SOURCE: “Double Plotting in Shakespeare's Comedies: The Case of Twelfth Night,” in Aesthetic Illusion: Theoretical and Historical Approaches, edited by Frederick Burwick and Walter Pape, Walter de Gruyter, 1990, pp. 313-23.

[In the following essay, Brown contends that Twelfth Night has two plots, one ruled by Olivia and one ruled by Orsino. These plots, argues Brown, are dramatized differently and correspond to two distinct worlds within the play.]

Doubleness of all sorts is typical of Shakespearean comedy. Nowhere, however, is doubling so fully worked out as in Twelfth Night: or, What You Will, the only play for which Shakespeare himself provided a double title, as Anne Barton points out.¹ The play's dramatis personae reveals not only the twins at its center, but two rulers (a countess and a duke referred to as count), two sea captains, two authority figures (an uncle and a steward) in the house of the countess (who has lost father and brother), that uncle comically echoed in his friend Sir Andrew, two gentlemen attending on the duke, and even the clown unaccountably split into the figures of Feste and Fabian—a doubling so gratuitous that the roles are often collapsed into one in performance. Theme, structure and plot all turn on the various dualities the play explores, and everything is resolved in a moment of wonder at the doubleness of the play's and our own vision.

For this reason it is a particularly appropriate text in which to explore the kind of doubleness that concerns me today. My argument will be that Twelfth Night is a play of two plots corresponding to two worlds in the play, and that these worlds are represented differently. By represented differently I mean that the relation of language to reality in each is different. Thus, I will argue, the play operates in two modes of aesthetic illusion; furthermore, it contains reflections on its own doubleness and on the range of possible dramatic illusions open to it.

I.

We have become so accustomed to “high” and “low” plotting in Shakespeare that I must point out that I am not drawing that distinction here. I will not group Orsino, Olivia, Viola and Sebastian on the one hand, and Malvolio and the clowns on the other, and thus not high characters versus low, aristocrats versus servants, nor romantic lovers versus clowns. Partly, such distinctions do not work here, for clownish as Sir Toby is, as Olivia's uncle he is nevertheless an aristocrat. Indeed, Barbara Everett has remarked both on the interesting proximity of the romantics Orsino and Olivia to the low characters in the play, and also on the discrepancy between the high seriousness of Orsino's dreams of Olivia and what we actually see of her.² I am concerned instead with a distinction implied by the way characters interact on stage, and this distinction turns out to be one of style and dramatic mode, not one of content or theme.³

In these terms, the two worlds of Twelfth Night are marked by the presence of their two rulers, the Duke Orsino and the Countess Olivia. Orsino would like their worlds to be one, but Olivia is opposed, so their double messenger Viola/Cesario must form the only link between them, except for occasional visits by Feste to Orsino's court. All the action takes place either at Orsino's court, in the absence of Olivia, or in Olivia's house without Orsino. In the first two acts everything happens within these two enclosures, except only the brief symmetrical scenes at the coast between Viola and Sebastian and their respective captains. Only gradually does the play escape these enclosures as Viola or Sebastian encounter other characters on the street, though never very far from Olivia's house. Orsino and Olivia meet on stage outside of Olivia's walls only at the end of the play and only as the cast assembles for the grand finale.

Their separation has less to do with suspense than with the fact that they were never destined for one another. The audience thus has a split view of the play. On the one hand we see the growth of Orsino's relationship with Viola. At Olivia's house, on the other hand, we see developing the relationship that results in the marriage of Olivia and Sebastian. Since Olivia responds only to Cesario's appearance and highly schooled rhetoric, it does not matter that Sebastian's courtship is actually conducted by Viola; in effect, he has wooed Olivia by proxy, as Orsino attempted to do. Viola is supposed to connect the two worlds, but, by virtue of her being a twin, instead divides the play into two plots.

