SOURCE: Kerrigan, John. “Secrecy and Gossip in Twelfth Night.” Shakespeare Survey 50 (1997): 65-80.

[In the following essay, Kerrigan studies Twelfth Night within the context of the Renaissance conventions regarding secrecy and gossip, finding that gossip is a means—both in early modern society and in the play—of maintaining social bonds. Kerrigan also discusses the affinity between Cesario and Malvolio, noting that as servants both characters are expected to be discreet.]

Renaissance secrecy is no longer quite as secret as it was. Art historians and iconologists have returned to the myths and emblems explored by Panofsky and Edgar Wind, and reassessed (often sceptically) their claims to hermetic wisdom. Thanks to Jonathan Goldberg and Richard Rambuss, we now have a better understanding of the early modern English secretary,¹ and of how his pen could produce, in Lois Potter's phrase, Secret Rites and Secret Writing.² Not just in popular biographies of Marlowe and Shakespeare,³ but in such Foucauldian accounts of high culture as John Michael Archer's Sovereignty and Intelligence,⁴ the world of Renaissance espionage is being analysed afresh. William W. E. Slights has written at useful length about conspiracy, fraud and censorship in middle-period Jonson.⁵ And, though the tide of Puttenham studies has now begun to ebb, students of Elizabethan England are still profiting from the work done by Daniel Javitch and Frank Whigham⁶ on what The Arte of English Poesie calls ‘false semblant’ or ‘the Courtly figure Allegoria’⁷—a line of enquiry which leads back to the civilized dissimulation advocated by Castiglione, but also to the politic ruthlessness of ‘l'art machiavélien d'être secret’.⁸

These investigations have not advanced in a state of mutual ignorance, but they have, inevitably, suffered from a degree of exclusive specialism. What interests me, on the other hand, is how different modes of concealment operated together. Certainly, I have found it impossible, in thinking about Twelfth Night, to separate iconography from secretarial inscription (as when Malvolio unpicks the Lucrece seal of silence on Maria's riddling letter), or to divorce Sebastian's intelligence-gathering, among ‘the memorials and the things of fame’ in Illyria,⁹ from that rhetorical discretion in him which is equally recommended in courtesy literature.¹⁰ At the same time, Twelfth Night pushes one's perception of Renaissance secrecy beyond the usual categories. It makes one return, for instance, to courtesy literature to notice what it says about that irregular but ubiquitous practice, the circulation of secrets as gossip, and to wonder how the gendered speech-patterns which Castiglione and his successors discuss might bear on the reticences and self-concealments involved in the construction of sexual identity.

By gesturing towards social practice, I am, of course, begging questions, and it is worth saying, at once, that Elizabethan London was not, in my view, full of cross-dressed maidens in love with Dukes. There is plainly much to be said against the current historicist tendency to discount the made uniqueness of particular Shakespearian play-scripts for the sake of readily meshing them with circumstantial contexts. Formalist criticism had its drawbacks, but its respect for the artful integrity—for the shifting, secret coherence—of such elusive works as Twelfth Night remains, in my view, admirable. On the other hand, there is no doubt that, as Richard Wilson (among others) has shown with As You Like It,¹¹ mature Shakespearian comedy goes much further in internalizing and articulating political conflict than traditional criticism realized. Good productions of Twelfth Night—such as John Barton's in 1969—have always been alert to the tensions which arise between kin-status and the dignity of office (Sir Toby vs. Malvolio), to the insecurity of a figure like Maria, whose social rank is ambiguous, and to the importance, in Illyria, of jewels and cash changing hands. Above all, in this connection, Twelfth Night is interested in service. It explores the fraught relations which often held, in early modern households, between employment and eroticism. This dialectic is most active in the Viola-Orsino plot,¹² but it also significantly contributes to the misfortunes of Malvolio. Too often, critics view his gulling as an incidental intrigue. When he asks his mistress, however, in Act 5, ‘tell me, in the modesty of honour, / Why you have given me such clear lights of favour’ (5.1.334-5), he lands on a complex word which catches his outraged feeling that his preferment (both real and imaginary) cannot have stemmed from nothing in Olivia's heart. The play punishes the steward for believing that the more precisely he obeys his mistress's wishes the more he will deserve her favour (in every sense), even while it allows, in Cesario/Viola's relations with Orsino, a ripening into love of what is erotically problematic in Elizabethan ideas of service.

One way of developing these claims is to make an oblique approach to Twelfth Night through the autobiography of Thomas Whythorne: the Tudor poet and musician who was employed in a series of noble households before his death in 1596. Though the memoir which he compiled in the late 1570s lacks great events, it is altogether enthralling because of its attentiveness to social detail, its intricacy of self-criticism and rationalization, and its almost neurotic sensitivity to the role of flirtation, deceit and gossip in the politics of favour. Like Gascoigne's Adventures of Master F. J.—a work which probably suggested to Whythorne how his occasional poems could be linked by commentary and narrative—the book of songs and sonnets, with long discourses set with them is particularly alive to the use and abuse of secrecy. Thus, as autobiographical writing starts to emerge from the commonplaces which begin the memoir, Whythorne describes a friend who once told a woman ‘the very secrets that were hidden in his heart’, only for her to ‘blaz[e] abroad that which he had told her to keep in secret’.¹³ Similarly, the first of many love intrigues in which he played a part involves a girl who wooed him by leaving a note threaded through the strings of his gittern. His typically wary reply praised her for proceeding ‘secretly’, but gossip made the affair ‘known all about the house’ and the girl was promptly discharged (pp. 22-3). Throughout his memoir, Whythorne describes situations in which secrecy and dissimulation shadow-box with each other and attempt to evade the tattling which his epigram, ‘Of secret things’, calls ‘blab’ (p. 224).

The episode which bears most interestingly on Twelfth Night—though it can only be loosely contextual—comes shortly after the dismissal of the gittern girl, while Whythorne was still at the age which he calls ‘adolescency’ (p. 11). Like the young Cesario waiting upon Olivia, Whythorne found his way to the household of a beautiful young widow. Even before he accepted a position as her tutor and ‘servingman’, he was wary of enduring ‘the life of a water-spaniel, that must be at commandment to fetch or bring here, or carry there’ (p. 28). His resentment mounted when he discovered how manipulative his mistress could be. Whythorne vividly describes the sort of emotional pressure which could be brought to bear on a man whose position as a servant resembled that of a biddable suitor:

Many times when I was not nigh unto her, although she had appointed me to wait on her cup when she sat at meat, she would bid me come nigher unto her. And therewithal scoffingly she would say to those that were with her, ‘I would fain have my man to be in love with me, for then he would not be thus far from me, but would be always at mine elbow.’ And then would she sometimes put a piece of good meat and bread on her trencher, and forthwith bid me give her a clean trencher, for the which I should have that of hers with the bread and meat on it.

