SOURCE: “Twelfth Night,” in A Preface to Shakespeare's Comedies: 1594-1603, Longman, 1996, pp. 229-55.

[In the following essay, Mangan focuses on Shakespeare's extensive reworking of themes, characters, and situations used in Twelfth Night, noting that Shakespeare revised his previous attitudes toward many of the ideas explored in the play.]

‘GIVE ME EXCESS OF IT’

Twelfth Night is a play characterized by excess. In the first few lines Orsino calls for an excess of music, and from that moment on the play stages a variety of excesses. On the most mundane level there are the literal excesses of Sir Toby and his drinking partners and their revelries. There are the excessive and obsessive emotional states of Orsino and Olivia; the one overwhelmed by his unrequited love for the other, who is herself trapped in mourning for her dead brother and sworn to wear a veil for seven years. People act and react excessively, too: the trick which Maria and Sir Toby play against Malvolio is funny to begin with, but eventually turns sour. Audiences frequently find the ‘mad-house’ scene, in which Feste torments the imprisoned steward, uncomfortable, and even Sir Toby thinks that things have been taken too far and says that he ‘would we were well rid of this knavery’. The play encompasses an extraordinary range of tones and moods, from melancholy to revelry. There is even an excess of characters in the play: Fabian seems to appear from nowhere and for no apparent reason in Act II Scene v, and then takes over the part which Feste seemed about to play in the early stages of the plot against Malvolio.

As for the plot, Shakespearean comedy is typically complicated in its narrative structure: even so, Twelfth Night is unusually ambitious in the number of narratives which it sets going simultaneously, and the complexity with which they need to interrelate. It attempts simultaneously to create both the accelerating fugue-like structure of a good farce, and also a series of characters who are allowed their own space to develop emotionally complex or subtle relationships with each other and with the audience. There are so many narratives going on at the same time that it is easy for an audience to lose track of everything that is happening. Plots of disguise and cross-dressing become interwoven with stories of mistaken identities, separated twins and (again) lost brothers; tricks are played on several characters simultaneously; and there is not one love-story but many.

As in As You Like It, all sorts of variations are played upon the theme of love and desire. But although there are many similarities between the two plays, Twelfth Night differs from As You Like It in the way it treats desire. In As You Like It a single kind of love-relationship, romantic love, was parodied in a variety of ways up and down the social classes. But the triangle of desire in which Viola is caught does not involve low-life shepherdesses like Phoebe, patently minor characters who can be relegated at the end of the play to their proper station in the sub-plot: she is adored by the Lady Olivia. Moreover, in Twelfth Night love takes on a greater variety of forms. Apart from Orsino's and Olivia's obsessive states there is also Viola's unspoken longing for Orsino; Olivia's impossible desire for Cesario (finally translated into possibility by the appearance of Sebastian); Orsino's fondness for ‘Cesario’ (which changes quite peremptorily into a willingness to marry Viola); Malvolio's self-interested pursuit of his mistress, which leads to its own kind of excess as he dresses in his ridiculous costume; Sir Andrew's hopes of marriage with Olivia; Antonio's adoration of Sebastian; the fictional sister invented by Viola and her male counterpart, the flamboyant and imaginary lover in the ‘willow cabin’ at the gate; Sir Toby's marriage to his partner-in-crime Maria; and not least the filial love of Sebastian and Viola, which is as intense as any relationship in the play. Twelfth Night is clearly concerned to show how many faces love and desire can have.

Perhaps, too, how many faces comedy can have. It seems at times that there is more material here than can be accommodated in a single play—and this is not entirely surprising, for into Twelfth Night Shakespeare crams a whole series of themes, characters, scenes and situations which he has already used in several previous plays.

Twelfth Night re-works, for example, the cross-dressing plot from As You Like It, with Viola following Rosalind's lead in donning male attire as protection, and then having to deal with the contradictions which arise from that disguise once people start falling in love with each other. Like another cross-dressed Shakespearean heroine, Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Viola becomes page to the man she loves, and then finds herself in the uncomfortable position of having to plead his cause to another woman. The cross-dressing plot is then interwoven with the ‘identical twins’ plot which was the central narrative of The Comedy of Errors. As in that earlier play, twins are separated by storm and shipwreck; one of them arrives in a strange city to find an unknown woman who lays claim to his love; people are confined in lunatic asylums; misunderstandings arise about ransoms and gifts of gold; and old enmities between cities put at risk the lives of men who are seeking the person they love. From Much Ado About Nothing comes the scene in which someone is tricked into believing that someone else is in love with them, while the tricksters look on. From As You Like It again comes the slightly dissonant ending: just as Jaques in the earlier play refused to join in the celebrations and return to court with the rest of the company, so Malvolio here, much more harshly, rejects the apologies and attempts at reconciliation, storming off-stage with threats of revenge.

Characters reappear, too. The figure of the jester, of course, has been used before, and Feste bears more than a slight resemblance to Touchstone, as Shakespeare and Robert Armin continue to develop the specialized clown rôle as a trademark of the Lord Chamberlain's Men. Several other stock characters, too, probably bear witness to the particular skills or comic routines of other actors: the inept lover Master Slender from The Merry Wives of Windsor, for example, reappears as Sir Andrew Aguecheek; the witty female servant Maria has antecedents in Hero's waiting women, Margaret and Ursula in Much Ado About Nothing, and Viola, as we have seen, replays Rosalind's breeches part. It has often been pointed out that Sir Toby is an Illyrian equivalent of Falstaff: like the fat knight of the Henry IV plays and The Merry Wives of Windsor, he is a descendant of the figures of misrule from seasonal entertainments. Like Falstaff, Sir Toby has gathered round him a group of like-minded revellers, with the result that Malvolio accuses him of trying to turn Olivia's house into an ‘ale-house’—as if Falstaff's Eastcheap haunts were to be imported into Illyria. Even Hamlet finds echoes in Twelfth Night, although this is perhaps less surprising than it might seem at first, since the comedy and the tragedy were written very close together in and around 1600-1. At any rate, both of them start with a figure displaying all the signs of mourning: Hamlet's ‘inky cloak’ is worn in mourning for his father, Olivia's veil is in memory of her brother. In this respect Olivia may also remind readers and audiences of Portia in the early phases of The Merchant of Venice, as both are potentially prevented from loving by the influence of a dead relative.

The list could go on. Nor is there anything unusual in itself about the fact that this play contains reworkings of old stories, characters and situations. Throughout his career Shakespeare continually re-uses material, adapting not only other writers' works for the stage (as was common enough in Elizabethan playwriting practice), but reworking his own ideas and narratives, giving new meanings to the stories he tells.¹ What makes Twelfth Night special is the relentlessness of these reworkings, the (again) excessiveness of them. It is true that shipwrecks, lost relatives, mistaken identities and love-triangles are standard fare in romantic comedy, but in Twelfth Night Shakespeare seems to be attempting—almost desperately—to cram everything in. Twelfth Night is a compendium of Shakespearean comedy, and in it it is possible to see Shakespeare taking further, revising and rethinking his attitudes to some of the ideas which comedy had already been a vehicle for expressing.