These two plots are parallel to one another. Orsino and Olivia are tied by the initial letter of their Italianate names, by their rank (Orsino is repeatedly referred to in the play as count, not duke), and by their melancholy situations. Within three lines of the opening, the incapacitated Orsino's thoughts of love lead to death (“The appetite may sicken, and so die”, I.i.3; reiterated in the next line with “dying fall”);⁴ Feste sings him a song about death (II.iv.73) and invokes the protection of “the melancholy god” for him. His love is a torment, exposing him to the “fell and cruel hounds” (I.i.22) of his desires. Apart from Olivia, only Viola can focus his affections, and only after deciding to marry Viola can he make plans and function as a ruler. He seems like a fairy-tale prince under an enchantment that is finally lifted by Viola. Olivia's melancholy is more obvious. She will mourn the deaths of her father and brother for seven years, and lives in the dubious company of her melancholic steward Malvolio and her riotous uncle, Sir Toby Belch. From this self-imposed imprisonment she is freed by Viola, who wins her trust and love as she did Orsino's. Viola is thus not only the messenger linking the plots, but the redeemer in each, an angel figuratively as well as literally (“messenger” being the root meaning of angel). Viola's identical role in the two plots is the wedge that keeps them separate.

II.

Let me attempt now to characterize the differences in the use of language and therefore in the kinds of illusion that prevail in these two worlds. In Orsino's world we find assertive metaphoric language from the very first line of the play: “If music be the food of love, play on.” The conditional, “If music be the food of love”, makes metaphor the central issue, an issue whose importance is elaborated by the further proliferation: “Give me excess of it, that surfeiting, / The appetite may sicken and so die.” Similarly the rest of the speech bristles with extended metaphors and similes—“like the sweet sound / That breathes on a bank of violets”, “Receiveth as the sea”, “That instant was I turn'd into a hart”, “like fell and cruel hounds”. This metaphoric language is extremely labile; in his fantastical fancy Orsino moves rapidly from love to death, from Olivia's purity to his own suffering. How do we keep up with the rapid transformations of “like the sweet sound / That breathes upon a bank of violets, / Stealing and giving odor”, with the shifts from sound to breath to the sight of the violets, with the confusion between giving and stealing? Or with the abrupt fall from “validity” to “abatement and low price” a few lines later? Such lavish metaphor and simile and such elaborate transformations of givens into fanciful imagery are equally typical of Orsino's speeches and of Viola speaking to or for her master.

The concreteness of language at Olivia's house forms a striking contrast. We first encounter Sir Toby, Maria, and Sir Andrew; they discuss the same topics as Orsino, food (and drink) and love. Maria berates Sir Toby for drinking too much and for bringing Sir Andrew to woo Olivia. Love expresses itself in this scene not in chaste longing for a Diana but in the direct language of “accost”, which Sir Andrew then misunderstands even more concretely as Maria's name. Another parody of Orsino's “food of love” motif appears in Malvolio, who in I.v is “sick of self-love” and tastes “with a distempered appetite”. Here the motif leads not to flights of fancy, but to the comic predictability of the bilious steward. In II.iii Feste will join the crew and the music will be as concretely present as the drinking; one will not be a metaphor for the other. Whenever, in Olivia's realm, words are understood to be metaphors, there is sure to be trouble: when Sir Andrew asks after Maria's metaphor in bringing his hand to the buttery-bar, he gets lost; the two knights cannot agree at the end of the scene whether Taurus represents sides and heart or legs and thighs. Things are little different when Olivia comes on stage. Olivia is introduced to us in an exchange with her fool, and she echoes Maria's complaints about dry jests. Indeed, Olivia is surrounded by a whole pack of fools, for Malvolio and Sir Toby enter in quick succession, both unable to dismiss the importunate Viola at the gates. Their language is none of it fluid or metaphorical. It is characterized—again—not by flights of fancy, but by repeated stumbles into the literal: the humor in all these exchanges involves a more literal, more concrete, meaning for a word than the one first assumed or the reduction of word to name. Repetition and a focus on the word as word or object provide the logic and continuity in this wordplay. Consequently it engenders a certain rigidity that accords with Olivia's rigidity in excluding the world in order to mourn the death of her brother, and that contrasts with the lability of Orsino's language. This is the dominant (though not exclusive) linguistic mode of Olivia's world.

