[In the following essay, Osborne studies the ways in which Trevor Nunn's film adaptation of Twelfth Night adopts a heavy-handed approach to film editing and textual rearrangement in order to produce the effect of character continuity.]

After contrasting traditionalist readings of continuous, interiorized Shakespearean characters and poststructuralist analyses of their fragmentation and discontinuity, Alan Sinfield concludes that “some Shakespearean dramatis personae are written so as to suggest, not just an intermittent, gestural, and problematic subjecti[vity], but a continuous or developing interiority or consciousness; and we should seek a way of talking about this that does not slide back into character criticism or essentialist humanism.”¹ Sinfield pursues this new way of talking about character, or rather “character effects,” by noting the history of responses to particular figures; he argues that a character such as Macbeth, for example, “is not a mysterious natural essence. Rather he is situated at the intersection of discourses and historical forces that are competing, we might say, to fill up his subjectivity.”² Recent Shakespearean films speak directly both to critical concerns with discontinuity or inexplicable characterizations in Shakespearean plays and to readings of “a continuous or developing interiority or consciousness.” To put it another way, these films help us see how we also produce “coherent characters” from discontinuous fragments.

Specifically, the radical use of crosscutting and intercutting in such recent works as Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night (1996) and Al Pacino's Looking for Richard (1996) reveal how film editing produces cinematic fragments that paradoxically “fill up” the subjectivity of early modern characters. Although this essay concentrates primarily on Nunn's Twelfth Night, Looking for Richard is perhaps most blatant in using cutting and fragments to create continuity in character. The film presents only brief scenes of Richard III in its quest to explore whether Richard is relevant today. For example, the crucial and critically vexed scene of Richard's wooing of Anne is spliced into a series of cross-cut scenes in which the actors worry, first, about the scene itself and whether it can work and, second, about which actress is best suited for the part.

By juxtaposing the crosscut scenes discussing the play with act 1, scene 2, Pacino suggests that looking for Richard requires looking for Anne. Although critics have not necessarily been kind to Winona Ryder as the choice for this very difficult scene, the action itself takes on a compelling continuity in contrast to the intercut scenes that precede and follow it. Set against the talking heads of scholars discussing Anne's dilemma and the earnest round robin of actors debating the scene's purposes, this scene, like many chosen by Pacino for inclusion here, seems at first to play continuously. However, Pacino uses startling cutaway shots to himself—outdoors, out of costume, and without Anne—to maintain attention definitively on Richard. Three interruptions mark the scene. Her spitting at him cuts away to his fierce declaration, “I'll have her.”³ At her announcement of contempt, Pacino inserts a brief of image of himself, smiling, in the same visual context as the declaration—a swift reminder that he will have her. Her capitulation and rejoicing “to see you are become so penitent” (2.2.220) yields immediately to the alternate setting and Pacino's bark of laughter.

These cutaways are all the more effective as emphasis on Richard's coherence of purpose because of the startling shift from the darkened, seemingly interior and somber lushness of the “performance” to the bright daylight, exterior shots of just Pacino, unkempt with his characteristic backwards baseball cap, leaning on what looks like a contemporary metal sculpture. In a scene that is labeled “Lady Anne” and that presents such a provocative reversal in Anne's responses, Pacino uses cutaways to underscore Richard's single-minded focus and coherence. Moreover, like so many of the play's characters, Anne does not need continuity beyond this scene within the structure of Pacino's film because the quest here is for Richard's character, itself a monster of discontinuity, broken into by actors, critics, and crucial scenes. Even Kevin Spacey's Buckingham or Alec Baldwin's Clarence, who appear more than once, may command our interest but do not survive the obsessive attention to Richard himself as a character.

In Twelfth Night, Trevor Nunn also uses extensive film editing and rearrangements to elaborate character. Because of his cinematic choices, Twelfth Night has provoked radically contradictory reviews that often extend their critique to filming Shakespeare generally. Stanley Kauffmann laments the film as a disaster and concludes that “the film medium is like an x-ray that enlarges the flaws in plays,” in his assessment, the flaw of Malvolio's treatment.⁴ At the opposite extreme, John Podhoretz suggests that “Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night is a glorious piece of work, and one that brings to mind a heretical question: Is it perhaps the case that the cinema is the ideal medium for Shakespeare?”⁵ My answer to that question is that cinema is certainly the ideal medium for Shakespeare in the twentieth century, largely because film both creates and reinscribes our ideologically based expectations about character.

Other critics of Shakespearean film have made comparable claims, often using the structures of stage criticism to justify film's suitability for the plays. In Shakespeare, Cinema, and Society, John Collick effectively demonstrates that early film developed out of Victorian stage display in ways that persisted even until the BBC Shakespeare plays.⁶ Peter Donaldson places the great film auteurs implicitly in the crucial interpretive place that actor/directors have held since the late eighteenth century.⁷ Critics from Barbara Hodgdon to Douglas Lanier look to the valuable and provocative interpretations that individual films, like individual stagings, have brought to the text.⁸ My argument here follows these in several features: it draws upon the continuity from the play's stage traditions as they are reworked in the film, it analyzes Nunn's approach as an auteur's vision, and it concentrates on the cinematic potential for Shakespearean performance, which this film in particular realizes.

My discussion actually runs closest to Lorne Buchman's analysis of how film techniques relate to and rewrite Shakespearean dramaturgy. In particular, I share Buchman's interest in how spectators interact with the temporal display allowed (or disabled) by film; however, I do not agree that difficulties in analyzing time in Shakespearean film arise because “Shakespeare's own temporal structure is so close to that of the film medium itself.”⁹ In fact, what I find most intriguing about the current trend of restoring the text in films like Nunn's Twelfth Night and Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet (1996) is the implicit affirmation that fuller texts require very aggressive film editing—less cutting of the text requires more elaborate cutting in the film. In Nunn's Twelfth Night, twentieth-century constructions of character emerge from within ideologies of romantic love and gender; moreover, these constructions thrive through film cuts rather than the textual cuts used in earlier centuries.

