrote in fact that “the thematic key” to Twelfth Night was its “imitation of a feast of misrule, when normal restraints and relationships were overthrown”:
The subplot shows a prolonged season of misrule, or ‘uncivil rule,’ in Olivia’s household, with Sir Toby turning night into day; there are drinking, dancing, and singing, scenes of mock wooing, a mock sword fight, and the gulling of an unpopular member of the household, with Feste mumming it as a priest and attempting a mock exorcism in the manner of the Feast of Fools…Moreover this saturnalian spirit invades the whole play. In the main plot, sister is mistaken for brother and brother for sister…. (“The Design of Twelfth Night.” Shakespeare Quarterly 9 (1958): 118 (117-139)
L. Barber’s Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (Princeton, 1959), described by Michael Dobson in the introduction to the current Penguin edition as “possibly the most influential book on Shakespearian comedy of the last half century” (lxxii), expounded Salingar’s insight from an anthropological perspective: “[Twelfth Night],” Barber wrote, “is filled with the zany spirit of twelfth night.”
STUDY EXERCISE TWO: THE FESTIVE ORIGINS OF TWELFTH NIGHT
Investigate Salingar’s reference to “a mock exorcism in the manner of the Feast of Fools.” (See M. M. Mahood’s Introduction to the earlier Penguin edition of Twelfth Night p. 14. For an exhaustive account of the Feast of Fools, see E. K. Chambers, The Medieval Stage. Vol. I, Chapters XIII, XIV and XV. London, 1903, often reprinted).
Where does the exorcism occur in Twelfth Night? Who is the exorcist, and who or what does he cast out?
Find examples of drinking, feasting, music, dancing, singing, riddling, joking, and mumming (play-acting, usually involving masks or disguises) in your text of Twelfth Night.
How do these features affect the comedy’s overall mood?
B. Gentle Melancholy
On the other hand, mainly through Feste, whose songs delight both his on-stage and off-stage audiences, Twelfth Night oversees the disorderly fun and “misrule” from a sweetly melancholic perspective which reminds us of the fleeting quality of youthful love and joy. This context makes the comedy’s music and dancing, feasting and romance, gender-bending and reversals of hierarchy seem all the more precious by contrast. For Shakespeare’s early audiences, twelfth night was not only the most boisterous day of the holidays—it was also the last. The play’s ending accordingly captures a feeling of the carnival being over. Tomorrow the workaday world of toil and domination, of marriage and responsibility, of sadness, old age and death, will re-constitute itself. Lovers and merry-makers alike will return to their economically and socially determined places and functions—“For the rain it raineth every day.”
C. Satire
The hidden heart of Twelfth Night lies in Shakespeare’s seriocomic rivalry with Ben Jonson, whose comedy of humours is being satirised throughout….Shakespeare generally mocks these mechanical operations of the spirit, his larger invention of the human scorns this reductiveness. (Bloom 228)
Bloom compares the theory of the humours to popular psychology today. The humours were certainly a fashionable interest in the period when Shakespeare was writing Twelfth Night. In fact Shakespeare himself is listed as “a principal comedian” for the first performance, by the Chamberlain’s Men in 1598, of Ben Jonson’s popular play, Every Man in His Humour:
Medieval medicine associated physical and mental dispositions with the preponderance of certain humours in the body: blood (hot and moist), phlegm (cold and moist), yellow bile (hot and dry) and black bile (cold and dry) should blend equally in the body. Imbalance led to various kinds of distempers. The theory became more and more complex, and the most elaborate account is to be found in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (first published 1621), by which time, however, medicine had begun to discountenance the theory.
(Martin Seymour-Smith, ed. Ben Jonson. Every Man in His Humour. London: Ernest Benn, 1966; Introduction xviii.)