‘AT OUR FEAST WE HAD A PLAY’

It may seem that this spotting of sources and intertextual relationships is a rather academic exercise: relevant to the classroom, perhaps, but not to the stage. Would Shakespeare have expected his audience to pick up references like these? Would they have noticed, or bothered about, the similarities between one play and another? As it happens we can answer this question with a qualified ‘yes’. While we have no way of knowing how Elizabethan audiences in general reacted to the play, or what sort of expectations or understandings they had of it, we do have evidence of the response of one spectator at a performance of Twelfth Night.

Twelfth Night, like most of Shakespeare's plays, was written with various possible audiences in mind. It was to be performed at the still-new Globe Theatre, of course, but the Lord Chamberlain's Men would also have hoped, like Bottom and his friends, to be commissioned for performances at court on the occasion of various festivities and celebrations. There is even a tradition that the play was first performed before the Queen on 6 January 1601, on Twelfth Night itself, although there is little or no evidence for such a performance (indeed there is no record of a performance of this play at the court of either Elizabeth or James until 6 April 1618, two years after Shakespeare's death). There was, however, a performance at another prestigious, and possibly better-paying, venue in 1602. A student of law at the Middle Temple, John Manningham, kept a commonplace book in which he noted all sorts of details about his life. This book is known as ‘Manningham's Diary’, and the first entry for February 1602 reads:

At our feast we had a play called [‘mid’ crossed out] Twelve Night or What You Will, much like the Comedy of Errors or Menaechmi in Plautus, but most like and near to that in Italian called Inganni. A good practice in it to make the steward believe his Lady widow was in love with him by counterfeiting a letter, as from his Lady in general terms, telling him what she liked best in him and prescribing his gesture in smiling, his apparel etc. And then when he came to practice making him believe they took him to be mad.²

This diary entry suggests something of the nature of the audience for which Shakespeare was writing, by showing us something of the mind of one Elizabethan play-goer: not a statistically relevant sample, of course, but useful nonetheless. It is a mind which is extremely well-stocked: Manningham, clearly, is well-read in both contemporary English, recent Italian and classical Latin drama. He not only picks up the resemblance to the Comedy of Errors, but is also able to trace both Shakespearean plays back to their common source in Plautus's Menaechmi. In addition there is the interesting slip of the pen in Manningham's first line: the word ‘mid’ is crossed out—as if he might have been about to write ‘A Midsummer Night's Dream’, briefly confusing one Shakespearean play with another (which also has a title referring to one specific night of the year). It is unlikely to have been pure coincidence that led Manningham to make the link with the earlier Shakespeare comedies. It would seem that Shakespeare as a writer had made enough of a name for himself by 1602 for an informed play-goer like Manningham to be able to discern an oeuvre. Manningham, it seems, was aware not merely of watching a play but of watching a play by a particular writer, William Shakespeare.

Manningham is judicious in his spotting of sources. Having recognized the twins' plot from The Comedy of Errors and Menaechmi, he goes on to consider the cross-dressing plot, which he correctly traces back to Italian comic traditions. Here, in fact, he may be conflating memories of two plays: the play which he names, Gl'Inganni (The Deceptions), tells the story of a woman who cross-dresses and takes the masculine name of Cesare, just as Viola in Twelfth Night becomes Cesario. It is also possible, however, that Manningham is actually thinking of another play, the anonymous Gl'Ingannati (The Deceived), which resembles Twelfth Night even more closely. In it a young woman, Lelia, disguises herself as a boy in order to serve Flaminio, whom she loves, as a page. Flaminio employs her as a messenger to Isabella, the woman he loves unrequitedly, and Isabella then falls in love with Lelia. Like Viola, Lelia is saved from these complications by the appearance of her long-lost brother Fabrizio, who falls in love with Isabella, leaving Flaminio and Lelia free to marry each other.

We should not assume that the sophisticated awareness of intertextuality which Manningham shows was typical of play-goers in Shakespeare's London. Clearly, though, Shakespeare was writing for an audience which included a proportion of very well-informed aficionados of the theatre, spectators whose experience of one play could be immediately related to memories of others. He might well have been able to expect that the self-referential and intertextual elements of Twelfth Night would not have been altogether lost on his audience.

Other things about Manningham's diary entry deserve comment. There is his evidence, for example, that Twelfth Night was performed at a feast. This particular play is especially suited to such an occasion: Sir Toby and his fellow-revellers in particular enact a story-line which is in itself ‘festive’, and the play bears the title of a feast. It would have been nice if Manningham's diary had provided evidence of the play being performed at some Twelfth Night celebrations; however, the feast at which Twelfth Night was presented to the Middle Temple seems, from the date of Manningham's diary entry, to have been to celebrate Candlemas rather than Twelfth Night.

The diary entry also gives a sense of what Manningham remembered most vividly from the performance. The romantic plot is mentioned only as it relates to sources, but what seems to have stuck in Manningham's mind is the trick played on Malvolio by Maria, Sir Toby and Feste. What Manningham carries away from the play is precisely the opposite of what the editors of the Arden edition of the play, J. M. Lothian and T. W. Craik, speaking for twentieth-century scholarship, say the modern reader is likely to experience:

It is probably true to say that a twentieth-century reader, suddenly invited to recall Twelfth Night, will think first of Viola's scene with Olivia and Orsino (I. iv and II. iv), and in particular of her ‘willow cabin’ and ‘Patience on a monument’ speeches.³

They compare this with a typically nineteenth-century perspective on the play, represented by the words of the Victorian scholar F. J. Furnivall, writing in 1877, who saw the below-stairs plot as a rather irritating distraction, behind which the beauties of the romantic plot might be glimpsed:

The self-conceited Malvolio is brought to the front, the drunkards and the Clown come next; none of these touches any heart; and it's not till we look past them, that we feel the beauty of the characters who stand in half-light behind.⁴

Manningham's memories are different again from this. He is not particularly interested in the shadowy half-light of romantic beauty; for him the ‘self-conceited’ Malvolio's smiling, his yellow cross-gartered stockings and the tricks played upon him by Sir Toby and his companions are what make the greatest impression:

A good practice in it to make the steward believe his Lady widow was in love with him by counterfeiting a letter, as from his Lady in general terms, telling him what she liked best in him and prescribing his gesture in smiling, his apparel etc. And then when he came to practice making him believe they took him to be mad.⁵

These varying responses provide some useful information about the diversity of ways in which different ages have related to the ‘same’ play. The changing structures of feeling over the centuries, and the changing expectations both of art and life which people have brought to the text in various ages has meant that different generations have privileged different parts of the story. In addition, though, it is worth noting how the Arden editors resolutely talk about ‘the reader’ rather than ‘the spectator’ or ‘the audience’. Manningham's response, on the other hand, is to a performance rather than to a text. It may be that the differences in perspective which exist between Manningham and the Arden edition owe something to the difference between reading Twelfth Night and watching it.

