[In the following essay, Hurworth explores the representation of deception, or gulling, in Twelfth Night. Hurworth highlights the links between criminal deception as it is described in Elizabethan narratives of the “underworld” and the deception found in the play.]

The age-old ploy of practising deception upon one's fellow for material profit and/or vindictive amusement, known as gulling, cozenage or cony-catching in the rogue literature of the Elizabethan period, figures prominently in the contemporary drama where its principal exponent is, of course, Ben Jonson. In Volpone and The Alchemist deception is treated as an art-form in itself. This is gulling on a grand scale, where the theatricality of deceiving and the deception inherent in the theatrical illusion find their finest expression. In Shakespeare's plays, gulling rarely occupies centre-stage as in Jonson (Othello may be the one exception to this), although it frequently surfaces as an incident in the main plot, for example, the double gulling of Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, or the cozening of Falstaff by Hal after the Gadshill episode in 1 Henry IV. The term itself, however, occurs infrequently in Shakespeare's plays. Unusually, in Twelfth Night the text designates two characters, Malvolio and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, as ‘gulls’, the instigator of the trap set for the steward, Maria, is addressed as ‘my noble gull-catcher’ by Fabian (2. 5. 180), and there may be an implicit reference to ‘gulling’ in the title of the play, since the prologue of Gl'Ingannati, a likely source, has a reference to la notte di beffana,¹ a phrase usually rendered as ‘Epiphany’ or ‘Twelfth Night’ in English but which, literally translated, may be understood as The Night of Gullings.

The gulling of Malvolio which results in his transformation from dour Puritan to ridiculous suitor is the comic highlight, if not the centre, of the play.² In fact Malvolio's comment that he is the ‘most notorious geck and gull / That e'er in vention played on’ (5. 1. 340-1) may be read as a meta-theatrical prophecy of his box-office popularity,³ initially commented upon by Digges:

                                                                                                    loe in a trice
The Cockpit Galleries, Boxes, all are full
To hear Malvoglio, the cross-garter'd gull.(4)

And the propensity of the comic sub-plot to upstage the main plot has characterized the play ever since Charles I wrote ‘Malvolio’ against the title in his copy of the Second Folio. Indeed we may note that the term ‘gull’ in its ornithological sense is interchangeable with ‘cuckoo’ in Shakespeare's usage: ‘As that ungentle gull, the cuckoo's bird, / Useth the sparrow’ (I Henry IV, 5. 1. 60-1), so that there is a semantic association between the cuckoo-like sub-plot in Twelfth Night and gulling.⁵ The secondary intrigue's appropriation of the place normally accorded to the main plot functions as a metatextual paradigm of the patterns of deception, substitution and metamorphosis in the play.

I wish to compare the representation of gulling in Twelfth Night with the narratives of underworld literature where such deception, known as cony-catching, cozenage or gulling, receives its fullest treatment. In his study of the Elizabethan underworld, G. Salgādo noted the affinities between the deception practised in the narratives of rogue literature and the Elizabethan stage:

The paraphernalia used in this form of cheating had all the imagination, energy, sense of timing and understanding of character that we find in the Elizabethan drama itself …⁶

However it should be remembered that these narratives are every bit as fictive as their onstage representation and should not be read as documentary evidence of criminal activity in Elizabethan London.⁷ My aim therefore is not to establish a relationship between Shakespeare's play and criminality in Elizabethan London but to draw attention to the contact between the two different representational modes. Firstly I shall relate the dramatic syntax and lexis of gulling in Shakespeare's play to the lexis and syntax of gulling in the underworld literature; I shall then show how the definition of gulling as a game with rules influences the configuration of the gulling in Twelfth Night, and note the theatricality of gulling, as presented in these pamphlets.

Malvolio may be the play's most ‘notorious geck and gull’, but he is certainly not alone in the part. Twelfth Night is replete with gullings, albeit of different degrees and durations. Andrew Aguecheek is by nature a gull⁸ (as he virtually admits⁹), and he is gulled from first to last. It is no secret that he is fleeced financially throughout, that he is deceived into ‘supposing that Toby's dry gullet is the way to Olivia's heart’,¹⁰ and then cozened into challenging Viola/Cesario by Sir Toby, as the latter's boast, ‘Marry, I'll ride your horse as well as I ride you’ (3. 4. 281), proclaims for all to hear.

But gulling is not merely exemplified by those designated as ‘gulls’ nor is its functioning simple. The dynamics of gulling is centripetal and draws many of the characters into its force field. For instance, we observe a spiral of gulling in the activities of Sir Toby Belch. He gulls Andrew into providing him with money, and inveigles Viola/Cesario into a farcial duel, but his control of its energy falters when Sebastian appears, and his duping backfires on him. Indeed, gulling shows itself to be a reversible game since Toby himself is gulled most effectively by Maria. Such is the implication of Fabian's comment when Sir Toby, carried away by his delight in the spectacle of Malvolio's humilation, says:

SIR Toby
I could marry the wench for this device
                                                  […] Enter Maria …
FABIAN
Here comes my noble gull-catcher.
SIR Toby
(to Maria) Wilt thou set thy foot o' my neck?