In the Induction to the sequel, Every Man out of His Humour (1600), Jonson poeticised the disordering effects on the psyche of the fluid properties of the four humours:
So in every human body
The choler, melancholy, phlegm, and blood,
By reason that they flow continually
In some one part, and are not continent,
Receive the name of Humours. Now thus far
It may apply itself unto the general disposition:
As when some one peculiar quality
Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw
All his affects, his spirits, and his powers,
In their confluctions, all to run one way,
This may be truly said to be a humour.
This notion of psychological excess, sometimes to the point of obsession, is applicable to most of the characters in Twelfth Night.
D. A Problem Play?
Twelfth Night is hardly a “problem play,” but issues of cruelty and violence surface towards the end and invite discussion:
- How will an audience respond to the gulling and imprisonment of Malvolio? Is this comedy or torture?
- How will an audience respond to Antonio’s arrest and threatened execution? See Dobson’s comment on the hidden violence of Illyria, Study Exercise Two, above.
- How will an audience respond to Orsino’s threat to kill Cesario-Viola as Olivia’s successful lover; and his/her consent to death: “And I, most jocund, apt and willingly/ To do you rest, a thousand deaths would die.” (Act 5, Scene 1, lines 120-31).
Bloom comments: “Orsino, not previously high in the audience’s esteem, is a criminal madman if he means this, and Viola is a masochistic ninny if she is serious….Wild with laughter, Twelfth Night is nevertheless almost always on the edge of violence” (234);
STRUCTURE OF TWELFTH NIGHT
The play’s action consists of changes and reversals that discourage analysis and demand that the audience fly with the unexpected. In the lunatic, lyrical world of Illyria, citizens and visitors alike are driven by the festive spirit, disorderly loves and hates, and zany eccentricities. The unlikely plot is part of the play’s appeal: the complicated events go against all the odds, fulfilling at all costs the audience’s wish for a happy ending. The comic resolution of Twelfth Night reminds us to have faith in good fortune and life’s possibilities.
There are some signs of the third-act climax typical of Shakespeare’s plays. However, action really consists simply of accelerating confusions and comic contretemps that build to a climax halfway through Act 5, when they are quickly resolved.
ACT 1:
Introduces most of the main and subplot characters; places Viola, disguised as Cesario, in Orsino’s court, and culminates when Olivia falls in love with Cesario.
ACT 2:
Introduces Antonio and Sebastian to the main plot and Fabian to the sub-plot; the action advances love confusions in the main plot and the gullings of Malvolio and Sir Andrew in the subplot.
ACT 3:
Momentum builds as gullings and confusions come to a climax: Malvolio’s cross-gartered yellow stockings and odd behaviour convince Olivia that he is mad; Sir Andrew and Cesario/Viola are on the point of a comic duel, when Antonio intervenes in defence of his friend, “Sebastian.” The Act ends with Antonio’s arrest; Sir Andrew sets out to look for and beat the “treacherous” Cesario.
ACT 4:
Instead, he comes upon Sebastian who belabours him with his own dagger hilt (confusion further confounded!). Sir Toby and Sebastian draw their swords, but Olivia berates her kinsman and dotes on the supposed Cesario; Feste (Sir Topas the curate) exorcises the fiend possessing the imprisoned Malvolio. Courted by Olivia, Sebastian meanwhile decides that he must be dreaming, or that he must be mad, or that Olivia is. The Act nevertheless ends with Sebastian and Olivia’s wedding.
Act 5:
Orsino and his company visit Olivia; the two noble households and all the sub-plot and main plot characters come together. Confusion builds yet further when Antonio, under arrest, accuses Cesario of treachery; when Olivia proves by the priest’s testimony that Cesario has married her; and when the battered Sir Andrew and Sir Toby accuse Cesario of beating them. Sebastian’s entrance stuns the company and begins the unravelling. Reconciliation reigns: brother and sister recognise each other in mutual love; Orsino rewards Cesario’s love by promising to marry him/her; Olivia claims Viola as a sister. Malvolio’s angry entrance exposing the plot against him, temporarily upsets the general rejoicing.