Viola participates in the modes of both plots. Her disguise at Orsino's court divorces her from her real self, who loves Orsino. Since she may not love him when she is his page, she must interject hypothetical relatives and elaborate similes between them—“My father had a daughter lov'd a man / As it might be perhaps, were I a woman, / I should your lordship” (II.iv.107-109). All of her conversation with Orsino is in this “as if” mode. But at Olivia's house, Viola's disguise causes her sense of self to be rigid rather than labile. To Olivia she reports her master's love with literal honesty, and repels Olivia's advances with the same literalism: there is nothing metaphoric about her inability to satisfy the countess. Olivia and her followers may fail to understand, but the audience knows that Viola means exactly what she says. In Orsino's house only the fact of disguise was significant, but in Olivia's it is the content that matters; by impersonating her brother Viola smooths the later transfer of Olivia's passion. (The play emphasizes this continuity by showing Antonio's irrational adoration of Sebastian in II.i just after Viola has awakened the same irrational adoration in Olivia.) In Olivia's realm Viola's language is double. When she speaks for Orsino she uses the most beautiful conventional love language in the play. Her exchange with Olivia in I.v is instructive in this regard, for there Olivia undermines Viola's metaphors with her literalizing wordplay, reducing Viola's words “as secret as maidenhead” to heretical text, her own “graces” to objects on a schedule. Viola's speeches on behalf of Orsino continue in his hypothetical, metaphoric mode, but for herself she is equally capable of entering into witty exchanges with Feste and Olivia that depend on their literalizing reductiveness. Thus once again the contrast between the realms is between metaphoric displacement and literal directness. This difference extends beyond spoken language to include dramatic gesture. Let us compare, for example, Orsino's and Olivia's expressions of trust in Viola. In I.iv Orsino tells Viola/Cesario that he has already opened to him “the book even of [his] secret soul” (14). Typically, Orsino expresses his confidence in words, and in the metaphor of his soul as book. But when Viola tries to recite his “text” to Olivia in the next scene, Olivia enters into the image as game and reduces the text to heresy (I.v.229). Orsino's metaphor destroyed, Viola nevertheless wins Olivia's heart by asking her to lift her veil, which she does, emphasizing the concreteness of the gesture by itemizing her beauty as a schedule of discrete objects. But Olivia's wordplay should not obscure the significance of her action: removing the veil she had sworn to wear for seven years and revealing herself to (presumably) male eyes is an exact parallel to Orsino's declaration of trust in the preceding scene. Here it is expressed not metaphorically but concretely, allegorically. Viola has operated in two different modes of illusion in the two scenes.

Finally, the names of the characters, too, operate in alternative modes of representation. The figures unambiguously associated with Olivia's house have speaking or allegorical names. Sir Toby Belch speaks loudly of gluttony. Olivia is an allegory for peace, a meaning that is underlined when Viola says, “I hold the olive in my hand; my words are as full of peace as matter” (I.v.209-210), and again by the constant use of “Peace” as a command for silence among Olivia's rowdy followers. She is an appropriate allegory for a Christmas season play that celebrates “peace on earth, good will to men” by bringing peace out of her disorderly house and driving ill will (i.e. Malvolio) from the stage.⁵ Malvolio's name is thus also a simple allegory. Orsino, on the other hand, means “little bear”. A bear is not an abstraction like ill will nor a traditional public symbol like the olive. Orsino is rather, in his melancholy and self-involvement, a little bearish; this is a relation of name to person that is not designation, but similitude, and is thus appropriate to his metaphoric mode.

Viola's and Sebastian's position between the plots is also reflected in their names. Viola means violet, the flower evoked in Orsino's opening speech, and she behaves rather like a shrinking violet in her relation to him. If this is the significance of her name, it is based, like Orsino's, on similitude; it is metaphoric. But the name also evokes music (viol, violin), a sense emphasized by the importance of music to Orsino and by her plan to recommend herself to the duke by her musical ability. She is the singing angelic messenger who makes peace manifest in the world, and in this respect her name is allegorical. Sebastian is similarly double. The Greek root “sebas” means “that which evokes religious awe”. Sebastian's appearance next to his sister evokes the wonder and astonishment of all present. Not only does this event seem supernatural, but it is also part of Viola's message of Christmas, and is thus religious. At the same time, this wonder is buried in a natural man and in a not too uncommon name whose meaning is obscure to those with too little Greek. The association with religious wonder is more likely to be evoked because Sebastian bears the same name as a saint who was widely portrayed as a handsome young man.⁶ Thus his name also speaks both allegorically and by similitude.