Since film editing most obviously influences the audience's sense of time, I find Franco Zeffirelli's description of that effect compelling: “You see, cinema creates a different chemistry, a different taste, and the attention of the audience moves so fast. Really, fantasy gallops in the audience in movies. They know all before the image is finished.”¹⁰ The speed Zeffirelli notes is everywhere in cinematic editing of late twentieth-century Shakespearean films, ranging from Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (1996) to Branagh's Hamlet. From a postmodern perspective, these quick cuts—or “flash cuts,” as Branagh calls them in his screenplay edition—offer the interplay of surfaces without depth.¹¹ However, as Buchman points out, the spectator's interaction with these disruptions of expectation, like that of Iser's readers interacting with the disruptive text, produces a dynamic sense of time in film.¹² And, I argue, this dynamic is produced in Twelfth Night's film editing to invoke depth of character for the twentieth-century spectator. The resultant “galloping fantasies” significantly extend and revise the stage practices that produced the “character effects” of earlier centuries. Nunn's cinematic solutions for apparent problems in the Shakespearean text on stage actually reveal the ideological imperatives of character construction in both the early modern and twentieth-century versions.

In his Twelfth Night, Nunn clearly draws upon changes made in performances since the late 1700s and often recuperates what typically was excised from the text. The film recasts in a modern idiom of crosscutting and the short take both the discontinuity of character produced by the twinning in the Renaissance text and the “character problems” that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics discovered within the play. As a result, far from agreeing with one of Nunn's detractors, who claims problems “can be laid at the feet of the director, who's hugely experienced in the theater but has his limitations when it comes to … the camera,”¹³ I see Nunn's film growing from stage conventions into quite thorough cinematic practice.

His Twelfth Night continues traditional theatrical changes, for example, opening the play with Viola's landing (1.2) rather than Orsino's speech (1.1). However, that reversal is translated through film convention: Viola's landing functions as part of the opening credits, as Nunn points out, “before the work proper, which would still begin with one of the most famous opening lines in the canon, ‘If music be the food of love, play on.’”¹⁴ Moreover, Nunn also employs a cinematic flexibility of setting and sequence to enact extreme revisions of the scenes between Orsino and Viola. Thus, his construction of these characters both draws on current cinematic models for displaying “depth” of character and on the Renaissance strategy of creating character through onstage relationships, suggested in the variable early speech headings.¹⁵ The interactions between Orsino and Viola are clearly key in the creation of both characters in the film; Nunn's several elaborations and elongations of that association actually emphasize the hierarchical connections between master and servant that underlie their mutual attraction in the Folio text. In this way, the Renaissance investment in the hierarchical nature of erotic involvement serves as the occasion for living up to twentieth-century assumptions that “true love,” as opposed to lust, develops over time.¹⁶

Nunn not only draws out Viola's involvement with Orsino, but also he brings her into the play early. Viola appears in act 1, scene 1, as the hapless musician first called upon to play “that strain again” and then forestalled because ‘“tis not so sweet now as it was before” (1.1. 4, 8). However, her presence is silent, unlike earlier stage performances, including those of Charles Calvert and Henry Irving, who combined and condensed act 1, scenes 1 and 4; none that I know have registered Viola's silent presence in Orsino's first scene.¹⁷ Moreover, Orsino connects with this musician specifically, first by walking over to stop his piano performance (“No more” [1.2.7]) and second by addressing Cesario directly in close-up before the premature ending of the scene. Whereas the early modern text exploits the conventions of the patronage system and the favoritism obvious in Orsino's confiding in Cesario after just three days, Nunn chooses to show the early moments of Cesario's service in order to mark out Orsino's awareness of his page from the start of the film and to track the development of their intimacy.

In a move that recuperates the closeness displayed in the Folio text, Nunn also restores a large proportion of the lines typically cut from act 2, scene 4, where Orsino once again sends Cesario off to woo Olivia. From the early nineteenth century on, 2.4 has undergone radical cutting, including the omission of all of Feste's role in the scene as well as the excision of Orsino's discourse on men's wavering love and its causes.¹⁸ Not only does Nunn retain Orsino's advice to Cesario about why “he” should choose a woman younger than himself, he also keeps the call for Feste to sing as well as the song itself. However, Nunn revises the scene just as radically as those early performances did: he intercuts act 2, scene 3, and act 2, scene 4, and disperses the remaining conversations between Orsino and Cesario throughout the film. The song that plays behind their initial conversation in 2.4 is the one that Feste sings to the below-stairs crowd in 2.3. And the song of the “fair cruel maid” is shifted well into act 3, the occasion for the near-kiss between Orsino and his page in the barn, which is the prelude to Orsino's perhaps overly vehement command: “once more, Cesario, / Get thee to yond same sovereign cruelty” (2.4.79-80). No other performance, not even John Dexter's inventively reordered 1968 television production, has so radically dispersed the various moments and moods of Cesario's second scene with Orsino. Nunn effectively keeps Viola and Orsino right before our eyes almost right up until the denouement.

These choices for Twelfth Night yield significant insight into characterization as reworked in cinematic productions of Shakespeare. In film, fragments paradoxically produce coherence and apparent depth of character within the sustained development of a relationship that critics since the eighteenth century have found both crucial and difficult. Samuel Johnson's early objections to Viola as an “excellent schemer” found their way into Francis Gentleman's commentary in Bell's 1774 edition of Shakespeare's plays: “Viola—It is very singular that a young lady, just escaped from a shipwreck, under apprehension for her brother, should so suddenly form a design upon the duke, whom she had never seen: But when Shakespeare wanted to push on his plot, he was not very ceremonious with probability.”¹⁹ By the mid-nineteenth century, Mrs. Elliott, whose praise for Viola is unstinting, finds Orsino problematic as the object of her affection: “It is earnestly to be hoped that Viola won as good a husband as she deserved. Orsino is no hero.”²⁰ In the 1888 introduction to the Henry Irving Shakespeare, Arthur Symons offers the following brutal assessment of the problems posed by Orsino and Viola together:

The great defect of Twelfth Night as an acting comedy lies, no doubt, in the fact that the love interest never takes very much hold on our sympathies. Viola is a charming young woman and makes a pretty boy; but who can possibly sympathize with her in her ardent pursuit of such a lover as Orsino, a man whose elaborate sentimentality reminds one of those delicacies which cloy rather than delight the appetite, and whose plastic readiness to transfer his affections makes one suspect they were, after all, scarcely worth such trouble to win.²¹

The distaste that Symons displays for the crucial love between Viola and Orsino reveals the difficulties caused by nineteenth-century perception of Viola's character: idealizing her constancy throws Orsino's “weakness” into sharp relief. Orsino's apparent inconsistencies, especially in 2.4, were anathema in the nineteenth century because of the high value set on coherence and consistency in characters. The result was that Viola's relationship to Orsino became the radical flaw in the play.