MAJOR CHARACTERS
When the wretched Malvolio is confined in the dark room for the insane, he ought to be joined there by Orsino, Olivia, Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Maria, Sebastian, Antonio, and even Viola, for the whole ninefold are at least borderline insane in their behaviour. (Bloom 226)
The comparatively featureless structure of Twelfth Night arises from the fact that the characters are driven by impulse and external events rather than by reasoning or long-term goals; they are lively, and embroiled in life.
Orsino
Orsino’s amiable erotic lunacy establishes the tone of Twelfth Night. (Bloom 230)
Orsino, far more in love with language, music, love and himself than he is with Olivia, or will be with Viola, tells himself (and us) that love is too hungry ever to be satisfied with any person whatsoever. (Bloom 229-230)
Critics have repeated the view fifty times that Orsino is more in love with love than with Olivia (J.M. Lothian and T.W. Craik, eds. Twelfth Night. Arden Shakespeare. London, Methuen, 1975: lii). A troubling egoism in fact powers Orsino’s love for Olivia, for example in his fantasy of rule and exclusive possession:
How will she love, when the rich golden shaft
Hath killed the flock of all affections else
That live in her; when liver, brain and heart,
These sovereign thrones, are all supplied and filled—
Her sweet perfections—with one self king!
(Act 1, Scene 1, lines 36-40)
This and other speeches of Orsino’s embody Shakespeare’s disillusioned understanding of sexual passion from the male perspective.
STUDY EXERCISE THREE: ORSINO
Orsino: There is no woman’s sides
Can bide the beating of so strong a passion
As love doth give my heart; no woman’s heart
So big to hold so much, they lack retention.
Alas, their love may be called appetite,
No motion of the liver, but the palate,
That suffer surfeit, cloyment, and revolt.
But mine is all as hungry as the sea,
And can digest as much. Make no compare
Between that love a woman can bear me
And that I owe Olivia. (Act 2, Scene 4, lines 94-104)
Bloom: “Here Orsino touches the sublime of male fatuity.” Comment.
Analyse the metre of this passage: how often does the stress fall on such words as “woman,” “my,” “mine,” “me,” and “I.” What effect does this metrical pattern have on Orsino’s characterisation at this point?
How do metaphors of feeding and the sea reinforce the contrast that Orsino makes between his and woman’s love?
Commentators on Twelfth Night have theorised what Bloom calls Orsino’s “amiable erotic lunacy” in other ways.
One of Orsino’s characteristics is extreme inconstancy of mind. In the opening scene he at first craves the music; quickly rejects it; and finally wanders off to indulge unhappy thoughts in a “canopy of flowers.” Later the down-to-earth Feste applies metaphors of fabric, gemstone, and voyaging to Orsino’s changeableness:
Now the melancholy god protect thee, and the tailor make thy doublet of changeable taffeta, for thy mind is a very opal. I would have men of such constancy put to sea, that their business might be everything, and their intent everywhere; for that’s it that makes a good voyage of nothing. Farewell. (Act 2, Scene 4, lines 72-77)
This analysis sums up the aimlessness of Orsino’s “fancy.” It can be further defined in relation to the theory of humours, which we have seen is probably one of Shakespeare’s comic targets in Twelfth Night. Dover Wilson in fact diagnoses Orsino’s changeableness as matching the symptoms of lover’s melancholy, as described in Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (Shakespeare’s Happy Comedies. London: Faber, 1962: 170).
Yet another way of understanding Orsino’s subjection to the “high fantastical” is in terms of a mask. According to Joseph H. Summers, Orsino is like other characters in Twelfth Night in that he has comically mistaken a mask that he has voluntarily put on as his true self: he has accepted the aristocratic and literary ideal of courtly or romantic lover as reality. (“The Masks of Twelfth Night,” in Twentieth Century Interpretations of Twelfth Night, ed. Walter N. King, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1968: 16).
