Background Lecture On Twelfth Night

The following information is based upon my taped lecture on this play. Although this text version is not the same as the taped lecture, it does contain the same information. All references are based on the Signet paperback edition which you should consult in conjunction with this lecture.

Twelfth Night was probably written in 1601 and first performed in January of 1602. We know this because the play is mentioned that year in the diary of a young man training to become a lawyer at the Inns of Court in London. We can also tell the approximate date of the play from the references to contemporary events and publications, things like books or new maps. To place the publication in Shakespeare's career, it comes about six years after Roemo & Juliet. Shakespeare's treatment of love and romance and his use of dramatic devices are even more sophisticated than they were in his famous tragedy. Twelfth Night is the fourth in a series of romantic comedies which all have very bright heroines who end up teaching valuable lessons to the men who will become their husbands. Three of these four plays – The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It and Twelfth Night – feature heroines who disguise themselves as men and deal with their male-dominated societies from this secret vantage point. They all have very sophisticated attitudes toward love and reveal human folly caused by the excess of some particular quality. It's interesting to note that Twelfth Night was written right after Shakespeare had written Hamlet, which is a very different kind of play, but it does give you some idea of the range of his creative talents.

The title of the play is unusual. It refers to the twelve days of Christmas, which you may recall from the old song, "On the Twelfth Day of Christmas." In earlier days the celebration and exchange of gifts which we associate with the 25th of December were actually conducted during the 12 days which followed that date, culminating with what is called Epiphany. For some reason this twelfth day was associated, and continues to be, with comic misrule, upset and especially confusion over gender. In this country many people observe a seasonal tradition by taking their family to see "The Nutcracker" ballet or The Christmas Carol, Dickens' story turned into a stage play. More recent cultural expressions may be the film How the Grinch Stole Christmas or television's A Charlie Brown Christmas. Well, in the United Kingdom the cultural equivalent is going to the pantomime or panto. Families will go to the local theater is see a series of comic skits which feature famous actors and actresses performing in drag. So you might see Benny Hill or John Cleese playing the parts of women and some shapely starlet dressed in tight pants playing the part of the hero. Shakespeare's play recalls this very old tradition by being a play with similar gender confusion at its core.

It is entirely possible that Shakespeare was commissioned to write the play for a group of law students to perform at their Twelfth Night celebration, later followed by performances at his public theater, The Globe. As such, the original audience consisted of young sophisticated gentlemen who would have been knowledgeable about the London theater scene: there are a number of references in the play to works by Shakespeare's contemporaries. Many of the jokes in the play are lost on us in the 21st Century because they refer to things which were very much in the public mind in 1601. So when Feste, the jester, says at one point he could have used the word "element," but he chose not to because the word is overused, it goes right over our heads. However, it was a howl in Shakespeare's time because there was a big flap over Ben Jonson's use of the word.

Twelfth Night is one of the few plays Shakespeare wrote which has a secondary or sub-title: "What You Will." Even here Shakespeare is having a little fun. At one level this title is just a throw-away line, much like the titles of Much Ado About Nothing or As You Like It, the Elizabethan equivalent of "Whatever" or "No big deal!" However, in his plays and poems Shakespeare often used the word "will" to refer to sexual desire. So the title "What You Will" also means "Whatever sexual desire you choose to pursue." Throughout the play there are at least three places where characters consciously give themselves permission to chase some inappropriate sexual fantasy which will end up making them appear foolish. I'll point these out as we go through the play.

The source of Twelfth Night has been pretty well identified. The immediate source is a book by a man named Barnaby Ridge titled Ridge: His Farewell to the Military Profession written about 20 years earlier. Ridge wrote a collection of stories he had picked up from many sources and to which he added his own inventions. One of Ridge's stories is about a young woman who disguises herself as a young man and goes to work for a handsome young lord with whom she promptly falls in love. The young lord orders his new employee to go off and win the love of a beautiful woman that he desires. The heroine in disguise tries her best, but the beautiful woman falls in love with her disguise. Comic confusion results. Ridge had stolen this story line from an Italian play written earlier, but in reality the ideas here go back to the ancient Greeks and Romans who often wrote about girls who used disguise to get around the restrictions of their own societies. The ancients also had lots of fun with characters who looked alike; identical twins were special favorites. One of the Roman playwrights that Shakespeare had read in school, Plautus, had written a famous comedy about a set of twins; Shakespeare had used it as the basis for his first comedy, Comedy of Errors. So this sophisticated comedy of Twelfth Night is actually based on very old ideas.

There are four major themes which are explored in this play. All the themes have to do with love. In fact no other play by Shakespeare shows so many different kinds of love or reactions to love. The first theme is everybody who loves faces obstacles to overcome in order to achieve their heart's desire. Falling love in a Shakespearean comedy is never easy. You really have to work hard to win. The second theme is that love takes many forms, and these coexist uneasily. There is self-love, misguided love, love which was gender inappropriate, or what in politically correct terms we would say was "deemed inappropriate by a dominant, sexually repressive society." That just means that in this play women fall in love with women and men with men without ever having a chance for that love to be requited or returned. The third theme is that love makes the unworthy appear foolish while correcting the worthy who are simply misguided. Love is the mechanism by which we are shown people acting ridiculously. Those who deserve our scorn appear as fools; those who have something going for them are shown the errors of their ways through love and finally earn our respect as wise. The fourth and final theme is that love is an infection we willingly seek – in the words of one of the characters in this play, a form of "divine madness." Despite the possibility of appearing foolish we give ourselves permission to experience it – the same idea I was getting at in my earlier discussion of the sub-title of the play, "What You Will."

The plot of the play combines three different story lines. There is the love triangle of the noble characters: Viola, a clever young woman who is forced to disguise herself as a young man; Orsino, the duke who employs Viola in disguise and with whom she falls in love; Olivia, the beautiful countess Orsino desires and who in turn falls in love with Viola. The second story deals with the low-life characters and their rough humor: Sir Toby Belch, whose name tells you everything you need to know about his character; Belch's favorite pigeon, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, from whom he steals and with whom he carries out an elaborate practical joke on Malvolio, the business manager of Olivia's estate. Malvolio is a character with special political significance for Shakespeare's audience. The third story line is not as prominent as the other two but is absolutely essential for the resolution of the play. It involves Sebastian, Viola's twin brother whom she believes has been drowned, and Antonio, a ship captain who rescues him, falls in love with him and pursues him, even at peril of his own life. These story lines intersect at different times and in different ways with different kinds of comic effects – from the slap stick to the romantic. Social distinctions are the basis for much of the humor of the play.

I've made the point that gender disguise is what distinguishes this play from some of the other comedies and that the idea goes back to the ancient Greeks and Romans. This device is found in Shakespeare's comedies of Two Gentlemen of Verona, Merchant of Venice and As You Like It. The device allows a heroine to exercise greater freedom of action. Young gentlewomen were under great social constraint. They were not allowed to go in public without an escort. They were forbidden to interact with men without a chaperone present. They were not supposed to be involved in choosing their own mates. Once they put on pants their opportunities expanded and the dramatic possibilities increased in the play. In Merchant of Venice a young woman dons the disguise and becomes a judge in a capital case. In Two Gentlemen of Verona a young woman plays a man and watches as her boyfriend tries to betray her with another woman. In As You Like It a bright girl fools even the man who is in love with her and trains him in how she wants him to behave toward her when they are reunited as man and woman. In Twelfth Night we see how a young woman, who is on her own, uses disguise to protect herself in a hostile world. The device of gender camouflage also provides a double vision. As women these pretenders see the world in terms of the traditional conflict between the sexes; as men they are able to inject a subversive note into the smug male world view. In this play, for example Viola is able to educate the man she loves as to the depth of passion and nobility of love women can experience for men, something he never suspected before. Finally Shakespeare could use disguise as a way of introducing comic effects and exposing male hypocrisy to his largely male audience. Women attended the plays, but most of the audience appears to have been men. Nevertheless, no one comes away from a Shakespearean comedy feeling that men are naturally superior to women. If anything Shakespeare's comic heroines seem to be the intellectual superiors of the men they eventually marry, as if they had taken pity on some poor fool they had just tricked.

The reputation of this play has always been very high. It is one of Shakespeare's most beloved works, and many people consider it the best of all the comedies. The humor is sharp, the satire still biting and many of the jokes just as funny as they were 400 years ago. As we go through the play scene by scene I'll point out some of the remarkable achievements Shakespeare realizes in this timeless comedy. Let's look at the play itself now.

Act I, Scene 1

We begin the play with the character of Orsino, who is called variously "count" or the "duke" throughout the play. Often Shakespeare was not consistent in details such as this. It is sufficient that we know Orsino is the ruler of the country of Illyria and the epitome of a lover. "Illyria" was a name applied to what is now Croatia in the former Yugoslavia on the coast of the Adriatic Sea. Shakespeare probably had no idea where Illyria was; he had read the name somewhere and liked the sound of it. It sounded exotic and far-away, qualities that would appeal to his audience. Orsino is cited throughout the play as the consummate lover, a man who experienced love in its purest and most passionate aspects. Listen to this first scene and see if you find anything unusual about this guy as a lover. [Act I, scene 1]

For someone who is supposed to be the ultimate lover, Orsino spends a lot of time describing how love makes him feel. He tells us what music best suits his mood, where one can feel love most acutely, the philosophical nature of loving and existence. The only thing he doesn't spend much time on is the person he supposed to be in love with. He is a connoisseur of love's excesses, a man in love with the idea of love. In the opening lines he listens to love music and in effect wishes that he could overdose on music to deaden the pain he feels from love. Orsino here is copping an attitude. He doesn't want to deaden the feeling; if anything he wants to increase it.

The play begins with a song and will end with one, and in between there is plenty of music. This is in fact one of Shakespeare's most musical plays, and much of the music for the play was recorded in the first book of popular music with musical notations printed right around the time the play was written. So we have the original music for many of the songs.

At lines 4 – 8 Orsino interacts with the music his own musicians are playing. (Orsino is fortunate to have his own musical group so that when he hears a passage he likes, he can have them play it over and over; I still can't manage that with my compact disc player.)

That strain again! It had a dying fall;

O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound

That breathes upon a bank of violets,

Stealing and giving odor. Enough, no more!

'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.

The musical passage reminds Orsino of the smell of violets. Everything about this guy's experience of love suggests that he is on sensory overload. The images are ripe and suggest emotional excess. The feelings change quickly too: after hearing it twice he's tired of it – it's lost its sweetness.

The next passage, line 9 – 15, was cited by a great Shakespearean scholar at UC Berkeley, as one of the most difficult in all of the plays to understand fully. Stephen Booth has devoted years of his life to the study of this one play, calling it the most perfect creation of the human mind and spirit. Despite its challenging construction, you get the general sense of its meaning:

O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou,

That, notwithstanding thy capacity,

Receivest as the sea. Nought enters there,

Of what validity and pitch so'er,

But falls into abatement and low price

Even in a minute. So full of shapes is fancy

That it alone is high fantastical.

Ironically the spirit of love is able to accept so much and then take even more, yet at the same time it dashes our hopes and turns what is exquisite into something cheap. The last two lines are especially interesting. Orsino here seems to say that love ("fancy") is the ultimate creation of our imaginations ("high fantastical").

At line 16 one of his men asks Orsino why he mopes around the house listening to this depressing music. Why doesn't he go out hunting for deer? This gives Orsino the chance to introduce a serious pun: in those days another name for a stag was "hart," so Orsino can say at line 19 he does hunt the hart, "the noblest that I have." Elizabethans believed that infection was spread through the air by impure chemical substances, but for Orsino his loved one's beauty is so great and divine that she "purged the air of pestilence" [line 21]. (Notice here is the first time he has mentioned the name of his great love, Olivia, just in passing.) He then shifts back to the pun on "hart/heart" and explains when he first saw her, he became a hart and his desires became "the cruel and fell hounds" that tore him to pieces. This last part, as your notes tell you, is a reference to the mythical figure of Actaeon, a mighty hunter, who is supposed to have peeked at the goddess Diana while she bathed. Since she was the goddess of chastity, she wasn't thrilled at being spied on, so she turned Actaeon into a stag and he was hunted down and torn to pieces by his own hunting dogs. There is in the story of Actaeon an object lesson for us all. What Shakespeare is doing here is revealing Orsino's knowledge as an educated gentleman (and Shakespeare's own learning about which he was somewhat sensitive.) The choice of this myth also emphasizes the idea of physically suffering for love.

At this point another servant, appropriately called Valentine, returns with word that Olivia, because her brother has just died, has declared that she will locked herself away from all contact with the outside world for seven years to honor his memory. What Shakespeare is showing here is that both Orsino in his pursuit of love and Olivia in her pursuit of grief are guilty of excess and therefore appear foolish. For example, when Orsino learns of Olivia's voluntary retreat from the world, he is not discouraged about getting a date for Friday night. He is challenged and energized at line 34 in his quest to win the love of this woman who makes it so difficult:

O, she that hath a heart of that fine frame

To pay this debt of love but to a brother,

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,

Those sovereign thrones, are all supplied and filled,

Her sweet perfections, with one self king.

I have already suggested that Orsino seems much more interested in experiencing the agonies of love than in actually loving a specific woman, whom he names just once. Here we see further evidence that he may not love the actual Olivia. Normally people in love empathize with the emotions of their loved one, but rather than feeling Olivia's grief at the loss of her brother, Orsino's revels in what it shows about her emotional capacity. In the passage above, the "rich golden shaft" refers to Cupid's arrow. The Elizabethans believed that love was governed by the liver, in addition to the heart and mind. Orsino plans to become the sole monarch of all her internal organs and her affections, but it will take a long time. If you think about it, this is an ideal situation for Orsino: he will win Olivia's love, but he'll get to suffer for years before he succeeds. He will make no effort to try to see Olivia until the final scene of the play, but in the interim he will go on and on about love. It is as if he does not require the flesh and blood woman to be present to feel the full emotional impact. You see why I say that he's in love with love.

Olivia is equally excessive in her emotions. Today locking yourself away from the world for seven years because your brother died might get you on the Doctor Phil's show; in Shakespeare's time it was perverse. The average life expectancy was only about 36 years. Olivia is proposing to throw away much of her adult life in the commemoration of death. It is a gesture that is simply self-destructive, and we are not surprised when Olivia begins to have second thoughts about it. Both Olivia and Orsino will learn the folly of their choices through their experience in love and will emerge more admirable because of it.

It is appropriate that Orsino ends the scene with a rhymed couplet at line 41: "Away before me to sweet beds of flow'rs;/ Love-thoughts lie rich when canopied with bow'rs." You probably know that Shakespeare often signaled the end of a scene by using two lines that rhymed. It was important on his stage, since there were no curtains or lights to let the audience know that the next characters they saw were in a different place or time, to have a device to indicate change. The images presented are Orsino at his best: having just decided to pursue Olivia's love despite the obstacles, he does not rush off to sing beneath her window or to press his love poems into her hands. No, he rushes off to listen to more sad music while smelling flowers. He's already determined the best places to feel the pain of love.

Act I, scene 2

In this scene we are introduced to Viola, the heroine of the play. She has just washed up on the shores of Illyria, convinced that she has lost her brother in a shipwreck. She is not from Illyria but from Sicily, and she has to be careful in this foreign country. As you listen to Viola listing her problems, notice the similarities between her and Olivia. Then ask yourself how Viola's responses to her problems differ from Olivia's reactions. [Act I, Scene 2]

Viola and Olivia have both lost their brothers and are filled with grieving. However, Olivia proposes to lock herself away from the world for seven years to allow the grieving process plenty of time to take place, while Viola does not have that luxury. As a young, unescorted woman in a foreign land, she has to take action to protect herself from danger. She does not have the time to engage in the sentimental excess that both Olivia and Orsino do. She has to take care of business.

Shakespeare is very workmanlike throughout the play in moving the story along. Here in the opening lines we are told the locale, Illyria, a place selected probably because of the exotic-sounding name. As she finds out about Olivia's mourning, Viola empathizes with her loss and wishes she too could mourn for her brother. From the beginning, however, Viola expresses doubts about her brother's supposed death. At line 5 she asks the sailors who saved her, "Perchance he is not drowned. What think you sailors?" The captain of the ship tells her, at line 11 following, how he saw Viola's brother, Sebastian, swimming strongly and then binding himself to a floating mast to save himself. This is the first of several foreshadowings of Sebastian's later arrival in Illyria. Viola is obviously a well-to-do and cultured young woman because she has some money which she uses to reward the Captain for giving her hope about her brother.

Shakespeare moves quickly to cover the details we already know. When Viola learns about Orsino, her first response, at line 28, is, "Orsino! I have heard my father name him./ He was a bachelor then." I don't want to suggest that Viola is a mercenary gold-digger, but it wouldn't surprise me if back home she had a chart on the wall of her bedroom showing the most eligible bachelors in the Mediterranean area. The Captain tells her about Olivia's decision, and Viola reacts sympathetically at line 41:

O that I served that lady,

And might not be delivered to the world,

Till I had made mine own occasion mellow,

What my estate is.

Viola's "estate" is that she is the daughter of a nobleman, well-educated and attractive. But as a stranger in a strange land, without the protection of a loving, extended family, she is responsible for protecting herself physically, psychologically and sexually. No wonder she comes up with the idea, which heroines in Shakespeare's comedies so often do, of disguising herself as a man.

At around line 51 Viola tells the Captain she will trust him with her secret because he has a "fair and outward character" (the appearance of someone trustworthy). At line 56 she says that she will pretend to be a "eunuch," and at line 62 the Captain confirms the idea of Viola in drag being a castrated male. For a long time scholars tried to explain away the idea of Viola playing the part of a man incapable of sexual action. However, often Shakespeare would often start out with one idea in mind, then change directions and forget to go back and change the text. He probably began with the idea of making Viola a castrated teenaged boy (who were not that uncommon in the Renaissance) and then changed his mind to develop the love interest between Viola and Olivia. This line merely represents an option not taken.

Act I, Scene 3

In the first two scenes we have seen several different reactions to the death of Olivia's brother. What is the reaction of Olivia's uncle, Sir Toby Belch? What does Toby seem most interested in? [Act I, scene 3, lines 1 –43]

Olivia's excessive grieving seems to turn Orsino on; Viola empathizes with Olivia's loss but realizes that elaborate grief is not an option for her. Here Sir Toby Belch, an immediate family member, resents Olivia's exaggerated behavior: "What a plague means my niece to take the death of her brother thus? I'm sure care's an enemy to life" [1 – 3]. With Toby whatever puts a crimp in the partying is bad; he values "good life" above all else. Throughout the play Toby, who is supposed to be a nobleman although he rarely acts like it, is variously referred to as Olivia's "uncle" or "cousin." The Elizabethans used the term "cousin" to refer to any member of one's extended family beyond your parents or siblings. Whatever you call him it's clear that Belch is a mooch or sponge. He probably showed up for Olivia's father's funeral and has simply not gone home. Olivia's just too nice to ask him to leave, and he will stay there as long as he can. You may have had relatives like this; maybe they're still with you. Belch's name really describes his character.

In addition to being an excessive consumer of food and drink, he is a con man, a swindler. This is not immediately apparent but becomes clear as the scene unfolds. Maria mentions "Sir Andrew Aguecheek," Toby's victim, and Belch's interest in Andrew becomes clear at line 22 when we learn Aguecheek has three thousand ducats a year – the annual revenue of his estate, a large fortune in those times. Belch plans to trick Andrew out of as much of that fortune as he can get. As we see he does this by promising to fix Andrew up with the beautiful and wealthy Olivia.

Maria is Olivia's gentle waiting woman. She is genteel, can read and write and is considered cultured enough to serve as a companion for Olivia. However, she is an employee. (Notice that she refers to Olivia as "my lady" at lines 5 and 15, a reminder that she is a social inferior to Olivia.) She probably has no money herself and is interested in Belch as a possible husband, as we'll see. There is an attraction between them as well, because they both share a sense of rough humor when it comes to playing practical jokes.

The first three scenes in this play all deal with Olivia's grief, but they each introduce a different story line. Eventually the stories will interconnect, and often in modern productions the scenes are intermixed to give a variety to the opening of the play while preparing us for their coming together. We'll see this intermingling especially in the film version of the play, directed by the famed Shakespearean filmmaker Trevor Nunn. The language in the first two scenes is in verse; this scene is in prose. Toby may have a "sir" in front of his name, but he is still of a lower social class than Orsino or even Viola. In addition the humor of this scene makes prose more appropriate,

Maria is concerned throughout this scene about the prospect of Toby being asked to leave Olivia's house, so she tries to get him to behave. Toby, as he is through much of the play, is already half drunk. She warns him about coming in late at night and making a lot of noise. Like many drunks, Toby is belligerent when his behavior is called in question. At line 5 Maria warns him that "Your cousin, my lady, takes great/ exception to your late hours." Toby shoots back, "Why, let her except before excepted," which your notes tell you is a legal term. It really doesn't make any literal sense here; it's just a way of Toby saying, "So what?" Maria persists at line 8, "Ay, but you must confine yourself within the/ modest limits of order." In other words, you've got to obey the rules of polite society within this household. Toby deliberately misconstrues this warning into a play on words at line 10: "Confine? I'll confine [dress] myself no finer than I am./ These clothes are good enough to drink in, and so/ be these boots too. And [if] they be not, let them hang/ themselves in their own straps." It's a long way to go to get a lame joke about bootstraps, but that's the way Toby's mind works. Maria presses on and adds to the charges against Belch the accusation that Olivia is upset because her uncle has brought in "a foolish/ knight….to be her wooer" [line 16] Here's where we begin to see how the confidence game works.

Sir Andrew Aguecheek (his name comes from the fact that his face is probably very pale, as if he had a fever or "ague") is a blithering idiot. Now Toby is not going to admit right away that Andrew is a hapless victim, so he tries to convince Maria that he is a suitable prospect for his niece. However, all he can come up with at first is, at line 20, "He's as tall a man as any's in Illyria," which means he's a real he-man. When Maria asks what possible relevance that has, Toby admits the truth at line 22: "Why, he has three thousands ducats a year." Maria is not impressed by Andrew's bank account, and at line 23 she charges, "Ay, but he'll have but a year in all these ducats./ He's a very fool and a prodigal." He may have money now but he won't have it for very long because he is so stupid and wastes his money. Toby resents this charge, even though it's true, and counters with evidence of two of Andrew's accomplishments as a gentleman – musicianship and linguistics: "Fie that you say so! He plays o' th' viol-de-gamboys [a primitive bass fiddle],/ and speaks three or four languages word/ for word without book, and hath all the good gifts/ of nature." Remember that a gentleman was supposed to be accomplished in a number of areas, so Toby offers proof. Andrew can even speak three or four foreign languages without looking up the meanings of words.

Maria knows Andrew's limitations, and so she takes Belch's phrase "gifts of nature," and turns it into an insult at line 29. (A mental defective was sometimes called a "natural.") "He hath indeed all, most natural." She now adds a new accusation: that Andrew quarrels a lot. Quarreling was dangerous for a gentleman, because it could mean that he would be forced to fight frequent duels to defend his honor. Fortunately, says Maria sarcastically, Andrew is also a coward, so he provokes duels but avoids fighting them. This is, of course, a devastating charge against a gentleman's honor, and it prepares us for an elaborate practical joke later in the play.

Toby's next defense is to angrily deny the charge: "By this hand, they are scoundrels and substractors/ that say so of him. Who are they?" Maria's response at line 36 brings the discussion back to her original point about Toby's substance abuse: "They that add, moreover, that he's drunk nightly in/ your company." This refers to another strategy that Belch uses to control Aguecheek; he keeps him drunk most of the times, with Andrew picking up the bar tab. At line 38 Toby turns this accusation into a positive accomplishment; if he and Andrew are drunk nightly, it's because they drink "healths," or toasts, to Olivia.

I'll drink to her as long as there is passage in my throat and drink in

Illyria. He is a coward and a coistrel [knave] that will not drink to

my niece till his brains turn o' th' toe like a parish top [an obscure

reference to some activity that involved a lot of spinning].

In Toby's world it is a point of honor to be drunk all the time, and everyone should join him! As Andrew himself enters at line 42, Toby urges Maria to keep a straight face ("Castiliano vulgo"). He also calls her "wench" as a sign of endearment.

In the next section ask yourself if Andrew meets the expectations of his build-up by Toby Belch. If not, in what ways does he fail? [I, 3, lines 44 – 138]

This is one of my favorite passages in all of the plays, and like the very thorough German professor I will now take you through this extraordinary passage so you will get all the inside jokes and will know when to laugh. In person Andrew turns out to be a complete fool. but lovable in a way. He's one of those people who walk through life and miss about 90% of what's going on around them. After greeting Sir Toby he sees Maria. Now he's not been introduced to her, but as a gentleman he is supposed to be charming and affable to members of the opposite sex, so he greets her at line 46 with a term of endearment, "Bless you, fair shrew." Unfortunately he picks the wrong rodent. A shrew is a vile-tempered, biting little scavenger, and so this attempt at savior-faire falls flat. Toby is worried that Andrew is not good at talking with girls, the one thing a gentleman was expected to excel at, so he urges Andrew to use this opportunity to practice flirtations on Maria. After all, she is cultured and quick-witted and will give Andrew some idea how to do it. So at line 48 he urges Andrew to "accost" or strike up a conversation with her. Poor Andrew doesn't know what "accost" means (so much for his vaunted ability with languages) and asks, "What's that?" Toby thinks he's referring to Maria and tells him, "My niece's chambermaid." Andrew makes the natural assumption that "Accost" is Maria's name: "Good Mistress Accost, I desire better acquaintance." Maria tries to clear up the embarrassment by telling Andrew her name is Mary, but that just compounds the problem as Andrew greets her again at line 54: "Good Mistress Mary Accost." It falls to Toby to explain the misunderstanding at line 55: "You mistake, knight. 'Accost' is front her," [Andrew has no idea what that means] "board her," [as if she were an enemy ship] "woo her," [Andrew remains clueless] "assail her." [He finally understands.]

Andrew realizes he has made an embarrassing blunder and quickly tries to come up with an excuse at line 56: "By my troth, I would not undertake her in/ this company. Is that the meaning of 'accost?'" He couldn't flirt with Maria in front of Sir Toby, so that's why he didn't react to the invitation. Besides, he didn't know the meaning of that tough two-syllable word, "accost"! When Maria starts to leave, Toby challenges Andrew to act decisively at line 60: "And [if] thou let part so, Sir Andrew, wouldst thou/ mightst never draw sword again." If you allow Maria to walk away without impressing her with your wit and gentlemanly qualities, you don't deserve to wear a sword. Carrying a sword was the ancient hallmark of a gentleman, who was given an official coat of arms to authorize his right to do so. Andrew risks losing his honor as a courtly gentleman unless he can perform. Unfortunately quick thinking is not Andrew's strong point, so to stop Maria's departure all he can think to say is what Toby just said, so at line 58 we get this strange threat: "And [if] you part so, mistress, I would I might/ never draw sword again!" Not only is this absolutely ridiculous (Why should Maria care if Andrew ever drew his sword again?), Andrew is so proud of himself for having "thought" of it, he crows, "Fair lady, do you think/ you have fools in hand?" Do you think you're dealing with fools? At line 65 Maria's stinging rebuke goes right over Andrew's head: "Sir, I have not you by the hand." So he gives her his hand and she remarks simply, "Now, sir, thought is free." In other words, as far as your previous questions about having fools in hand, you can draw your own conclusion.

Maria now recommends that Andrew bring his hand to the "butt'ry bar" and let it drink." Your notes tell you the "butt'ry bar" was the door to the storage rooms for butts of liquor. Sometimes in modern production Maria will use her own bosom to represent the butt'ry and clamp his hand on her breast, simply to embarrass him, knowing he is absolutely harmless. That rather dramatic gesture isn't necessary to perceive Maria's real intent here, because when Andrew asks her why, she observes that his hand is dry. She means that he is impotent, dry skin being one symptom of that condition to the Elizabethans. However, Andrew can think of only one situation under which a man's hand might be wet (accident while urinating). For all his failings, at least he can take a leak without getting his hand wet, so he proudly proclaims, "I am not such an ass but I/ can keep my hand dry" [73]. He had asked earlier what Maria's "metaphor" [secret meaning] was, and now he asks what the "jest" is. Andrew always has to have the joke explained to him. At line 75 she calls it a "dry jest" and says she is full of them and, as she lets go of his hand at line 77, "Marry, now I let go your hand, I am barren." Maria leaves Andrew thoroughly befuddled, although he's not sure how..

Now it is Toby's turn to tease Andrew at line 79: "O knight, thou lack'st a cup of canary! When/ did I see thee so put down?" Andrew answers: "Never in your life, I think, unless you see/ canary put me down." Here we see one of the ways Toby takes advantage of Andrew; as long as he's around to pay the bar bill, Toby doesn't have to settle for the ordinary French wine. He can indulge in the expensive wine from the faraway Canary Islands. And Andrew has to buy every time Toby decides that he has messed up, as he does here. Andrew is like all of us, and he looks for a scapegoat for his failures, so at line 81 he suggests that too much wine may "put him down." Then at line 82 he proposes another culprit:

Methinks sometimes I have

no more wit than a Christian or an ordinary man

has. But I am a great eater of beef, and I believe

that does harm to my wit.

Today on Oprah, Sir Andrew Aguecheek blows the whistle on the beef conspiracy! Remember a couple of years ago when Oprah ran afoul of the Texas Cattlemen Association? Andrew knows that as a gentleman with a title he is supposed to be superior, but he realizes he isn't and casts about for a reason.

In his frustration, at line 87, Andrew suddenly utters those words Sir Toby fears to hear:

"I'll ride home tomorrow." Horrors! Toby will have to buy his own wine. So Toby asks him why, using the fashionable French word "Pourquoi, my dear knight?" Andrew, the master of languages, responds at line 90

What is pourquoi? Do, or not do? I would

I had bestowed that time in the tongues that I have

in fencing, dancing and bearbaiting. O, had I but

followed the arts!

The activities which Andrew does mention as things he has spent a lot of time on include fencing or swordsmanship, which Andrew will reveal in the duel scene later was time wasted. His dancing ability we will judge by his performance at the end of this scene. Bearbaiting was not really an activity but a spectator sport: watching bears fight large dogs. It was the Elizabethan equivalent of the tractor pull or destruction derby.

Toby picks up on that last word, "arts," and uses it to talk about Andrew's hair, which apparently is unflatteringly straight. The hairdresser's "arts" would mean he could curl it, especially using tongs, a pun on "tongues," or curling irons. Like most people on the reality shows on television, Andrew can be easily distracted by discussing his appearance: curl your hair and you'll look better. When Andrew asks for reassurance at line 98, "But it becomes me well enough, does't not?" Toby tells him "Excellent. It hangs like flax on a distaff; and/ I hope to see a huswife take thee between her legs/ and spin it off." "Flax" is a plant used to make fibers for weaving cloth, like linen. The individual fibers were tied around a stick called a distaff and then spun until they twisted together to make a usable thread. To people with dirty minds that distaff might resemble a male erection; housewives often spun the stick on their thighs. All this creates a rather deliciously obscene image of what could happen to Andrew. Of course, if he's not careful Andrew could catch syphilis from his adventures in the flax business, in which case he could lose his hair.

Andrew comes back to his decision to go home. He knows enough to realize that Olivia isn't interested in him. She's locked herself away from the world. Besides, Count Orsino wants to marry her. Toby reassures him that there's still some hope. Olivia has sworn she will not marry someone who is above her in estate (wealth), years (age) and wit (intelligence). In other words, Olivia may be stupid enough to pick Andrew as her husband. That's all that Andrew needs to hear, and at line 109 he cheerfully changes his mind: "I'll stay a month longer. I am a fellow o' th'/ strangest mind i' th' world." He then offers an observation about his strange mind, that he enjoys masques and revels – light musical entertainment and partying. Suddenly Toby sees hope for his protegee; if he likes masques and revels, he may be a good dancer. He asks if Andrew is good at these "kickshaws," or musical trifles. At line 113 Andrew admits that he is, being excessively careful not to overstate his achievements: "As any man in Illyria, whatsoever he be,/ under the degree of my betters," (He's careful not to compare himself with his social betters.) "and yet I will not/ compare with an old man." (And he excludes any comparison with a person "older" or more experienced than himself.) But within those limitations he's good at a popular dance called a "galliard." Notice Toby's pun about "cutting the mutton" in conjunction with Andrew's "caper." Andrew brags that he can do the "backtrick simpy as/ strong as any man in Illyria" [119]. You thought Michael Jackson invited the "moon-walk"? Andrew's like the guy with gold chains and 8-track tapes who's waiting for disco to come back into fashion.

Toby has at last found something that Andrew can do to impress girls, and at line 121 he mockingly berates Andrew for having hidden his talents before this. At line 123 he proposes a course of action to impress the world with his ability:

Why dost

thou not go to church in a galliard and come home

in a coranto? My very walk should be a jig. I

would not so much as make water but in a sink-a-

pace, What dost thou mean? Is it a world to hide

virtues in?

Toby lists four different dances Andrew can perform as he moves through the ordinary events of his day. My favorite is, of course, making water (urinating) in a sink-a-pace, using a pun on a French dance step and a chamber pot or sink. The scene ends with Andrew dancing frantically at Belch's direction and discussing which astrological signs affect your dancing ability. Why are we not surprised that Andrew, who believes beef has harmed his wits, also is a great believer in astrology?

Act I, Scene 4

Here we see how Viola has gotten along in her plan to go to work for Orsino. What complication arises in this scene? [Act I, scene 4]

The complication, of course, is that in the last two lines Viola reveals she is in love with Orsino: "Yet a barful [complicated] strife!/ Whoe'er I woo, myself would be his wife."

Last time we saw Viola, she was planning to disguise herself as a young man and go to work for Orsino. She has been very successful in just three days, becoming the count's confidante. Shakespeare often sets something in motion and checks in later, leaving it up to the audience's imagination to fill in the missing stages of the event. We don't see how Viola disguises herself or the job interview with Orsino. He just jumps to the established set-up.

Viola's "disguise" on Shakespeare's stage was probably little more than a man's jacket, tights and a phony beard or wig. There was a convention, an unspoken agreement between actors and audience, that if a character simply changed one aspect of his/her appearance, the other characters would not recognize that person. Similarly, later in the play we are asked to accept that Viola and her brother Sebastian are identical in appearance. For Shakespeare's audience if they were dressed alike, they were close enough to fool everyone in Illyria. In modern productions with audiences that are used to realistic drama directors often go to great lengths to show how the disguise works or how Viola could be mistaken for her brother. In the film version of the play which you'll see, the director Trevor Nunn adds an introductory scene which makes the gender confusion more believable. Later he has at least one character, a fencing master at Orsino's court, discover Viola's secret. These are clever additions to make the play more believable for a movie audience. The fact is that Twelfth Night is not a realistic play; it is a comedy built upon wildly improbable elements. If you are looking for believable disguises or exact similarities, you will be disappointed.

At line 13 we learn that Viola has quickly gained Orsino's trust. The count tells Viola, now called Cesario, "I have unclasped/ To thee the book even of my secret soul." He urges his newest servant to do whatever he must to get in to see Olivia. At line 18 Viola is overwhelmed by what he is asking of her: "Sure, my noble lord,/ If she be so abandoned to her sorrow,/ As it is spoke, she never will admit me." Orsino now orders Cesario to do whatever he must to speak to Olivia: "Be clamorous and leap all civil bounds/ Rather than make unprofited return." Now this introduces a dilemma for Viola: as a woman, she does not want Orsino and Olivia to get together. As a gentleman Cesario is duty-bound to do what his lord has ordered him to do. Viola/Cesario will wrestle with this ethical dilemma throughout the play because she cannot afford to win Orsino's love in a dishonorable way.

For his part Orsino is convinced that Cesario will succeed where his earlier messengers failed. He mentions the youthfulness of his new servant and then has a strange description at line 30:

For they shall yet belie thy happy years

That say thou art a man. Diana's lip

Is not more smooth and rubious; thy small pipe [voice]

Is as the maiden's organ, shrill and sound.

And all is semblative a woman's part.

These are not the kinds of things one man normally says to another. However, in the final scene in the play Orsino will suddenly discover Cesario's real identity, and he will have to develop erotic feelings for this person who is about to become his wife. So here we see that he is aware of this boy's potential as a girl from the beginning.

Act I, Scene 5

In this scene we meet three very important characters. The heiress Olivia we have heard described by several others. Her business manager is named Malvolio; more about him later. Then we meet Feste, the clown or jester, who is called "fool" frequently by other characters. You need a little background to appreciate this character more fully. Throughout history powerful people have often employed someone whose primary job was to entertain the boss: kings and dukes in the old days, movie stars and rock idols today. Frank Sinatra always had a guy whose job was to make the big man laugh; I'm sure J-Lo and Eminen do the same thing. In the old days this person was called the "jester," the purveyor of jokes or jests. Now in the early days this person was often someone who was mentally or physically challenged, and the humor was primarily laughing at the person. The humor was often heightened by having the jester wear bells so that every time he moved he made noise. (I confess, this humor would wear thin with me in about two minutes.) However, the tradition going back thousands of years was that the jester was a mental defective or fool. Now over the centuries the humor provided by the jester became much more sophisticated than bells or slapstick, but the jester continued to be seen as a fool, because it provided a cover for his humor. If your job was to make jokes to amuse a powerful man, you could get into trouble for offending powerful people in the court or even your boss. However, if you pretended to be a fool, no one could get angry with you because you weren't responsible for what you said. To make this game even more believable, a jester began using a little hand puppet called a zany. The fool would talk to the puppet, and then answer in the voice of the puppet. The zany could be as insulting as possible, because no one could be offended. You can see how this tradition leads right down to today when professional comedians often pretend to be mentally handicapped, like the early Jerry Lewis or Bob "Bobcat" Golthwaite. In an ventriloquist's act, it's always the dummy who cracks the job and the human is the straight man.

Another tradition started long before from the fact that the jesters were the least powerful people at the court and often could wear only rags or castoff clothes. This became the uniform for the jester, an outfit of rags sewn together called "motley." Finally, for reasons too complicated to explain here, the jester wore a cap which had several long spikes or horns, often with bells at the ends, called a "coxcomb." This strange headpiece was also associated with the jester's profession. So we have a professional comedian, called a fool, wearing motley and a coxcomb, dispensing humor which was often barbed and satiric. Review the first 30 lines of this scene. Why is the clown Feste in trouble with his employer? Characterize his humor. [Act I, Scene 5, lines 1 – 35].

We see Feste here is easy-going with the other members of the household and enjoys trading barbs with them. As the play progresses, however, we will find that he is somewhat removed from the issues that are so important for others, above the fray. We will come to see that he provides a kind of moral vantage point from which we can see the follies that others commit.

Apparently Feste has been away for a while, and Maria warns him at the beginning of the scene that Olivia is angry and will have him hanged. This threat is purely rhetorical; Olivia could not hang Feste, even if she wanted to. Feste turns the threat into a kind of bawdy joke at line: "Let her hang me. He who is well hanged in this world needs to fear no colors." Now "well hanged" meant the same thing for Shakespeare's audience that it does for us: a man being well-endowed sexually. Feste gets off a creative pun when he says such a person need "fear no colors," referring to flags on the battlefield, but also a "collar," or slang term for a hangman's noose. Feste's humor is filled with clever sexual innuendo and plays on words. Notice his obscene joke at line 19 "Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage." Maria has heard a lot of his jokes before, so that at line 22 when Feste says he is resolute on two points, as if he was determined not to change his mind on two issues, she supplies the punchline. "Points" could referred to intellectual positions, but it also meant the ties or primitive suspenders that held your pants up: "That if one break, the other will hold; or if/ both break your gaskins [loose trousers] fall" [24].

