[In the essay below, originally published in 1976, Levin compares and contrasts the main plot and subplot of Twelfth Night, describing Malvolio as the star of the underplot.]

The kind of comedy that was practiced by Shakespeare has repeatedly challenged definition. Though his last comedies have been retrospectively classified as romances, most of their components are equally characteristic of his earlier ones: love, adventure, coincidence, recognition, and occasional pathos. The problem is not simplified by the circumstance that his greatest comic character, Falstaff, was far more impressive in two histories than he is in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Traditional definitions of the comic somehow fail to hit the Shakespearean mark, perhaps because they tend to emphasize the spectatorial attitude of ridicule. Shakespeare's attitude is more participatory; its emphasis falls upon playfulness, man at play, the esthetic principle that Johan Huizinga has so brilliantly illuminated in his historico-cultural study, Homo Ludens. Whereas we may laugh at Ben Jonson's characters, we generally laugh with Shakespeare's; indeed, if we begin by laughing at Falstaff or the clowns, we end by laughing with them at ourselves; semantically speaking, they are therefore not ridiculous but ludicrous. The critical approach that best succeeds in catching this spirit, it would seem to me, is that of C. L. Barber in Shakespeare's Festive Comedy. That the same approach can be applied to Plautus, as Erich Segal has convincingly demonstrated in his book Roman Laughter, suggests that “the Saturnalian pattern” may well be universal. Twelfth Night very appropriately marks the culmination of Professor Barber's argument. Since the play is so rich and the argument so fertile, I am tempted to add a few notes here, encouraged by his gracious recollection that our personal dialogue on comedy has extended over many years.

Any speculation about Twelfth Night might start with its alternative title, which has no counterpart among the other plays in the First Folio. The subtitle What You Will echoes the common and casual phrase that Olivia uses at one point in addressing Malvolio (I.v.109); it would later be used as a title by John Marston; and the German version is simply entitled Was ihn wollt. It is not equivalent to As You Like It, Bernard Shaw would argue; the latter means “this is the sort of play you would like”; the former means “it doesn't really matter what you call this play.” To designate it by the seasonal dating would have touched off some associations, especially since Twelfth Night signalized the grand finale to the Christmas entertainment at Queen Elizabeth's court, and sometimes featured a performance by Shakespeare's company. But the English term seems relatively vague, when contrasted with the overtones of the French and Italian translations. La Nuit des Rois almost seems to promise a visitation of the Magi; Shakespeare anticlimatically gives us, instead, the iconological joke about “We Three” and a clownish snatch of song from Sir Toby, “Three merry men be we” (II.iii.17, 76-7). La Notte dell'Epifania may also hold theological—or at least, in Joycean terms, psychological—connotations. Shakespeare merely seems concerned to promise his audience a pleasant surprise by evoking a winter holiday, even as he did with the opposite season in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Festivals are the matrices of drama, after all, and that “holiday humor” in which the transvested Rosalind invites Orlando to rehearse his wooing sets the prevalent mood for Shakespearean comedy (As You Like It, IV.i.69).

Some of Shakespeare's other comedies have titles so broadly general that they could be interchanged without much loss of meaning: The Comedy of Errors, Much Ado About Nothing, All's Well That Ends Well. Twelfth Night, which has figured more prominently in the repertory than most of the others, has frequently been cited by concrete reference to its most memorable characterization. Thus Charles I entitled it “Malvolio” in his inscribed copy of the Second Folio, and a court production for James I was entered into the records under that name. As it happens, five of the other parts in the play are actually longer than Malvolio's: in order of length, Sir Toby's, Viola's, Olivia's, Feste's, and even Sir Andrew's. Yet stage history has gradually made it clear that, with slightly less than ten per cent of the lines, this has come to be regarded as the stellar role. The other roles I have listed offer varied opportunities to actors and actresses, and Viola's embodies the special attraction of the hoydenish heroine in tights. That advantage is somewhat lessened by the complication of having to be passed off as identical with her unexpected twin brother Sebastian. Hence the plot “wants credibility,” as Dr. Johnson put it, though our incredulity is all but disarmed by the Pirandellian comment of Fabian: “If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction” (III.iv.127-8). Henry Irving, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, and many other stars have absurdly twinkled in the part of Malvolio. There may be a latent significance in the fact that the leading actor of the Restoration, Thomas Betterton, played the adversary role of Sir Toby Belch.