(p. 29)

The problem for Whythorne, however—as he chooses to remember the situation—was that, while he disliked these coercive games, he had to flirt with a mistress towards whom he was clearly attracted (not least in her exercise of power) because ‘open contempt might breed such secret hate in her toward me’ (p. 30). Innured, like F. J., to duplicity, and hoping for advancement, he recalls deciding that, ‘if she did dissemble, I, to requite her, thought that to dissemble with a dissembler was no dissimulation … But and if she meant good will indeed, then I was not willing to lose it, because of the commodities that might be gotten by such a one as she, either by marriage or otherwise’ (pp. 30-1). As a result, when the widow told him ‘how she would have me to apparel myself, as of what stuff, and how she would have it made’ (though cross-gartering is not specified), he ‘feathered his nest’ by accepting money from her to buy clothes and other finery (p. 32). He also wrote to her in secret, and was, like Malvolio, deceived by an encouraging letter which, he later discovered, had been written by her ‘waiting gentlewoman’ (p. 34). By now, of course, gossip was rife (the attempt at secrecy assured that)—‘our affairs were not so closely handled but they were espied and much talked of in the house’ (p. 36)—and the problem of his mistress having to disguise any signs of love which might, in themselves, be dissimulated, added to Whythorne's difficulty in deciding whether she could be won. The ‘comical’ affair (as he calls it) reached its climax when he appeared before her, not exactly in yellow stockings, but in ‘garments of russet colour (the which colour signifieth the wearer thereof to have hope). And one time I did wear hops in my hat also; the which when my mistress had espied, she in a few scoffing words told me that the wearing of hops did but show that I should hope without that which I hoped for’ (pp. 40-1). Thanks to his quibbling wit, Whythorne was able to deflect this rebuff, but his suit thereafter cooled.

If one moves too hastily from this material across to Viola and Malvolio, the contrasts are overwhelming. Where Whythorne describes his affair in such calculating and duplicitous terms that even an impression of mutual vulnerability cannot offset his cynicism, Twelfth Night shows Viola concealing what she is to persist in faithful service. Unlike Rosalind, who seems, at least initially, pleased by the experimental scope which men's attire affords, she speaks of frustration and self-division, and the dissembling which her disguise entails is not embraced with relish. Malvolio, rather similarly, is constrained by the habit he adopts. His alacrity in putting on yellow stockings may smack of the self-promotion which infuriates Sir Toby, but his inability to see (as Whythorne instantly would) that he is being made a fool of stems as much from his eagerness to obey Olivia as from ingrown pride. Yet these differences between the memoir and Twelfth Night should not distract attention from their shared early modern fascination with the ambiguities of service, and their interest in how secrecy relates to what Cesario calls ‘babbling gossip’ (1.5.277).

Certainly these issues are prominent in Viola's opening scene. When she questions the Captain about Illyria, he can tell her of the Duke's love for Olivia—that obsession of his ‘secret soul’ (below, p. 72)—because ‘murmur’ has put it about. ‘What great ones do,’ he observes, ‘the less will prattle of’ (1.2.32-3). Gossip is equally active around the countess's reclusive life. The Captain knows of her resistance to Orsino because, again, of report: ‘(They say) she hath abjur'd the company / And sight of men’ (40-1). Olivia's withdrawal into mourning for the death of her father and brother naturally attracts Viola, because she fears herself equally bereft, and she cries out for a position in her household which she imagines will bring emotional consonance: ‘O that I serv'd that lady’ (41). Though the motif is merely incipient, the play is beginning its exploration of the knot which ties employment to love. Hence the Captain's reply, ‘That were hard to compass, / Because she will admit no kind of suit, / No, not the Duke's’ (44-6), where the idea of suing to serve is inextricable from a lover's suit.

In Shakespeare's chief source, Barnabe Riche's novella ‘Of Apolonius and Silla’, the Captain is a villain whose designs on Silla's virtue are only foiled by tempest and shipwreck. Early audiences of Twelfth Night may or may not have recalled this when they saw Viola come on stage with the Captain, but Shakespeare alludes, through the heroine, to the possibility that he might be as he is in Riche:

There is a fair behaviour in thee, Captain;
And though that nature with a beauteous wall
Doth oft close in pollution, yet of thee
I will believe thou hast a mind that suits
With this thy fair and outward character.
I prithee (and I'll pay thee bounteously)
Conceal me what I am, and be my aid
For such disguise as haply shall become
The form of my intent.

(47-55)

This is touchingly complex because Viola's youthful moralism about appearances slips into an equally youthful trust, while she raises doubts about dissimulation in the same breath as she proposes concealment. But their deeper interest lies in their showing us how secrets are made: produced through interaction with possible or actual disclosure. For what is only known to yourself cannot be a secret, except in so far as its potential for disclosure anticipates that disclosure, or in so far as you might feel (as Viola/Cesario will later feel) that you are sharing the secret with your self as with another person.

Unlike Silla, Viola does not explicitly disguise herself in men's clothes to avoid sexual predators. While she may share this motive, the scene points towards a practical desire to secure a court position and an impulse to escape from herself. It is as though, by becoming Cesario, she hoped to leave Viola to grieve in secret. That is, paradoxically, why her suit to serve the Duke can resemble Olivia's immurement. Just as the countess resolves to withdraw into a nun's asexuality, and thus becomes a ‘cloistress’ (1.1.28), so Viola proposes to be a eunuch—if not for the kingdom of heaven, then at least to sing at court. ‘I'll serve this duke’, she says:

Thou shalt present me as an eunuch to him.
It may be worth thy pains; for I can sing,
And speak to him in many sorts of music,
That will allow me very worth his service.

(55-9)

These lines have baffled editors not least because they seem to go from singing to speech but then return to music. What Viola is saying, however, in a play which is much concerned with that branch of rhetoric which Feste calls vox (5.1.295), is that she is not only musically competent but has the flexible pronunciatio of a courtier. ‘The pleasure of speech,’ writes Stefan Guazzo, in Pettie's 1581 translation of The Civile Conversation, ‘so wel as of Musicke, proceedeth of the chaunge of the voyce, yea … the change of the voice, like an instrument of divers strings, is verie acceptable, and easeth both the hearer and the speaker’.¹⁴ ‘If Nature haue denied you a tunable accent,’ James Cleland urges in Hρω-[b.pi ][b.alpha ]ι[b.delta ]ει[b.alpha ], or The Institution of a Young Noble Man (1607), ‘studie to amend it by art the best yee maie’ (p. 186). Interestingly, when Viola concludes the scene by urging ‘silence’ on the Captain (61), he sustains her rhetorical concerns by promising to avoid the speech-style which Thomas Whythorne calls ‘blab’: ‘Be you his eunuch, and your mute I'll be: / When my tongue blabs, then let mine eyes not see’ (62-3).

At once the blabbers enter, as Maria, Sir Toby and, a few lines later, Sir Andrew come on stage. Maria is eager for Toby to avoid expulsion from Olivia's household by moderating his behaviour, but when she urges, ‘confine yourself within the modest limits of order’, he replies: ‘I'll confine myself no finer than I am’ (I.3.8-10). We have by this point become so accustomed to characters seeking confinement—Orsino lying ‘canopied with bowers’ (I.1.41), the countess's enclosure in mourning—that Toby's quibbling excess, as he sprawls through the play's first prose dialogue, is bound to appeal. As the scene goes on, however, the superb inconsequentiality of Maria's wit, when she toys with Sir Andrew, and his stupefying inability to get a grip on language, test the audience's patience. We feel assailed as well as amused by the prattle and networking chat which conduct books typically chastise by citing Plutarch's De Garrulitate. This challenge to the audience mounts. As the RSC director John Caird has noted, it creates problems in production that Sir Toby ‘goes on and on and on’ during Acts 2 and 3.¹⁵ Even in I.3, Shakespeare points up the garrulity of networking. Sir Andrew's reputation has reached Maria, for instance, from those she refers to as ‘the prudent’ and Toby calls ‘scoundrels and subtractors’ (32-5). Where report is offered sceptically by the Captain, gossip is here the stuff of life.