On the other hand, these insights into the purely comical or satiric Orsino should not be taken too far. After all, Twelfth Night is appealing largely because it affirms the joy of erotic love. The characterisation of Orsino must therefore combine love’s silliness with love’s reality; somehow he must be maintained as a worthy love object for Viola. Shakespeare achieves this in part by having other characters testify to Orsino’s worthiness: the sea Captain describes him to Viola as “A noble duke, in nature as in name” (Act 1, Scene 2, line 25); and Olivia endorses this assessment:
I suppose him virtuous, know him noble,
Of great estate, of fresh and stainless youth,
In voices well divulged, free, learned, and valiant,
And in dimension and the shape of nature
A gracious person. (Act 1, Scene 5, lines 247-251)
However, Orsino is mainly humanised for the audience, beyond his lover’s lunacy, humour, melancholy or mask, through his affectionate conversations with the “youth” Cesario.
Viola
The “high fantastical” Orsino perhaps attracts [Viola] as an opposite; his hyperboles complement her reticences. (Bloom 232)
In contrast with Orsino’s extravagance in love, Viola’s is the true voice of feeling in Twelfth Night. She is a gauge for measuring the humours, lunacies and masks of the other characters. Although Viola alone wears a physical “mask”—her disguise as Cesario—for most of the play, her love for Orsino is openly revealed and real to the audience.
STUDY EXERCISE FOUR: VIOLA
Reread Act 2, Scene 4, paying special attention to Viola’s story of her “sister” (lines 104-120), told in response to Orsino’s assertion of male superiority in love (Exercise Four, above).
Who wins this “battle of the sexes”?
What is the effect of Viola’s story on the tone and pace of the comedy at this point?
Explain the force of Viola’s response to the music earlier in this scene, as an authentic evocation of love.
How is an audience likely to feel about Viola?
How does dramatic irony function throughout this scene? How does Viola’s story of her “sister” complicate the irony?
What form does the theme of “mutability”—the transience of youth and beauty—take in this scene? How important is this theme in Twelfth Night as a whole?
Bloom stresses that Viola adopts her male disguise from necessity, as “a way of going underground,” and not, like Rosalind, as an act of liberation. Like all other characters in Twelfth Night, Viola is subject to changing circumstances. She is sensible about the limits of her control over events, and surrenders to outcomes. For example, after deciding to serve in disguise at Orsino’s court, she says: “What else may hap to time I will commit” (Act 1, Scene 4, line 61); and extends this when she realises that Olivia has fallen in love with her persona as Cesario: “O time, thou must untangle this, not I!/ It is too hard a knot for me to untie” (Act 2, Scene 2, lines 41-42).
Viola wins the audience’s favour from her first landing on the coast of Illyria, when, despite heartbreak, she maintains a rational hope that her brother Sebastian has survived the shipwreck. This later gives the audience a measure for judging Olivia’s prolonged mourning-plan for her brother.
It is especially Viola’s loyalty in love that wins the audience’s favour: the poignancy of her seeking to win Olivia for the man she loves herself.
Although Viola adopts her male disguise defensively, she does so decisively, in a way that demonstrates both activity and an active imagination. If her dialogues with Orsino are somewhat sad, those with Olivia, Malvolio and Feste are combative and quick-witted. In trying to avoid her hilarious “sword fight” with the even more reluctant Sir Andrew, Viola invents an impressive list of excuses (Act 3, Scene4, lines 214-301).