The impression registered in the diary of John Manningham, who had attended a performance at the Middle Temple in 1602, is particularly significant:

At our feast wee had a play called “Twelue Night, or What You Will”, much like the Commedy of Errores, or Menechmi in Plautus, but most like and neere to that in Italian called Inganni. A good practise in it to make the Steward beleeve his Lady widdowe was in love with him, by counterfeyting a letter as from his Lady in generall termes, telling him what shee liked best in him, and prescribing his gesture in smiling, his aparaile, &c., and then when he came to practise making him beleeue they tooke him to be mad.

It is true that Shakespeare's adaptation from Plautus had likewise dealt with a pair of twins divided by shipwreck and reunited after the contretemps of mistaken identity. Manningham might also have mentioned The Two Gentlemen of Verona, where the heroine disguises herself as a page so that she may serve the man she loves. And Manningham's Italian cross-reference has led the source-hunters to various plays and novelle which are quite analogous to the main plot. But the episode he singles out for praise does not figure in any of them. Malvolio, with no established source behind him, must be reckoned as one of Shakespeare's originals. Efforts to discern an actual prototype in the court gossip about Sir William Knollys, who was Comptroller to Her Majesty's Household, have carried little conviction. Nor is there much topical implication in Maria's qualified epithet, “a kind of puritan,” which she herself immediately rejects in favor of “timepleaser” and “affectioned ass” (II.iii.140, 148). There is not very much in common between Jonson's Ananias or Zeal-of-the-Land Busy and this Italianate upstart who aspires to “be proud” and “read politic authors” (II.v.161). He is undoubtedly puritanical in the psychological sense; as Professor Barber perceptively comments, “he is like a Puritan because he is hostile to holiday.” William Archer considered him more of a Philistine than a Puritan, more to be approached as a sequence of “comic effects” than as “a consistent, closely-observed type,” and therefore somewhat opaquely presented as a personality. “He has no sense of humour,” so Archer summed it up, “—that is the head and front of his offending.”

In a formal as well as a functional manner, he is thus an intruder into the play. Shakespeare's plot, as its forerunners had shown, could have got along without him. Olivia already had two suitors to be rejected, plus the masculine twin who was ready to replace his sister as the object of Olivia's choice. The lovesick Duke Orsino, after the fiasco of his vicarious courtship, could submit no less quickly and rather more gracefully than she to this sudden change of partners. The odd-man out, Sir Andrew, might have weakly borne the full onus of the underplot, insofar as it burlesques the main plot and has its agon in the reluctant duel. Music sets the keynote at the beginning, at the conclusion, and throughout. Illyria would almost seem to be the idyllic setting for an operetta. Yet, despite the roistering-snorts of melody and the high-kicking capers of the roisterers, the cadence often has a dying fall. “O mistress mine” is balanced against “Come away, death,” and the singer Feste—whom G. L. Kittredge called “the merriest of Shakespeare's fools”—shares his concluding refrain with the tragic Fool of King Lear: “For the rain it raineth every day” (II.iii.39ff; iv.51ff.; V.i.392; cf. King Lear, III.ii.77). Even in the sunniest of Shakespeare's comedies, there are shadows now and then, and it is worth remembering that Twelfth Night was probably conceived in the same year as Hamlet. The aura of melancholy emanates from Olivia's household, but it extends to Orsino's palace because of his unwelcome suit. Widow-like, the veiled Olivia mourns her dead brother; Viola, the go-between, though she depicts herself as the mourning figure of “Patience on a monument,” cherishes justified hopes for her own brother lost at sea (II.iv.114).

Together, these adventurous siblings are destined to dispel the shade that has overcast the Illyrian horizon. Olivia's house of mourning should have been, and will again become, a house of mirth—to reverse the language of Ecclesiastes. Toward the end her kinsman, Sir Toby Belch, and his gregarious crew of what Malvolio will term “the lighter people” have been doing their damnedest to turn the kitchen into a tavern and to obliterate the differences between night and day (V.i.339). Over their eructations the hard-drinking Sir Toby fitly presides as a sort of miniature Falstaff, the local agent of revelry and misrule. “Th'art a scholar,” he tells his eager gull Sir Andrew Aguecheek, the carpet knight whose linguistic accomplishments are as limited as his skills at fencing and dancing. “Let us therefore eat and drink” (II.iii.13-4). Sir Andrew's surname bespeaks his pallid face and quivering figure; all his claims to wit and gallantry and bravado only exist in order to be put down. When Feste asks “Would you have a love-song, or a song of good life?” and Toby responds, “A love-song, a love-song,” Andrew gives himself away by blurting out, “Ay, ay, I care not for good life” (35-8). Akin to Justice Shallow and Master Slender, he is the ancestor of those witless foplings who will strive so vainly to cut a caper in Restoration comedy. And yet this ninny is not without his touch of Shakespearean poignance. When his mentor Toby—who is, if nothing else, a genuine bon vivant—complacently avows himself to be adored by Maria, Andrew sighs, “I was adored once too” (181). Behind that sigh lies some namby-pamby case history, about which we are relieved to hear no more.