(2. 5. 175-81)

This moment is an example of the intersection of two trajectories of gulling: that of Malvolio by Maria and of Toby by Maria. This mistress of the game is also expert enough to synchronize two moments of gulling when, immediately prior to Malvolio's appearance before his mistress in yellow stockings, she represents him to Olivia as unhinged: ‘Your ladyship were best to have some guard about you if he come, for sure the man is tainted in's wits.’ (3. 4. 11-13), thereby tricking Olivia, just as she has duped her steward. It should be noted however that there are different varieties of gulling. The trick played on Malvolio is of the savage, vengeful kind (known in the commedia dell'arte as a beffa) whereas Maria's gulling of Olivia and Sir Toby is essentially harmless (thus, in Italian terms, a burla).¹¹

Although as a ‘waiting gentlewoman’ Maria is socially and dramatically marginal to the play, her part in concocting the plot and stage-managing the gulling game in its opening stages reveals her to be at the centre of the secondary intrigue, the mainspring of the action. She is responsible for unleashing forces which bring about hugely comic situations before spinning out of control. In spite of J. W. Draper's exhaustive and perceptive character sketch of Mistress Mary, she nevertheless remains something of an enigma.¹² She never makes any comment on her role as a gull-catcher: all we are shown is her evident enjoyment in devising and executing her own schemes, and her apparent desire to please Sir Toby. Draper's conjectures regarding Maria's reasons for wanting to marry Sir Toby are plausible enough in terms of the social ambitions of Elizabethan waiting-women, for him the play's main theme is ‘the Elizabethan pursuit of social security’,¹³ but Maria is as much a dramatic construct as a representative of Elizabethan society. Her role is steeped in comic tradition: adept at the classic techniques of duping associated with the commedia dell'arte, she is also the trickster figure of classical comedy, the clever slave figure found in Plautus.¹⁴

Early in the play, the object of her desire, Sir Toby, apparently sees her in terms of sexual opportunity rather than wedlock. Feste comments on Sir Toby's failure to appreciate Maria: ‘If Sir Toby would leave drinking, thou wert as witty a piece of Eve's flesh as any in Illyria’ (1. 5. 24-6). This reveals to her the need to curb Sir Toby's carousing if she is to succeed in capturing his attention, hence her readiness to devise a scheme to be revenged on Malvolio for his disapproval of their drunken antics. The knight has to be brought to a realization of her worth as a wife. To use Leo Salingar's phrase, it is the experience of ‘the pleasure of contrivance’ that awakens Sir Toby to Maria's eligilibity: ‘She's a beagle true bred and one that adores me’ (2. 4. 173-4). This appreciation of the pleasure of intrigue leads Sir Toby to want to emulate his better half, to become a master of the game himself, but forces beyond his control make his gulling misfire, whereas Maria not only emerges unharmed, but is rewarded, as Fabian reminds us: ‘Maria writ / The letter, at Sir Toby's great importance, / In recompense whereof he hath married her’ (5. 1. 359-61).

The case of Malvolio demonstrates how a gulling trajectory may be subject to inversion, for not only is the steward gulled by the plotters, but he is also in the grip of ‘self-gulling’. In his egoism, Malvolio unwittingly appropriates the discourse of gulling. After reading the forged letter, he believes that he has in fact become a gull-catcher, having snared Olivia like a bird on a branch:¹⁵ ‘I have limed her’ (3. 4. 75). This reveals the steward at the centre of a web of real and imagined gullings: ‘self-gulled’, about to be gulled, he believes himself to be the gull-catcher. To complicate matters, Olivia is, of course, ironically enough, the victim of a gulling, but not by Malvolio, by Viola/Cesario instead (an unwilling and unwitting gull-catcher). Thus various instances of gulling may coincide or intersect, spiral or reverse one another.¹⁶

But gulling may also be linear and sporadic, in contrast to the density of gulling trajectories enmeshing Malvolio. Thus in the course of the gulling of Malvolio, the cozening of Sir Andrew surfaces from time to time in the text, as when Toby tells Andrew baldly:

SIR Toby
Thou hadst need send for more money.
SIR Andrew
If I cannot recover your niece, I am a foul way out.
SIR Toby
Send for money, knight. If thou hast not her i' th' end, call me cut.

(2. 3. 176-81)

Likewise, later, Sir Toby refers unabashedly to his fleecing of Sir Andrew:

FABIAN
This is a dear manikin to you, Sir Toby.
SIR Toby
I have been dear to him, lad, some two thousand strong or so.

(3. 2. 51-3)

This follows the broad outlines of the typical relationship between the would-be gallant and his gull described in Dekker's The Guls Horne-book¹⁷ (1609). The author claims to write as the arbiter of advice to the man-about-town—as opposed to his opposite, a gull—but the syntax of the title The Guls Horne-book is ambiguous, since ‘gulls’ may function as either a possessive plural or a genitive plural here. The choice of construction determines the meaning. Is it a manual of instruction for the gull-catcher or the gull? If the title has the sense of the possessive plural, then it is a manual destined for use by gulls, in order to avoid being gulled. Conversely, if the genitive plural construction is intended, then it is a work describing gulls, a manual for the would-be gallant whereby he may identify a gull (and take advantage of him). Furthermore, the grammatical ambiguity of the title is never elucidated by the hornbook's content, which implicitly ridicules the activities of the would-be gallant, so that there is only a difference of degree between his foolishness and that of his victim, the gull.

Sir Toby and Sir Andrew fit the categories of the would-be gallant and his gull to a nicety. Sir Toby is a ‘kinsman’ of Olivia's, apparently dependent on her hospitality. Salgādo suggests that part of the underworld society was composed of precisely this kind of rootless person, probably knighted in the wars and discharged from the army after some expedition against Spain¹⁸ (the gallants in The Guls Horne-book are frequently posited as soldiers¹⁹). Demographically the lesser gentry were increasing in numbers in the second half of the sixteenth century, but decreasing in wealth;²⁰ enclosures, the abolition of the monasteries had swollen the ranks of vagrants; court faction also meant that today's great man (and his retinue) could be down on their luck tomorrow. If Sir Toby Belch conforms to the portrait of the gallant in Dekker's manual, and Sir Andrew Aguecheek is a perfect example of a gull,²¹ then their association may be no accident, for Dekker recommends that every gallant should find a foil to accompany him:

Select some friend … to walk up and down the room with you. Let him be suited if you can worse by far than yourself: he will be a foil to you, and this will be a means to publish your clothes better than Paul's, a tennis-court or a playhouse.²²

To be a successful gallant, it is desirable to practise a perfectly hedonist life-style, adopting revelling and drinking as primary occupations: ‘your noblest gallants consecrate their hours to their mistresses and to revelling’.²³ And as in Twelfth Night, life consists not of the four elements but of eating and drinking, so Dekker advocates joining forces with a fellow roisterer and getting drunk in public:

And if any of your endeared friends be in the house and beat the same ivy-bush that yourself does, you may join companies, and be drunk together most publicly.²⁴

Moreover the gallant lives by his wits, never paying for his drink if he can avoid it,²⁵ and the advice given by the hornbook is that gallants with empty purses should have recourse to gulling:

and, no question, if he be poor he shall now and then light upon some gull or other whom, he may skedler, after the genteel fashion, of money.²⁶

Even though The Guls Horne-book was written in the decade following Shakespeare's play, it is possible to see it as an intertext to Twelfth Night, for it describes a category of person well known in Elizabethan London (or at least, in its fiction). Dekker's syntax of gulling has much in common with Shakespeare's: we see Sir Toby's strategies mimic the behaviour of the would-be gallant in the Horne-book. The reversibility of gulling is also suggested by Dekker, both in the title and in his advice to impecunious gulls that they should ‘skedler’ other gulls of money. In Twelfth Night the gulling game is reversed in the case of Sir Toby Belch, as we have noted. Equally, the term denoting his relationship to Olivia contains a certain semantic ambivalence, an inversion of its apparent meaning. At first Sir Toby is known as ‘kinsman’ to Olivia, but she later calls him ‘Cousin’ (1. 5. 113, 119) and subsequently ‘my coz’ (1. 5. 130), terms which may indicate a closer degree of relationship as well as suggesting that she is aware of his taking advantage of her hospitality, since the terms ‘cousin’ and ‘cozen’ were considered cognate by Cotgrave (1611): ‘to clayme kindred for advantage, or particular ends; as he, who to save charges in travelling, goes from house to house, as cosin to the owner of every one’.²⁷ Toby is therefore acknowledged by Olivia as the swindler in their midst, but as we have already seen the word ‘cousin’ can equally well designate the victim of a cozenage, the ‘practice or habit of […] cheating, deception’,²⁸ and this reversibility is replicated in his portrayal as both guller and gull.

Gulling, as represented in the literature of the underworld, is an essentially ludic activity, and, as such, rule-bound. A survey of early rogue pamphlets reveals its division into two main sub-genres: beggar-books such as the anonymous Fraternity of Vagabonds (1561) or Thomas Harman's A Caveat or warning for Common Cursitors (1566), and cony-catching tracts which were ostensibly written to expose underworld activities whereby the unwary were deprived of their worldly goods. One of the earliest exponents of this sub-genre was Robert Greene. His pamphlets span the early 1590s, and the first, A Notable Discovery of Cozenage (1591), contains narratives describing elaborate methods of cheating at cards. This is based on A Manifest Detection of Dice Play (1552), a tract attributed to Gilbert Walker. This narrative sets out a paradigm for cheating at cards which is subsequently expanded by Greene to provide formulaic accounts of other forms of cozening in The Second Part of Cony-Catching (1591), and The Third and Last Part of Cony-Catching (1592). There are also plays directly drawn from the rogue narratives of the pamphlets, such as the anonymous A Knack to Know a Knave (1592) where the protagonist is the arch cony-catcher Cutbert Cutpurse.

A Manifest Detection demonstrates the organization and codification of card-sharping crime, which functions according to specific rules just like an inverse form of law:

And thereof it riseth that, like as law, when the term is truly considered, signifieth an ordinance of good men established for the commonwealth to repress all vicious living, so these cheaters turned the cat in the pan, giving to divers vile patching shifts an honest and goodly title, calling it by the name of a law; because by a multitude of hateful rules, a multitude of dregs and draff (as it were good learning) govern and rules their idle bodies, to the destruction of good labouring people.²⁹

There are many kinds of the ‘art’, but cheating is the common ground of them all and this is based on the cozener's capacity to dissemble effectively:

the first and original ground of cheating is a counterfeit countenance in all things, a study to seem to be, and not to be indeed.³⁰

—a phrase which evidently evokes Viola's ‘I am not what I am’ (3. 1. 139). The rules for cheating with dice are set out in detail, and a frequent configuration described by Walker is that four accomplices lure a victim to participate in an elaborate game:

a jolly shift, and for the subtle invention and fineness of wit exceedeth all the rest, is the barnard's law which … asketh four persons at the least, each of them to play a long several part by himself.³¹

Greene takes up the same distribution of roles:

There be requisite effectually to act the art of cony-catching three several parties, the setter, the verser, and the barnacle [the fourth element being the cony himself].³²

The narrative describes the complex interaction of the three rogues in extracting money from their prey: the plot is set in motion as soon as a suitable prey comes into view, typically:

a plain country fellow, well and cleanly apparelled, either in a coat of homespun russet or of a frieze, and a side-pouch at his side.³³

and then the victim is duped into taking wine with the rogues:

then ere they part, they make a cony and so ferret-claw him at cards, that they leave him as bare of money as an ape of a tail.³⁴

The ingenuity of such rogues is stressed: ‘they do employ all their wits to overthrow such as with their handy thrift satisfy their hearty thirst’.³⁵ This same configuration surfaces in the gulling of Malvolio; there are three main gullers: Maria, Toby and Feste or Fabian (this may explain the mutual exclusivity of the last two in the gulling scenes), but Maria plays the most elaborate role, like the ‘barnard’ or the ‘barnacle’,³⁶ and she is careful to observe the tripartite pattern of the game:

I will plant you two—and let the fool make a third—where he shall find the letter.