In summary, we are dealing here with an opposition between metaphorical and allegorical discourse. The first term requires no clarification, but the second may. I mean allegorical in the sense that this language meets the three major criteria recently so clearly specified for allegory by Maureen Quilligan.⁷ The language of Olivia's realm is allegorical first because it is profoundly conscious of itself as language, a consciousness manifested in the ceaseless punning, and further even as text, as we will see in the baiting of Malvolio; second it is consistently literal and concrete—it means its own words, not what its words represent or stand for. Third, this language comments on and elaborates its grounding Biblical pretext, “Peace on earth, good will toward men”. As Quilligan insists, allegorical writing is different from allegorical interpretation or allegoresis. Allegoresis will be rejected in Malvolio's misreading of Maria's note and will in fact be associated with metaphoric language in the play. Thus to refer to the Olivia plot as allegorical is not to deny the reality or the humanity of the characters, nor to say the play is about something other than what it seems. True allegory is literal and does not refer beyond itself; such is the case in Olivia's world.

III.

It is time now to explore the interaction between the modes of illusion associated with the two plots. Let us begin with the play's reflections on the metaphor of “text”. As we saw above, the initial confrontation between Viola and Olivia is couched in terms of Orsino's “text”. Nevertheless, while the beauty of Viola's language evokes repeated comment, the real damage to Olivia's heart is done by her eye: “Methinks”, she says, “I feel this youth's perfections / […] To creep in at mine eyes” (I.v.296-98). Similarly Olivia's first turn to Viola is marked by lifting her veil and revealing her image, and Antonio later refers to Sebastian/Viola as an “image” that has failed him (III.iv.362; cf. “idol” three lines later). Orsino's imagery of text is defeated by Olivia's image. The baiting of Malvolio attacks metaphoric text at a more parodistic level. The joke turns first on mistaking Maria's handwriting for Olivia's, that is, it depends on the literal letters of Maria's note. Second, it depends on Malvolio's misinterpretation of the letters M O A I, which he tries to make “resemble”, as he says (II.v.120), his own name, by crushing the “simulation” to make it bow to himself (139-141). His violent interpretation (allegoresis) in terms of similitude parodies the dependence on simile and similarity in the Orsino plot, just as Malvolio himself parodies Orsino's melancholy self-involvement and love for Olivia. Malvolio has, we might say, interpreted the text, but ignored the absurd image of himself cross-gartered in yellow stockings. At the same time, there is all the noise made by the on-stage spectators as they shout “Peace”: the ready divorce of word from meaning here points up the inherent danger in reasoning by similitude, linguistic or otherwise.

Feste is the focus for some of the most important reflection on language and dramatic form in the play. As Olivia's “corruptor of words” (III.i.36) he reduces all words to concrete absurdity, to themselves as words and not just as the most concrete object signified by them. Unlike Malvolio or Orsino, he does not need to “corrupt” words by forcing them to resemble other things; he knows that words inherently possess the quality of suggesting things other than themselves. Thus his apparently nonsensical formulation, “that that is is” (IV.ii.16), anticipates and prepares the revealed doubleness of Viola and Sebastian that arouses such peace-making wonder at the end of the play—“A natural perspective, that is and is not!” (V.i.216-217). Indeed, Feste's anticipation of Viola's doubleness suggests that he should be understood as a parody of her, just as Malvolio is a parody of Orsino. Except for Viola, Feste is the only link between the two worlds of the play, and like her he is a musician. It is surely to emphasize this likeness that the two have a scene to themselves that does nothing to further the plot, right at the center of the play. Feste, whose name derives from Festus, lord of misrule at Epiphany,⁸ and thus suggests perhaps good will, mediates for Malvolio with Olivia just as Viola does for Orsino. He is, finally, the only character in the play beside Viola to appear on stage in disguise. As he virtuosically wavers between the roles of Sir Topas the curate and Feste in Act IV he parodies Viola's fluttering between the roles of Viola and Cesario, preparing, as we have seen, the more miraculous doubleness of Viola and Sebastian. If Malvolio reveals and carries off the ill will implicit in Orsino's bearish love for Olivia, Feste's wise fooling reveals Viola's healing of the madness of Illyria to be the good will of the clown. Unlike Malvolio, Feste remains on stage to speak the final word, appropriately, for he is the figure who embodies the mediating grace of play-acting.

