[In the following essay, Slights maintains that Twelfth Night illustrates the thematic principal of reciprocity as the foundation of successful human relationships.]

Like Shakespeare's other romantic comedies, Twelfth Night moves from personal frustration and social disorder to individual fulfilment and social harmony by means of what Leo Salingar has shown to be the traditional comic combination of beneficent fortune and human intrigue.¹ This basic pattern, of course, takes a radically different form in each play. In comparison with many of the comedies, Twelfth Night begins with remarkably little conflict. The opening scenes introduce no villain bent on dissension and destruction, nor do they reveal disruptive antagonism between parents and children or between love and law. In contrast to the passion and anger of the first scene of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the restless melancholy that pervades the beginning of The Merchant of Venice, or the brutality and tyranny that precipitate the action in As You Like It, the dominant note of Orsino's court and of Olivia's household is static self-containment. To be sure, both Orsino and Olivia sincerely profess great unhappiness, but, as many critics have noted, a strain of complacent self-absorption dilutes the poignancy of Orsino's love-melancholy and of Olivia's grief. Orsino's concentration on his own emotions cuts him off from real personal relationships as effectively as does Olivia's withdrawal or Sir Toby's careless hedonism. The self-absorption of the native Illyrians and Viola's involuntary exile present a spectacle of isolation rather than confrontation, not so much a society in disorder as a series of discrete individuals without the interconnexions that constitute a society.

While the beginning of Twelfth Night is unusually static, the conclusion is strikingly active. Far from tying up a few loose ends, the last scene contains major events in both the double main plot and the sub-plot. Both pairs of lovers meet with full awareness for the first time. Viola finally wins Orsino's love, Orsino and Olivia, in different ways, discover whom it is they love, and Malvolio is released from imprisonment. Beginning calmly and purposefully enough with Orsino's first attempt to woo Olivia in person, the scene gathers intensity through a series of increasingly bitter confrontations. Orsino's banter with Feste is interrupted when Antonio appears, ominously under armed guard. Recognition as the duke's old enemy, however, is less galling to him than the apparent ingratitude of Sebastian (Viola-Cesario). At Olivia's entrance the tone darkens further with Orsino's jealous spite and threat to murder his presumed rival, to ‘sacrifice the lamb that I do love’ (V. 1. 130).² On the priest's confirming Cesario's marriage to Olivia, Orsino's rage is replaced by even more bitter contempt at such betrayal. In quick succession Viola-Cesario has provoked condemnation as an ‘ingrateful boy’ (l. 77) from Antonio, sorrow at the faithless cowardice of her new husband from Olivia, and, from the man she loves, a threat of death and disgusted rejection as ‘a dissembling cub’ (l. 164). The crescendo of pain and anger climaxes in the bloody spectacle of Sir Andrew's and Sir Toby's broken heads and Toby's vicious attack on his friend: ‘Will you help?—an ass-head and a coxcomb and a knave, a thin-fac'd knave, a gull!’ (l. 206).

At the midpoint of the scene, as Sir Toby and Sir Andrew exit to find help for their bleeding heads, Sebastian enters and the scene reverses direction. In the first half, relationships disintegrate in the whirling confusions of mistaken identities emanating from Viola's disguise. In the second half, new relationships form from the revelation and identification of the twins, Sebastian and Viola. The scene performs the conventional function of uniting lovers and reuniting family, but the emphasis is less on restoration and reconciliation than on the discovery of unexpected relationships and acceptance of new obligations. Sebastian's reunions with Antonio and Viola reveal that Olivia is betrothed not to a cowardly faithless boy but to a strong loyal man. By identifying Viola, Sebastian's appearance transforms Orsino from Cesario's master and Olivia's unsuccessful suitor into Viola's future husband and Olivia's prospective brother-in-law. Viola suddenly hears herself hailed as Olivia's sister and Orsino's mistress. Through marriages prospective and already performed, Maria, Toby, Olivia, Sebastian, Viola, and Orsino become one extended family, in households where Malvolio, Fabian, and Feste have secure positions.