Nunn takes a distinctively cinematic approach to the “problem,” which he frames specifically in terms of theater: “the biggest problem of the play in stage performance is that Orsino, who dominates the early part of the work, drops out at the end of Act Two and doesn't return again until the last scene of Act Five.”²² Nunn reworks the relationship between Orsino and Viola through the distinctive temporal strategies of film and edits their scenes together in three ways: he films continuous scenic sequences across a series of settings; he crosscuts pairs of scenes, like 2.3 and 2.4, so that continuous action becomes discontinuous by virtue of apparently simultaneous interactions; and he literally divides up both of the scenes between Viola and Orsino and spreads them throughout the film. Nunn uses these several strategies to earn the emotional impact of Viola's most famous, self-revelatory speech about her imaginary sister and the poignancy of her voice-over declaration “Whoe'er I woo myself would be his wife” (1.4.42), which he has moved to the end of their penultimate meeting in the film. As a result, the fragments and combined scenes produce a coherence in their developing relationship that a twentieth-century audience both “reads” and helps to produce as the film progresses.

The first of the displaced moments from the theatrical text emphasizes Viola's “tending” to Orsino and underscores what Nunn argues are the crucial difficulties of Cesario's disguise: “It was important to me that Viola, converting herself into her brother, Sebastian (who she believes has drowned), should have to face considerable physical and temperamental challenges.”²³ For example, Cesario's appearance in act 1, scene 1, follows directly from the emotional trauma of shearing her locks and the physical pain of confining her breasts in the disguise; the difficulties of playing the piano and passing as male in this scene, which seems to include all of Orsino's court, abruptly gives way to the emotional pain of remembering her brother's death when Orsino looks straight at her in praising Olivia—”She that hath a heart of that fine frame / To pay this debt of love but to a brother” (1.1.34-35). Her brief flashback to the scene of her drowning brother vividly invokes the parallels between Viola and Olivia's situations while beginning to reveal what Viola might find so appealing about Orsino—his speech makes it seem that he knows the book of her secret soul. This first scene marks Viola's literal repositioning in the text and initiates the almost subliminal expansion of their relationship.

Nunn's strategies reveal an investment in the relationship developing over time, especially in contrast to the concentrated interactions between Orsino and Viola in the Folio. Love, according to current assumptions evident in film, television, and even romance novels, both arises from and generates continuous interaction. Nunn's Twelfth Night displays and reproduces this ideology.²⁴ However, this film also, paradoxically, demonstrates that the impression of such “continuity” can only be achieved through the fragmentation and dispersal of scenes between the two.

When Nunn breaks Viola's encounters with Orsino into smaller, separate scenes, the time that will untangle Viola's dilemma becomes three months of service most convincingly, especially when scenes that run continuously are filmed in different locations and situations. For example, act 1, scene 4, plays continuously, but its temporal frame is visually extended. Orsino first interrupts Cesario's fencing lesson, “Who saw Cesario, ho?” (1.4.10) and then leads him out to the seaside to ask his help. Nunn's screenplay even registers an imagined length of time in this cut: “ORSINO is sitting by the sea, with the castle in the background, next to CESARIO, having told the whole story of his love for OLIVIA.”²⁵ After Orsino teases him about his near-girlishness, inadvertently threatening both the false mustache above the lip “more smooth and rubious” (1.4.32) and her concealed breasts by grabbing the front of Cesario's jacket, Cesario punches him to get free and knocks Orsino over onto his injured arm. Nunn then cuts to Orsino, reclining as in the opening scene on his couch with his arm in a sling, as he reaches for Cesario's hand: “I know thy constellation is right apt / For this affair” (1.4.35-36). Although the scene's lines flow without interruption, the three complete scene changes and interaction of injury and forgiveness elongate the exchange. The abandonment of Orsino's sling by the middle of the film serves as a further subliminal reminder that, as Orsino puts it, “Three months this youth hath tended upon me” (5.1.97).

Beyond revisions in setting which nonetheless maintain textual continuity, Nunn also uses interwoven scenes to create “character effects” in Viola and Orsino. Although some critics have complained that “the film compulsively cross-cuts among the characters, rarely allowing a scene to build,”²⁶ in fact that film strategy accomplishes several things. First, like extending a single scene across several settings, the crosscutting stretches out the conversation between Orsino and Cesario. Second, the strategy of intercutting the two scenes, uses specific aspects of the text, for instance, Feste's song, to illuminate the content of the scenes as well as Nunn's interpretation. All in all, Nunn fleshes out the verbal and thematic connections between sequential scenes—a cinematic underscoring of the diptych/triptych structure that Mark Rose has discussed in Shakespearean scenic construction.²⁷ Nunn portrays as simultaneous the actions in two plots that explore the yearning singled out by some critics as the central insight of Nunn's production.

As Podhoretz's glowing review suggests, “two scenes are combined into an exquisitely edited expression of the way in which sister and duke and noblewoman pine for each other,”²⁸ but the intermingling of act 2, scenes 1 and 2, is actually even richer, given the backdrop of Feste's song. “Oh Mistress mine” is the song that the twins originally sing on the boat before the shipwreck. Whereas their voices combined jest with the line “that can sing both high and low” during the boat scene because they do sing both high and low, in the middle of the film that line marks a cut to Olivia half-sleeping as she hears the singing from the kitchen. The scene thus foreshadows the replacement of Sebastian's low voice for Viola's high one in her affair of the heart.

Nunn also uses songs to mark significant parallels linking 2.3 and 2.4. For example, when Andrew Aguecheek and Sir Toby ask for a song, the scene cuts immediately to Orsino's request for a song.²⁹ The account of this missing singer that Curio gives—“Feste the jester, my lord, a fool that the Lady Olivia's father took much delight in” (2.4.11-12)—cuts back to Feste's question to the revelers in the kitchen about what kind of song they would like. The song itself makes a vivid bridge between the two scenes, underscoring both the ambivalently voiced lover and the invocation of transitory youth in both scenes. For example, “high and low” not only functions as voice-over for Olivia but as the cue to cut back to Orsino's music room with the same tune playing in the background and his question to his page “How dost thou like this tune?” (2.4.20). Viola's “masterly” (2.4.22) response yields to Feste's verse “Every wise man's son doth know” (2.3.45). The “present laughter” (2.3.49) of the song then becomes Orsino's laughter at Cesario when perceiving that the youth's eye “hath stay'd upon some favour that it loves” (2.4.24). During their entire exchange, the music of Feste's song plays in the background, creating aural continuity between the interleaved scenes. When Orsino's comments on women as roses culminate in Cesario's lament, “alas, that they are so: / To die, even when they to perfection grow!” (2.4.40-41), the song's response in the cut back to the kitchen is that “what's to come is still unsure” (2.3.50). As Maria begins to sing with Feste, they arrive at the carpe diem motif in song, expressing her longing and the lament that “youth's a stuff will not endure” (2.3.53). That echo of Orsino's and Cesario's comments about women becomes a refrain repeated four times and a commentary on Maria's lost youth and palpable longing for Sir Toby in this production.