At line 27 Feste reveals something that will become important at the end of the play: "If Sir Toby would leave drink, thou wert as/ witty a piece of Eve's flesh as any in Illyria." In other words, if Toby ever sobered up, he would realize how attractive Maria was and would make a move to win her love. Maria doesn't want that discussed in public, but she does hanker after Olivia's uncle. That will explain why she is such a willing conspirator in the practical joke they play on Malvolio.

In the next sequence we'll meet Olivia, about whom everyone has expressed an opinion so far. She is supposedly grief-stricken. How would you assess the level of mourning in this scene? We also meet Malvolio, her business manager. On a large estate and in a big manor house the business steward could be a very important person. He oversaw all the operations, and he could often be spotted because he wore the keys to all the locks on a chain around his neck, sort of like the janitor in a school. What is Malvolio's dominant quality? Why is he so antagonistic toward Feste? [Act I, Scene 5, line 31 – 98]

At line 31 Feste hopes that he will be able to get out of trouble:

Wit, and't be thy will, put me into good

fooling. Those wits that think they have thee do

very oft prove fools, and I that am sure I lack thee

may pass for a wise man. For what says Quina-

palus? "Better a witty fool than a foolish wit."

In the first few lines of this speech we see the tension for Feste between his native intelligence and his reputation for being a fool. Although he says here that he lacks any wit, he is consistently the most intelligent character in the play, as Viola will attest later. As a comic Feste has discovered the inherent humor in inventing phony but impressive-sounding experts, as Quinapalus here. Educated people may try and impress people by quoting Roman writers; this jester just makes up his own. This is the same comic routine that was used for many years by an inventive comedian, Professor Irwin Corey, who would present very plausible-sounding arguments citing scholars and then quickly descend into howling silliness. David Letterman will also occasionally use this comic technique of mock learnedness.

Olivia is obviously angry with Feste and orders him to be taken away. At this point Feste does something that seems strange to us: he openly challenges his employer and says, she is the fool and must be taken away. Feste can get away with this because he is an "allowed fool," see line 94; this is, he is allowed to engage his superiors with barbs and witticisms. Olivia isn't interested in playing and calls him dishonest and a "dry fool" [39]. There's that word that set Sir Andrew off in scene three but here it is used to mean "unfunny." Feste chooses to interpret the word to mean "thirsty" at line 41:

Two faults, madonna, that drink and good

counsel [sound advice] will amend. For give the dry fool drink,

then is the fool not dry. Bid the dishonest man

mend himself; if he mend he is no longer dishonest;

if he cannot, let the botcher [mender of old clothes] mend him.

Feste's refutations of the charges of being dishonest and unfunny are not particularly humorous, but they do show us the basis for most of his humor: playing on the different meanings of words. By the way, his calling Olivia "Madonna" seems to be a kind of mock honorary title; no one else calls her that in the play. At line 45 he goes into his mock learnedness routine again, as if he were a philosophy major on powerful drugs:

Anything that's mended is but patched; virtue that trans-

gresses is but patched with sin, and sin that amends

is but patched with virtue. If that this simple syllo-

gism will serve, so; if it will not, what remedy?

Well, technically, in the language of philosophy, this is not a syllogism, but doesn't it sound impressive? It's just a play on the words "sin" and "virtue" in asserting that most things are neither one of the extremes but a mixture of both good and bad. Behind the foolery, Feste often has ideas which we would do well to heed. At line 54 he uses a Latin phrase: "cucullus non facit monachum," which means "A cowl or robe doesn't make a monk." He then applies this truism to himself by assuring Olivia at line 56 "I wear not motley [the uniform of the fool] in my brain." Just because he's supposedly mentally challenged doesn't mean he's stupid. Feste ends his initial exchange with Olivia by spouting academic-sounding gobbledygook at line 50: "As there is no true cuckold but calamity, so beauty's/ a flower. The lady bade take away the fool;/ therefore, I say again, take her away."

Now if Olivia were as grief-stricken as everyone says she is, she would have no interest if listening to the fool's lame jokes. But she does listen and accepts his challenge at line 57 to prove she is a fool. She enjoys the give-and-take. Feste warns her that he will have to "catechize" or question her to prove she is a fool, which she readily accepts. Feste's "proof" at line 65 is quite extraordinary:

Fool: Good madonna, why mournest thou?

Olivia: Good fool, for my brother's death.

Fool: I think his soul is in hell, madonna.

Olivia: I know his soul is in heaven, fool.

Fool: The more fool, madonna, to mourn for your

brother's soul, being in heaven. Take away the fool,

gentlemen.

This is breathtakingly tasteless! You don't make jokes about the soul of your employer's brother being in hell. The poor woman is so wracked with grief that she has vowed not to leave the house for seven years. The disposition of one's soul after death was something people in this time took very seriously. And that's why Feste made this apparently tasteless joke. It is actually a reminder to Olivia that her grief should be mitigated by the knowledge that her brother is in a better place; Feste has used his humor to comfort Olivia in her loss, probably more than any other member of her household. No wonder Olivia's response at line 71 shows her spirits lifting: "What think you of this fool, Malvolio? Doth/ he not mend?" Remember Feste's "syllogism" back at line 44 about "mending?" Olivia is beginning to see the virtue in Feste's humor.

We now meet Malvolio, who does not agree with Olivia's assessment. I've told you that he is the business manager for Olivia's estate, a position of importance, but still one of her employees. Shakespeare's audience would have recognized the type immediately. At line 74 he shoots down Feste's attempt to comfort Olivia. She asked if he did not mend:

"Yes, and shall do till the pangs of death/ shake him. Infirmity, that doth decay the wise, doth/ ever make the better fool." Malvolio's knee-jerk reaction to anything light, frivolous or kind throughout the play is self-righteous condemnation. If effect he says, "You think he's funny? Wait till he dies. Sickness and death makes even wise men fools." So much for comfort!

The last decades of Queen Elizabeth's reign had seen the rise of a new kind of religious fanatic, the puritan. These were people who were attracted by the more extreme Protestant zealots in Europe, people who believed that God was not interested in humans doing good deeds to earn their way into heaven. They believed that God knew whether individuals were to be saved or damned for all eternity when he made men, and most of humankind was condemned to everlasting hell. There was nothing we could do to escape our fate. There were only a few souls who were God's chosen, and they knew they were saved and looked down on the rest of us with smug righteousness.

They were called "puritans" because they sought to "purify" the Anglican Church, the state religion of England, from the last vestiges of the Catholic faith. Many of the puritan leaders were ministers in the official church, working for change within the church. They specialized in sermons featuring fire and brimstone. Many of the people attracted to this new, rigid faith were from the merchant class of the cities. That was because the puritans took a very unorthodox attitude toward wealth. Traditional Christian belief, stated in the New Testament, was that rich people would not be able to enter heaven: "It is as difficult for the wealthy to enter the kingdom of heaven as it is for a camel to enter the eye of a needle." However, under puritan belief, wealth was simply one more tangible sign that God had selected you for his chosen. The more you made, the more God smiled upon you. The poor were probably damned to hell anyway. To the puritan everything that happened to you was an expression of God's will. You can see why the beliefs of puritans were attractive to the rising merchants of Shakespeare's England, and why an ambitious man like Malvolio might call himself a puritan.

Despite their black-and-white beliefs about salvation and damnation, the puritans were very concerned about what they saw as immoral behavior by anyone else. They had become a political force on the city council of London and had forbidden any public theaters, which they considered dens of iniquity, within the city limits. Whenever there was an outbreak of plague, puritans insisted that the theaters be closed as sources of moral infection. So Shakespeare and his audience members were predisposed to dislike the religious beliefs espoused by Malvolio.

Malvolio's negative reaction to Feste is more than just a religious stance; he is jealous of anyone else who is close to Olivia, including Toby. Feste says at lines 77 – 80 that he may be no more than a fool, but Sir Toby is not taking bets that Malvolio is a genius. We now see Malvolio's personal enmity at line 81:

I marvel your ladyship takes delight in such

a barren rascal. I saw him put down the other day

with an ordinary fool that has no more brains than

a stone. Look you now, he 's out of his guard

already. Unless you laugh and minister occasion

to him, he is gagged. I protest I take these wise men

that crow so at these set kind of fools no better

than the fools zanies..

Before Malvolio had objected to Feste's levity on religious grounds, but now he becomes personal. He says that Feste isn't much of a jester, that he was beaten in an exchange of wits with another clown who really was a fool. Feste only succeeds in his job when people laugh. He concludes by saying that supposedly smart people who claim such professional comedians are funny are no better than the little hand puppets that I mentioned earlier, like the ventriloquist's dummy. Now this really hits below the belt, attacking Feste's professional competence. Feste never accuses Malvolio of being an incompetent business manager.

But Olivia does appreciate Feste's humor. After all he just used it to comfort her in her grief. Malvolio is calling her a dupe. At line 90 she defends her jester:

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 birdbolts that you deem cannon bullets.

There is no slander in an allowed fool, though

he do nothing but rail; nor no railing in a known

discreet man, though he do nothing but reprove.

Olivia's accusation that Malvolio is "sick of self-love" is very perceptive. In fact it will be Malvolio's imagining that everyone, including Olivia, is in love with him that will lead to the practical joke that will devastate him. Feste, she implies, is a decent, kindhearted person who means no harm, whereas Malvolio blows everything out of proportion, turning innocent birdshot into massive missiles. Feste has been allowed to engage her with jokes and satiric remarks. That's his job. This doesn't mean he is guilty of slander as Malvolio seems to suggest. In the same way Malvolio is in his position because he is "discreet," or responsible and serious, but his complaints against the jester, unfair as they are, do not make him a bitter, negative person. She accepts both her employees for what they are and what they do for her. Feste is so pleased by her defense of him at line 97 that he wishes the god of trickery, Mercury, will make her a spokesperson for fools.

In this next sequence Maria will bring word of a visitor at the front gate. Now it would be unusual for someone to call at Olivia's house. Remember she is in mourning and has vowed to lock herself away from the world. What's Olivia's reaction to the news? Why does she agree to see the messenger? [Act I, scene 5, lines 99 – 165]

Maria brings word that a young gentleman at the gate wishes to speak with her. Olivia guesses that it's a messenger from Orsino; she knows the passion of the duke/count. At line 102 Maria describes him as "a fair young man and well attended" (accompanied by a number of other servants, suggesting that he's someone important.) Now this piece of information is quite revealing: the fact that he is young and "fair," or good-looking, and has some signs of social prestige intrigues Olivia, who will ask to see him. Furthermore, Maria knows her employer well enough to know that this information will be of interest to her. Notice that in the following exchanges both Toby and Malvolio will absolutely fail to recognize Olivia's personal interest in this young stranger.

When she is told that Toby is talking with the visitor, Olivia angrily sends Maria to stop him at line 106: "Fetch him off, I pray you. He speaks nothing/ but madman. Fie on him!" Olivia knows her uncle's disposition well, and she doesn't want him to create a bad impression. After Maria leaves, Olivia sends Malvolio to deal with the messenger at line 108: "If it be a suit from the Count, I am sick, or/ not at home. What you will, to dismiss it." Here we get the subtitle of the play, What You Will, used for the only time in the play. Notice that its sense is dismissive, sort of like "Whatever!" for us. This is similar to the title of another play written about this time, Much Ado About Nothing. It also means "whatever you choose," which is the mantra of the characters in this play who make fools of themselves over love.

With Malvolio gone, Olivia warns Feste that his behavior "grows old, and people dislike it" [110], meaning Malvolio. Feste, however, saw how his employer stood up for him and he offers this double-edged blessing at line 112:

Thou hast spoke for us, madonna, as if thy

eldest son should be a fool; whose skull Jove

cram with brains, for – here he comes – one of thy

kin has a most weak pia mater [brain].

Feste praises Olivia for empathizing with him and other "fools," as if her son were a member of the fraternity. However, he quickly adds a hope that any son she might have will have plenty of brains to compensate for Uncle Toby's impeded mental powers, as he staggers in.

The next exchange, at line 116, is one of Shakespeare's greatest portrayals of a drunk. Toby is trying to be cool, although he is overjoyed to see Feste again and is plagued with his trademark belching. He tries to explain away his lapses in behavior as he blunders his way through the conversation.

Olivia: By mine honor, half drunk. What is he at the gate, cousin?

Toby: A gentleman

Olivia: A gentleman? What gentleman?

Toby: 'Tis a gentleman here. A plague o' these pickled herring! How now, sot?

Olivia immediately recognizes Belch's condition and was correct in her assessment that Toby would speak "nothing but madman." She's most interested in who this fair young visitor is and asks Toby for information, which is pointless. He can only blurt out twice that it's a gentleman. The reason Olivia seems surprised is that it would be unusual for a member of the upper classes to come unannounced to your front door. Toby belches loudly and tries to blame the pickled herring he had with his wine for breakfast. He recognizes Feste, a potential drinking buddy, and calls him "sot," an inappropriate term to use in front of Olivia.

At line 123 Olivia reprimands Toby. Notice the euphemism she uses to refer to his drunkenness:

Olivia: Cousin, cousin, how have you come so early

by this lethargy?

Toby: Lechery? I defy lechery. There's one at the gate.

Olivia: Ay, merry, what is he?

Toby: Let him be the devil and he will, I care not.

Give me faith, say I. Well, it's all one.

Olivia doesn't want to insult her uncle [remember "cousin" could refer to any relative beyond your immediate family], so she uses "lethargy" to refer to his drunkenness, as if his staggering were caused by excessive sleepiness. Toby mishears and thinks she is accusing him of sexual arousal and angrily denies the charge. (Ironically, most drunks do "defy lechery," since they're usually incapable of performance.) He returns to the point of his appearance, to tell her there's a visitor. When in frustration Olivia asks for more details, Toby dismisses the whole question: he simply doesn't care who it is.

After Toby staggers out Olivia and Feste have a short comic discussion of whether her uncle's intoxication has reached the first stage (being a fool), the second stage (being a madman) or the third (being drowned). She thinks he's in the third stage and asks that the "crowner," or coroner, be sent for to pronounce his verdict, but Feste reassures her it's only the second stage. Consequently he, the fool, will look after Toby, the madman.

Malvolio returns with more information about the visitor, but Olivia remains frustrated in her desire to find out what she really wants to know. Malvolio is dismayed by the visitor's behavior: he demands to see Olivia. Malvolio was told to get rid of him and has used the most common polite excuses – that the lady of the house is sick or is sleeping, but Cesario has refused to be deterred. (Remember, Orsino charged him/her in Act I, scene 4, line 21 to "Be clamorous and leap all civil bounds." Cesario's refusal to play the game of social fabrications is leaping civil bounds. Olivia is at first angered by this behavior and orders at line 145, "Tell him he shall not speak with me." Malvolio has anticipated this response and tells her, "H'as been told so; and he says he'll stand/ at your door like a sheriff's post, and be the supporter/ to a bench, but he'll speak with you." This threat to stay at her gate like a board used to post notices is not very genteel, but that just seems to intrigue Olivia all the more. Who is this guy?

Olivia asks Malvolio at line 149 "What kind o' man is he?" Malvolio gives her the same kind of non-answer her uncle did before, "Why, of mankind." So she asks again, "What manner of man?" Malvolio answers again with a kind of pun, "Of very ill manner. He'll speak with you, / will you. or no." She asks a third time, "Of what personage and years is he?" (The fact that Olivia keeps asking questions about this stranger alerts us that she's interested, although Toby and Malvolio remain clueless.) Malvolio finally gives her some specific information at line 155:

Not old enough for a man nor young

enough for a boy; as a squash [unripe pod of peas] is before 'tis a

peascod, or a codling [unripe apple] when 'tis almost an apple.

'Tis with him in standing water [at the turning of the tide], between boy and

man. He is very well-favored [good-looking] and he speaks very

shrewishly [like a teenager]. One would think his mother's milk

were scarce out of him.

Olivia finally finds out the visitor is good-looking, although this judgment comes from Malvolio. It's enough information for her to take the next step and see him for herself. Notice that the comparisons Malvolio uses above are the kinds of things someone who lived on a large estate where food was grown would use, things like peas and apples.

When Olivia agrees to see Cesario she orders Maria to place the veil over her face. A woman in mourning would normally appear only in a veil of mourning, but we'll see that Olivia also wants to play a practical joke on her caller. Furthermore, at line 165 she says, "We'll once more hear Orsino's embassy," letting us know that she knows all about Orsino's passion. It's the messenger she's interested in.

The first exchange between Olivia and Cesario/Viola takes place in prose, because

it is largely a joke. In this next sequence look for the change from prose to verse as the indication of where the characters get serious. Why doesn't this shift come at the same place for both characters? What words convince Olivia to violate social convention and speak with Cesario without anyone else present? [Act I, scene 5, lines 166 – 312]

This sequence opens with a practical joke. Depending on how the director chooses to stage the scene, there are at least two women present wearing veils when Cesario enters. When he asks which one is the lady of the house, Olivia answers at line 167, "Speak to me. I shall answer for her. Your will?" That implies that Maria, or any other veiled woman present, is Olivia rather than Olivia herself. Cesario launches into the overly formal, elaborate speech Orsino has asked her to present to his lady love at line 168:

Most radiant, exquisite, and unmatchable beauty

I pray you tell me if this be the lady of the house,

for I never saw her. I would be loath to cast away

my speech; for, besides that it is excellently well

penned, I have taken great pains to con [memorize] it. Good

beauties, let me sustain no scorn. I am very comptible [sensible],

even to the least sinister [impolite] usage.

Cesario realizes he is being made the butt of a joke and doesn't want to waste his fancy speech if Olivia is not present. His request for information emphasizes the perception that Orsino's message, while beautiful ("well penned"), is insincere since the messenger has had to memorize or "con" it. Cesario asks again at line 178 which woman is Olivia, and the countess asks sharply at line 180: "Are you a comedian" or actor, having to learn his lines. In Viola/Cesario's response we get one of the innumerable hints at the secret of her hidden identity: "No, my profound heart; and yet (by the very/ fangs of malice I swear) I am not that I play./ Are you the lady of the house?" She is not the same person as the one she plays (a man) – a piece of dramatic irony.

Olivia finally admits that she is the lady of the house at line 184: "If I do not usurp myself, I am." Cesario quickly turns that statement against Olivia and her resistance to Orsino: "Most certain, if you are she, you do usurp/ yourself; for what is yours to bestow is not yours/ to reserve." In other words, you have no right to deny a worthy man who loves you; you owe it to yourself and the world to marry and produce an heir. This is an ad-lib by the quick-witted Cesario who immediately returns to his prepared remarks, telling Olivia, "I will// on with my speech in your praise and then show/ you the heart of my message." When Olivia tells him to get to the point and skip the praise, Cesario objects at line 192: "Alas, I took great pains to study it, and 'tis poetical." Olivia, who remains unfazed by Orsino's verbal efforts, declares if it is poetical it is more likely to be "feigned" or phony. At line 195 she tells Cesario one reason why she has allowed him to enter her house:

I heard you were saucy at my gates, and

allowed your approach rather to wonder at you

than to hear you. If you be not mad, be gone; if

you have reason, be brief. 'Tis not that time of

moon with me to make one in so skipping [insignificant] a dialogue.

This passage reinforces the perception that Cesario/Viola's behavior in demanding to see Olivia went beyond "all civil bounds," as Orsino instructed her. If all this messenger is going to do is repeat Orsino's tired declaration of love, Olivia has no patience. Maria makes the answer more definite at line 201: "Will you hoist sail, sir? Here lies your way." Characters in a Shakespearean play seldom deliver straight-forward messages, so here Maria turns the occasion into a metaphor about hoisting anchor and sailing away. It is a mark of Cesario's quick wit that he answers Maria in the same vein: "No, good swabber [a sailor who swabbed the deck]; I am to hull [a ship remaining at rest] here a little longer." He then says to Olivia at line 203: "Some mollification for your giant, sweet lady," referring to the short Maria sarcastically

This comment on Maria's size is similar to references in several of Shakespeare's plays written around this time where one teenaged actor is shorter than the other actor who specialized in playing the women's roles. We saw such a reference in A Midsummer Night's Dream with Hermia and Helena. Many scholars believe that in the late-1590's Shakespeare had two principal boy actors, one of whom was noticeably shorter than the other, hence the sarcastic reference to Maria as a "giant."

When Olivia expresses disapproval of Cesario's behavior in delivering his message at line 205, "Sure you have some hideous matter to deliver,/ when the courtesy of it [your demeanor} is so fearful," Cesario responds at 214, "The rudeness that hath appeared in me have I/ learned from my entertainment." In other words, "You treated me badly, played jokes on me. I'm simply answering in kind." He makes it clear that his message is entirely peaceful at line 208 – 211 but for Olivia's ears alone. At line 215 he tells her, "What I am, and/ what I would are as secret as maidenhead: to/ your ears, divinity; to other's profanation." This last part really arouses Olivia's curiosity – something divinely secret! She immediately orders everyone else to leave so she can "hear this divinity," and in so doing she violates one of the cardinal rules of courtly ladies – always have a chaperone present when you speak to a strange man. Cesario understands how to play the psychological game to get Olivia to listen by promising something mysterious.

As soon as Maria, Malvolio and the others have left, Olivia asks, "What is your text?" at line 220. Cesario answers by addressing her as "Most sweet lady," but before he can complete his thought, Olivia answers her own question about Cesario's "text" as if "most sweet lady" were a quotation or idea from the Bible, the "text" upon which a preacher might base his sermon. At line 222 she mockingly declares "most sweet lady" to be "A comfortable doctrine, and much may be/ said of it. Where lies your text?" That is, "Where in the Bible does this idea come from?" This is an elaborate play on ideas, much like "hoist sail" and "swabber" back at line 201. Olivia is testing Cesario's mental quickness in responding to this comic riff, and the kid comes through by answering, "In Orsino's bosom." If this is the source in the Bible, the book of true faith, demands Olivia, "In what chapter of his bosom?" Cesario says at line 226, "To answer by the method [playing this word game] in the first of his heart." Olivia is not impressed by Cesario's message, although she has enjoyed playing the game. At line 228 she declares, "O, I have read it; it is heresy." She rejects the claim that Orsino's love is genuine or that she should take it seriously.

Cesario/Viola now does something daring. At line 230, he asks to see Olivia's face. Why would he/she ask to see behind that black veil? As a woman, Viola might be naturally curious to check out her competition. As a man Cesario would recognize by her flippant conversation that Olivia is terribly vain. Asking to see her face would be a way to keep her talking, to locate another approach to persuade her to accept Orsino. Olivia is vain. A proper courtly lady at this point would end the conversation immediately and excuse herself, but Olivia jumps at the chance to show herself to this young stranger at line 231:

Have you any commission from your lord to

negotiate with my face? You are now out of your

text. But we will draw the curtain and show you

the picture. [unveils] Look you, sir, such a one I

was this present. Is't not well done?

She realizes that Cesario is probably going beyond the instructions he received from Orsino, but she willingly plays along and refers to herself as a picture, a thing of beauty at this moment. She is proud of her beauty and asks if, like a painting, it is well done. If Viola is curious and Cesario is just trying to keep her talking, what do you think Olivia makes of this request to see her face? That's right – the kid must be interested in her.

Cesario/Viola's response to the question "Is't not well done" at line 236 reveals just a little natural jealousy: "Excellently done, if God did all," answers Cesario/Viola. It's about the only place in the play where Viola reveals any jealousy about her rival for Orsino's love. Here she is, in love with this guy who only knows her as a boy, and she's got to win Olivia for him. No wonder she questions whether Olivia's beauty is natural or is chemically enhanced. Olivia probably misses the full import of this catty remark, but she assures Cesario about her beauty: "'Tis in grain, sir; 'twill endure wind and weather." If she is like a beautiful picture, the paint won't fade.

Up to this point the entire scene has been in prose because it has been primarily comic. Now Cesario/Viola suddenly gets serious. Perhaps, she realizes how desperate her own situation is; maybe she wonders how Olivia can make a joke out of the love of a man she would die to have. In any event she begins to speak verse as she analyzes Olivia's attitude at line 239:

'Tis beauty truly blent, whose red and white

Nature's own sweet and cunning hand laid on.

Lady, you are the cruel'st she alive

If you will lead these graces to the grave,

And leave the world no copy.

Viola acknowledges that Olivia's beauty is natural and genuine. Her disdain for Orsino's love is just not understandable, especially given the power of Viola's own passion. So Cesario/Viola uses an argument that men had used on women since the Middle Ages – you are so beautiful, you owe it to the world to get pregnant as soon as possible so that you leave a legacy of your beauty. The impregnation is a dirty job, but the guy is willing to do it.

Viola may be serious, but Olivia still treats the situation as a joke, so she continues to speak in prose at line 244:

O, sir, I will not be so hard-hearted. I will give

out divers schedules [various descriptions] of my beauty. It shall be

inventoried [catalogued], and every particle and utensil [detail] labeled

to my will [as if in a legal document]: as, item, two lips, indifferent red;

item, two gray eyes, with lids to them; item,

one neck, one chin, and so forth. Were you sent hither

to praise me?

In this passage we see how Olivia enjoys mocking Orsino's passion and how aware she is of her own beauty and its ability to captivate men. She is vain and cruel toward those who fall under her spell. In the final question in this passage we see her indirectly reminding Cesario that he is a messenger and has a particular job he must fulfill. She is intrigued that this young servant has asked to see her face and wonders if he has fallen for her, i.e. wants to "praise" her.

As a woman Viola finds Olivia's attitude indefensible. Orsino's love, which the countess mocks, Viola would give anything to possess. At line 251, again in verse, she pronounces her judgment of Olivia:

I see you what you are; you are too proud;

But if you were the devil you are fair.

My lord and master loves you. O, such love

Could be but recompensed though you were crowned

The nonpareil [epitome] of beauty.

Women who rejected men were often accused of being "proud"; in fact, the term was often used to emotionally blackmail women into submitting to a man's advances, just to avoid the accusation. At the same time Viola has to admit that she is "fair" or beautiful. Nevertheless, she could be the most beautiful in the world, the "nonpareil," she should recognize and "recompense" the ardor of Orsino's passion.

What Olivia hears is that this intriguing young man finds her "fair." She wants to hear more, so she asks at line 255, "How does he love me?" looking for more details, more praise. She has now shifted to verse. Cesario answers with rather conventional images of passion: "With adoration, with fertile tears,/ With groans that thunder love, with sighs of fire." Olivia is not impressed, but she realizes that she must be polite, and in the passage from 258 to 264 she carefully praises Orsino for all his virtues but concludes, "I cannot love him./ He might have took his answer long ago."

Now Viola sees the same things in Orsino, but she is consumed by passion for him and his qualities. She articulates her mystification at Olivia's attitude at line 265:

If I did love you in my master's flame,

With such a suff'ring, such a deadly life,

In your denial I would find no sense;

I would not understand it.

Now, this idea touches a nerve in Olivia and she asks, "Why, what would you?" i.e. "what would you do if you loved me." In her effort to convey Orsino's affection, and perhaps to articulate her own fantasy about how she wishes someone would woo her, Viola makes a fatal mistake in answering Olivia's question beginning at line 269.

Make me a willow cabin at your gate

And call upon my soul within the house;

Write loyal cantons [songs] of contemned [unrequited] love

And sing them loud even in the dead of night;

Hallo your name to the reverberate [echoing] hills

And make the babbling gossip of the air

Cry out, "Olivia!" O, you should not rest

Between the elements of air and earth

But you should pity me.

On the surface this passage is romantic claptrap, filled with exaggerations. This idealized lover would camp outside his girlfriend's house, building a small structure (in violation of zoning regulations) out of willow branches – willow was the tree associated with sorrow and unrequited love. The lover's soul was the girlfriend, inside the big house. The lover would write country-western songs and sing them all night. (Try that in my neighborhood and I'm calling the cops!) The lover would call out the girl's name so loud it would echo from the hills. He would drive her crazy with this kind of stalking behavior until she relented and "pitied" him, i.e. gave him what he wanted.

However, imagine what Olivia hears. This attractive young man describes over-the-top behavior to prove his love, behavior which "leaps over all civil bounds." He would violate the standards of polite society to prove his devotion. He has already begun this process by his insistence on talking with her and then seeing her face. He seems willing to go to any length to prove his love. We may find the content silly, but the passage is very poetic. Notice how the sounds of "reverberate" and "babbling" in a way imitate the very echo effect they describe. The power of the words has a real effect upon Olivia. Much as we saw in Romeo and Juliet the human voice and imagination are the ultimate organs of romantic love. No wonder at line 278 she observes, "You might do much."

Where does Viola come up with this description? She may well be imagining how she would like to be courted by the man she loves. There's a kind of desperation in the description given by the poor young woman who is trapped in a role she does not want to play. Think for a moment about Orsino behaving like this. Is he the guy to build the cabin and write the songs? Hardly! He's back home finding a comfortable position in the garden to suffer for love. Maybe in some way Viola wishes Orsino were more like the idealized, action-packed lover she imagines here.

Olivia is now fully in love. But before a Renaissance lady can allow herself to indulge in love, she has to make sure her potential lover is socially appropriate. And so Olivia asks at line 278, "What is your parentage?" and Cesario/Viola answers, "Above my fortunes [because I have to work for another person], yet my state is well [I am a member of the upper class]./ I am a gentleman." Olivia ends the conference, telling Cesario to return to Orsino and tell him she cannot love him, but asking Cesario to return to tell her how he takes the news. This request sets up an awkward dilemma for Cesario/ Viola: on one hand Olivia says Orsino has no hope; on the other, she offers this suggestion she may just be playing coy, so come back tomorrow. The countess offers the young man a tip for delivering the message at line 284. This action may be a test of his status as a gentleman. A person with real gentility would never accept a tip, unlike the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet. Cesario denies that he is "a fee'd post" or paid messenger, and reminds Olivia that Orsino is the one who wants a little consideration. At line 287 he places a kind of curse on Olivia: "Love make his heart of flint that you shall love [the man you fall in love with];/ And let your fervor, like my master's, be/ Placed in contempt. Farewell, fair cruelty." Of course, that is exactly what is about to happen to Olivia.

Olivia now alone repeats pieces of the conversation she just had to let us know how much she is in love. At line 296 she asks, "Even so quickly may one catch the plague?" Here again is that odd way the Elizabethans had of seeing love as an affliction, a wonderful state to be in, but an illness nonetheless. She calls for Malvolio and tells him to return a ring that Cesario had left behind despite her refusal to accept it. She means the ring, of course, as a secret indication of her affection for Cesario. Olivia has now become the initiator in this love affair. Of course, she feels she has no choice and at line 311 she concludes, "Fate, show thy force; ourselves we do not owe [we have no control over ourselves]./ What is decreed must be – and be this so!" However, before she gave way to her passion, we see her give herself permission to feel this way at line 299, "Well, let it be." This is simply another way of stating the subtitle of the play, "What You Will."

ACT II

The second act of the play begins with two short scenes. The first scene introduces us to Viola's supposedly drowned brother, Sebastian, who lands in Illyria with his rescuer, a sailor named Antonio. The second scene is the completion of the action at the end of Act I, scene 5 as Malvolio catches Cesario and delivers the ring. As you review these two scenes ask yourself why they appear in this particular order. Also ask yourself in what way Antonio is similar to Olivia. [Act II, scenes 1 and 2]

This scene seems to come out of nowhere. We had only been prepared by a brief reference back in Act I, scene 2 to Viola's missing brother. Shakespeare expects us to figure out where these two guys come from and how they relate to the rest of the play.

Sebastian reveals his real identity to Antonio as he prepares to part from him. Apparently Antonio saved Sebastian from the sea after the shipwreck. At that time Sebastian, for some reason, gave Antonio a phony name. Perhaps he did not wish strangers to know who he was, the son of a wealthy man, until he could trust them. Maybe it is just part of the pattern of deception in which all the other characters indulge in this play. In any event Sebastian tells his friend who he is and of the sorrow of the loss of his sister at line 25: "A lady, sir, though it was said she much/ resembled me, was yet of many accounted beautiful." So we get the idea of the physical resemblance of the brother and sister reinforced. Like Viola, Sebastian feels himself almost overwhelmed by his grief.

What's most important in this scene is the powerful love which Antonio feels for Sebastian. He does not want to part from him. When he learns that Sebastian is of the upper class, he asks if can serve as his servant at line 35. Finally, in the last five lines of the scene, after Sebastian has left for Orsino's court, Antonio reveals that he loves the boy so much, he will follow him to Orsino's, despite the fact that he has many enemies there. At line 47 he declares: "But come what may, I do adore thee so/ That danger shall seem a sport, and I will go." This statement, made in verse, unlike the rest of the scene in prose, is a serious declaration, as Antonio gives himself permission to do something stupid in the name of love, just as Olivia had back at the end of Act I, scene 5. Both Antonio and Olivia have chosen to fall in love with someone who is not gender appropriate.

Do Antonio and Sebastian have a homosexual relationship? The text does not suggest that the interest Antonio has is sexual. Elsewhere in the plays Shakespeare does allude to sexual relations between men, although the term "homosexual" was not in use at that time. Commentators back in the 19th Century took great pains to deny that there was anything erotic in Antonio's love; he just liked Sebastian a whole lot. It is true that men in the Elizabethan time were often much more emotionally intimate with other men than they were with their wives or girlfriends. Shakespeare's own sonnets are filled with this kind of affection. More contemporary scholars and directors have argued that Antonio could well be an aging gay man seeking a younger companion. Shakespeare's text lets us have it both ways. The important thing is that Antonio will put himself in harm's way for the sake of love.

The second scene where Malvolio catches up with Cesario takes place only minutes after he had left Olivia's house. Yet Shakespeare has inserted the first scene into the time sequence. Why? What information do we, the audience, receive in the first scene that changes our perception of the dilemma Viola discovers in the second scene? When Olivia falls in love with Cesario/Viola she creates a real problem. How can Viola win Orsino's love and still remain loyal to his charge that Cesario win Olivia's love for him?

The appearance of Sebastian suggests the solution. However, only we in the audience glimpse this possible development. This difference in what the characters perceive and what we perceive is what allows us to enjoy the humor of the comedy, the discomfort and uncertainty of the characters while we rest assured that there will be a solution at the end. Olivia and Viola will each get the man they can love.

As we might expect Malvolio is very short-tempered and surly in delivering the ring and message to Cesario. However, we get the secret meaning when he throws the ring to the boy and warns him not to come again on Orsino's behalf, except to come tomorrow and tell Olivia how the count takes this rejection. At line 12 Cesario declares, "She took the ring of me. I'll none of it." This suggests that Cesario/Viola quickly guesses what's going on. To protect the noble lady's honor he pretends that she had given him a ring. However, at line 17, after Malvolio has stomped out, throwing the ring on the ground, Viola tells us,

I left no ring with her. What means this lady?

Fortune forbid my outside have not charmed her.

She made good view of me; indeed, so much

That sure methought her eyes had lost her tongue,

For she did speak in starts distractedly.

She loves me sure; the cunning of her passion

Invites me in this churlish messenger.

None of my lord's ring? Why, he sent her none.

I am the man.

It doesn't take Viola long to figure out what has happened. She is much more perceptive about emotional issues than most of the men in play. Can you see Orsino. Toby or Andrew picking up the clues the way Viola has here?

Once Viola figures out the situation, she expresses some sympathy for poor Olivia, but who does she blames for the terrible mistake? At line 25 she concludes,

If it be so as 'tis,

Poor lady, she were better love a dream.

Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness

Wherein the pregnant enemy does much.

Viola's decision to dress up and behave as a man has led directly to this confusion, but, like all the other characters in the play, she does not accept responsibility for the harm she has caused. No, the fault is some abstraction called "disguise" that is the culprit.

At line 29 she continues laying the blame on someone or something else:

How easy is it for the proper false

In women's waxen hearts to set their forms!

Alas, our frailty is the cause, not we,

For such as we are made of, such we be.

Yes, that's the source of the problem. Because Olivia is a woman she mistook the reality of the situation. Nor is Viola guilty because, of course, she's a weak woman as well. The concept that women were "weaker" than men was widely accepted in Shakespeare's society. The comedies, however, consistently show that in matters of the heart, women were usually stronger and smarter than men.

Cesario/Viola concludes by analyzing the situation at line 36 just in case anyone has missed all the ramifications:

As I am man,

My state is desperate for my master's love.

As I am woman (now alas the day!)

What thriftless sighs shall poor Olivia breathe?

O Time, thou must untangle this, not I;

It is too hard a knot for me t' untie.

Here again we see Viola ducking responsibility for her own behavior. There's nothing she can do to alter the situation, so she calls on some abstraction called Time to straighten out the mess she has made. It is an all-too-human response.

Act II, Scene 3

The next scene is a drunken party with just Sir Toby and Sir Andrew. Feste joins them for fun and games. Finally Maria comes in to warn them that they are making too much noise. What conflict is anticipated in the first 86 lines of this scene? [II, 3, lines 1 – 86]

We have all probably had this experience of being at a party which has gone on far too long, and one diehard insists that no one leave; we must keep the party going all night. At the beginning Toby is trying to convince Andrew that going to bed after midnight is actually going to bed early. It's the kind of twisted logic that doesn't make sense even if you're already drunk. Andrew says plaintively at line 4, "I know to be up late is to be up late." Toby, playing the mock philosopher, denies this conclusion at line 8: "to go to bed after midnight/ is to go to bed betimes [early]" To prove his point he asks the obvious question, "Does not our lives consist of the four elements.?" This is obvious, because everyone at that time knew that all existence consisted of earth, air, fire and water. Everyone, that is, except Andrew, who must have missed that day in school when they covered the subject. He answers, "Faith, so they say; but I think it rather consists of eating and drinking."

Feste enters and does a visual joke based on a popular illustration of the time showing two donkeys and titled "We Three." (You were supposed to realize that the third ass was the person looking at the picture.) Toby asks for a "catch," a song. Andrew agrees and compliments Feste on his voice and on his recent performance, which he repeats word-for-word at line 22: "In sooth, thou wast in very gracious fooling/ last night, when thou spok'st of Pigrogromitus, of/ the Vapians passing the equinoctial of Queubus." Andrew had even sent him a tip of three sixpences for his performance. It's revealing that Andrew, who doesn't know the four elements and can't speak a word of French, has absorbed Feste's performances word-for-word. Essentially everything that Feste does in the play is designed to get a tip, and so he gives Andrew some more of the mockery of learned language at line 27 that delighted the knight before: "I did impeticos thy gratillity, for Malvolio's/ nose is no whipstock. My lady has a white hand,/ and the Myrmidons are no bottle-ale houses." This quickly degenerates into sheer nonsense, but that has not kept scholars for the last four hundred years from searching for the "hidden meaning" in "myrmidons" and "bottle-ale houses."

The party needs music, and both Toby and Andrew offer Feste, whom Andrew has praised for having a "sweet breast," or voice, a tip to sing. When Feste asks what kind of a song they want, a "love song" or a "song of good life," (party song), they both answer, "a love song," to which Andrew adds, ridiculously, "I care not for good life" [line 39]. Feste sings one of the most famous songs in all of Shakespeare's plays at line 40:

O mistress mine, where are you roaming?

O, stay and hear, your true-love's coming,

That can sing both high and low.

Trip no further, pretty sweeting;

Journeys end in lovers' meeting,

Every wise man's son doth know.

What is love? 'Tis not hereafter;

Present mirth hath present laughter;

What's to come is still unsure;

In delay there lies no plenty;

Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,

Youth's a stuff will not endure.