Maria, the classic soubrette, is the most effectual of the plotters against Malvolio, and her recompense for forging the letter is marriage with Sir Toby. This provides a comic parallel for the two romantic betrothals, and it is announced by Fabian in the absence of the less-than-joyful couple, Toby having been discomfited along with Andrew by Sebastian. Since Andrew has essentially been a figure of fun, not a funster, he is gradually supplanted among the merrymakers by Fabian. It is Fabian who faces Olivia in the final disentanglement, backed by the festive exultations of the fool. Feste's maxim—“Better a witty fool than a foolish wit”—underlines the implicit contrast between himself and Andrew (I.v.36). One of the jester's assumed personae is that of the Vice, the principal mischief-maker in the old-fashioned morality plays (IV.ii.124). As “an allow'd fool,” he has the privilege of raillery, which we hear that Olivia's father “took much delight in” (I.v.94; II.iv.12). Her father's death, which cannot have happened very long before, has presumably added to her brother's in deepening the gloom of the abode where she now finds herself mistress. Shakespeare has gone out of his way to darken the background of the conventional situation among the lovers, possibly reflecting the widespread preoccupation with the theme of melancholia during the early years of the seventeenth century. If so, his ultimate concern was to lift the clouds, to brighten the effect of the picture as a whole by the deft use of chiaroscuro, to heighten the triumph of the comic spirit by presenting it under attack. And, of course, with the rise of Puritanism, it was increasingly subject to attackers.

Such considerations may help to explain why Shakespeare went even farther by introducing the character of Malvolio—a superimposition so marked that one of the commentators, F. G. Fleay, has argued that the two plots are separable and may have been composed at different times. That seems too mechanical an inference, since Shakespeare has taken pains to unify them; since Olivia is “addicted to a melancholy,” it follows that she should employ a majordomo who is “sad and civil,” as she says, “And suits well for a servant with my fortunes” (II.v.202; III.iv.5-6). Though she tolerates Feste, her first impulse is to dismiss him from her company. His response is both a catechism and a syllogism, demonstrating that she should not mourn because her brother is better off in heaven and proving the fool's dialectical point that his interlocutor must be still more foolish than he: “Take away the fool, gentlemen” (I.v.71-2). She is mildly cheered by the nimbleness of the repartee; but Malvolio is distinctly not amused; and his hostile and humorless reaction is our introduction to him. Gleefully and ironically recalling this exchange, Feste will reveal the natural antipathy that was bound to operate between himself and Malvolio: “‘Madam, why laugh you at such a barren rascal? An you smile not, he's gagg'd.’ And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges” (V.i.374-7). Malvolio and Feste are brought together and kept at odds by a certain complementarity, like that between the melancholy Jaques and the festive Touchstone in As You Like It or the clowns and the “humorous men” of Jonson and Marston. The pretensions of the Alazon are thus laid open to the exposures of the Eiron.

The issue is sharply drawn by Sir Toby's entrance speech: “What a plague means my niece to take the death of her brother thus? I am sure care's an enemy to life” (I.iii.1-2). As a master of the revels, he and his fellow revelers embody the forces of life, on the one hand. On the other, the interloping Malvolio represents the force of care, which has usurped a temporary control over once-carefree Illyria. It is not for nothing that his name signifies “ill-wisher.” He is the perennial spoilsport, fighting an aggressive rearguard action against a crapulous playboy and his Bacchanalian cohorts. As Olivia's steward, Malvolio's functions are more than ceremonial; he can not only cut off the daily bounties of existence; he can threaten, and he does, to expel the incumbent devotees of good living. After Toby's rhetorical question on behalf of cakes and ale, seconded by Feste's plea for ginger, their prodigal levity takes the offensive against his false dignity. By a convention which is not less amusing because it is artificial, the practical jokers overhear—and react to—the soliloquy expressing Malvolio's fantasies and delusions of grandeur: “To be Count Malvolio! …” (II.v.35). It brings home the self-love and the ambition to regulate the lives of others that they have resented all along. And it plays into the trap that Maria has baited, the letter that he is obliging enough to read aloud. To act out its malevolent instructions is to betray his solemn and pompous nature. Not only must this non-laugher—this agelast, as Meredith would classify him—doff his somber black for yellow stockings and cross-garters, but he must force his atrabilious features into an unremitting smile.