Nunn uses Feste's role rather than cutting it, as the nineteenth-century productions did, in order to emphasize part of what he thinks the play is about: “It's about mortality, the transience of youth, the transience of the happiness that we associate with youth.”³⁰ Nonetheless, he has changed the song that Orsino requests at the beginning of act 2, scene 4, from “Come Way, Death” to “Oh, Mistress Mine,” in effect doubling the number of scenes that use song and lyrics to elaborate Orsino's relationship with Cesario. The impression of unrequited longing created by “Oh, Mistress Mine” is reinforced by a very brief, final, silent cutaway first to Cesario looking at Orsino and then to Orsino looking at Cesario after the song closes. Even Andrew Aguecheek, whose face on film supplies us with powerful emotional cues when, for example, he says, “I was adored once” (2.3.181). These images, especially the silent close-up, implicitly refute Mark Rose's contention that “the presentation of character in Shakespeare is perhaps less like a modern film in which the figures are in constant motion than an album of snapshot stills to be contemplated in sequence, each photo showing the subject in a different light, a different stage of development.”³¹ Shakespearean filmmakers incorporate these visual parallels without sacrificing the “constant motion”: the cut itself becomes the constant motion that engages the audience in comparing different views of a single character or comparing different characters entirely.

Although the entire sequence takes place continuously over the card table, the conversation is extended and builds audience involvement. The two scenes also become mutually interpretive. For example, the overt clues marking out Maria's painful longing for Sir Toby underscore the more subtle hints of Viola's apparently futile desire for Orsino—even though we have not yet heard about her love in the film. With this crosscutting, Nunn teaches his audience to expect and to “read” the brief scenes between Orsino and Viola with which he has seeded the rest of the film. Feste's song effectively situates the brief encounters between Orsino and Viola as evidence of desire functioning below everyday activities. Thus this scene prepares the audience still more thoroughly to perceive the “depth” of character in the yearning that underpins Viola's subsequent brief scenes with Orsino.

This strategy works especially well since Nunn creates a series of dislocated, composite scenes that flesh out and elaborate the closing conversations of act 2, scene 4. One pair of scenes interpolated into act 3 offers Viola the combination of “physical and temperamental challenges” I have already mentioned in the opening scene. Cesario's appearance, riding hard and jumping her horse with the Duke's court, leads directly to Orsino's calling for the “boy” to help him in the bath. Cesario's response to the physical difficulty of jumping the hedge (“cries of distress welling up in her”) yields to “the most compromising position so far.”³² The actual summons is taken from 2.4—“Come hither, boy” (2.4.15)—but the speech Orsino gives from his bath continues his early meditation about how Olivia's love for her brother augurs well for her later love, while Cesario, at first embarrassed and then bemused, bathes his back:

How will she love, when the rich golden shaft
Hath kill'd the flock of all affections else
That live in her. When liver, brain, and heart,
These sovereign thrones, are all supplied and fill'd
Her sweet perfections with one self king.

(1.1.35-49)

This speech, completing the one interrupted in act 1, scene 1, applies as vividly to Viola as Olivia, as Nunn once again draws out the parallels implicit in the Shakespearean text and allows Viola to hear this meditation. The accompanying action, the lingering intimacy of Cesario sponging Orsino's back, shows Viola in just the position that Orsino is imagining for Olivia—having taken him as her “one self king.”

What the Renaissance text implies in scenic parallels between act 1, scenes 1 and 2, Nunn's film interweaves explicitly for a twentieth-century audience. When Viola herself breaks off this moment, she reverts to act 2: “Sir, shall I to this lady?” (2.4.123). His response, though lacking the jewel he sends in the Folio text, follows directly: “Ay, that's the theme, / To her in haste; [Give her this jewel;] say, / My love can give no place, bide no delay” (2.4.123-25—bracketed material has been omitted). The physical challenge of riding like a man is juxtaposed here with the emotional challenge of acting the page to the man she loves and recalling the death of her brother. The two are spliced together in a scene that combines one speech from 1.1 with fragments from 2.4. Such brief sequences encourage an awareness of Viola's hopeless desire operating “beneath” her direct service to the Duke throughout the film, creating the sense of a coherent character through carefully dispersed fragments.

In a second reworked and relocated scene from 2.4, Nunn offers yet another location—the billiards room—and a useful separation of Orsino's contradictory representations of love. In this encounter, shifted still later in act 3 after Sebastian's meeting with Antonio in Illyria (normally 3.3), the film explicitly stages Orsino's advice to Cesario in the context of the two “men” playing billiards:

If ever thou shalt love, remember me;
For such as I am, all true lovers are,
He takes his shot and misses badly.
Unstaid and skittish in all motions else,
Save in the constant image of the creature
That is beloved.

(Nunn 74; 2.4.15-20)

In this context, Orsino's comment is a laughing excuse for his failed motion—he has missed his shot. Nunn thus displaces and recasts Orsino's claim of constancy well away from his account earlier in the film of wavering male affection that must choose a younger woman to “hold its bent” (2.4.37). The scene also offers Cesario the first chance to present her greater constancy; to her surprise, her motion is not skittish, and she makes her shot.

Moreover, this brief scene introduces the remainder of 2.4, which, like 1.4, emphasizes different moods by stretching the encounter across different settings. After Cesario successfully sinks his ball, Nunn cuts away to the two rushing down to the barn to solicit the song from Feste. The scene then resumes where it left off several sequences before with Orsino's request to the fool for “that old and antic song we heard last night” (2.4.3). The actual song from 2.4 that Feste sings provides the backdrop for the growing closeness of the two characters listening, as first Orsino crosses the room and places his arm behind Cesario and, next, in an over-the-shoulder shot, Nunn shows Cesario gradually leaning back as if to kiss Orsino. At Feste's final line of the song, the point of view cuts to a head-on two-shot of the pair, startled out of the intimate moment. Feste's reactions both during the song and immediately thereafter draw direct attention to the near-kiss—the measure of the intimacy the pair achieve by “act 3” of Nunn's film.