Anthropological work on gossip has stressed the importance of verbal trivia in maintaining social bonds. Max Gluckman, for instance, argues that scandalous chat draws participants together while serving to exclude others because access to conversation depends on inside knowledge. ‘The right to gossip about certain people is’, he says, ‘a privilege which is only extended to a person when he or she is accepted as a member of a group.’¹⁶ This account can be squared with the way the lighter people network in Twelfth Night in opposition to the aloof Malvolio. But Gluckman's critics are right to insist that gossiping is by no means always collective, and that a group can turn out, once inspected, to be full of conversational partitions.¹⁷ In that sense, the garrulous in Twelfth Night form an interestingly fractious set, with Fabian and Feste as satellites, and Sir Toby prepared to bamboozle Andrew with what sounds like friendly chat, in ways which make it easier for him to scorn and reject him in Act 5. But Sir Andrew is not the only one left behind in the conversational flow. Everyone who works on gossip would agree that the morsels of information and rumour which it retails must have some element of obscurity, some secret component worth disclosing, since they would otherwise not be passed on. Twelfth Night respects this principle to the point, almost, of defiance, by including material which may well have been written to exclude early audiences from what the play's in-crowd knows, and which certainly excludes us now. Who, for instance, is Mistress Mall, and why should we care about her picture?

In the drinking scene of Act 2, the obscurities of prattling accumulate. What is Sir Toby on about when he says, ‘My lady's a Cataian, we are politicians, Malvolio's a Peg-a-Ramsey’ (2.3.76-7)? The clown calls this ‘admirable fooling’ (81), and it does, indeed, resemble the patter of Feste, which rings in Andrew's empty head, and which he now babbles out: ‘thou wast in very gracious fooling last night, when thou spok'st of Pigrogromitus, of the Vapians passing the equinoctial of Queubus’ (22-4). This replication of proliferating nonsense recalls Plutarch's comparison of gossip to the porch or gallery at Olympia which ‘from one voice by sundry reflections and reverberations … rendered seven ecchoes’. When speech comes ‘to the eares of a babbler,’ he says, ‘it resoundeth again on every side … insomuch, as a man may well say: That the conducts and passages of their hearing reach not to the braine … but onely to their tongue.’¹⁸ Babbling of this sort climaxes in the drinking scene for obvious reasons. It hardly needs Plutarch to tell us (though he does so more than once) that drunkenness provokes ‘much babling and foolish prattle’ (p. 194). What we can misunderstand, historically, is that the folly of babbling was—partly because of Plutarch—so routinely associated with drink that when a commentator such as Thomas Wright seeks to explain garrulity, he gravitates to talk of ‘foolery’ and ale-house metaphors: ‘he that wil poure foorth all he conceiueth, deliuereth dregges with drinke, and as for the most part, presently men apprehend more folly than wisdom, so he that sodainely vttereth all he vnderstandeth, blabeth forth moore froath than good liquor’.¹⁹ This is the mixture of assumptions which Malvolio provocatively ignites when he stalks in and rebukes the drinkers for choosing ‘to gabble like tinkers’ (88-9).

It should now be clear why the Captain's word ‘blab’ refers as much to a style of speech as to the betrayal of secrets. Early modern accounts of the psychology and practice of gossip start, as it were, from rhetoric.²⁰ The blabber was a verbal incontinent, whose itch to gabble whatever was in his mind would lead (as Plutarch warned) to rash disclosure. Avoid making friends, advises Wright, with the ‘blabbish, and … indiscreet’ because they will not ‘keep secret, or conserue thy credit, and so with one breath they blow all away’ (pp. 119-20). The corresponding virtue to this vice was called ‘discretion’—a word which, symptomatically, has etymological and semantic links with ‘secrecy’.²¹ Time and again, in conduct books, gentlemen are advised to be discreet. The courtier, Castiglione says, ‘shall be no carier about of trifling newes … He shall be no babbler [but keep] alwayes within his boundes.’²² In Guazzo, who is almost anticourtly, at moments, in his mistrust of easy eloquence,²³ there is an equally firm resistance to what Cleland calls ‘pratling’ and ‘Babling’ (p. 189). ‘Blaze neuer anie mans secret,’ Cleland says, ‘nor speake of that which discretion commandeth you to conceale, albeit it was not commended to your silence’ (p. 190).

This has a gendered aspect, in that, while gentlemen are encouraged discreetly to converse, women are incited to a discretion which can be absolute. It is the anti-feminist Lord Gaspar who maintains, in Castiglione, ‘that the verye same rules that are given for the Courtier, serve also for the woman’, and the sympathetic Julian²⁴ who argues that ‘in her factions, maners, woordes, gestures and conversation (me thinke) the woman ought to be muche unlike the man’ (pp. 215-16). Like the courtier, he argues, women should be ‘discreete’ and avoid ‘babblinge’, but they should concentrate, further, on cultivating ‘sweetnesse’ and reticence (pp. 216-18). English writers were as confident as Guazzo that ‘a young man is to be blamed, which will talke like an olde man, and a woman which will speake like a man’ (1, p. 169). Nor was it just the fools, including Sir John Daw in Epicoene, who believed that ‘Silence in woman is like speech in man.’²⁵ In The English Gentlewoman (1631), Richard Brathwait pushes his praise of ‘Discretion’ to the point of insisting that ‘bashfull silence is an ornament’ in women (p. 89). Against the background of a prejudice which assumed (as it still does) that women are more garrulous than men,²⁶ he writes: ‘It suites not with her honour, for a young woman to be prolocutor. But especially, when either men are in presence, or ancient Matrons, to whom shee owes a ciuill reuerence, it will become her to tip her tongue with silence’ (ibid.).

In ‘The Table’ to The English Gentlewoman, Brathwait cites the apothegm, ‘“Violets, though they grow low and neare the earth, smell sweetest: and Honour appeares the fullest of beauty, when she is humblest”’ (††2). As Gerard's Herball confirms,²⁷ the Latin word ‘Viola’ was used in Elizabethan England as another name for the violet, a flower which, in general, was associated with modesty. What Cesario inherits from Viola is the discretion which a female upbringing made second nature to gentlewomen. What he gains, as it were, over Viola is permission to speak out—even when men are present. These claims are not in conflict with traditional accounts of the role, but they do, I think, point up the hybridity of Viola's performance. To think about her in relation to courtesy literature is to notice those comical moments when she overplays the courtly rhetoric—as when Cesario impresses Sir Andrew (always a bad sign) by praying for the heavens to ‘rain odours’ on Olivia, or, more oddly, when Andrew surprises us by speaking French, and exchanges such exquisite salutations with Cesario that both are satirically construed.²⁸ As strikingly, to look at Viola in the light of Guazzo, Cleland and other conduct writers is to recognize the acute importance of discretion in the play.

