SOURCE: Tromly, F. B. “Twelfth Night: Folly's Talents and the Ethics of Shakespearean Comedy.” Mosaic 7, no. 3 (spring 1974): 53-68.

[In the following essay, Tromly suggests that folly is a positive force in Twelfth Night, one that allow the characters to come to terms with life by learning to accept “delusion, vulnerability, and mortality.”]

Well, God give them wisdom that have it, and those that are fools, let them use their talents.

(I, v, 13-14)

To speak of the ethics of Shakespearean comedy, and especially those of a play so dedicated to “good fooling” as Twelfth Night, smacks of critical perversity. When Feste asks Toby and Andrew, “Would you have a love song, or a song of good life [a song praising the virtuous life],” the two superannuated roaring boys surely answer for the audience as well as for themselves. Toby exclaims, “A love song, a love song,” and Andrew's response, as usual, is a vacuous echo: “Ay, ay, I care not for good life” (II, iii, 32-35).¹ Only a Malvolio would want to deny the play the cakes and ale of comic release. The vision of romantic comedy tends to hold the reality principle in abeyance, to dissolve it in music and moonlight, and hence our quotidian notions of ethical conduct may seem irrelevant to Illyria and the forest of Arden.

Also, one hesitates to dilate on the ethics of Shakespeare's comedies because there is a sense in which the comic world actively subverts moral codes. It does so by suggesting that people stumble upon rather than earn their happiness, and hence it reassures us that felicity is not reserved for the conspicuously virtuous. As every Jack gets his Jill, hormones seem as instrumental as head or heart in bringing about the inevitable mass marriages. The romantic comedies manage to sidestep the crushing moral issues which lie at the core of tragedy because they insinuate that mistakes simply don't count. To borrow the Captain's words to Viola, comedy works to “comfort you with chance” (I, ii, 8).

Whatever the ethics of the comedies may be, they have nothing to do with law. The comic form capitalizes on an important psychic fact: that breaking the law, and watching it be broken, are deeply satisfying. The exhilaration which comedy creates stems partially from its systematic violation of statutory law as well as the law of probability. Shakespeare's comedies insist on the inadequacy of the law, and their denouements often turn on its violation. In The Merchant of Venice Shylock gets his comeuppance when his insistence on the strict application of the law backfires. The attempt of the humorous Egeus to inflict “the ancient privilege of Athens” upon his nubile daughter carries the plot of A Midsummer Night's Dream into the license of the woods. Nowhere in the comedies does the law seem so inimical and foreign to human needs as in Measure for Measure, where the “most biting laws” (I, iii, 19) are often imaged as a beast of prey. Frequently the comedies insinuate that the law is itself unlawful. In his first appearance on stage, Falstaff derides the “rusty curb of old father antic the law” (I, ii, 56), which implies that the law is the true lord of misrule. It is no coincidence that many of Shakespeare's comedies locate their action during a time of Holiday or Carnival, when the proper law is the inversion of law.

This enmity between comedy and law is a consequence of comedy's most fundamental ethical axiom—that only limited moral achievement can be expected of man. Comedy discovers its perspective on morality in its insistence on human weakness. It is that great melancholic, Hamlet, who voices the discrepancy which comedy creates between the demands of the law and man's congenital inability to fulfill them. When Polonius says that he will treat the visiting players “according to their desert,” Hamlet retorts:

God's bodkin, man, much better! Use every man after his desert, and who shall scape whipping? Use them after your own honor and dignity. The less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty.

(II, ii, 516-19)

Man delights not Hamlet, nor woman neither, as he has told Rosencrantz and Guildenstern a few moments earlier. The actions of Claudius, Gertrude, and Ophelia, and his mistaken sense of his own cowardice, have given him ample cause to revile human frailty, and yet, for a moment, he contemplates moral failure with a tolerant equanimity. Since everyone merits the whip for misdemeanour, no one should have to suffer what he deserves. Huck Finn, the Hamlet of Hannibal, shares the Prince's point of view when he decides to help the murderers trapped on a sinking steamship:

I begun to think how dreadful it was, even for murderers, to be in such a fix. I says to myself, there ain't no telling but I might come to be a murderer myself yet, and then how would I like it?²

Like Hamlet, Huck never forgets that he is “low-down and ornery.”