These lyrics are the equivalent of an Elizabethan country-western song – a popular number about fleeting love and unrequited affection and especially songs about love cut short by death. We know how the music for this number went, because a song-book of popular pieces was printed right around this time, and some of songs from the plays are included. We don't know for sure if Shakespeare wrote the music or just used popular numbers already composed. In the Trevor Nunn film version of the play, this song is done as a duet by Feste and Maria and it is pointedly sung to Sir Toby, emphasizing the idea that neither he nor Maria are getting any younger, and he needs to make a decision.

Toby and Andrew are sloppy drunks, and they weep at the sentiments of this song, until Toby snaps out of his funk and declares, "Let's party!" in effect and asks at line 68, "Shall we make the welkin dance?" literally, "Shall we make the heavens dance." He wants Feste to start a "catch" or "round" that "will draw three souls out of one weaver." The weavers were noted for their piety and singing of religious hymns. Toby wants a song so good it will have triple effect on a holy man. The catch that Andrew suggests is "Thou Knave." Feste tells him that if they sing that song, he will be required to calls Andrew "thou knave." That doesn't bother Andrew at all; people call him "knave" all the time. Then Feste, in a fooling mood, says he can't start since the first line is "Hold thy peace!"

Maria enters and angrily tells the boys they are making too much noise and that Olivia has told Malvolio to come and throw them out of the house. Using his own gobbledy-gook nonsense answer, Toby dismisses the threat, proclaiming at line 77, "Am I not consanguineous?" that is, "Am I not a blood relative of Olivia?" Toby further flaunts his contempt for the admonition to be quiet by singing lines from old songs, including the seasonal favorite at line 85, "O the twelfth day of December." When Feste compliments Toby on his "admirable fooling," Andrew, not to be out done, says, at line 82, "Ay, he does well enough, if he be disposed,/ and so do I too. He does it with a better grace, but/

I do it more natural." The knight does not realize that his use of "natural" here can also mean that his fooling is that of an idiot, or "natural."

In the next sequence notice how Toby and Malvolio battle for control of the household. What is the principal conflict between these two very different men? [II, 3, lines 87 – 191]

Malvolio enters the room with a blast at line 87:

My masters, are you mad? Or what are you?

Have you no wit, manners, nor honesty, but to

gabble like tinkers at this time of the night? Do you

make an alehouse of my lady's house, that ye squeak

out your coziers' catches without any mitigation

or remorse of voice? Is there no respect of place,

persons, nor time in you?

Toby answers at line 94: "We did keep time, sir, in our catches. Sneck up!"

Malvolio is justifiably angry about the racket the party-guys are making, but his rage reveals a real personal animosity and a social prejudice. He begins by questioning their sanity and then accuses them of behaving like "tinkers," itinerant, lower-class workers who were notorious for drinking. He then accuses Toby and Andrew, both knights, of turning Olivia's house into a cheap dive, an "alehouse." The singing he characterizes as "coziers' catches," or songs by shoemakers, again suggesting that their behavior is socially inappropriate. Drunkenness by members of the upper classes was tolerated; King James himself once got smashed at a state dinner and had to be carried from the room. Malvolio, in his condemnation, is stepping over a line and equating behavior with social class. Toby denies that he and the others did not respect time; they kept musical time in their singing. He insults Malvolio with a great Elizabethan oath: "Sneck up!" Feel free to use the phrase whenever you need a slightly more refined put-down than the usual vulgarity.

The fact is that Malvolio is envious of title and rank. In a couple of scenes we will learn his innermost fantasy is to become a count and use that title to straighten up everyone else's behavior. Malvolio represents the power of censure, the self-righteous condemnation of whatever others enjoy. Malvolio uses his position and Olivia's justifiable displeasure to advance his own agenda. At line 95 he tries a slightly less hostile approach to get Toby's attention:

Sir Toby, I must be round [direct] with you. My

lady bade me tell you that, though she harbors

you as her kinsman, she's nothing allied to your

disorders. If you can separate yourself and your

misdemeanors, you are welcome to the house. If

not, and it would please you to take leave of her,

she is very willing to bid you farewell.

Malvolio invokes Olivia here as his authority for controlling Toby's behavior. He makes it clear, although indirectly, that his niece is perfectly willing to see Toby leave, if he can't behave. Notice, "If not, and it would please you to take leave of her, she is very willing to bid you farewell." Is that too subtle a warning? Well, it is if you're a leech like Toby. It will take a tow truck to get him out of the house.

Toby ignores Malvolio's warning and, with Feste, sings a song which taunts the business steward indirectly. At line 111 he sings a line which asks, "Shall I bid him go, and spare not?" Feste teases him by answering, "O. no, no, no, no, you dare not." At line 113 he blasts Malvolio directly, reminding him of his position in the household and in that society: "Out of tune, sir? Ye lie." Despite what your notes tell at this point, I believe the line is directed at Malvolio for suggesting, back at line 94, that Toby and his friends are committing a nuisance by their singing. Toby then uses the ultimate argument against Malvolio at line 113: "Art any more than a steward? Dost thou think, because thou are virtuous,/ there shall be no more cakes and ale?" Malvolio is just a servant, an employee, and he is out of line criticizing Toby's behavior. Furthermore, his self-righteousness gives him no moral superiority over others. Having a good time, here symbolized by "cakes and ale," is not affected by Malvolio's judgment. Feste agrees, and echoes the same sentiment at line 116, "Yes, by Saint Anne, and ginger [often put in ale] shall be hot in the mouth too." Toby adds the final insult at line 118: "Go, sir, rub your chain with crumbs," and calls for another cup of wine in direct defiance of Malvolio. Elizabethans often used dried bread crumbs to polish silverware, and here Toby reminds Malvolio that the chain he wears around his neck to hold all his keys is a badge of his office, his inferior status as a servant. Furthermore, the line suggests that Malvolio is so proud of being an employee, he preens and tries to advertise his lowliness by polishing his chain.

Malvolio now shifts his attention to Maria; if he can't control Toby's drinking, he can try to keep Maria from enabling it, what he calls, "this uncivil rule." He threatens to tell Olivia if Maria does what Toby asks. This is not the first time we've seen Malvolio try to control the way others behave; if moral persuasion doesn't work, he'll use threats. Maria, anxious to catch Sir Toby, quickly makes her allegiance clear when she says at line 124, "Go shake your ears," implying that as an ass Malvolio has ears large enough to shake. The question is whether Malvolio hears Maria's defiance of his directive or if she waits until he is safely out of earshot before she utters her insult.

Andrew has kept quiet as long as Malvolio was in the room; now, when it's safe, he tries to think of some way to insult the steward. He comes up with this strange plan at line 126 that he will challenge him to a duel, an affair of honor, and then not show up for the fight. Andrew believes this will make Malvolio look like a fool; in reality such actions would make Andrew look like a coward in the eyes of all the gentlemen. Toby urges him to issue the challenge and offers to help. This hare-brained idea will resurface in the next act.

Maria, realizing this joke will backfire on the boys, quickly offers an alternative way to make Malvolio look foolish. At line 132 she observes that Olivia is acting strange ever since Cesario had visited, reinforcing what we have already seen in the countess' behavior. At line 140 Maria reveals that Malvolio is a kind of Puritan. Andrew, who probably doesn't know what a Puritan is, says if that were true, he would beat the steward, "like a dog." At line 142 Toby questions this statement:

Toby: What, for being a Puritan? Thy exquisite

reason, dear knight.

Andrew: I have no exquisite reason for't, but I have

reason good enough.

Just as he doesn't know what a Puritan is, Andrew doesn't have any idea what an "exquisite" reason is. So he's reduced to assuring Toby he does have reasons for his strong feelings. Andrew's problem is that people around him are always talking about things he doesn't understand but which seem to require strong responses.

Maria now gives us the most perceptive evaluation of Malvolio's character at line 146:

The devil a Puritan that he is, or anything

constantly but a time-pleaser [sycophant]; an affectioned [phony] ass,

that cons state without book [tries to act like a gentleman] and utters it by great

swarths [swaths]; the best persuaded of himself [an egomaniac]; so

crammed, as he thinks, with excellencies that it is

his grounds of faith that all that look on him love

him; and on that vice in him will my revenge find

notable cause to work.

Malvolio's problem isn't so much his religious beliefs but that he pretends to be something he really isn't and that he has too high an opinion of himself and thinks that everyone else shares that opinion. Olivia had made a similar observation back in Act I, scene 5, line 90 when she said to him, "O, you are sick of self-love, Malvolio." Maybe the implied superiority of the Puritan beliefs attracted people like Malvolio who needed to feel superior; or maybe the religion encouraged its adherents to develop these character flaws. In either case Maria's description makes it easier for the audience to enjoy the practical joke about to be played on the steward. Maria now proposes to fool Malvolio by using her ability to imitate Olivia's handwriting and composing a supposed love letter wherein Olivia will reveal that she loves Malvolio. She suggests that Toby, Andrew and Feste will eavesdrop on Malvolio when he finds and reads the letter. At line 168 Andrew gets to offer one of the few jokes he has in the whole play.

After she leaves Toby reveals his affection for her, or at least as much affection as he is capable of at line 179: "She's a beagle, true-bred, and one that adores me." I guess being called a beagle by the man you want to marry is better than being called a pit bull. Notice that Toby knows exactly how she feels about him and what she wants from him. Not to be outdone Andrew confesses, "I was adored once too." How poignant! As they leave to continue the party Toby reminds Andrew that he will need to send home for some more money. When the knight worries that if he doesn't win Olivia's hand, he will out of money. Toby assures him that the marriage is a certainty.

Act II, Scene 4

Notice how this scene differs from the previous one. Feste is in this scene as well and sings another song. Finally, notice how Viola tries to educate Orsino about the reality of women and their love. [II, 4]

Like the previous scene this is a kind of party with music, but how different the mood! Rather than getting drunk on sack, Orsino is getting intoxicated on his own emotions. In the opening lines he requests a song performed the previous night. A servant is sent to find Feste, who performed the number. In the first lines of the play Orsino defined his mood by music: "If music be the food of love…." While they wait for Feste's arrival. Orsino instructs Cesario in the proper way to use music to heighten your pain in love. At line 15 he says

If ever thou shalt love,

In the sweet pangs of it remember me:

For such as I am all true lovers are,

Unstaid and skittish in all motions else [distracted in all your emotions]

Save in the constant image of the creature

That is beloved. How dost thou like this song?

Between the lines here there is a sense of pride Orsino seems to be taking in his suffering for love, as if to say, "I'm the poster boy for unrequited love." He tells us he thinks only of his beloved, but he has apparently made no effort to see her.

At line 21 Cesario answers that the song being played, while they wait for Feste's performance, "gives a very echo to the seat [the heart]/ Where Love is throned." This is the kind of elaborate courtly love talk that Orsino enjoys, and he guesses that since Cesario can talk the talk he must have walked the walk, i.e. been in love. At line 23 he asks, "thine eye/ Hath stayed upon some favor [face] that it loves./ Hath it not, boy?"

Cesario/ Viola's answer is one of the classic examples of dramatic irony in the play. By that I mean that as Cesario the answers at line 25 have one meaning for Orsino, but as Viola the answers have another meaning for us:

Viola: A little, by your favor

Orsino: What kind of woman is't?

Viola: Of your complexion.

Orsino: She is not worth thee then. What years, i'faith?

Viola: About your years, lord.

Orsino: Too old, by heaven.

Notice that in his first answer Viola has a little pun. Orsino had asked back at line 24 about "some favor" Viola had fallen for, and at line 25 she answers, "A little, by your favor," a subtle way of reminding us and hinting to Orsino that his is the "favor" she loves. After declaring that Cesario shouldn't be chasing any woman as old as he is, Orsino proceeds to lecture the boy on the correct age for a girlfriend offering this rationale at line 32.

For, boy, however we do praise ourselves [as men],

Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm,

More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn,

Than women's are.

Given Orsino's behavior in pursuing a woman who obviously does not love him, he gives proof to his own charge that men are "giddy and unfirm." No wonder at line 35 poor Viola agrees, in a further example of dramatic irony, "I think it well, my lord." She has firsthand evidence of men's failing to make the right choice in love. Naturally Orsino misses the significance of Viola's ironic remark, as he continues to offer his insights to a person who knows better at line 36:

Then let thy love be younger than thyself,

Or thy affection cannot hold the bent [a bow under tension];

For women are as roses, whose fair flow'r,

Being once displayed, doth fall that very hour.

Here Orsino is telling Viola that women's biological clocks run down more quickly than men's; Viola, trapped in her disguise and eaten by passion for a man who hasn't a clue, probably doesn't need to be reminded of her time running out. She takes Orsino's last remark and invests it with much more emotional force when she says at line 40: "And so they are; alas, that they are so./ To die, even when they to perfection grow." In a subtle way this is part of the education of Orsino about real women and real love that Viola undertakes. She repeats his idea about women fading quickly, but she points out what a tragedy it is.

Feste enters at line 42, and Orsino requests an old love song which he says reminds him of "the old age" at line 48, meaning the good old days when, Orsino implies, people knew how to love. The song Feste sings is an even more plaintive love song than the one he sang at the party in the previous scene. It's all about a young man preparing to die because his girlfriend is cruel. He details the kind of wood to be used for his coffin ("cypress" which was associated with the sorrow of a broken heart) and what he is to wear on his shroud ("yew" also associated with death). It's a beautiful little song, but it also represents the sentimentality and emotional excess which characterizes Orsino's whole approach to love. Orsino obviously enjoys being made to feel so bad; we can only imagine what is going through Viola's mind. The duke gives Feste a big tip, and the clown thanks him in a very strange way at line 73:

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 always makes a good voyage of nothing.

Feste's response here to Orsino is actually very sarcastic, but because of the Clown's habit of using mockery and because he masquerades as a fool, Orsino probably doesn't pick up the implied insult. He calls on the "melancholy god" to look out for Orsino who obviously likes really depressing love songs. Feste characterizes Orsino's mind as matching the "changeable taffeta" of his doublet, a material which seems to change colors in different light. This in turn will reflect his mental processes, which like the opal, are of no single color. Feste seems to be saying that, despite his commitment to love, Orsino lets his conflicting emotions rule his life. Feste reinforces this idea of inconstancy by then associating the duke with the sea's tides and winds which blow him all over the place, without any clear single purpose. Despite his reputed commitment to Olivia, Orsino's emotional excess renders him at a loss. Feste ends with a little bawdy pun: the word "nothing," elsewhere in the plays, was used as a play on "nodding," which in turn was a slang term for sexual activity. All this big uproar and exaggerated emotions, says Feste, is "much ado about nothing" in the final analysis. Feste leaves.

Orsino orders Cesario to go back to Olivia, whom he calls a "sovereign cruelty" at line 81, and to argue more forcefully for her love. He thinks that her resistance may be because Olivia thinks he's only interested in her wealth. He tells Cesario to make clear he is not interested in her "dirty lands," that is her property. The only "gem" he wants is that of her beauty. All this is simply a way of assuring that he will not demand an expensive dowry if she should agree to marry him.

This scene represents a real challenge for the actress playing Viola. She must at once convey her love for Orsino, her frustration over his choices and her disappointment over his rather limited view of women. She now at line 88 tries to talk Orsino out of his stubborn pursuit of a woman who will never love him:

Viola: But if she cannot love you, sir?

Orsino: I cannot be so answered.

Viola: Sooth, but you must.

Say that some lady, as perhaps there is,

Hath for your love as great a pang of heart

As you have for Olivia. You cannot love her.

You tell her so. Must she not then be answered?

We can see Viola trying to lead Orsino into considering the possibility of someone being in love with him, just as he is with Olivia. The problem with people like Orsino is that they are so self-centered they never consider other people's feelings. And sure enough at line 94, he now lectures Cesario on why no woman could love as strongly as he does:

There is no woman's sides

Can bide [withstand] 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 [capacity to hold].

Alas, their love may be called appetite [physical lust],

No motion of the liver [considered the source of real passion] but the palate,

That suffer surfeit, cloyment, and revolt [she'll quickly regret her choice],

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.

Poor Viola is probably really tempted to reveal her true identity at this point and force this sexist "smuck " Orsino to admit that a woman can love as passionately as he. In fact she may well start to tell him the truth at line 104: "Ay, but I know – " But what can she tell him? She can't reveal her true identity yet, so she comes up with a brilliant alternative, Cesario's mysterious sister. When Orsino asks what Cesario knows, the young man responds at line 106,

Too well what love women to men may owe.

In faith, they are as true of heart as we.

My father had a daughter loved a man

As it might be perhaps, were I a woman,

I should your lordship.

And so in this indirect way Cesario/Viola introduces the idea of someone loving Orsino. Viola uses her disguises as a way to force Orsino to recognize the capacity of women for genuine feeling and independent action. In the same way Shakespeare most often uses his romantic comedies to make the same point with his largely male audiences. Shakespeare was not a proto-feminist, trying to lead his society into political correctness. But he is exploring the dramatic tension between male stereotypes of women and the reality of his authentic, intelligent heroines. The great irony is, of course, that women could not demonstrate this reality themselves but had to be portrayed by teenaged boys on the Elizabethan stage.

When Orsino asks what the history is of this supposedly superior woman, probably with a very sarcastic tone, Viola has the opening she needs at line 110:

A blank, my lord. She never told her love,

But let concealment, like a worm I' th' bud,

Feed on her damask cheek. She pined in thought;

And with a green and yellow melancholy,

She sat like Patience on a monument,

Smiling at her grief. Was not this love indeed?

We men may say more, swear more; but indeed

Our shows are more than will [we show more passion than we really feel];

for still [always] we prove

Much in our vows bur little in our love.

Notice how this description of the mythical sister fits Viola herself exactly. Women in Elizabethan society were supposed to wait for men to make the first move, (although Olivia certainly didn't). But Viola, trapped in her disguise, her "concealment," has multiple reasons why she cannot reveal her love. She gives us a powerfully moving portrait of a woman who can never reveal her love, and yet she feels just as powerfully as Orsino who can let the world know of his affection. The image of "Patience on a monument" is especially effective. It refers to a feminine figure often found on tombstones representing the supposed capacity of women to suffer great loss in silence. She ends with a comparison between men and women in their ability to suffer. She's a kind of gender subversive.

Now Orsino can only conceive of "suffering for love" in the melodramatic images of Feste's song. If Cesario's sister suffers unrequited love, he asks at line 120, "But died thy sister of her love, my boy." Suddenly Viola is reminded of the reality of her situation, and she gives a very ambiguous answer at line 121: "I am all the daughters of my father's house,/ And all the brothers too, and yet I know not." Orsino hears the answer that says Cesario's sister must have died, because the boy is his father's only daughter. Viola then quickly adds, because of her disguise, that she is the only brother too. But there's that slight possibility the Captain mentioned, that Sebastian may still be alive, so she adds, "and yet I know not." Because Shakespeare revealed Sebastian to us back in II, 1, we can appreciate Viola's uncertainty. Cesario/Viola probably feels she may have revealed too much at this point, and she quickly changes the subject back to making a return visit to Olivia. Orsino's lesson is done for the moment, and he quickly reverts back to being a fool for love, even offering a jewel to win Olivia's affection.

Act II, Scene 5

This scene, where an elaborate practical joke is played on Malvolio, is one of the funniest in all of Shakespeare's plays. I have seen Twelfth Night performed in many productions, both professional and amateur, in this country and in Britain, and I have never seen this scene done when it wasn't hilarious, when it is performed. Your challenge will be to envision the humor behind the words. In the first 83 lines of this scene the joke is established. What surprising fact do we learn about Malvolio's fantasy life before he reads the letter? Secondly, in Act II, scene 3 when Maria set up the plan to fool Malvolio, she did so for Toby, Andrew and Feste. Why do you think Shakespeare has replaced Feste with a new character, Fabian, in pulling off the joke? [Act II, scene 5, lines 1 – 83]

The reason Shakespeare replaced Feste with Fabian seems to have to do with keeping Feste from being completely committed to any one of the different groups in the play. Although he will later join in the fooling of Malvolio, he maintains some distance from the worst excesses of Toby by not being here in this scene. Besides, his special kind of humor isn't really needed for a scene where the thing that's funny is how Malvolio fools himself.

Fabian is just another one of Olivia's servants, and like everyone else we meet at her house, he has a grievance against Malvolio who "brought me/ out of favor with my lady about a bearbaiting here." It's easy to see Toby, Andrew and the rest as just high-spirited guys who enjoy a good time, but if you had to put up with their drunken brawls every night, you wouldn't be amused. And here Fabian acts as if holding a bearbaiting at Olivia's house was no big deal. However, a bearbaiting consisted of getting a bear to fight specially trained mastiff dogs, probably for money from a lot of rabid spectators. It was the Elizabethan equivalent of having monster trucks crush cars out in the driveway. If you were Olivia you probably wouldn't find it innocent fun.

At line 14 Maria directs the boys to hide in the shrubbery to watch while Malvolio discovers the phony letter. She describes at line 15 how Malvolio "has been yonder in the/ sun practicing his behavior to his shadow this hour." This is such a revealing detail about Malvolio, who is always thinking about how he appears to others. There is a similar detail in the great film Lawrence of Arabia where the heroic wannabe T.E. Lawrence strides along the top of a train surrounded by thousands of Arabs, watching his shadow and calculating the effect he is having on the spectators he wants to impress. Maria promises the letter will make a "contemplative idiot of him" [line 18], that is a egotist at whom others laugh. At line 21 she calls him "a trout that must be caught with tickling" or flattery.

Now the physical setup for the next 160 lines is that while the three jokers eavesdrop on Malvolio, their reactions will wildly swing from laughter to rage; they laugh at Malvolio's gullibility and then they are enraged by what he says. Their extreme reactions keep threatening to reveal their presence to Malvolio, so they are constantly struggling to remain hidden. The director and actors usually augment this comic situation by having the boys come up with wildly improbable ways of getting close enough to hear Malvolio while still hiding, an occasion for a lot of physical humor. Finally, Shakespeare discovered a simple principle of humor: Watching someone make a fool of himself is funny; watching others watch someone make a fool of himself makes the action even funnier. Remember, however, that the true humor of the scene is only fully realized in performance.

Malvolio enters at line 23:

'Tis but fortune; all is fortune. Maria once

told me she [Olivia] did affect [like] me; and I have heard herself

come thus near, that, should she fancy [fall in love] it should

be one of my complexion. Besides, she uses me with

a more exalted respect than anyone else that

follows her. What should I think on't?

The opening sentence here is that echo of the real-life Puritan cliché about "God's will," which they were always citing as the source of their good luck. Remember, at the time he wrote this play Shakespeare had to be careful to avoid the charge of blasphemy, so he substituted "fortune" for "God." Later in the scene he'll use "Jove" as a replacement. You could blaspheme with the names of the Roman gods all you wanted. Now comes the big surprise: Malvolio, even before he finds the letter, is convinced Olivia is in love with him. He cites all these things he thinks she's said as evidence that she's in love with him. Remember in I, 5 when Olivia told him he was "sick of self-love"; apparently she was right on the mark. We see absolutely no evidence that Olivia has ever looked at him in a sexual sense, but he knows she's hot for him and analyzes her words and behavior to bolster his self-delusion. Then at line 35 he reveals his real purpose in fantasizing about Olivia loving him and wanting to marry him: "To be Count Malvolio." He doesn't love her; he just wants to get his hands on her power. He's always looking for examples where noble women have married men below their social station, as at line 39: "There is example for't. The Lady of the/ Strachy married the yeoman of the wardrobe." We can imagine that Malvolio has cut out all the stories from the National Enquirer where powerful women have made improbable marriages, like Julia Roberts and Lyle Lovett.

At this point (line 41) Andrew is so outraged be bursts out, "Fie on him, Jezebel" Unfortunately, of course, he picks a villainous character from the Bible but of the wrong gender, "Jezebel" being a .fem fatale.

Malvolio now begins to fantasize about being married to Olivia, and his fantasy tells us a lot about his character. Notice that the supposed object of his affection hardly appears in his vision. Not surprisingly for someone "sick of self-love," Malvolio is the central figure in his dream. Furthermore, as a Puritan Malvolio was supposed to reject any worldly affectation, such as fine clothes or jewels. He was supposed to be a simple, plain man of faith. But at line 44 he begins his fantasy, "having been three months married to her,/ sitting in my state – " he pictures himself sitting above all the other people in Olivia's household, in a position of authority, probably in a throne on a dais. He continues at line 47, "Calling my officers about me, in my/ branched velvet gown; having come from a day-bed where I have left Olivia, where I have left Olivia sleeping –". First, as soon as he is married, he hires "officers" to do his bidding. Next, he envisions himself in a fancy embroidered robe, something very non-Puritan. Finally Olivia is conveniently out of the way in his dream, leaving him to deal with other people's shortcomings by himself. Olivia is sleeping on a sofa somewhere, probably exhausted by the sexual satisfaction Malvolio has delivered. At line 52 the fantasy builds to the payoff:

And then to have the humor of state; and

after a demure travel of regard, telling them I

know my place, as I would they should do theirs, to

ask for my kinsman Toby –

Malvolio has created exact details of how he will appear to others: his "humor of state" or how to appear to others as the one in authority. This is the kind of thing he has been practicing. He looks at each person present to assert his power. He uses a very unusual way of describing his new position: "I know my place, as I would they should do theirs." He knows what he is as Olivia's husband, Count Malvolio; the others must do their positions, or their jobs under Malvolio's control. Now he moves to the whole point of his marriage fantasy – his confrontation with Toby, who is now not his employer's uncle but his kinsman, under his power. The eavesdropping Toby almost explodes. At line 58 Malvolio describes the meeting:

Seven of my people, with an obedient start,

make out for him. I frown the while, and per-

chance wind up my watch, or play with my – some

rich jewel. Toby approaches; curtsies there to me –

Malvolio has a rich and full fantasy life. When he asks for Toby in his dream, it's not just one or two people who jump to obey, but seven of his people. That's power! Malvolio wants to let the rest of his people know that he is not happy and so he frowns and plays with a watch, a new and very expensive possession at that time. Maybe not a watch, and he reaches down as he fantasizes the moment and touches his steward's chain! A reminder of his humble position at that moment intrudes into his dream and he quickly changes the detail to some rich jewel. Toby finally comes running in response to Malvolio's summons, and look what he does – he curtsies, the sign of submission by a social inferior.

Malvolio is now triumphant. He can afford to be magnanimous to the beaten Toby at line 65: "I extend my hand to him thus, quenching/ my familiar smile with an austere regard of control –" He offers his hand, like a good winner, but he doesn't smile. He shows by his stern or "austere" expression that he is holding his temper. It's interesting that Malvolio thinks of himself as smiling frequently, but when he reads the letter he is told that Olivia wants him to smile more often. Toby, at line 68, has his own fantasy: that he will punch Malvolio in the mouth. Malvolio continues to imagine what he will say to Toby, "Cousin Toby, my fortunes having/ cast me on your niece, give me this prerogative of speech…/ You must amend your drunkenness." There it is, through some abstract force called fortune, Malvolio has won the love of Olivia just so he can tell Toby to quit drinking. This is so self-centered and judgmental, whatever horrible practical joke is played on Malvolio, everyone will feel it is fully justified. At line 78 Malvolio adds another admonition: "Besides, you waste the treasure of/ your time with a foolish knight." Andrew suddenly brightens up and announces, "That's me, I warrant you [I know]." Sure enough, Malvolio identifies the culprit as Andrew, to which the knight tells us at line 83, "I knew 'twas I, for many do call me fool." How proud he is to have guessed correctly!

In the rest of this scene Malvolio finds the letter. Maria has been very careful to construct the letter in such a way as to avoid a direct identification of Olivia as the writer and Malvolio as the intended recipient of the letter. Why? [II, 5, lines 84 – 209]

Maria has written the letter to maximize the psychological damage and public humiliation to Malvolio. If she had simply forged a letter addressed to him and signed Olivia's name, when the joke was made public people would have said, "Shame on you, Maria." However, by making the letter deliberately ambiguous, she forces Malvolio to jump to his own conclusions and in the process reveal his own egotistical gullibility. The letter is extremely clever and sophisticated, and it makes us wonder why a woman as smart as Maria would want to settle for an old drunk like Toby for a husband. But then in almost all Shakespeare's comedies the heroines have IQ's much higher than their husbands.

Malvolio finds the letter at line 87, and fortunately for the eavesdroppers and us he reads it aloud. He first recognizes Olivia's handwriting from certain letters in the address on the outside of the letter:

By my life, this is my lady's hand [handwriting]. These be

her very C's, her U's, and her T's; and thus makes

she her great P's. It is, in contempt of question [undoubtedly],

her hand.

This is one of the funniest bawdy jokes in the play. When Malvolio exclaims about Olivia making her "great P's," her capital letter, even the snickering schoolboy gets the joke. Even the celestial Olivia has to relieve her bladder sometimes. The real joke is with the other letters. "Cut" was the Elizabethan equivalent of "cunt." The idea that the priggish Puritan Malvolio unwittingly picks out those three letters at random makes it even funnier. Everyone in Shakespeare's audience got the joke, if they could spell. However, a large number of the spectators were illiterate and, like Sir Andrew at line 91, had to have it explained to them. There must have been two distinct moments of laughter in the performance of the original play.

The letter is not addressed to Malvolio but to someone called "the unknown beloved." Malvolio makes an assumption and in the process will make himself look more foolish when the joke is revealed. At line 92 Malvolio reads:

"To the unknown beloved, this,

and my good wishes." Her very phrases! By your

leave, wax. Soft, and the impressure of her Lucrece,

with which she uses to seal. 'Tis my lady. To

whom should this be?

Besides the handwriting, the choice of phrases, he believes identifies the letter as coming from Olivia. It is not in an envelope but folded three times and the letter sealed with wax. In order to ensure privacy the hot wax had a special design placed in it by a signet ring. Olivia uses one which shows the Roman heroine Lucrece, about whom your notes tell you. Breaking the wax is a social taboo, unless you are the one to whom it's addressed. Malvolio continues to fool himself.

The letter opens with an odd little poem at line 98:

"Jove knows I love,

But who?

Lips, do not move;

No man must know."

"No man must know." What follows? The numbers

altered! "No man must know." If this should be

thee Malvolio?

Here we get the first use of the politically correct "Jove," the chief Roman god and a substitute for the taboo "Lord" or "God" on the Elizabethan stage. The little poem is a teaser, and it teases Malvolio, who repeats the last line three times before articulating his fondest hope that he is the man. By the way the "numbers altered" here referred to the change in the poetic meter of the poem which follows.

Maria drops two more ambiguous hints in the next part of the letter at line 106:

"I may command where I adore,

But silence, like a Lucrece knife,

With bloodless stroke my heart doth gore.

M,O,A,I doth sway my life."

Obviously Olivia commands Malvolio as his employer, but you could say the same thing about Fabian or Feste. The reference to the "Lucrece knife" evokes the idea of the noble woman protecting her reputation but suffering inwardly, without blood. Poor Olivia! Someone needs to relieve her. It's a dirty job, but Malvolio's willing! The last line about "M, O, A, I" is a master stroke. Why does Maria use those letters in that sequence? Fabian calls it "A fustian riddle," something sounding very complicated and mysterious. Malvolio repeats the line and racks his brain to come up with the answer. Toby describes this process at line 115 as a "staniel" or small hawk going after the wrong prey, or in this case the wrong meaning. Malvolio's self-deceptive analysis continues at line 116:

"I may command where I adore." Why she

may command me: I serve her; she is my lady.

Why, this is evident to any formal capacity. There

is no obstruction in this. And the end; what should

that alphabetical position portend? If I could make

that resemble something in me! Softly [let's see], "M,O,A,I."

He pounces on the fact that he works for Olivia as if this were an overwhelming proof. You can hear him trying to convince an imaginary critic (and himself) when he says, that the fact is "evident to any formal capacity," i.e. apparent to any reasonable intelligence. But then he comes back to the riddle of the letters and tries to make it fit his name. Toby and Fabian at line 122 compare him to a hunting dog following a cold scent until he is able to find what he's looking for. "M" does begin his name, but as he says at line 129, "there is no consonancy in the/ sequel [consistency in the sequence]. That suffers under probation [examination]. A should/ follow, but O does." The boys make a joke about making Malvolio cry "O" when they beat him. Nevertheless, he overcomes the problem at line 138: "This simulation [hidden meaning] is not as the/ former; and yet, to crush this a little, it would bow/ to me, for every one of these letters are in my name." In a memorable production Malvolio literally crushed and twisted the letter to try and get the letters into the proper sequence. Here we see the genius of Maria's invention. This hint is just close enough to allow Malvolio to convince himself but is still not exact so that his self-deception will make his humiliation all the more satisfying when it comes out in public.

The letter continues and encourages Malvolio's secret ambition at line 142:

"If this falls into thy hand, revolve [change]. In my

stars [social rank] I am above thee, but be not afraid of great-

ness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness,

and some have greatness thrust upon 'em."

Malvolio undoubtedly falls into the third category of greatness – he has just lucked out. Of course the letter is encouraging Malvolio to accept the changes in his station that he has dreamed about. The letter then offers some specific changes Olivia wants to see at line 147:

"[T]o inure [prepare] thyself to what thou

art like to be, cast thy humble slough [exterior] and appear

fresh. Be opposite with a kinsman, surly with

servants. Let thy tongue tang arguments of state;

put thyself into the trick of singularity. She thus

advises thee that sighs for thee. Remember who

commended thy yellow stockings and wished to see

thee ever cross-gartered. I say, remember. Go to,

thou art made, if thou desir'st to be so. If not, let

me see thee a steward still,. the fellow [equal] of servants,

and not worthy to touch Fortune's fingers. Farewell,

She that would alter services with thee,

The Fortunate Unhappy."

What Olivia supposedly asks Malvolio to do is essentially what he is already doing. She wants him to act above his humble social station, to pick a fight with a kinsman, like Toby. She urges him to be "surly with servants," like Feste and Maria. She advises him to make himself "singular," to stand out from his peers. Then the advice gets strange: to wear yellow stockings and to tie his garters around his legs in a elaborate crossed pattern. Maria will tell us a few lines later that Olivia hates the color yellow, but Malvolio assumes that if his employer has said anything about his fashion choices, it must have indicated approval. The letter urges Malvolio, "Thou art made, if thou desir'st to be so."

From line 160 on Malvolio reviews all the evidence that the letter was written by Olivia for him. He is convinced he is correct in his assumptions:

Daylight and champian [open country] discovers not more. This

is open [apparent]. I will be proud. I will read politic authors,

I will baffle Sir Toby, I will wash off gross acquaintance [inferior friends],

I will be point-devise, the very man [what the letter advises].

I do not now fool myself, to let imagination jade [fool]

me, for every reason excites to this [conclusion], that my lady

loves me. She did commend my yellow stockings of

late, she did praise my leg being cross-gartered; and

in this she manifests herself to my love, and with

a kind of injunction drives me to these habits of her

liking.

Malvolio's response to the letter from when he first finds it is to convince himself that his fantasies are true. Here he swears he will do whatever the letter has told him to do, which is what he was already doing. So he will read books that make him appear more intelligent than he really is and to act as if he is superior to the other servants. He will quarrel with Toby, which he had already been doing. He knows that his fashion choices have impressed Olivia and he will continue with them because they please her. In effect Malvolio gives himself permission to fall in love, much as Olivia did when she allowed herself to lust after Cesario.

Of course none of this is Malvolio's doing. Olivia has fallen for him and plans to make him her husband because God has singled him out for His special favor. (There is a kind of arrogance in Puritanism that imputes everything to God's Will.) In the next sequence, beginning at line 170, notice how many times Malvolio thanks some higher power for his success:

I thank my stars. I am happy [successful]. I will be

strange [arrogant], stout [courageous], in yellow stockings, and cross-

gartered, even with the swiftness of putting on. Jove

and my stars be praised. Here is yet a postscript.

"Thou canst not choose but know who I

am. If thou entertain'st [reciprocate] my love, let it appear in

thy smiling. Thy smiles become thee well. There-

fore in my presence still [always] smile, dear my sweet, I

prithee."

Jove, I thank thee. I will smile; I will do everything

that thou will have me.

In the course of this scene Malvolio has used "fortune," "stars," and "Jove" to substitute for "God's Will." None of it was Malvolio's doing or desire. Now the last injunction in some ways is the funniest. Remember the first time we heard Malvolio speak, back in Act I, scene 5? Olivia asked him if he didn't think Feste's humor improved after the Clown had helped ease her grief, and the self-righteous prig said, at line 74, "Yes, and shall do till the pangs of death shake him." Based on that response, would you guess that Malvolio was a fun kind of guy, given to smiling and laughing? Hardly! In every production I've ever seen of this play Malvolio is a very dour person. When he reads this directive that his lady love wants him to smile more, he really has to work at getting his face to unfreeze enough to form a grotesque smile. It's always a bit of very funny physical comedy.

When Malvolio leaves Toby, Andrew and Fabian collapse with laughter. Toby is so impressed by the quality of the joke that he announces at line 183 "I could marry this wench [Maria] for this device [joke]." This prepares us for the marriage of Maria and Toby at the end of the play. Now Andrew wants to be a full part of the levity, but he can't think of what to say, so he becomes like a little kid who can only say "Me too!" when someone says something that sounds neat. How many times, from line 181 to the end of the scene, does Andrew say the equivalent of "Me too"? Maria explains the full significance of the humor and what we can expect later in the play at line 198 – 206. We'll see the final effect of the practical joke over the next three acts.

Act III. Scene 1

In the first 85 lines of this scene we get a slight digression as Cesario arrives at Olivia's house and has an exchange with Feste. How is Feste's humor here different from his humor earlier in the play? Then Cesario will have a short conversation with Toby and Andrew before Olivia enters. What seems to be Toby's attitude toward the young man? [III, 1, lines 1 – 85]

The conversation between Cesario and Feste does not add to the plot line in the least. It does give us a further sense of Feste's (and Shakespeare's) kind of humor: plays on words. We see this kind of comic misuse of language in the elaborate joke in the first 10 lines of the scene about "living by the church." As Feste explains at line 11, "To see this age! A sentence/ is but a chev'ril [fine leather] glove to a good wit. How/ quickly the wrong side may be turned outward." We've seen Feste's quick wit in nonsense comedy, in the mockery of pretentious speech and sentimental love songs. Now we have a more philosophical humor. Cesario agrees that misunderstanding can occur when people take the meaning of words in the wrong way, saying at line 14, "They that dally nicely [play tricks]/ with words may quickly make them wanton [ambiguous]." We get this exchange at line 16,

Feste: I would therefore my sister had had no name.

Viola: Why, man?

Feste: Why, sir, her name's a word, and to dally with

that word might make my sister wanton [promiscuous]. But indeed

words are very rascals since bonds disgraced them.

Feste goes a long way just to create a pun on "wanton." Then he makes an interesting point in the second sentence above. In the good old days a man's "word" was his promise, but as the times became more litigious, people came to depend more on "bonds," formal, provable legal agreements. As he says at line 24 "words are grown so false I am loath to/ prove reason with them."

When Cesario asks if Feste works as Olivia's "fool," the clown gets in a great barbed remark at line 33:

No, indeed, sir. The Lady Olivia has no folly.

She will keep no fool, sir, till she be married; and

fools are as like husbands as pilchers [small herrings] are to her-

rings – the husband's the bigger. I am indeed not

her fool, but her corrupter of words.

The point of Feste's fooling is always to try and get a tip, the primary way he has of picking up pocket money. Al though Feste declared back at line 29 that he did not care for Orsino's young messenger, at line 45 when Cesario gives him some money, the jester suddenly bestows a blessing on Cesario/Viola:

Feste: Now Jove, in his next commodity [shipment] of hair,

send thee a beard.