(2. 3. 167-68)

Indeed the ludic dimension of the tricking of Malvolio is underlined by its designation as ‘Sport royal’ (2. 3. 166), and it is alluded to as ‘sport’ several times (2. 5. 173; 2. 5. 191). In the last scene, when the Duke is about to pass judgement on the affair, Fabian pleads for this view of gulling as essentially ludic to be upheld:

How with a sportful malice it was followed
May rather pluck on laughter than revenge
If that the injuries be justly weighed
That have on both sides passed.

(5. 1. 362-65).

We may equally question whether the inversion of values in the underplot of Twelfth Night where Sir Toby Belch functions as the Lord of Misrule, and honest everyday activity is absent, does not replicate the inversion of the rules of honest society demonstrated by the description of the cheating ‘laws’ in the underworld pamphlets.³⁷

Nevertheless ‘justice’ is not always done, for as the authors of rogue literature recognize, the game can sometimes turn against its instigator, and biters can also be bit:

Thus we may see, fallere fallentem non est fraus: every deceit hath his due: he that maketh a trap falleth into the snare himself, and such as covet to cozen all are crossed themselves oftentimes almost to the cross, and that is the next neighbour to the gallows.³⁸

This mutability of fortune can be seen to apply to Sir Toby: his gulling Sir Andrew into a duel results in a bleeding head, and, as already demonstrated, he is comically ‘caught’ by Maria as a consequence of her success with Malvolio.

If gulling is a game, this implies performance, and, as such, it constitutes a spectacle. For example, the metamorphosis is verbally and visually an essential characteristic of the gulling process. In the table of words published in the Notable Discovery of Cozenage (1591), Greene informs us that in highway robbery the victim is called ‘a martin’; in cony-catching law, the victim received the designation of ‘cony’. In The Black Book's Messenger (1591), the same Greene lists the terminology used by Ned Browne, ‘one of the most notable Cutpurses, Crossbiters and Cony-catchers that ever lived in England’, which emphasizes the cynegetic transformation of all involved in the gulling process:

He that draws the fish to the bait, the beater.
The tavern where they go, the bush.
The fool that is caught, the bird.(39)

Dekker, in Lantern and Candlelight (1608) appends a list of those necessary to execute a swindle in a game of cards where all the participants are designated as varieties of birds:

In this battle of cards and dice are several regiments and several officers: …

He that wins all is the ‘Eagle’.
He that stands by and ventures is the ‘Woodpecker’.
The fresh gallant that is fetched in is the ‘Gull’.
He that stands by and lends is the ‘Gull Groper’.(40)

The OED records ‘to grope a gull’ as being synonymous in 1536 with the expression ‘to pluck a pigeon’.⁴¹ Thus the lexis of rogue literature represents gulling as the transformation of a human victim into an animal species, often into birds.

Similarly the representation of gulling in Twelfth Night recognizes that transformation is, by definition, inherent in cozening; Maria expresses her intention to transform Malvolio into his very opposite: to ‘gull him into a nayword’ (2. 3. 130); later she notes the success of her ambition, saying ‘Yon gull Malvolio is turned heathen, a very renegado’ (3. 2. 65-6). To be revenged on the steward for his reproval of their revelry, the plotters seek to change Malvolio into a creature of farce; like Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream, he is to be transformed into an ass, as indicated by Maria's comment ‘Go shake your ears’ (2. 3. 121). Sir Andrew, for once, manages a real witticism in this respect, for when Maria says: ‘My purpose is indeed a horse of that colour’, he replies: ‘And your horse now would make him an ass’ (2. 3. 161-3).

When Malvolio takes up the forged letter, this process of transformation is marked by his metamorphosis into a whole range of native woodland animals. Already, in anticipation he has been designated ‘the niggardly rascally sheep-biter’ (2. 5. 4-5), ‘the trout that must be caught with tickling’ (2. 5. 20-1)⁴², and, as the extent of his self-delusions is revealed, the tricksters turn him into ‘a rare turkeycock’ (2. 5. 29). Then, just as he approaches the letter he is seen as a game bird (of a proverbially stupid nature): ‘Now is the woodcock near the gin’ (2. 5. 81); immediately after opening the letter he becomes a badger—‘Marry, hang thee, brock’ (2. 5. 102)—then a bird of prey—‘And with what a wing the staniel checks at it!’ (2. 5. 112)—then a hound sniffing at a scent while he wrestles with the conundrum of MOAI:

SIR Toby
… he is now at a cold scent.
FABIAN
Sowter will cry upon't for all this, though it be as rank as a fox.

(2. 5. 119-21).

This process of metamorphosis (of the basse-cour) echoes that of the real court (i.e. the haute-cour)⁴³ where Orsino is changed into Actæon, the stag devoured by his own hounds, and Olivia compares herself to a bear chained to the stake, attacked by her own desires (3. 1. 117-19).⁴⁴ Malvolio too is transformed into a bear, as Sir Toby says:

To anger him we'll have the bear again, and we'll fool him black and blue, shall we not, Sir Andrew?

(2. 5. 8-10).

