[In the following essay, Dean analyzes Twelfth Night as the union of Renaissance Platonism and Augustinian theology, contending that Shakespeare employed the device of twins in order to explore the notion that two individuals are united as one through love, a concept that was understood by Neoplatonists to be analogous to the doctrine of the Trinity.]

One cannot read far into Twelfth Night without noticing the extent to which Shakespeare is fascinated, in this play, by triads and their possible resolution into monads. Olivia's ‘liver, brain and heart’ are to be supplied, in Orsino's imagination, with ‘one self king’ (I. i. 36-8); the Captain was ‘bred and born ❙ Not three hours' travel from this very place’ (I. ii. 20-1); Sir Toby tells Maria that Sir Andrew ‘has three thousand ducats a year’, to which she replies, ‘Ay, but he'll have but a year in all these ducats’ (I. iii. 20-1); Sir Andrew wishes he had ‘bestowed that time in the tongues that I have in fencing, dancing, and bear-baiting’ (I. iii. 88-9); Olivia will ‘not match above her degree, neither in estate, years, nor wit’ (I. iii. 102-3); Orsino has known Cesario ‘but three days’ (I. iv. 3); a drunkard is like ‘a drowned man, a fool, and a madman’ and Sir Toby is ‘in the third degree of drink’ (I. v. 125-30); Olivia possesses a ‘most radiant, exquisite, and unmatchable beauty’ yet remains a ‘good gentle one’ (I. v. 162, 171); Olivia's ‘schedules’ of her beauty proceed in three stages, ‘item, two lips … item, two grey eyes … item, one neck, one chin, and so forth’ (fourth?) (I. v. 236-7); Viola sets out the infernal triangle in which she, Olivia, and Orsino are trapped (II. ii. 33-5); Feste asks Sir Toby and Sir Andrew ‘Did you never seee the picture of “we three”?’ (II. iii. 15-16); Sir Toby proposes to sing ‘a catch that will draw three souls out of one weaver’ (II. iii. 56-7), and the catch when sung is for three voices; Sir Toby also sings ‘Three merry men be we’ (II. iii. 72); Malvolio asks the roisterers whether they have ‘no wit, manners, nor honesty’ (II. iii. 83); Maria schemes to ‘plant you two—and let the fool make a third’ in the box-tree (II. iii. 161-2, cf. II. v. 83); Orsino charges women's affections with suffering ‘surfeit, cloyment, and revolt’ (II. iv. 98); Sir Toby dallies with the idea of marrying Maria with ‘Shall I play my freedom at tray-trip?’, a dice game in which the winner was the one who threw a three (II. v. 179); Sir Andrew, impressed by Cesario's courtly vocabulary, recapitulates ‘“Odours”, “pregnant” and “vouchsafed”—I'll get 'em all three all ready’ (III. i. 88-9); Viola insists ‘I have one heart, one bosom, and one truth’ (III. i. 156); Sir Toby says of Sir Andrew's challenge, ‘If thou “thou'st” him some thrice, it shall not be amiss’ (a miss?) (III. ii. 41-2); Malvolio declares, ‘Please one, and please all’ (III. iv. 22); Sir Toby warns Cesario of Sir Andrew that ‘souls and bodies hath he divorced three’ (III. iv. 229); Feste attempts to beg a third coin from Orsino with a set of variations on triplets (V. i. 32-5); Antonio is as certain that he has been with Cesario/Sebastian for ‘three months’ as Orsino is that ‘three months this youth hath tended upon me’ (V. i. 89, 94); Sebastian says that if only Cesario were a woman he would say, ‘Thrice welcome, drowned Viola’ (V. i. 235).

There are of course other numbers in the play, and nobody would want to hang an argument on such evidence alone, but it seems indisputable that Shakespeare, like other writers of the period such as Spenser or Donne, was prepared to play teasing Neoplatonic, numerological games with ones and threes. A triad in Neoplatonism is not the same concept as the three-in-oneness of the Christian Trinity, but Shakespeare's non-dramatic poetry offers firm evidence that he was interested in the paradoxes of the latter doctrine. Commenting on Sonnet 105 (‘Let not my love be called idolatry’) in her recent study of the Sonnets, Helen Vendler notes that it

depends first of all on the reader's recognizing the speaker's inventive transmutation of Christian Trinitarian theology and of the doxology. But this substantial piece of cleverness is accompanied by others. First of all, by identifying his beloved's qualities (fair, kind, and true) as those of the Platonic Triad (the Beautiful, the Good, the True), the poet opposes to his accuser's Christian Trinity an equally powerful, but classical, cultural totem as an emblem of the divine. The early Christianizing of the Platonic Triad had somewhat muted the contrast between classical and Christian values, but Shakespeare here restores them to full opposition.¹

She goes on to note the structuring of the poem in Trinitarian terms, the octave concentrating on oneness, the first three lines of the sestet on threeness, and the last three on three-in-oneness, so that the sonnet ‘is what it describes: a combination of one and three to make up three-in-one’.² I agree with Vendler that Shakespeare is juxtaposing Neoplatonism and Christianity in this sonnet, although I am not as sure as she is that he is concerned only with the opposition between them, and I certainly do not believe that to be the case in Twelfth Night.

A further key piece of evidence from the poetry, The Phoenix and the Turtle, was written about the same time as Twelfth Night and published in 1601 in the collection Loves Martyr, edited by Robert Chester. It is, in the words of its recent editor John Roe, a poem about ‘the paradox of pure eros’³ which equally expresses itself in terms of the monad-triad relationship:

So they loved, as love in twain
Had the essence but in one:
Two distincts, division none;
Number there in love was slain.