Viola: By my troth, I'll tell thee, I am almost sick

for one, though I would not have it grow on my

chin.

In a time when nearly all men wore beards, Viola is hair-challenged. Of course she can use the lack of a beard to further her disguise as a teenager. So when Feste hopes she soon matures enough to grow facial hair, she uses that wish to express one of the dramatic ironies found throughout the play where the audience alone gets the full significance of a character's comment. The beard she is "almost sick for" is undoubtedly Orsino's.

Having begged one tip, Feste tries for two with a literary allusion at line 50:

Feste: Would not a pair of these [coin he previously got] have bred, sir?

Viola: yes, being kept together and put to use [lent out].

Feste: I would play Lord Pandarus of Phrygia, sir,

to bring a Cressid to this Troilus.

In the story of Troilus and Cressida, supposedly dating back to the Trojan Wars, Troilus was a prince, and Cressid a Trojan maiden whose uncle, Lord Pandarus, engineered a love affair between the two young people. When they were separated by the war, Cressid was forced to betray his love and ended her life a figure of scorn and contempt and died a beggar (see Feste's comment at line 56.) For his part in the ill-fated affair, Pandarus gave his name to unsavory character who brings men and women together for illicit sex, i.e. a panderer or pimp. It's obviously a clever way for Feste to get a second coin, because the person being begged has to recognize the reference. It also illustrates one of the interesting ways by which Shakespeare's creativity works. At times in his career when he was working on or had just finished a play, he would refer to the subject in another play. Right around the time he was writing this play he was working on his own version of a tragic love story called Troilus and Cressida. He did the same thing in Hamlet, referring to Julius Caesar and also Macbeth, referring to Antony and Cleopatra. Feste also makes a more contemporary literary allusion, as your notes tell you, when he explains at lines 58 – 60 why he chooses to use the word "welkin" rather than "element."

In a passage from line 61 to 69 Viola comments on the role Feste plays, saying, "This fellow is wise enough to play the fool." This passage is in verse signifying that it is serious compared to the earlier foolery. Shakespeare has Viola confirm what we already suspected: that Feste is hardly a fool but is indeed a very intelligent and observant person. Like Maria and her perceptive letter, real intelligence in this play is found with some of the lower-class servants.

Toby and Andrew enter at line 70 and greet Cesario. Andrew parrots a few words in French (not very well), and when Cesario answers him in courtly language, the knight quickly reverts to English. Now Toby uses certain words in an unusual manner, much like Feste, but in this case the word-play is not for comic effect but almost hostile. At line 75 Toby says,

Toby: Will you encounter the house? My niece is

desirous you should enter, if your trade be to her.

Viola: I am bound to your niece, sir. I mean, she is

the list of my voyage.

Toby: Taste your legs, sir; put them to motion.

Viola: My legs do better understand me, sir, than I

understand what you mean by bidding me taste my

legs.

Toby: I mean, to go, sir, to enter.

Viola: I will answer with gait and entrance. But

we are prevented.

Olivia has made a big deal over the arrival of Cesario, sending Toby, among others, to watch for him. I think Toby picks up on Olivia's excitement and resents it, especially since he wants to keep Andrew interested. He is territorial about Olivia and her home. When he greets Cesario in this sequence there is almost a competitiveness in his use of language. The underlined words above challenge Cesario to get the hidden message. At first he speaks as if Cesario were an arriving merchant ship. The young man gets the joke and answers appropriately, showing his quick wit. Then Toby changes the metaphor with "Taste your legs," and Cesario expresses his confusion in a clever pun about his legs "under-standing him." What's really important in this exchange is that Olivia, by her behavior, confirms everyone's suspicions about her feelings for Cesario when she rushes out to meet him. A proper young noble woman would never do that; it reveals her emotions to everybody, including the servants. In the remainder of this scene how else does Olivia make a fool of herself for love? [III, scene 1, lines 86 – 166]

It is always a potentially messy and embarrassing situation when one person desperately loves someone who can't stand that person. Viola/Cesario has an additional problem. As Viola, she wants Olivia to continue rejecting Orsino's advances; as Cesario she is duty-bound as a courtly gentleman to do everything possible to further her master's wishes. As Olivia rushes out to meet Cesario, the young man continues speaking as an accomplished gentleman. Now in the Renaissance gentlemen watched each other closely, actually copying down especially impressive words and phrases others used. The highest achievement for a courtly gentleman was to be taken for a courtier, a gentleman of the court. Andrew, who's not very good at this game, decides to use Cesario as his model in the exchange at line 86 – 93:

Viola: Most excellent accomplished lady, the heavens rain

odors on you.

Andrew: That youth's a rare courtier. "Rain odors" –

Well!

Viola: My matter hath no voice, lady, but to your

own most pregnant and vouchsafed ear.

Andrew: "Odors," "pregnant," and "vouchsafed" –

I'll get 'em all three all ready.

Cesario's opening lines are an exaggerated greeting to Olivia, calling down the sweetness of the heavens on her as a blessing. Then he seeks to speak to her alone, without a chaperone, as he had done back in Act I, scene 5, so he says his message is not for anyone else – "hath no voice" – except for her "pregnant" – quick-understanding and "vouchsafed" – confidential – "ear." Andrew doesn't have a clue what Cesario is saying, but he likes the big words, so he memorizes three that he wants to use himself. You only need to look at his choices to realize that when he tries to use these three words in a single sentence, it's going to be a disaster.

Olivia dismisses everyone and takes Cesario's hand. She plays the coquette, and as the language changes from prose (humor) to verse (serious) she asks his name. When Cesario refers to himself as her servant, she jumps on that idea. How can he call himself her servant when he rules over her passion? She suggests that his remark is "lowly feigning" at line 101 – phony humility. Olivia reminds him that he is the servant of Orsino and then rejects any mention of the count's name. When Cesario gently urges his master's suit, Olivia urges him at line 110 to "undertake another suit,/ I had rather hear you to solicit that/ Than music of the spheres." The Elizabethans believed that when the universe was in perfect harmony, the heavens produced a music that was transcendentally beautiful.

Olivia now reveals her intentions with an apology at line 113:

I did send,

After the last enchantment you did here,

A ring in chase of you. So did I abuse

Myself, my servant, and, I fear me, you.

Under your hard construction must I sit,

To force that on you in a shameful cunning

Which you knew none of yours. What might you think?

To modern audiences Olivia's behavior sending the ring to Cesario probably seems perfectly normal. In the context of that age, however, it is an embarrassment that Olivia feels bad about. Notice that she characterizes her actions as an "abuse" of everyone involved, including her servant Malvolio. She fears that Cesario must think badly of her for her violation of the code of polite society. She compares her situation at line 120 as having put her reputation at risk, as if it were a bear, chained to a stake and set upon by angry, unmuzzled dogs. (Remember Fabian talking about staging a bear baiting at Olivia's house?) She asks Cesario what he thinks at line 124, and Viola/Cesario replies, "I pity you." Here's a general rule for living: if you ask someone what they think of you, hoping for some expression of love, and they reply that they pity you, it's not a good sign. Olivia is so besotted with Cesario that she tries to make something positive out of pity, saying at line 125, "That's a degree to love." Cesario makes it crystal clear that he/she has absolutely no interest at all in Olivia, observing that we sometimes pity our enemies.

Confronted with the awful truth that the young man is not in love with her, Olivia almost makes an escape from total embarrassment, beginning at line 128:

Why then, methinks 'tis time to smile again.

O world, how apt the poor are to be proud.

If one should be a prey, how much better

To fall before the lion than the wolf. Clock strikes

The clock upbraids me with the waste of time.

Be not afraid, good youth, I will not have you,

And yet, when wit and youth is come to harvest,

Your wife is like to reap a proper man.

Her response here is adult, considered and very classy. Rather than blaming someone else, like the losers on reality television shows, Olivia manages to retrieve some dignity. She pays tribute, indirectly, to Cesario, saying it was better to be shot down by him as a superior man, "the lion," than by some second-rate guy, "the wolf." She doesn't wallow in self-pity but decides to get on with her life, "to smile again," and not to waste any more time. She even wishes Cesario well and envisions that when he finally does marry, his wife will get a real winner. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could all extricate ourselves from inappropriate relationships as Olivia does here? She points out his exit, "due west," and Cesario replies with a touch of gentle humor, "Then westward ho!" at line 136. Your notes explain that this was the cry used by the boatmen who transported people on the Thames River, much like the cab drivers crossing New York City. Cesario asks one last time if she has anything to say to Orsino.

Alas, Olivia's acceptance of the end of her illusions about love does not last. Most people are not able to handle that kind of rejection. And so she asks the young man what he really thinks of her at line 140, setting off a series of dramatic ironies:

Olivia: I prithee tell me what thou think'st of me.

Viola: That you think you are not what you are.

Olivia: If I think so, I think the same of you.

Viola: Then think you right. I am not what I am.

Olivia: I would you were as I would have you be.

Viola: Would it be better, madam, than I am?

I wish it might, for now I am your fool.

Olivia asks pathetically what the man thinks of her who has just broken her heart and told her that he pities her. How low can love make us stoop? Cesario is getting irritated and tells her she is mistaken in her self-perception of being in love with a man, the first dramatic irony. Olivia misconstrues and thinks he is insulting her sanity. Cesario agrees that he is not what he seems to be, the second irony. Finally, when she wishes Cesario would be what she wants him to be, i.e. in love with her, he angrily says that she has made him her fool. He means that her holding onto a hopeless desire has made him appear foolish, and it also alludes to the fact that as Viola, Olivia's misdirected passion is doubly pointless, the third irony. These ironic statements are things that only the audience picks up on at this point.

You can tell when someone is besotted with love when even insults make the person horny, as Olivia shows us at line 147: "O, what a deal of scorn looks beautiful/ In the contempt and anger of his lip!" Then she makes an absolute fool of herself:

Cesario, by the roses of the spring,

By maidhood [virginity], honor, truth, and everything,

I love thee so that, maugre [despite] all thy pride,

Nor wit nor reason can my passion hide.

Do not extort thy reasons from this clause,

For that I woo, thou therefore hast no cause;

But rather reason thus with reason fetter,

Love unsought is good, but given unsought is better.

The line of reasoning in the last four lines gets complicated, but the overall meaning is clear. Olivia is throwing herself at Cesario and asking him to ignore the disgust he has expressed about her passion. She begs him to accept her unwanted love and return her affection. Can't you simply accept the fact that I am pursuing you, despite the convention that the man does the wooing?

Cesario/Viola has tried to be polite and tactful, without success. Now she explodes with rage at line 160:

I have one heart, one bosom, and one truth,

And that no woman has; nor never none

Shall mistress be of it, save I alone.

And so adieu, good madam. Never more

Will I my master's tears to you deplore.

We get still one more hint at the gender surprise that awaits Olivia at the end of the play. Now Cesario declares that he is through playing games with Olivia, trying to get her to love Orsino while the willful countess makes goo-goo eyes at Cesario. But Olivia is so far gone that she uses the possibility of accepting Orsino's love as a kind of emotional blackmail to make Cesario come back: "Yet come again; for thou perhaps mayst move/ That heart which now abhors to like his love." Poor Olivia can't get much lower than this.

Act III, Scene 2

Ironically Andrew is the first person in the play, other than the two principals, to realize that Olivia is in love with Cesario. How does he reach this realization? Why does he immediately decide to return home? How do Toby and Fabian convince him that what he saw did not mean what he thinks it meant? [III, 2, line 1 – 84]

Andrew, the nitwit, is the first person to discover Olivia's passion for Cesario. This discovery is more clearly shown in performance than in the text. In some productions he grabs a glimpse of Olivia throwing herself at the youth; in other versions he spies on the whole meeting between the two. However, he finds out, Andrew instantly realizes he will never get that date with Olivia. Furthermore, he is offended that the countess prefers a servant over a knight such as himself. He decides to go home immediately; Toby's fund of ready cash is about to disappear.

Fabian becomes Toby's accomplice and makes the argument at line 18 that Olivia's behavior with Cesario was calculated to make Andrew react:

She did show favor to the youth in your sight

only to exasperate you, to awake your dormouse

valor, to put fire in your heart and brimstone in

your liver. You should then have accosted her, and

with some excellent jests, fire-new from the mint,

you should have banged the youth into dumbness.

This was looked for at your hand, and this was

balked. The double gilt of this opportunity you

let time wash off, and you are now sailed into the

North of my lady's opinion, where you will hang

like an icicle on a Dutchman's beard unless you do

redeem it by some laudable attempt either of valor

or of policy.

Poor Andrew, you just know his whole life has been like this. He thinks he sees something (Olivia's clear rejection of his affections), but someone comes along and convinces him that he didn't see what he thought he did. Furthermore, it's all his fault. He was supposed to have done something in response to Olivia's provocation, and he didn't realize it. Fabian convinces him that she expected him to step up and defeat Cesario in a contest of wit with newly-minted, original insults. (Not much chance of that!) She wanted Andrew to have "accosted" her (there's that word again!) and win her heart. He has blown his chance. Fabian describes how badly Andrew has tarnished his reputation in a wonderful comparison to a recent expedition to the polar seas north of Norway by the Dutchman Willem Barents, for whom the Barents Sea is named. His only chance is to rescue his reputation by an act of courage in combat or of trickery in a plot. Andrew probably isn't sure what "policy" means, so at line 31 he decides, "And't [if it] be any way, it must be with valor; for/ policy I hate. I had as lief be a Brownist, as a politician." As your notes explain a "Brownist" was an advocate in a rather obscure theological debate; it is highly unlikely that Andrew would have known anything about it except the name.

Toby urges Andrew to challenge Cesario to a duel and to hurt him seriously. He assures Andrew that the report of value in combat really turns women on (lines 38 – 39). Now Shakespeare has prepared us for this development. Back in Act I, scene 3 Maria had referred to the fact that Andrew liked to pick fights but was too much of a coward to ever follow through. And in the confrontation with Malvolio in II, 3 at line 125 Andrew himself offered a plan for revenge on the steward: challenge him to a fight and then not show up for it. In his warped view of the world, this would make Malvolio appear to be a fool; in the reality of the courtly gentleman, this would make Andrew appear to be a coward. Toby directs Andrew to write a challenge at line 43:

Go, write it in a martial hand. Be curst [bitter] and

brief; it is no matter how witty, so it be eloquent

and full of invention. Taunt him with the license of

ink. If thou thou'st him some thrice, it shall not

be amiss; and as many lies as will lie in thy sheet

of paper, although the sheet were big enough for

the bed of Ware in England, set 'em down. Go

about it. Let there be gall enough in thy ink, though

thou write with a goose pen, no matter. About it!

Toby knows that Andrew will have trouble writing a coherent letter of challenge, so he says just make the handwriting appear serious ["martial hand"]. There's no hope Andrew can be witty, so shoot for "eloquent" and inventive. Andrew can be as insulting as he wants in a letter, since there's no danger of an immediate attack. In the language of Shakespeare's time you could refer to someone in the formal third-person pronoun of "you" or in the informal pronoun of "thou." Unless you knew the person you were talking to very well, to use "thou" was an insult, so Andrew's urged to use the word at least three times. Toby uses a very specific comparison to describe how many lies about Cesario Andrew should include in the letter: as many lies as will fill the sheet of paper, even if the sheet were big enough to fit the bed of Ware. So much of Shakespeare's humor is topical, like the icicle on Barents' beard; it is also local. Apparently in an inn in the little town of Ware there was a particularly big bed, and enough people in London had stayed in Ware or knew the bed by reputation that a reference like this, that puzzles modern audiences, got a big laugh in 1600. A similar kind of joke particular to that time is found in the references to "gall" and "goose." Back then ink was made from "gall," the internal fluid that aided digestion in animals. The Elizabethans believed this chemical caused anger and courage in humans. Birds, included geese, did not produce gall, and so they were thought of as being "pigeon-livered" or cowardly. So even though Andrew wrote the letter with a pen made from a goose feather, he was urged to write with lots of gall in the ink. Andrew runs off to write his letter with the appropriate chemical content.

At line 55 Toby reminds us that his only interest in Andrew is to spend his money. He correctly predicts that neither Andrew nor Cesario will be eager to fight. As he says about Andrew's courage at line 61, "For Andrew/ if he were opened , and you find so much blood in/ his liver as will clog the foot of a flea, I'll eat the/ rest of the anatomy." The liver was thought to be the seat of the emotions in the body, and blood was believed to carry the emotions through the body. So Toby offers to eat Andrew's body if his liver is found to contain any blood at all (enough to "clog the foot of a flea"). Although not predisposed to violence, Cesario appears intelligent enough to recognize that the letter Andrew will write comes from a fool. So Toby will rely on a verbal challenge to try to bring Andrew and Cesario to fight.

Maria enters with news of Malvolio's transformation. Line 67 reminds us of the short stature of the young boy playing this role when Toby refers to Maria as "the youngest wren of nine," what we might call "the runt of the litter." Shakespeare prepares us for Malvolio's ridiculous appearance by having Maria laughing hysterically and using some unusual comparisons. At line 70 she describes his improbable appearance and behavior:

there is no

Christian that means to be saved by believing

rightly can ever believe such impossible passages

of grossness. He's in yellow stockings.

Malvolio is so outrageous in costume and actions that to believe he is for real would challenge the faith of even a devout Christian! He has crossed his garters, "Most villainously; like a pedant that keeps a/ school in th' church. I have dogged him like his/ murderer" [lines 75 – 77]. The comparison here suggests that crossed garters were so out of fashion that only clueless schoolteachers who ran small-time operations in the local church were still doing it. (Shakespeare may have spent several years in his youth working in just such a school.) The reference to Maria having "dogged him like his murderer" seems to suggest that she has gotten as close to him as would someone following him to kill him. At line 78 we learn "He does smile his/ face into more lines than is in the new map with/ the augmentation of the Indies." Your notes tell you about the Hakluyt map with its arcing lines of meridian, just like the wrinkles around the mouth of someone trying to smile broadly. Once again we see how the comparisons Shakespeare uses, especially in the comic passages, contain references to events or situations which are very specific to that time and place. For Shakespeare's original London audience in 1600 it must have seemed like a string of inside jokes. Maria revels in the extent to which she has brainwashed Malvolio. At line 81 she tells us, "I can hardly forbear hurling/ things at him. I know my lady will strike him. If/ she do, he'll smile and take't for a great honor." Now even though Olivia doesn't hit Malvolio when she sees him, the idea of how he would react were she to do so helps establish the extent to which he has been hoodwinked.

Act III, scene 3

Before Shakespeare allows us to enjoy the pay-off of the joke on Malvolio and to see what Andrew writes in his challenge, he takes us back to check in with Sebastian and Antonio. They have now entered the capital of Illyria, and Antonio reveals to his friend that he is wanted for capital crimes in the country and has to stay out of public view. What exactly is the crime that Antonio is accused of, and how does Shakespeare mitigate or lessen its severity? Why? [Act III, scene 3, lines 1 – 49]

At the opening of this scene Antonio explains his reasons for having followed Sebastian into the city. Notice how he openly acknowledges his love for the young man, but adds another reason for his obsessive behavior at line 4:

I could not stay behind you. My desire

(More sharp than filed [sharpened] steel) did spur me forth;

And not all love to see you (though so much

As might have drawn one to longer voyage)

But jealousy [anxiety] what might befall your travel,

Being skilless in these parts; which to a stranger,

Unguided and unfriended, often prove

Rough and unhospitable. My willing love,

The rather by these arguments of fear,

Set forth in your pursuit.

Antonio is not shy about proclaiming his love for Sebastian, a love so strong that it could have led him to travel much further ("a longer voyage") to be with the young man. But he adds another reason, a concern ("jealousy") that being young and naïve ("skilless"), Sebastian might get into trouble. Now whether Antonio's worry about his friend getting into trouble is legitimate, or just another rationale for his own obsession, what this passage does do is set up the reason for Sebastian's reaction when strange people start recognizing him. He thinks it's all part of a criminal plot to rob him. Of course, from Antonio's perspective, when he falls into Olivia's clutches Sebastian does get into trouble.

Sebastian acknowledges Antonio's love and concern for him. His expression of appreciation is in very formal language, suggesting a sense of gratitude without any kind of emotional commitment. When he declares his love for Olivia, the young man will use a very different kind of language, much more direct and emotionally charged. Whatever Antonio's feelings, Sebastian is not swept off his feet by the ship captain. At line 13 he says,

My kind Antonio,

I can no longer answer make but thanks,

And thanks, and ever oft good turns

Are shuffled off with such uncurrent [worthless] pay,

But were my worth [wealth], as is my conscience firm [my sense of your value],

You should find better dealing.

In effect Sebastian here just expresses his appreciation and says he wishes he had the means to reward Antonio more fully for his love and concern. The formality of his language reminds us of his status as a educated, courtly gentleman and also keeps out any sense of emotional attachment. Sebastian quickly changes the subject and proposes to view the sights.

Now Antonio has to explain why he is a marked man in Illyria, how he took part in an attack on Orsino's ships. When Sebastian asks if anyone was killed in the action, Antonio begins to qualify and play down the extent of his crime at line 30:

The offense is not of such a bloody nature,

Albeit the quality of the time and quarrel

Might well have given us bloody argument [it could have been more serious].

It might have since been answered in repaying

What we took from them, which for traffic's sake [purposes of trade]

Most of our city did. Only myself stood out [refused to go along];

For the which if I be lapsed in this place

I shall pay dear.

Antonio's explanation makes it clear that he is no murderer. Furthermore, the rest of those involved in the attack have since made their peace with Orsino. Only Antonio has been defiant. Perhaps it is the same nonconformist trait that we see in his rash decision to follow Sebastian. What's the purpose of this lengthy explanation and offer of mitigating circumstances? Shakespeare will have a problem with the character of Antonio at the end of the play. He will be one of several misfits, like Malvolio and Andrew, who are made fools by love, who don't end up with the person they love. We are led to believe that he will be pardoned for his offenses against Orsino, especially since no one was killed and the rest of the perpetrators have been forgiven.

Finally Antonio gives Sebastian his purse while he goes off to find rooms for them at an inn called "The Elephant." We already know that the young man is broke from line 17, and the captain at line 44 says, "Haply [perhaps] your eye shall light upon some toy [knickknack]/ You have desire to purchase, and your store [wealth]/ I think is not for idle markets, sir." Antonio probably figures that since his open declaration of love didn't work, maybe bribing the kid may make him more forthcoming. Sebastian agrees to take the purse, but only to hold it for his friend and goes off on his own.

Act III, scene 4

We have been prepared for this scene for some time: Malvolio's appearance before Olivia. I want you to notice the complicated levels of awareness. Malvolio will quote extensively from the letter. We recognize certain key words and phrases, and we realize why he cites those particular items. But Olivia has no idea of the letter. She doesn't realize he's quoting. What does she think he's talking about? [III, 4, lines 1 – 88]

Olivia is frantic over Cesario's return visit, and at line 2 she wonders how to bribe him:

"How shall I feast him? What bestow of him?/ For youth is bought more oft than begged or borrowed" [lines 2 –3]. This is the same strategy for seduction that Antonio just tried in the preceding scene. Olivia realizes she is too giddy and speaking too loudly, so that the servants may overhear her, and at line 4 she asks for Malvolio because "He is sad and civil [formal],/ And suits well for a servant with my fortunes." Olivia sees herself as a servant to love. Maria says he is coming but warns that he is acting strangely and at line 8 declares, "He is sure possessed." Maria is preparing Olivia to see Malvolio as crazy. In Shakespeare's day there were two causes for insanity: the excess of some emotional state, what we might characterize as a nervous breakdown; and possession by demons, what we might diagnose as schizophrenia. Of the two forms of madness, possession was definitely the scarier. When Olivia asks about Malvolio's symptoms, Maria says at line 10, "he does nothing but smile" and warns her employer to have a guard to protect her.

At line 13 Olivia sees a parallel between her steward and her own condition: "I am as mad as he,/ If sad and merry madness equal be." Here we see that ambivalent quality of love which Shakespeare explored in the oxymorons of Romeo and Juliet.

In the next 50 lines the humor comes primarily from the fact that Malvolio quotes from the letter about which Olivia has no inkling; what he says we understand, but she hears as mad ranting. She asks why he is smiling when she called for him because it is a serious or "sad" occasion. Malvolio responds at line 19:

Sad, lady? I could be sad. This does make

some obstruction in the blood, this cross-gartering;

but what of that? If it please the eye of one, it is

with me as the very true sonnet is, "Please one,

and please all."

Malvolio is so proud that he appears in this ridiculous, affected fashion of having his garters crisscrossing his legs that he has to call attention to it so she doesn't miss the significance. Now lovers were supposed to write short poems or "sonnets" in praise of their loved ones. Malvolio's sonnet is his garter. If he pleases his beloved, he pleases everyone. What does Olivia make of all this?

When Olivia asks what's wrong with him, he points out another way he has obeyed the directions in the letter at line 26:

Not black in my mind, though yellow in my

legs. It did come to his hands, and commands shall

be executed. I think we do know the fine Roman

hand.

In case Olivia has missed his yellow stockings, he points them out and explains that he has them on in response to the suggestions she has made in the letter, suggestions which he has taken as commands. He knows these directions come from her, because although the letter was not signed to protect Olivia's modesty, he has recognized her handwriting, the "fine Roman hand" written in elegant italics. Once again, what does Olivia make of all this?

Concerned that he is ill, she asks if he will go to bed. He hears this, of course, as an erotic invitation and eagerly answers at line 31, "To bed? Ay, sweetheart, and I'll come to thee." Poor Malvolio is really excited! Olivia asks why he smiles and kisses his hand. (Courtly gentlemen used this gesture as a way of emphasizing their romantic comments.) Now Maria joins in and asks Malvolio why he is behaving so oddly. The love besotted steward sees this as an opportunity to fulfill another suggestion from the letter: to be surly with servants. He replies at line 36: "At your request? Yes, nightingales answer daws!" What he means here is that his love has elevated him above the common flock of crows or "daws" to become a superior, elegant bird, a "nightingale." Normally he would disdain to answer a mere servant who asked an insulting question as Maria has done, but even the nightingale responds to the crow sometimes. Maria persists in asking about his "ridiculous boldness" in front of Olivia; he is not acting as a servant should, with humbleness and restraint.

Now Malvolio refers to his favorite part of the letter, the part about achieving greatness. From line 40 to line 58 he will quote from the letter, and Olivia's response will remind us she has no idea what he's talking about. Malvolio is so self-possessed that he fails to see that the supposed author of the letter on seven different occasions fails to recognize the quotations.

Malvolio: "Be not afraid of greatness." 'Twas well writ.

Olivia: What mean'st thou by that, Malvolio? [#1 failure]

Malvolio: "Some are born great."

Olivia: Ha! [#2]

Malvolio: "Some achieve greatness."

Olivia: What say'st thou? [#3]

Malvolio: "And some have greatness thrust upon them."

Olivia: Heavens restore thee! [#4]

Malvolio: "Remember who commended thy yellow stockings."

Olivia: Thy yellow stockings? [#5]

Malvolio: "And wished to see thee cross-gartered."

Olivia: Cross-gartered? [#6]

Malvolio: "Go to, thou art made, if thou desir'st to be so."

Olivia: Am I made? [#7]

Malvolio: "If not, let me see thee a servant still."

Olivia: Why, this is very midsummer madness.

If this were a sanity hearing presided over by Olivia, Malvolio has flunked. Of the three causes of greatness, Malvolio is especially fond of the third one, having "greatness thrust upon him." Why? Notice how failure to recognize #7 makes it clear that Olivia doesn't even realize he is quoting from another source. Elizabethans believed that around the summer solstice, "midsummer," people would act in a crazy manner, especially about love, i.e. A Midsummer Night's Dream.

When a messenger comes with word of the return of Cesario, Olivia rushes out to see him, but she does give specific directions at line 63: "Let this fellow be looked to. Where's my cousin/ Toby? Let some of my people have a special care/ of him. I would not have him miscarry for the/ half of my dowry." Olivia is a very kind person, and although Malvolio is only an employee, she gives instruction that he be cared for, citing Toby as a possible caregiver; he might as well do something useful for a change. She even suggests that money is no obstacle to Malvolio's treatment. Now all this kindness serves only to convince Malvolio even further that his employer is in love with him. Alone, at line 67, Malvolio explains the significance of what just happened:

O ho, do you come near me now? No [Do you see who I am?]

worse man than Sir Toby to look to me. This

concurs directly with the letter. She sends him on

purpose, that I may appear stubborn to him; for she

incites me to that in the letter. "Cast thy humble

slough," [behavior ]says she; "be opposite with a kinsman,

surly with servants; let thy tongue tang with

arguments of state [weighty matters]; put thyself into the trick of singularity." And consequently sets down the manner

how; as, a sad face, a reverend carriage, a slow

tongue, in the habit of some sir of note [dressed as a grand gentleman]

, and so forth.

From when Malvolio first read the letter he has carried on an imaginary argument over its authenticity and whether or not it was directed to him. He keeps citing evidence that he is indeed Olivia's beloved, as if he had to convince someone else. Now he finds all kinds of hidden meanings in Olivia's confusion over his strange behavior, so that the choice of Toby as caregiver was deliberate, allowing Malvolio to work on being an arrogant aristocrat, as he says "some sir of note," i.e. someone with a title. Malvolio here reads from the letter to make sure he gets all the details correct. Better yet, I imagine that he has memorized the letter in its entirety.

He continues his self-justification at line 78:

I have limned [caught her like a bird] her; but it is Jove's doing, and Jove make me thankful. And when she went away

now, "Let this fellow be looked to." "Fellow."

Not "Malvolio," nor after my degree [my social status as a servant] , but "fellow." Why everything adheres together, that no

dram of a scruple, no scruple of a scruple, no

obstacle, no incredulous or unsafe circumstance [no impossible objection] –

what can be said? Nothing that can be can come

between me and the full prospect of my hopes.

Well, Jove, not I, is the doer of this, and he is to

be thanked.

Malvolio wins his self-argument here. Olivia's use of "fellow," or social equal, proves she thinks of him as her future husband. There can be no possible doubt that the letter and its contents are authentic. He even makes a pun (something unusual for the sober business manager) on "scruple," as a pharmacist's measure of something very small, and "scruple" as doubt – not even a doubt as big as a third of a dram, another measurement of smallness. The discovery of the trick played on Malvolio will be all the more devastating because it will be apparent to those who read the letter that he has deluded himself most of all. Least we feel to bad for the abused lover, notice how he expresses his "love" in this passage – he has caught her, like a trophy, and he expresses his triumph not as the achievement of true love, but as the fulfillment of his hopes for social advancement. He doesn't love Olivia; she is just the means to his end, which is power. Finally, we get the self-deprecation. It wasn't his doing but "God's will," here expressed with the euphemism of "Jove," the chief Roman god, used to get around the charges of sacrilege.

In the next sequence Sir Toby, Fabian and Maria get to play with Malvolio. What do they pretend to assume is wrong with him? How do they treat him? [III, 4, 88 – 147]

Remember that the people at this time believed that one of the causes of insanity was possession by the devil. It was very scary to be around such a person, not just because of the possibility his unpredictable behavior, but also because the possession was believed to be contagious. So throughout the sequence the three jokesters behave as if Malvolio is a dangerous lunatic, which angers him, and they try to calm him by offering advice and speaking to him as if he were a child, which angers him all the more. At line 90 Toby vows to speak to Malvolio, despite the danger, "if all the devils of hell be drawn in little," that is concentrated inside his head. At line 97 Maria pretends to hear the devil in Malvolio's voice: "Lo, how hollow the fiend speaks within him!" At line 103 Toby urges Malvolio to resist the possession: "What, man, defy the devil?" At line 121 Toby characterizes Malvolio's behavior as playing "at cherry-pit," a child's game, "with Satan."

To treat Malvolio's illness the three "concerned" visitors suggest using a gentle approach, so as not to anger the fiend inside him. At line 108 Fabian says, "Carry his water to the wise woman," the local healer. And you thought peeing into a small cup was a modern invention! Finally, at line 124 Maria advises Toby to get Malvolio to say his prayers, and when Malvolio becomes enraged by her presumption, she observes that the demons make him mad at the idea of godliness. Part of Toby's "gentle" approach is to speak to the steward as if he were a child, calling him between lines 118 and 121 "bawcock," "chuck," and "biddy," three terms used to address children. For her part, Maria keeps reminding her friends, and Malvolio, that Olivia is very concerned about him: "Sir Toby, my lady/ prays you to have a care of him" [line 98]; "My lady would not lose him for more/ than I'll say" [line 110]. Both times Malvolio reacts as if these are further proof of her love. Finally, there's a subtle social put-down. At line 93 Fabian addresses Malvolio as "sir," like a social inferior addressing a gentleman. However at the next line Sir Toby, a real gentleman, calls Malvolio "man," reminding him that the steward is only an employee and a wannabe.

Malvolio rejects all efforts to "help" him. At line 129 he condemns Toby, Maria and Fabian: " Go hang yourselves all! You are idle, shallow/ things; I am not of your element. You shall/ know more hereafter." He is so emboldened by the letter, he is insulting even to Toby, using that word "element" which Feste had refused to use because it was overused back at Act III, scene 1, at line 59. Notice that Malvolio teases them by saying they will learn more about his true worth in the future. After he has gone Toby, at line 141 outlines his plan for continuing the joke by having Malvolio tied up and placed in a dark room, the standard treatment for lunatics in those days. They can get away with it because Olivia already believes he is crazy.

In the next sequence Sir Andrew returns with his letter challenging Cesario. On what grounds does he challenge the young man? What does Toby propose to do with the letter? [III, 4, lines 148 – 208]

Back in III, 1, line 43, Toby had told Andrew to be "curst, but brief" in his challenge. The results in Andrew's letter are not exactly brief, and it's not clear how curst they are because the letter is not very comprehensible. Andrew, of course, thinks it's really hot in its insults. At line 2 he announces, "I warrant there's vinegar and pepper in't." Toby reads Andrew's letter aloud, beginning at line 153:

Youth, whatsoever thou art, thou art but a scurvy fellow….

Wonder not nor admire not in thy

mind why I do call thee so, for I will show thee no

reason for't….

Thou com'st to the Lady Olivia, and

in my sight she uses thee kindly. But thou liest in

thy throat; that is not the matter I challenge thee for.

Having denied Olivia's favor to Cesario as the reason for the challenge, Andrew offers no other explanation for his challenge. Furthermore, Andrew writes the letter as if Cesario were physically present and were disputing the contents of the letter. Fabian congratulates the letter, even as he calls it "senseless" at line 165, and offers the explanation that Andrew has avoided any subsequent legal problems by avoiding giving any reason for the challenge, as at line 159. Toby continues reading the letter at line 167:

I will waylay thee going home; where

if it be thy chance to kill me – ….

Thou kill'st me like a rogue and a villain….

Fare thee well, and God have mercy

upon one of our souls. He may have mercy upon

mine, but my hope is better, and so look to thyself.

Thy friend, as thou usest him, and thy sworn enemy,

ANDREW AGUECHEEK

This is probably the only letter of challenge in which the challenger doesn't tell us what he intends to do to his opponent, but instead focuses on what may happen to himself. Andrew just can't help himself from being kind-hearted and polite. He worries about God having mercy on Cesario's soul and signs himself as both the youth's "friend" and "sworn enemy." He manages to write the entire letter without once mentioning the grounds for the duel. Toby commends the letter and sends Andrew off to prepare for the sword fight. He tells the knight to wait for Cesario in the orchard, as if he were the "bum-baily," the rent-a-cop that was used to arrest debtors. He advises Andrew to draw his sword when he sees Cesario and to utter a loud curse, which will frighten him. Often in modern productions Andrew goes off practicing his curses.

Toby now tells us he will not deliver the challenge since it is so stupidly written, and he assumes that Cesario has "good capacity and breeding," that is intelligent, as shown by the fact that Orsino has employed him as a messenger. Therefore, he will only laugh at Andrew's letter. Therefore, Toby will deliver the challenge orally. Judging by Cesario's youth and slight build, he believes the young man will be as reluctant to fight as Andrew is. He concludes, at line 203, "This [describing the fencing skill of the other one] will so fright them both that they/ will kill one another by the look, like cockatrices." Your notes explain the significance of the "cockatrice."

In the next sequence we have the conference between Cesario and Olivia, followed by the comic confrontation between Andrew and the youth. How does the form of the language in this part signal the change in tone? How do the two combatants seek to avoid a fight?

[III, 4, lines 209 – 322]

The change in language between the section at lines 209 – 225 and what comes both before and after should be clear, as well as the reason for the change. Both Olivia and Cesario find themselves in double binds. As the countess says at line 209,

I have said too much unto a heart of stone

And laid mine honor too unchary on't [carelessly upon it].

There's something in me that reproves my fault;

But such a headstrong potent fault it is

That it but mocks reproof.

Olivia realizes she has risked her honor by spilling her heart to someone who doesn't really love her. It is a fault that she wishes to "reprove" or correct. However, her passion is so strong that the fault mocks any effort to change her behavior. Hence, she faces a dilemma of continuing to do something she knows she should not do. At line 216 she tries bribing Cesario by giving him a jeweled locket which contains her picture.

Viola faces a similar dilemma. She rejects Olivia's advances, but she is duty-bound to try and win her love for Orsino. As she says at line 214, "With the same havior that your passion bears,/ Goes on my master's griefs." At line 221 when Viola urges Olivia to give her true love to her master, the countess replies that she cannot give what she has already bestowed on Cesario. Although both are trapped by the dilemmas they face, Olivia, all honor and sense of restraint swallowed up by unrequited love, blackmails Cesario into coming again at line 224: "Well, come again tomorrow," with the implicit hope that the youth may change her mind about Orsino.

The comic duel takes up the next 100 lines. It is another opportunity for lots of comic effect and physical humor as Toby and Fabian conspire to get Andrew and Cesario into a sword fight both desperately wish to avoid. How to the two combatants react to the situation? How does each try to get out of the fight?

Toby at line 228 warns Cesario that he is in mortal danger, "That defense thou hast, betake thee to't." He has no idea what Andrew's grievances are, but he warns that the knight is deadly. At line 245 he declares "Souls and bodies hath he divorced three," that is he has killed three men. Later Fabian will try to explain Andrew's apparent lack of a martial appearance, saying at line 274 Andrew doesn't look ferocious but is a "skillful, bloody, and fatal opposite." Throughout the sequence Toby and Fabian deliberately use technical terms related to fencing, probably to increase the level of anxiety of the young man: "Dismount thy tuck [sword], be yare [complete] in thy preparation"[line 232]; "'hob,nob' is his word;/ give't or take't!'" [line 248]; Fabian calls the fight "mortal arbitrament" [line 271].

Cesario reacts with horror at the prospect of a fight. He denies that he has done anything to insult any man. At line 250 he proposes to return to the house and Olivia's protection, claiming, "I am no fighter" [line 251]. Toby replies that he will not allow Cesario to back out of the fight and leaves Fabian to guard Cesario from running away. The young man asks if the challenge isn't just a trick to test his courage. He pleads with both Toby and Fabian to try to negotiate a peaceful settlement with Andrew, saying at line 281, "I am one that had rather go with sir priest than with sir knight," that is with the man of peace than with the duelist who must protect his honor. Just before the swords are finally drawn, Viola considers revealing her real identity at line 313: "A little thing/ would make me tell them how much I lack of a man."

For his part Andrew is equally upset at the idea of the duel. Despite having written his "saucy" letter of challenge, he is angry when Toby tell him at line 289 that Cesario is an accomplished swordsman. "They say he has been/ fencer to the Sophy," the ruler of far-off Persia which had a reputation of being very warlike. Andrew says if he had known how valiant and skilled Cesario was, he would never have challenged him. At line 296 he tells Toby to offer Cesario his horse, gray Capilet, if he will let the matter drop. Toby tells the audience, "Marry, I'll ride your horse as well/ as I ride you."