No less an authority on comedy than Falstaff endorses Hamlet's and Huck's viewpoint. When Hal tries to shame him for cheating Mistress Quickly, Falstaff replies:

Thou knowest in the state of innocency Adam fell, and what should poor Jack Falstaff do in the days of villainy? Thou seest I have more flesh than another man, and therefore more frailty.

(III, iii, 158-62)

Shakespearean comedy acknowledges the consequences of the Fall, but, like Falstaff, it proceeds to turn Calvinism inside-out by suggesting that man's frailty should exonerate rather than damn him. For the Calvinist, man is depraved, but for the comic artist he is only deprived. In Shakespearean comedy the key terms for man's limitation are two: frailty and folly. These terms are close in meaning, but not interchangeable. Folly resides primarily in the mind, while frailty is weakness of the flesh. In the romantic comedies, such as A Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelfth Night, folly predominates, while in the so-called “dark comedies” the emphasis shifts to frailty. But, regardless of differences of emphasis, comedy always fashions a world of diminished moral expectation. Paradoxical as it may sound, Shakespeare's comedies are less sanguine about human potentiality than the tragedies. The gentle scepticism of the comedies questions excellence in evil as well as in goodness; as Don John and Oliver discover, comic villainy is destined to incompetence, vulnerable to the sleuthing of a Dogberry.

Twelfth Night, the last and richest of Shakespeare's romantic comedies, gathers up the themes of the earlier comedies, and one senses in the play a new exploration of the possibilities of comic form. It is almost as if Shakespeare wrote Twelfth Night after mulling over his earlier comedies and deciding he would have a last try. The most telling manifestation of Shakespeare's new commitment is the play's emphasis on human limitation. None of the other romantic comedies forces us to question human capability in the way Twelfth Night does. None of the earlier comedies gives us so much of the dark side of comedy's moon. The movement from Twelfth Night to Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida (all written in about two years) is not as surprising as it may first seem.³

Twelfth Night is of course not unique among the romantic comedies in its reference to the sadness of things. All the comedies employ what might be called tragic relief. In Northrop Frye's phrase, “in almost any comedy we may become aware of having been delivered from the tragedy.”⁴ In fact, most of Shakespeare's so-called “happy comedies” begin and end in shadow. A Midsummer Night's Dream, for instance, begins with images of the waning moon, the wasting away of desire, and love won by inflicting injury. It ends with a lamentable comedy (lamentably acted), with the tolling of “the iron tongue of midnight,” and with Puck describing how the screech owl “Puts the wretch that lies in woe / In remembrance of a shroud” (V, i, 366-67). Similarly, the opening lines of Love's Labour's Lost refer to “brazen tombs,” “the disgrace of death,” and “cormorant devouring Time,” and at the end the sombre announcement of the King's death breaks in upon the festivities. A pair of seasonal songs concludes the play, with the song of Winter significantly following that of Spring. Thus, the whirligig of Time brings in his revenges on us all. The romantic comedies always hint at the incompleteness of their vision.

Twelfth Night is a play of much mirth, good fooling. Twelfth Night, itself, we should recall, was traditionally a time of licensed festivity and carnival. Inversions of hierarchy, masqueradings, song, and excessive drink were the disorder of the day. Shakespeare's play beautifully recreates the celebratory nature of its social occasion.⁵ Yet, the play constantly reminds us that its lovers and roisterers are playing out their games in a context of suffering, hazard, and death. To put it another way, the foreground of the play is festive, but in its immediate background Shakespeare constantly reminds us that life isn't always happy, and in fact cannot sustain happiness for long.