A play is a paradoxical kind of literary hybrid, one whose ‘success’ is in part measured by the number of times the text gets staged and re-staged. In the course of this process, of course, the play gets altered from its original appearance. Twelfth Night's history on the English stage between the 1600s and the mid-twentieth century includes such radical transformations as a version played at James I's court in 1623 entitled merely Malvolio; a Restoration adaptation by William D'Avenant; an incorporation of sections of it in Charles Burnaby's Love Betray'd: or the Agreeable Disappointment; an 1820s musical version by Frederick Reynolds containing ‘Songs, Glees and Choruses’ from other Shakespeare plays.⁶ Just as Shakespeare cannibalized previous plays (including, as we have seen, his own) to create his texts, so his texts are cannibalized by later generations of theatre practitioners. But it is not only a matter of rewritings and adaptations. For each new staging, each new stage, each change of cast or venue means a different experience for the audience. Manningham's diary entry tells us about an early staging of Twelfth Night, and reflects accurately an important theatrical dimension of the play which is not always obvious to the reader: the way in which the apparent main plot, the romance involving Viola, Orsino and Olivia, frequently has trouble holding its own in competition with the ‘sub-plot’, and the below-stairs activities of puritanical stewards and drunken knights threaten continually to take centre stage. As with that 1623 performance at court, Twelfth Night can easily metamorphose into Malvolio.

‘I SMELL A DEVICE’

Let us focus, then, on the below-stairs plot. Act II Scene iii sees the ‘low-life’ characters of the play, Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Feste and (after a little persuasion) Maria holding a late-night party. They drink, they sing—and they disturb Malvolio, who bursts into the scene full of righteous indignation:

Malvolio 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 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 with you?

(II, iii, ll. 33-9)

His diatribe has little effect on the revellers. Despite Malvolio's attempt to quieten them, they continue with their drinking and singing. Sir Toby retorts, ‘Art any more than a steward? Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?’ (II, iii, ll. 109-11).

In this below-stairs plot of Twelfth Night Shakespeare stages once again the battle between Carnival and Lent. The confrontation between Sir Toby and Malvolio is emblematic: on the one side Malvolio's ‘virtuous’ mean-spiritedness, on the other Sir Toby, the representative of revelry, with a surname which speaks for itself, and a first name which is pointedly and familiarly English in this alien world of Illyria. As in the famous painting by Bruegel, the personifications of Carnival and Lent confront each other directly.

The title of the play itself draws attention to this confrontation. In Elizabeth's court, as elsewhere in Europe, the Feast of the Epiphany on 6 January, Twelfth Night, was the occasion of the final phase of Christmas-time celebrations, and

… one of the most brilliant and joyful court occasions. Before stepping down, the Lord of Misrule would announce his desire to round off with a kind of apotheosis and a whole succession of spectacular displays of music, dancing and feasting bursting like fireworks one after the other … Twelfth Night provided a fine occasion to hand out these titles of king and queen, which appear to have been very popular amongst the rites and traditions of folklore. It was a mimetic ritual of royalty that was probably a survival from the old Saturnalia, giving the king of the evening a chance to masquerade as the monarch, derisively aping his authority … Masquerades and fancy-dress mummings are another feature of the lavish amusements of Twelfth Night … Twelfth Night was the festival which brought to an end the long, eventful period of ‘Yuletide’ revels …⁷

The ambiguous nature of these Twelfth Night celebrations is significant. It was a time of revelry, a carnival time at which the world might be turned upside-down, a celebration presided over by the Lord of Misrule and the ‘King of the Bean’ (a mock king elected by means of a dried bean hidden in the festive cake: whoever found it in his portion was elected ‘king’). Yet it also marked the end of revelling: the Christmas holiday was almost over and a return to work and the realities of midwinter imminent. We retain a memory of this in present-day Christmas customs: Twelfth Night is the night the decorations come down. The confrontation between the riotous world of Sir Toby and the sober world of Malvolio could hardly take place in a more fitting context than that of Twelfth Night.

Sir Toby and his drinking companions comprise an carnivalesque underworld, an alternative society to the ‘official’ world of Olivia and Orsino. This world has all the essential characteristics of Bakhtin's definitions of carnival. The pleasures of the body are paramount; language—especially in Feste's hands—runs riot; and traditional hierarchies and class boundaries have become virtually irrelevant. Knights carouse with servants, fools and other unspecified members of the household. Sir Toby breaks all the rules of Elizabethan decorum by marrying his sister's ‘waiting-gentlewoman’, thus honouring at one remove Falstaff's promise of marriage to Mistress Quickly. The analogy with Falstaff works theatrically as well as socially. While the social details of the fictional settings are different, the dramatic functions of the two figures are so similar that it is difficult to imagine that the part of Sir Toby was not played by the same actor who created Falstaff.

There are important differences, it is true. Whereas in the history plays Falstaff had to carry the main weight of the plays' foolery, with Pistol, Bardolph, Nym and Mistress Quickly very definitely supporting rôles, Twelfth Night spreads the comic burden more evenly. There is a fully-developed fool rôle in the character of Feste, and another excellent comic part in Sir Andrew Aguecheek; Maria, too, is a more interesting and better-established part than Mistress Quickly—indeed she has inherited some of the attributes not only of the witty servant, but also of Shakespeare's witty heroines such as Rosalind and Beatrice. Another important distinction between Twelfth Night and the Henry IV plays is geographical: in the history plays the world of Bankside was physically as well as socially distant from the court, whereas in Illyria Sir Toby's alternative world exists within the same household as the official one. In Twelfth Night the confrontation between the forces of authority and those of licence is played out on a domestic scale. It is not a class conflict, nor is it strictly to do with law and order. There is no opposition between the so-called ‘respectable’ world and a criminal ‘class’. Sir Toby is Olivia's kinsman and the revellers are of her household.

The significance of these similarities and differences between Falstaff and Sir Toby Belch can be seen if we view the confrontation between Sir Toby and Malvolio as a reworking of the confrontation between Falstaff and the Lord Chief Justice in Henry IV Part 2. In that play, which was first acted a year or two before Twelfth Night, the main narrative concerned the way in which Prince Hal, re-fashioning himself in heroic mode in order to become the warrior-hero Henry V, distanced himself from Falstaff's subversive carnival influence, and aligned himself with the forces of authority, sobriety, law and order, represented in their most extreme form by the Lord Chief Justice. In an early scene in the play the Lord Chief Justice encounters Falstaff and reprimands him, just as Malvolio reprimands Sir Toby. But whereas Malvolio is routed, the Lord Chief Justice is not: Falstaff attempts to answer him, but cannot get the better of him. Eventually, in Henry IV Part 2 the forces of authority triumph over those of revelry, and Falstaff is banished and imprisoned. Twelfth Night replays the same contest but with a different result: here it is the forces of revelry which prevail, and Malvolio who is imprisoned, ridiculed and tormented.