(ll. 25-8)

The love engendered between the two birds becomes a third term in the equation: ‘Either was the other's mine’ (l. 35), a word which I would see as an extraordinarily bold use of the pronoun requiring mental inverted commas (‘Either was the other's “mine”’). J. V. Cunningham has argued that the doctrine of love put forward in this stanza is Trinitarian, a position to which Roe is sympathetic.⁴ The stanza which has received most recent attention runs:

Property was thus appalled
That the self was not the same;
Single nature's double name
Neither two nor one was called.

(ll. 37-40)

An exchange between Christianne Gillham, Peter Milward, and James H. Sims has sought to relate this stanza to Plato's Symposium and to Aquinas and Augustine on the Trinity,⁵ works which I shall also cite as important for our understanding of Twelfth Night. In passing from the anthem to the threnos, as Roe observes, ‘two-in-one becomes three-in-one’,⁶ as in Sonnet 105; and when he praises the poem for ‘The curious effect of producing a mood of triumph and exhilaration in treating of loss and disillusionment’⁷ I am irresistibly reminded of the peculiarly precarious comic mood of Twelfth Night, steeped as it is in a melancholy which could have turned to something more painful. Indeed, perhaps it shortly afterwards did so; Stephen Medcalf has drawn attention to the strain of Platonic argument, which he derives from The Phoenix and the Turtle, in Troilus and Cressida,⁸ while if E. A. J. Honigmann is right, as I believe he is, in his suggestion that Twelfth Night and Othello were acted by the same cast,⁹ the remarkable ‘infernal trigonometry: a perfect, highly complex pattern of incongruent triangles’ which A. P. Rossiter discerned in the later play¹⁰ could be seen as a kind of diabolical inversion of Trinitarianism.

Twelfth Night itself has been linked to Plato, although its Trinitarianism has scarcely been remarked. That unprecedentedly audacious Shakespearian coup de théâtre, the reunion of Viola and Sebastian, offers a moment of stasis, of contemplative wonder, in a play full of comings and goings; a moment, too, which challenges the other characters', and our own, faith in the evidence of the senses, as Orsino remarks, ‘One face, one voice, one habit, and two persons, ❙ A natural perspective, that is and is not’ (V. i. 209-10), and Antonio's question to Sebastian—‘How have you made division of yourself? ❙ An apple cleft in two is not more twin ❙ Than these two creatures’—is echoed by Sebastian himself: ‘Do I stand there?’ (V. i. 216, 220). Barbara Everett, in her fine essay on Twelfth Night, remarks that at this point ‘the language deliberately but signally takes on what can only be called metaphysical dimensions’, so that Shakespeare ‘is asking questions almost too profound and philosophical for a romantic comedy’, and she cites by way of analogy the discussion of the origins of gender in Plato's Symposium.¹¹ At the same time, the echoic closeness of ‘twin’ to ‘twain’ was likely to raise biblical and liturgical echoes for Shakespeare and his audience: when the Pharisees question Jesus about divorce,

he answered and said vnto them, Haue ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning, made them male and female, And saide, For this cause, shall a man leaue father and mother, and cleave vnto his wife, and they which were two, shalbe one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twaine, but one flesh.

(Matthew 19: 4-6)¹²

In this passage Jesus alludes to Genesis 1: 26-7: ‘Furthermore God said, Let vs make man in our image according to our likenesse … Thus God created man in his image: in the image of God created he him: he created them male and female.’ Shakespeare and his audience also knew these passages from the marriage service (which probably underlies the opening of Sonnet 36, ‘Let me confess that we two must be twain, ❙ Although our undivided loves are one’), and Augustine several times quotes the words ‘Let us make man in our image’, in his treatise on the Trinity, as evidence that the doctrine was already latent in the Old Testament.¹³

If Shakespeare read Plato it was almost certainly in Latin; Stephen Medcalf speculates that he might have had access to Jonson's copy of Serranus's edition and translation.¹⁴ However that may be, Shakespeare had a close knowledge of the Platonic tradition as it had been transmitted by the Renaissance, and, I think, was also well acquainted with Augustinian theology, if not specifically with the treatise on the Trinity. Twelfth Night is a characteristic fusion (rather than a Vendlerian opposition) of these ideas. My argument in what follows will be that Shakespeare uses the device of the twins, two individuals with, as it were, one flesh in Cesario, to explore the mystery of human love whereby twain become one, understood Neoplatonically as an analogy of the doctrine of the Trinity.

II

In the Symposium Plato puts into the mouth of Aristophanes the myth that originally human beings were spherical in shape: ‘each human being was a rounded whole, with double back and flanks forming a complete circle’, with each bodily organ and feature doubled; there were three sexes, male, female, and hermaphrodite which was a compound of the other two. The male sprang from the sun, the female from the earth, and the hermaphrodite from the moon, ‘which partakes of the nature of both sun and earth’. Fearing that the power of the human race posed a threat to the gods, Zeus bisected each person in order to dissipate its energies. Love, and its physical expression in sex, are thus explained as ‘the desire and pursuit of the whole’, the longing of human beings to recover their original spherical shape (we remember Othello and Desdemona ‘making the beast with two backs’). Halves derived from hermaphrodites, Aristophanes adds, are heterosexual in orientation, halves derived from male spheres homosexual, and halves derived from female spheres lesbian.¹⁵

The relevance of this to the biologically impossible existence of identical twins of opposite sexes, Viola and Sebastian, and of the composite Cesario for whom each is at various times mistaken, seems clear. When Viola defines the incongruous and incongruent triangles which she finds so frustrating, she recognizes the dilemma of hermaphroditism in which she has unwittingly placed herself by her disguise—which, we may remember, she expected, in a strikingly Neoplatonic phrase, to ‘become ❙ The form of my intent’ (I. ii. 51-2):

How will this fadge? My master loves her dearly,
And I, poor monster, fond as much on him,
And she, mistaken, seems to dote on me.
What will become of this? As I am man,
My state is desperate for my master's love.
As I am woman, now alas the day,
What thriftless sighs shall poor Olivia breathe!