Toby and Fabian continue the joke by telling each that the other requires at least a show of conflict to satisfy their honor, promising no one will be killed in the fight. This provides an opportunity for lots of non-verbal humor as Andrew and Cesario carry out the most reluctant, incompetent sword fight in history. Lots of fun!

In the final sequence of this scene the plot line involving Viola finally meets the plot line of her brother Sebastian. How do you account for the way she reacts to the intervention of Antonio? How do you account for the reaction of Toby and Andrew to the way Cesario treats Antonio? How do you account for the fact that some characters speak prose in this sequence and some speak verse? [III, 4, lines 323 – 408]

Antonio happens upon the comic duel, and he takes it seriously. At line 328 he tells Toby he will defend the person he takes to be Sebastian at all costs: "[I am] One, sir, that for his love dares yet do more/ Than you have heard him brag to you he will." The people in this scene for whom the action suddenly becomes serious speak verse; those who continue to think it is a joke continue to speak prose. Toby, probably because he's already drunk, quickly takes up Antonio's challenge and starts to fight with the captain. He'll start the same kind of fight with Sebastian later with disastrous results. The arrival of the officers quickly stops the fight because dueling was a criminal offense. In the middle of the tumult at line 336 Andrew assures Viola that "I'll be as good as my word. He will bear you/ easily, and reins well." This makes perfect sense to us, but poor Viola doesn't realize Andrew is taking about his horse and must be very confused.

Antonio, who put himself knowingly in harm's way by following Sebastian, now says at line 344, "This comes with seeking you," as if it were Sebastian's fault. He asks for his purse back, not only because he may need to pay a fine, but because it was common practice for prisoners to have to pay for their meals while in jail. Naturally Viola has no idea what he is talking about, and although she offers to share her purse with him, the captain still accuses her of ingratitude, a serious violation of the gentlemanly code of behavior. At line 378 Antonio calls Cesario "Sebastian" after describing how he had saved the youth from death. All that Viola hears is her brother's name. All that Toby, Fabian and Andrew hear is the charge of ingratitude based on the youth's being afraid to acknowledge his friend. At line 385 Viola says to the audience:

Methinks his words do from such passion fly

That he believes himself; so do not I.

Prove true, imagination, O prove true,

That I, dear brother, be now ta'en for you.

So while Viola says she doesn't believe Antonio, she does allow the possibility that she has been mistaken for Sebastian and hopes it means he is still alive. She goes on to tell us that she has imitated her brother in her disguise, and at line 395 she hopes again that Sebastian has somehow managed to survive: "O, if it prove,/ Tempests are kind, and salt waves fresh in love." Toby condemns Cesario at line 397 as "A very dishonest [dishonorable] , paltry boy, and more a coward than a hare." He and Fabian now change their message to Andrew and tell him they knew before that Cesario was afraid to fight. At line 403 Fabian assures the knight, "A coward, a most devout coward: religious in it." Enraged, and encouraged because he now thinks it safe to attack, Andrew vows, "'Slid

[shortened form of the sacrilegious oath 'God's eyelid'], I'll after him again and beat him." Toby urges that he do so, but having seen Andrew's pathetic swordplay, warns him, "Do, cuff him soundly, but never draw thy sword" [line 405]. So the scene ends with a pending collusion between Toby-Andrew and Sebastian.

Act IV, Scene 1

The three scenes of Act IV explore the issue of madness and sanity and how different characters react to the idea that they may have lost their minds. In the first scene what convinces Sebastian that the people of Illyria are crazy? At what point does he allow himself to "go along" with the madness? Why? [IV, 1, lines 1 – 65]

Sebastian is unsettled when strangers seem to know him and talk with him of things he has supposedly done. Not surprisingly, he assumes they are lunatics. As the scene open

Feste is trying to get Cesario to return to Olivia's and growing increasingly angry at what he interprets as the youth's attempt to pretend he's someone different. At line 7 he declares, facetiously, "nor your name is not/ Master Cesario; nor this is not my nose neither./ Nothing that is so is so," In a very real sense Feste is right in his final statement, although he doesn't realize it. Identities are about to be turned upside down. In his irritation Sebastian tells Feste to "vent thy folly somewhere else" [line 10]. Now we have seen Feste's sensitivity to words throughout the play, and we shouldn't be surprised when he fixates on "vent," which strikes him as pretentious. At line 12 he responds:

Vent my folly! He has heard that word of

some great man, and now applies it to a fool. Vent

my folly!….I prithee now, ungird thy

strangeness, and tell me what I shall vent to my

lady. Shall I vent to her that you art coming?

If Sebastian can use an unusual word or phrase, so can Feste, who tells the youth to "ungird his strangeness." Sebastian now tries to bribe Feste to leave him alone. The fool appreciates the money, but he warns Sebastian at line 21 not to expect much: "These wise men that give fools money get themselves a/ good report – after fourteen years' purchase." It will take a long time and a lot of money before Feste will speak well of Sebastian.

Toby, Andrew, and Fabian enter. True to his word Andrew slugs Sebastian and is shocked when the young man slugs him back three times, wondering aloud if all the people of Illyria are mad. Not surprisingly Toby jumps into the fight, threatening to disarm Sebastian ("throw thy dagger o'er the house" [line 29]. Feste runs to tell Olivia, anticipating that this attack will get Toby and Andrew in trouble. For his part Andrew now changes his tactics, threatening at line 34 to have him charged with battery, even though he, Andrew, threw the first punch. Let's hope the knight doesn't take the case to Judge Judy. Toby persists in his effort to intimidate the youth, and at line 41 Sebastian frees himself from Toby's grip and draws his sword. As he does so, he changes to verse, because he takes this attack seriously. Toby and the boys continue to use prose.

Olivia enters and, enraged by Toby's attack on her beloved, quickly puts an end to the fight, calling her uncle "ungracious wretch" and my personal favorite, "rudesby." Toby is in big trouble and departs. Olivia invites Sebastian into the house at line 55, to hear how many "fruitless pranks/ This ruffian hath botched up," that is tricks he tried to pull off. The countess begs the young man, saying at line 57, "Thou shalt not choose but to go./ Do not deny. Beshrew his soul for me./ He started [frightened] one poor heart of mine, in thee." Now this is the third time people have spoken to Sebastian as if they knew him, but this beautiful young women is different. At line 60 he considers his options:

What relish is in this? How runs the stream? [What does this mean?]

Or I am mad, or else this is a dream.

Let fancy [imagination] still my sense in Lethe [river of forgetfulness] sleep;

If it be thus to dream, still let me sleep!

So apparent Sebastian is willing to play along with a crazy person if she is attractive. When Olivia at line 64 repeats her plea, "Nay, come, I prithee. Would thou'st be ruled by me!" Sebastian agrees. Suddenly a whole new world of possibilities opens up for Olivia and she drags the suddenly pliant young man off into the house.

Act IV, Scene 2

In the previous scene a man who thought everyone else was crazy learned to go with the flow and got a very pleasant surprise. In this scene a man who is treated as if he were crazy resists mightily until someone has pity on him. What is Feste trying to teach Malvolio in this scene? [IV, 2, lines 1 – 134]

This scene is an example of how Shakespeare misdirected the audience's attention from off-stage action. While Olivia and Sebastian discover each other for the first time, we get this action happening at the same time as Toby and Maria try to figure out how to end a practical joke which has gone on far too long. Feste performs the function of continuing the joke, but he also tries to teach Malvolio an important lesson.

Maria, the joke director, decides to have Feste dressed as the local curate, Sir Topaz, visit Malvolio in his dark room and tease him. Feste agrees to put on the disguise of gown and phony beard, but at line 5 he observes, "I would I were the first that ever dissembled/ in such a gown," a reminder of the poor quality of ministers, especially out in the country. When Feste greets Toby at line 13 he is fully into his part:

Bonos dies [Latin for "Good day"] , Sir Toby; for, as the old hermit of Prague, that never saw pen and ink, very

wittily said to a niece of King Gorboduc, "That that

is is"; so, I, being Master Parson, am Master Parson;

for what is "that" but that, and "is" but is?

Feste is doing his comic routine of the make-believe scholar, here an improbable figure called the Hermit of Prague who doesn't know how to write. King Gorboduc is a legendary king of ancient Britain. The piece of nonsense that supposedly passed between the Hermit and Gorboduc's niece sounds suspiciously like former President Clinton explaining how he interpreted the word "is" in order to avoid revealing his affair with Monica.

Malvolio has been imprisoned in a dark room, the standard treatment for lunatics. Feste is the first human contact he has had in some time. His first request is for the parson to go to Olivia who he believes will rescue him. Feste chides the demon which supposedly possesses him at line 26: "Out, hyperbolical fiend! How vexest thou this/ man! Talkest thou nothing but of ladies?" Malvolio, of course, protests his sanity and whines that he has been locked in a dark room. (Usually on stage Malvolio is shown at a small window from which he cannot see anyone.) Feste and Malvolio argue over whether or not the room is dark. Feste denies that it is dark, using his comic nonsense at line 37: "Why, it hath bay windows transparent as/ barricadoes, and the clerestories toward the south/ north are as lustrous as ebony; yet complainest/ thou of obstruction?" Can you find at least three ways in which this passage is self-contradictory? Feste continues to hector Malvolio on the issue of light, saying at line 43, "I say there is no darkness/ but ignorance, in which thou art more puzzled/ than the Egyptians in their fog." This last passage is a reference to Moses plaguing the Egyptians in the Bible.

Malvolio still won't give Feste what he wants to hear, a little bit of humility and less of the arrogance which got Malvolio in trouble in the first place. Instead the self-righteous steward demands a test of his sanity. (In some states sanity is actually determined by having a person count backward from 100 by threes!) Feste tries a more philosophical approach, and asks Malvolio to state the opinion of the ancient Greek thinker Pythagoras regarding wild fowl. Malvolio replies that the Greek thought that the souls of the dead might inhabit birds. When asked his reaction to this idea, Malvolio rejects it as unworthy of the human soul. Feste now condemns Malvolio at line 58:

Fare thee well. Remain thou still in darkness.

Thou shalt hold the opinion of Pythagoras ere I

will allow of thy wits, and fear to kill a wood-

cock, lest thou dispossess the soul of thy grandam.

Now it is possible to see this exchange simply as a continuation of the practical joke that has been played on Malvolio all along. I choose to see this as an effort, using humor, to get Malvolio to re-examine his smug superiority that he has all the answers. The scene can be played both ways, giving cause to many in the audience to laugh at how Malvolio is being teased while others see in it an attempt by Feste to provide some kind of therapy for the self-righteousness of the Puritan.

However, we see the scene, Toby has seen enough. He abandons the imprisoned Malvolio and walks away with Maria at line 69:

I would we were

well rid of this knavery. If he may be conveniently

delivered [turned loose] , I would he were; for I am now so far in offense with my niece that I cannot pursue with

any safety this sport to the upshot [logical conclusion].

The practical joke on Andrew and Cesario backfired when Sebastian showed up. Toby and Maria make the mess and leave it for Feste to clean up.

Feste now speaks to Malvolio as himself, and the desperate steward begs for pen, ink and paper to write a note to Olivia. Ironically Malvolio must depend on the man he vilified back in the first act. The opportunity gives Feste a chance to crack jokes about his own reputation for being mentally challenged. At line 89 he asks,

Feste: Alas, sir, how fell you beside your five wits? [How did you go mad?]

Malvolio: Fool, there was never man so notoriously

abused. I am as well in my wits, fool, as thou art.

Feste: But as well? Then you are mad indeed, if you

be no better in your wits than a fool.

When Malvolio curses Sir Topaz for being an ass, the minister pays a return visit and urges him to "leave thy vain bibble babble" [line 100]. Malvolio continues to press for help, saying at line 109, "I tell thee I am as well in my wits as any/man in Illyria." Feste responds with a subtle message, "Well-a-day that you were, sir," as if to say, "If only you were sane." Later, at line 119, the clown tells Malvolio that he won't believe his protests about his sanity while he is a madman "till I see his brains." He does agreed to help and sings a little comic song about how he will help the steward defy the devil by playing the figure of Vice from the old morality plays.

Feste's message of tolerance and kindness is very understated, but ultimately it is the clown, the man who has most reason to hate Malvolio, who helps the wronged man out of his situation.

Act IV, scene 3

How does Sebastian convince himself to go ahead with his love for Olivia under these circumstances? [IV, 3, lines 1 – 35]

Back at Olivia's we see the outcome of the couple's discovery of love. Sebastian comes out and tries to understand what has happened. Before Olivia took him in the house, he thought everyone in Illyria was crazy. Now, at line 1, he tests reality in a different way: "This is the air; that is the glorious sun;/ This pearl she gave me, I do feel't and see't;/

And though 'tis wonder that enwraps me thus,/ Yet 'tis not madness." He explains more fully at line 9:

For though my soul disputes well with my sense

That this may be some error, but no madness,

Yet doth this accident and flood of fortune

So far exceed all instance, all discourse, [accounts of similar events]

That I am ready to distrust mine eyes

And wrangle with my reason that persuades me

To any other trust [belief] but that I am mad,

Or else the lady's mad.

Sebastian goes on to dispute this last assertion, telling us that Olivia could not command her servants and carry on the household affairs if she were truly insane. Nevertheless, despite his uncertainty, Sebastian accedes to Olivia's request. She asks him to go into a nearby chapel and "Plight me the full assurance of your faith," that is to take a solemn oath that he will marry her. You can understand her haste; she's had so much trouble getting him to accept her love, she's not going to take any chances with a change of mind. Sebastian, despite his uncertainty, goes along, swearing at line 32: "I'll follow this good man [the priest] and go with you/And having sworn truth, ever will be true."

Act V, Scene 1

In this final scene all the loose ends get resolved, Viola's secret is finally revealed, and characters get what they deserve. Which characters are left unhappy by the final resolution of the comedy? Why does Viola take so long to final admit her true identity, once Sebastian is revealed? What is the significance of Feste little song at the end of the play? [Act V, scene 1, lines 1 – 410]

In the first 100 lines Orsino, having sent messages to Olivia throughout the play, finally shows up at her house. But first we ease into the scene by having some more patented begging by Feste. He appears at the opening of the scene with the letter Malvolio sent to Olivia. No wonder Fabian wants to see it; after all, he may get into more trouble with his employer for his part in the joke on the steward. But Feste won't give it up. When Orsino enters, Feste shares with the Duke a little bit of his home-spun wisdom at lines 12 – 23. The clown shows how relevant his folk truth is and the adds some of his nonsense academic gabbled-gook at line 21;" your four negatives/ make your two affirmatives." When Orsino rewards his wit with a tip, Feste goes for a second coin at line 29: "But that it would be double-dealing, sir, I/ would you could make it another." When he gets a second tip, he immediately tries for another, using a number of creative efforts. He begins by using the Italian phrase for "one, two, three," employed in gambling games. Then he alludes to triple time in popular dances. Then he recalls the three note peal of St. Bennet's Church in London, which was later used as a signal on network radio and television. When Orsino refuses to be conned out of any more money, Feste suggests that he allow his generosity to take a nap so it can be reawakened when the clown returns with Olivia.

The proceedings now become serious as Antonio is brought in as a prisoner. Orsino recognizes him and praises his skill and courage in battle, although he was an enemy. We learn that although the captain did attack Orsino's ships and cause serious injury among the duke's sailors, he did not kill anyone. In his comedies Shakespeare was usually careful not to have characters guilty of murder, especially, as in this case, that character will eventually be pardoned. Cesario/Viola acknowledges Antonio's help in dealing with the sword fight, but declares that Antonio's message to him, such as calling him "Sebastian," was "distraction," or insanity [68]. Viola is at pains throughout this scene to play down the possibility that her brother may be alive; any suggestion that Antonio knows something is dismissed as insane. Antonio defends his actions against Orsino at lines 72 – 75, denying that he was a thief or pirate, again subtly playing down the idea that Antonio is a bad person. He openly acknowledges his obsession with Sebastian, which he calls "witchcraft" at line 76. (The idea here is that it wasn't Antonio's fault he was arrested in Illyria; love made him do it, a rationale that everyone else in the play tries to evoke in one way or another.) The captain charges the youth with ingratitude and betrayal for denying him after his arrest. When asked, Antonio swears that he and Sebastian had been inseparable for three months, a fact that Orsino denies at line 99.

When Olivia enters things really heat up. In the following sequence both the countess and the count will accuse Cesario of disloyalty, as Antonio had done. Olivia greets Orsino in a very dismissive manner at line 101: "What would my lord, but that he may not have,/ Wherein Olivia may seem serviceable?" In effect she says, "What I know you want you're not going to get, and whatever I can do for you I'll do only to appear, 'seem,' obedient, 'serviceable.'" Then at line 103 she suddenly turns to Cesario and accuses him, "Cesario, you do not keep promise with me." Apparently, she had extracted a promise at the troth-plighting before the priest that the youth would not go back to work for Orsino. Unfortunately, at that moment Orsino finally begins his ardent courtship of his lady love in person at line 105:

Orsino: Gracious Olivia –

Olivia: What do you say, Cesario? – Good my lord –

Viola: My lord would speak: my duty hushes me.

Olivia: If it be aught to the old tune, my lord,

It is as fat and fulsome to mine ear

As howling after music.

In this passage as Orsino starts his eloquent address to Olivia, she in effect tells him to shut up so Cesario can speak. You don't need to hit the duke upside the head with a 2×4 to let him know how she feels about him, and who she values. Of course, Viola, the loyal servant, tries to defer to Orsino, but Olivia makes it clear that she really doesn't want to listen to Orsino any more. It is a brutal putdown of this powerful ruler in public – a potentially dangerous move.

Orsino accuses Olivia of not playing the game of love fairly at line 112:

Orsino: You uncivil lady,

To whose ingrate and unauspicious altars

My soul the faithfull'st off'rings have breathed out

That e'er devotion tendered. What shall I do?

Olivia: Even what it please my lord, that shall become him.

This is strong stuff. He calls her "uncivil," a very strong charge among these most civilized gentle folk. He has treated her as a goddess with an "altar," but she has received his love with "ingratitude." He has loved her more fully and faithfully than any woman ever was, and she now rejects his devotion. In his pain and frustration he cries out, "What shall I do?" and she coldly answers, "Whatever!" Up to this point Orsino has seemed kind of a wimp, whining about love. Now we see a different Orsino, energized by rejection, and dangerous. At line 116 he examines his options:

Why should I not, had I the heart to do it,

Like to th' Egyptian thief at point of death,

Kill what I love – a savage jealousy

That sometimes savors nobly.

Orsino evokes a story from the ancient Greeks about a man who sought to kill the woman he loved but whom he could never possess. Such an action, suggests Orsino, might seem noble to some. However, he continues at line 120, he has an alternative course of action:

But hear me this:

Since you to non-regardance cast my faith,

And that I partly know the instrument

That screws me from my true place in your favor,

Live you the marble-breasted tyrant still.

But this your minion, whom I know you love,

And whom, by heaven I swear, I tender dearly,

Him will I tear out of that cruel eye

Where he sits crowned in his master's spite.

Come, boy, with me. My thoughts are ripe in mischief.

I'll sacrifice the lamb that I do love,

To spite a raven's heart within a dove.

He has quickly discerned that Cesario has betrayed him and is Olivia's beloved, so he will kill the youth to spite Olivia, even though the count loves Cesario himself. Within less than 100 lines, Cesario has been accused of betrayal by Antonio, Olivia and Orsino. His employer threatens to make the consequences fatal. So how does Viola/Cesario respond to the threat at line 132? "And I, most jocund, apt and willingly, [glad and readily]/ To do you rest, a thousand deaths would die." That's right, the supposedly disloyal kid says he would gladly die at Orsino's hand if it would give him some peace of mind. Furthermore, when Olivia asks him why he would choose to follow Orsino under these circumstances, Cesario answers at line 134: "After him I love/ More than I love these eyes, more than my life,/ More, by all mores, than e'er I love wife." That would seem to make clear where the youth's loyalties lie; like Antonio he seems determined to put his life at risk to follow someone of the same gender.

Olivia reminds him of his recent promise and calls him "husband" at line 143. That, of course, stirs things up even more. Cesario/Viola denies the implication, but Olivia produces the priest who attests to the "contract of eternal bond of love" at line 156. Orsino is now absolutely convinced of his employee's treason, marveling at how deceitful he is as a youth and wondering how much more disloyal he will become as he ages. He now banishes Cesario and tells him to take Olivia and get out of his sight. When Cesario protests his innocence, Olivia believes he is acting out of fear at line 171.

Shakespeare now shifts the scene to a comic interlude with Andrew and Toby. In part he does this to provide emotional relief from the heavy-duty betrayal charges, but mostly he does it to prolong the suspense over the inevitable revelation of Viola's secret. Having learned nothing from their previous encounter, Andrew and Toby have apparently attacked Sebastian again, and he has bloodied both of them. Andrew enters, calling for a surgeon to go treat Toby's wounds and accusing Cesario of the attack at 180: "The count's gentleman, one Cesario. We/ took him for a coward, but he's the very devil incardinate."

In previous plays I have pointed out how Shakespeare often has lower class characters stumble over words of more than one syllable. The same provision applies to literacy-challenged gentlemen like Andrew, who manages to twist "incarnate" into a nonsense word "incardinate." When Cesario/Viola denies the charge, the fourth denial so far in this scene if you're keeping track, Andrew at line 185 blames Toby for the ill-conceived attack. When Toby himself is helped in by Feste, Andrew observes that if Toby had not been drunk, he would have acquitted himself better in the fight than he did. Ironically, when Toby asks for "Dick Surgeon" at line 197, Feste has to tell him that the care provider is dead drunk. (Just a reminder that the "surgeon" who provided first aid for minor medical emergencies, including teeth extractions, also doubled as a barber, hence the red-and-white striped barber's pole.) Toby piously declares at line 201, "I hate a drunken rogue."

Andrew holds out the consolation that he and Toby will receive medical treatment together and gets an unexpected response at line 204:

Andrew: I'll help you, Sir Toby, because we'll be

dressed together.

Toby: Will you help – an ass-head and a coxcomb [fool]

and a knave, a thin-faced knave, a gull. [gullible sucker]

This is a very brutal way to end the friendship between Toby and Andrew, and modern productions sometimes try to soften Toby's rejection, by having him embrace Andrew after having insulted him. However, their relationship was a scam all along, and Toby, having ruined any chance he might have had to stay with Olivia, strikes out at a handy target – poor, dumb Andrew. Although this is a comedy, not every character gets what he desires, and Andrew is one of those bitterly disappointed. It is also the last we see in the text of Toby or Andrew.

Sebastian finally enters at line 209. In modern productions the audience is eager to judge how close he and his disguised sister are in appearance; in Shakespeare's day the audience just accepted that the two were identical if they wore the same clothes. What is of more interest is Viola's reaction. She will not reveal her identity for 46 lines. What dramatic and/or psychological reason can you see for this delayed recognition?

The other characters react predictably to the appearance of the two on stage together. Olivia looks at Sebastian strangely, what he calls at line 212 a "strange regard." Orsino sees the brother and sister as an optical illusion, what he describes at line 217 "A natural perspective, that is and is not." Antonio is perplexed and asks at line 222, "How have you made division of yourself?/ An apple cleft in two is not more twin/ Than these two creatures. Which is Sebastian?" Olivia's reaction at line 225 is perhaps the most evocative, as she stares at two men who sexually excite her: "Most wonderful." Sebastian is puzzled as well and tells us he never had a brother, just a sister who was drowned. He begins firing questions at Viola about her identity. She answers, pretending to be equally uncertain and even suggests that this may be a ghost of her dead brother. He responds by saying at line 239, "Were you a woman, as the rest goes even,/ I should my tears let fall upon your cheek/ And say, "Thrice welcome, drowned Viola!" Viola persists in being coy about her identity. She offers the fact that her father had a mole and died on her thirteenth birthday, both of which Sebastian confirms. Finally, after prolonging the suspense, she offers to reveal her true identity by changing out of her masculine attire and tells everyone at line 253 that she is indeed Viola. This business about changing into the proper clothes tells us again how costume creates identity on Shakespeare's stage. Viola's prolonged denial of her true identity gives everyone else on stage a chance to adjust to this surprising development.

The reactions of the characters to Viola's true identity vary. Sebastian gently teases his beloved about her mistake at line 263: "You are betrothed both to a maid and man," probably to help ease the embarrassment over her past obsession. At line 318 Olivia makes her peace with Orsino, saying she welcomes him as a brother-in-law and offering to host and pay for both their weddings. More importantly Orsino now reviews his relationship with Cesario and reinterprets everything the youth had said to him. At line 267 he concludes,

Orsino: Boy, thou hast said to me a thousand times

Thou never shouldst love woman like to me.

Viola: And all those sayings will I over swear,

And all those swearings keep as true in soul

As doth the orbed continent the fire

That severs day from night.

Shakespeare has prepared us for Orsino's rapid reconfiguration of Cesario's gender. He realizes in a flash that Viola is in love with him. For her part Viola reconfirms her promise of love, comparing it to the constancy of the sun, a heavenly body that most in Shakespeare's audience still thought circled the Earth. Orsino asks to see Viola in her proper clothes, and at line 320 he formally discharges her from her duties as his servant:

Your master quits [releases] you; and for your service done to him

So much against the mettle [qualities] of your sex,

So far beneath your soft and tender breeding,

And since you called me master for so long,

Here is my hand; you shall from this time be

Your master's mistress.

This is as close as Orsino comes to a formal proposal of marriage. Olivia adds her best wishes and calls Viola "sister" at line 328.

We now have only the mess of the joke on Malvolio to deal with. We now learn at line 275 that the sea captain who helped Viola back in I, 2, and who still has her belongings, has been jailed on a charge brought by Malvolio. There's no further explanation of this development; it's just mentioned before the Duke says he will free the captain. Dramatically, it is a kind of emotional "piling-on," coming up with still one more reason not to extend Malvolio much sympathy when he appears in a few lines. Olivia suddenly remembers her steward's mental condition, which she calls a "frenzy," suggesting that it may be caused by love as hers was, and asks Feste about him. The clown characterizes his condition at line 284: "Truly, madam, he holds Belzebub at the/ stave's end as well as a man in his case may do." Here is still one more reminder that the jokesters pretend that Malvolio is possessed by a demon, here rather humorously portrayed as Malvolio holding him off with a long stick. When Feste produces the letter from the steward, he explains that he should have delivered it earlier, but that since Malvolio is crazy, it doesn't matter when he gives it to her. Asked to read it to his employer, Feste reads it in a loud, obviously crazy-sounding voice, claiming that he has to read it in the style in which it was written by a lunatic.

Olivia tires of Feste's relentless humor and has Fabian read the letter at line 303. The letter, as we might expect, reveals an angry, self-pitying Malvolio, threatening Olivia for being responsible for his treatment. When he is brought in at line 330 his first words are

"Madam, you have done me wrong." Despite Feste's efforts to help Malvolio to be less sure of himself and his own righteousness, the steward has apparently learned nothing.

He produces the letter and points out how he has followed her instructions, only to be "made the most notorious geck and gull" [line 345]. Olivia now draws the connection with Maria, who has obviously written the letter and who first told the countess her steward was insane. At line 353 she offers Malvolio an opportunity for "justice":

This practice hath most shrewdly passed upon thee,

But when we know the grounds and authors of it,

Thou shalt be both the plaintiff and the judge

Of thy own cause.

Olivia's first reaction here is to give Malvolio the means for his own revenge, without knowing who or what was involved in the joke or why. This offer prompts Fabian to speak, since he is the only one present who was in on the original joke. His speech, from line 357 – 370 contains five important points. First, Fabian and Toby were behind the joke on Malvolio. Second, their reason at line 363 was "some stubborn and uncourteous parts/ We had conceived against [Malvolio]." This suggests that there was no one cause bur rather the steward's general character which was inflexible and insulting. Third, Maria only wrote the letter because Toby implored her to. (This conveniently ignores the fact that Maria came up with the idea of the letter and provided the creative details that made it successful.) For her efforts Toby has married her. Fourth, Fabian concludes that the reasons for the trick and the outcome should "pluck on laughter [rather] than revenge" [line 368] since there were "injuries" on both sides. Fifth, and most important, Fabian places Malvolio's complaint in the context of the miraculous event which has just preceded, the discovery of siblings believed dead and true love for four people. In light of that, Malvolio's problems seem small indeed. Now, at line 371, Olivia speaks of Malvolio not as a wronged plaintiff but as the butt of a joke: "Alas, poor fool, how they have baffled you!" Fabian's confession and explanation seem to have changed the previous sympathy for the steward.

Feste now confesses his part at line 373 and makes the rationale for the trick all the stronger:

Why, "some are born great, some achieve

greatness , and some have greatness thrown upon

them." I was one, sir, in this interlude [comedy], one Sir

Topas, sir, but that's all one. "By the Lord, fool, I

am not mad!" But do you remember, "Madam, why

laugh you at such a barren rascal? And you smile

not he's gagged"? And thus the whirligig of time

brings in his revenges.

Malvolio now realizes that lots of people know the details of the letter, and they know which lines Malvolio used to fool himself. Does he really want a general discussion of the meaning of "M,O,A,I"? How will he feel when the details of his self-delusion are made widespread? Feste heard him at his most vulnerable, when he pleaded with the fool that he was not insane, and now the man he insulted with his arrogance back in Act I is throwing his words back in his face. Feste remembers exactly the cutting insults Malvolio hurled at him when he sought to comfort Olivia's grief, and now he repeats them to remind Malvolio of the consequences of his cruelty and self-righteousness. No wonder Malvolio runs out at line 380, shouting, "I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you!" Not everyone ends this comedy happy with his or her lot. Orsino is given what should be the final speech of the play. He sends after Malvolio to seek some way of resolving his pain. He promises again to clear up the legal problems of the sea captain. And he asks a third time to see Viola in her feminine clothes, when she will become "Orsino's mistress and his fancy's queen" [line 390].

Normally in a Shakespearean play the final lines are given to whatever character is left in charge, the person who will see to it that order is restored to a troubled world and the truth made public. However, in this play, after all the other characters leave, Feste is given the last word in the form of a song. It is appropriate that this play, which begins with music and has songs scattered throughout, should end musically. But how the music has changed! Orsino's interest in the opening scene was focused on the emotional and aesthetic quality. Feste's emphasis is on the moral content of the lyrics, summing up the lessons of the play. Nearly everyone in the play was made a fool of love at some point. The lucky ones – Orsino and Olivia, Sebastian and Viola – learned from their folly. Others – most notably Malvolio and Andrew – had their folly punished. At one level Feste's little song, "The Rain It Raineth Every Day," is just a nonsense piece. (The musical notation for the original song survives in a songbook from that period.) It is interesting that the same song is sung by another famous jester or fool in the powerful tragedy King Lear at a dramatic highpoint. By being at the end of the play Shakespeare seems to invite us to find parallels between the message of the song and the characters we have met. Which character has a problem with drinking? Which character forgot to "lock his gates," metaphorically, and lost a lot of money? Which one tried to gain a wife by "swaggering," or behaving unnaturally?

Finally, Feste's song is significant because it reminds us that the real world we inhabit is plagued by rain, and troubles, daily. If we are lucky, we learn a few lessons in the years given to us. The world of the comedy is make-believe, where every play ends with marriage and people living happily ever after. The great 18th Century scholar, Samuel Johnson, although he liked Twelfth Night, said that it "exhibits no just picture of life," it's just a fantasy. Others might argue that the power of the play is precisely that it is make-believe. The contrast between our own disordered lives and the romantic perfection of the play may help us recognize love when we are lucky enough to stumble upon it and to treasure it..

The end of the lecture on Twelfth Night

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FIVE LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE’S

TWELFTH NIGHT

President’s College, University of Hartford

Humphrey Tonkin

November-December 1999

© Humphrey Tonkin, 2003

NOTE. This series of lectures was originally illustrated by clips from three film versions

of Twelfth Night: (1) the 1980 BBC version directed by John Gorrie with Felicity

Kendal as Viola, Sinead Cusack as Olivia, Trevor Peacock as Feste, and Alec McCowan

as Malvolio; (2) the 1988 video version of the Renaissance Theatre Company’s stage

production, directed by Kenneth Branagh, with Frances Barber as Viola, Caroline

Langrishe as Olivia, Richard Briers as Malvolio, Anton Lesser as Feste, and Christopher

Ravenscroft as Orsino; (3) the 1995 film directed by Trevor Nunn, with Imogen Stubbs as

Viola, Helena Bonham-Carter as Olivia, Nigel Hawthorne as Malvolio, and Ben Kingsley

as Feste.

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LECTURE ONE

It is often said that whereas As You Like It has a minimalist plot, Twelfth Night, written at

about the same time, has a plot of such complexity that it is hard to keep everything

straight. So perhaps we should begin with a summary, and get a sense of how the play is

organized.

Viola is shipwrecked on the coast of Illyria. Thinking her twin brother Sebastian

has been lost in the storm, she disguises herself as a page and seeks a position at

the court of Duke Orsino. The Duke is in pursuit of Olivia, a gentlewoman, who

has declared that she will mourn for her dead brother for seven years and has

spurned his suit. Viola is immediately attracted to Orsino, but is required to serve

as his messenger to Olivia. Olivia falls in love with Viola/Cesario. Later, when

Sebastian appears, Olivia thinks him Cesario and persuades him to marry her.

Orsino is furious -–until Viola appears, recognizes Sebastian and explains all.

Meanwhile, Sir Toby, Olivia’s cousin, his friend Sir Andrew, and the servant

Maria, are leading a boisterous life in Olivia’s house. Her steward Malvolio

disapproves. Maria leaves a letter for Malvolio that purports to come from Olivia

and declares her love for him. To please her, Malvolio makes himself ridiculous,

is shut in a dark room as a madman, and finally, when the plot is revealed,

declares that he will have his revenge. [Modified from Halliday]

Beyond this bare outline of the plot lies a multitude of interpretations: like several other

Shakespeare plays, Twelfth Night has received wildly varying readings over the years

from its critics and directors. Regarded by the Victorians as a relatively uncomplicated

comedy, popular in the theatre, it became in the course of the twentieth century, and at

the hands of a succession of directors, a darker, more tentative affair, presided over by a

melancholy clown and haunted by a joyless steward on whom is perpetrated a practical

joke that goes badly wrong. The Problem of Malvolio and the relative rise in his

importance within the play will inevitably come up in the course of our analysis.

Critics and scholars analyze plays as structures; directors treat them as opportunities.

The first approach offers insights into the plays of Shakespeare as works of art but is

often of little assistance to the poor director faced with the need to make choices: if you

are an actor or a director, it is hard to see characters in a play as anything but complete

people, even though the scholar keeps telling you that they are essentially partis pris,

positions taken in a philosophical argument. The second approach pushes at the

boundaries of a play’s plausibility, particularly when the play is often performed, and

questions of authorial intention often give way to instances of directorial opportunism.

My own intent is partly to pay some attention to modern productions, and potential

productions, of the play, but primarily to show how this play fits into the larger context of

Shakespeare’s oeuvre. There are readings of this play that are just plain wrong, and

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others that seem to me to go beyond the boundary that separates adaptation from radical

rewriting. It is one thing to adapt an old play to modern concerns, but quite another to

rewrite an old play to have it perform some function at odds with the story it was

intended to deliver. Adaptation of Shakespeare is good: his myths have always reshaped

themselves to reflect contemporary anxieties; but rewriting of Shakespeare is something

else – not necessarily bad, but different: its willful distortions, however rewarding they

may be, must be recognized for what they are.

Romeo and Juliet, our last port of call, will be my beginning point. What happened , over

a period of five years or so, between Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night? Having

completed the early history plays and the early comedies (The Comedy of Errors, The

Taming of the Shrew, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love’s Labor‘s Lost), Shakespeare

worked on Romeo and Juliet, Richard II and A Midsummer Night’s Dream at about the

same time. All three plays are marked by a rich sense of the poetic: Romeo and Juliet,

tragedy though it is, feeds into the poetry and the experience of the mature comedies, all

of which have their moments of incipient tragedy – moments that actually serve to

heighten their ordered outcomes. This comic vein began earlier than Romeo and Juliet,

back in The Comedy of Errors, a play that Shakespeare mined for much of his career. In

fact, one of Shakespeare’s strongest characteristics is the fact that he threw very little

away, constantly returning to the same themes, the same plot turns, the same

combinations of characters. Of course, Shakespeare wrote not so much because he

wanted to produce complete works of art but because he wanted to provide dramatized

versions of stories suitable for the commercial theatre. He chose the tried and true. If

something worked, he used it again. If something didn’t work, he tended to play with it

until it did.

Northrop Frye pointed out many years ago that Shakespearean comedy has three stages: a

rule-bound and apparently arbitrary “old” society gives way to a state of confusion and

loss of identity, which is followed in turn by a third stage in which a “new” society is

established out of the old. This new society is more flexible, more accommodating, and

frequently even incorporates within its dynamic some of the elements that in the middle

stage constituted threats. The new society, the re-created community, tends to be held

together through the institution of marriage.

The comedies, lively and simple in The Comedy of Errors, become more ambiguous in

the complex equivocation of The Taming of the Shrew, Two Gentlemen and its betrayal

and ending, and Love’s Labor’s Lost and the delayed gratification of its conclusion.

From Romeo and Juliet the path to Twelfth Night leads on through The Merchant of

Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, and As You Like It. Each has its dark ambiguities.

The Merchant of Venice, comedy though it is, is almost overpowered by the figure of

Shylock, one who uses the law for his own ends, carries death on the point of his knife,

and is excluded at the end from the notably Christian consensus that has condemned him

and his kind to the life of outsiders for generations. This genuinely tragic figure sits

uneasily in a play in which even the alleged good guys are found seriously wanting. He

has his successor, in little, in Malvolio, also excluded from the consensus, the community

of shared irony. Like Shylock, Malvolio has recourse to the law (his prosecution of the

4

Sea Captain has the effect of postponing the full effect of the happy ending), and like

Shylock he is tricked into submission and exclusion. Much Ado has a villain of a

different kind: Don John, as motiveless as an Iago, undoes the consensus because it is

there: the dramatic strength of the play comes in large part from the threats that he

instigates and the patterns of loyalty needed to resist them. As You Like It, when we get

past the cruelties of the opening, balances cold realism and literary fantasy, turning the

conventions of pastoral on their heads. As for Twelfth Night, it too rejects the stale

conventions of stylized love and balances festival against humdrum existence, workday

against holiday.

It is not just the comedies that lead us to Twelfth Night, but the histories as well. Henry

V, written within a year or two of Twelfth Night, completes two rounds of history plays..

The intricate plotting of Twelfth Night has some of its beginnings in what might be

described as the great discovery of the two Henry IV plays, namely the use of a comic

plot to highlight the main plot through a kind of subversive irony. The device is used in a

slightly different way in Henry V. Malvolio’s ventures into love, his sickness of self-

love, the collapse of his dignity, these things throw the main plot into relief. And Sir

Toby is a version of Falstaff, feckless, drunk, but attractive in his very debauchery. His

showing-up of Malvolio, engineered primarily by Maria, involves an elaborate plot of a

complexity to rival Hamlet itself. I should also add that, while there is much

disagreement about its date, The Merry Wives of Windsor may date from about this time –

and this play ends with the showing-up of Falstaff himself as spectacularly, and as

mortifyingly, as Malvolio is shown up in Twelfth Night.