In all, Bloom’s emphasis on Viola’s passivity may be excessive. As a counter-argument, you might like to consider the applicability to Viola of an earlier evaluation of Shakespeare’s women, by H. B. Charlton:
Shakespeare’s enthronement of woman as queen of comedy is no mere accident, and no mere gesture of conventional gallantry. Because they are women, these heroines have attributes of personality fitting them more certainly then men to shape the world towards happiness….These heroes [Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello], in effect, are out of equipoise: they lack the balance of a durable spiritual organism. It was in women that Shakespeare found this equipoise, this balance which makes personality in action a sort of ordered interplay of the major components of human nature. In his women, hand and heart and brain are fused in a vital and practical union, each contributing to the other. (Shakespearean Comedy. London: Methuen, 1938: Chapter IX)
Olivia
Equipoise, and the promotion of harmony in the self and in the world around her are not, however, obvious features of Olivia. Olivia’s foolish “humour” or “lunacy” in wasting so many youthful years in mourning is revealed in dialogue with Feste:
Feste: ….Good Madonna, give me leave to prove you a fool.
Olivia: Can you do it?
Feste: Dexteriously, good Madonna.
Olivia: Make your proof.
Feste: I must catechize you for it, Madonna. Good my mouse of virtue, answer me.
Olivia: Well, sir, for want of other idleness, I’ll bide your proof.
Feste: Good Madonna, why mourn’st thou?
Olivia: Good fool, for my brother’s death.
Feste: I think his soul is in hell, Madonna.
Olivia: I know his soul is in heaven, fool.
Feste: The more fool, Madonna, to mourn for your brother’s soul, being in heaven. Take away the fool, gentlemen.
(Act1, Scene 5, lines 52-68)
Viola treats Olivia’s idealistic mourning with similar realism, by literally removing her “mask”—her mourning veil—to reveal her beauty: “Lady, you are the cruellest she alive,/If you will lead these graces to the grave,/And leave the world no copy.” (Act 1, Scene 5, lines 230-232).
The realism of Feste and Viola rescues Olivia from her mourning “madness,” only to see it instantly replaced with the lunacy of her love for Cesario: “Even so quickly may one catch the plague?” Olivia asks (Act 1, Scene 5, line 284), deploying yet another metaphor for a distorting humour—sickness—that is common both in Twelfth Night, and generally in Elizabethan love poetry.
Although Olivia doesn’t arouse the love that an audience will feel for Viola, she is touching in her passion, which betrays her pride. Read the exchange between Viola and Olivia, Act 3, Scene 1, lines 81-161—a wonderful scene of dramatic irony and comic cross- purposes, where each character is equally appealing to an audience.
Malvolio
Quotes from Harold Bloom have helped to anchor our consideration of Twelfth Night throughout, and will assist us again in interpreting Malvolio. Bloom writes:
That accurate portrait of an affected time server is one of the most savage in Shakespeare. What happens to Malvolio is, however, so harshly out of proportion to his merits, such as they are, that the ordeal of humiliation has to be regarded as one of the prime Shakespearean enigmas. (239)
Malvolio obviously does not possess the infinitude of Falstaff or Hamlet, but he runs away from Shakespeare, and has a terrible poignance even though he is wickedly funny and is a sublime satire upon the moralising Ben Jonson. (Bloom 227)
Malvolio is, with Feste, Shakespeare’s great creation in Twelfth Night; it has become Malvolio’s play, rather like Shylock’s gradual usurpation of The Merchant of Venice….His dream of socio-erotic greatness—‘To be Count Malvolio!’—is one of Shakespeare’s supreme inventions, permanently disturbing us as a study in self-deception, and in the spirit’s sickness. (Bloom 238)
Let’s deal first with Malvolio’s characterisation, and secondly with his ordeal.
Malvolio’s name means “ill-will” and this may point to Shakespeare’s original intention in creating him. Malvolio does have ill-will towards Feste and Sir Toby Belch, both of whom he would like to see thrown out of Olivia’s household. Olivia uses another sickness metaphor in astutely defining Malvolio’s humour:
O you are sick of self-love, Malvolio, and taste with a distempered appetite. To be generous, guiltless, and of free disposition, is to take those things for bird-bolts that you deem cannon bullets. (Act 1, Scene 5, lines 85-87)
As this assessment implies, Malvolio is a comic study of introverted egoism. As such, he may be more relevant to some of us than we care to admit! Olivia diagnoses Malvolio as suffering from an all-consuming self-involvement (self-love) that rules out generosity, forgiveness, and a sense of proportion in relating to other people. Much of Malvolio’s behaviour confirms this diagnosis.