(II. ii. 33-9)

The ‘as’ in ‘As I am man … As I am woman …’ means both ‘in so far as’ and ‘since’. Her plight is made worse if she has, as she requested, been presented to Orsino by the Captain ‘as an eunuch’ (I. ii. 53). Shakespeare does not follow out this idea, perhaps wisely; at any rate the word suggests the frustrating denaturing which Viola must undergo in her disguise.

At the rediscovery of the Platonic corpus during the Italian Renaissance, the Symposium was frequently condemned as immoral, for instance by Antonio Panormita in his book Hermaphroditus (1425), although it found powerful defenders such as Leonardo Bruni and Cosimo de' Medici. In 1469 Cardinal Bessarion's treatise In calumniatorem Platonis rehabilitated the dialogue by placing it in what James Hankins calls ‘a tradition of metaphysical eros’,¹⁶ setting out the doctrines of Platonic love. Bessarion was buttressed by Marsilio Ficino's commentary on the Symposium, also published in 1469, which, like Bessarion, leaned on Augustine and recognized that Plato had evolved his own kind of Trinitarian thinking.¹⁷

Ficino's Convivium is undoubtedly the most important of these works,¹⁸ since it was widely known in England through its restatement by Castiglione in Il Cortegiano, translated into English in 1561 by Sir Thomas Hoby as The Book of the Courtier, a work Shakespeare knew. The Convivium is itself cast in the form of a symposium, whose participants take turns to comment on the speeches in Plato. There are numerous points of interest for a reader of Twelfth Night; for example, the remark that Platonists are supposed to think in triplets (p. 43 n. 7), or the belief of the Pythagoreans that ‘the Trinity was the measure of all things’ (p. 45)—Malvolio, we recall, was to ‘hold th'opinion of Pythagoras’ concerning transmigration before Feste would believe him sane (IV. ii. 57-9);¹⁹ or the statement that the soul dwells in the body as in the Lethe (p. 76), just as Sebastian prays, ‘Let fancy still my sense in Lethe steep’ (IV. i. 60—the preceding line, quoted earlier, was ‘Or I am mad, or else this is a dream’). On a broader canvas, the speeches of the commentators frequently offer illuminating glosses on the relationships in Twelfth Night. Here, for example, is Cavalcanti commenting on Pausanias:

O wondrous contact in which he who gives himself up for another has the other, and does not cease to be himself! O inestimable gain, when two become one in such a way that each of the two, instead of being only one, becomes two, and, as if he were doubled, he who had one life, with only one death intervening, now has two lives. For a man who dies once and revives twice has acquired for a single life a double, for a single self two selves. … The soul of the love becomes a mirror in which the image of the beloved is reflected. For that reason, when the beloved recognises himself in the lover, he is forced to love him.

(pp. 56-7)

Or here is Cristoforo Landini commenting on that very speech of Aristophanes to which I referred at the outset. He allegorizes it, equating the male hemispheres with courage, the female with temperance, and the hermaphrodite, because of its impartial nature, with justice. Souls were created originally with two lights, one innate, whereby they perceived inferiors and equals, and one infused, whereby they acknowledged superiors. Division came when they turned to innate light alone:

When souls, already divided and immersed in bodies, first have come to the years of adolescence, they are aroused by the natural and innate light which they retained (as if by a certain half of themselves) to recover, through the study of truth, that infused and divine light, once half of themselves, which they lost in falling.

(p. 73)

If you are the lover, another speaker adds, you must be near the beloved in order to be near yourself, since all your striving is to ‘ransom your captive self’ (p. 129).

The trap of narcissism is also considered by Ficino. The inexperienced soul achieves in the body a beauty which is really its own shadow, so its desire is directed upon itself, but not realizing this it remains eternally unsatisfied (pp. 140-1). One thinks of Malvolio ‘practising behaviour to his own shadow’ (II. iii. 14-15), although the Echo and Narcissus myth has far wider applicability to the play.²⁰ Medieval interpretation of Ovid had thrown up one detail which, as far as I know, is not paralleled elsewhere outside Shakespeare: Pausanias speculated that Narcissus might have had a twin sister who died, and that he drowned himself believing it was she whom he saw in the pool. It would follow from this, of course, that they were identical twins.²¹

Castiglione refers to the Symposium explicitly and allusively, as when he gives the following comments to Lord Julian de Medicis:

Truth it is, that Nature entendeth alwaies to bring forth matters most perfect, and therefore meaneth to bring forth the man in his kind, but not more male than female. Yea were it so that she alwaies brought forth male, then should it without peradventure bee an unperfectnesse: for like as of the bodie and of the soule there ariseth a compound more nobler than his partes, which is man: Even so of the felowship of male and female there ariseth a compound preserving mankinde, without which the partes were in decay, and therefore male and female by nature are alwaies together, neither can the one be without the other: right so he ought not to bee called the male, that hath not a female (according to the definition of both the one and the other) nor she the female that hath not a male.

And so for much as one kinde alone betokeneth an imperfection, the Divines of olde time referre both the one and the other to God: Wherefore Orpheus saide that Jupiter was both male and female: And it is read in scripture that God fashioned male and female to his likeness. And the Poets many times speaking of the Gods, meddle the kindes together.²²

Lord Julian then becomes embroiled in a complicated discussion with Lord Gaspar Pallavicin about the similarity of male and female to Platonic Form and Matter respectively, until they are both rebuked by the umpire of the discussion, Lady Emilia Pia: ‘for love of God (quoth she) come once out of these your Matters and Formes and males and females, and speake so that you may bee understood’.²³ The case is, however, even more complicated than Lady Emilia supposes.