There are those who see Twelfth Night not so much as the culmination of a sequence of

comedies, after which the path leads to the so-called problem plays like Measure for

Measure, but rather as the first of these complex and inter-generic works (this is the way

the Royal Shakespeare Company played it under the direction of John Caird in 1983).

While this strikes me as overstating the case, we should remember that Twelfth Night and

Hamlet are close in time (both from around 1600), and that the sharp division that we are

inclined to fix between the so-called mature comedies and the later romances is by no

means as clear as we might like it to be.

Our play is a neatly organized series of situations, built out of elements already

encountered (as though Shakespeare’s works are one huge continuum), but in a new

combination. We can note the following:

• A female lead: Viola resembles earlier strong women, like Rosalind in As You Like It,

Portia in The Merchant of Venice.

• A heroine disguised, like Rosalind in As You Like It, Portia in The Merchant of

Venice, Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

• Twins and mistaken identity, as in The Comedy of Errors.

• A Falstaff figure in Sir Toby, derived from 1 Henry IV and 2 Henry IV.

5

• A clown in the long line running back to Dogberry and Launce, but notably related to

Touchstone in As You Like It.

• Travel to a foreign country and shipwreck, as in The Comedy of Errors.

• Songs, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or As You Like It.

• The Princess’s year of mourning for a father in Love’s Labor’s Lost becomes Olivia’s

seven years’ mourning for a brother.

The play is a household comedy, set primarily in Olivia’s house, though the layout of the

play really involves Orsino’s palace and Olivia’s house and the road in between – where

Viola and Feste meet or pass, and along which Orsino ultimately travels. If we were to

draw a plan of the geography of the play, it would show the Illyrian seashore and, back

from it, the palace of Orsino. Down the road from the palace – perhaps across town,

perhaps across a stretch of countryside (as in Trevor Nunn’s spectacularly beautiful

Cornish setting), is Olivia’s house, the setting for most of the main action and all of the

subplot. In effect, the play consists of a set of static figures (Olivia, Toby, Malvolio,

Orsino), plus solvents, primarily Viola and in some measure Maria, who unstick the

moral gridlock that seems to afflict the main characters as the play opens. These solvent

figures rearrange and free up the static elements to bring about a coincidence of sexual

and family love in the play’s conclusion. Until then, sexual love must be disguised, and

family is divided.

When we first meet him at the opening of the play, the Duke Orsino is totally lovesick – a

true Petrarchan lover. He is turned inward, self-regarding, deeply self-centered:

If music be the food of love, play on,

Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,

The appetite may sicken and so die.

That strain again! It had a dying fall;

O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound

That breathes upon a bank of violets,

Stealing and giving odour! Enough, no more;

‘Tis not so sweet now as it was before.

O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou!

That, notwithstanding thy capacity

Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,

Of what validity and pitch soe'er,

But falls into abatement and low price

Even in a minute. So full of shapes is fancy,

That it alone is high fantastical. (1.1.1-15)

Music in abundance should lessen the pangs of love; but the fact is that anything given to

love immediately loses its value and we are worse off than we were before. Note the

6

reference to violets (Viola will soon appear, and violets are particularly associated with

sexuality) and to the sea (Viola will appear from a shipwreck, like Venus rising from the

waves).

Orsino is like Actaeon, destroyed by the very thoughts of his beloved. This wonderfully

powerful image is at the heart of a notable sonnet by Samuel Daniel published a few

years before:

Whilst youth and error led my wand’ring mind,

And set my thoughts in heedless ways to range,

All unawares a goddess chaste I find,

Diana-like, to work my sudden change.

For her no sooner had my view bewray’d,

But with disdain to see me in that place,

With fairest hand the sweet unkindest maid

Casts water-cold disdain upon my face –

Which turn’d my sport into a heart’s despair,

Which still is chased, whilst I have any breath,

By mine own thoughts: set on me by my fair,

My thoughts like hounds pursue me to my death.

Those that I foster’d of mine own accord

Are made by her to murder thus their lord. (Delia 5, [1592])

The image occurs elsewhere among the sonneteers (e.g. in Griffin’s Fidessa and William

Smith’s Chloris): here and in Orsino’s speech it neatly reinforces the frustration of a love

turned in on itself. Missing in Orsino’s life is productive love. Perhaps Viola will be his

Juliet as Olivia is his Rosaline.

This beloved, Olivia, laments the death of her brother and swears she will avoid the

world for seven years. Missing in her life is a brother, perhaps a younger brother, not

unlike a Sebastian or a Viola? Her self-centered choice of a kind of secular monasticism

looks like a denial of her sexual role, in fact a posture of sexual fear: she will break out

of this self-imposed isolation through a woman (rather than a man) with a name that is

almost an anagram of her own. And through Viola the road leads to Sebastian. Perhaps

in some sense Viola is an extension of herself, and the dead brother of the one woman

can be replaced in due course by the soon-to-be-found living brother of the other.

Think how she’ll love when she recognizes me for what I am! exclaims Orsino, his mind

seeking a parallel of sexual and sisterly love:

O, she that hath a heart of that fine frame

To pay this debt of love but to a brother,

How will she love when the rich golden shaft

Hath kill'd the flock of all affections else

That live in her; when liver, brain, and heart,

These sovereign thrones, are all supplied and fill'd,

7

Her sweet perfections, with one self king! (1.1.33-39)

We are already in deep. One of the notable characteristics of this play is the sheer

complexity of its sexual patterning: Viola’s transsexual disguise makes her a potential

attraction for both Olivia and Orsino, and the fact of the disguise allows their love to

grow, unfulfilled, much as Orlando’s grows for Rosalind under the controlled

circumstances of her tutelage (she is disguised as a man). In due course, Orlando’s love

will be transferred (and transformed in the process) from Olivia to Viola, and Olivia’s

love will move from a female Viola to her identical male version, Sebastian.

Jan Kott speaks of the “erotic delirium” of the play – the merging of types of love, of

gender, of love and friendship, “the metamorphoses of sex.” The impossibility of

choice….

Note that both Orsino and Olivia are fundamentally immature in their behavior. They

are, says Ruth Nevo, “in unstable tension with themselves.”

The shore on which Viola is washed up is a magical shore, and Illyria, like Prospero’s

island (scene of another shipwreck), is a magic place. To ask why Viola, stepping, or

rather rolling, ashore, chooses almost at once to disguise herself is to ask the unknowable.

We know next to nothing about why she and her brother are out on the high seas in the

first place. There are fatal forces in this play – not really magic, I suppose, yet

unexplained. The adamant that draws Viola to Illyria’s shores is a precursor of the magic

that brings Prospero’s compatriots to his island: this shipwreck is a kind of naufragium

felix, a fortunate wreck, bringing to Illyria a brother and sister who can unstick the

amatory gridlock into which it appears to have fallen. Are these forces like the forces

that drive fiction? Must we play-act to reach truth?

Viola begins by wishing to serve the lady Olivia, so that she “might not be delivered to

the world, / Till I had made my own occasion mellow, / What my estate is”, but, finding

this impossible, she decides to serve the Duke.

In 1.3 we meet the foolish Sir Andrew and Sir Toby; in 1.4 we learn that Viola loves

Orsino. Interestingly, he sends Viola to Olivia because she seems feminine…. We will

come back to these episodes, but let’s pursue Viola’s connection with Olivia a little

further by turning to scene 5 and the meeting of the two.

Viola’s situation, as we discover in 1.2, parallels Olivia’s: her brother seems dead (line

4). Viola and Olivia become two near-allied elements: the attraction of Olivia for Viola

seems sexual but is in part a merging of personality. (The ultimate rediscovery of

Sebastian will bring a more than adequate substitute for a brother to one of them and a

real long-lost brother for the other.) Olivia is drawn to Viola, and, in her way, Viola to

Olivia.

Both of them, then, are mourning – Olivia negatively, by watering her chamber round

with tears, Viola assertively, by assuming the very appearance of her lost twin (Viola, we

8

are told later, imitates her brother [3.4.389]). The two reflect one another – even in their

names. While Twelfth Night tells us at numerous junctures that we must be suspicious of

words and appearances, Viola’s name is too much like Olivia’s for us not to search for

similarities between these two young women, both loved, in very different ways, by a

single man. “Two loves I have, of comfort and despair,” writes our poet in Sonnet 144,

Which like two spirits do suggest me still:

The better angel is a man right fair,

The worser spirit a woman colored ill.

The influence of the man-woman Viola-Cesario who, as it turns out, is not (to use the

language of Sonnet 20) “pricked … out for women’s pleasure,” is benign and comforting

to Orsino (“The better angel is a man right fair”), but that of Olivia, “the worser spirit,”

unproductive, leading only to Orsino’s languorous despair. Remarks Alexander Leggatt,

in Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love (1974): “The irony is that Orsino and Viola, in

exchanging experiences as they do [throughout the play], demonstrate a sympathy they

cannot express: the images they have found for love belittle and even betray it,

concentrating on its privateness, but the interplay of minds that surrounds these images

suggests a deeper capacity for love than either of them can make articulate” (237-238).

In short, the language of love fails them, but is replaced by what Donne might call an

inter-assurance of the mind, a firm base for their love when it finally blossoms.

If Viola’s name seems an anagram for Olivia’s, Malvolio’s is its opposite. As Benvolio

means good will (the Benvolio of Romeo and Juliet is a faithful confidant), Malvolio is

its opposite – ill will.

As Viola imitates her brother (3.4.389), so all the major characters in the play are

engaged in role-playing, not to say locked into their respective roles: Orsino is the suitor,

full of clichés of love and tags of Petrarchanism; Olivia is the grief-stricken sister;

Malvolio is the poor player who seeks to assume roles and cannot.

And why is the play called Twelfth Night? The titles of Shakespeare’s comedies, while

they always have a certain relevance, are often not easily understood or interpreted.

What makes The Winter’s Tale a winter’s tale? Why is the play of Beatrice and Benedick

Much Ado About Nothing? The connection of this current play with the night before the

last of the twelve days of Christmas, namely January 5 or Epiphany Eve, followed on

January 6 by the Feast of the Epiphany, seems obscure. The full title is Twelfth Night, or

What You will, a clear link to As You Like It . What You Will was also the title of a play

by Marston from this same period, so perhaps it was a working title that was then

discarded.

As the eve of the last day of Christmas, Twelfth Night was a time of final celebrations

before life settled down to normalcy, and particularly to the long stretch of dark nights

and cold days that extended ultimately into an English spring. This was the time when, in

country places, the decorations hung in the hall were taken down and burned, and when

the Yule Log, dragged into the hall at the beginning of Christmas and kept burning

9

throughout the celebration, was extinguished before it could burn out completely, so that

the old log could be used as kindling for the new in the following year. Christmas in

general was a time of misrule, when masters and servants shared a common board and

servants were sometimes even licensed to take command. We have a fairly complete

account of at least part of the Christmas festivities at Gray’s Inn in 1594-95 in a little

book published almost a hundred years later, in 1688, entitled Gesta Grayorum. This

account is particularly interesting to Shakespeareans because it includes reference to a

performance of what was probably Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors as a part of the

program. The celebrations, which were so riotous that guests from the Inner Temple

actually retired from the scene, were presided over by one Henry, Prince of Purpoole, a

lord of misrule chosen from among the company.

Sometimes, the lord of the revels was chosen for the last night of Christmas celebrations

only. A poem by Robert Herrick tells us how the selection was made:

Now, now the mirth comes

With the cake full of plums,

Where Beane’s the King of the sport here;

Beside we must know,

The Pea also

Must revell, as Queene, in the Court here.

A bean was hidden in the Twelfth cake baked for the occasion for the gentlemen and the

recipient was made King of the Revels for the evening. His queen was chosen by a pea

hidden in what must have been a different Twelfth cake for the ladies. (Hiding coins in

Christmas puddings continues in Britain to this day.)

What does this have to do with our play? We know the play was acted in 1601/02 at the

Inns of Court on Candlemas (Feb. 2), but it is conjectured (e.g. by Hotson) that it was

performed a year earlier, Jan. 6, 1601, when Don Virginio Orsino, Duke of Bracciano,

was a guest at court; Lord Hunsdon, Lord Chamberlain, writes of selecting and preparing

a play for the occasion. The situation perhaps resembled the competition for the

entertainment at the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,

where the Mechanicals, receiving the good news that their play “is preferred,” are able to

go on and perform it before the lords and ladies What more natural than that Lord

Hunsdon should have turned to his own company, known as the Lord Chamberlain’s

Men, the best known company in England at the time, of which Shakespeare was a

member?

(The company was formed in 1594 and was resident initially at the Theatre, built in 1576

just outside the north wall of London in an area known (then as now) as Shoreditch. In

1599 the company was evicted from the Theatre on the expiration of their lease and the

owner of the land announced that he was going to pull the structure down. The Lord

Chamberlain’s men anticipated him by pulling it down themselves and transporting the

timbers to the south bank of the Thames, where they built the Globe, opened in 1599.)

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If there is rather more conjecture in Hotson’s theory than most people are entirely

comfortable with, none the less the play shows many of the characteristics of what

C.L.Barber describes as “Shakespeare’s festive comedies” – comedies that made use of

the spirit and the traditions of festival such as Shakespeare’s audience, newly urbanized

and deracinated, would have associated with the old village festivals they may well have

grown up with. Barber explains: “I have been led into an exploration of the way the

social form of Elizabethan holidays contributed to the dramatic form of festive comedy

… we can see here … how art develops underlying configurations in the social life of a

culture.” If we go along with I.B.Cauthen’s theory that Sir Toby’s drunken song “O’ the

twelfth day of December” (2.3.85) is an intoxicated error for “O’ the twelfth day of

Christmas,” then we have at least a reference to Twelfth Day embedded in the play. But

the general spirit of festival runs all through the play, taking in Feste the Clown and

various of the other characters, perhaps even Malvolio himself. As for Twelfth Night

itself, it was particularly well known as an occasion for dressing up and acting out.

Writes Leigh Hunt, in the early nineteenth century, “All the world are Kings and Queens.

Everybody is somebody else, and learns at once to laugh at, and to tolerate, characters

different from his own by enacting them.” [Quoted in Miles and John Hadfield, The

Twelve Days of Christmas, 1961]

An ancestor of Father Christmas introduces Ben Jonson’s Christmas His Masque,

presented at court in 1616: “Enter Christmas with two or three of the guard. He is attired

in round hose, long stockings, a close doublet, a high-crowned hat with a brooch, a long

thin beard, a truncheon, little ruffs, white shoes, his scarfs and garters tied cross, and his

drum beaten before him.” Even Malvolio is not dressed as fantastically as this – but we

note that fantastic dressing is associated with the season.

Whether the time of the play is intended as December and January, or whether its title

simply reflects the fact that it is an entertainment suitable for that season, we cannot

readily ascertain. Most directors place it in warmer temperatures, though there have been

modern productions that set the play in winter – Kenneth Branagh’s video version for

example, or Terry Hands’s Royal Shakespeare Company production of 1979, part of

Branagh’s inspiration. Perhaps the very question is illegitimate: Illyria, after all, is a real

place and no place, a part of the Adriatic coast inhabited by people with Italian-sounding

names like Orsino and Olivia (and famous, by the way, for its pirates), but with a sub-plot

consisting of people called Toby Belch and Andrew Aguecheek, as English as the others

are Italian. Perhaps the play is of all seasons and none… Later in his career,

Shakespeare will write a play called The Winter’s Tale which includes a sheep-shearing

festival and features a Bohemia complete with a sea-coast…. And The Taming of the

Shrew starts with an English frame that contains an Italian fiction.

In any case, we may wish to note that Twelfth Night does seem to have been written with

a sophisticated private audience in mind, rather than for the public theatre..

11

LECTURE TWO

In the first lecture we noted that this play is made up of many elements from previous

plays: Shakespeare was always reworking his materials. The play is concerned with

marriage, as so many comedies are – just as tragedies are concerned with death. Romeo

and Juliet, of course is concerned with both….

It has a plucky heroine, who, like Julia in Two Gentlemen, Portia in The Merchant of

Venice, Rosalind in As You Like It, dresses as a man. The leader of its subplot, Sir Toby

Belch, looks back to Falstaff in the two Henry IV plays and The Merry Wives of Windsor.

It involves a shipwreck, like The Comedy of Errors, and, most particularly like The

Comedy of Errors, it revolves around the mistaken identities of a pair of twins.

The Comedy of Errors, complicated as it is by having two pairs of twins at the center of

the action, has twins of the same sex: in Twelfth Night, by linking the confusion of twins

with the confusion of disguise, Shakespeare introduces sexual and gender ambiguity into

the mix. Given that female parts were normally played by boys on the Elizabethan stage,

this innovation of gender ambiguity perhaps only legitimizes through the fiction

something already present in the workaday reality of the theatre of the day. In this sense,

the play is a play about play-acting – as indeed it is in other ways: it is populated by

people playing roles. Orsino adopts the persona of the lovelorn Petrarchan lover; Olivia

adopts, or seeks to adopt, that of the chaste penitent, the secular nun; Malvolio is tricked

into assuming the role of the tasteless and absurd lover (at the very opposite end of the

aesthetic spectrum from Orsino’s courtly lover).

We noted also that Twelfth Night came around 1600 at the end of a line of comedies –

from The Comedy of Errors by way of The Taming of the Shrew, Love’s Labor’s Lost,

Two Gentlemen of Verona, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Much

Ado About Nothing, and As You Like It.

We noted also that its date is almost the same as that of Hamlet and the beginning of the

major tragedies. Thomas Mann once said of comedy and tragedy that “a shift of lighting

suffices to convert one into the other.” Much depends not on where the characters are,

but where the audience is in relation to the characters: as Russ McDonald reminds us, “to

slip on a banana peel is painful to the slipper, but potentially hilarious to the uninvolved

spectator.” We would do well before we are through to inquire whether the

incompleteness of the conclusion of Twelfth Night (Malvolio is not part of the consensus

and Viola does not have her maiden’s weeds) has some bearing on the proximity of the

12

tragedies – though, as we well know, in Shakespeare comedy is seldom complete, seldom

unalloyed.

We begin, then, with a lovesick Orsino addressing a life-denying Olivia, sworn to seven

years of mourning for her brother’s death. Both (to use a term that Olivia uses of

Malvolio) are “sick of self-love,” so taken up with themselves, so narcissistic, that they

are lost to the rest of the world. Viola the fixer, the ingenious, the optimistic, floats into

town like Venus rising from the waves, and, after a complex series of adventures, brings,

through her influence and that of her alter ego her brother, the various parties together

and allows the community to move forward productively by causing its leaders to escape

from their imprisoned selves. It would not be too much to call Viola the spirit of love,

drawn by who knows what adamant and power of attraction to Illyria, and disguise, and

the Duke’s court. Such miracles are possible at certain times of the year – at times of

festival when the forces of negativity are driven back….

The BBC version of Twelfth Night makes 1.5, the scene in which Viola first comes

calling on Olivia, into a complex patterning of sex and language, attraction and

verbalism. We reach this part of the scene through a series of incidents that serve as a

kind of preparation for it. We begin with Maria and Feste. Feste, it seems, has absented

himself from the household (one wonders whether this is because he finds the funereal

atmosphere suffocating, or perhaps because of Malvolio’s unwelcoming and censorious

presence, or perhaps because he has been hanging out at Orsino’s place). Says Maria,

“My lady will hang thee for thy absence.” This, it seems, is no idle prophecy: one has the

impression that a good deal hangs on Feste’s ability to get through to Olivia when she

appears on the scene: “Wit, and’t be thy will, put me into good fooling,” he says to

himself.

In Trevor Nunn’s version of the episode, we see a cold and reluctant Olivia, freshly come

from church and in deep mourning, whose initial behavior towards Feste is hostile. We

are also rapidly made aware of the tension between the feckless fool and the coolly

efficient steward. Malvolio, dismissive of Feste’s talents, seems to suggest that, if Olivia

insists on having a fool around, there are plenty to be had on the open market: Feste, says

Malvolio, was recently put down “by an ordinary fool.”

But, for all her initial hostility, Olivia comes alive, turns positive, as Feste speaks. Feste

focuses on Olivia’s mourning for her dead brother, catching her with her own words and

suggesting that her preoccupation with mourning is unproductive and self-defeating.

CLOWN. Good madonna, why mourn’st thou?

OLIVIA. Good fool, for my brother’s death.

CLOWN. I think his soul is in hell, madonna.

OLIVIA. I know his soul is in heaven, fool.

CLOWN. The more fool, madonna, to mourn for your brother’s soul, being in

heaven. Take away the fool, gentlemen. (1.5.64-70)

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The episode is deftly executed in Trevor Nunn’s production, and it helps explain Feste’s

implacable hostility towards Malvolio down to the very end: in Act 5 he repeats to

Malvolio Malvolio’s words: “’Madam, why laugh you at such a barren rascal, and you

smile not, he’s gagged’…. And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.”

(5.1.373-6) As Nunn interprets it, this incident concerns Feste’s continued employment,

and Malvolio’s effort to break what we discover is a strong bond between Feste and

Olivia.

Branagh also makes much of the incident, with a similarly melancholy Feste. It is of

course the efficient Malvolio who is sent to get rid of the young man at the gate, coming

back with the news that he refuses to leave:

Madam, yond fellow swears he will speak with you. I told him you were sick; he

takes on him to understand so much, and therefore comes to speak with you. I

told him you were asleep; he seems to have a foreknowledge of that too, and

therefore comes to speak with you. What is to be said to him, lady? He’s

fortified against any denial. (1.5.140-147)

And what manner of man is he? Says Malvolio:

Not yet old enough for a man, nor young enough for a boy: as a squash is before

‘tis a peascod, or a codling when ‘tis almost an apple. ‘Tis with him in standing

water, between boy and man. (1.5.158-161)

Why does Olivia let him in? His obduracy? Malvolio’s description of him? Trevor

Nunn, by having Feste first raise the veil on Olivia’s face, seems to suggest that it is Feste

who starts the process of bringing Olivia back to life: his unveiling of her anticipates

Viola’s similar action later on in the scene. Perhaps Orsino is right to send a boy who

seems a girl on such a mission:

Diana’s lip

Is not more smooth and rubious: thy small pipe

Is as the maiden’s organ, shrill and sound,

And all is semblative a woman’s part. (1.4.31-34)

Olivia’s almost fanatical mourning for her dead brother may seem like a refusal to leave

the love of brothers behind and embrace the sexual love that moves us from dependence

on family towards independence: her love is turned back on itself, and made barren. As

Viola says a little later on, echoing Shakespeare’s sonnets,

‘Tis beauty truly blent, whose red and white

Nature’s own sweet and cunning hand laid on.

Lady, you are the cruell’st she alive

If you will lead these graces to the grave

And leave the world no copy. (1.5.242-6)

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Shakespeare writes as follows in Sonnet 3, and the theme is carried through the first

block of sonnets in the sequence:

Look in thy glass, and tell the face thou viewest,

Now is the time that face should form another,

Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,

Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.

Perhaps, in the first instance, Olivia’s admittance of Viola is as mysterious as Viola’s

arrival on the Illyrian seashore. Perhaps it is Feste’s touch that has brought Olivia far

enough back to allow her to consider admitting Viola-Cesario. In any event, this non-

threatening figure, barely masculine at all, is right for Olivia. “I hold the olive in my

hand,” says Viola when she arrives – meaning that she comes in peace, but meaning so

much more, though she herself does not know it.

In the BBC version, the arrival of Viola leads to a brilliant verbal exchange that is at the

same time a kind of awakening of Olivia. Next to the act of sex itself, language is the

most sexual of human behaviors: Viola brings Olivia back from mourning and into the

daylight – a fact made the more emphatic through the raising of her veil.

But Viola does her master’s bidding too well: her almost defiant confusion upon arrival

only makes her the more attractive, and Olivia is soon caught up in a wooing-by-proxy

that becomes, for her if not for Viola, a wooing-in-earnest.

Yet even for Viola the wooing takes on a curious intensity, because it is as though her

words are directed not so much at Olivia as at Orsino: she becomes a willing proxy for

Olivia, an Olivia as eager for Orsino as Orsino is for Olivia. Her superb final speech is

the speech not of a young man sent to woo for his master but of a girl willing to wait for

ever to win a young man. What would she do?

Make me a willow cabin at your gate,

And call upon my soul within the house;

Write loyal cantons of contemned love,

And sing them loud even in the dead of night;

Halloo your name to the reverberate hills,

And make the babbling gossip of the air

Cry out ‘Olivia!’ O, you should not rest

Between the elements of air and earth,

But you should pity me. (1.5.272-280)

Trevor Nunn fails to get this little episode right, but John Gorrie and the BBC do it (in

my view) just the way it should be done. In Shakespeare, great love is expressed and

validated through great poetry: so, here, the poetry arises spontaneously from the very

intensity of Viola’s love. One is reminded of the sonnet that Romeo and Juliet utter

together when they first meet: poetry rises to those lovers’ lips as spontaneously as the

love that they feel. One could, I suppose, argue that Viola is only giving voice to

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Orsino’s instructions: in the previous scene the Duke tells her, “Be not denied access,

stand at her doors, / And tell them, there thy fixed foot shall grow / Till thou have

audience.” But John Gorrie is at pains to emphasize the spontaneity of it all: Felicity

Kendal, his Viola, hesitates for long enough to make it clear that this is no set speech (a

point made the more obvious by the sheer awkwardness of her efforts to deliver such

speeches at the beginning of the interview), but she then launches herself into it with the

verve of a surfer, riding its beauty.

Thus the misprision of these two figures, so alike and yet so different, is complete. It

doesn’t take long for Viola to figure out what is going on. After Olivia has sent her a

ring, by way of Malvolio, that she claims Cesario/Viola left behind, Viola understands

what is all too obvious to her audience:

I left no ring with her; what means this lady?

Fortune forbid my outside have not charm'd her!

She made good view of me; indeed, so much

That methought her eyes had lost her tongue,

For she did speak in starts distractedly.

She loves me, sure: the cunning of her passion

Invites me in this churlish messenger.

None of my lord's ring! Why, he sent her none.

I am the man. If it be so- as 'tis-

Poor lady, she were better love a dream.

Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness

Wherein the pregnant enemy does much.

How easy is it for the proper-false

In women's waxen hearts to set their forms!

Alas, our frailty is the cause, not we!

For such as we are made of, such we be.

How will this fadge? My master loves her dearly,

And I, poor monster, fond as much on him;

And she, mistaken, seems to dote on me.

What will become of this? As I am man,

My state is desperate for my master's love;

As I am woman- now alas the day!-

What thriftless sighs shall poor Olivia breathe!

O Time, thou must untangle this, not I;

It is too hard a knot for me t' untie! (2.2.16-40)

Branagh, whose less buoyant characters hardly allow themselves the flights of fancy and

emotion that we find in the BBC interpretation, directed by John Gorrie, emphasizes

Viola’s sense of inadequacy when the radiant beauty of Olivia is revealed.

As we move out of Act 1, the action is already well under way. It was launched in effect

in three ways: by Viola’s arrival in Illyria (1.2), by Orsino’s dispatch of Viola to visit

Olivia (1.4), and also, between the two, in 1.3, by some minor by-play between Sir

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Andrew and Sir Toby. Asks Sir Andrew, as the scene ends, “Shall we set about some

revels?” “What shall we do else?” asks Sir Toby. One is reminded of Rosalind’s famous

question of Celia in As You Like It (1.2.24), “Let me see, what think you of falling in

love?” And so the play is launched and goes rolling forward.

As 1.2 showed us the arrival of Viola, 2.1 brings us Sebastian. What is the nature of the

relationship between Sebastian and Antonio? Antonio rescued Sebastian from drowning,

and is clearly powerfully drawn to him. “If you will not murder me for my love, let me be

your servant,” says Antonio (2.1.35). Sebastian, grateful though he is, keeps his distance:

“If you will not undo what you have done, that is, kill him whom you have recovered,

desire it not.” Sebastian departs, and Antonio at once (a) switches into verse and (b)

moves from the second person plural (you) to the second person singular (thee),

declaring:

I have many enemies in Orsino’s court,

Else would I very shortly see thee there:

But come what may, I do adore thee so,

That danger shall seem sport, and I will go. (2.1.44-47)

The episode is perhaps best compared with an episode early in The Merchant of Venice,

when another Antonio (the Merchant of Venice himself of course) agrees to help

Bassanio finance his wooing of Portia. Frequently the episode is played to suggest

Antonio’s erotic attraction to Bassanio and hence the sadness of a love great enough to

grant the requests of the beloved even when they mean a greater and permanent

separation. The possibility of a similar kind of attraction here in Twelfth Night does seem

reinforced by the language. It also offers a parallel to the previous scene, in which

heterosexual love (Viola speaking for Orsino to Olivia) and homosexual love (Olivia

falling for a Cesario who is in fact Viola) are hopelessly entangled. As one scene shows

the love of females, so the other shows the love of males. No wonder Viola asks, in the

next scene, “How will this fadge?” “It is too hard a knot for me t’untie,” she adds.

In truth we have a triple alignment in three successive scenes: Orsino is drawn to the

maiden’s cheek and rubious lip of Viola in 1.4; Olivia is attracted to Viola, thinking her a

man, in 1.5; Antonio is attracted to Viola’s male copy, Sebastian, in 2.1. This fluidity of

sexual interactions, following and crisscrossing gender boundaries, opens up in the center

of the play an abundance of possibilities that are normally kept at bay or eliminated by

strict understandings and assumptions imposed by society and biological and economic

necessity: sexual attraction normally leads to marriage, and normally crosses gender

lines. But comedy, especially romantic comedy of this kind, set in the magical region of

Illyria, lowers and remove such limitations: at the center of the play is a time and a place

in which all attractions are in some sense legitimized. The purpose of this opening out of

possibilities is in effect to perform surgery on a sexual regime that has gone badly wrong.

The license of festival makes all things possible, so that sexual attraction can be freed

from artificial constraint as a preliminary to realigining it in conformity with the rules of

heterosexual love at the end of the play. Northrop Frye’s three-stage dynamic of comedy

is at work here: deadlocked and unproductive social pressures (stage 1) are released into a

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freedom licensed by comedy (stage 2) in order to bring nature and convention back into

alignment (stage 3).

Getting the balance, the pitch of the hall, is hard in this play: how do we play the

sexuality? (Antonio and Sebastian? Olivia and Viola? Duke and Viola? Toby and

Maria?). How do we play the cruelty (Malvolio)? The differences among directors are

notable.

And will Malvolio be pulled back into the consensus after the play has ended? Perhaps

the play has to end for it to end…. Will Malvolio have revenge on us because Christmas

is over? Says Toby, “Dost thou think because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more

cakes and ale?” (2.3.114-15). The answer, perhaps, is yes, because Sir Toby’s world of

festival idleness will inevitably give way to Malvolio’s killjoy world of every day. If Sir

Toby is one long party, Malvolio is the Department of Motor Vehicles, the IRS, the

zoning board. Without marriage that is aligned with love, and love that is aligned with

fecundity, we have no defense against the killjoys and the small-minded.

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LECTURE THREE

Shakespeare wrote Twelfth Night probably at about the same time as he wrote Henry V,

completing a run of comedies at about the same time as he was completing the second of

his two four-play history sequences. Other plays from this same period included Hamlet

and As You Like It. Each of these plays deals in some way with the donning of disguise,

and with the conscious self-presentation that we associate with acting.

Henry V, for example, begins with a stirring prologue that draws attention to the dramatic

fiction:

Can this cockpit hold

The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram

Within this wooden O the very casques

That did affright the air at Agincourt?

O, pardon – since a crooked figure may

Attest in little place a million;

And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,

On your imaginary forces work…. (1. Prologue. 11-18)

Henry himself has a sense of theater that holds him in good stead when he traps Scroop,

Cambridge and Gray by presenting them with their death warrants under the guise of

marching orders, and this is matched by a sense of the value of rhetorical performance:

his grand speeches, at Harfleur and at Agincourt, are not only grand utterances outside

the fiction, but also very carefully staged performances within the fiction, a skill he has

learned from his father Henry IV.

In Hamlet, our hero puts an antic disposition on, in order to confuse those around him,

and he uses theater as a device to reveal his uncle’s treachery.

“This wide and universal theater / Presents more woeful pageants than the scene /

Wherein we play in,” remarks Duke Senior in As You Like It, as Orlando bursts on the

scene in search of food for his old retainer Adam. “All the world’s a stage,” remarks

Jaques, in a sudden access of melancholy, and at once launches into an examination of

the analogy between theater and reality. In fact, the notion of play-acting is built into the

very structure and plot of As You Like It, since it turns on the male disguise that Rosalind

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has put on in order to travel into the forest. This disguise begins as a device for survival

and becomes a means of coaxing love from a confused Orlando – he who, when he first

meets Rosalind is struck dumb with her beauty: “What passion hangs these weights upon

my tongue? / I cannot speak to her, yet she urged conference” (1.2.233-34). He falls

irredeemably in love with her, but, while he can give vent to his feelings through bad

poetry, hanging his poetic utterances on the trees of the forest, he cannot, it seems, deal

directly with Rosalind herself. Perhaps if he could the result would be good poetry – just

as Romeo and Juliet make good poetry to replace the moony narcissism of Romeo’s

Petrarchan oxymorons.

One might argue that, whatever ails Orsino, it is not a reluctance to declare his love, and

in this regard he is very different from Orlando. But in one respect the two resemble one

another: both are brought to true and authentic love through a relationship with a girl

disguised as a boy: same-sex attraction leads ultimately to socially (and economically)

productive heterosexual love (with misprisions along the way, as when Phebe falls for

Ganymede/Rosalind). More to the point, Orlando’s inability to take action is contrasted

with Rosalind’s willingness to take charge, as she dons man’s clothing and as she

assumes responsibility for Orlando’s love-life. Viola, too, shows a certain aptitude for

taking charge: surely one of the qualities that attract Olivia to her is her very assumption

of the role of active wooer, unwilling to be put off by denial and able to launch herself

into the forthright passion of the willow-cabin speech.

Make me a willow cabin at your gate,

And call upon my soul within the house;

Write loyal cantons of contemned love,

And sing them loud even in the dead of night;

Halloo your name to the reverberate hills,

And make the babbling gossip of the air

Cry out ‘Olivia!’ O, you should not rest

Between the elements of air and earth,

But you should pity me. (1.5.272-280)

In short, Viola, like Rosalind before her, hijacks a certain masculinity in an environment

where that quality is sadly missing, at least when it comes to love, and, most particularly,

the articulateness that love requires. (Orlando, of course, in As You Like It, is the strong

silent type, who can neither speak his love nor render it in passable poetry.)

We noted last time that in Act 1 and the beginning of Act 2 of Twelfth Night Shakespeare

rings the changes on types of love, as Orsino seems oddly attracted by a girl who is

pretending to be a boy, and Olivia is attracted by a boy who is actually a girl. This is

followed in turn by a scene in which a man seems attracted by the girl’s twin brother. If

Sebastian can be brought into this mix, we think, perhaps the various relationships can

subside into biologically productive love….

Thus the misprisions of As You Like It are deepened and expanded to become a central

theme in Twelfth Night. We might note, though, that whereas Orlando and Rosalind are

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near-anagrams who ultimately marry – analogous naming leads to productive loving – in

Twelfth Night it is two women, Viola and Olivia, who spell one another, so that even as

the play ends the two couples are linked by two occult bonds, the one of linguistic

analogy between Viola and Olivia, and the other of biological twinship between Viola

and Sebastian: Viola resembles Olivia linguistically and Sebastian genetically and she is

set to marry Orsino…. These lovers are bound together more magically even than those

in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, because they are in effect metaphoric and metamorphic

manifestations of one another: if Illyria is a language, they are metaphors within that

language, and, like metaphors, they are shape-changers, whose interaction gives them a

kind of protean brilliance.

If I were engaged in a different pursuit right now, I would point to interest among

Shakespeare’s contemporaries in the question of the autonomous self. Shakespeare’s

theory of love, like John Donne’s, posits a fusion of personality, a platonic union of

selves. In that most famous of Donne’s poems, “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,”

the speaker describes a union of the spirit that overcomes geographical separation:

Dull sublunary lovers’ love

(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit

Absence, because it doth remove

Those things which elemented it.

But we, by a love so much refin’d

That our selves know not what it is,

Inter-assurèd of the mind,

Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls, therefore, which are one,

Though I must go, endure not yet

A breach, but an expansion,

Like gold to airy thinness beat.

Love, Donne suggests elsewhere, may create an autonomy of the loving pair: “She’is all

states, all princes I: nothing else is” – just as such an autonomy is hinted at in Romeo and

Juliet, even as the world closes in and destroys it. Love is a fusion, a merging of selves.

Spenser, in the stanzas that originally ended Book III of The Faerie Queene, used the

image of the hermaphrodite to represent the union of lovers. Donne’s poem “The

Ecstasy” returns to the subject in a different way:

But as all several souls contain

Mixture of things, they know not what,

Love these mix’d souls doth mix again,

And makes both one, each this and that.

A single violet transplant, –

The strength, the colour, and the size,

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All which before was poor, and scant,

Redoubles still, and multiplies.

When love, with one another so

Interinanimates two souls,

That abler soul, which thence doth flow,

Defects of loneliness controls.

Shakespeare expresses similar sentiments in The Phoenix and the Turtle, where these two

mysterious birds seem to merge into a single being:

So they loved, as love in twain

Had the essence but in one;

Two distincts, division none:

Number there in love was slain.

The Sonnets, for example number 116, speak of a kind of permanence and immovability

of love, as though it defies and overcomes all external forces, binding the lovers together

within its universe of power:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me prov'd,

I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

We have lost the ability to understand the force of such sentiments, just as we are

bewildered by twins and anagrams in Twelfth Night. In a recent book by Barbara Maria

Stafford, Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of Connecting (Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press, 1999), the author suggests that in the realm of the modern and the postmodern “we

possess no language for talking about resemblance, only an exaggerated awareness of

difference.” “Without a sophisticated theory of analogy,” she adds, “there is only the

negative dialectics of difference, ending in the unbreachable impasse of pretended

assimilation or the self-enclosed insistence on absolute identity with no possibility for

meaningful communication” (p.51). Analogy, she suggests, is emphatically not the

same thing as sameness. We are good at finding sameness and finding difference, but

poor at bridging the two. While she does not discuss rhyme, we might note that poetic

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rhyme in English is a form of analogy: identical words do not rhyme, but similar words

do. The calculus of love in Twelfth Night calls for just such a rhyme-scheme of love, just

such occult analogy. Viola and Olivia are not the same, but each constitutes a

manifestation of Orsino’s desire: the loves of comfort and despair are near-allied. Viola

and Sebastian are not the same, but a mere difference of genitalia separates the two.

But who is this shadowy Sebastian? Is it most useful to see him as a fourth figure,

washed up like Viola on the shores of Illyria, and necessary to the resolution of the play?

Or should we not rather see him as a kind of alter ego of Viola, a different manifestation

of our heroine, now “prick’d out for women’s pleasure,” as the sonnet puts it? I am

inclined, for all the reasons mentioned, to think the latter.

This sonnet, by the way, is number 20. It bears quoting in its entirety, not least because it

seems to echo Orsino’s observations about Cesario and his “rubious” lip in Act 1 scene 4,

and his comments about women’s weakness later on in the play (to which I will come in

a moment).

A woman's face with nature's own hand painted,

Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion;

A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted

With shifting change, as is false women's fashion:

An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,

Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;

A man in hue all 'hues' in his controlling,

Which steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth.

And for a woman wert thou first created;

Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,

And by addition me of thee defeated,

By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.

But since she prick'd thee out for women's pleasure,

Mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure.