The scene continues directly from there, but only after Orsino and Cesario abruptly rush outside to stand by the sea. Shouting to be heard above the surf (much louder now than 'twas before), both Orsino and Cesario seem pushed beyond the “normal” friendly interaction of the game of billiards. In Orsino's case, the abrupt command, “Once more, Cesario” (2.4. 80) seems an almost desperate attempt to gain heterosexual equilibrium; moreover, Cesario both reveals and hides her love simultaneously in the story of her sister. Her speech serves both as a forceful defense for women “as true of heart as we” and a self-revelation that paradoxically seems to promise silence about “his” feelings for Orsino—“she never told her love” (2.4.107, 111). Through these sequences, Imogene Stubbs fully earns the poetry and poignancy of the “Patience on a monument” speech as she smiles at grief with a tear flowing down her cheek. Only after this scene, in fact the next morning when Cesario returns to Orsino still on the battlements, does Nunn produce Viola's telling comment from the end of 1.4: “Whoe'er I woo myself would be his wife” (1.4.42).³³ The filmed fragments of her scenes with Orsino have effectively built up the conflict between her “interior” grief and love and her “exterior” participation in Orsino's household.

Thus Nunn elaborates the growing closeness between Orsino and his page by elongating the interactions of the playtext through filmic time. He claims to “alter the chronology so that the Viola/Orsino story could continue developing throughout, by being interleaved between Olivia scenes and Malvolio scenes, so that we never lose sight of the relationship about which we are required to be so joyously happy at the end.”³⁴ This development actually builds the relationship in a variety of ways. Music room, seaside, riding country, bath, billiards room, battlements—all these varied settings demonstrate how thoroughly Cesario tends upon her lord. The dispersal of their concentrated time together illuminates Viola's life in Orsino's court while expanding Orsino's character and separating some of the startling, even incoherent reversals in his various speeches about love in 2.4. Most important, even continuous scenes, especially the crucial last one hundred lines of 2.4, spread across a variety of settings and an array of sounds—silence, song, surf—display the evolving relationship between Orsino and Cesario in visual and aural variations that justify the changes in tone and Orsino's sudden changes of attitude.

In fact, through film editing, Nunn resolves the inconstancy that leads Arthur Symons ultimately to dismiss Orsino as “a sentimental egoist.” Symons's distaste for Orsino's character derives from the scene he describes as “Shakespeare's judgment on him,” namely, Orsino's “shallow words on woman's incapacity for love (2.4), so contradictory with what he has said the moment before, an inconsistency so exquisitely characteristic; both said with the same lack of vital sincerity.”³⁵ In the twentieth century such inconsistencies of character have been attributed to Shakespearean scene structure or even Renaissance ideology. Rose suggests that “a Shakespearean scene, when it is concerned with ‘character,’ will show us a figure in a given emotional posture, or assuming one, switching from joy to grief';³⁶ more recently, Sinfield argues that “when critics believe they find a continuous consciousness … [in Shakespearean characters], they are responding to cues planted in the text for the initial audiences.”³⁷ In planting film cues for a twentieth-century audience, Nunn separates Orsino's inconsistent assertions across space and time; he disperses Orsino's emotional postures rather than radically cutting an already comparatively small role as the nineteenth-century performances did. In Nunn's version, Orsino's inconsistency in act 2, scene 4, becomes less striking because his conflicting comments occur in different locations, even at different times. Moreover, these interactions in the film's configuration register his complex responses to Cesario as their relationship develops.

The success of these techniques suggests that such fragmentation—or intimations of fragmentation in changing settings—functions as the twentieth-century technique for developing character. Whereas the lengthy sustained intimacy of 2.4 in the Folio marks out the mutual definition of the two principals in the Renaissance theatrical context, and the eighteenth- to nineteenth-century versions simply cut Orsino's role to promote character consistency and ameliorate his suitability as Viola's love object, in twentieth-century film we can have almost all of the complicated interaction between the two characters, but only if those varied interactions extend across the surface of the action and allow us to supply their imagined depths. In both the seventeenth-century play and the twentieth-century film, the conventions registering the mutual attraction of Orsino and Viola expose ideologies of erotic union. The playtext stages multiple emotional postures that show Orsino's influence over Viola, displaying erotic alliance as hierarchical at its core; the film deploys fragments to convey long-term, continuous interaction. As a result, each in different ways and at different times produces “character effects.”

At the same time that the film editing of Orsino's and Cesario's relationship and characters exploits twentieth-century ideologies of romantic love, Nunn's treatment of the twins invokes ideologies of gender. As a result, he tests the limits of creating character complexity through cinematic fragments. Viola's abilities, developed through her tenure in Orsino's court, match her brother's, offering a version of gender equality in her mirroring of him. However, his appearances and their addition to Cesario's character and activities ultimately make Cesario an unreadably complicated figure, whose “depth” becomes obscurity when too many pieces of cinematic behavior are attributed to “him.”

In the process, Nunn uses the same strategies of intercutting and expansion in elaborating the relationship between Olivia and Sebastian as he has between Viola and Orsino. However, the later crosscutting, which mingles 3.4 and 4.1 and again 4.2 and 4.3, more significantly exposes, in the first pair of scenes, the potential to confuse the twins and, in the second pair, the madness that seems to result. Cesario's resistent reactions to Olivia's household are, at first, mirrored explicitly in her brother's responses. Cesario's final plea that Olivia love Orsino leads into Feste's question of Sebastian: “Will you make me believe that I am not sent for you?” (4.1.1). However, Sebastian's response is limited to “Go to, go to, thou art a foolish fellow”(4.1.2) before Nunn returns to Cesario listening to Olivia, who declaims, “Come again tomorrow. [Fare thee well;] / A fiend like thee might bear my soul to hell” (3.4.218-19). Cesario's attempt to depart cuts to and echoes Sebastian trying to shake Feste's persistence: “Let me be clear of thee” (4.1.2-3). After Sebastian walks off, with Feste swaggering along behind, Nunn then cuts quickly back to 3.4 and a side shot of Cesario walking, collar up and in the same coat as her brother, just before she is stopped by Toby for the duel. In addition to establishing the twins' parallel reactions to Olivia's solicitations, this scenic juxtaposition invites our confusion of the two characters as well as Feste's.