While describing his affair with the widow, Whythorne glumly notes: ‘It is a common matter among servants, … if any one of them be in favour with their masters or mistresses above the rest, by and by all the rest of the servants will envy him or her, and seek all the means and ways that they can imagine to bring them out of credit’ (p. 36). Again, it would be wrong to read too directly from this into Twelfth Night. Because critics have neglected the politics of favour, however, they have missed the edginess of Viola's first exchange as Cesario, when s/he comes on stage with Valentine, who was trusted, in I.1, with the task of visiting Olivia, but who is now losing his influence. ‘If the Duke continue these favours towards you,’ Valentine says, ‘you are like to be much advanced: he hath known you but three days, and already you are no stranger.’ This could be spoken neutrally, but Cesario's reply indicates that the actor playing Valentine should give his words some salt: ‘You either fear his humour, or my negligence, that you call in question the continuance of his love. Is he inconstant, sir, in his favours?’ (I.4.1-7). The question is fascinatingly pitched, given the erotic range of ‘favour’, since the constancy which Cesario hopes for in his master is not one which Viola, who now loves the Duke, would unambiguously welcome—at least in Orsino's relations with Olivia.

One thing is clear immediately, though: Valentine is right to envy Cesario's progress with Orsino. As soon as the Duke appears, his cry is for Cesario, and for the rest to stand ‘aloof’ (12). Drawing his servant down-stage, no doubt, into the theatre-space which signifies and facilitates intimate conversation, he says:

                                                                                                                        Cesario,
Thou know'st no less but all: I have unclasp'd
To thee the book even of my secret soul.
Therefore, good youth, address thy gait unto her,
Be not denied access …

(12-16)

In the Italian comedy Gl'Ingannati—a probable source for Twelfth Night—the Viola-figure says to Clemenzia, when asked why she attends her lover in disguise, ‘Do you think a woman in love is unhappy to see her beloved continually, to speak to him, touch him, hear his secrets … ?’²⁹ Shakespeare's emphasis is more on the intimacies of disclosure than on the content of those ‘secrets’ which are, in any case, the stuff of Illyrian gossip. This is not a process which can be represented, entirely, through dialogue. It depends on proximity and touch between actors, and on the boy or woman playing Cesario having a demeanour which promises that discretion described in Bacon's ‘Of Simulation and Dissimulation’: ‘the Secret Man, heareth many Confessions; For who will open himselfe, to a Blab or a Babler? But if a man be thought Secret, it inviteth Discoverie.’³⁰

Cesario gains access to Olivia by means of stubborn pertness, but his suit is then advanced because he is a ‘Secret Man’. As Bacon adds, with worldly acumen: ‘Mysteries are due to Secrecy. Besides (to say Truth) Nakednesse is uncomely, as well in Minde, as Body; and it addeth no small Reverence, to Mens Manners, and Actions, if they be not altogether Open’ (ibid.). If there is a technology of mystery, Cesario exemplifies it. Olivia's veil of mourning cannot but advertise the celebrated beauty it conceals, and she is right (though her modesty is false) to worry about prosaic nakedness when the lacy screen is lifted to reveal ‘two lips indifferent red … two grey eyes, with lids to them’ (I.5.250-1). Cesario, whose ‘smooth and rubious’ lips are so meshed into gender ambiguity that their very nakedness tantalises (I.4.32), has a nature more covert and estranged, which, because of Viola's recessive psychology, is not just disguised by clothes. His embassy goes in stages. At first, he attracts attention by presenting himself as a forward page-boy, seeking to recite a script of compliments,³¹ but he intrigues Olivia by modulating into a more inwardly performative role which plays on the comeliness of secrecy while expressing, with a twist of pathos, Viola's sense of being mysterious to herself as she comes to terms with loving the Duke: ‘and yet, by the very fangs of malice I swear, I am not that I play’ (184-5). Orsino has told his servant to ‘unfold the passion of my love’ (I.4.24), but, as Cesario quickly discovers, that secret is too open to entice. It is almost an objection to the Duke, for Olivia, that his qualities are manifest and talked of: ‘Of great estate, of fresh and stainless youth; / In voices well divulg'd’ (I.5.263-4). Cesario, by contrast, has a secret allure—the allure of secrecy; and he uses it to secure a private audience by promising revelation: ‘What I am, and what I would, are as secret as maidenhead: to your ears, divinity; to any other's, profanation’ (218-20).

These lines are alive with risk. As Georg Simmel has noted, in his classic account of secrecy: ‘the secret is surrounded by the possibility and temptation of betrayal; and the external danger of being discovered is interwoven with the internal danger, which is like the fascination of an abyss, of giving oneself away.’³² Cesario's mention of a ‘maidenhead’ produces secrecy from what is hidden by anticipating disclosure. He alludes to the ‘she’ in Cesario, and ‘she’ alludes to something so essentially intimate that her feelings for Orsino come to mind. Yet the process of tempting Olivia into private conference, of enticing her (and the audience) with intimations of a sexual secret more real than maidenheads merely talked of,³³ goes along with an urge on Viola's part to be done with her intolerable disguise and give herself away by blabbing. For as Simmel adds: ‘The secret puts a barrier between men but, at the same time, it creates the tempting challenge to break through it, by gossip or confession—and this challenge accompanies its psychology like a constant overtone’ (ibid.).

The overtone is most audible, a few lines later, in the willow cabin speech. If I loved you, Cesario tells Olivia, I should

Make me a willow cabin at your gate,
And call upon my soul within the house;
Write loyal cantons of contemned love,
And sing them loud even in the dead of night;
Halloo your name to the reverberate hills,
And make the babbling gossip of the air
Cry out ‘Olivia!’ O, you should not rest
Between the elements of air and earth,
But you should pity me.

(272-80)

The speech is emotionally electric because, by positing herself as Orsino wooing Olivia, Viola is imagining what it would be like to woo the Duke,³⁴ while seducing Olivia into imagining what it would be like to be wooed by Cesario.³⁵ But the energy of the utterance, as it moves through double, endstopped lines to the suddenly freed enjambment and exclamatory caesura after ‘gossip of the air’,³⁶ also stems from her frustrated impulse to babble out what she is. Given the fact that Shakespeare varied his characters' names from those in the sources, it can hardly be accidental that, if ‘the babbling gossip of the air’ did cry out ‘O-liv-ia’, the rebounding echoes would reverberate into something very like ‘Vi-o-la’—a word which is, for innocent audiences, a secret within the secret until, near the end of the play, Sebastian greets Cesario by saying ‘“Thrice welcome, drowned Viola”’ (5.1.239).

Characterization in mature Shakespeare is angled into complexity by what holds between roles as well as by what is written into them. The lucid symmetries and parallels which shape such early comedies as Errors and Love's Labour's Lost give way, from Much Ado onwards, to a recognizably more mannerist procedure in which analogies are elliptical and overdetermined, and characters who seem unlike can be, in fluctuating ways, related. No case is more extreme, perhaps, than the coupling of Cesario and Malvolio. Yet the resemblances are there. Both gentlemen are upwardly mobile suitors (respectively unwelcome and coerced) of Olivia. In the echoing cluster of names which lies at the heart of the play, ‘Malvolio’ is more involved with ‘Olivia’ and ‘Viola’ than is, for instance, ‘Orsino’. And this reflects, perhaps, a similarity rooted in source-material, given that, in ‘Of Apolonius and Silla’, the Viola-figure is thrown into the dark house reserved, in Twelfth Night, for Malvolio, when the Duke gathers, from gossip among servants, that the countess has fallen in love with his man.