As for Orsino himself, I remarked last time that he seems caught between a love

unproductive because spurned – his self-centered and self-punishing love for Olivia – and

a love comforting and yet potentially unproductive because homosexual – his love for

Cesario-Viola. He is, in short, like the speaker in Sonnet 144, possessed of two loves, “of

comfort and despair.” Unthreatening to Olivia, Viola is the right kind of envoy to send to

her, because she is able to break through Olivia’s resistance to love. When Viola is

carried away, in Olivia’s presence, by the poetry of her love for Orsino, it is Olivia who

falls for her – which is ultimately all right because she will eventually be seemingly

magically transformed into Sebastian. As for Orsino, Viola is no challenge to him either

– he of macho aspirations:

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

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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. (2.4.93-101)

The speech, in Act 2, scene 4, echoes Orsino’s opening speech. Perhaps in some sense

Illyria itself, Orsino’s realm, is Orsino’s being. If so, he little realizes what has washed

up on his shore, and how strongly this woman’s heart can beat. This slight page turns out

indeed to be master-mistress of his passion.

For the moment, though, our concern is with a different matter, the riotous behavior of

Sir Toby and his friends. Orsino, we might say, is concerned with feelings and ideas; Sir

Toby is concerned with the physical. Viola, in Act 2 scene 2, has just tumbled to the fact

that Olivia is in love with her and for this reason has sent Malvolio after her: “She loves

me sure; the cunning of her passion / Invites me in this churlish messenger” (2.2.23-24).

Now, we return to Sir Toby and Sir Andrew. “Shall we set about some revels?” asked Sir

Andrew at the end of Act 1 scene 3. And so the revels begin.

Toby and Andrew are joined by Feste (“Did you never see the picture of ‘we three’?” he

asks), whose charming song “O mistress mine” is a carpe diem, an appeal to seize the

day:

What is love? ‘Tis not hereafter,

Present mirth hath present laughter:

What’s to come is still unsure.

In delay there lies no plenty,

Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty:

Youth’s a stuff will not endure. (2.3.48-53)

Some directors make it seem that Feste sees through Viola’s disguise, others that he

recognizes the attraction of Olivia for Cesario, but one thing is certain: we know already

that Feste disapproves of his mistress’s insistence on prolonged mourning for her brother,

indeed that, in its various ways, the entire household does. So singing such a song in a

house of mourning is both a breach of decorum (a house of mourning is no place for

songs) and an exhortation. If Feste sings sweetly, his friends sing merely boisterously,

ending with a rendering of something called “O’ the twelfth day of December,” which, as

we have seen, some scholars suggest may be a misquotation for the well-known song on

the twelve days of Christmas.

And right on cue, Malvolio appears:

My masters, are you mad? Or what are you? Have you no wit, manners, nor

honesty, but to gabble like tinkers at this time of night? Do ye make an ale-house

of my lady’s house, that ye squeak out your coziers’ catches without any

24

mitigation or remorse of voice? Is there no respect of place, persons, nor time in

you? (2.3.87-93).

The answer of course is that there is not. Sir Toby, perhaps deliberately misconstruing

Malvolio’s reference to their lack of respect for time, suggests that he is criticizing the

quality of their singing:

Out o’ time, sir? Art any more than a steward? Dost thou think because thou art

virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale? (2.3.113-115)

If Sir Toby does have in mind the song of the twelve days of Christmas (2.3.85) – a song

that concludes with the twelfth and makes the title of the play more than a mere label of

convenience – he has hit a raw nerve, not among the characters in the play but among the

audience. Cakes and ale end with the end of Christmas, misrule gives way to the

restoration of order, and the Malvolios of this world bring in a sorry January, to be

followed by a lenten February. It is Sir Toby, imagining that stewards do not rule the

world, who has things wrong.

But Malvolio – his name implying that he is the very opposite of Viola and Olivia – is not

only the enemy of Sir Toby and Maria, not only the enemy of Feste, but also the enemy

of love itself. It is this life-denying force that everyone must beat down: authority, as

Romeo and Juliet learned to their cost, is the enemy of passion.

Most contemporary readings of the showing-up of the steward Malvolio ultimately come

down on the side of compassion for this unsmiling stick of a man, beginning with the

path-breaking Peter Hall production of 1958, the first of the “modernist” Twelfth Nights.

Yes, the ending of the play is, to say the least, emotionally complex, but Malvolio’s

primary significance in this play is not even simply as killjoy, but as the very

embodiment of all that suppresses the spirit. “Marry sir,” says Maria, “sometimes he is a

kind of Puritan” (2.3.140) – but not even that all the time.

The devil a Puritan that he is, or anything constantly, but a time-pleaser, an

affectioned ass, that cons state without book, and utters it by great swarths: the

best persuaded of himself, so crammed (as he thinks) with excellencies, that it is

his grounds of faith that all that look on him love him: and on that vice in him will

my revenge find notable cause to work. (2.3.146-153)

The mousetrap that Maria sets is as cunningly wrought as Hamlet’s and, in its way, as

effective. It involves a letter dropped in his way, purporting to come from Olivia but in

fact written by Maria.

We return briefly to the Duke and Viola. Orsino’s mood is reminiscent of what we saw

of him at the opening of the play: he listens to music, remarks on the depth and instability

of his love – and, now, draws from Viola responses whose ambiguity only we as

audience can fully appreciate. Feste, sent for by Orsino, appears and sings a further song.

We might note that as Viola moves back and forth between the two houses, so does Feste

25

(Olivia may have had this in mind when she accused him of dishonesty earlier in the

play), his music providing moods appropriate to the location. Here the song is about the

death of a spurned lover, the ultimate in Petrarchan melancholy:

Come away, come away death,

And in sad cypress let me be laid.

Fie away, fie away breath,

I am slain by a fair cruel maid. (2.4.51-54)

This death, exemplary of spurned love, must not be mourned, lest the mourning grow out

of all proportion, into “a thousand thousand sighs.” “I would have men of such

constancy put to sea,” says Feste, in an ironic reminder of the watery arrival of the

unwaveringly constant Viola (she who comes from the sea is un-sea-like in her

constancy; Orsino is protean like the sea).

The melancholy of the song is reflected in the melancholy of the scene as a whole – a

sharp contrast to the world of Sir Toby and his cronies from which we just parted and to

which we will shortly return. In response to Orsino’s suggestion that women lack the

power to love as men do, Viola-Cesario suggests otherwise:

In faith, they are as true of heart as we.

My father had a daughter lov’d a man,

As it might be perhaps, were I a woman,

I should your lordship. (2.4.107-110)

“And what’s her history?” asks Orsino. “A blank, my lord: she never told her love, / But

let concealment like a worm i’ th’ bud / Feed on her damask cheek.” “But died thy sister

of her love, my boy?” asks Orsino, perhaps implying that such death may afflict men but

that women lack the depth to die of love (a variant on Rosalind’s witticism in As You Like

It). With the past drawn up so tight against the present – Viola, after all, still lives –

Viola’s response is cryptic and we pass on. And so Viola sets out once more to win

Olivia’s love.

We might note that – at least in the BBC version of the play and in the Trevor Nunn

movie – there are frequent shifts of mood and pace in 2.3 and 2.4. There are of course

ways of playing these scenes in a faster and less disturbing way, but the text does seem to

support such rapid changes. Penny Gay (31) quotes Judi Dench, who played Viola in the

1969 John Barton production: “She is never just a jaunty boy; she is desperately

vulnerable and there are tremendous areas of great sadness in her although she is the

catalyst in the play.”

We might also note that Viola in effect becomes the wooer in this scene: she controls the

action, and it is she who pulls back to address the main agenda, the wooing of Olivia.

Her male disguise allows her, like Rosalind, to woo rather than being wooed – and, like

Rosalind, her view of love is altogether more mature than that of the rather rudderless

man she woos. More than anyone else in the play, it is Viola who is the spirit of love,

26

she who brings it to a benighted Illyria, and she who has an understanding of it far

beyond her years. Hence the sadness as well as the energy, the melancholy as well as the

optimism.

The entrapment of Malvolio (‘the trout that must be caught with tickling,” Maria calls

him) takes place in the garden, in a box-tree walk, where the close-cut box hedges (box is

a kind of small-leafed privet) afford good cover for our on-stage audience. We note, of

course, that we have here a situation not dissimilar from the play-within-the-play in

Hamlet: Malvolio in the center, an audience of interested parties on the stage,

commenting on what they are witnessing, and the theater audience beyond, able to assess

the significance of the events in the context of audience comment. We are let in on an

elaborate fantasy: any suggestion that Malvolio’s zealous intervention the previous night

was mere respect for his mistress’s seven-year mourning is exploded in his soliloquy as

he wanders along the walk. First, it is Maria:

Maria once told me she did affect me, and I have heard herself come thus near,

that should she fancy, it should be one of my complexion. (2.5.23-26)

Olivia called Malvolio “sick of self-love.” It is hard to see such blindness as anything

else. But the steward is not content with musing on his attractiveness to his fellow

employees: he already has Olivia in his sights. Clearly he sees himself as capturing

Olivia’s attention and her love, which he regards as first and foremost an opportunity to

lord it over everyone else. Indeed, Malvolio is obsessed not so much with sex as with

power.

To be Count Malvolio…! Having been three months married to her, sitting in my

state … Calling my officers about me, in my branched velvet gown, having come

from a day-bed, where I have left Olivia sleeping … And then to have the humour

of state; and after a demure travel of regard, telling them I know my place, as I

would they should theirs, to ask for my kinsman Toby … Seven of my people,

with an obedient start, make out for him. I frown the while, and perchance wind

up my watch, or play with my – some rich jewel. Toby approaches; curtsies there

to me … I extend my hand to him thus, quenching my familiar smile with an

austere regard of control…. (2.5.35-67)

And thus it continues. So it is not the letter that sets Malvolio going, but rather the letter

that confirms his fantasies. In such a state of suggestibility, he has no need to check the

handwriting: he knows it is his lady’s hand: “These be her very C’s, her U’s, and her T’s,

and thus makes she her great P’s.” The fact that the letters form a reference to the female

genitalia, “and thus she makes her great P’s,” only adds to the absurdity of it all (careful

scholars have pointed out that there are no capital C’s or P’s in the letter itself…).

On Olivia’s seal, we note, is the figure of Lucretia, the ultimate example of the faithful

wife – she who was raped by Sextus Tarquinius and subsequently took her own life, after

swearing her husband and his friends to vengeance. But the letter left in Malvolio’s way

is, to say the least, enigmatic, beginning with two doggerel verses:

27

Jove knows I love;

But who?

Lips, do not move,

No man must know.

I may command where I adore;

But silence, like a Lucrece knife,

With bloodless stroke my heart doth gore;

M.O.A.I. doth sway my life. (2.5.98-101, 106-109)

Why M.O.A.I? The conjectures of editors from Shakespeare’s day to our own have been

less than convincing. Malvolios all, we might say. Malvolio, puzzling over its meaning,

is as baffled as they. In a play in which Olivia and Viola do indeed seem to be bonded by

their names, we can perhaps be forgiven for looking for an answer (or is the joke on us

for doing so?). However, since Maria’s intention is to incite while preserving deniability,

there probably is none, beyond perhaps I AM O, “I am nothing.” It takes even the

credulous Malvolio a while to understand that the letters M, O, A and I are all contained

in his name: “to crush this a little, it would bow to me, for every one of these letters are in

my name.” Three of them are in Maria’s name too, we might add….

But to the credulous it is enough, and when Malvolio is told to be “opposite with a

kinsman, surly with servants,” to smile a lot, and (like Father Christmas in Ben Jonson’s

masque) to wear cross-garters and yellow stockings, he is at once ready to oblige. “Some

are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them,”

writes the temptress Maria, but it is entirely appropriate that Malvolio does not recognize

her biblical source, the Gospel of St. Matthew (19.12): “For there are some eunuchs,

which were so born from their mother’s womb; and there are some eunuchs, which were

made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for

the kingdom of heaven’s sake.” And what kind of eunuch are you, Malvolio? the letter

seems to ask. The trap is set. An exultant Malvolio declares, “Daylight and champaign

discovers not more!”

I will not delay us long with unpacking this scene – a scene that is hilarious in its

execution and which overbalances only if we see Sir Toby and company as unworthy of a

victory and Malvolio as a figure deserving of compassion rather than contempt.

Personally, as I have pointed out before, I have difficulty with what I regard as such

misplaced compassion. Malvolio is odious – a killjoy and a spoil-sport. Yes, he is loyal

to Olivia when others are not; yes, he seeks to keep some semblance of order in her

household. But the fantasies that we overhear him indulging in (and, mark you, before

the plot laid for him takes effect) are not those of orderly housekeeping or loyal

stewardship but, at best, the petty vengeances of a small-minded retainer and, at worst,

the ravings of a power-hungry misanthrope. And am I not right to see here a collection of

Brits – Tobys and Andrews and Marys – subverting the affectations of a hopelessly

Italianate household? Thomas Nashe, in Have with you to Saffron Walden makes famous

fun of Spenser’s humorless friend Gabriel Harvey for his Italianate affectations before the

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Queen on the occasion of her visit to Audley End a few years before. The truth-tellers of

England are once again at work on exploding the affectations of Italy….

Illyria, we should note once again, is a mixture of Italy (Orsino, Olivia, Viola) and

England (Aguecheek, Belch), or rather a riotous England embedded in a romantic Italy.

The Comedy of Errors is set in a Mediterranean world, though it too has its farcical core

and its romantic frame.

The relationship of plot to subplot of course embodies a dynamic related to the one that

we see at work in the Henry IV plays and Henry V, where the subplot makes fun of set

assumptions about honor, and where the lesser folks imitate absurdly the actions of their

leaders. “On, on, on, on, on, to the breach, to the breach,” cries the disloyal and vapid

Bardolph following Henry V’s grand speech at Harfleur. “What is honor? A word.

What is in that word honor?… Air – a trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died a

Wednesday” – thus Falstaff, as Henry IV’s army prepares to do battle against Hotspur

and the Douglas. It does not necessarily undermine the main plot, but causes us to define

and redefine our terms, to accept nothing at face value, to ask for the reality behind mere

appearances.

But I wander a long way from my text. As we enter the third act, the stage is set for a

series of confusions, which will be played out in the remainder of the play, to remarkable

effect.

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LECTURE FOUR

At the end of his efforts to interpret the letter that Maria has written and that purports to

come from Olivia, Malvolio declares, “Daylight and champaign discovers not more!”

Soon, as we noted last time, daylight and champaign will be replaced by a dark room:

Malvolio will be declared mad. Says Sir Toby, “Why, thou hast put him in such a dream,

that when the image of it leaves him he must run mad.” Malvolio’s supposed madness

gives concrete expression to what is surely a central theme of Twelfth Night: the shifting

shapes of personality, and the extreme difficulty of pinning characters down to a firm and

definable place. The lovers themselves shift with the sea, and they move through a series

of self-generated errors and misunderstandings. As Ruth Nevo puts it, “no play of

Shakespeare’s is launched with greater dispatch into its vortex of truth-discovering

deception than this.”

When John Manningham, studying law at the Middle Temple, described the Feb. 2, 1602,

performance of Twelfth Night at the Inns of Court, the first recorded performance, he

wrote, “At our feast we had a play called Twelve night or what you will, much like the

comedy of errors or Menechmi in plautus…” It is interesting that he seizes on this aspect

of the play, since Plautus’s play of twins certainly lies behind the figures of Viola and

Sebastian, and the confinement of Malvolio, but barely figures in the first half of the play

at all. I want now to turn now to the second half.

Latin theatre was popular in the Renaissance. The Menaechmi, of Plautus (250-184 BC),

a play of mistaken identities, had been performed on a couple of occasions at the English

court (for example 1577 and 1583, according to Leah Scragg), and Shakespeare modeled

the central plot of The Comedy of Errors on it, adding a second pair of twins. A

translation by William Warner came out in 1595 (see Arden edition p.xxv): Shakespeare

may have read it in manuscript. More likely, he had done the play at school in Stratford.

The fact that Shakespeare comes back to this play of Plautus inevitably causes us to

contemplate the connections with The Comedy of Errors. Is Twelfth Night, the only other

Shakespeare play that deals with misunderstandings arising from the confusion of twins,

in some sense a rewriting of its predecessor?

In Plautus’s play, a merchant of Syracuse loses one of his twin sons in Epidamnum,

where he is raised by a local merchant. Years later, the other son returns to Epidamnum

30

to find him. The two sons are mistaken for one another, and a whole sequence of

misunderstandings takes place, culminating in a declaration by the wife of the

Epidamnum twin that her husband is crazy. She calls in a doctor to drive out the

madness. Finally the twins arrive on the stage at the same time and all is discovered.

While Plautus’s play is relatively simple, Shakespeare seizes on the confusion that arises

from the invasion of identity. He moves his action to Ephesus, a city well known, ever

since the time of St. Paul, as the home of witches. The misunderstandings that arise are

accordingly attributed either to witchcraft (by the visitors from Syracuse) or madness (by

the local inhabitants). Though The Comedy of Errors is best described as a farce set in a

romance frame, there is a distinctly unsettling quality to the loss of identity that the twins

suffer because the people around them no longer recognize them for what they are. The

confusion is, to use my earlier terms, one in which sameness replaces analogy: to the

other inhabitants of Ephesus, the two twins become one and the same person. The

misprision of the Ephesians is transferred to the victim and labeled madness.

Though madness is much talked about in The Comedy of Errors, as it is in such obvious

contexts as Hamlet and King Lear, the word, with its variants, occurs more frequently in

Twelfth Night than in any other Shakespeare play. Malvolio is trapped into madness: he

plays out, in more elaborate form, the fate reserved for Plautus’s Menaechmus of

Epidamnum, and repeated by Shakespeare’s Antipholus of Ephesus, who is labeled as

mad by his wife, bound, and subjected to the ministrations of Doctor Pinch (see Act 4 of

that play). Sebastian, mistaken for Viola, and Viola, mistaken by Antonio for Sebastian,

suffer some of the misunderstandings that Plautus built into his play: when Antonio gives

Sebastian his purse and then asks for it back from Viola, he is essentially repeating an

event in The Comedy of Errors, which is in turn derived from Plautus.

But there are two fundamental differences between The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth

Night. First, the errors in the latter play are, as I have already suggested, mostly self-

generated: they arise because the characters make choices (Maria and Sir Toby mislead

Malvolio; Viola creates confusion because she chooses to assume a disguise). Thus a

play of chance is replaced by a play in which the imagination creates its own confusion.

Second, the twins in Twelfth Night are of different sexes, and Viola’s crossing of gender

lines creates sexual confusion of a quite different kind from that generated in The

Comedy of Errors. Shakespeare’s other great play of confused identity, A Midsummer

Night’s Dream, also uses a device essentially external to character, namely magic.

The Comedy of Errors is a play primarily (though not exclusively) about men The love

of man and woman is a matter of secondary interest. Indeed the only romantic

relationship in the play is the incipient love between Luciana and Antipholus of Syracuse,

to which I will return in a moment. In Twelfth Night, however, love is a central concern.

The Comedy of Errors is about relationships already formed; Twelfth Night, like its

immediate predecessors As You Like It and Much Ado About Nothing, is about

relationships in the process of formation.

31

But the story of Viola, Orsino and Olivia really has its origins not directly in Plautus but

in a play performed in Siena in 1531 and following Plautus at a distance, entitled

Gl’ingannati (the mistaken ones). Leah Scragg, who writes lucidly about the connection,

summarizes the plot of the Italian play as follows:

This play concerns the amorous adventures of a young woman who, having been

separated from her brother during the sack of Rome, and lodged in a convent by

her father, has run away from the sisters to enter the service of a man she loves

disguised as a page, only to be employed by him as emissary to the lady he wishes

to marry. In executing her master’s commission, the heroine becomes the object

of her rival’s affections, and is extricated from the triangular relationship she has

unwittingly created only by the appearance of her brother, who is mistakenly

afforded an opportunity to impose his own attentions on his sister’s suitor.

The play was adapted as a novella by Giraldi Cinthio, known to Shakespeare and a source

for Othello, and by Barnabe Riche. Riche’s story, known as Apolonius and Silla, was

published in Riche His Farewell to Militarie Profession (1581). Riche has the young

lady shipwrecked at the beginning – and she enters the service of the man she is pursuing

and who has previously spurned her love.

In the Italian play and in Riche, we are dealing with siblings, but, as we have seen, in

Twelfth Night and The Comedy of Errors they are twins, “with all the divisible

indivisibility which that traditionally mysterious relationship implies,” as Scragg puts it.

In The Comedy of Errors, the two brothers are in effect drawn together by mysterious

forces – or so we sense. Something similar seems to happen also in Twelfth Night:

Shakespeare, as we have seen, is frequently interested in mysterious powers bringing

people together and keeping them apart.

Scragg enumerates some of the parallels between the two plays. In both we have a

shipwreck, with all the implications of fearful life-crossings that such things imply in

Shakespeare (The Tempest, Hamlet, and Othello all have dangerous sea-crossings or

shipwrecks, and Pericles has more than one) and the contrast of formless water (a place

of shape-changing and magic) versus solid land. It was, by the way, a stroke of genius

that caused Trevor Nunn to set his movie version of Twelfth Night in Cornwall, a place

where the sea is never far away, and the shots of the seashore, or of the sea-girt St.

Michael’s Mount, here serving as the palace of Orsino, help remind us of the turbulent

identities of the people who inhabit the maritime Illyria.

Antipholus of Syracuse in The Comedy of Errors is lodged at the Centaur, Sebastian in

Twelfth Night at the Elephant. Sebastian sets out to “see the relics” of the town (3.3.19)

(a nice example of early tourism), while Antipholus says he will “view the manners of the

town / Peruse the traders, gaze upon the buildings” (1.2.11-13). Like Antonio, Sebastian

is accosted by a servant (Feste in 4.1.1ff), invited to the house of a lady he has not met

(4.1.1) and addressed fondly by a woman he does not know (Olivia at 4.1.50), finally

rediscovering himself and finding a marriage partner. He questions his own sanity and, at

the end, he is saluted as a ghost (“If spirits can assume both form and suit,” says Viola,

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“You come to fright us,” 5.1.233-6). There is a major mix-up with money, as in The

Comedy of Errors. Antonio, required to explain himself to the Duke, resembles Egeon,

the father in The Comedy of Errors, in his narrative (5.1.74ff). As with Egeon, he has

been drawn to an alien town in his search for a young man, only to be repudiated by him

in his hour of need.

In many ways The Comedy of Errors seems the quarry from which Shakespeare drew his

material for an entire career as a comic playwright. When Adriana and her sister

Luciana discuss the proper role of a wife in the second act of this play, they begin a line

of thought about spousal relations that blossoms into an entire play – The Taming of the

Shrew. When, later, Antipholus of Syracuse woos Luciana, he falls into a mode of poetic

speech, a kind of sonnet-like discourse, that Shakespeare explores in greater detail in

Love’s Labor’s Lost, a play that looks directly at the relationship between poetry and

love, and again in Romeo and Juliet. And if the magic of Ephesus is but an illusion of the

misguided, it becomes real in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Running through all of

these plays, and others besides, is a growing interest in the nature of love and its effect on

those it touches. As we have seen, the Sonnets serve as a gloss on the exploration of love

in these plays and in the mature comedies. So does Shakespeare’s most mysterious

poem, The Phoenix and the Turtle.

Love’s Labor’s Lost calls into question the reliability of language, an issue that reappears

on the table at the dead center of Twelfth Night. In 3.1, Viola and Feste come together,

meeting on the street, as it were. These two figures, we recall, are unique and in some

sense privileged in that they move freely between the two houses – Orsino’s and Olivia’s.

Each in a way is a go-between. The topic of their conversational encounter is language.

The scene begins with a quibble:

VIOLA. Save thee, friend, and thy music! Dost thou live by thy tabor?

CLOWN. No, sir, I live by the church.

VIOLA. Art thou a churchman?

CLOWN. No such matter, sir. I do live by the church, for I do live at my house,

and my house doth stand by the church….

(3.1.1-7)

“A sentence is but a chev’ril glove to a good wit – how quickly the wrong side may be

turned outward,” says Feste. “Words,” he adds, “are grown so false, I am loath to prove

reason with them..”

Of Olivia, Feste says, “I am not indeed her fool, but her corrupter of words.”

It is not new, this anxiety about language. The Princess, in Love’s Labor’s Lost,,

assessing the sincerity of the young men’s expressions of love, conveyed to her and her

ladies in writing, asserts:

We have received your letters, full of love;

Your favours, the ambassadors of love;

And in our maiden council, rated them

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At courtship, pleasant jest, and courtesy,

As bombast and as lining to the time;

But more devout than this in our respects

Have we not been…. (5.2.765-771)

In vain Dumain replies, “Our letters, madam, show’d much more than jest.” The age was

itself profoundly ambivalent about language, particularly language intended to persuade,

and about ornament, the natural accompaniment of persuasive language. Such language

has the power to seduce, as George Herbert and others make clear.

In this play, language is a poor mediator between Orsino and Olivia, indeed a misguided

and misguiding force in the hands, and the mouth, of Orsino himself, whose rhetorical

excesses about the nature of his love for Olivia really own serve to create barriers

between him and the rest of the world. It is not language that stirs Olivia, but ocular

proof. It is seeing Viola that stirs her love.

We have just come from the supreme case of words misleading: the love-letter that Maria

creates to catch Malvolio makes her a corrupter of words of a different kind: her palpable

improbabilities catch the attention of a self-absorbed Malvolio and he is readily

convinced. So perhaps we should say that, in this play at least, words composed in a kind

of sincerity (if that is what Orsino reveals) go nowhere, whereas words intended to

mislead do so all too effectively.

Questions about reading or listening (Viola conveying Orsino’s messages; Maria catching

Malvolio) are accompanied by questions about seeing. It is a disguised Viola who

appeals to Olivia, and the fact that her identity is hidden makes for a kind of amatory

deadlock that collapses into various kinds of unrequited love. While direct sight of

people in this play seems to have a more profound and valid effect than mere words about

them, as Viola’s effect on Olivia testifies (or, for that matter, Viola’s effect on Orsino),

Viola is still captive within her disguise.

As the third act opens, we are moving, in fact, into a situation in the households of Olivia

and Orsino in which even the old uncomfortable consensus is beginning to fall apart. We

know from experience that the old, unsatisfactory community with which Shakespeare’s

comedies customarily open has to be swept away before it can be replaced with a

restructured community. This is in effect the process that we now embark on –

intensifying into the (customary) near-chaos of Act 4. (Consider in this connection the

parallel with The Comedy of Errors: the arrival at Antipholus of Ephesus’s house at the

beginning of Act 3, where Antipholus of Syracuse in effect usurps his twin brother’s

position, is the turning-point which leads in due course and through a series of

misprisions already set in motion, to the chaos of Act 4.)

As for Viola, she ends this initial episode in Act 3 by meditating on Feste’s power:

This fellow is wise enough to play the fool,

And to do that well, craves a kind of wit:

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He must observe their mood on whom he jests,

The quality of persons, and the time,

And like the haggard, check at every feather

That comes before his eye. This is a practice

As full of labour as a wise man’s art:

For folly that he wisely shows is fit;

But wise-men, folly-fall’n, quite taint their wit. (3.1.61-69)

The little speech is a reminder of the extent to which Viola, in her generosity of spirit, is

an empathetic personality. She feels so strongly for those around her – for Orsino

suffering in self-delusion or in love; for Olivia confused about her surroundings. Above

all, her wandering back and forth between the houses, for all that it is conducted in

disguise and against her better interests, is a wandering of the free. The other characters

are caught in themselves – Orsino in his self-made Petrarchan prison, Olivia watering her

chamber round like a caged bear, Malvolio sick of self-love, Sir Andrew tied to Sir Toby

and Sir Toby tied to his bottle and to Sir Andrew’s ATM card. These are self-regarding

prisoners: Viola and Feste see with wider vision.

Feste is, as we readily recognize, one in a line of Shakespearean fools, and perhaps most

like Touchstone in As You Like It. The part was probably played by Robert Armin, who

may also have played Touchstone and gone on to play the Fool in Lear. His predecessor

was Will Kempe, a comedian whose broader style was evident in such characters as

Dogberry in Much Ado or Launce in Two Gentlemen. Touchstone and Feste have a

melancholy wisdom beyond mere foolery. “This professional jester,” remarks Welsford

(381) of characters like this, “is no longer a mere butt or foil to the normal members of

the community, but his detachment enables him to be their critic. The laughter becomes

more subtle. It is no longer caused by the mere juxtaposition of normal and abnormal; it

is caused by the incongruity of the servant being in reality stronger than the master, the

madman wiser than the man of sense.” In short, then, Feste represents a kind of

permanent presence of misrule in the household, a reality check for the other characters.

As such, he is both a part of the household and detached from it, both a member of the

community and privileged by his separation.

Viola’s meeting with Olivia in 3.1 brings Olivia’s apologies – for the ring and the

embarrassment it may have caused Viola. Now, by the way, we understand why

Malvolio took his mission in 2.2 in such ill part: he wants Olivia and saw Viola as a

rival. He is not trying to keep a mourning household but trying to hold on to his

advantage, as he sees it.

Olivia is confused, emotionally overwrought. First she tells Viola that she will hold off:

“I will not have you, / And yet when wit and youth is come to harvest / Your wife is like

to reap a proper man” (3.1.133-135). Like the speaker in Shakespeare’s sonnets, Olivia

wishes her beloved on someone else (one is reminded of Viola’s declaration that Olivia

should marry and have children when she first sees her face in 1.5). We go through an

exchange in which each party emphasizes her disguise and her separation from her

surroundings:

35

OLIVIA. I prithee tell me what thou think’st of me.

VIOLA. That you do think you are not what you are.

OLIVIA. If I think so, I think the same of you.

VIOLA. Then think you right; I am not what I am. (3.1.140-143)

Viola’s formulation, “That you do think you are not what you are,” may seem an odd

displacement, but Viola is presumably suggesting that Olivia thinks she is in love with a

man. As for Olivia, used to dominating others, to running a household, to keeping even

the Duke himself at bay by her disdain, she cannot understand the emotions that she feels

in Viola’s presence, though she perhaps understands all too well that Viola spurns her

much as she has been spurning Orsino. The very indifference fuels her passion. And so

she bursts out in a declaration of love, brought on, we note, by Cesario’s very scorn:

O, what a deal of scorn looks beautiful

In the contempt and anger of his lip!

A murd'rous guilt shows not itself more soon

Than love that would seem hid: love's night is noon.

Cesario, by the roses of the spring,

By maidhood, honour, truth, and every thing,

I love thee so that, maugre all thy pride,

Nor wit nor reason can my passion hide.

Do not extort thy reasons from this clause,

For that I woo, thou therefore hast no cause;

But rather reason thus with reason fetter:

Love sought is good, but given unsought is better. (3.1.147-158)

The declaration of love is rendered in couplets: it is almost as though the word “noon,”

the inevitable conclusion of the lines before it, sets the couplets going: the very regularity

of the verse is a sign of the force of the emotion.

And so now we have three cases of unrequited love – Olivia’s for Viola, Viola’s for

Orsino, Orsino’s for Olivia. Viola scorns Olivia who scorns Orsino. The pressure is on

for the rediscovery of Sebastian, the shedding of the disguise, and the turning of this love

triangle into a square….

The hilarious episode of the duel again depends on the corruption of words, specifically

on the deceptive conveyance of messages between Sir Andrew and Viola. Sir Andrew

begins the process. Says Sir Toby, sending him off to write a challenge:

Taunt him with the licence of ink. If thou thou’st him some thrice, it shall not be

amiss, and as many lies as will lie in thy sheet of paper, although the sheet were

big enough for the bed of Ware in England, set it down. (3.2.42-46)

And we are hurried off to see Malvolio cross-gartered.

36

But not before we return to Sebastian and Antonio – a welcome reminder (much needed

at this point) that Sebastian has not ridden out of the play permanently. Antonio shows

huge generosity in treating Sebastian as he does – one of the few people in the play to do

so, to anyone – especially when we learn that he is persona non grata in Illyria. He gives

his purse to Sebastian, setting us up for a Plautan misunderstanding, and Sebastian heads

off to see the sights. Little does he know what he is letting himself in for.

Olivia is a girl in love as 3.4 opens

I have sent after him, he says he’ll come:

How shall I feast him? What bestow of him? (3.4.1-2)

Perhaps it is hard for her really to attend to Malvolio, but his garb and his conversation

are as attention-getting as they are incomprehensible. Indeed, his quoting from a letter

that Olivia has never seen (she does not even know that he is quoting, of course) leads to

the most abject and complete collapse of language that we have in the play. The arrival

of Cesario calls her away, but Sir Toby continues the deception:

Come, we'll have him in a dark room and bound. My niece is already in the belief

that he's mad. We may carry it thus, for our pleasure and his penance, till our very

pastime, tired out of breath, prompt us to have mercy on him; at which time we

will bring the device to the bar and crown thee for a finder of madmen. (3.4.136-

143)

Sir Andrew’s idiotic challenge separates us from the latest interview of Viola and Olivia.

It is brief and poignant. Says Olivia:

Here, wear this jewel for me; 'tis my picture.

Refuse it not; it hath no tongue to vex you.

And I beseech you come again to-morrow.

What shall you ask of me that I'll deny,

That honour sav'd may upon asking give? (3.4.210-214).

“Nothing but this, your true love for my master,” replies Viola. But, says Olivia, “How

with mine honour may I give him that / Which I have given to you?” Says Viola in reply,

“I will acquit thee.”

Why does Viola return to Olivia’s house so willingly? Is she driven by her love for

Orsino? Is she perhaps motivated by a certain determination to succeed? More likely, is

she driven by compassion for Olivia? This little exchange here makes me think that she

is discovering a somewhat different role for herself, a little bit like Rosalind’s promise to

Phebe in As You Like It that she will love her under certain conditions (“I will marry you

if ever I marry woman” 5.2.112-113). Rosalind has already told Silvius, who loves

Phebe, “Say this to her: that if she love me, I charge her to love thee; if she will not, I will

never have her unless thou entreat for her” 4.2.69-71. Viola, as I read the situation here,

37

sees a possibility that, if she can attract Olivia to her, she can in due course redirect those

affections to Orsino. In other words, she can serve as a kind of proxy for Orsino.

“A fiend like thee might bear my soul to hell,” she adds, with unconscious allusion

perhaps to what is happening to Malvolio even as she speaks, and picking up on the

imagery of devils that is scattered through the latter half of the play.

In the duel, no letter is used, but rather the shuttle anti-diplomacy of Sir Toby. His goal?

Our amusement and his (because he is in league with the audience in some measure), and

the showing-up of Sir Andrew Aguecheek, with whom he is evidently becoming a little

bored, and who is clearly giving him more trouble than it’s worth.

Viola is a rather unimpressive opponent for Sir Andrew, but the arrival, suddenly of

Antonio, generosity itself, changes the picture: he breaks up the fight almost before it can

start. But the officers are in pursuit and seize Antonio in turn (the outside world has

suddenly invaded the self-contained household of Olivia), and this leads to further

misprision as Viola fails to respond to Antonio’s need for money as Sebastian might be

expected to do. And of course Antonio uses Viola’s brother’s name to refer to her.

“He named Sebastian,” says Viola,

I my brother know

Yet living in my glass; even such and so

In favour was my brother; and he went

Still in this fashion, colour, ornament,

For him I imitate. O, if it prove,

Tempests are kind, and salt waves fresh in love! (3.4.389-394)

Can she pass through this glass? Can she somehow reach her brother?

Sebastian now enters a Plautan world, as Olivia intervenes to save him from Sir Toby,

dismissing Sir Toby in the process,

Will it be ever thus? Ungracious wretch,

Fit for the mountains and the barbarous caves,

Where manners ne'er were preach'd! Out of my sight!

Be not offended, dear Cesario.

Rudesby, be gone! (4.1.46-50)

(This last is perhaps addressed to Sir Andrew.) Thus Olivia breaks up another piece of

the uneasy harmony in her household, but replaces a reticent Viola with a willing, if

perplexed, Sebastian. “Are all the people mad?” he asks, as bewildered as Antipholus of

Syracuse in the earlier play; and he adds, “Or I am mad, or else this is a dream.” (Cf.

Antipholus of Syracuse: “Am I in earth, in heaven, or in hell? / Sleeping or waking, mad

or well-advised” (Comedy of Errors 2.2.213-214).

38

Act 4, Scene 2 is focused on Malvolio, about whom more later. Malvolio clinging to his

prison bars is in some sense an emblem for the entire play, at least before the grand

recognition scene of Act 5. Feste, in the role of Sir Topas, taunts him, and is funny even

as he does so, but Sir Toby grows weary of the joke, and sees himself as somehow caught

in a sequence of events he can no longer control:

To him in thine own voice, and bring me word how thou find'st him. I would we

were well rid of this knavery. If he may be conveniently deliver'd, I would he

were; for I am now so far in offence with my niece that I cannot pursue with any

safety this sport to the upshot. (4.2.68-73)

For Feste too the joke has worn thin. Back with Malvolio in his own person, he promises

Malvolio ink and paper so that he may write to his mistress. This decision itself

obviously compromises both Sir Toby and Maria, and so it is just as well that in Act 5 we

discover that the two have married (if Maria and Toby have been such an item from the

beginning, this throws their taunting of Sir Andrew in 1.3 into a new light). Maria is

thereby safe from Olivia’s wrath and Sir Toby is presumably intending to turn over a new

leaf.

For the moment, though, Malvolio gives concrete representation to a psychological

reality that runs all through the play. If the image of Malvolio clinging to his prison bars

is indeed a legitimate picture, it might also be an image for Olivia, caught in the prison of

her grief, or like Orsino, trapped in the golden ropes of Petrarchan love, or like Sir Toby,

a hopeless layabout, or like Sir Andrew, as captive as a tame bear. While Viola is in a

sense a free spirit, she too is captive in her boy’s clothing.

In a way (though I would not push the parallel too far!), Malvolio resembles Gloucester

in King Lear. Gloucester’s blindness gives concrete realization in the sub-plot to the

psychological blindness of Lear in the main plot: the literal imprisonment of Malvolio

resembles the metaphorical imprisonment and isolation of the other characters. This

paralleling of main plot and subplot, so subtly exploited by Shakespeare in many of his

plays and brought to perfection in the character of Falstaff, is here at work again, this

time with the Falstaff-like Sir Toby, whose exploits are at one and the same time an

expression of underlying festival (something that must in due course be abandoned) and

an examination of the deception and disguise that predominates in the main plot as well.

39

LECTURE FIVE

I ended my previous lecture by focusing on Act 4, an act that belongs to Malvolio and to

Sebastian. We turn now to Act 5. Act 4 actually begins, you will recall, with Feste

coming in search of Sebastian and encountering him in much the same way as he

encounters Viola at the opening of Act 3 and will encounter Orsino at the beginning of

Act 5. (In fact, Feste’s role in the play is defined in part by encounters with each of the

play’s four lovers in turn, beginning with his meeting with Olivia at the beginning of 1.5,

then Viola, then Sebastian, and finally Orsino. He has criticism for each.).

Sebastian proves immediately that he does not lack that “little thing” that Viola declares

she lacks right before the duel in Act 3: when Sir Andrew strikes him he returns the blow,

and only Olivia’s intervention prevents further bloodshed with Sir Toby. Sir Toby is

firmly rebuked by Olivia and in effect driven off into her disfavor. The scene ends with

Sebastian going off with Olivia.