In Twelfth Night, then, the comic movement from disorder to harmony is more particularly the transformation of isolation and fragmentation into mutuality and cohesion. The personal and societal problems at the beginning of the play result not from envy, aggression, or malice, but from a perhaps no less insidious, and equally universal, ambition for self-sufficiency. As the social anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss points out,

mankind has always dreamed of seizing and fixing that fleeting moment when it was permissible to believe that the law of exchange could be evaded, that one could gain without losing, enjoy without sharing. At either end of the earth and at both extremes of time, the Sumerian myth of the golden age and the Andaman myth of the future life correspond, … removing to an equally unattainable past or future the joys, eternally denied to social man, of a world in which one might keep to oneself.³

Orsino's vision of self-surfeiting desires, Olivia's projected isolation, Toby's life of unconfined pleasure, and Malvolio's ‘practicing behavior to his own shadow’ (II. 5. 17) are all versions of this dream of inviolable autonomy. Their various attempts to create these solipsistic paradises in Illyria produce an atmosphere of sterility, a society without cohesion. While a current of self-indulgence runs through Orsino's and Olivia's pain, the real dangers of isolation from the protection of human society threaten the more cheerful characters. Viola and Sebastian are separated and shipwrecked in unknown country, Sir Toby and Feste are threatened with dismissal from Olivia's household, and Antonio is banned from Orsino's territory on pain of death. By the end of the play this sense of incipient disintegration has disappeared from the enlarged and cohesive group, and the communal joy and affection are achieved largely in terms of what Lévi-Strauss, in the passage quoted above, calls the law of exchange.

Instead of celebrating personal and social harmony with the dancing and wedding festivities that end most of the comedies, the final scene of Twelfth Night demonstrates the mutual obligations imposed by the complicated new relationships. Public recognition of Viola's female identity depends on recovering her ‘maid's garments’ (l. 275) from the sea captain who befriended her. The captain, in prison under some legal obligation to Malvolio, cannot be released until Malvolio is satisfied. The need for Malvolio reminds Olivia of her responsibility to him and Feste of the letter in his charge. The letter brings Malvolio's release, which in turn precipitates Fabian's confession of responsibility. Meanwhile Olivia's and Sebastian's wedding festivities wait on Orsino's and Viola's, and Viola remains Cesario until Malvolio is pacified. This cycle of mutual dependence gives an open-ended quality to the ending of the play. Our confident expectation that ‘golden time’ (l. 382) will bring happiness to the lovers is complemented by our sense of continuing obligations. Reciprocal love, the design of Twelfth Night implies, naturally culminates not in a private dream-world of complete fulfilment, but in the give and take of human society.

This happy, albeit imperfect, ending is possible only when the major characters have come to terms with the inescapable mutuality of communal life through a series of exchanges, often financial transactions. We usually think of The Merchant of Venice as Shakespeare's treatment of the relationship of wealth to love, but, as Porter Williams, Jr, has pointed out, ‘seldom in a play does money flow so freely’ as in Twelfth Night.⁴ Viola gives gold to the sea captain, Antonio gives his purse to Sebastian, Orsino sends a jewel to Olivia, Olivia showers gifts on Cesario, Viola-Cesario offers to divide her wealth with Antonio, and they all repeatedly give money to Feste. Economic advantage is not a prime motive for any of the characters, but hardly a scene goes by when they are not engaged in giving or receiving money or jewels. The lovers in the forest of Arden may rely on Hymen to arrange their nuptials, but in Illyria Olivia knows that someone must pay for the double wedding that is to replace the differences and frustrations of the past with a joyous alliance:

My lord, so please you, these things further thought on,
To think me as well a sister as a wife,
One day shall crown th'alliance on't, so please you,
Here at my house and at my proper cost.

(V. 1. 316)

Illyria definitely is not Gonzalo's imaginary commonwealth without trade, service, or riches.