It is in their role as servants, however, that the two are most closely aligned. As I noted in relation to Whythorne, both are equally subject to the politics of favour. At first, Malvolio is as successful as Cesario. If Orsino finds it natural to turn to his discreet young servant when thoughts about Olivia well up, Olivia calls for that ‘known discreet man’, her steward (I.5.95), both in sending Cesario her ring, and, later, in 3.4, when she comes on stage with Maria, but talks, rather, to herself about how to win the Duke's handsome ambassador. ‘I speak too loud’, she says, checking her own indiscretion: ‘Where's Malvolio? He is sad and civil, / And suits well for a servant with my fortunes: / Where is Malvolio?’ (4-7). The word ‘sad’ here does not mean ‘gloomy’, as in modern English. The steward is grave and close. He can observe the decorum which Puttenham praises when he says that a man should be ‘secret and sad’ in counsel (p. 292). This quality is defined, of course, against the babbling indiscretion of Sir Toby and his friends. Towards the end of 3.4, Cesario will say that he hates ‘babbling drunkenness’ (364). It is a trait which Malvolio shares, as we know from his denunciation, in the drinking scene, of those who ‘gabble like tinkers’ and keep ‘uncivil rule’ (2.3.89, 122).

To insist that Malvolio feels the same urge as Viola/Cesario to disclose a hidden nature through babbling would be false to the glancing way in which parallels work in Twelfth Night. His yellow stockings and forced smile do involve an element of disguise, since they belie his ‘sad and civil’ self; but they owe more (I shall argue) to adornment, and they cannot be patly compared to the costume which stirs up in Cesario a desire to reveal the Viola in him. Yet the steward is not as indifferent to ‘babbling gossip’ as he would like the world to suppose. Even before he reads the forged letter, he is fantasizing about Olivia by recalling, ‘There is example for't. The Lady of the Strachy married the yeoman of the wardrobe’ (2.5.39-40). This snippet from Illyrian gossip columns is every bit as trivially topical, or, more likely, pseudo-topical, as Sir Toby's allusion to Mistress Mall. Indeed the plot against Malvolio can be understood, in early modern terms, as designed to bring out the babbler in the discreet man, by emptying his language. ‘My masters, are you mad?’, the steward asks the drinkers (2.3.87). When denounced as a madman and locked up, he is not just confined as finely as Sir Toby Belch could wish: his words—once so commanding in the household—are discredited and trivialized, then mocked as empty verbiage. ‘Malvolio,’ Sir Topas cries, ‘thy wits the heavens restore: endeavour thyself to sleep, and leave thy vain bibble babble.’³⁷

It is easy to see how the courtesy literature which sheds light on Cesario can also illuminate his double, Sebastian. In the elaborate, even stilted idiom of his first exchanges with Antonio, in the reserve and sturdy valour with which he engages Sir Andrew and Sir Toby, and in his discreet handling of the secret betrothal to Olivia, he conforms with the ideals laid out in such texts as Henry Peacham's Compleat Gentleman (1622). The plot against Cesario's more eccentric co-rival, Malvolio, might seem harder to relate to conduct books. In practice, though, even the courtly Castiglione is more tolerant of what Fabian calls ‘sportful malice’ (5.1.364) than a modern reader might expect. The Book of the Courtier describes, indeed, a series of ‘Meerie Pranckes’ which bear comparison with Twelfth Night. In one of them, an unfortunate man is persuaded by his companions that the dark room in which he has been sleeping is illuminated by the—actually, unlit—candles which they carry. Like Sir Topas visiting Malvolio, they cry, with incredulity, ‘Say'st thou that house is dark?’ (4.2.35) until—lacking the steward's resilience—the poor man is convinced of his blindness, repents his sins and prays to Our Lady of Loreto, whereupon his friends undeceive him (pp. 193-5). Almost as cruel is the tale told by Monsieur Bernarde about the occasion when he fell a-wrestling, in sport, with Cesar Boccadello on the Bridge of Leo. When passers-by made to separate them, Bernarde cried ‘Helpe sirs, for this poore gentilman at certein times of the moone is frantike, and see now how he striveth to cast himselfe of the bridge into the river’ (p. 197). Cesar was instantly set upon, and the more he struggled and protested, the more apparently justified and inevitable his confinement (like Malvolio's) became.

There are, Castiglione says, ‘two kyndes of Meerie Pranckes … The one is, whan any man whoever he be, is deceyved wittilie … The other, whan a manne layeth (as it were) a nett, and showeth a piece of a bayte so, that a man renneth to be deceyved of himself’ (p. 191). The plot against Malvolio is a fine example of this latter, more sophisticated form of joke. It is always surprising, when one returns to the play, to discover just how deeply the steward is mired in fantasies about Olivia before he finds the letter. Yet Malvolio does need some enticement to run himself into the net, and Maria's letter is well-judged to appeal not only to his ambitions but to his pride in managing secrets. It is relevant, in this regard, that her writing parodies secretaryship—or, as likely, abuses a secretarial office which she has discharged on other occasions—by conducting the sort of covert correspondence with a suitor which such a servant might expect to handle for her lady (as when the devious secretary in Gascoigne writes to F. J. on Elinor's behalf). In a secretary, discretion was essential. Indeed, as Angel Day notes, in The English Secretary, ‘in respect of such Secrecie … the name was first giuen to be called a Secretorie’.³⁸ Equally integral, however, was the idea of imitative substitution. The secretary, Day reports, will be ‘a zealous imitator’ of his master, down to the ‘forme and maner’ of his penmanship.³⁹ This is the context of Maria's announcement, ‘I can write very like my lady your niece; on a forgotten matter we can hardly make distinction of our hands’ (2.3.160-2). She is indicating that her letter will not be a forgery so much as a duplicitous secret.

The hermeticism of the missive is compounded, for it is wrapped in mysteries—ornamented by secrets—from the tantalizing address on its outside (‘To the unknown beloved …’ (2.5.92)), through the seal which closes it up (but which also dis-closes its matter, by hinting that Olivia is the author), into the enigmas of its message:

I may command where I adore;
But silence, like a Lucrece knife,
With bloodless stroke my heart doth gore;
M.O.A.I. doth sway my life.

(106-9)

This ‘secrete conceit’—to use Puttenham's phrase for the posies and anagrams of amorous courtiers (p. 102)⁴⁰—is a sub-plot version of those riddles which elsewhere in the play (and especially in Cesario/Viola's lines) have an ontological aspect. And it does, more locally, raise the thought that Malvolio's cultivated discretion (his chosen mode of being) is a form of self-advertisement. For the ornate secrecy of the letter is calculated to command attention: it engages in a covert exhibitionism which the steward finds congenial. To that extent it recalls Simmel's insight, that ‘although apparently the sociological counter-pole of secrecy, adornment has, in fact, a societal significance with a structure analogous to that of secrecy itself’ (p. 338). In other words, the secrecy of the letter has much in common with the yellow stockings, cross-gartering and fixed smile which it encourages its recipient to adopt.

This claim may sound unlikely, but I am encouraged to advance it by the cogency of Simmel's observation that, while man's desire to please may include outward-going kindness, there is also a

wish for this joy and these ‘favors’ to flow back to him, in the form of recognition and esteem, … [B]y means of this pleasing, the individual desires to distinguish himself before others, and to be the object of an attention that others do not receive. This may even lead him to the point of wanting to be envied. Pleasing may thus become a means of the will to power: some individuals exhibit a strange contradiction that they need those above whom they elevate themselves by life and deed, for they build their own self-feeling upon the subordinates' realization that they are subordinate.

(ibid.)