In production it is tempting to represent Malvolio as a stereotyped Puritan figure while Sir Toby becomes the Cavalier of popular imagination: aristocratic and rather dissolute. Such a staging has some historical justification. One of the main social and economic tensions of early-seventeenth-century England involved the shift of real power away from the established but by now fading nobility, whose influence was based on land and tradition, towards the rising middle classes. They were much influenced by Puritan thought, and they were the sector of society which would, on the whole, profit most from the emerging capitalist economy. Thus the confrontation between Carnival and Lent might also be seen as a confrontation between the old order and the new, with Sir Toby representing the traditional values of an already-sentimentalized ‘Merrie England’ which is being challenged by the likes of the socially ambitious Malvolio. Since, historically, this was a tension which finally erupted in civil war, it gives a sinister power to Malvolio's final line in the play. Humiliated and enraged he exits, vowing ‘I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you’ (V, i, l. 374). That revenge was forty years brewing and when it came it brought with it Oliver Cromwell.

Caricature Puritans, with names such as Zeal-of-the Land Busy and Tribulation Wholesome, appear on the London stage during this period in Ben Jonson's plays, and Malvolio is a recognizable kinsman to these stereotyped figures: self-righteous, overbearing, a hypocrite and a killjoy. His speech is ostentatiously moralizing and he names ‘Jove’ frequently and self-importantly, exclaiming piously, for example, that ‘Jove, not I, is the doer of this, and he is to be thanked’ (III, iv, l. 81). Some scholars, incidentally, suggest that the word ‘Jove’ is used here, rather than ‘God’, as a later emendation to the text in accordance with the 1606 Act ‘to Restraine Abuses of Players’ which outlawed profanity in plays.⁸ Yet the word ‘God’ is used later in the same scene by Andrew Aguecheek, and both the Clown and Viola name ‘God’ directly in Act I Scene v. It is more likely that this slightly pretentious name for God is simply a feature of Malvolio's idiolect, the function of which is to strengthen the impression of Elizabethan Puritanism: the word contains resonances of the Old Testament ‘Jehovah’ and the Old Testament was a particular source of inspiration for Puritan preachers and pamphleteers. This kind of stereotyped Puritan was an easy and indeed almost an inevitable target for the Elizabethan playwright: Puritan-led attacks on the stage ensured not only the animosity of most playwrights, but also that of the audience, who by definition were not opposed to the theatre.

Yet it is important not to oversimplify. If Malvolio is, in this loose sense of the word, puritanical, the term ‘Puritan’ itself is, as historians repeatedly remind us, a notoriously slippery one. It was used at the time to refer to a whole spectrum of Protestant thought and belief (not all of which was ascetically dismissive of worldly pleasure) and a variety of associated political positions ranging from the moderate to the revolutionary. As David Underdown says, ‘The term is impossible to define with precision, can mean anything its users want it to mean, and there are modern historians who would like to abandon it altogether’.⁹ Nonetheless, the historical movement which we know as Puritanism had certain discernible features. When historians use the word ‘Puritan’ they generally mean those people who wished

to emphasize more strongly the Calvinist heritage of the Church of England; to elevate preaching and scripture above sacraments and rituals, the notions of the calling, the elect, the ‘saint’, the distinctive virtue of the divinely predestined, above the equal worth of all sinful Christians … [Puritanism] gave its adherents the comforting belief that they were entrusted by God with the special duty of resisting the tide of sin and disorder that surged around them. Through preaching, prayer, the study of scripture, and regular self-examination, it provided a strategy for cultivating the personal qualities necessary to these ends.¹⁰

Shakespeare goes to some lengths to distance Malvolio from this more precise definition of Puritanism. He expressly states that he does not want simply to label him ‘Puritan’. When Toby asks Maria to tell the company something about Malvolio, the following conversation ensues:

Maria Marry, sir, sometimes he is a kind of puritan.
Sir Andrew O, if I thought that I'd beat him like a dog.
Sir Toby What, for being a puritan? Thy exquisite reason, dear knight.
Sir Andrew I have no exquisite reason for't, but I have reason good enough.
Maria 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 swathes; 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.

(II, iii, ll. 135-46)

Maria characterizes Malvolio as ‘a time-pleaser’, one whose ‘Puritanism’ has nothing to do with belief or faith. Shakespeare typically draws back from commenting on any specific contemporary theological, philosophical or political position, and contents himself with satirizing the more general and traditional vice of hypocrisy, showing how the trappings of religion are manipulated by the likes of Malvolio in order to further their own ambitions and feed their own vanity. But, as Maria sees, Malvolio's ambition and vanity are the very handles by which the revellers can catch hold of him.

‘ARE ALL THE PEOPLE MAD?’

John Manningham enjoyed the humour of the prank which the revellers play on Malvolio. A ‘good practice’, he called it. Yet the plot against Malvolio calls forth a cruel kind of laughter, the laughter of ridicule. Pulled down from his seat of power and imprisoned ‘in a dark room and bound’, Malvolio is both tortured and humiliated. There is a further psychological torment which Sir Toby and his companions inflict upon Malvolio, however, ‘making him believe they took him to be mad’, as Manningham puts it.

Acting, as he thinks, on his mistress's instructions, Malvolio adopts uncharacteristic dress and behaviour. He appears to Olivia, yellow-stockinged, cross-gartered, talking unintelligibly and wearing a smile; the Lenten figure has put on, in effect, the garb of Carnival. Acting as he does so far out of his accustomed character, it is small wonder that Olivia is made to think he is deranged.

Malvolio ‘Remember who commended thy yellow stockings’—
Olivia ‘Thy yellow stockings’?
Malvolio, ‘And wished to see thee cross-gartered.’
Olivia ‘Cross-gartered’?
Malvolio ‘Go to, thou art made, if thou desirest to be so.’
Olivia Am I made?
Malvolio ‘If not, let me see thee a servant still.’
Olivia Why, this is very midsummer madness.

(III, iv, ll. 45-54)

In fact the revellers' aim is crueller than this: it is to make Malvolio doubt his own sanity. The techniques which they use on the hapless steward are the classic techniques of brainwashing: sensory deprivation combined with false or contradictory information designed to throw into doubt the subject's usual ways of making sense of the world. In the guise of Sir Topas the priest, Feste visits Malvolio in his dark room:

Malvolio Sir Topas, never was man thus wronged. Good Sir Topas, do not think I am mad. They have laid me here in hideous darkness.
Feste Fie, thou dishonest Satan … Say'st thou that house is dark?
Malvolio As hell, Sir Topas.
Feste 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?
Malvolio I am not mad, Sir Topas; I say to you this house is dark.
Feste Madman, thou errest.

(IV, ii, ll. 29-43)

Feste describes a reality to Malvolio which is the opposite of what his senses tell him is the truth. The fact that he does so in nonsensical and contradictory terms (‘bay windows, transparent as barricadoes, clerestories toward the south-north … lustrous as ebony’) only increases the sense of disorientation. Malvolio repeatedly affirms that he is not mad, yet his sanity is under severe attack in this scene.