This echoing effect develops further in the unexpected interruption of Cesario's duel at the end of act 4, scene 1, when the mistaking of the twins for each other becomes part of Viola's experience as well. When Antonio is dragged off, pleading for the money Sebastian has been holding for him, Nunn cuts to Sebastian denying that he knows Feste yet a third time: “I prithee, foolish Greek, depart from me, / There's money for thee, if you tarry longer, / I shall give worse payment” (4.1.18-20). Unfortunately, as he denies that he knows Feste, he performs the same sleight of hand that Cesario did earlier when giving money to the fool. In this context the switch of hands in the coin trick not only further convinces Feste that Sebastian is Cesario but also resonates thematically with the money that Antonio has given into the other twin's hand. In effect, the twins embody the coin trick. Viola's purse is almost empty but Sebastian's is full; the hand that appears to hold the money is empty, while the identical but opposite hand actually does have the coin. The comparable abilities of the twins as entertainers from before the shipwreck emerge here as the sign that they are a single person.

This doubling underscores the emergent and contested Western ideas about gender equality that prove almost as significant to Viola's character as is her relationship with Orsino. Of all the Twelfth Night films I have seen, this one best creates the twinning of brother and sister. Viola's “training” in Orsino's military court gives her rough equality to her brother that extends beyond dress. This Viola plays cards and billiards as well or better than a man; she rides and jumps obstacles successfully, even if she gives muffled cries of distress; “Cesario” even (for once) acquits himself well in the duel. Although Antonio still interrupts to fight on “Sebastian's” behalf, Viola is at that point putting her fencing tuition into practice and fighting well against Aguecheek. This Viola is not only “as true of heart” as a man; she is also as competent as a man in several pursuits that face her during her adoption of male attire. Like the coin trick, which convinces Feste that the twins are the same person, Viola's skills as well as Sebastian's arrival make their ultimate confusion for each other unavoidable. By encouraging the audience to share the bemusement of the doubling, Nunn adds layers to Viola's character, playing upon twentieth-century gender ideologies as well as romantic ideologies in his construction of her plausibility as a character.

As Nunn very carefully places Sebastian in a world going mad even before Olivia lays claim to him, the film produces the Illyrians as the audience to the twins as a single character. The wholly unexpected assault by Aguecheek becomes the penultimate oddity in a series of strange encounters that Sebastian experiences. His question, “Are all the people mad?” (4.1.26), and his aggressive response to Aguecheek and Toby are all the more justified because his interactions with Olivia's household and his confusion at misidentification not only parallel Viola's final solo visit to Olivia (duel for no cause, strangers claiming to know her) but also immediately echo that experience. The simultaneity of the twins' experiences, “both born in an hour” (2.1.19), is restored cinematically as simultaneous experiences registered in crosscutting. At the same time, the audience becomes more aware of the confusion arising from mistaking the twins for each other as Olivia pleads, “Be ruled by me” (4.1.63). His acceptance of her and his willingness now to keep the madness or dream that has overcome him find an echo transported from 3.4 as Nunn cuts away to Viola, sitting by the sea: “Prove true, imagination, O prove true” (3.4.384). On the one hand, from the audience's privileged position, “reading” Cesario's character at the end of the film apparently presents no problem; on the other hand, the discontinuities perceived by the Illyrians, most by notably Orsino and Olivia, disrupt that character completely, in part because “Cesario” is a product of their imaginations supplying the “interior” logic of “his” character according to their own assumptions about servants and young gentlemen.

However, Nunn also significantly challenges the audience's superior knowledge in his filming of the twins. He provokes his audience's confusion by substituting Imogene Stubbs for Steven Mackintosh when Olivia spies Feste and “Cesario” outside her window just after this exchange. He also uses the same sleight of film several other times, interchanging Mackintosh for Stubbs when “she” rides away from Olivia's house after her second visit and again when Malvolio, crossgartered and convinced of her regard, peers through the window at Olivia and “Cesario” walking from audience right to left outside the window. In turn, Stubbs stands in for Mackintosh at the start of the first scene between Antonio and Sebastian on the quayside and outside the church where Feste spies “him” with Olivia. When asked about this cinematic indirection, Nunn acknowledges that “the twin trick was played on the audience several times, though that wasn't quite my intention—rather to imprint swift physical images on the audience's collective retina so that the final moment of re-union would be credible and moving.”³⁸ In fact, Nunn himself is not sure how many times Cesario was filmed for Sebastian or vice versa. Whenever such substitutions occur, the film audience occupies the position of the Illyrians: they see the twin that they expect to see, projecting the identity of the actor-as-character into the situation that should present one or the other twin in terms of filmed and filial coherence.

The dangers attached to believing the imagination, to projecting a complete character from a partial view, become the core of the next pair of intercut scenes, foreshadowed by a brief cutaway to Malvolio (“they have laid me here in darkness. The world shall know it”).³⁹ The crosscutting interleaving 4.2 and 4.3 hinges on the madness that Malvolio denies and Sebastian suspects. Malvolio's certainty that Olivia loves him finally rests on far less direct evidence than does Sebastian's; as a result, their responses prove different yet interrelated. The intercutting of these two scenes, while again drawing out the encounters with the Illyrians, explicitly uses references to madness as the cinematic pivot linking the gulling of Malvolio to the good luck of Sebastian. After all, Malvolio's insistence that the house is dark and that he is not mad leads immediately into Sebastian's opening speech in 4.3, in which he tries to determine who is mad:

This is the air, that is the glorious sun,
This pearl she gave me, I do feel't, and see't,
And though 'tis wonder that enwraps me thus,
Yet 'tis not madness.

(4.3.1-4)

Unlike Malvolio, Sebastian wavers on the subject of his own sanity; he is “ready to distrust [his] eyes” (4.3.13) as he looks at his reflection in one of Olivia's mirrors. His reflection, echo to the doubling that makes the twins so confusing throughout the last two acts of the play, leads him to “wrangle with my reason that persuades me / To any other trust, but that I am mad” (4.3.14-15). Not so Malvolio whose immediate line following the cut back to 4.2 is “I am not mad” (4.2.41). Malvolio's encounter with Feste offers another possibility besides madness for the confusion that both Sebastian and Malvolio are experiencing. After Malvolio begs Feste to “convey what I will set down to my lady” (4.2.115-16), Nunn cuts back to Sebastian in 4.3: “Or else the lady's mad” (4.3.16). But the proof of Olivia's sanity surrounds him in her well-ordered gardens and household. As Sebastian notes, if she were mad, “She could not sway her house, command her followers, / Take and give back affairs, and their dispatch, / With such a smooth, discreet, and stable bearing” (4.3.17-19). Of course, the crosscutting underscores that at least one of her followers is not being swayed or commanded with “smooth, discreet and stable bearing.”