The romance of the main plot is ordered, or disordered, by the workings of chance: Viola has been saved “perchance,” and so may Sebastian be (I.ii.6, 7). The satire of the underplot is managed by human contrivance, which motivates the duel and fabricates the letter. Malvolio ascribes his prospective elevation to a wise providence (“it is Jove's doing”), but we know that it is a hoax on the part of Maria and her tosspot companions (III.iv.74-5). He is thereby prompted to strut through his grand scene of hubris, all the more ironic in its deliberate reduction of self-importance to silliness. Instead of having greatness thrust upon him, he is thereupon thrust down into a dark room, where he is bound and treated like a madman—like the Ephesian Antipholus in The Comedy of Errors, whose questioners look for symptoms of derangement in his answers. Malvolio's most pertinacious visitor and inquisitor is Feste, who has thrown himself into the persona of the neighboring curate Sir Topas. When the prisoner complains that the house is dark as hell, the pseudocurate replies in Feste's vein of Rabelaisian nonsense: “Why, it hath bay windows transparent as barricadoes, and the clerestories toward the south north are as lustrous as ebony; and yet complainest thou of obstruction” (IV.ii.36-9). At the height of his vainglory, Malvolio has admitted that his sartorial alteration had caused “some obstruction in the blood;” but this was nothing, if the result pleased Olivia; and to her inquiry about the state of his health he has answered, “Not black in my mind, though yellow in my legs” (III.iv.21, 26-7). The trouble was that so black a mind could never have become accustomed to bright colors.

It is therefore fitting that he be plunged into literal darkness, although Feste's paradoxes seem to suggest that brightness may have something to do with the eye of the beholder. Maria had begun by requesting Sir Toby to “confine” himself “within the modest limits of order,” and he had blustered back with a pun: “Confine? I'll confine myself no finer than I am” (I.iii.8-11). When we see Malvolio confined, we may be weak enough to feel sorry for him; Charles Lamb, with Romantic perversity, has even worked up “a kind of tragic interest”, and some of those leading actors who have appeared in the part have made the most of that potentiality. However, though Shakespeare's laughingstocks have a way of enlisting our sympathies, though we may be torn by Prince Hal's repudiation of Falstaff, though Shylock and Jaques may take with them some measure of respect when they make their solitary departures, we should be glad to get rid of Malvolio. Poetic justice prevails in comedy if not in tragedy, and it requires that he be finally “baffled” (V.i.369). Olivia can charitably speak, as his patron, of his having been “notoriously abused” (379). But his parting vow of revenge has been neutralized by Fabian's wish that “sportful malice”—a combination of the ludicrous and the ridiculous—“May rather pluck on laughter than revenge” (365-6). Nor, having witnessed his threat of expulsion to Sir Toby and his crew, should we repine at seeing this gloomy interloper expelled. As a sycophant, a social climber, and an officious snob, he well deserves to be put back in his place—or, as Jonson would have it, in his humor, for Malvolio seems to have a Jonsonian rather than a Shakespearean temperament.

What we have been watching is a reenactment of a timeless ritual, whose theatrical manifestation takes the obvious form of the villain foiled, and whose deeper roots in folklore go back to the scapegoat cast into the outer darkness. The business of baiting him is not a sadistic gesture but a cathartic impulse of Schadenfreude: an affirmation of Life against Care, if we allow Sir Toby to lay down the terms of our allegory. We could point to an illustration so rich in detail and so panoramic in design that it might prove distracting, if it were not so sharply focused on the conflict before us, Pieter Breughel's Battle between Carnival and Lent. There the jolly corpulent personification of Mardi Gras, astride a cask of wine and armed with a spit impaling a roasted pig, jousts against a grim penitential hag carted by a monk and a nun, and flourishing a paddle replete with two herrings. Beggars and buffoons and many others, the highly variegated proponents of revelry and of self-mortification, intermingle in the teeming crowd. Which of the antagonists will gain the upper hand? Each of them, in due season. J. G. Frazer has instanced many analogues for the observance, both in the Burial of the Carnival and in the mock-sacrifice of Jack o' Lent. Shakespeare loaded his dice on the side of carnival, in that hungover hanger-on, Sir Toby, as against the lenten Malvolio, that prince of wet-blankets. But Shakespeare was writing a comedy—and, what is more, a comedy written in defense of the comic spirit. He could commit himself, in this case, to the wisdom of folly and to the ultimate foolishness of the conventional wisdom. But, in his dramaturgy, he was moving onward to care, to death, to mourning, and toward tragedy.