While he is no doubt efficient in carrying out his duties as a steward, Malvolio’s sense of superior worth isolates him emotionally and rules out fun and relaxation. Malvolio’s pride separates him from his instincts, the source of his energy. He condescends to Feste, hinting to Olivia that Feste is an inferior jester (Act 1, Scene 5, lines 78-84). He condescends to Cesario in delivering Olivia’s message and ring (Act 2, Scene 2, lines 5-16). He is officious in the strict sense of “identified with his office” when he quells the early morning revelries of Sir Toby, Sir Andrew and Feste—he carries out his office without humour, humanity or tact. He is, moreover, sanctimonious—he combines officiousness with a sense of moral superiority. Sir Toby sums up the steward’s entrenched pride in a famous accusation: “Dost thou think, because thou are virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” (Act 2, Scene 3, lines 110-112). Malvolio is safe, however, until he makes the mistake of reporting Maria to Olivia (Act 2, Scene 3, lines117-120).
Malvolio is vulnerable to Maria’s scheme only because it builds on his conviction about his own worthiness, which it may be dangerous for any human to hold without qualification. (See Maria’s analysis of his false puritanism, Act 2, Scene 3, Lines 134-146.) Malvolio’s self-love, combined with ambition and a desire for revenge against Sir Toby, leads him to accept that Olivia is smitten and intends to marry him. In the famous “Box Tree Scene” (Act 2, Scene 5), Malvolio’s “sickness” comes to full comic expression, as he fantasises about how, as Olivia’s husband, he will lord it over Sir Toby, Sir Andrew and the servants. The commentary from the hidden watchers emphasises the diseased state of Malvolio’s imagination. This places him at the opposite pole from such down-to-earth but poetic figures as Viola and Feste: Maria:… this letter will make a contemplative idiot of him (lines 18-19); Sir Toby: Contemplation makes a rare turkey-cock of him; how he jets under his advanced plumes! (lines 30-31); Fabian: Look how imagination blows him.
It is this pretentiousness and humourlessness that makes Malvolio’s conduct in Olivia’s presence so funny (Act 3, Scene 4).
As far as Malvolio’s ordeal is concerned, I have a few thoughts to offer:
- The Elizabethans, and indeed Europeans into the eighteenth century, saw insanity as funny, rather than pitiable. Visiting Bethlehem Hospital (Bedlam) to laugh at the inmates’ antics, and to exchange jokes or insults was a favourite pastime. The theory of humours, and indeed the play’s treatment of the lunatic emotional excess that afflicts most of the characters, supports the relevance to Twelfth Night of what seems to us an unacceptable perspective. It was a common Elizabethan view also that moral failure caused insanity, and this seems to apply to Malvolio. In interpreting Twelfth Night, and especially the exorcism scene (Act 4, Scene 2), it is therefore important to decide if the context is Shakespeare’s time or our own.
- Although it’s fashionable in criticism of Twelfth Night to compare Malvolio with Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, Malvolio is by no means so eloquent a pleader for the audience’s understanding. When Malvolio returns in Act 5, following the comedy’s resolution, he is full of a self-justifying anger that discourages sympathy.
In 1602, however, after mentioning Twelfth Night’s Latin, Italian and Shakespearean genesis, John Manningham’s diary focussed on Malvolio’s gulling and imprisonment as the most memorable aspects of the performance he had seen. He refers to the gulling as “a good practise”—apparently to him a source of simple pleasure. The exorcism scene demands virtuoso acting from Feste, disguised as the curate Sir Topas, while Malvolio may be wholly or partly out of sight, hidden in “hideous darkness”—the so-called hell where he is said to be subject to possession by Satan. Perhaps there is poetic justice in this, given Malvolio’s pride? Perhaps Feste is the main focus of the scene that Shakespeare wrote?