In this regard Feste's position on dramatic art is all-important. What matters in Feste's gay alternation of roles between himself and the curate is not that he is taken for Sir Topas, but the pleasure that he and we take in the act of representation. Malvolio misreads Feste's representation mimetically, taking him to be two people: Sir Topas, on the one hand, and a Feste literally opposed to freeing Malvolio on the other. And Malvolio is, as a result, the one spectator (auditor, actually), who derives no pleasure from Feste's performance. Here the triumphant Feste takes the opportunity to connect himself to an older dramatic tradition, alluding to King Gorboduc (IV.ii.13), subject of the first Senecan tragedy in English, and to the Old Vice of the morality in his song at the end of the scene. In Feste's fooling two modes of representation are thus confronted, the mimetic and the festive, and the distinction between them is understood to be historical.

A final reflection on the mode of the play emerges from the allusions to bear baiting. Sir Andrew regrets that he has devoted more of his life to bear-baiting than to the arts (I.iii.93); Fabian is in trouble with Olivia over a bear-baiting. Orsino (“little bear”) sees himself as set upon by the hounds of his unrequited desires (I.i.20-22); Olivia describes her honor as a bear set upon at the stake (III.i.118-120). When Fabian takes revenge on Malvolio (for bringing him out of favor with Olivia over the bear-baiting) by participating in baiting Malvolio, we are once more dealing with a concrete parody of the metaphoric baiting of love. Lest there be any doubt of the implicit context, we are told that Viola flees the equivalent baiting of her by Toby and Fabian “as if a bear were at [her] heels” (III.iv.295). This pattern of allusion is interesting, because bear-baiting was a popular public spectacle of virtually equivalent status to theater, and apparently on occasion used the same facilities.⁹ The play is thus laced with references to an alternative, generally older mode of public spectacle; a play that sees itself as a near descendant of public bear-baiting is once again calling attention to its non-mimetic aspects.¹⁰

Such reflections on the play's own illusions suggest a strong preference for its allegorical over its mimetic mode of representation. And indeed, though I have spoken of two equivalent worlds in the play, much more attention is devoted to the Olivia plot than to the Orsino plot. The play does not just tolerate the allegorical mode, it privileges it. Given this distinction and given the hint from Feste's allusions to the Vice that it is a historical one, I would like to draw it more explicitly as I conclude. I have called Orsino's plot mimetic. In his metaphoric mode every divergence from the literal to the figurative level of meaning is clearly marked. Whenever characters become other than what they appear they express their intention to don a disguise, and repeatedly remind us when they are disguised. Similarly when things become other than what they seem the transition is marked by the rhetorical structure of simile or metaphor. Indeed, it is also necessary to mark when things are just what they seem: Orsino, we are told, is noble “in nature as in name” (I.ii.25). Unless signification is marked, things are only what they seem. In this sense we may say the plot is mimetic; it offers us the imitation of nature, the second artificial nature implied in the ut pictura poesis tradition of early neoclassicism. Thus what we see on stage is an illusion of reality, and it depends on the prevailing metaphoric diction to import significance beyond the literal into its sphere. Olivia's world, on the other hand, is allegorical precisely because it does not take note of the divergence of the figurative from the literal. There is no divergence, because the figurative is always presumed to be incarnate in the literal. Allegory is always concrete in this sense that what you see is what it means. There can, therefore, be no divergence between name and nature in Olivia's world, and the issue need never be raised; nor can there be disguise, only self-consciously theatrical role-playing.

Historically, then, Orsino stands near the very beginning of the tradition of the modern dramatic character we associate with the neoclassical illusion of reality school, for he is, essentially, a melancholy duke who cheers up at the end of the play. Olivia, on the other hand, is Peace in the garb of a countess, and belongs to the allegorical or non-illusionist tradition, in which characters are embodied significations, and hers is the preferred mode of the play. Such preference is, I would suggest, typical of Shakespeare: even A Midsummer Night's Dream, which celebrates the transformative and proliferative power of metaphor above all, moves in the last act to the parodistic, concrete, allegorical realm of the mechanicals. And overall Shakespeare's career moves toward the allegorical, non-mimetic four romances, and the most unrealistic history Henry VIII.¹¹ It would be a mistake to see this preference simply as conservatism on Shakespeare's part. The allegorical mode for which he opts has another eighty years of rich development on the continent—in the sophisticated yet popular Jesuit moralities of Jakob Bidermann, in the powerful martyr tragedies of Andreas Gryphius, but most of all in the flowering of allegorical comedies, tragedies, and Corpus Christi plays in Spain that we associate with the names of Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, and above all Calderón de la Barca. Rather we should see him as experimenting with neoclassical strategies of representation as he experimented with neoclassical plot structure in Romeo and Juliet and The Tempest.