As in the previous scene, where Sebastian accepts confusion and follows Olivia, here he again abandons his attempts to reason out his situation and promises, “I'll follow this good man, and go with you, / And having sworn truth, ever will be true” (4.3.32-33). Nunn then cuts away to Feste and Malvolio on truth and madness:

CLOWN.
[I will help you too't.] But tell me true, are you not mad indeed, or do you but counterfeit?
MALVOLIO.
Believe me I am not, I tell thee true.

(4.2.116-18)

This telling interchange happens before Sebastian's promise of truth in the Folio; Nunn's filming and cuts make the parallels more direct and pointed. Sebastian's primacy apparently sets his logic as the more valid one, but “truth” itself is suspect since Sebastian, like Malvolio, is caught up in mistaken identity.

The extensive elongation of the very short 4.3 by crosscutting it with one of the play's longest scenes, 4.2 (even though substantially cut here), sets the evolution of Sebastian's mistaken involvement with Olivia against the consequences of Malvolio's erroneous belief that she loves him. Not only does Sebastian's hesitancy show well against Malvolio's unyielding self-delusion, but also the extended time frame and parallels develop both Sebastian's character and his relationship with Olivia beyond the two brief encounters they have before their marriage in the Folio text. In this way, the striking fragmentations and rearrangements of the play's text in Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night not only answer the critical queries about Viola's sudden affection for Orsino, which extend from the eighteenth century, but also attempt comparable effects in making Olivia's mistake more acceptable. Nonetheless, this development is not and cannot be as thorough as the elaboration provided by the combination of 2.3 and 2.4 and by the dispersal of composite scenes between Viola and Orsino. Even though this mingling of 4.2 and 4.3 does extend Olivia's involvement with Sebastian and sets the level of confusion between the twins as high as possible, the layering of these fragments actually exposes how characters in Illyria interpret and try to make coherent their encounters with Cesario in assessing “his” character. Their mistaken reactions to the partial views offered them by Viola and Sebastian underscore how expectations set by gender and romantic ideology produce “Cesario” ultimately as an impossible character.

The twin relationship in Nunn's film calls into question the emerging fullness of “Cesario's” character by displaying Viola as complexly grounded in shifting ideologies of gender. Extending from the seventeenth-century text through the British nineteenth-century setting (“where the differences between men and women were at their greatest … the last years of the previous century took those attitudes to extremes exemplified in the dress silhouettes of the two genders”)⁴⁰ to a twentieth-century audience, Nunn's film emphasizes Viola's abilities, once driven, to enact and dress the male part. The plausibility of mistaking one twin for the other derives not just from the excellent casting or even the camera tricks, but from the establishment of male and female characters whose talents, tricks, and even abilities prove closer to interchangeable than in any previous Twelfth Night film. In fact, the casting here is even more effective than those films that use a single actress for both roles and are consequently compelled to emphasize gender differences.⁴¹ Nunn's film as a whole works through the equality and blend of genders predicted in their opening performance, largely because this Twelfth Night reflects a particularly twentieth-century Western set of assumptions about gender equity—given equal opportunity. Sebastian's incursions into Cesario's Illyria expose how the Illyrians' mistaken constructions of Cesario mirror our investment in “reading” Viola's character within her extended association with Orsino.

Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night reveals our twentieth-century investment in character as a complex weave of gender identity and erotic alliance. The “depth” of Viola's character proves inextricably linked to the depth of her love, which can only be shown through her ongoing relationship with Orsino. The paradox, of course, is that both her character and their relationship are signaled by dispersed fragments of the text, echoed and emphasized by the comparable strategies applied to Sebastian's interactions with Olivia. As a result, the film exposes a peculiarly twentieth-century “filling up of subjectivities”: scenic parallels both confuse and establish gender identity, and only short, disjointed interactions can produce the required continuity. In Nunn's Twelfth Night, our “natural perspective” on the twins, like that in Shakespeare's play, proves at once fragmented and continuous—and therefore ideological rather than “natural.”

Notes

1. Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 62.

2. Sinfield, 63.

3. William Shakespeare, Richard III, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 1.2.229. All subsequent references to Shakespeare's plays will refer to this edition and be noted parenthetically in the text.

4. Stanley Kauffmann, “Blanking Verse,” The New Republic, 2 December 1996, 42.

5. John Podhoretz, “O for a Muse of Fire,” The Weekly Standard, 18 November 1996, 46.

6. John Collick, Shakespeare, Cinema, and Society (New York: Manchester Press, 1989), 33-37.

7. Peter Donaldson, Shakespearean Films/Shakespearean Directors (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990).

8. See Barbara Hodgdon, The Shakespeare Trade: Performances and Appropriations (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), and Douglas Lanier, “Drowning the Book: Prospero's Books and the Textual Shakespeare,” in Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance, ed. James Bulman (London and New York: Routledge, 1996).

9. Lorne M. Buchman, Still in Movement: Shakespeare on Screen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 107.

10. Franco Zeffirelli, “Filming Shakespeare,” in Staging Shakespeare: Seminars on Production Problems, ed. Glenn Loney (New York: Garland Publishing, 1990), 261.

11. Kenneth Branagh, Hamlet: Screenplay, Introduction, and Film Diary (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1996), 33.

12. Buchman, 108-9.

13. Joe Morgenstern, “Film: Vintage Wine in Hip Flasks.” The Wall Street Journal, 25 October 1996, A12.

14. Trevor Nunn, William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night: A Screenplay (London: Methuen, 1996), xii. Unfortunately, Nunn's screenplay text does not include page numbers for his valuable introduction; I supply them as they would appear.

15. In “‘The very names of the Persons’: Editing and the Invention of Dramatick Character” in Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, ed. David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), Randall McLeod examines the variations in stage directions in All's Well in order to argue that characters on stage seem to be reconfigured—and renamed—according to their relationships to other characters on stage. Such variable naming does not appear in the 1623 Folio Twelfth Night, except insofar as Orsino wavers between being called “Count” and “Duke.” Some textual critics have taken this variation as a sign of textual revision in the play, but the naming has implications for characters as well since the counts in Shakespeare's plays have less authority and more involvement with love than do the dukes.