Ovid's treatments of the myths of Echo and Narcissus in Book III, and of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus in Book IV, of the Metamorphoses lodged in the minds of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. As Leonard Barkan observes, the stories are thematically paired, that of ‘one being who becomes two lovers’ with that of ‘two lovers who are fused into one being’.²⁴ Both, too, are narratives about the process of psychological and sexual maturation, showing that the discovery of the self is also the discovery of its limitations. Narcissus will live to old age, Tieresias predicts in Golding's translation, only provided that ‘him selfe he doe not know’.²⁵ Cold and disdainful, he scorns women and men alike, one of the latter praying that he may know the agony of unrequited love, as Viola prays for Olivia (I. v. 276). The plight of Echo, ‘trapped’, in Barkan's phrase, ‘in imitation and reflection’,²⁶ strongly anticipates that of Viola, who must ‘act’ Orsino's ‘woes’ and reduces herself to a voice in the ‘willow cabin’ speech. Narcissus, both ‘the party whom he woos, and suitor that doth woo’, states his dilemma in words which Shakespeare must have recalled when he gave Viola the ‘How will this fadge?’ speech I quoted earlier: ‘What shall I doe? Be wood or wo? whom shall I wo therefore? ❙ The thing I seek is in my selfe’.²⁷ As for the story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, that evokes the Symposium myth, and supplies a source for the denouement of Twelfth Night, when the lovers are fused into a single creature so that

The bodies of them twaine
Were mixt and joyned in one. To both them did remaine
One countenance.
.....They were not any lenger two; but (as it were) a toy
Of double shape: Ye could not say it was a perfect boy,
Nor perfect wench: it seemed both and none of both to beene.(28)

‘A toy ❙ Of double shape’ must be ‘A natural perspective, that is and is not’. Shakespeare would also have known Marlowe's use of the story in Hero and Leander (registered 1593), which credits Leander's lips with a beauty ‘exceeding his ❙ That leapt into the water for a kiss ❙ Of his own shadow’ (I. 73-5),²⁹ so that ‘some swore he was a maid in mans attire’ (I. 83), just as Orsino will say of Cesario (I. iv. 30-4), while Leander's argument that Hero's refusal to propagate is a selfish waste (I. 234-48) is also urged by Viola to Olivia (I. v. 230-2). Hero is ‘Venus nun’ (I. 45), a cloistered solitary like Olivia; she is compared to Salmacis (II. 46) and Leander's flirting with her is said to be ‘as a brother with his sister toyed’ (II. 52), perhaps picking up ‘toy’ from Golding. Chapman accepted these ambiguities in his continuation of Marlowe's poem (1598); Hero deflowered is ‘even to her selfe a stranger’ (III. 203), and feels ‘As if she had two soules: one for the face, ❙ One for the hart’ (III. 271-2). She addresses Leander as ‘my selfe’ (III. 412) and the narrator summarizes, ‘Hero Leander is, Leander Hero: ❙ Such vertue love hath to make one of two’ (III. 357-8).³⁰ Chapman's treatment is more elevated and Neoplatonic than Marlowe's, and Shakespeare would surely have found congenial the conclusion that ‘Where Loves forme is, love is, love is forme’ (V. 227).

III

It was at the Council of Nicea in 325 that the credal statements that Jesus was ‘begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father’ and that the Holy Ghost ‘proceedeth from the Father and the Son’ were framed. These formulas were the Church's response to the questions of the relationship between Christ's divinity and humanity, and of his relationship to those he called the Father and the Comforter. In his treatise On the Trinity, completed around the year 420, St Augustine, as Henry Chadwick engagingly puts it, ‘showed effortlessly that the concept of being both one and three is so far from being gobbledygook that simple reflection on the nature of human personality offers an immediate example’.³¹ Augustine defended the doctrine both in mathematical terms, with a sequence of arguments based on the ratio 1:2, and in relational terms, giving a whole series of analogies from our own experience, of which the most relevant one here is the triad amans, quod amatur, and amor: the lover, the beloved, and the love which each has for the other. I shall say a little more about each of these positions in turn.

First, the mathematical arguments. The number 3 consists, Augustine observes, of itself and also of the sum of the two preceding numbers. The number 6 is a perfect number

because it is made up of its parts, of which it has three, a sixth, a third, and a half; nor has it any other part which is a simple fraction of it. Its sixth part then is 1, its third part 2, and its half part 3. But 1, 2, and 3 added together make the same number 6.

(On the Trinity, IV. 2. 158)

I cannot help wondering about the relevance of this to Twelfth Night, which in the Christian liturgy commemorates the visit of wise men who early in tradition, although not in Scripture, numbered three, to adore the baby who was both a single child with two human parents, and a Person of the Trinity. (Furthermore, the sum of the two digits in the number 12 is itself 3—which may be seen as too neat but is no more so than much in Augustine's treatise.) The title of Shakespeare's play has often been dismissed as arbitrary; ‘a silly play, and not at all relating to the name or day’, Samuel Pepys thought.³² He could not have been more wrong. Although Leslie Hotson's argument that the play was originally staged on Twelfth Night 1601 ‘has not won general acceptance’³³—the only recorded performance of it in Shakespeare's lifetime was on Candlemas, 2 February 1602—this does not mean that the Feast of the Epiphany is irrelevant to the play, as a glance at the passages appointed to be read for that feast and its season in the 1559 Prayer Book indicates.³⁴ Augustine allegorizes the story of the Magi into a narrative of the human condition; just as they, ‘after they were warned of God in sleep that they should not go again to Herod … returned into their own country another way’,³⁵ so we journey towards our homeland in Paradise, not by the way of death but by the way of life (IV. 3. 163). So, too, Viola and Sebastian journey to their reconciliation by an indirect and apparently circuitous path. The paradigm statement of this Christian romance is Gonzalo's in The Tempest: that each of the travellers found ‘ourselves, ❙ When no man was his own’ (V. i. 215-16).