In this experimental doubleness resides, I think, the peculiar elusiveness of the play, which is visible in readers' discomfort to attribute to it any meaning at all.¹² It also explains the most popular controversy about the play, that over the degree of sympathy we are to feel with Malvolio. If we respond in the mode of the Olivia plot, Malvolio is ill will personified and we rejoice at his departure; but if we carry over the responses evoked by the mimetic Orsino plot, we are inclined to sympathize with his plight at the end. And since, as we have seen, Malvolio parodies or reflects Orsino in the Olivia plot, we are indeed tempted to accord him some of the same dignity we would to Orsino. At the same time, this parodistic linkage invites us to react less sympathetically to Orsino as personified melancholy. Small wonder there has been confusion. If, however, we are sensitive to the play of the different modes in the text, part of our pleasure in it derives from our own agility in discovering and adjusting our responses. Both the play and our response to it thus become explorations of the complexity of aesthetic illusion.

Notes

1. The Riverside Shakespeare, p. 403.

2. Everett: “Or What You Will”, pp. 300 and 302.

3. Kenneth Muir remarks in passing on the “contrast between the levels of reality represented by the two main plots” in Taming of the Shrew (Introduction to Shakespeare. The Comedies, p. 4). In this respect Taming of the Shrew seems to me to have most in common with Twelfth Night. Here again the distinction between plots cannot be social, for the two heroines are sisters; much more important is the difference in the characters' relations to their language and therefore in the kind of illusion in each.

4. The play is cited according to The Riverside Shakespeare.

5. For detailed discussions of the play as an Epiphany and Christmas season play, see Lewalski: “Thematic Patterns”, and Hassel: Renaissance Drama, pp. 77-86. I focus here more on the implications of the literal aspects of the plot than on the implications of character development. As a result I would not subscribe to Lewalski's views of Viola and Sebastian as Christ-like (p. 176); Viola is rather just what she is called in the play, a messenger (Greek: ‘angelos’).

6. I am grateful to my colleague Charles Barrack for this suggestion.

7. I exploit Quilligan's defining characteristics in The Language of Allegory, although I recognize she intended to describe a narrative genre, not a general linguistic mode. I have left out her reader-oriented categories, whose potential application to drama is beyond the scope of this essay. Elizabeth Freund, in “Twelfth Night and the Tyranny of Interpretation”, has recently explored the tension between mimesis and semiosis in the language of the play, focusing largely on the clowns. While Freund sees Twelfth Night as paradigmatic for the functioning of all literary language, the lines she draws are not unrelated to those drawn here; metaphoric language will be shown below to be associated with mimetic action, while the definition of allegory used here is essentially a semiotic one.

8. Hassel: Renaissance Drama, p. 77.

9. Wickham: Early English Stages, pp. 161-66.

10. A striking parallel example of the use of bears to call attention to non-mimetic dramatic form occurs in Jakob Bidermann's Cenodoxus (1602), III.viii, where a prank involving a trained bear is connected to significant discussion of the nature of dramatic illusion. Closer to home is the bear who apparently eats Antigonus in A Winter's Tale, III.iii; it is the first figure to appear as the play moves into the pastoral mode, and thus again associated with the play's self-consciousness about genre.

11. Cox, in “Henry VIII and the Masque”, for example, argues that it exploits the dramaturgy of the court masque.

12. Elaborated with particular delicacy and elegance by Barbara Everett (“Or What You Will”), who sees both the play's reticence and its ultimate seriousness. Compare also Lewalski's extreme hesitation to offer her reading too seriously as allegory (“Thematic Patterns”, p. 177), and Stephen Booth's interesting ruminations on the coherence of the play's language in “Twelfth Night 1.1: The Audience as Malvolio”.