What is more, in his comic transformation, Malvolio may well change himself into a grotesque bird before our very eyes, when he says to Olivia: ‘Not black in my mind, though yellow in my legs’ (3. 4. 24-5). This kind of grotesque transformation intersects with the disguises adopted as part of Carnival, where the sober black and white garb of the Puritan is transformed into motley, the garb of the Fool, by the garish addition of yellow; his identity is inverted and subverted by the force of comedy. The imposition of a symbolic animal identity on an individual, as E. Le Roy Ladurie notes, was characteristic of late sixteenth and seventeenth-century Carnival and the person thus disguised was king of his reynage or faction: thus in Romans in 1580, the representative of the upper classes adopted the identity of an Eagle, that of the lower classes, a capon, a castrated cock. There are references to Malvolio's provisional castration in the constriction imposed by cross-gartering; and by exposing him to the force of satire, via visual and mental metaphormosis into a gull, we recognize one of the typical forces unleashed by Carnival, that of seeking to purge society of evil⁴⁵—indeed Maria refers to her gulling as physic (2. 3. 166). Such evil is formulated in Twelfth Night as self-love, hypocrisy, social ambition, elements united, for the gullers and for the play-goers too, in the guise of Puritanism. Indeed in this play deliberate trickery exposes hidden truth, evidence of a dialectic between truth and untruth noted elsewhere by Shakespeare, for instance when Polonius says: ‘Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth’ (Hamlet, 2. 1. 62).

It is possible that this visual transformation of Malvolio also contains a reference to the iconography of melancholy since the OED records as late as 1600 the adjective ‘gull’, meaning yellow:⁴⁶ ‘Thou was full blyth and light of late … / And art now both gool and green’: thus yellow stockings may also be the symbolic markings of a melancholic. Malvolio has therefore been metamorphosed into the comic double of Orsino, whose narcissism he reflects and comically amplifies.

Nevertheless metamorphosis is not the only element borrowed from the performance aspect of gulling as presented in the narratives of underworld literature. Other characteristics include putting on an entertainment for the sake of others—this is what Maria achieves by making Malvolio into ‘a common recreation’. A typical cony-catching story demonstrates how the enjoyment of the spectacle of a victim's discomfiture constitutes an integral part of the action:

A kind of foist performed in St Paul's:

There walked in the middle walk a plain country farmer, a man of good wealth, who had a well-lined purse, which a crew of foists having perceived, their hearts were set on fire to have it, and every one had a fling at him, but all in vain, for he kept his hand close in his pocket, and his purse fast in his fist like a subtle churl. Well, however, it was impossible to do any good with him he was so wary. … At last one of the crew … spoke to fellows … went to the farmer and walked directly before him … swooned … the poor farmer, seeing a proper young gentleman, as he thought, fall dead afore him, held him in his arms … the foist drew the farmer's purse and away … coming to himself, staggered out of St Paul's to join his crew and there boasted of his wit and experience.⁴⁷

The ingenuity required to devise a plan to rob this particular farmer of his money commands the admiration of the co-plotters: a similar concern for and delight in plotting is evident in the play, as Sir Toby says, gleefully: ‘Excellent, I smell a device …’ (2. 3. 156)

The ‘play-acting’ in St Paul's with the elaborate charade of the mock fainting emphasizes the incident's status as a dramatic interlude, and in The Guls Horne-book, Dekker describes how ‘plotting’ is one of the activities which occupy the gallant's leisure hours:

The Duke's Tomb is a sanctuary … There you may spend your legs in winter a whole afternoon: converse, plot, laugh and talk any thing.⁴⁸

In Twelfth Night the plot to gull Malvolio introduces a theatrical mise en abyme, the intradramatic doubling of all the aspects of performance. It is an additional layer of reflexivity in a play whose plot turns upon the confusion engendered by the existence of twins, where narcissism creates its own double(s), and where disguise inverts notions of sameness and difference.

In the sub-plot of Shakespeare's comedy, energy and appetite—characteristics of gulling⁴⁹—are meshed with farce. Although the origins of farce are ancient, it was an essential component of Mystery and Morality plays and flourished in medieval France as a dramatic genre in its own right. In La Farce ou la Machine à rire, Bernadette Rey-Flaud argues that medieval farce was not an intrigue following a linear scheme but a tripartite mechanism, comparable to a syntactic group centred on a verb.⁵⁰ In her view, whatever the specificity of the verb according to the individual farce, its essential significance must be ‘to dupe’. One of the expressions for ‘to dupe’ in Middle French farces, especially La Farce de Maistre Pathelin, was ‘manger de l'oie’.⁵¹ It is striking that the paradigmatic image of the goose contains the same elements as we have seen in ‘gull’, i.e. a bird and the victim of a stratagem. Moreover, ‘gull’ in the dialect of Warwickshire and Worcestershire could, until relatively recently, have the meaning of ‘an unfledged bird, especially a gosling’: a sense found in Shakespeare: ‘for I do fear / When every feather sticks in his own wing / Lord Timon will be left a naked gull, / Which flashes now a phoenix.’ (Timon, 2. 1. 29-32); the word ‘gull’ here is cognate with ‘goose’. In medieval fabliaux, the goose is an object of desire, thus an object of theft, an easy prey and a silly victim. These characteristics are codified in 1597 in a game entered by John Wolfe in the Stationers' Register as A new and most pleasant Game of the Goose (sometimes also known as Fox and Geese).

The association of duping with the image of a bird is therefore common to both gulling literature and farce. If we examine the lexical ramifications of the term ‘gull’ in detail, a further clue to the dramatic syntax of the subplot may emerge. There are earlier attestations of the word where the seabird—a prominent meaning of the term here—figures allusively as an image of appetite. Crowley in A Way to Wealth in 1550 has it that: ‘Men that would have all in their own handes … Comerauntes, gredye gulls, yea men that would eate up mene, women and children’.⁵² This meaning can be extrapolated to include the other sense of ‘gull’, i.e. throat or mouth, and which occurs as a verb, from the French engouler. Palsgrave (1530) glosses ‘I gulle in drinke as great drinkers do’, as ‘je engoule’. There exists a further attestation (1607): ‘O you that gull up the poysoned cup of pleasure’. In the seventeenth century, this sense is apparently always associated with revelry and indulgence in drink: ‘They are roystering and gulling in wine with a dear felicity’⁵³ (a phrase which admirably describes the knights' activities in this play). On a semantic level Sir Toby and Sir Andrew inscribe themselves as ‘gulls’, so that the dramatic and linguistic ramifications of ‘gulling’ reinforce one another in the play.