The second great plank in Augustine's argument, the analogies with human personality, considers the nature of sexual love in markedly Platonic terms:

Now bodies of course grow by being joined together. Although it is true that whoever cleaves to his wife is one body, nevertheless it becomes a bigger body than the man's alone or the woman's alone.

(VI. 2. 211)

Yet even this does not approach the unity of the Persons of the Trinity, which Augustine states in what the translation renders as a staggeringly powerful series of monosyllables: ‘They are each in each and all in each, and each in all and all in all, and all are one’ (VI. 2. 214). In Book VIII he considers the triad referred to earlier, amans, quod amatur, amor: ‘What does spirit love in a friend but spirit? So here again there are three, lover and what is being loved, and love’ (VIII. 5. 255). This would fit the friendship of Sebastian and Antonio just as much as the more obviously sexual relationships in Twelfth Night. Meeting the objection that if I love myself there will be only two terms in the equation, Augustine asserts that ‘it is not the case that anyone who loves himself is love except when love loves itself’ (IX. 1. 272), a remark which conjures up the different narcissisms of Orsino, Olivia, and Malvolio. But if the mind knows and loves itself, there is the triad mind, love, and knowledge, ‘and so you have a certain image of the trinity, the mind itself and its knowledge, which is its offspring and its word about itself, and love as the third element, and these three are one (1 Jn 5: 8)’ (IX. 3. 282).

Attacking what he calls academic philosophy, which adopts a proto-Cartesian scepticism, insisting that we can know nothing for certain, Augustine maintains that the most fundamental knowledge we have is of our own existence. If an academic philosopher objects that our belief that we exist is caused by the fact that we are dreaming, or insane, we can retort that dreaming or insanity can be predicated only of existing beings: ‘So someone who says he knows he is alive can never be lying or be deceived’ (XV. 4. 412). These matters are reflected in Twelfth Night in both serious and light-hearted ways. Malvolio, whose love for Olivia is an illusion, really only love of self, is driven nearly mad by Feste in the prison scene (IV. ii), Viola realizes that, if Olivia has really fallen in love with Cesario, ‘she were better love a dream’ (II. ii. 27), while Sebastian, in his bewilderment following his meeting with Olivia, declares ‘Or I am mad, or else this is a dream’ (IV. i. 59), although he later becomes certain that ‘though 'tis wonder that enwraps me thus, ❙ Yet 'tis not madness’ (IV. iii. 3-4). The wonder is that Olivia did love a dream, whose name was Cesario, but that the dream had a correspondent reality; in Platonic terms Cesario is the Form of which Viola and Sebastian are the material embodiments, just as in Christian terms Viola, Sebastian, and their relationship, which is so strong that it has its own separate existence as Cesario, are the Trinity of this play of love. And if we agree with Linda Woodbridge that ‘the central mystery of Twelfth Night’ is that ‘Cesario is a being made up of both Viola and Sebastian—a hermaphroditic symbol of wholeness that calls forth love from Olivia and Orsino alike’,³⁶ we can add that such a procedure is a characteristic Shakespearian fusion of Augustinian Trinitarian theology and the parallel Neoplatonic tradition of number symbolism which constructs a triangle of the two lovers and the third self which they become through their love.

IV

Finally I should like to consider what light may be thrown on these issues by contemporary theological thinking about the Trinity. I shall focus on a recent stimulating book, Colin Gunton's 1992 Bampton Lectures. He regrets the fact that

The Symposium, with its systematic downgrading of bodily sexuality and of sexual distinctions—with some of which Augustine and other Christian thinkers unfortunately colluded—reveals an evasion of what I believe to be the fact that the whole person, body, mind and spirit, and not merely a part, is definitive of human being.³⁷

Professor Gunton offers his lectures as an extended commentary on the first chapter of Genesis in opposition to those, among whom he names Augustine, whose interpretation of it was Platonic, seeing Adam and Eve as universal archetypes. Against this Gunton argues that the creation was of particulars, and that the neglect of this truth, paradoxically, lies at the heart of postmodernist relativism and subjectivity: for while ‘everything may be what it is and not another thing … it is also what it uniquely is by virtue of its relation to everything else’.³⁸ In their uniqueness and diversity, human beings are images of the creative Trinity whose ‘persons do not simply enter into relations with one another, but are constituted by one another in their relations’.³⁹

I see this as a profound and timely application of Augustinian thought rather than as antagonistic to it, and it certainly accords with what Shakespeare gives us. The first leader in The Times for 24 May 1997, which was the day before Trinity Sunday, well states that ‘At the heart of the doctrine of God as Trinity, is the conviction that God is a communion of persons’, a communion for which the writer, like Professor Gunton, reminds us that the ancient name is perichoresis, beautifully glossed as ‘a divine round-dance of mutually indwelling love’. All Shakespeare's comedies are like this, even if, as with Malvolio, Shylock, Jacques or Don John, there are always those who are ‘for other than for dancing measures’. One of the greatest representations of the perichoresis, the fifteenth-century icon ‘The Hospitality of Abraham’ by Andrei Rublev, is based, like much Trinitarian thinking in the Eastern tradition, on the interpretation of the visit of the three angels to Abraham in Genesis 18 as a figura of the Trinity. Augustine explains the passage in this sense (On the Trinity, II. 4. 111, II. 7. 121, III. 4. 142), so resolving the apparent contradiction that the angels are sometimes spoken of as though there were only one of them.⁴⁰