This emphasis on giving and receiving serves, as Porter Williams says, to contrast the generous and loving nature of Viola, Orsino, and Olivia with the selfishness of Malvolio and Sir Toby, but he oversimplifies, I think, when he suggests that the money and gifts that change hands so freely ‘symbolize generous love and friendship’ and that ‘such giving and receiving must be done without counting the cost or measuring the risk’ (p. 194). Orsino's financial generosity is patently not identified with generous love. Admittedly, he does not count the cost in his courtship of Olivia. His motives are not mercenary and his emissaries bear jewels; nevertheless, his love is self-regarding. In the first scene, for example, when he makes the expected pun on Curio's suggestion to hunt the hart, he first seems to be directing his thoughts beyond himself, thinking of the noble Olivia:

CUR.
Will you go hunt, my lord?
DUKE.
What, Curio?
CUR.
The hart.
DUKE.
Why, so I do, the noblest that I have.

(I. 1. 16)

But immediately we discover that the noble heart Orsino pursues is his own:

O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first,
Methought she purg'd the air of pestilence!
That instant was I turn'd into a hart,
And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds,
E'er since pursue me.

(l. 18)

His love for Olivia does not give rise to thoughts of serving her or sharing with her but of reigning supreme in her:

                                                                                when liver, brain, and heart,
These sovereign thrones, are all supplied and fill'd
Her sweet perfections with one self king!

(l. 36)

In the meantime he seeks solitude: ‘for I myself am best / When least in company (1. 4. 37).

Viola too is generous, but, while her love is more selfless than Orsino's, her economic liberality is less purely spontaneous and more thoughtful. When she gives gold to the sea captain, she does so explicitly in gratitude for the comfort he has given her: ‘For saying so, there's gold’ (1. 2. 18). She promises to pay him more in return for specific help she requests from him:

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.

(1. 2. 52)

She is fully aware that she takes a risk in trusting him:

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.

(l. 48)

And she is not averse to reinforcing his good will with the hope that ‘It may be worth thy pains’ (l. 57). Just as she gladly pays for help she needs, she expects to earn her way with the duke she proposes to serve, confident that she can prove ‘worth his service’ (l. 59). Like the other characters, Viola is tempted by the attractions of solitude: she would like to join Olivia in her isolated grief and postpone being ‘delivered to the world’ (l. 42), but she readily accepts the necessity of taking part in the commerce of human society.

The idea of reward for service continues in Viola's first scene with Orsino. The short scene opens with Valentine commenting on Cesario's advancement: ‘If the Duke continue these favors towards you, Cesario, you are like to be much advanc'd; he hath known you but three days, and already you are no stranger’ (l. 4). The dialogue between Orsino and Viola ends with the duke's promise:

                                                                                                    Prosper well in this,
And thou shalt live as freely as thy lord,
To call his fortunes thine.

(l. 38)

The effect is not to stress Orsino's generosity, or to suggest his vulgarity in offering reward, but to show that Viola belongs; she has become an active participant in the reciprocal relationships that bind the social group together. Indeed, the play as a whole, I think, demonstrates the principle of reciprocity, the unwritten rule, according to Marcel Mauss and Lévi-Strauss, by which the exchange of goods creates mutually-satisfying relationships among individuals and groups.

Building on Mauss's seminal study of the gift in primitive societies, these social anthropologists point out that exchanges of goods may be complex social events—at once legal, economic, religious, aesthetic, and morphological—rather than solely, or even primarily, economic transactions.⁵ Most basically, ‘the agreed transfer of a valuable from one individual to another makes these individuals into partners’ because it implies that the gift will be reciprocated with a counter-gift, usually of equivalent or greater value.⁶ Through the principle of reciprocity, then, the act of exchange binds the giver and the recipient in a relationship. To give is to create an obligation; to take is to imply a willingness to pay that debt. Consequently, to refuse a gift is an insulting rejection of relationship with the giver, and to take without repaying is either humiliating failure or an act of aggression in the eyes of the whole society.