Even before he finds the letter, Malvolio's attentiveness to Olivia and his contempt for those like Sir Toby exemplifies a powerseeking desire for ‘favours’. His attraction to the countess has less to do with eroticism than with a longing for the unruly, over whom he elevates himself, to become his subordinates: his day-dream about Toby curtsying to him, and being required to amend his drunkenness, shows that he cannot imagine life in the household (certainly not an agreeable life) without having the lighter people to condescend to. In preparation for the happy day when he will be made Count Malvolio, he distinguishes himself before others by means of a singular discretion (so unlike their collective gabbling) which is actually a form of ostentation. We are not surprised when Maria reports that Malvolio ‘has been yonder i' the sun practising behaviour to his own shadow this half hour’ (2.5.16-18) because he is that recognizable type: a secret exhibitionist. The invitation to put on yellow stockings, cross-gartered, is, in one sense, ludicrous and improbable, because it contradicts those ‘sad and civil’ qualities which attract Olivia's praise. But it is hardly surprising that Malvolio takes the bait, because, as Simmel says, ‘Adornment is the egoistic element as such’ (p. 339), and the strange garb—which the steward claims he already owns, and which he may indeed have worn, at least in fantasy (2.5.166-8)—amplifies and gives expression to his desire for singularity without compromising his attentiveness to Olivia: on the contrary, it is a way of ‘pleasing’ her.

Simmel goes on to notice that adornment does not express the organic nature of the person adorned, but depends on superfluousness and impersonality. Jewels and precious stones are typical of its highly external relationship with the person, but yellow stockings and cross-garters work to similar effect because they divide up and cut into the wholeness and ease of the body (they obstruct, indeed, Malvolio's circulation (3.4.19-20)). One might compare Simmel's example of new clothes as against old: the former ‘are particularly elegant’, he says, ‘due to their being still “stiff”; they have not yet adjusted to the modifications of the individual body as fully as older clothes have’ (p. 341). There is a vein of comedy here, of course, because, as Bergson points out in Le rire, laughter is provoked by superimpositions of mechanical rigidity on the organic flow of the body. The ornaments seemingly requested by Olivia, the clothes which Malvolio puts on to mark his new status, are laughable even as—and for precisely the same reason that—they signify advancement. For adornment is a mark of status regardless of the materials used, and Malvolio's attire shares the usual property of adornment in bringing together, or parodying (since Olivia cannot bear yellow), what Simmel calls ‘Aesthetic excellence’ and the ‘sociological charm of being, by virtue of adornment, a representative of one's group’ (p. 343)—with the added delight, in this case, for Malvolio, that, by becoming a count, he will represent the dignity of Olivia's house to the consternation of Sir Toby and his ilk. Beyond that, and underwriting it, is secrecy: the ultimate bait. To assume yellow stockings and be cross-gartered puts Malvolio's discretion on display, without abolishing it, because the new garb allows him, as he thinks, to share a secret with Olivia, to signal an ambition and grasp of courtly intrigue (hence ‘I will read politic authors’ (2.5.161-2)) which she will understand and appreciate while the drinkers and babblers will not.

That this exhibitionistic secrecy is designed to please Olivia only with the intention of gratifying Malvolio is compatible with the sickness of self-love which she diagnoses when he first comes on stage (1.5.89). From a psychoanalytical perspective, indeed, the yellow stockings are narcissistic fetishes while the cross-gartering looks auto-erotic. This line of enquiry could bear a Lacanian twist, given that the anagrammatic relations which hold between ‘Olivia’ and ‘Malvolio’—pointed up by the disjection of those names (‘M.O.A.I.’) in the letter—register, at the level of the sign, her role in reflecting Malvolio's constitutive desire back on himself. Freudian speculation aside, there is certainly something masturbatory about the steward's complacent cry, as Sir Toby and the rest move in to take the yellow-stockinged madman away: ‘Let me enjoy my private’ (3.4.90). This recoil into self-pleasuring is not restricted, of course, to the steward. Critics often call Orsino (rather loosely) a narcissist, and his early remark—before Cesario's charms get to work—‘for I myself am best / When least in company’ (1.4.37-8) would have suggested to an Elizabethan audience, with its inherited disapproval (to simplify somewhat) of solitariness,⁴¹ a similarly troubling mind-set. The conduct literature is emphatic in its insistence on affective sociality. ‘Self-Loue is the greatest disease of the minde,’ according to James Cleland, and it has ‘beene the cause of manie Narcissus his changing among you Nobles’ (p. 241). There is, in other words, an important Renaissance distinction between the socially produced (and socially productive) quality called secrecy and suspect, anti-social solitude.

It is entirely in line with this that Stefan Guazzo celebrates discretion but bends his dialogue towards showing how arguments for civil conversation can persuade his brother, William Guazzo, from abandoning society: ‘And now my joye is the greater’, William's interlocutor, Anniball Magnocavalli, says at the end, ‘that I understande how readie and willinge you are to caste of the obscure and blacke Robe of Solitarinesse, and in liew of that to revest and adorne your selfe with the white and shininge garment of Conversation’ (ii, p. 215). The danger was, inevitably, that discretion could become exaggerated into self-absorption. Malvolio's anti-social vanity bears out Nashe's observation in Pierce Penilesse his Supplication to the Divell (1592): ‘Some thinke to be counted rare Politicans and Statesmen, by being solitary: as who would say, I am a wise man, a braue man, Secreta mea mihi: Frustra sapit, qui sibi non sapit [My secrets are my own; he is wise in vain who does not know his own business], and there is no man worthy of my companie or friendship.’⁴²

Much is now being written about the way Renaissance culture developed modern ideas about privacy by building and exploring the uses of secluded chambers and closets.⁴³ This emergent mentality is reflected in the appeal which Twelfth Night makes to varieties of privy space. Somewhere off-stage Andrew has his ‘cubiculo’ and Toby his own retreat. But it matters that we should learn of the former by Toby saying, ‘We'll call thee at thy cubiculo’ and of the latter by his remark (to Feste or Maria) ‘Come by and by to my chamber’ (3.2.50, 4.2.73-4). The babblers are social in their privacy, where Malvolio seeks to be private even in the open spaces of Olivia's great house. That is why the ‘dark room’ (3.4.136)—that dramatically overdetermined locale—is such an apt punishment for his pretensions: locked up there he is both cast out of society and thrown in upon himself. He is forced into a solitude which represents, but which is also maliciously designed to induce, asocial derangement. But he is also given a chance—I shall end by suggesting—to reassess the value of what Nashe calls ‘companie or friendship’.

I referred, a little earlier, to ontological riddling. What I mean by that is the presence of, and counterpoint between, such claims, in Cesario/Viola's part, as ‘I am not that I play’ and ‘I am not what I am’ (1.5.185, 3.1.143). As disguise and confusion mount, even simple indicative statements such as ‘I am the man’ (when Viola deduces that Olivia has fallen for Cesario) are deceptive, twisting into dubiety and delusion: ‘if it be so, as 'tis, / Poor lady, she were better love a dream’ (2.2.24-5). ‘Nothing that is so, is so’, the clown will later quip (4.1.8-9). Sebastian calls this ‘folly’, but Olivia is alert to the instability of so-ness when, a few lines later, she thanks him for agreeing to be ruled by her by saying, quite simply, but, by now, with some perplexity, ‘O, say so, and so be’ (64). This line of enigmatic quibbling, of instability in the indicative of being, runs all the way through the play to its perhaps redemptive reformulation when Cesario meets Sebastian: ‘A natural perspective, that is, and is not!’ (5.1.215). It matters to the Malvolio plot because, in his attempt to subvert the steward's sanity, Feste turns such riddling against him. ‘“That that is, is”’, he tells Sir Toby (with the assurance that, by this point, what is is not): ‘so I, being Master Parson, am Master Parson; for what is “that” but “that”? and “is” but “is”?’ (4.2.15-17).