I do not claim that Shakespeare knew the Rublev icon, but I am sure he knew its tradition, and I regret the refusal of editors of Twelfth Night to take that tradition seriously as an explanation of ‘the picture of “we three”’ (II. iii. 15-16). For instance, Warren and Wells simply note on that phrase, ‘A caption to a trick picture showing two fools' or asses' heads; the third was the viewer.’ However, in the Rublev icon, as in some medieval and Renaissance depictions of the Trinity or Holy Family, there is a vacant space at the table as though to be filled by the viewer, who is then a participant in as well as an interpreter of the picture. Similarly, Orsino and Olivia are both in love with images rather than substances; Viola's vocation is to be their therapist, to bring them from illusion to reality. Orsino's images of love as the amorphous and devouring sea (I. i. 10-11, II. iv. 99-100) are at odds with his claim that he is the archetypal lover, ‘unstaid and skittish in all motions else ❙ Save in the constant image of the creature ❙ That is beloved’ (II. iv. 17-19). Orsino sends Cesario to Olivia not only as his ambassador but as his substitute, who is to ‘act [his] woes’ (I. iv. 26), and his reason is not Cesario's asexuality but ‘his’ femininity: ‘all is semblative a woman's part’ (I. iv. 34), so that Olivia may listen as though to another woman. Olivia cannot love Orsino simply because she cannot (and, after all, what better reason could there be?), yet she falls in love with the image of Orsino embodied in ‘this youth's perfections’ (I. v. 286). Similarly, Cesario confesses that he has loved a woman who resembles Orsino (II. iv. 24-7), and plays a masochistic game of ‘Let's pretend’:

Say that some lady, as perhaps there is,
Hath for your love as great a pang of heart
As you have for Olivia
.....My father had a daughter loved a man
As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman
I should your lordship …

(II. iv. 88-90, 107-9)

In the neutral space created by Viola's disguise, that may be spoken which must otherwise be stifled, yet only by analogy; hypotheses multiply, triangles become blocked off, emotional frustration results. Viola declares that ‘I am all the daughters of my father's house, ❙ And all the brothers too’—adding, more truly than she intends, ‘and yet I know not’ (II. v. 120-1). If she is all the daughters and all the brothers she is a hermaphrodite, yet her circular perfection is barren: what will release her lies beyond her control; she has already committed it to Time (II. ii. 40), and Time, directed by a benevolent Providence, casts her twin upon the Illyrian shore. She is never called Viola until Sebastian so calls her (V. i. 123); for us she has always been Cesario, and only Sebastian can restore to her her rightful name and the freedom to be herself. She at first assumes he is a ghost, ‘If spirits can assume both form and suit’, and has to be reassured: ‘A spirit I am indeed, ❙ But am in that dimension grossly clad ❙ Which from the womb I did participate’ (V. i. 229-31). Sebastian is no Neoplatonic Form, unlike Cesario; he is Form embodied in Matter.

In the parallel dialogue with Olivia in II. i, Viola speaks more openly, if more bafflingly. She has earlier stated that ‘I am not that I play’ (I. v. 176). Now she goes further: ‘I am not what I am’ (II. i. 139)—a line, incidentally, which she shares with Iago.⁴¹ Warren and Wells explain this by ‘I am not what I seem’, but it means what it says, and its wording must recall the self-naming of God in Exodus 3: 14, ‘And God answered Moses, I am that I am’, a verse cited by Augustine as an affirmation of God's eternal being and his defiance of further definition (On the Trinity, V. 1. 190, VII. 3. 228). Viola-as-Cesario brings no epiphany for Olivia, but rather a dangerous delusion; Viola's own true being is in suspension, awaiting its awakening, while she is forced to play Echo to everyone else's Narcissus—not only Orsino's and Olivia's, but Antonio's, who, mistaking her for Sebastian in the moment of his arrest, admits that he felt ‘sanctity of love’ and offered ‘devotion’ to Sebastian's ‘image’ (III. iv. 352-4), and exclaims:

But O, how vile an idol proves this god!
Thou hast, Sebastian, done good feature shame.
In nature there's no blemish but the mind.
None can be called deformed but the unkind.
Virtue is beauty, but the beauteous evil
Are empty trunks o'er-flourished by the devil.

(III. iv. 356-61)

These lines do not often receive much comment, but Antonio's recognition that he has been performing a kind of idolatry in his attachment to Sebastian is couched in Neoplatonic terms (cf. Viola's words to the Captain in I. ii. 44-8). Sebastian, after all, had entrusted Antonio with his true name (II. i. 13-15); Antonio is the only other person who knows that Sebastian is still alive, and his addressing Viola by her brother's name here reveals that fact to her (III. iv. 370). Antonio begs to be Sebastian's ‘servant’ and declares, though not to his face, that he ‘adore[s]’ him (II. i. 31, 42). To call Sebastian and Antonio ‘an overtly homosexual couple’, as Stephen Orgel has done⁴² is to commit a peculiarly naive piece of political correctness. To repeat Colin Gunton's point, personal relationships are constitutive of the persons related, so that it is only through our relationships that we come to understand ourselves. Not only theologians but philosophers such as John MacMurray and Michael Polanyi have stressed this anti-Cartesian point,⁴³ which Olivia states when she acknowledges that ‘ourselves we do not owe’ (I. v. 300).