At the outset, we hear of the recent deaths of Olivia's father and brother, as well as a reference to pestilence in the air. Then in the next scene we hear a vivid description of a shipwreck, meet a defenceless young woman cast ashore in a foreign land, and entertain the likelihood of yet another dead brother. The ensuing complication of the action creates confusion and anxiety among the characters, who experience intensely such painful emotions as jealousy and impute ingratitude and disloyalty to the people closest to them. Also, the sub-plot concerning the gulling of Malvolio leaves a bad taste in many readers' mouths and suggests that even foolery has its dark side. The play reminds Clifford Leech of those social occasions on which “we look coldly on the merry-making and the good relationship and see the precariousness of our tolerance for one another, the degree of pretence in all sociability.”⁶

Perhaps the darkest aspect of the play is its frequent reference to the remorseless attrition of mutability. It refuses to let us forget that “beauty's a flower” (I, v, 47) and that women are as roses, which die “even when they to perfection grow” (II, iv, 40). Even its songs, which dally with the innocence of love, concern themselves with the interment of dead lovers and remind us that “youth's a stuff will not endure” (II, iii, 49). The play ends with Feste's piercingly lonely and plangent song—as we leave the playhouse we walk into the world of its insistent refrain, where “the rain it raineth every day.”

The darkness of the play is not confined to these sombre references to disaster and time's ruthless passage. The action of the plot creates for the audience a constant spectacle of illusion and deception. The limitations of the characters are bodied forth most vividly in their lack of knowledge about the world and themselves. They are constantly deceived about their own identity as well as that of others. To borrow a phrase from Feste, the play gives us “Misprision in the highest degree” (I, v, 50). Shakespeare sharpens the audience's awareness of the characters' illusions by always giving it more information than the people on stage possess. In none of the other romantic comedies is the discrepancy between the Olympian awareness of the audience and the limited awareness of the characters so sustained. Bertrand Evans informs us that in no less than seven scenes in Twelfth Night, the audience holds an advantage in awareness over all who take part. He goes on to say that “In the course of the action every named person takes a turn below our vantage-point, and below the vantage-point of some other person or persons; in this play neither heroine nor clown is totally spared.”⁷ Nor, it might be added, is the audience itself totally spared. In Act II, Feste refers to what the Elizabethans called the “picture of We Three” (II, iii, 15-16), which was a picture of two asses, the looker-on becoming the third. The audience's enjoyment of a fictional representation of deluded people ironically suggests that it, too, is part of the picture—the third ass.

To catalogue all the illusions which beset the characters would require a sizeable essay in itself. But a casual sample may suggest the frequency of delusion in the play. Toby gulls Andrew into thinking he has a chance with Olivia; in a parallel action, the downstairs people memorably gull Malvolio with similar hopes for Olivia. Of course they only intensify a process of self-deception in Malvolio which is already well under way. Meanwhile, Viola deludes everyone by posing as a man named Cesario. But it is only with the appearance of Sebastian in Act III that confusion reaches its climax. Antonio is baffled by the apparent refusal of his bosom friend Sebastian to recognize him; Sebastian, in turn, is baffled by the vigor of Olivia's advances (he must have thought that Illyrian women were uncommonly brazen), and by the people who walk up and hit him for no apparent reason; Viola is deluded not only in her ridiculous fear that Aguecheek is a mean man in a duel, but she is also puzzled by Olivia's insistence that they are married and by Antonio's insistence that they are old friends; Toby and Andrew are bruised as well as baffled by the sudden show of manliness on the part of Sebastian (who they think is Cesario); and even Feste, the most distanced and objective spectator in the play, is baffled by Cesario's apparent refusal to recognize him. Feste expresses the pervasive sense of bewilderment when he remarks that “Nothing that is so is so” (IV, i, 8). For its inhabitants, the world of Illyria increasingly assumes the fierce vexation of a dream and even the terror of nightmare. As the play dances to its conclusion, characters increasingly speculate on the possibility that they have become mad. And Malvolio remains locked in his darkened room, accused of madness and demoniacal possession. Like Puck, the audience may well exclaim, “What fools these mortals be.” But there is no Puck-figure in Twelfth Night, no need for supernatural high jinks and magic potions to confuse the characters. The Illyrians are quite capable of creating their own confusion.