It is worth pointing out that the end of the first scene of Act 4, with Olivia’s departure

with Sebastian, is subject to various interpretations, and is one of the many episodes in

Twelfth Night that are heavily dependent on directorial decision. Does Olivia make

overtures to Sebastian that are clearly sexual? Or might Sebastian interpret her behavior

not as an expression of sexual interest, but as an expression of interest in his service –

much as Viola was accepted into Orsino’s household and had hoped, briefly, to be

accepted into Olivia’s? “O that I served that lady!” exclaimed Viola in 1.2. Is this what

is happening here to her alter ego Sebastian? In a sense the question is academic: when

we next meet Sebastian in 4.3 he is on his way to his wedding.

The three scenes of Act 4 form a pair of brackets around a core episode: we begin with

Sebastian, switch to Malvolio, and return to Sebastian. Malvolio’s imprisonment offers

an absurd parallel to, and a commentary on, Sebastian’s sudden contract of marriage. We

recall that Feste said to Viola, back in 3.1, “The Lady Olivia has no folly. She will keep

no fool, sir, till she be married, and fools are as like husbands as pilchards are to herrings,

the husband’s the bigger.”

But as Malvolio is imprisoned and deprived of light in scene 2, Sebastian seems to

emerge into light at the opening of scene 3, almost as though his spirit has been released

because Malvolio’s is held in check:

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This is the air, that is the glorious sun,

This pearl she gave me, I do feel’t, and see’t,

And though ‘tis wonder that enwraps me thus,

Yet ‘tis not madness. (4.3.1-4)

Sebastian is part of the new order, the reconstituted community that will arise from the

ashes of the old, flawed community. Act 4, Scene 2 is focused on Malvolio, a part of the

old order now humbled and in disarray. Feste, as Sir Topas, is amusing in his taunting of

the steward, but he seems to grow weary of the joke, which is already out of hand. Sir

Toby, who has drawn on Sebastian, has been dismissed by Olivia with fighting words,

and Toby has also grown weary of the joke, which has spiraled out of control: “I would

we were well rid of this knavery. If he may be conveniently delivered, I would he

were…” (4.2.69-71).

Returning to Malvolio in his own person, rather than the character of Sir Topas, Feste, in

promising Malvolio ink and paper, opens up the probability of Olivia’s discovery of the

deception practiced on Malvolio and the end of this burned-out joke. No wonder Sir

Toby and Maria get married, thereby removing themselves from Olivia’s retribution. It is

left to Fabian, a minor character about whose fate we are less likely to be concerned, to

explain in Act 5 the circumstances of the deception.

As I suggested earlier, Malvolio gives concrete representation to a psychological reality

that runs all through the play: the image of Malvolio clinging to his prison bars is also an

image of Olivia, caught in the prison of her grief, or Orsino, trapped in the golden ropes

of Petrarchan love, or Sir Toby, a hopeless layabout, or Sir Andrew, as captive as a tame

bear. Even Viola is a captive of her disguise. Malvolio, I suggested, resembles

Gloucester in King Lear: his blindness gives explicit expression to the psychological

blindness of Lear in the main plot. Shakespeare develops this paralleling of main plot by

subplot primarily in the two parts of Henry IV, where Falstaff and his exploits provide

running commentary on the main action. In some respects Sir Toby is a re-creation of

Falstaff and his holiday sentiments. Thus such episodes as Sir Toby’s incitement of Sir

Andrew and Viola-Cesario by a kind of shuttle diplomacy parallel Viola’s story, in this

case her shuttling between Orsino’s house and Olivia’s. And Malvolio’s unrequited love

is a comic version of that of Olivia and of Orsino.

Sir Toby functions as a great manipulator in this play from the outset – first with Sir

Andrew, then with Viola, and above all with Malvolio. His manipulations get bigger and

bigger as the play progresses, until ultimately they implode. The cause of the implosion

is Viola’s other half, Sebastian.

We make a mistake if we see Malvolio with 20

th

-century (not to say 21

st

-century) eyes, as

a victim for whom we must show sympathy because it is P.C. to sympathize with the

underdog. Yes, he merits a certain amount of our concern, but what matters most is that

he has brought his misfortune on himself, by his overweening pride, his egotism, his love

41

of power, his unwillingness to join the world, to make common cause with others. In this

regard we are all Malvolios, and his showing-up is our showing-up.

Of course, there are less benign constructions that we can put on the discomfiture of

Olivia’s steward. From the beginning of the play Shakespeare is at pains, for whatever

reason, to make clear the distinction between masters and servants. In 1.2, in one of

several exchanges of money in this play, Viola gives the Sea Captain money to help her

disguise herself; “I’ll pay thee bounteously,” she says), and, in an access of noblesse

oblige, offers a reading of the lower classes that only one of more distinguished

background would be inclined to utter:

There is a fair behaviour in thee, Captain;

And though that nature with a beauteous wall

Doth oft close in pollution, yet of thee

I will believe thou hast a mind that suits

With this thy fair and outward character. (1.2.47-51)

She “thous” the Captain throughout, and he “yous” her in response.

At the end of Act 1, and in response to Viola’s pouring out her heart in the willow-cabin

speech, Olivia’s question seems almost irrelevant: “What is your parentage?” And Viola

replies: “Above my fortunes, yet my state is well: / I am a gentleman.” Olivia in fact is a

step ahead of us: her question clearly signals that her sexual attraction to Viola/Cesario

has caused her thoughts to turn to marriage. (Orsino, thinking of marriage in 5.1,

reassures his listeners in similar terms about the nobility of Sebastian’s blood, and hence

Viola’s: 5.1.262.) Predictably, Viola refuses Olivia’s proffered tip: “I am no fee’d post,

lady; keep your purse.”

Not so Feste, the perpetual outsider. No aristocrat he. He needs sixpence to sing to Sir

Toby and Sir Andrew in 2.3, takes money from Orsino under rather more ambiguous

circumstances following his song “Come away, come away death” (2.4), collects from

Viola at the opening of Act 3, from Sebastian at the opening of Act 4, and Orsino at the

opening of Act 5.

And if there were any doubts at all that Malvolio might make a suitable match for Olivia,

we have Sir Toby’s memorable confrontation with Malvolio in 2.3. “Art any more than a

steward?” asks Sir Toby, insinuatingly. “Dost thou think because thou art virtuous, there

shall be no more cakes and ale?” (Sebastian’s acceptance of Antonio’s purse in 3.3, one

of the more creaking plot devices in the play, is clearly a gift rather than a payment – the

sort of thing the previously well-to-do might expect of their fellows: Antonio and

Sebastian “you” one another throughout the scene.)

With the lines between servants and masters so clearly defined (Maria is the only

exception: some readings make her a companion to Olivia, others a chamber-maid;

historically the former is more likely), one could read the play in class terms: a collection

of decadent, seldom entirely sober upper-class representatives of the privately wealthy

42

are momentarily threatened by their trusted servants, who, in the person of Malvolio, get

ideas above their station (the notion that the Steward might marry the Mistress) and are in

due course humiliated and put down. Certainly the politics of the power struggle between

Sir Toby and Malvolio have their intrinsic interest. It is indeed true that Shakespearean

comedy, whether or not it follows the notoriously conservative dynamic of pastoral, as in

A Midsummer Night’s Dream or As You Like It, or has other settings, as in Twelfth Night,

tends to deal with threats to the existing social hierarchy which are ultimately put down.

Thus Hermia’s defiance of the laws of marriage at the opening of A Midsummer Night’s

Dream unleashes a kind of chaotic magic at mid-play, only to have it absorbed into the

pre-existing social hierarchy, now made flexible enough to absorb and co-opt the very

forces that threatened to engulf the social hierarchy in the first place. The Mechanicals,

of course, provide a class parody of such subversion, absorbed in turn into the consensus

through the power of art: they act out subversion under the auspices of the hierarchy

itself. But the whole point about Misrule is that it never turns into Rule: when the

feasting is over, servants go back to behaving like servants, and masters like masters.

Northrop Frye, as we have noted earlier, divides Shakespearean comedy into three stages:

a rule-bound, anti-comic “old” society, followed by confusion and loss of identity,

followed by a third stage in which the confusion of the second stage is resolved, generally

through the institution of marriage. One can, of course, also see this as a process of

growing up: a stage in which we are subject to the apparently arbitrary rules of others,

followed by a stage of self-discovery, followed by a mature stage in which we make the

rules. One can also interpret it as a counter-revolutionary process, in which instability is

followed by incipient revolution, and society responds by broadening its parameters just

sufficiently to co-opt and integrate into itself the previously revolutionary impulses.

But if the struggle of Malvolio and Sir Toby is a class struggle, Feste is on the wrong

side; and there are other complications inherent in an attempt to foreground such a

reading. I mention this approach to the character of Malvolio in part in the interests of

full disclosure. It is a reading given particular sanction in the egalitarian environment of

the modern theatre (and many modern productions exploit it), but it is at odds with the

more hierarchical turn of mind of the Elizabethans. More time and space would be

needed to tease out the specifics of that hierarchy, but suffice it to say that the economics

and politics of the households of the Elizabethan nobility were complex: servants

destined to remain servants jostled with nobility cast as servants, who dealt with nobility

acting as nobility. And in amongst all this, the second person singular and the second

person plural played a complex role as social indicators.

As Act 5 opens, the letter is written. It is Fabian who carries it, not Feste, who is, after

all, a freelancer rather than a salaried servant (hence his freedom to move between the

two households earlier in the play): Fabian will not allow Feste to see the letter, perhaps

because Fabian wishes to maximize his leverage in dealing with the inevitable débacle

that will follow when the true story is revealed. Sir Toby, of course, is needed

elsewhere, as bleeding evidence of Sebastian’s skill with a cudgel. And the newly-

married Maria has disappeared from sight, or at least from hearing: she may not even be

present in Act 5.

43

We have noted already that something causes Orsino to put on his hat and coat and make

his way from his palace to the house of Olivia. His motive remains a mystery: like Viola

arriving on the shores of Illyria, he seems driven by some power (though, just possibly,

Viola) to undertake the walk from the one place to the other. Shakespeare of course

needs him in Act 5, and that may be the only explanation of his presence that we can

provide. He comes, we might note, from an oddly sterile and inhospitable palace into a

place that is at least full of life: Orsino and Viola might as well be alone in his palace for

all that we ever learn about anyone else in his household. Indeed, it is Orsino’s solitude

that surely comes across to us most strongly here (as we have noted, a kind of spiritual

solitude holds most of the characters in this play apart from one another). But the house

of Olivia is at least full of activity, increasingly from people who arrive from outside.

Perhaps, in fact, Orsino’s crossing of the distance between the two houses signifies a kind

of breaking out of the bonds of self-regard and narcissism.

Antonio, the first person, after Viola herself, to parachute into Olivia’s household – to

rescue Viola from Sir Andrew in 3.4 – now appears conveniently on the stage, to be

recognized as “notable pirate” and “salt-water thief” by Orsino (remember Illyria’s

association with piracy), and as her deliverer by Viola. But Antonio in effect looks past

Viola to recognize her as Sebastian, claiming that he has been with Sebastian constantly

for the past three months, a statement denied by Orsino: “Three months this youth hath

tended upon me; / But more of that anon,” because in the meantime Olivia has appeared

(“Now heaven walks on earth,” declares Orsino).

But Olivia’s appearance on the stage, and consequently her first meeting with Orsino in

the entire action of the play, leads immediately to an explosion of hostility, on both sides.

We are reminded of Titania and Oberon meeting in the forest in A Midsummer Night’s

Dream. Both Viola and Orsino talk at once. When Olivia turns to Viola, Viola defers to

Orsino:

VIOLA. My lord would speak, my duty hushes me.

OLIVIA. If it be aught to the old tune, my lord,

It is as fat and fulsome to mine ear

As howling after music. (5.1.105-108)

Hardly a conciliatory conversation-opener, especially to one about whose love of music

we learned at the very beginning of the play…. Orsino’s reaction is immediate:

You uncivil lady,

To whose ingrate and unauspicious altars

My soul the faithfull’st off’rings hath breath’d out

That e’er devotion tender’d – What shall I do? (5.1.110-113)

Orsino still talks like a young man trapped inside a sonnet, and one who believes that he

should be given an A just for effort. His anger, violent, sudden, somewhat unexpected, is

total. In a glancing reference to Heliodorus’s late-Greek romance Ethiopica, he cries:

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Why should I not, had I the heart to do it,

Like to th’Egyptian thief at point of death,

Kill what I love? (5.1.115-117)

In Heliodorus, the Egyptian thief in question attempts to kill his beloved when faced with

certain death himself, in order to prevent her from falling into the hands of his enemies.

In Orsino’s mind, then, he is the thief and Olivia is the beloved. But, in an interesting

turn, Orsino thinks better of such an idea:

Since you to non-regardance cast my faith,

And that I partly know the instrument

That screws me from my true place in your favour,

Live you the marble-breasted tyrant still.

But this your minion, whom I know you love,

And whom, by heaven, I swear I tender dearly,

Him will I tear out of that cruel eye,

Where he sits crowned in his master’s spite. (5.1.119-126)

So he will rewrite Heliodorus by killing the object of his beloved’s affections rather than

his beloved herself. But will he?

Come, boy with me; my thoughts are ripe in mischief:

I’ll sacrifice the lamb that I do love,

To spite a raven’s heart within a dove. (5.1.128-129)

“Thus Olivia hurls discretion to the winds in her pursuit of Cesario and in her precipitous

marriage, which, added to Cesario’s smooth and rubious lip brings out an excess of

masculine aggressiveness in Orsino,” suggests Ruth Nevo (212). “The speech … in

which this is expressed is as packed and as menacing as anything in the tragedies still to

be written…. It is a dangerous moment. It is the moment of incipient disaster, of

incipient tragic possibility, for which the remedies in comic plots provide a providential

salvation.” In short, we need this moment when all bets are off, the disorder and

disintegration are total, and chaos might come again….

But who is Orsino’s beloved: the dove-like woman with the heart of a raven, or the boy,

now called, suddenly “the lamb that I do love”? The image from Heliodorus remains, but

the identity of the beloved shifts. I earlier described Orsino as resembling the speaker of

Sonnet 144, caught between two loves, “of comfort and despair.”

The better angel is a man right fair,

The worser spirit a woman colored ill.

Thus the raven-like “woman colored ill” is rejected in favor of the “man right fair.” As

for that man, Cesario/Viola is ready even to endure death for Orsino’s sake: “And I most

jocund, apt, and willingly, / To do you rest, a thousand deaths would die."

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And Viola turns from Olivia and follows Orsino as he prepares to leave the stage. But

even thoughts of murder can be deflected: when Olivia addresses Viola as “husband,” she

gets even Orsino’s attention. And of course she backs her assertion up by bringing the

priest along to testify that he has performed the marriage.

One interruption follows another, and the audience bounces from crisis to crisis along

with the characters on the stage. Now it is Sir Andrew and Sir Toby who appear, both

beat about the head by someone they took for Cesario. We note in passing that Sir Toby

rounds on Sir Andrew:

SIR ANDREW. I’ll help you, Sir Toby, because we’ll be dressed together.

SIR TOBY. Will you help? An ass-head, and a coxcomb, and a knave, a thin-

faced knave, a gull? (5.1.204-206)

With Sebastian’s arrival, we are set for the grand recognition scene. But it moves

forward with tantalizing slowness. First Sebastian turns to Antonio, standing there with

the Officers. “How have you made division of yourself?” asks Antonio in amazement.

As for Olivia, her response is simply a heartfelt “Most wonderful!”

And what does it mean, Olivia’s “Most wonderful!”? Is it simply an expression of

surprise, or delight at the notion that she may have two young men for the price of one, or

even a realization that she has two companions of different genders? Modern

productions have played on all three possibilities, most notably Peter Gill’s 1974 RSC

production. In this production, Olivia even turns mistakenly to Viola and Orsino to

Sebastian before they realize their mistake.

But, before we get lost again in the labyrinths of sexual interchangeability, let’s follow

the process forward:

SEBASTIAN. Do I stand there? I never had a brother;

Nor can there be that deity in my nature

Of here and everywhere. I had a sister

Whom the blind waves and surges have devour'd.

Of charity, what kin are you to me?

What countryman, what name, what parentage?

VIOLA. Of Messaline; Sebastian was my father.

Such a Sebastian was my brother too;

So went he suited to his watery tomb;

If spirits can assume both form and suit,

You come to fright us. (5.1.224-234)

The moment is magical: the twins seem to be looking at one another through a glass, each

afraid that the other is mere reflection, or a mere ghost. We savor the moment.

Alexander Leggatt points out interestingly, that this is the only case in Shakespeare where

a disguise put on by one character has an objective reality in another [see Nevo, who

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points this out]. Sebastian knows that he is real enough, and yet he seems to see only his

reflection in the glass, not the sister he has lost. As for Viola, she, who said (3.4.389-

390) “I my brother know / But living in my glass,” fears that the self-deception merely

continues.

SEBASTIAN. A spirit I am indeed,

But am in that dimension grossly clad

Which from the womb I did participate.

Were you a woman, as the rest goes even,

I should my tears let fall upon your cheek,

And say 'Thrice welcome, drowned Viola!'

VIOLA. My father had a mole upon his brow.

SEBASTIAN. And so had mine.

VIOLA. And died that day when Viola from her birth

Had numb'red thirteen years.

SEBASTIAN. O, that record is lively in my soul!

He finished indeed his mortal act

That day that made my sister thirteen years. (5.1.234-246)

But Viola, circumspect and slightly distant, still cannot fully believe. We are confronted

with a suspended recognition: only when she reassumes her female appearance, puts on

her sexuality again, will the recognition be complete:

If nothing lets to make us happy both

But this my masculine usurp'd attire,

Do not embrace me till each circumstance

Of place, time, fortune, do cohere and jump

That I am Viola; which to confirm,

I'll bring you to a captain in this town,

Where lie my maiden weeds; by whose gentle help

I was preserv'd to serve this noble Count.

All the occurrence of my fortune since

Hath been between this lady and this lord. (5.1.247-256)

Philip Edwards calls this moment “the truest thing in Twelfth Night.” “It is so much

greater,” he adds, “than the ritual of converging lovers…. There was something here to

hold on to, when the celebration of achieved love may have wearied Shakespeare.”

While I do not agree with Edwards about the peremptoriness of the revealing of the

lovers, I do think it worth reminding ourselves that this play and Hamlet were likely

written at much the same time, and that it is at least possible to see Twelfth Night as

closer to Measure for Measure than to the earlier more uncomplicated comedies. Even

As You Like It is characterized by a certain Weltschmerz. And this is as good a moment

as any to point to another historical truth: it was in August 1596 that Shakespeare’s twin

son Hamnet, brother to Judith, died in Stratford at the age of 11½…. To what extent is

Twelfth Night, with its echoes of the sonnets and its meditations on twinship,

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Shakespeare’s way of working through some of his personal concerns? To what extent

do Olivia’s grief for a dead brother or Viola’s rediscovery of a lost twin brother reflect

Shakespeare’s own preoccupations three or four years after, when he can perhaps finally

write about such things?

But let us return to the text. Leggatt, perceptively, describes this recognition scene as “a

freezing of the moment of romantic contemplation, before the practical business of

marriage,” and he speaks of a happiness that is “stylized and conventional.” I am not

sure that I would characterize it quite in this way, but certainly there is a kind of

separation between the resolution of our geometrical problem (the triangle of lovers

becomes a square) and the tribulations of ordinary life that appear to be going on just

outside the door. This is, in some sense, happiness delayed – not as in Love’s Labor’s

Lost, for a full twelvemonth, but at least until holiday and workday can be reintegrated

into a world we recognize. “Not since The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” Leggatt remarks

elsewhere (221), “has there been such emphasis on the pains rather than the pleasures of

love.”

As for Orsino, the miracle that the speaker of Shakespeare’s sonnets seems to wish for

has actually occurred right before his eyes: a young man has become a young woman and

can be his. “If this be so,” he says, “as yet the glass seems true,” (i.e. not a distorted

glass) “I shall have share in this most happy wreck.” It is “a happy wreck” indeed:

Orsino was locked in 1.1, Viola in 1.2. She could come to him only in disguise. Now,

together in 5.1, they need only make appearance match reality by transforming Viola

back into femininity.

Deprived of wild embraces and unalloyed relief, we may admire the careful restraint of

this most poetic of meetings, or we may be irritated at a certain coyness; we may savor

the moment, or we may see even so momentous an occasion as the meeting of long-lost

twins filtered through Shakespeare’s skepticism about romance and happy endings.

At the end, says Leah Scraggs, “though a sense of wonder … pervades the final scene, it

is tinged with a wistfulness born of the characters’ experience of loss, and of the

spectators’ awareness of the precariousness of the happiness that has been achieved.” If

the disguise has drawn Orsino and Olivia out of their isolation, will its removal assure

their happiness and that of Viola and Sebastian? Either way, the matter of Viola’s

clothing takes on huge symbolic importance.

Now Viola adds another crucially important piece of information:

The captain that did bring me first on shore

Hath my maid's garments. He, upon some action,

Is now in durance, at Malvolio's suit,

A gentleman and follower of my lady's. (5.1.272-275)

“Durance” means forced confinement. In short, the Sea Captain we met at the beginning

of the play is in jail on a charge brought by none other than Malvolio – he who is himself

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imprisoned. The implication is clear: unless Olivia springs Malvolio, and unless

Malvolio can spring the captain, Viola cannot spring her maid’s garments, and the play

cannot come to a satisfactory conclusion….

Stage one, then, is to release Malvolio, forgotten in this collective jollity. The mood

shifts. Feste, no longer Sir Topas, reads Malvolio’s letter as if he is Malvolio. Olivia

entrusts the reading to a more reliable and less excitable reader, Fabian.

As Fabian goes off to bring Malvolio to Olivia, we are provided with a further moment of

realignment in the reconciliation of Olivia and Orsino. Says Olivia:

My lord, so please you, these things further thought on,

To think me as well a sister as a wife,

One day shall crown th' alliance on't, so please you,

Here at my house, and at my proper cost. (5.1.315-318)

It is Olivia, ever practical, who thinks about the mechanics of Viola’s marriage to Orsino,

but, more than that, takes it on as a project. More than that: actually proposes it…. And

if she has shifted from the role of Orsino’s potential wife, she can now become his sister –

– which, of course, makes Orsino not a predator but, in his way, a replacement for

Olivia’s dead brother.

Says the Duke in reply, “Madam, I am most apt t' embrace your offer,” and, turning to

Viola:

Your master quits you; and, for your service done him,

So much against the mettle of your sex,

So far beneath your soft and tender breeding,

And since you call'd me master for so long,

Here is my hand; you shall from this time be

You master's mistress. (5.1.320-324)

But the mood shifts again. Now Malvolio stands before the assembled company. His

appearance on the stage can evoke different emotions, depending on the directorial

decisions to which I alluded earlier. Do we see, as we see in the Branagh version, an

utterly humiliated, filthy, bedraggled Malvolio? In that case, it is not wholly trivial or

carping to wonder why the room in which Malvolio was confined was quite so filthy,

why his clothing has literally come apart at the seams in the course of a few hours, and

whether the director does not have an agenda that he plans to carry through regardless of

the text…. Malvolio’s predicament is obviously unsettling, a dissonant element in a

carefully choreographed sequence of recognitions and marital plans. Donald Sinden,

playing Malvolio in John Barton’s RSC production of 1969, exited through the back of

the stage while the other characters left at the end of the play through the front, as though

somehow the spirit of Malvolio had to be removed to allow for a happy ending. In Peter

Gill’s 1974 production, Nicol Williamson fairly tore the collective heart out of the

audience in his portrayal of a despairing and desolate Malvolio screaming his exit lines

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“I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you!” So powerful was Antony Sher’s

interpretation of the role in Bill Alexander’s 1987 RSC production that there were those

who saw the play as the Tragedy of Malvolio.

It is not for me to say that such readings of Malvolio are wrong. Shakespeare’s plays

offer many interpretations, and this is nowhere more apparent than in Twelfth Night.

Consider for example the question of the ages of the various characters. Traditionally,

Orsino and Olivia have been played as older than the twins, but there is nothing in the

text to suggest this. It may be altogether preferable to see all four of them as young, in a

world in which (unlike most other Shakespeare comedies) there are no parents to order

them around, or to give them guidance. How old is Malvolio? Or Feste? They have

been played in different ways over the years. Even Sir Toby has been de-Falstaffed on

occasion and made truly young rather than Falstaff-young.

But to me what is most intriguing at this point in the play is that Malvolio, abused and

wronged as he is, with his dignity down around his ankles and his libido waving in the

wind, none the less has the Sea Captain, and hence access to Viola’s femininity, in an odd

way under his control, “in durance” no less. This is of course the Sea Captain of whom

Viola said, back in 1.2.

There is a fair behaviour in thee, Captain;

And though that nature with a beauteous wall

Doth oft close in pollution, yet of thee

I will believe thou hast a mind that suits

With this thy fair and outward character. (1.2.47-51)

So Malvolio’s killjoy reach extends even to good men like this. I called Malvolio the

Department of Motor Vehicles, the IRS, the workaday world of the-day-after-the-day-

after-Twelfth-Night. And this is surely so. These rejoicing young men and women,

delighted, finally, to be alive and themselves, must still come to terms with those they

love to hate. And why do they love to hate them? Because they are not members of the

community of irony, the community of shared perceptions and shared aesthetics, to which

our young aristocrats belong – and to which the audience is also invited so strongly to

belong.

And so, with Malvolio’s words echoing from the wings, the play essentially ends. Olivia

regrets the “notorious abuse” of Malvolio, and the Duke asks that he be brought back:

“Pursue him, and entreat him to a peace.” Perhaps, in Act 6, he is indeed brought back,

and peace is made and apologies are delivered. Perhaps, instead, Act 6 is set in a

lawyer’s office with Malvolio’s attorneys talking to Olivia’s attorneys. What I do not

think is likely, though at least one 1980s production suggested as much, is that Malvolio

plans to leave the stage to commit suicide.

The reference to Malvolio’s litigiousness reminds us that the Elizabethans were a

litigious lot, and that the law was for the Elizabethans in many ways the new world that

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replaced the old world of the landed aristocracy and inherited value. So perhaps I was

too hasty in my rejection of class and economics as issues in this play.

Malvolio’s situation is not the only problematic situation as the play ends. Antonio,

famously, is provided no release by Orsino, who, ending the play as he began it in his

role as ruler of this little country of Illyria and master of our community of actors, has

plenty of opportunity to set him free. Should we conclude, as most directors do, that such

release is assumed in the general harmony, or should we go along with at least one recent

director (Denise Coffey at the Young Vic in 1983), who marches him off in chains on his

way to execution?

Denise Coffey’s production was one of a number of somber renderings of the 1980s.

Indeed, John Gorrie’s 1979 BBC production was eclipsed by productions more along the

lines of Kenneth Branagh’s wintry 1988 version until Trevor Nunn’s movie came along

in 1995, preceded by what was apparently a rather insipid RSC production directed by

Ian Judge in 1994. Perhaps, in this respect as in so many others, Shakespeare productions

were simply moving with the times: as more than one critic has pointed out, the fluid,

multi-gendered sexuality of the 1970s was replaced by the fear of AIDS in the 1980s and

sexuality itself took on a new sense of menace. Under either circumstance, the settled

conformity of marriage perhaps seemed to the directors of these years almost

anticlimactic, banal.

Be that as it may, the intermingling of personality, the crossing of sexual boundaries, the

exploration of the limits of sexuality, ends with the pairing off of lovers and the tacit

consensus of characters and audience around the institution of generative marriage. Yet

in the course of the play Shakespeare has explored gender assumptions with a subtlety

comparable only to that of the Sonnets, and he has suggested to us ways of defining

human relationships that are not determined by reproductive imperatives and economic

necessity. “I am yet so near the manners of my mother,” says Sebastian to Antonio in

2.1, “that upon the least occasion more mine eyes will tell tales of me.” Viola,

meanwhile, resembling Sebastian in ways normally reserved for identical twins (it is

worth pointing out that their status in the play is in fact a biological impossibility…), is

given a licence to play the role of aggressive male in her masculine attire. As for Olivia

and Orsino, Viola causes them both to touch the limits of socially sanctioned sexuality,

even as they draw back at the end of the play, the disguises drop away and the

conventional takes over. Is this a narrow escape or a sexual utopia denied?

Either way, the epilogue belongs to Feste, the melancholy clown who sings now of wind

and rain appropriate to an English January and whose little song contains a life’s story as

he moves from childhood (“a little tiny boy”) to adulthood, to marriage, and so “unto my

beds,” and the wind and the rain lash on. “Thus the whirligig of time brings in his

revenges,” as Feste earlier pointed out to Malvolio.

If Orsino presides over the community, Feste presides over the play of which the

community is a part. For me, at least, Twelfth Night is a reminder that the spirit of

festival, and the spirit of love, do endure, even though they must be cherished and

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nurtured and are all too frequently difficult to find. On the other hand, perhaps Malvolio

has the last word in other ways too. You will recall that in the final scene Feste reminds

Malvolio of his words back in 1.5, where it all began: “Madam, why laugh you at such a

barren rascal; and you smile not, he’s gagged.” But Malvolio says something else as

well. Olivia asks him, “What think you of this fool, Malvolio? Doth he not mend?”

“Yes, and shall till the pangs of death shake him,” replies Malvolio. As Feste sings to us

at the end of the play, time-worn and unsentimental, perhaps we should conclude that

Malvolio got it right. “But that’s all one, our play is done,” sings Feste. Does he

perhaps also add as we all of us rise to leave, aware at least and at last of the sheer

complexity of it all, “Now take away the fool, gentlemen”?

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Edwards, Philip. Shakespeare and the Confines of Art. London: Methuen. 1968.

Garber, Marjorie. Coming of Age in Shakespeare. New York and London: Routledge.

1997.

Gay, Penny. As She Likes It: Shakespeare’s Unruly Women. London and New York:

Routledge, 1994.

Holland, Peter. English Shakespeares: Shakespeare on the English Stage in the 1990s.

Cambridge: Cambridge U.P. 1997.

Jardine, Lisa. Reading Shakespeare Historically. London and New York: Routledge.

1996.

Leech, Clifford. Twelfth Night and Shakespearian Comedy. Halifax and Toronto:

Dalhousie U Press and U of Toronto Press, 1965.

Leggatt, Alexander. Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love. London: Methuen. 1974.

McKernan, Luke, and Olwen Terris, ed. Walking Shadows: Shakespeare in the National

Film and Television Archive. London: British Film Institute, 1994.

Nevo, Ruth. Comic Transformations in Shakespeare. London and New York: Methuen.

1980

Parsons, Keith, and Pamela Mason, ed. Shakespeare in Performance. London:

Salamander, 1995.

Pennington, Michael. Twelfth Night: A User’s Guide. New York: Limelight Editions,

2000.

Scragg, Leah. Shakespeare’s Mouldy Tales. London and New York: Longman, 1992.

Welsford, Enid. The Court Masque. Cambridge: Cambridge U.P. 1927.

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Some Productions of Twelfth Night

[See bibliography, above: Gay, Parsons and Mason, McKernan and Terris.]

1910. Silent movie, dir. Charles Kent. Abbreviated version of the play, with Florence

Turner as Viola and Kent himself as Malvolio.

1912. Dir. Harley Granville-Barker. A melancholy and aging Feste.

1947. SMT. Dir. Walter Hudd, who also played Malvolio, gave depth to the figure of

Malvolio. John Blatchley as Sir Toby gave some lightness to the part, and Daphne Slater

portrayed a young Olivia (a departure from the traditional madonna). Imprisoned

Malvolio was made painful. Beatrix Lehmann, at 44, played Viola as a “strong-chinned,

short-haired, modern-looking woman. The social disruptions of World War II perhaps

brought this masculine type of woman to the fore.

1955. SMT. After an eight-year hiatus. Dir. John Gielgud, with Laurence Olivier as

Malvolio and Vivien Leigh as Viola. Keith Mitchell as Orsino was heavily made-up,

coiffed, bejewelled. Maxine Audley as Olivia was mature, sensible. Set suggested “a

Persian court as an Italian old master might have imagined it.” Malvolio was played as a

Puritan steward, instead of the traditional Italian grandee, but Olivier presented him, said

Gielgud, “like a Jewish hairdresser, with a lisp and an extraordinary accent,” an arriviste.

Olivier balanced the enormity of Malvolio’s plight with a determination not to make him

tragic.

1957. Hallmark Hall of Fame TV production, dir. David Greene. Maurice Evans plays

Malvolio, Rosemary Harris is Viola.

1958. Dir. Peter Hall. SMT. Visual tone was autumnal, with a “faint air of over-

lushness.” Max Adrian, as Feste, set the tone. Geraldine McEwan, as Olivia, played her

as a poseuse and coquette, creating a sensation. This was Olivia sexualized. “Most

wonderful,” she exclaimed, at the thought of enjoying two Sebastians at the end…. Some

objected that this was not what the play presented in this character. Dorothy Tutin played

Viola as cheeky and mischievous. Mark Dignam played Malvolio in 1958, and Eric

Porter in the 1960 revival.

1966. Dir. Clifford Williams. RSC. Diana Rigg as Viola, played the role as a strapping

principal boy. Alan Howard as Orsino brought a new sensuality to the role, playing it as

a slightly decadent Renaissance prince. Estelle Kohler’s Olivia was also sensuous in the

Peter Hall way. Ian Holm played Malvolio as a somewhat effeminized martinet.

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1969. Dir. John Barton. RSC. A late-afternoon Elizn world, with Emrys James’s Feste,

“wistfully wise.” Play took place in a kind of wickerwork hall (a “willow cabin” as it

were). Lisa Harrow, as Olivia, was young. Judi Dench played Viola, with “comic

naiveté” and freshness, but, as Dench herself said, Viola “is never just a jaunty boy; she

is desperately vulnerable and there are tremendoius areas of great sadness in her although

she is the catalyst in the play.” Production was described as “beautiful” but tended to

play down the sexuality. Described as “Chekhovian.” Donald Sinden played Malvolio.

1974. Dir. Peter Gill. RSC. Confronted the sexual and psychological ambiguity far

more directly. Set was dominated by a huge picture of Narcissus, to which characters

turned, intoxicated by their own reflections. Jane Lapotaire played Viola, John Price

Orsino. Frank Thornton’s Sir Andrew was sad and David Waller’s Sir Toby “a cynical

bully.” Much emphasis on bodies and sex, in all directions. Viola “is fondled in turn by

both Orsino and Olivia … and treated as a kind of intellectual love object.” No tomboy

here. Mary Rutherford played Olivia as aggressive. Orsino and Sebastian seemed more

passive, feminine, than the women. Nicol Williamson “moves the house to heartbreak”

in his final words. Ron Pember played Feste, gritty, saturnine, an outsider.

1979-80. BBC-TV production dir. John Gorrie, with Felicity Kendal as Viola, Sinead

Cusack as Olivia, Alec McCowen as Malvolio, Trevor Peacock as Feste. Described by

McKernan and Terris as “the very best of the BBC Television Shakespeare series.”

1979. Dir Terry Hands. RSC. Interest in seasonal myth caused Hands to set play in

winter, with drab b/w costumes. This was the first of a series of RSC dark readings of the

comedies. Feste is on the stage throughout, plants spring flowers. Enid Welsford on the

wise fool lies behind the production. Disillusionment dominates at the end. Sexuality

plays important part. Says Benedict Nightingale, “In Illyria love is a sudden and

alarming affliction, a variety of glandular fever.” Gareth Thomas played Orsino as a

“grizzled gentleman-pirate.” Kate Nicholls as Olivia, tall and forthcoming. Cherie

Lunghi played Viola. She and Olivia were “both adolescent girls in a hothouse of

emotion.” Viola is looking for “emotional wholeness.” John Woodvine played Malvolio

with “downright lust and social panic.”

1983. Dir. John Caird. RSC. Production was “steeped in an atmosphere of autumnal

rejection,” with people withering under the strain of hopeless love.” Set dominated by a

bare-branched tree, with sea pounding in the distance. Zoë Wanamaker was at a

disadvantage as Viola in a production that favored the losers. Sir Toby was played as

cruel. The production stressed the failure of romantic love. A post-AIDS production?

Emrys James played Malvolio. The play seemed more connected with MfM or Hamlet

than with the plays that went before it. The duels were “very extended and very violent.”

1983. Dir. Denise Coffey. Young Vic. Set in 1930s in palm court setting: Feste sang

jazz alto. Antonio remains in captivity at the end – on his way to execution. Deborah

Poplet as Viola; Christina Nagy as Olivia; Stephen Lewis as Malvolio; James Bowman as

Feste.

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1986. Film based on the 1983 Lighthouse production, Playhouse, Adelaide. Dir. Neil

Armfield. Heavy emphasis on sexuality, incl. homosexuality. Setting: a holiday-resort

island. Gillian Jones (Viola), Jacqy Phillips (Olivia), Peter Cummins (Malvolio), Kerry

Walker (Feste). In the video version, Gillian Jones plays both Viola and Sebastian.

1987. Dir. Bill Alexander. RSC. Action set, incongruously, in the central square of an

Aegean village. Viola was played by Harriet Walter “perpetually on the point of tears.”

Donald Sumpter’s Orsino was “a balding, bad-tempered, middle-aged village tyrant.”

Alexander was more interested in the alienation of the characters than in their sexuality.

A young Sir Toby (Roger Allam) was youngish, good-looking and given to casual

brutality (“the left’s image of the upper-class remnant at play”). Deborah Findlay, as

Olivia, seemed not very interested in Viola. Antony Sher played a young Malvolio doing

a major display to Olivia. In fact the play really became the tragedy of Malvolio.

1988. Dir. Kenneth Branagh. Renaissance Theatre Company. Frances Barber as Viola,

Caroline Langrishe as Olivia, Richard Briers as Malvolio, and Anton Lesser as Feste.

Later shot for Thames Television and broadcast at Christmas 1988.

1991. Dir. Michael Pennington. English Shakespeare Company. Jenny Quayle as Viola,

Allie Byrne as Olivia, Timothy Davies as Malvolio, Colin Farrell as Feste.

1995. Movie, dir. Trevor Nunn. Imogen Stubbs as Viola, Ben Kingsley as a melancholy

Feste strongly attached to Olivia, played by Helena Bonham-Carter. Malvolio played by

Nigel Hawthorne, Sir Toby by Mel Smith. Filmed in Cornwall, primarily at St.

Michael’s Mount, Lanhydrock House, and Prideaux Place. Spectacular scenery.

Extended prologue performing a function not dissimilar from the Elizabethan dumb-

show.

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Rhyming verse etc. produces distance in CofE. Here there is greater involvement – and there are pauses in

the forward action. The audience is placed in a conspiratorial relationship with Viola, not least because of

asides (1.4.41, 3.4.307 etc.). It is also partly wrong-footed by sympathy with Sir Toby and Maria.

The play is different in that it is not family entanglements that delay the outcome, but the deceptions of the

characters themselves. A critique, in short, of self-presentation and play-acting.

Sir Andrew “is perhaps as marvellously impenetrable to self-knowledge as any character in drama” – Nevo

210

Aguecheek’s nemesis will be the duel. (Nevo)

We are invited to take in “the unequivocal manliness” of Sebastian, who leaves a trail of broken coxcombs

behind him. He rejects, firmly but gently, Antonio’s passionate devotion. His arrival brings in the

masculinity that Viola pretended to possess, that Olivia needed (a Penelope badgered by suitors); that Sir

Andrew aped; that Malvolio pretended to, and that Orsino lacked. Nevo 214

“Feste is the most detached, observant (his livelihood depends upon it) and ironic of Sh’s fools, and the

tutelary spirit of a play whose marvellous fooling is as serious as it is funny.” Nevo 215

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