16. This distinction between “true love” and lust is a common feature in popular romance fiction, as analyzed by Janice Radway in Reading the Romance: Women Patriarchy and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).

17. See Laurie Osborne, The Trick of Singularity: Twelfth Night and the Performance Editions (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996), 47-77.

18. Osborne, 92-96.

19. Francis Gentleman, Twelfth Night in Bell's Edition of Shakespeare's Plays, vol. 5 (London: Bell, 1774), 299.

20. Mrs. M. L. Elliott, Shakespeare's Garden of Girls (London: Remington & Company, 1885), 215.

21. Arthur Symons, introduction to The Henry Irving Shakespeare, ed. Henry Irving and Frank Marshall, vol. 4 (London: Blackie & Son, 1888), 355.

22. Nunn, xii.

23. Trevor Nunn, as quoted in Twelfth Night: About the Film, n.d., 16 July 2000.

24. For a discussion of how underanalyzed are the effects of romantic ideologies as they affect the reception of Shakespeare's plays, see Linda Charnes, “‘What's Love Got to Do with It?’ Reading the Liberal Humanist Romance in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra,” Textual Practice 6, no. 1 (1992): 1-16.

25. Nunn, Screenplay, 16.

26. Stephen Holden, “There's Something Verboten in Illyria,” New York Times 25 October 1996, B1.

27. Mark Rose, in Shakespearean Stage Design (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), draws attention to the roots of Shakespearean scenic structure in the visual arts, especially in the juxtaposition of scenes that “reflect upon” each other. Rose only addresses Twelfth Night specifically in his comments on the structural effects of the opening scenes; in Shakespeare's Art of Orchestration (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), Jean Howard analyzes more fully the dynamic development from scene to scene between stasis and motioning the comedy.

28. Podhoretz, 47.

29. Nunn, 42.

30. Nunn, as quoted in Peter Marks, “So Young, So Fragile, So Vexed about Sex,” New York Times, 20 October 1996, 13.

31. Rose, 9.

32. Nunn, Screenplay, 54.

33. Nunn allows Viola's glances to give this information almost as early as the first scene. Certainly her interest in him is clear as early as the seaside scene when he first sends her to Olivia; however, it is an interest that we as the audience must supply out of our interpretation of the cinematic gaze she offers of him rather than the revelation of a spoken declaration.

34. Nunn, Screenplay, xii.

35. Symons, 257.

36. Rose, 9.

37. Sinfield, 63.

38. Trevor Nunn, Letter to Author, 8 May 1997. I wrote to inquire about the doubling I had noticed only to discover that the substitutions also appeared in places I had not recognized, despite several viewings.

39. Nunn, Screenplay, 101.

40. Nunn, Screenplay, 8-9.

41. Osborne, 124-36.

Works Cited

Branagh, Kenneth. Hamlet: Screenplay, Introduction, and Film Diary. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1996.

Buchman, Lorne M. Still in Movement: Shakespeare on Screen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Charnes, Linda. “‘What's Love Got to Do with It?’ Reading the Liberal Humanist Romance in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra.” Textual Practice 6, no. 1 (1992): 1-16.

Collick, John. Shakespeare, Cinema, and Society. New York: Manchester Press, 1989.

Davies, Anthony. Filming Shakespeare Plays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Donaldson, Peter. Shakespearean Films/Shakespearean Directors. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990.

Elliott, Mrs. M. L. Shakespeare's Garden of Girls. London: Remington & Company, 1885.

Gentleman, Francis. Twelfth Night. In Bell's Edition of Shakespeare's Plays. Vol. 5. London: Bell, 1774.

Hodgdon, Barbara. The Shakespeare Trade: Performances and Appropriations. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998.

Holden, Stephen. “There's Something Verboten in Illyria.” New York Times, 25 October 1996, B1, B16.

Howard, Jean. Shakespeare's Art of Orchestration. Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989.

Kauffmann, Stanley. “Blanking Verse.” The New Republic, 2 December 1996, 40-41.

Lanier, Douglas M. “Drowning the Book: Prospero's Books and the Textual Shakespeare.” In Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance. Edited by James Bulman. London and New York: Routledge, 1996.

Marks, Peter. “So Young, So Fragile, So Vexed about Sex.” New York Times, 20 October 1996, 13.

McLeod, Randall. “‘The very names of the Persons’: Editing and the Invention of Dramatick Character.” In Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama. Edited by David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass. London and New York: Routledge, 1991.

Morgenstern, Joe. “Film: Vintage Wine in Hip Flasks.” The Wall Street Journal, 25 October 1996, A12.

Nunn, Trevor. Letter to Author. 8 May 1997.

———. As quoted in Twelfth Night: About the Film, n.d., 16 July 2000.

———. William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night: A Screenplay. London and New York: Methuen, 1996.

Osborne, Laurie. The Trick of Singularity: Twelfth Night and the Performance Editions. Iowa Studies in Theatre and Culture. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996.

Podhoretz, John. “O for a Muse of Fire.” The Weekly Standard, 18 November 1996, 46-47.

Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance: Women Patriarchy and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.

Rose, Mark. Shakespearean Design. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981.

Shakespeare, William. Richard III. In Riverside Shakespeare. Edited by G. Blakemore Evans et al. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1974.

———. Twelfth Night, Or What You Will. In Riverside Shakespeare. Edited by G. Blakemore Evans et al. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1974.

Sinfield, Alan. Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Symons, Arthur. “Introduction to Twelfth Night.” In The Henry Irving Shakespeare. Vol. 4. Edited by Henry Irving and Frank Marshall. London: Blackie & Son, 1888.

Zeffirelli, Franco. “Filming Shakespeare.” In Staging Shakespeare: Seminars on Production Problems. Edited by Glenn Loney. New York: Garland Publishing, 1990.

Films Cited

Hamlet. Directed by Kenneth Branagh. 3 hr. 58 min. Castle Rock Entertainment, 1996. Videocassette.

Looking for Richard. Directed by Al Pacino. 1 hr. 52 min. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 1996. Videocassette.

Twelfth Night. Directed by Trevor Nunn. 2 hr. 13 min. Fine Line Films, 1996. Videocassette.

William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet. Directed by Baz Luhrmann. 2 hr. Twentieth Century Fox/Bazmark Films, 1996. Videocassette.