Malvolio does not doubt that Master Parson is Master Parson, even when Feste presents himself in that guise without disguise—just in a different voice. By the same token, however, he persists in a stubborn belief that ‘that’ is ‘that’ and ‘is’ ‘is’. He has a self-centred clarity about what he credits which carries him with some dignity through Feste's peculiar questions about Pythagoras' metempsychosis, and whether the soul of one's grandam might haply inhabit a bird. No audience can entirely warm to Malvolio's self-assurance, unchanged since the letter scene, but his persistent protestations of sanity seem the more admirable as his opponents' pranks become redundantly sadistic. Their cruelty is particularly marked in respect of the motif of ‘companie or friendship’, because, if the plot to incarcerate Malvolio is justified in so far as it obliges him to confront what it means for a man to be truly solitary, it abandons any claim to the moral high ground when Feste assists the steward by bringing him writing materials and agreeing to take a letter to Olivia, but then suppresses the missive—an event of such moment that Shakespeare underscores it in that otherwise null episode where the clown refuses to divulge the letter's contents to Fabian (5.1.1-6).

I have touched, several times, in this paper, on the social dimension of secrecy, and stressed how it is produced, in the early modern period, out of civil intercourse. It should be clear, in consequence, at this late stage, why ‘companie or friendship’ is so important in Twelfth Night. Obviously, in this play of cross-dressing and variant sexuality, there is an interest in the mergings of heterosexual love with same-sex friendship, and with the friendship in heterosexual love as well as the eroticism of same-sex amity. But secrecy impinges on, and gives rise to, friendship (as in the shaping confidences shared between Sebastian and Antonio) because, although the period knew that—as the cynical commonplace put it—three can keep a secret when two of them are away, it was also aware that not to confide a hidden thing was to go the readiest way to public exposure or self-destruction. In trying to ‘keepe love secrete’, says Lord Julian in The Book of the Courtier, it is bad to be ‘over secrete’ and better to trust a friend with your feelings so that he can help you conceal what you will otherwise, certainly, betray (pp. 284-5). Recall Duke Charles the Hardy, Bacon advises, in his essay ‘Of Frendship’, who, because he ‘would communicate his Secrets with none’, damaged his wits. ‘The Parable of Pythagoras is darke, but true; Cor ne edito; Eat not the Heart. Certainly, if a Man would give it a hard Phrase, Those that want Frends to open themselves unto, are Canniballs of their owne Hearts.’⁴⁴

Bacon's fable from Pythagoras is not the same as Feste's, but something close to what the clown says can be found in Cleland's Institution, where, immediately after explaining why a man's friend should not be ‘a great pratler’, he enthuses:

O how much am I bound to Gods bounty amongst al the rest of his benefits towardes me, in sending me such a friend! … In the very first daie of our meeting … I found my minde so changed and remooued into the place of his, which before that time was in me. Hitherto I could neuer excogitate anie reason why I shoulde loue him, but Pythagoras his μετεμψύχωσις, and that hee is another my selfe.

(p. 197)

Why is a friend so valuable? Cleland's answer is typical of the period: because he is a person ‘in whom I dare better trust, and vnto whom I dare discover the most secret thoughtes of my minde with greater confidence then I am able to keepe them my selfe’ (ibid.). So the dialogue between Feste and Malvolio about the steward's grandmother and a woodcock is not just random nonsense, and more than an insult to the old lady's intelligence. It contributes to the close texture of Twelfth Night a riddling reminder that, notwithstanding the resistance of the self-centred steward, the soul can be said, at least in amity, to migrate from one body to another. This is what Viola/Cesario means when s/he speaks of calling ‘upon my soul within the house’ (above, p. 73), and what Orsino invokes when he promises the assembled lovers that ‘A solemn combination shall be made / Of our dear souls’ (5.1.382-3).

Malvolio is often seen as excluded from this finale. In one of the best essays on Twelfth Night, Anne Barton stresses the fragmentariness of its ending by pointing out that, like Sir Toby and Sir Andrew, the steward ‘comes as a figure of violence and leaves unreconciled’. At the end of As You Like It, ‘Jaques had walked with dignity out of the new society; Malvolio in effect is flung.’⁴⁵ This is largely true. Yet the charmed circle of amity does not actively dismiss Malvolio: if anything, Olivia and Orsino do the opposite, acknowledging, in an echo of his own words, that ‘He hath been most notoriously abused’ and commanding, ‘Pursue him, and entreat him to a peace: / He hath not told us of the captain yet’ (5.1.378-80). What Orsino reminds the audience of here is that Malvolio is holding ‘in durance’, at his own suit, the Captain who arrived with Viola in the third scene of the play. This character, almost forgotten, is now freshly important, because he holds Viola's ‘maiden weeds’ (272ff., 251ff.). I am not myself persuaded that clothes were so constitutive of identity for Shakespeare's original audience that Cesario cannot become Viola until those very clothes are recovered from the Captain. Even Orsino, piquantly intrigued at being affianced to a boy, only says that ‘Cesario’ will keep his masculine name until ‘in other [unspecified] habits you are seen’ (386).⁴⁶ Yet the gesture of deferral—as against fragmentation—is unmistakable, and compatible with a denouement which straggles its endings out, from the pre-emptive coupling of Maria and Toby, through the betrothal but delayed marriage of Olivia and Sebastian, to the as-yet-unrealized resolution of the Cesario/Viola-Orsino romance. In that delayed conclusion, space is made for Malvolio, his hold over Viola's weeds confirming what his anagrammatic link with her name implies. These characters belong together. Until the steward is reconciled, comedy will not be consummated. Just how he will be persuaded remains one of the secrets of the play.

Notes

1. Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1990), Richard Rambuss, Spenser's Secret Career (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993).

2. Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641-1660 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989).

3. E.g., Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (London, Cape, 1992), Graham Phillips and Martin Keatman, The Shakespeare Conspiracy (London, Century, 1994).

4. John Michael Archer, Sovereignty and Intelligence: Spying and Court Culture in the English Renaissance (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1993).

5. Ben Jonson and the Art of Secrecy (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1994); for his comments on Shakespeare see pp. 25-30.

6. Daniel Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1978), Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1984).

7. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1936), p. 186.

8. Michel Senellart, ‘Simuler et dissimuler: l'art machiavélien d'être secret à la Renaissance’, paper at ‘Le Secret à la Renaissance’, Colloque IRIS 1996.

9. Twelfth Night, ed. J. M. Lothian and T. W. Craik (London, Methuen, 1975), 3.3.23.

10. E.g., James Cleland, Hρω-[b.pi ][b.alpha ]ι[b.delta ]ει[b.alpha ], The Institution of a Young Noble Man (1607), Bks v, chs 7-9, and vi (‘shewing a young Noble mans Dutie in Travailing’)—esp. pp. 258-62, on sight-seeing as gentlemanly espionage (the pursuit of ‘manie secrets’).

11. ‘Like the Old Robin Hood: As You Like It and the Enclosure Riots’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 43 (1992), 1-19; rpt. as Ch. 3 of his Will Power: Essays on Shakespearean Authority (Hemel Hempstead, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993).