In the last Act, the limit of comedy is attained with the denunciation of gulling. Of the tricking of Malvolio, Orsino remarks: ‘This savours not much of distraction’ (5. 1. 311), the pun on distraction indicating that he finds not only that the steward is sane but that as Duke and ultimate authority, he fails to appreciate the humour of gulling. Here the designation of the various victims as ‘gulls’ can be seen as the final stage in the dramatic syntax, since for Malvolio and Sir Andrew the term ‘gull’ is the culmination of previous insults: Malvolio refers to himself as the ‘most notorious geck and gull’; and Sir Toby turns on Sir Andrew, stripping away any pretence of friendship, calling him ‘an ass-head, and a coxcomb, and a knave; a thin-faced knave, a gull’ (5. 1. 203-4). The ultimate metamorphosis bears no face, and as such it is the ne plus ultra of grotesque metamorphosis which marks the limit of carnivalesque transformation.

Examination of the context, or of the intertexts, of gulling in Twelfth Night might reveal an instance of what Stephen Greenblatt calls ‘the circulation of social energy’,⁵⁴ when he argues that the theatre appropriates the energy of other kinds of discourse and adapts them for dramatic purposes. I would argue instead that the gulling game has affinities with theatrical representation since the simple narratives of the pamphlet literature enact fictive deceptions, in which comedy is often latent. To use Feste's expression (5. 1. 292) we observe how drama allows vox⁵⁵ to the potential of these narratives, the result being an amplification of the dramatic dimension of gulling and a release of comic energy, as palpable on the twentieth-century stage as in the seventeenth-century playhouse.

But this is not to say that the loss of the Elizabethan context does not, in some sense, weaken the impact of the gulling on the spectator. The playhouse itself was the site of much nefarious activity: cut-purses, pickpockets and prostitutes thrived in the vicinity, if not on the premises themselves. Leah Scragg goes as far as reading into Twelfth Night a meta-textual warning against pickpockets: she argues that Malvolio's reference to Olivia's Cs, Us, Ts and her great Ps spells out the beginning of the word CUTP—, that is, cutpurse.⁵⁶ The bear-baiting imagery associated with the treatment meted out to Malvolio may also allude to the proximity of the Elizabethan playhouse to the Bear Garden. ‘Yon gull Malvolio’ may then be designated as the most notorious of gulls, but certain of those looking on are gulled too, so the text reflexively implies that being a spectator to a gulling is to run the risk of becoming a gull oneself. Indeed the onstage gulling may have held a mirror up to cozenings in progress within the confines of the playhouse. Moreover, if the spectator has been led to believe in the innocuousness of gulling on account of its place in the comic underplot, the final moments of the play when Malvolio departs vowing ‘I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you’ (5. 1. 374) demonstrate that gulling takes comedy to its limit, and that in fact the playgoer may have been gulled into an assumption of its inoffensiveness.

In Twelfth Night gulling is allied with farce, but is also a means of exposing the truth. Malvolio, the pious Puritan, is revealed as an abominable hypocrite and a libidinous arriviste. But Maria is replaced by Feste as the master of the game, and the ‘sportful malice’ turns its perpetrators into sadistic persecutors in its latter stages, and demonstrates that gulling may unleash evil impulses in apparently good-natured characters. Malvolio has committed no crime, he is appreciated by Olivia for the quality of his stewardship and, if his humiliation may appear as poetic justice, his imprisonment and virtual torture cannot be justified; as Hazlitt remarks, ‘poor Malvolio's treatment is a little hard’.⁵⁷ It has often been observed that Malvolio's refusal to participate in the festive ending points to the tragic potential of gulling, but the corrupting influence of the ‘sport’ on its agents passes without comment.

The darker implications of this ostensibly ludic activity may anticipate the Machiavellian appropriation of the sport by Iago in Othello (1604). Here there is but a single player, an infinitely more sinister master of the game than Maria, who nevertheless acquires diabolic associations by setting events in motion, being apostrophized as ‘thou most excellent devil of wit’ (2. 5. 199-200). But in Othello, the pleasure of contrivance is a private, perverted pleasure experienced only by Iago, whose gullings exceed the force of the beffa in their savagery. Like his counterparts, Iago takes delight in gulling, but unlike them, he revels in evil for its own sake; there is no satisfactory explanation for his obsessive desire to destroy, whereas we understand, and even sympathize with, the plotters' desire for revenge on Malvolio. Iago's prey, Othello, although not without failings, does not deserve to be cozened into murdering his wife, forfeiting his self-respect and taking his own life; thus the balance of sympathy is wholly on the side of the victims in this play, and the consequences of cozening result in the deaths of most protagonists. In Twelfth Night Malvolio's predicament awakens only tardy and partial sympathy and his refusal to join in the general celebration does not have any incidence on the comic dénouement; he emerges unscathed and unchanged from the gulling game. But the gulling of Malvolio (and even of Sir Andrew Aguecheek) has revealed that this is potentially, if not necessarily, a cruel game. Othello undergoes tragic metamorphosis, the efficient soldier being transformed into a jealous monster, and the moment of anagnorisis is reached when (as in Twelfth Night) the victim is called a ‘gull’ to his face. Emilia says to Othello:

                                                            O gull, O dolt,
As ignorant as dirt! …

(Othello, 5. 2. 170-1)

The depiction of gulling in Twelfth Night progressively reveals its latent forces, for the game's centripetal energy corrupts the players: Feste's sadistic treatment of Malvolio in the dark contrasts with Maria's innocent enjoyment of a ridiculous spectacle. In Othello, the latent energy of gulling is unleashed and we witness the extent of its capacity for destruction. But the game's forces, multiple trajectories and dramatic syntax are identifiably the same in both plays. Hence the difference between ‘comic’ and ‘tragic’ gulling as exemplified by Twelfth Night and Othello is one of emphasis and not of essence.