But it is not only Malvolio who is threatened with madness: a kind of madness seems endemic to Illyria. It is the dominant metaphor of the play. According to Feste, Sir Toby is a ‘madman’ because of his drink (I, v, l. 126); Orsino thinks Antonio's ‘words are madness’ (V, i, l. 95) because of his claim to know ‘Cesario’; Olivia worries that Viola's unconventionally assertive wooing on behalf of Orsino might amount to madness (I, v, l. 191) and, as we have just seen, is later convinced that the yellow-stockinged Malvolio is suffering from ‘midsummer madness’ (III, iv, l. 54). Malvolio himself, on the other hand, sees madness in the riotous living of Sir Toby and his friends, and demands of them ‘My masters, are you mad?’ (II, iii, l. 83). And Sebastian, who finds himself at the centre of the whole network of misunderstandings suspects first of all that in Illyria ‘all the people [are] mad’ (IV, i, l. 26), and then that the madness might be confined either to Olivia or himself:

This is the air, that is the glorious sun.
This pearl she gave me, I do feel't and see't,
[And] 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,
That I am ready to distrust mine eyes
And wrangle with my reason that persuades me
To any other trust but that I am mad
Or else the lady's mad.

(IV, iii, ll. 1-2, 9-16)

These repeated references to madness are hardly surprising in a world where people's sensual impressions are often deceiving, and where identities are not always what they appear. Significantly, this speech in which Sebastian tries to make sense of what is happening to him comes immediately after Malvolio's ‘madhouse’ scene. For, in an odd way, Sebastian and Malvolio are in similar situations. For both of them normal meanings and the evidence of their senses are not operating. Madness is offered as the most rational explanation!

In comedy a little madness can be a liberating thing. The heroes and heroines of Shakespearean comedies typically go through a series of disorienting experiences which eventually act benevolently upon them. The lovers in A Midsummer Night's Dream are made ‘wood within this wood’, and are unable to tell what is real and what is not, but at the end Jack ends up with Jill. In The Taming of the Shrew it happens more blatantly and cruelly; yet Petruchio engineers the brainwashing of Kate which has her agreeing that the sun is the moon precisely in order to browbeat her into the supposed ‘happiness’ of a conventional marriage. The pattern works more subtly in Twelfth Night: Viola's traumatic ‘loss’ of her brother and the disguise she assumes as a result mean that temporarily she loses her own identity and throws other peoples' perceptions of reality out of kilter; yet an equilibrium is reinstated at the end with a joyful reconciliation with Sebastian and eventual marriage to the man she loves. The ‘madness’ that Sebastian fears is an example of this comedic pattern in which people lose themselves and find themselves once more, often changed for the better by the experience. For Malvolio, however, the pattern does not offer up its traditional rewards.

Like others in the play, he aspires to Olivia's hand. It is one of the signs of Malvolio's ambition that he yearns to rise above his present station in life by marrying Olivia, and much is made (especially by Sir Toby) of his presumption in so aspiring. But Malvolio is by no means the only one whose desire crosses social boundaries: the question of marriage between socially unequal partners is raised several times in the play, from the moment when Sir Toby first tells Sir Andrew that one of Olivia's reasons for rejecting Orsino is that ‘She'll not match above her degree, neither in estate, years or wit’ (I, v, ll. 105-6). Actually it is not at all clear that Orsino is above her in any of these things, yet the marker has been set down. From then on a series of relationships is projected between men and women of unequal status. Malvolio's desire for Olivia is treated comically, as something scandalous, yet Olivia falls in love with Orsino's ‘messenger’ whom Malvolio can look down on socially. Maria herself marries out of her class when at the end of the play she is wedded to Sir Toby. Nobody makes much of this. But for the steward Malvolio, being in ‘love’, entering the domain of desire, ends in humiliation and fury. When Viola rejects her customary identity and dresses up in male clothing, it works to her good. When Malvolio rejects his, and dresses up as a lover rather than a steward and disguises himself in smiles, he is made to look ridiculous. The ‘madness’ Sebastian experiences is a kind of bliss; Malvolio's is a torment, and his spell in the madhouse leads not to a comedic repentance and reconciliation, but to threats of revenge. Malvolio suffers all the disorientations of comedy, but reaps none of the recompense: what acts upon others benevolently acts upon Malvolio … malevolently.

That complex latinate pun which is Malvolio's name reads both forwards and backwards. ‘Mal’ and ‘volio’ can be put together to suggest ‘I want something badly’ or (more literally) ‘I wish ill’—and both are true of Malvolio. It is also true that he becomes the object of others' malevolence, and that they wish him ill. But further: just as the names of Viola and Olivia echo and rewrite themselves in each other, so Malvolio's name, too, picks up that same phonetic theme of vowels and consonants: V.L.O.A.I. Malvolio … Mal-Olivia … Mal-viola … Male-viola.¹¹ He even misreads it himself in his desire to see himself as the object of Olivia's affections:

‘M.O.A.I. doth sway my life’ Nay, but first let me see, let me see, let me see … ‘M.’ Malvolio—‘M’—why, that begins my name … But then there is no consonancy in the sequel. That suffers under probation. ‘A’ should follow, but ‘O’ does … And then ‘I’ comes behind … ‘M.O.A.I.’ This simulation 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.

(II, v, ll. 109-10, 122-3, 126-8, 135-7)

Malvolio's eagerness is self-alienating: it allows him to mistake even his own name.

The relationships between names and people, and between words and meaning, are continually under a strain in Twelfth Night. They come under such strain because of ambition, subterfuge, trickery and disguise. They are put under strain most notably by the clown, Feste. In the guise of Sir Topas, Feste creates for Malvolio an illusory world of unreliable meanings. Elsewhere in the play his wit and wordplay are aimed at subverting ‘normal’ meanings—at proving, for example, that the Lady Olivia, not he himself, is the real fool. In the following exchange with Viola/Cesario, he turns his attention to language itself:

(Enter Viola as Cesario and Feste the clown, with [pipe and] tabor)
Viola Save thee friend, and thy music! Dost thou live by thy tabor?
Feste No, sir, I live by the church.
Viola Art thou a churchman?
Feste 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.
Viola So thou may'st say the king lies by a beggar, if a beggar dwell near him; or the church stands by thy tabor, if thy tabor stand by the church.
Feste You have said, sir. To see this age! A sentence is but a cheveril glove to a good wit—how quickly the wrong side may be turned outward!
Viola Nay, that's certain: they that dally nicely with words may quickly make them wanton.
Feste I would therefore my sister had no name, sir.
Viola Why, man?
Feste Why, sir, her name's a word, and to dally with that word might make my sister wanton. But indeed, words are grown very rascals since bonds disgraced them.
Viola Thy reason, man?
Feste Troth, sir, I can yield you none without words, and words are grown so false, I am loath to prove reason with them.
Viola I warrant thou art a merry fellow and car'st for nothing.