The movement from image to reality is a commonplace in discussion of Shakespeare, but we need, in this context especially, to give to the word ‘image’ an unusually strong meaning. The verse in Genesis 1: 26, ‘Furthermore God said, Let vs make man in our image according to our likenesse’, with its plural pronouns, had traditionally been taken, as I mentioned earlier, as evidence that the doctrine of the Trinity was latent in the Old Testament. Augustine had so taken it (On the Trinity, I. 3. 75, VII. 4. 231, XII. 2. 325, XIV. 5. 390), while cautioning that each human being is made in the image of the Trinity as such, not of any one of the Persons. The marriages which close Twelfth Night are evidence of the attainment of such a reality by the partners, summed up in the words of the Priest:

A contract of eternal bond of love,
Confirmed by mutual joinder of your hands,
Attested by the holy close of lips,
Strengthened by interchangement of your rings,
And all the ceremony of this compact
Sealed in my function, by my testimony;
Since when, my watch hath told me, toward my grave
I have travelled but two hours.

(V. i. 152-9)

The great surprise is that he does not say ‘three hours’, but that would be inappropriate; Shakespeare wants to emphasize two persons becoming one here, rather than one person reflecting three. Sebastian remarks to Olivia:

You would have been contracted to a maid,
Nor are you therein, by my life, deceived.
You are betrothed both to a maid and man.

(V. i. 255-7)

—a line of thought echoed by Orsino when he calls Viola ‘your master's mistress’ (V. i. 317, cf. Sonnet 20, 1. 2) and insists on retaining the name Cesario for her ‘while you are a man’ (V. i. 376). The notes in the current editions are less than helpful here. The lines, I take it, have to be understood as referring to the hermaphroditic wholeness of Cesario and to the completeness of the creation: ‘Thus God created the man in his image: in the image of God created he him: he created them male and female’ (Genesis 1: 27), quoted by Jesus in Matthew, as I mentioned earlier, just before he says, ‘For this cause, shall a man leaue father and mother, and cleave vnto his wife, and they which were two, shalbe one flesh’ (Matt. 19: 5)—‘as though’, the Geneva Bible wonderfully adds in the margin, ‘they were glued together’.

If we are created in the image of the Trinity, and the mutual love of the marriage partners is the highest analogy for the communion of the Persons of the Trinity, then reality is Trinitarian, human life a perichoresis. The natural perspective ‘is, and is not’, because, like God, it simply is what it is. When Sebastian says ‘Nor can there be that deity in my nature ❙ Of here and everywhere’ (V. i. 221-2) he is in a sense right, but in another sense Shakespeare, I have tried to show, wants to say emphatically that that is just what there can be.

Notes

1. H. Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 445.

2. Ibid. 446. Not that this Neoplatonic view of friendship was Shakespeare's alone. In the refrain of a poem first printed in 1602, for example, Sidney celebrated his friendship with Dyer and Greville in Trinitarian terms, as attesting the existence of ‘one Minde in Bodies three’: The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. W. A. Ringler Jr. (Oxford, 1962), 260-1.

3. The Poems, ed. J. Roe (Cambridge, 1992), 47.

4. J. V. Cunningham, ‘“Essence” and The Phoenix and Turtle’, ELH 19 (1952), 273; cf. Poems, ed. Roe, 233, n. on 1. 26.

5. C. Gillham, ‘“Single Natures Double Name”: Some Comments on “The Phoenix and Turtle”’, Connotations, 2/1 (1992), 126-36; P. Milward, ‘“Double Nature's Single Name”: A Response to Christianne Gillham’, Connotations, 3/1 (1993), 60-3; J. H. Sims, ‘Shakespeare's “The Phoenix and the Turtle”: A Reconsideration of “Single Natures Double Name”’, Connotations, 3/1 (1993), 64-71; C. Gillham, ‘Single Natures—Double Name: A Reply to Peter Milward and James H. Sims’, Connotations, 3/2 (1993/4), 123-8.

6. Poems, 53.

7. Ibid. 54.

8. S. Medcalf, ‘Shakespeare on Beauty, Truth and Transcendence’, in A. Baldwin and S. Hutton (edd.), Platonism and the English Imagination (Cambridge, 1994), 117-25.

9. Othello, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann (London, 1997), 346-9.

10. A. P. Rossiter, Angel with Horns (London, 1961), 206-8.

11. B. Everett, ‘Or What You Will’, Essays in Criticism, 35 (1985), 31. The debt to the Symposium was also suggested by W. W. E. Slights, ‘Man and Maid in Twelfth Night’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 80 (1981), 346. Since this article was accepted for publication I have read Anthony Gash's ‘Shakespeare's Comedies of Shadow and Substance: Word and Image in Henry IV and Twelfth Night’, Word and Image, 4 (1988), 623-62, in which he discusses Neoplatonic triads in Twelfth Night and links the play with the Symposium (pp. 652-6). Anthony Gash, ‘Shakespeare, Carnival and the Sacred: The Winter's Tale and Measure for Measure’, in Ronald Knowles, ed., Shakespeare and Carnival: After Bahktin (London, 1998), pp. 177-210, has valuable incidental comments on Twelfth Night in relation to Erasmus's use of Plato's work in The Praise of Folly: see especially pp. 198-9.

12. I quote from the 1599 Geneva Bible, repr. with an introd. by M. H. Brown (Ozark, Mo., 1990).

13. Augustine, On the Trinity, trans. E. Hill OP as pt. I, vol. v of The Works of St Augustine: A Translation for the Twenty-First Century, published by the Augustinian Heritage Institute (New York, 1991), see Bk. I, ch. 3, p. 75; VII. 4. 231; XII. 2. 325; XIV. 5. 390. Subsequent references, citing book, chapter, and page number, are given in the text.

14. Medcalf, ‘Shakespeare on Beauty, Truth and Transcendence’, 118. As he reminds us, Jonson was one of Shakespeare's fellow-contributors to Loves Martyr.

15. The Symposium, trans. W. Hamilton (London, 1951), 59-62.

16. J. Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols., continuously paginated (Leiden, 1990), 259.

17. Indeed, George of Trebizond had indicted Plato of Arianism: Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 357.