Notes

1. G. Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 2 (1958), p. 287, says: ‘If we believe that Shakespeare used Gl'Ingannati as a source we may also believe that he took his title from a phrase in its prologue.’ However, he fails to make the connection between the sense of beffana and the comic gullings which figure in Twelfth Night: ‘Yet even if Shakespeare had read the passage and had recognized “la notte di beffana” as meaning “Twelfth Night”, there is nothing in the context of that prologue to lead him towards choosing this title for his comedy.’

2. In 1602 John Manningham's comments record his impression of the gulling of Malvolio being the play's most memorable feature; see The Diary of John Manningham of the Middle Temple (1602-3), edited by Robert Parker Sorlien (1976), p. 48. Many modern critics have concurred with the view that Malvolio is the play's central attraction, for example, Mark Van Doren, ‘The center is Malvolio’, Shakespeare (1939), p. 169 and Milton Crane, ‘Twelfth Night and Shakespearean Comedy’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 6 (1955). For a counter-view, see Harold Jenkins, Shakespeare's ‘Twelfth Night’ (Rice Institute Pamphlet 45, 1958-9), pp. 19-42. All references to Twelfth Night are taken from The Complete Oxford Shakespeare, edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford, 1986).

3. For an account of the theatrical history of Malvolio's success, see Twelfth Night, The Cambridge Shakespeare, edited by Elizabeth Story Donno (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 28-33.

4. Leonard Digges' much quoted commendatory verses in the Preface to Poems: Written by Wil. Shakespeare. Gent (London, 1640).

5. Quoted by E. Story Donno, Twelfth Night, p. 8. The play was performed before Charles I at Whitehall on 2 February, 1631.

6. Gāmini Salgādo, The Elizabethan Underworld, repr. Alan Sutton Publishing Company (Gloucestershire, 1995), p. 26.

7. On the problem of the Elizabethan representation of the underworld, see A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560-1640 (London, 1985).

8. Bertrand Evans, ‘The Fruits of the Sport’ in Shakespeare's Comedies (Oxford, 1960), p. 130: ‘Of the race of Bottom, Sir Andrew would be at a disadvantage if he were not being gulled; being gulled, he is doubly “out”.’

9. Nashe, in The Terrors of the Night (1594), qualifies the gull in the following terms: ‘Lives there anie such slowe yce-brained, beefe-witted gull’ (OED, sb. 3, 1., quoted from Grosart, 111, 257) and we note that Andrew Aguecheek inadvertently advertises his own gullibility by applying the epithet ‘beef-witted’ to himself: ‘I am a great eater of beef, and I believe that does harm to my wit’; to which Sir Toby replies: ‘No question’ (1. 3. 80-1).

10. Evans, ‘The Fruits of the Sport’, in Shakespeare's Comedies, p. 135.

11. According to B. Rey-Flaud, La Farce ou la Machine à rire. Théorie d'un genre dramatique 1450-1550. Droz (Geneva, 1984), the former is ‘un bon tour pour rire’ (a good-natured trick to arouse laughter), and the latter ‘un mauvais tour’ … ‘pièce au déroulement complexe, articulée sur une tromperie fondée sur le jeu d'un mécanisme déterminant strictement les rapports entre les personnages’ (a nasty trick … whose progression is complex, involving a deception based on the action of a mechanism determining the relations between characters); p. 218, n. 50. The beffa is typically used to obtain reparation for insult or injury, as D. Boillet notes in ‘L'usage circonspect de la beffa dans le Novelino de Masuccio Salernitano’, Formes et significations de la ‘Beffa’ dans la littérature italienne de la Renaissance, 2 vols. (Paris, 1972-5) vol. 2, p. 101. See also K. M. Lea, Italian Popular Comedy. A Study in the Commedia dell'arte 1560-1620 with special reference to the English Stage, 2 vols. (New York, 1962).

12. J. W. Draper, The ‘Twelfth Night’ of Shakespeare's Audience (Stanford and London, 1950), see the chapter on ‘Mistress Mary’, pp. 70-85.

13. Draper, The ‘Twelfth Night’ of Shakespeare's Audience: ‘Twelfth Night is rather the comedy of the social struggles of the time. Orsino wishes to fulfill his duty as head of the house and prolong his family line by a suitable marriage; Maria wants the security and dignity of marriage to a gentleman—a difficult accomplishment in view of her lack of dowry. Feste and Sir Toby want the security of future food and lodging; Viola and Sebastian hope to reassume their doffed coronets; and Sir Andrew and Malvolio are arrant social climbers … In short, this is Shakespeare's play of social security’, pp. 249-50.

14. Leo Salingar, Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy (Cambridge, 1974), p. 84: ‘The lesson of classical “art” for the comic playwright was the pleasure of contrivance. And the other leading motif Roman comedy, readopted and constantly diversified by Shakespeare and his renaissance predecessors, was deception—the irony of the trickster.’

15. See The Black Book's Messenger by Dekker where Ned Browne designates ‘the fool that is caught, the bird’, in A. V. Judges, The Elizabethan Underworld (London, 1930, repr. 1965), p. 250.

16. This may be another example of what L. G. Salingar calls ‘points of contact between characters’ which is a constant theme in the play; ‘The Design of Twelfth Night’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 9 (1958), 117-39.

17. I have reproduced the title as found in the original printing. In The Gull's Hornbook, edited by E. D. Pendry, in Thomas Dekker: ‘The Wonderful Year’, ‘The Gull's Hornbook’, ‘Penny-Wise, Pound-Foolish’, ‘English Villanies Discovered by Lantern and Candelight’ and Selected Writings’ (London, 1967), the title-page gives ‘The Gvls Horne-book’ (p. 67) showing that the editor's normalizing techniques have operated a grammatical choice.