The principle of reciprocity operates most clearly through Feste. His first scene, Act I, Scene 5, establishes his position as a professional entertainer. After Maria's warning that his absence has threatened his security as Olivia's fool, he successfully fools Olivia out of her bad humour and in return receives her support and protection when Malvolio attacks him. In Act II he sings, first for Sir Toby and Sir Andrew, and then for Orsino, demonstrating each time that he who pays the piper calls the tune. There is nothing demeaning in the financial aspect of the transaction, despite A. C. Bradley's worry that Feste is offended and disgusted by Orsino's offer of payment.⁷ Feste sings for pleasure, as he tells Orsino, but ‘pleasure will be paid, one time or another’ (II, 4. 70), and he pockets as his due the money Toby, Andrew, and Orsino pay for the pleasure he gives them. The scenes where Feste is paid for his foolery follow the same pattern. In Act III, Scene 1, his witty wordplays elicit coins from Viola as well as an appreciative analysis of the fool's art. Similarly, at the beginning of Act V, Scene 1, Orsino pays for Feste's excellent foolery and promises further bounty if he will carry a message. Feste's cleverness in getting his tips doubled, as he tells Orsino, is not ‘the sin of covetousness’ (V. 1. 47), but part of his performance, rather like the plea for applause by the epilogue to a Renaissance play. Often, Feste expresses gratitude for these payments in a wittily pertinent blessing: ‘Now the melancholy god protect thee’ to Orsino, and to Viola-Cesario: ‘Now Jove, in his next commodity of hair, send thee a beard!’ (II. 4. 73; III. 1. 44).

The only significant departure from the pattern of a mutually satisfying exchange of talented performance for money comes when Feste tries to deliver to Sebastian a message intended for Cesario. Feste's words, of course, make no sense at all to Sebastian, who in exasperation tips the fool in an effort to get rid of him:

I prithee, foolish Greek, depart from me.
There's money for thee. If you tarry longer,
I shall give worse payment.

(IV. 1. 18)

Instead of begging for more or invoking a witty blessing on his benefactor, this time Feste responds with open contempt: ‘By my troth, thou hast an open hand. These wise men that give fools money get themselves a good report—after fourteen years' purchase’ (l. 21). When the young man seems to deny his identity and his relationships with people in Illyria, Feste's words, his medium of exchange, lose their value, and the exchange process breaks down: ‘No, I do not know you, nor I am not sent to you by my lady, to bid you come speak with her, nor your name is not Master Cesario, nor this is not my nose neither: nothing that is so is so’ (l. 5). Because Sebastian cannot receive Feste's message, his offer of money is not part of a reciprocal exchange but, from his point of view, an insulting dismissal and, from Feste's, a wise man's folly.⁸

Sebastian's refusal to participate results, of course, from Feste's mistake, not from Sebastian's rejection of the principle of reciprocity. His scenes with Antonio stress his dual awareness that taking implies an obligation to give and that gifts of love cannot be reduced to an economic transaction. ‘Recompense’, Shakespeare's word for the idea of reciprocity, is the subject of his first speech: ‘My stars shine darkly over me. The malignancy of my fate might perhaps distemper yours; therefore I shall crave of you your leave, that I may bear my evils alone. It were a bad recompense for your love, to lay any of them on you’ (II. 1. 3). He pursues isolation because he feels unable to enter into a balanced mutual relationship. But when Antonio persists in offering help and protection, Sebastian understands that rejecting such love would be unkind, although gratitude is the only recompense he can give:

                                                                                My kind Antonio,
I can no other answer make but thanks,
And thanks; and ever oft good turns
Are shuffled off with such uncurrent pay;
But were my worth as is my conscience firm,
You should find better dealing.

(III. 3. 13)

Similarly, Sebastian values the pearl Olivia gives him as symbol of the wonder of her love and reciprocates by vowing eternal love.

Thus the transfer of wealth from one person to another in Twelfth Night creates and expresses a wide variety of relationships: entertainer with audience, employer with employee, friend with friend, and husband with wife. Concomitantly, repudiating the principle of reciprocity signals the breakdown of community and the outbreak of hostility. The extreme case is Antonio, who is excluded from Illyria because he refuses to repay what he has taken from Duke Orsino. His offence, he explains to Sebastian,

                    might have since been answer'd in repaying
What we took from them, which for traffic's sake
Most of our city did. Only myself stood out,
For which if I be lapsed in this place
I shall pay dear.