18. I quote from Sears Jayne's translation of Ficino, Commentary on Plato's ‘Symposium on Love’ (Dallas, 1985); subsequent references are given in the text.

19. Independently pointed out in A. Fowler, ‘Twelfth Night and Epiphany’, in S. Chaudhri (ed.), Renaissance Essays for Kitty Scoular Datta (Calcutta, 1995). I owe this reference to the anonymous RES reader.

20. See D. J. Palmer, ‘Twelfth Night and the Myth of Echo and Narcissus’, Shakespeare Survey, 32 (1979), 73-8, and J. Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford, 1993), 144-51. Plays, now lost, entitled Narcissus were, tantalizingly, presented at court on Twelfth Night 1572 and 1603: E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford, 1923), iv. 36, 87, 146.

21. K. J. Knoespel, Narcissus and the Invention of Personal History (New York, 1985), 3; A. B. Taylor, ‘Narcissus, Olivia, and a Greek Tradition’, Notes and Queries, 262 (1997), 58-6, and, more broadly, his ‘Shakespeare Rewriting Ovid: Olivia's Interview with Viola and the Narcissus Myth’, Shakespeare Survey, 50 (1997), 81-9.

22. The Book of the Courtier, trans. T. Hoby (London, 1928), 199.

23. Ibid. 200.

24. L. Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (Yale, 1986), 273.

25. Shakespeare's Ovid, ed. W. H. D. Rouse (London, 1904), iii. 433. The story had previously been translated by T. Peend in 1565, with a moralization interpreting it as a tale of youthful purity misled: D. Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry (Oxford, 1932), 303. Shakespeare had already drawn on these narratives in Venus and Adonis; see Poems, ed. Roe, 283, supplementary note on ll. 161-2.

26. The Gods Made Flesh, 48.

27. Shakespeare's Ovid, ed. Rouse, iii. 586-7.

28. Ibid. iv. 462-4, 468-70. ‘Toy’ here must mean a perspective (not cited in OED), providing a further link with Orsino's words in Act V. Shakespeare takes this idea from Golding, not from Ovid, who compares the couple's closeness to that of a twig grafted on to a tree.

29. Marlowe, Poems, ed. M. MacLure (London, 1968). References are given in the text.

30. Chapman has numerological digressions in his continuation (e.g. V. 323-40). Marlowe had commented on the paradox that ‘one is no number’ (I. 255), which Shakespeare pursues in Sonnets 4-14: Sonnets and ‘A Lover's Complaint’, ed. J. Kerrigan (London, 1986), 175, headnote to Sonnet 4. Spenser's Venus is hermaphroditic in the Neoplatonic tradition: The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London, 1977), iv. x. 41, 6-9 and n.

31. H. Chadwick, Augustine (Oxford, 1986), 91-2.

32. Diary entry for 6 Jan. 1663, quoted in the Warren and Wells edn., p. 2.

33. Ibid. 4. Hotson presented his case in The First Night of ‘Twelfth Night’ (London, 1954).

34. For details see B. K. Lewalski, ‘Thematic Patterns in Twelfth Night’, Shakespeare Studies, 1 (1965), 168-81; M. B. Smith, Dualities in Shakespeare (Toronto, 1966); R. C. Hassel Jr., Renaissance Drama and the English Church Year (Lincoln, Nebr., 1979), 82-5. I have followed out some of the implications in ‘The Harrowing of Malvolio: The Theological Background of Twelfth Night, Act 4, Scene 2’, Connotations, 7/2 (1997/8), 203-14. Steve Sohmer has recently taken a different view of the evidence in Shakespeare's Mystery Play: the Opening of the Globe Theatre 1599 (Manchester, 1999), pp. 199-216. Setting Shakespeare's work in the context of the refusal of Protestant England to adopt the Gregorian calendar in place of the old Julian one, he suggests that the play's title in fact refers to 12 December (mentioned by Sir Toby at II. iii. 79), which would have been Christmas Day under the reformed calendar.

35. The end of the Gospel passage for the Feast of the Epiphany (Matt. 2: 12) as given in the 1559 Prayer Book.

36. L. Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1620 (Brighton, 1984), 141. My approach offers a different perspective on the role-playing to that which sees it mainly in terms of cross-dressing and gender ambiguity. The question whether a boy actor dressed as a girl had pederastic or homosexual appeal for some men in an Elizabethan audience is of course impossible to settle. In her pioneering Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (London, 1975) Juliet Dusinberre argued against this supposition, and was challenged by Lisa Jardine in Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Brighton, 1983). A recent contribution to the debate is M. Shapiro, Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages (Ann Arbor, 1994).

37. C. E. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity. The Bampton Lectures 1992 (Cambridge, 1993), 48.

38. Ibid. 173.

39. Ibid. 214.

40. Contrast the interpretation given by the marginal gloss on Genesis 18: 3 in the Geneva Bible, which comments that Moses is ‘speaking to one of them in whom appeared to be most maiestie, for he thought they had bin men’.

41. Othello, ed. Honigmann, I. i. 64.

42. Quoted by Warren and Wells, p. 42 n. 2.

43. J. MacMurray, The Form of the Personal, i: The Self as Agent (London, 1957); ii: Persons in Relation (London, 1961); M. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (London, 1958).

An earlier version of this article was presented to the Renaissance Graduate Seminar at the University of York in February 1998 at the kind invitation of Dr John Roe. I am grateful to him for his comments, and especially to my colleague Martin Cawte for many hours of discussion. Work on the article was greatly helped by the resources of the Folger Shakespeare Library and of the John K. Mullen Memorial Library at the Catholic University of America.

All references to Twelfth Night are to the edition by Roger Warren and Stanley Wells (Oxford, 1994).