18. Salgādo, The Elizabethan Underworld, p. 111.

19. See Draper, The ‘Twelfth Night’ of Shakespeare's Audience, the chapter ‘Sir Toby Belch’, pp. 26-7.

20. S. T. Bindoff, Tudor England (Harmondsworth, 1950, repr. 1967), pp. 34-8.

21. Draper in The ‘Twelfth Night’ of Shakespeare's Audience, chapter on ‘Sir Andrew Aguecheek’, comments on the ‘fellowship between Sir Toby and this foolish knight, the archetype of the contemporary dupe’: ‘Such gulls as Sir Andrew feathered the nests of many a rare bird in Elizabethan London’, p. 61.

22. The Gull's Hornbook, p. 93.

23. Ibid., p. 86.

24. Ibid., p. 105.

25. Ibid., p. 105-6.

26. Ibid., p. 97.

27. OED, v.

28. Ibid., 1.

29. A Manifest Detection of the most vile and detestable use of Dice-play, and other practices like the same; A Mirror very necessary for all young gentlemen suddenly enabled by worldly abundance to look in. Newly set forth for their behoof, by Gilbert Walker (1552), in A. V. Judges, p. 35. For comprehensive accounts of underworld literature see E. D. Pendry, Four Pamphlets, Stratford-upon-Avon Library (London, 1967), the collections of Frank W. Chandler, The Literature of Roguery, 2 vols. (Boston, 1907); and Frank Aydelotte, Elizabethan Rogues and Vagabonds (Oxford, 1913).

30. Judges, A Manifest Detection, in The Elizabethan Underworld, p. 36.

31. Ibid., p. 47.

32. Greene, The Art of Cony-Catching in Judges, The Elizabethan Underworld, p. 123.

33. Ibid., p. 124.

34. Ibid., p. 125.

35. Ibid., p. 125.

36. A Manifest Detection: ‘the barnard go so far beyond him in cunning (i.e the taker-up), as doth the sun's summer brightness exceed the glimmering light of the winter stars’ (in Judges, The Elizabethan Underworld, p. 47). This is an apt description of Maria's mastery of the game. A barnacle is, of course, a species of wild goose, but it seems probable that both expressions for this virtuoso role in the game are derived from the French verb, berner, to dupe.

37. Greene, A Notable Discovery of Cosenage: ‘High law is robbing by the highway side; sacking law is lechery; cheating law is play at false dice, cross-biting law is cozenage by whores; cony-catching law is cozenage by cards; figging law is cutting of purses and picking of pockets, etc.’ in Judges, The Elizabethan Underworld, p. 135.

38. Greene, The Second Part of Cony-Catching, in Judges, The Elizabethan Underworld, pp. 161-2.

39. Greene, The Black Book's Messenger, in Judges, The Elizabethan Underworld, p. 250.

40. Dekker, Thomas, English Villanies Discovered by Lantern and Candelight, ed. by E. D. Pendry, Stratford-upon-Avon Library (London, 1967) p. 205.

41. OED: 3. fig. b. slang: ‘one who lets himself be swindled’.

42. Cf. Dekker, The Black Book's Messenger: ‘He that draws the fish to the bait [is] the beater’, in Judges, The Elizabethan Underworld, p. 250.

43. See the analogy with the Carnival of Romans where social rank was replicated by the variety of birds adopted as disguises: the bourgeoisie assumes the identity of birds capable of flight, whereas the vulgar elements are earth-bound animals: Le Roy Ladurie, Le Carnaval de Romans: De la Chandeleur au mercredi des Cendres 1579-1580 (Paris, 1979), p. 240.

44. Stephen Dickey, ‘Shakespeare's Mastiff Comedy’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 42 (1991), 225-75.

45. See Le Roy Ladurie, Le Carnaval de Romans, p. 345.

46. OED, ‘gull’, A. Obs.

47. The Second Part of Cony-Catching, in Judges, The Elizabethan Underworld, pp. 167-8. This is a condensed quotation of the incident as indicated.

48. The Gull's Hornbook, p. 90.

49. In Figures théâtrales: spectacle et société, edited by F. Decroisette and Elie Konigson (Paris, 1970), B. Faure considers that the dynamic of farce is determined by the will for money, food and sex.

50. B. Rey-Flaud, La Farce ou la Machine à rire: ‘on voit que le seul moment dynamique, celui qui engendre l'action, est constitué par la farce, qui fonctionne comme un verbe, porteur de l'action’ (one notes that the only dynamic moment, which starts up the action, is constituted by farce, which functions like a verb, the part of speech which signifies action), p. 231.

51. Mario Roques, ‘Notes sur Maistre Pathelin’, Romania, 57 (1931) 548-60, sees the meaning of manger de l'oie to be de faire moquer de soi (to be an object of derision), p. 554.

52. OED ‘gull’ n.¹ b.

53. OED ‘gull’ v.¹ Obs. 1. trans.

54. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford, 1988). Although Greenblatt states that ‘in a Caveat for Common Cursitors (and in much of the cony-catching literature of the period in England and France) printing is represented in the text itself as a force for social order and the detection of criminal fraud’, pp. 50-1.

55. In the Arden edition of Twelfth Night, ‘allow vox’ is glossed by J. M. Lothian and T. W. Craik as ‘permit me to use the appropriate voice’ (London), 1975.

56. L. Scragg, ‘“Her Cs, her Us and her Ts”: Why's That? A New Reply’, Review of English Studies, 42 (1991), 1-16.

57. W. Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, 1817, quoted in Twelfe Night, or What You Will, edited by Horace Howard Furness, A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare (Philadelphia and London, 1901), pp. 378-9.