(III. 3. 33)

Antonio knows that because he has refused to repay, he will pay dearly if he is recognized, for the ugly reverse of the reciprocity binding people harmoniously together is the requital of injury with injury in a divisive cycle of revenge. Similarly, when it appears that Sebastian is unwilling to return his purse, Antonio's love turns to hostility. The refusal is a denial of their relationship, and to claim no relationship is to create a hostile one. Antonio has sincerely believed his love to be totally selfless and his generosity to expect no return. But in the crisis produced by Orsino's revenge and by the confusion of brother and sister, he discovers that he has counted on receiving loyalty and gratitude in return for giving Sebastian ‘his life’ and ‘my love’ (V. 1. 80, 81). Without such recompense love is impossible, and his adulation is transformed to scorn.

Sir Toby's relationship with Andrew Aguecheek also demonstrates the principle of reciprocity by negative example. Toby coaxes money from the thin-faced knight, who receives nothing in return but deceptive assurances of success in his courtship of Olivia. Because Toby is exploitative and Andrew foolish, we see their companionship as a travesty of friendship, and its disintegration in the last act strikes us as no loss and no surprise. Toby's high-spirited gaiety is equalled by his selfish disregard for other people, but even he realizes that ‘pleasure will be paid, one time or another’, and he marries Maria ‘in recompense’ (V. 1. 364) for her part in the gulling of Malvolio.

Only Malvolio stands outside the lines of exchange that link the characters in increasingly complex patterns of relationship. He is the only major character who pays Feste nothing and neither gives nor receives a gift. He lacks the ‘generous’ and ‘free’ temperament that provides a sense of proportion, as Olivia tells him (I. 5. 91, 92), but he is no more greedy than Sir Toby, who calculates that he has cost Sir Andrew ‘some two thousand … or so’ (III. 2. 54-55), or than Sir Andrew, who expects to repair his fortune by marrying Olivia. The measure of Malvolio's self-love is not his miserliness or covetousness but his presumptuous belief that he lives in a sphere above and beyond ordinary human relationships. Maria's attempts to define what is so odious about Malvolio (he is a ‘puritan’ and a ‘time-pleaser’ (II. 3. 140, 148)) at first sound contradictory, if a puritan is one who self-righteously condemns lapses from a moral ideal and a ‘time-pleaser’ one who cynically manipulates worldly affairs for self-aggrandizement. But Maria is right both times; the puritan and the politician meet in Malvolio's self-esteem and in his contempt for people and for human relationships as ends in themselves. This total lack of identification with other people both incites and provides the means for Malvolio's gulling. When his insults provoke the conspirators to revenge, they can easily persuade him that Fortune has singled him out for greatness. Maria's letter merely reinforces his desire to ‘wash off gross acquaintance’ and his assumption that he condescends to speak to ordinary mortals as ‘nightingales answer daws’ (II. 5. 162-63; III. 4. 35-36).

In Twelfth Night money symbolizes not love so much as a broader engagement with the real and imperfect world; paying, lending, giving, and taking are signs of willingness to have commerce with human society. Because the attitude that controls Malvolio's response to other people is ‘I am not of your element’ (III. 4. 124), he does not take part in the exchanges of wealth that engage the other characters. Even when he is duped into believing that Olivia has given him her love and, by marrying him, will give him wealth and power, he feels no obligation or gratitude. He thanks ‘Jove’ and ‘my stars’ (II. 5. 172), but not Olivia. He believes that ‘nothing that can be can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes’ (III. 4. 81) and that no human actions, not even his own, contribute to this perfect felicity.

The success of the plot against him teaches Malvolio the vulnerability he shares with the rest of mankind. In his distress he appeals to Feste for help, and promises, ‘I will live to be thankful to thee for't’; ‘It shall advantage thee’; ‘I'll requite it in the highest degree’ (IV. 2. 82, 111, 118). A demonstration of dependency so humiliating and a promise to reciprocate offered under duress do not promise Malvolio's sudden conversion to brotherly love, but even his departing curse, ‘I'll be reveng'd on the whole pack of you’ (V. 1. 378), does not inspire, in the theatre, the dread or pathos critics often solemnly attribute to it. Malvolio may never learn with Prospero that ‘the rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance’, but even his comically impotent fury registers his dawning awareness that he is ‘one of their kind’ (The Tempest, V. 1. 27-28, 23). In suffering wrong and experiencing the natural human desire to hurt back, he is at least entering the rough give and take of the real world. And Olivia's immediate sympathy and Orsino's command to ‘Pursue him, and entreat him to a peace’ (V. 1. 380) assure the audience, I think, of future reconciliation.