(III, i, ll. 1-26)

It is a verbal duel, of the kind Shakespeare's comedies revel in. Later in the play Viola/Cesario will be tricked into a duel of weapons with Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and will come out of that little better than he/she comes out of this. The followers of carnival in Illyria, it seems, show scant respect for the romantic hero(ine), and insist on challenging and tricking him/her. Here Feste, the clown, outmanoeuvres Viola at every turn and fulfils the fool's traditional function of being able to reduce everything to meaninglessness. It is a paradox of the play that he does so by virtue of his great skill in playing with meanings. Viola's final quoted remark evinces a frustration but also an analysis. Feste's ability to ‘dally nicely with words’ leads, she is suggesting, not merely to wantonness but to nihilism, to the point where he cares for nothing.

These wordplays about words sound oddly modern. Feste's remarks about the cheveril glove insist on what his own speeches go on to prove, and indeed enact: the slipperiness of language. Signified and signifier do not, in Feste's world, match neatly: it is the truth and also the falsehood of words that allow the anarchic clown to be taken—however briefly—for a churchman. Yet perhaps the ‘mistake’ is not so outrageous after all, for the function of the fool may be allied in many ways, both straight and parodic, to that of preacher. Certainly, this relation is stressed in Twelfth Night: as well as this moment, there is the scene we have already looked at in which Feste takes on the character of a priest in his impersonation of Sir Topas. Earlier, too, Feste has taken on the part of a priest in a rôle-play catechism of Olivia, in which he undertakes to prove that she, not he, is the ‘real’ fool.

In the exchange with Viola the disguised heroine cannot keep up with Feste, and after a couple of attempts to ‘bandy words’ with him becomes reduced to the rôle of straight man (or woman?), feeding him the necessary questions to allow him to elaborate upon his paradoxes. The speed at which these paradoxes follow one another demonstrates the truth of Feste's linguistic scepticism; they encompass philosophy, the law and sexuality: the falseness of words is linked (with what now seems a depressing inevitability) to the common Renaissance theme of the falseness of women. This does more than merely imply a link between a world in which language is no longer to be trusted and one in which sexual licence is paramount. For once again, in the person of Viola/Cesario the audience have before them an image of another kind of false woman—doubly so indeed, given the cross-casting of the Elizabethan theatre. What Feste says of his ‘sister’, that ‘her name's a word and to dally with that word might make [her] wanton’, has a kind of aptitude to Viola/Cesario, whose two names themselves denote the duality of her gendered identity.

Feste takes one idea and spins others from it, linking linguistics to economics and changing legal and mercantile practices: ‘words are very rascals since bonds disgraced them’, says Feste. In the emerging capitalist economy a person's promise is invested not merely in the spoken word but in the legality of a written ‘bond’. The legal status of everyday speech is minimal compared to that of the formally drawn-up legal document, and Feste makes the point that truth can no longer be expected to reside in the mere ‘word’ of a person. Yet we have already seen in the preceding ‘letter scene’ that the written word is no more to be trusted than the spoken—and as Shylock discovered in The Merchant of Venice, legal bonds are also composed of words, whose significance may be open to more than one reading.

And Feste's sceptical inquiry into language is itself a verbal fabric. He concedes as much as he parries Viola's request for ‘a reason’, and then goes on, typically, to make the point work for him: if words are not to be trusted they cannot be used to prove reason. And thus a central paradox of contemporary linguistics is articulated by a Shakespearean fool: that there is no extralinguistic standpoint from which to analyse language itself. It is the poststructuralist catchphrase: there is nothing outside the text. And yet, of course, by means of an elegant double-take the analysis is after all validated. The rascality of words is proved because Feste's sentence is both self-reflexive and also demonstrative; even as he speaks his words manifest their own slipperiness. When Viola asks ‘Thy reason, man?’ she is requesting his motive or his justification for a preceding remark. When he replies that ‘words are grown so false, I am loath to prove reason with them’ he is talking about ‘reason’ as logic. Thus the sense of the word ‘reason’ itself hovers uncertainly between the two meanings, and the very inadequacy of language to act as a logical tool proves its own logical point.

Feste's job is to destabilize meanings; he claims as much himself:

Viola Art not thou the Lady Olivia's fool?
Feste No indeed, sir, the Lady Olivia has no folly … I am indeed not her fool, but her corrupter of words.

(III, i, ll. 30-1, 34-5)

In the view of this ‘corrupter of words’, language is—indeed all sign-systems are—deceptive and ambiguous; and he proves the point by exploiting their deceptiveness and ambiguity. Viola understands this element of ambiguity well enough, being herself the epitome of ambiguity, the signifier which belies its signified.

‘LIKE PATIENCE ON A MONUMENT’

Viola Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness
Wherein the pregnant enemy does much.
How easy it is 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 sigh shall poor Olivia breathe!
O time, thou must untangle this, not I.
It is too hard a knot for me t' untie.

(II, ii, ll. 27-41)

This speech of Viola's shows the difference in tone between As You Like It and Twelfth Night. Viola is in a predicament not unlike Rosalind's in the earlier play: disguised as a boy she is in close proximity to the man she loves but remains unknown to him; meanwhile Olivia has fallen in love with her boy-persona, as Phoebe did with Rosalind's. Twelfth Night and As You Like It share the cross-dressing plot, with its destabilizing of gender identities, but the two plays use the same material in very different ways.

Rosalind enjoys her rôle as Ganymede; it empowers her and allows her to improvise rôle-play games with Orlando. Her response to the love entanglement with Phoebe is to stage the masque which makes all clear: she sorts it out. Viola on the other hand, declares that it is all too hard for her and that she will just leave it to time to sort it all out. And so she does. Eventually her twin brother turns up, they are reunited, Olivia and Orsino recognize the ‘true’ objects of their affection and the love-relationships sort themselves out accordingly: time, as Viola hoped it would, untangles things, not she.

Viola is the opposite of Rosalind, who enjoyed rôle-playing to the extent of inventing further rôles within the rôles. Rosalind's male disguise allowed her to take the initiative in wooing Orlando; in her love for Orsino Viola behaves as passively as any Renaissance patriarch could wish. Having taken the single active step of disguising herself, she does little more thereafter than wait for him to notice her. The language of love which she has learnt is one of passivity:

Viola My father had a daughter loved a man
As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman
I should your lordship.
Orsino And what's her history?
Viola A blank, my lord. She never told her love
But let concealment, like the 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 grief. Was not this love indeed?

(II, iv, ll. 107-15)

She is describing herself, of course. Not entirely, but with sufficient accuracy for us to recognize that concealment is working on her, too, ‘like the worm i' th' bud’. She can only articulate her love for Orsino in the subjunctive mood.