12. Cf. Lisa Jardine's excessively darkened judgements, in Reading Shakespeare Historically (London, Routledge, 1996), pp. 72-7.

13. The Autobiography of Thomas Whythome: Modern Spelling Edition, ed. James M. Osborn (London, Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 19.

14. The Civile Conversation of M. Steeven Guazzo, tr. George Pettie (Bks i-iii) and Barthlomew Young (Bk iv), introd. Sir Edward Sullivan (London, Constable, 1925), 2 vols; i, p. 129.

15. Bill Alexander, John Barton, John Caird and Terry Hands, Directors' Shakespeare: Approaches to ‘Twelfth Night’, ed. Michael Billington (London, Nick Hern Books, 1990), p. 22.

16. ‘Gossip and Scandal’, Current Anthropology, 4 (1963), 307-16, p. 313.

17. E.g., Robert Paine, ‘What is Gossip About?: An Alternative Hypothesis’, Man, n.s. 2 (1967), 278-85.

18. ‘Of Intemperate Speech or Garrulitie’, in The Philosophie, Commonlie Called, The Morals Written by the Learned Philosophy Plutarch of Chæronea, tr. Philemon Holland (1603), pp. 191-208 (p. 192).

19. The Passions of the Minde in Generall, rev. edn (1604), p. 107.

20. Contrast the more recent views surveyed in, e.g., Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip (1985; Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1986), ch. 2. For work by social historians on the practice of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century gossip see, e.g., J. A. Sharpe, Defamation and Sexual Slander in Early Modern England: The Church Courts at York, Borthwick Papers no. 58 (York: University of York, 1980) and Steve Hindle, ‘The Shaming of Margaret Knowsley: Gossip, Gender and the Experience of Authority in Early Modern England’, Continuity and Change, 9 (1994), 391-419.

21. Cf. Sissela Bok, Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation (1982; Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 286 n. 7.

22. The Book of the Courtier, tr. Sir Thomas Hoby (1561), introd. Walter Raleigh (London, David Nutt, 1900), p. 124.

23. For contexts see, e.g., Daniel Javitch, ‘Rival Arts of Conduct in Elizabethan England: Guazzo's Civile Conversation and Castiglione's Courtier’, Yearbook of Italian Studies, 1 (1971), 178-98, pp. 188-9.

24. See, e.g., Gaspar's remarkable anticipation, out of Aristotle, of Freud on the castration complex in women, and Julian's reply: ‘The seelie poore creatures wish not to be a man to make them more perfect, but to have libertye, and to be ridd of the rule that men have of their owne authoritie chalenged over them’ (pp. 226-7).

25. Epicoene or The Silent Woman, ed. L. A. Beaurline (London, 1966), 2.3.109.

26. Cf., e.g., Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Brighton, Harvester, 1983), ch. 4.

27. John Gerard, The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes (1597), p. 701.

28. 3.1.86-7, 72-3. On courtly excess in ‘Salutation … complements, false offers, & promises of seruice’ see, e.g., Cleland, Institution, pp. 176ff.

29. Tr. and excerpted as The Deceived, in Geoffrey Bullough (ed.), Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. ii (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958), pp. 286-339 (p. 296).

30. The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, ed. Michael Kiernan (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 20-3 (p. 21).

31. Compare (but also contrast) lines 169-96 with Mote at Love's Labour's Lost 5.2.158-74, addressing the Princess and her ladies.

32. ‘The Secret and the Secret Society’, pt iv of The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. and tr. Kurt H. Wolff (New York, The Free Press, 1950), pp. 307-76 (p. 334).

33. The effect of elusive enigma was enlarged, no doubt, for early audiences aware of being addressed by a boy (playing a woman playing a boy), especially given medical doubts concerning the existence, in reality, of the hymen: see, e.g., Helkiah Crooke, Mι[b.kappa ]ρo[b.kappa ]oσμo[b.gamma ]ρ[b.alpha ][b.phiv ]ι[b.alpha ]: A Description of the Whole Body of Man, 2nd edn (1631), p. 256: ‘It hath beene an old question and so continueth to this day, whether there be any certaine markes or notes of virginity in women …’.

34. To woo, that is, as Viola (if a woman might be so assertive), rather than compoundly, as in 2.4, where the attraction of Cesario/Viola's eye to ‘some favour that it loves’ (which riddlingly means the Duke's ‘favour’ (24-5)), prompts him/her to utter the half-betraying speech about ‘concealment’, ‘My father had a daughter lov'd a man …’ (108-19). Symptomatically, in the exchange which follows, Bacon's observation, ‘he that will be Secret, must be a Dissembler, in some degree. For Men are too cunning, to suffer a Man, to keepe an indifferent carriage … They will so beset a man with Questions, and draw him on, and picke it out of him’ (p. 21) is ratified both by Orsino's leading interrogation (‘But died thy sister of her love, my boy?’ (120)) and by Cesario/Viola's dissimulation (‘I am all the daughters of my father's house, / And all the brothers too’ (121-2)), which slurs into poignant honesty, as s/he hopes for Sebastian's survival (‘… and yet I know not’ (122)), but which remains sufficiently in touch with the deviousness of his/her opening ploy to recall (for instance) the explicitly seductive discretion of F. J. when he woos Dame Elinor with a lute song composed by ‘My father's sister's brother's son’ (Gascoigne, The Adventures of Master F. J., in Paul Salzman (ed.), An Anthology of Elizabethan Prose Fiction (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 3-81 (p. 28)).

35. For another perspective see John Kerrigan, ed., Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and ‘Female Complaint’. A Critical Anthology (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991), esp. pp. 20-3, 41-5.

36. Folio punctuation mostly conforms to the rhetorical shape of the passage, though, as routinely, it divides the run-on ‘air / Cry’ with a comma.

37. 4.2.98-100; cf., e.g., the ‘jangling bibble babble’ of ‘praters’ in Plutarch's ‘Of Intemperate Speech’ (p. 193).

38. The English Secretary, rev. edn (1599), pt 2, p. 102.

39. English Secretary, pt 2, p. 130; cf. Rambuss, Spenser's Secret Career, p. 43.

40. For examples beyond Puttenham (esp. pp. 108-12), see, e.g., [Sir John Mennis], Recreation for Ingenious Headpeeces (1654), p5^r-q4^r, r3^r-4^r. On verse composition, more broadly, as ‘secret intercommoning’—a compromise formation between self-consuming inwardness and full disclosure (below, p. 79)—see Gascoigne, Adventures of Master F. J., pp. 40-1.

41. See Janette Dillon, Shakespeare and the Solitary Man (London, Macmillan, 1981), chs 1-2.

42. The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow, corr. by F. P. Wilson (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1958), 5 vols, 1, pp. 137-245 (p. 169).

43. See, e.g., Orest Ranum, ‘The Refuges of Intimacy’, in Roger Chartier (ed.), Passions of the Renaissance, tr. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1989), vol. iii of A History of Private Life, pp. 207-63, Patricia Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1991), ch. 2 and Alan Stewart, ‘The Early Modern Closet Discovered’, Representations, 50 (1995), 76-100.

44. Essayes, ed. Kiernan, pp. 80-7 (p. 83).

45. ‘As You Like It and Twelfth Night: Shakespeare's “Sense of an Ending”’ (1972), rpt. in her Essays, Mainly Shakespearean (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 91-112 (p. 110).

46. Contrast Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare's England (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 104.