STUDY EXERCISE FIVE: MALVOLIO
Many famous and well-loved actors, including Richard Briers and Nigel Hawthorne, have played Malvolio. For a list of recent productions, go to: http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Theater/sip/character/tn_malvolio/
Modern interpretations usually show little awareness of Malvolio’s pretentiousness, and instead emphasise his loyalty to his office, his humanity and pathos. Watch at least one modern DVD or video of Twelfth Night, with a view to arriving at your own evaluation of Malvolio. Does he deserve the fate that befalls him? What is your response to Maria and the other plotters? (See some judgments following.)
Maria, Sir Toby, Sir Andrew
If we’re naïve about Shakespeare, we feel we have to like these jokers, as embodying the spirit of twelfth night—not to like them, we fear, will align us with the humourless Malvolio and with the upper classes against the lower classes; with the powerful against the powerless.
The revellers and practical jokers—Maria, Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek—are the least sympathetic players in Twelfth Night, since their gulling of Malvolio passes into the domain of sadism….Both Belch and Aguecheek are caricatures, yet Maria, a natural comic, has a dangerous inwardness, and is the one truly malicious character in Twelfth Night. (Bloom 237-238)
Feste
We have seen that Feste is the main vehicle for Twelfth Night’s themes of mutability and carpe diem. These dominate his three solo songs, “O mistress mine!” (Act 2, Scene 3, lines 37-50); “Come away, come away, death” (Act 2, Scene 4, lines 50-65); and “When that I was a little tiny boy” (the play’s epilogue: Act 5, Scene 1, lines 385-405).
In discussing Olivia, we saw that Feste has the function of bringing her elaborate mourning down to earth. “Come away, come away death” similarly parodies the extremities of Orsino’s love lunacy. Feste is in fact the wise fool, “a witty fool,” who reveals the realities that underlie both the delusions and the aspirations of other central characters.
Feste’s wisdom includes a grounding in morality: his babble to Olivia recognises virtues and sins as part of the human condition (Act 1, Scene 5, lines 38-48). He is therefore comically appropriate as the curate who exorcises Malvolio’s devil. Feste’s own reality is his dread of dismissal by Olivia, a precariousness certain to earn him the audience’s sympathy.
As well as reminding players and audience of the realities of change and death (thanatos), Feste speaks for the reality of eros, the sexual drives that underlie and determine the emotional idealism of such characters as Olivia, Orsino, Viola and Sebastian. Sexuality is an important association of his name, which embodies the rejoicing and freedom from inhibitions associated with twelfth night festivities. His bauble (jester’s stick with an ass-eared head carved on it), which he addresses as Quinapalus, stands among other things for a penis, and his language bulges with sexual puns, e.g. “He that is well hanged in this world need fear no colours.”; “Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage,” etc., etc., etc!
When Shakespeare created Feste’s part in Twelfth Night, he must have had a virtuoso actor and singer at his disposal. Granville Barker comments:
Who was Shakespeare’s clown, a sweet-voiced singer and something much more than a comic actor? He wrote Feste for him, and later the Fool in Lear. At least, I can conceive of no dramatist risking the writing of such parts unless he knew he had a man to play them. (92)
Later commentators, such as Keir Elam, in what may be the definitive edition of Twelfth Night (London: Bloomsbury, 2008), assume that Robert Amin, an accomplished clown, mime, singer and himself a playwright, was Shakespeare’s original Feste.
Less Than Final Comment
Twelfth Night is not of Hamlet’s cosmological scope, but in its own very startling way it is another “poem unlimited.” One cannot get to the end of it, because even some of the most apparently incidental lines reverberate infinitely. (Bloom 227)