And so it is not merely that Viola is comparatively passive: she is positively uncomfortable with the disguise she has assumed. While As You Like It revelled in the complexities engendered by the cross-dressing plot, Twelfth Night continually expresses anxiety about them. Viola considers herself not liberated by her rôle-playing but trapped by it and doubly unfulfilled. ‘As I am a man / My state is desperate for my master's love. / As I am a woman now, alas the day …’ (II, ii, ll. 35-8). And although she later argues with Orsino that women are ‘as true of heart as [men]’, here her assumed masculine identity gives her a voice in which she articulates misogynistic Renaissance truisms about ‘women's waxen hearts’ and their ‘frailty’. There is little liberation here. Viola sees herself as a freak and a grotesque; she refers to herself, significantly, as ‘poor monster’! The moralizing tone of that self-disparaging comment is revealing: Viola finds herself in agreement with the anti-theatrical propagandists who condemned play-acting as inherently sinful. Disguise, she exclaims, is ‘a wickedness / Wherein the pregnant enemy does much’. This is the language of the Elizabethan anti-theatrical pamphleteers, who similarly condemned cross-dressing:

And so, if any man do put on woman's raiment, he is dishonested and defiled, because he transgresseth the bounds of modesty and comeliness, and weareth that which God's law forbiddeth him to wear, which man's law affirmeth he cannot wear without reproof … [M]en's wearing of women's raiment, though in plays, [is] a heinous crime … Players are abomination that put on women's raiment.¹²

The moralists' usual condemnation was, as it is here, of boy actors dressing up as women. Ironically, Viola's line about disguise being a wickedness is written to be spoken by a boy actor who is not dressed up as a woman but who (like the boy actor playing Rosalind in As You Like It) has become visible in his own gender once more. Once again, a gap has been created between the line spoken and the actor who speaks it. This gap disturbs any simple acceptance of what Viola says: clearly, on another level, the play does not endorse the message that disguise is a wickedness—otherwise there would be no play. Even so, cross-dressing in Twelfth Night has the air of a desperate experiment rather than of the playful risk-taking which it had in As You Like It. If madness is a central metaphor in this play, then Viola experiences her disguise as something akin to schizophrenia: it alienates her from herself, creating a split personality. She refers to herself in the third person (‘My father had a daughter …’) and speaks as a divided self (‘As I am a man … As I am a woman’).

It also gives rise to a set of questions about gender identity which are taken more seriously than they were in As You Like It. In As You Like It homoerotic attraction tended to be treated quite lightly: Phoebe's crush on Ganymede never amounted to much dramatically, and the complex rôle-playing between Ganymede and Orlando was always counterbalanced by the fact that Orlando's attention was continually fixed on the ‘absent’ Rosalind of his imagination. In Twelfth Night, however, Olivia's desire for ‘Cesario’ is depicted as something much more uncontrollable, powerful and painful. It is the passion which can break the depressive hold which melancholy has had on her since her brother's death; it is more important to her than her dignity:

Cesario, by the roses of the spring,
By maidhood, honour, truth and everything,
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.

(III, i, ll. 147-51)

Another kind of sexual tension exists between Orsino and Viola: charged this time by her desire for him coupled with his response to her ambiguous sexual persona. While Orsino, like Orlando in As You Like It, remains infatuated with an absent woman, we are left in no doubt that Cesario is present for him in a way that Ganymede never is for Orlando. The language in which he addresses Cesario makes the point:

Orsino … 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.

(I, iv, ll. 31-4)

Viola and her friend the sea-captain had originally agreed that she would be presented at Orsino's court as a ‘eunuch’, but there is nothing unsexed about the attraction Orsino feels for ‘Cesario’. The physicality of his language is sensuous even without the double-entendres of ‘organ’ and ‘part’. Moreover, the conversation between them is continually about sexual desire: ostensibly about Orsino's desire for Olivia, but continually charged by the unspoken actuality of Viola's desire for Orsino.

The gender confusions of Twelfth Night are given a context in the portrayal of the relationship between Antonio and Sebastian. In this Twelfth Night recognizes, in a way that As You Like It does not, a homosexual love-relationship. Antonio's love for Sebastian is couched time and time again in the language of erotic attraction, language drawn from the registers of Elizabethan love poetry: ‘I do adore thee so’ (II, i, l. 42); ‘My desire, / More sharp than filed steel, did spur me forth’ (III, iii, ll. 4-5); ‘to his image, which methought did promise / Most venerable worth, did I devotion’ (III, iv, ll. 354-5). He talks of the ‘witchcraft’ which led him to follow Sebastian, whom he calls ‘this god’ (III, iv, l. 357) and to whose physical beauty he continually refers. ‘My love without retention or restraint’ (another image of excess!) is how he describes his feelings for Sebastian, and his actions in defence of the young man he says he adores bear out his words.¹³

Antonio's adoration of Sebastian gives a depth and a seriousness to the gender confusions of Twelfth Night; the stakes here are higher than they were in As You Like It. There a fairytale logic was available to make everything fit neatly into conventional patterns, so that cruel brothers repented and became kind, and all the complications of the interwoven love-plots could be sorted out by the stage-managed appearance of Hymen, announcing ‘Peace, ho! I bar confusion’ (As You Like It, V, iv, l. 123). The love-plots of Twelfth Night are more urgent and there is a continual sense that things could get out of control.

In both the Viola-Olivia and the Viola-Orsino relationships, then, the text toys with the possibility of same-sex eroticism more intensely than was the case in As You Like It. By balancing these two relationships the play does not allow the audience to explain away the gender confusions easily. Some critics have rationalized the attraction Orsino manifests for Cesario by arguing that what he is ‘really’ responding to is the woman underneath—but if that is so, the same logic leads to the conclusion that Olivia is also ‘really’ attracted not to Cesario but to Viola. Olivia, faced at the end with the realization that she had fallen in love with a girl, is reassured by Sebastian that her mistake was natural enough:

So comes it, lady, you have been mistook.
But nature to her bias drew in that.
You would have been contracted to a maid,
Nor are you therein, by my life, deceived.
You are betrothed both to a maid and man.

(V, i, ll. 257-61)

Sebastian's reassurance, however, does not so much dispel ambiguity as reinforce it: Olivia is betrothed ‘both to a maid and man’.

This is typical of the final scene of Twelfth Night: like the last scene of so many Shakespeare comedies it both offers and resists closure. Narratives are brought to a climax, yet not everything is resolved: the play leaves a great deal open. The scene contains an immense amount of action: again, it works through excess. It is worth summarizing the scene just to show how much there is going on in it:

Feste teases Fabian about the contents of Malvolio's letter; Orsino arrives, and Feste goes through a begging routine with him; Antonio is brought on and his story, including background incidents about his battles against Illyria, is told, ending with his accusation against Viola; Olivia arrives, and Orsino encounters on stage for the first time the woman he has been obsessed with throughout the play; Olivia encounters ‘Cesario’ and confusion arises—firstly because she now thinks he is Sebastian, and secondly because Orsino begins to suspect that ‘Cesario’ has been wooing Olivia on his own behalf; his disappointment at Olivia's rejection is expressed in threats of violence against Cesario, who still professes faithfulness to him, and they begin to depart together; Olivia prevents their exit by revealing that she and Sebastian (Cesario, as she thinks) are married, and sends for the priest to prove it; the priest arrives and confirms the marriage; Orsino's anger against Cesario turns to disgust and he rejects him; meanwhile Cesario's protestations of innocence are making Olivia concerned about ‘his’ love for her.