While all the characters take part in the process of exchange, Viola is distinguished by her fuller understanding of the conscious and unconscious operation of the principle of reciprocity. Hating ingratitude more than any other vice,⁹ she repays Orsino's trust and favour with loyal service, faithfully wooing Olivia for him despite her own longing to be his wife. And the heart of her plea to Olivia is that love deserves recompense; ‘My master, not myself, lacks recompense’ (I. 5. 285), she replies tartly when Olivia offers to tip her. However great Olivia's beauty, she argues, Orsino's love could be ‘but recompens'd’ (l. 253) by winning her. Indeed, Viola breaks through Olivia's reserve by teaching her that the gifts of nature too bring an obligation to give in return, ‘for what is yours to bestow is not yours to reserve’ (l. 188). The lesson Olivia learns, ‘ourselves we do not owe’ (l. 310), strikingly resembles the ‘basic theme’ which Marcel Mauss's English editor finds in the anthropologist's analysis of reciprocity: ‘One belongs to others and not to oneself.’¹⁰ Still, for all Viola's advocacy of the human obligation to love and to give, it is impossible for her to reciprocate the love Olivia gives to Cesario, a fiction Viola has created. And she begins to regret her male disguise when she realizes the falseness of her position in relation to Olivia. As Cesario she clearly tells Olivia that she can never love her but, even so, she accepts Olivia's gifts, sparing her the pain and humiliation of having these symbols of love rejected.

Viola, then, understands that we cannot take without giving, but she knows also that giving may not be as selfless as it appears. Just as she sincerely tries to persuade Olivia to reciprocate Duke Orsino's love, she tries to show him the arrogance of his stubborn refusal to accept rejection. When Olivia refuses to return his love, his insistence that he ‘cannot be so answer'd’ (II. 4. 88) reveals his noble passion to be, at least in part, a determination to dominate and an egoist's conviction that reality must conform to his will. Although Orsino does not recognize the self-glorification in his unrequited love for Olivia, when he speaks of Olivia paying a ‘debt of love’ (I. 1. 33) to her brother or when he advises Cesario against loving a woman ‘not worth thee’ (II. 4. 27), he assumes that people seek a return of equivalent or greater value for the love they give. Because Viola is fully conscious that giving love involves asking for love, she denies herself the joy of offering her love to Orsino.

Recognizing the reciprocal nature of human relationships, then, does not solve all problems. It is impossible to give without desiring some return, but to expect exact recompense, as Feste demonstrates to Fabian, makes an absurd sham of giving: ‘to give a dog and in recompense desire my dog again’ (V. 1. 6). Giving without recompense may be self-indulgent, insulting, foolish, or tyrannical, but failing to give is self-destructive, as Viola reminds us, describing her father's daughter who ‘never told her love, / But let concealment like a worm i' th' bud / Feed on her damask cheek’ (II. 4. 110).

Not even Viola, then, can discover a way out of the tangled personal relationships that make up the plot of Twelfth Night. Beneficent fortune, not human wit, creates the happy ending. It is the fact that Sebastian exists, rather than moral education or spiritual growth, that solves the problems troubling the inhabitants of Illyria. The sorting out of couples in the last scene, however, is not merely a mechanically-contrived happy ending; it is, rather, the culmination of the reciprocal exchanges I have been tracing. In the course of the action, all the major characters have been tempted by the dream of self-sufficiency, but have been forced, by circumstances and by their own needs and desires, into relationships where they become aware of their obligations to and dependence on others. Viola-Cesario is the key figure in the process. She triggers Olivia's abandonment of her vows of celibacy and provides her with the humbling experience of finding the real world intractable to her will. She provides Orsino with real human love as an alternative to a self-centred fantasy. When all fantasies of limitless personal power and happiness collapse in the last scene under the pressure of the destructive aspect of reciprocity, Orsino and Olivia are ready to relinquish their dreams of Olivia and Cesario for the real love of Viola and Sebastian. Finally repelled from worshipping at ‘uncivil’ Olivia's ‘ingrate … altars’ (V. 1. 112, 113), Orsino's first reaction is the angry cruelty that is so often the corollary of sentimentality. But when Sebastian's arrival reveals Viola's identity, he asks for Viola's hand and gives her his in grateful recompense for ‘service done him’ (l. 321).