At this point the action suddenly switches from melodrama to farce: Andrew Aguecheek arrives with a bloodied head (having been fighting with the real Sebastian off-stage); he espies Viola and panics, reprising an earlier encounter between them; then Sir Toby arrives, also with a bloody head, and in a foul temper, rejecting Sir Andrew's offer of help, and going off-stage again almost immediately.

At this point Sebastian finally comes on. Initially he does not notice Viola, although she sees him. He is joyfully reunited with Antonio, and only after that does he see his sister. Carefully, almost tentatively, they begin to come together, testing each other's identity with details of shared memories; Sebastian refers uneasily to the paradox of Olivia's love for Cesario; Viola explains that the sea-captain who saved her life has been imprisoned by Malvolio's request for some unspecified offence.

This reintroduces the Malvolio plot: Feste arrives with the letter and attempts to make a joke of it; Fabian is given the job of reading the letter, which is sober and serious, and Malvolio is sent for; while he is being fetched, attention turns back to the love-plot, with Orsino offering his hand to Viola; Malvolio arrives and he tells his story; Olivia is shown the letter which originally trapped him, and she explains that it is Maria's handwriting; Malvolio is offered recompense; the moment of potential reconciliation is marred by Feste's spiteful interruption as he quotes Malvolio's own words back at him; Malvolio stalks off with threats against the whole company; Orsino sends somebody off to try and persuade him to a peace; addressing Viola, Orsino promises that they will be lovers when she returns to her female attire. At last, the clown steps forward to sing a final song, with the melancholy refrain ‘And the rain it raineth every day’.

All this in about three hundred and eighty lines!

It is not only the number of different actions within this one scene which is extraordinary (each paragraph of the above amounts to a small scene or routine in itself), but the variety of them, the speed with which they follow on one from another, and the resulting emotional range of the scene. Its tone continually shifts, moment by moment, between intensity and frivolity, violence and tenderness, melodrama and downright farce, celebration and discord, wonder and harshness, laughter and melancholy. It starts with a couple of (by now familiar) clown routines. Antonio's entry picks up the narrative, laying out his part of the story so far in a way which seems to prepare for a dénouement in which all the confusions are unravelled. This is interrupted, though, by the Olivia-Orsino encounter, the climax of another strand of the plot. But far from reaching a resolution, this meeting seems only to complicate things further and threaten the ending with tragedy. These complications are then repeated, but in a different key, as Sir Andrew and Sir Toby pass across the stage. Yet even this tiny scene-within-a-scene contains a sharp tonal shift. It looks as if it is going to be a moment of pure farce; then, without warning, Sir Toby turns to Sir Andrew, insults him, and casts him off with a snarl. The carnivalesqe high spirits of their roistering end in a moment of rejection as bitter as that experienced by Falstaff.

The moment at which things do begin to unravel themselves is, of course, the moment when Viola and Sebastian both appear on stage together: from now on, things begin to make sense. Yet some of the surprise value of this moment of revelation was preempted earlier in the play, when Viola first guessed, in Act III Scene iv, that all the confusions were due to her brother's being in Illyria. And then, just as the scene seems set to concentrate on reunions, betrothals and marriages, this, too, is interrupted by the as-yet-unresolved Malvolio plot. The confrontation between Malvolio and his mistress also shifts through a variety of emotional tones, from the comedy of Feste's attempt at ‘vox’, through the pathos of Malvolio's own account, the offer of reconciliation by Olivia, the interruption of that by Feste, spitefully quoting Malvolio's own words back at him, to the anger of Malvolio's exit. The ending of Twelfth Night, in fact, is structured as a series of interruptions. It is this structure which prevents the positive mood of the narrative's romantic-comedy climax from completely dominating the end of the play: the harmony is established and celebrated—but across it can be heard the notes of discord.

Contributing to the same destabilizing effect is the fact that narratives are left unfinished—notably, of course, the Malvolio story itself. Who pursues Malvolio to ‘entreat him to a peace’? With what result? What about the power he still holds over Viola's friend the sea-captain, whose story is so strangely re-introduced in these final moments of the play? Most directly, the audience is left with the question of Malvolio's powerful final threat: what sort of revenge is he envisaging? His exit line contains such a blatant promise of the story's continuance, that if Shakespeare were writing for television or the movies we would assume he was setting up the sequel. But it is not only the Malvolio plot which is left unfinished. The reunion of Viola and Sebastian is not fully celebrated; she says to him:

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.

(V, i, ll. 249-53)

Viola's return to her own female identity is incomplete; unlike Rosalind she never appears on stage again as a woman, and as a result Orsino cannot yet begin to see her as Viola. Even at the very end of the play she is still ‘Cesario’ to him:

Cesario come—
For so you shall be while you are a man;
But when in other habits you are seen,
Orsino's mistress and his fancy's queen.

(V, i, ll. 381-4)

Thus Orsino, like Olivia, leaves the stage without having fully resolved the ambiguities about whom he is actually in love with, and the promised love-relationship between him and Viola is deferred until after the play's ending. Feste's final song trips through a nonsense-version of Jaques' Seven Ages speech, set against the gloomy refrain of wind and rain. Its last stanza perfunctorily shrugs away all the problems and uncertainties of the play's ending with an insouciant nonsense of its own:

A great while ago the world begun
With hey ho, the wind and the rain,
But that's all one, our play is done,
And we'll strive to please you every day.

(V, i, ll. 401-4)

And so Carnival gives way to Lent, and the play named after the final day of revelling is finally done.

Notes

1. An entire book devoted to this subject is Leah Scragg, Shakespeare's Mouldy Tales: Recurrent Plot Motifs in Shakespearian Drama (Harlow: Longman, 1992).

2. Quoted in William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, ed. J. M. Lothian and T. W. Craik (London: Methuen, 1975), p. xxvi. My modernization.

3. Twelfth Night, ed. Lothian and Craik, p. liii.

4. Quoted in ibid., p. liii.

5. Quoted in ibid., p. xxvi.

6. Ibid., pp. lxxix-lxxxiii.

7. François Laroque, Shakespeare's Festive World: Elizabethan Seasonal Entertainment and the Professional Stage, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 153.

8. E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923), vol. 4, pp. 338-9.

9. David Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 41.

10. Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion, p. 41.

11. See Matthew H. Wikander, ‘As secret as maidenhead: the profession of boy-actress in Twelfth Night’, Comparative Drama, 20, iv, pp. 349-63.

12. Thomas Rainoldes, The Overthrow of Stage-Plays (Middleburgh: 1599), p. 16.

13. See Joseph Pequigny, ‘The two Antonios and same-sex love in Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice’, English Literary Renaissance 22, ii, pp. 201-21 for a detailed analysis of Antonio's language.