The sudden reversal from hostility and disintegrating relationships to love and alliance results from the amazing yet natural division of Cesario into Viola and Sebastian. This separation of brother and sister into two independent people symbolically illustrates Lévi-Strauss's theory that the principle of reciprocity binds people together in stable societies through the prohibition of incest and its wider social application, the custom of exogamy. He speculates that incest ‘in the broadest sense of the word, consists in obtaining by oneself, and for oneself, instead of by another, and for another’ (p. 489). The functional value of reciprocal exchange in marriage alliances and of the prohibition of marriage within certain degrees is to maintain ‘the group as a group, … avoiding the indefinite fission and segmentation which the practice of consanguineous marriages would bring about’ (p. 479).

So too in Twelfth Night, it is only when Olivia's exclusive allegiance to her brother is relinquished, and when brother and sister are brought together so that they can be publicly divided, that a harmonious and cohesive society becomes possible.¹¹ The strangers from across the sea rescue the native Illyrians both from the sterility of self-preoccupation and from the divisive violence of their inevitable conflicts. Viola and Sebastian free Orsino and Olivia from illusions of exclusive self-fulfilment and total dominance and give them instead the shared happiness of mutual love. Neither Shakespeare nor the anthropologists claim that awareness of the principle of reciprocity can fundamentally alter the finite, complex nature of the human condition, but in his last romantic comedy Shakespeare suggests that by understanding our mutual needs we can choose love, generosity, and alliance rather than isolation, stagnation, and division.

Notes

1. Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy (Cambridge, 1974), p. 20 and passim.

2. Quotations throughout are from The Riverside Shakespeare, edited by G. Blakemore Evans and others (Boston, Massachusetts, 1974).

3. The Elementary Structures of Kinship, translated by James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham, revised edition (London, 1969), pp. 496-97; originally published as Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (Paris, 1949).

4. ‘Mistakes in Twelfth Night and Their Resolution’, PMLA, 76 (1961), 193-99 (p. 194).

5. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, translated by Ian Cunnison, introduction by E. E. Evans-Pritchard (London, 1954), originally published as Essai sur le don, forme archaïque de l'échange (Paris, 1925); Claude Lévi-Strauss, Elementary Structures, especially Chapter 5, ‘The Principle of Reciprocity’.

6. Lévi-Strauss, p. 84. The socio-morphological function of exchanging gifts had not, of course, escaped earlier observation. Seneca's De Beneficiis seeks to explain the rules of giving, receiving, and repaying, ‘a practice that constitutes the chief bond of human society’, Moral Essays, translated by John W. Basore, Loeb Classical Library, 3 vols (London, 1928-35), III, 19.

7. ‘Feste the Jester’, in A Miscellany, second edition (London, 1931), p. 212.

8. Compare Seneca, De Beneficiis, ‘A gift is not a benefit if the best part of it is lacking—the fact that it was given as a mark of esteem’ (Moral Essays, III, 49).

9. III. 4. 354-57. Compare Seneca: ‘Homicides, tyrants, thieves, adulterers, robbers, sacrilegious men, and traitors there always will be; but worse than all these is the crime of ingratitude’ (p. 33).

10. The Gift, p. v.

11. In her discussion of mutual love in Shakespeare's romantic comedies, Marianne L. Novy presents the meeting of Sebastian and Viola as emblematic of mutual love between man and woman (‘“And You Smile Not, He's Gagged”: Mutuality in Shakespearean Comedy’, PQ [Philological Quarterly], 55 (1976), 178-94). Without denying that the loving reunion is crucial to the mutual happiness of the ending, I want to argue that its primary function is to divide Cesario, the brother-sister amalgam, into two people, a division which allows new love relationships to succeed long-established biological ones.