The ethics of Shakespeare's romantic comedies, and of Twelfth Night in particular, center on one problem: given the harshness of the world, given man's vulnerability and frailty, given his propensity for self-deception, how can he get by? How can the play resolve itself happily? One indication of Shakespeare's deliberate exploration of comic form in Twelfth Night is that he poses this question explicitly. When Viola realizes that Olivia is in love with her impersonation of a man, she soliloquizes:

Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness
Wherein the pregnant enemy does much.
How easy is it for the proper false
In women's waxen hearts to set their forms!
Alas, our frailty is the cause, not we,
For such as we are made of, such we be.
How will this fadge?

(II, ii, 26-32)

The modulation of tone in Viola's speech suggests the great range of feeling that Twelfth Night contains. She begins in the idiom of theology, with sombre reference to “wickedness” and “the pregnant enemy,” but her language soon descends to the reassuringly colloquial: “How will this fadge?” And notice the comic implications of the rhymed lines:

Alas, our frailty is the cause, not we,
For such as we are made of, such we be.

Although Viola's logic scarcely would suffice in an ethical treatise, it is convincing in the same way as Falstaff's is. Since we are what we are made of, our frailty is the cause of our moral shortcomings, not ourselves. Her clear implication is that man is too frail to be punished. But her question remains: How does life fadge?

As I mentioned earlier, it is always dangerous to imply that comic characters are fully responsible for earning or creating their happiness. Luck is usually involved in bringing about the vital recognition which resolves the plot; at the end of Act V, happiness seems to come wheezing in from the wings. In Twelfth Night the appearance of Viola's shipwrecked twin Sebastian intensifies and then suddenly disentangles the perplexities of the plot. If Sebastian had not found a mast in the shipwreck to buoy him up, or if he and his sister had not chanced to meet in Illyria, then the major characters in the play would have remained permanently stuck in an increasingly intolerable situation.

But to say that Lady Luck presides over the resolution of comic plots is not to say that comic characters, frail as they may be, can do nothing to advance the resolution. Most emphatically, Shakespeare's comedies do not embody or advocate a philosophy of fatalism, cosmic do-nothingness. Sebastian does, after all, actively bind himself to the mast that saves him, and he does choose to visit Illyria (even though he doesn't know that his sister is there). If human resolve counted for nothing, then the comic world would become farcical or absurd, and ethical discrimination about its inhabitants would become impossible. Such is not the case in Twelfth Night.

As John Russell Brown has argued convincingly, the romantic comedies “do not formulate a judgement in the manner of the history-plays and early tragedies, nor in the manner of satirical comedy, but a judgement is implicit nevertheless.”⁸ What we need to discover in Twelfth Night is the precise relationship between the plentiful limitations of its characters and the happiness that befalls most of them at the end. What values mediate between the characters' frailty and the fadging of the plot? It may be helpful to recall a sententious couplet that Antonio delivers:

In nature there's no blemish but the mind;
None can be called deformed but the unkind.

(II, iv, 347-48)

The word “unkind” here means both “un-natural” and “un-loving.” If, as Brown has suggested, there is an implicit judgement in Twelfth Night, it will take its positive force from such values as love, the heart, and nature.

My contention is that folly is the idea which resides at the center of the play's implied values and focuses them. It may seem strange to talk about folly as a positive value, since it would seem to be the opposite of wisdom, and therefore a bad thing. And, at first glance, the constant delusion which the characters suffer would seem to be their greatest limitation, the greatest barrier separating them from their happiness. But a closer look at the plot will change our negative valuation of folly. The task of a satirist like Ben Jonson is to scourge folly, but in Twelfth Night it becomes a great and positive, if mischievous, force. Folly bestows upon the characters the delusions which allow them to embrace their limitations. It liberates those natural qualities which enable them to pursue a life of fulfillment in a very harsh world. The play suggests that one can come to terms with life only by accepting the nature of things—delusion, vulnerability, and mortality.

But if the play reveals the wisdom of a foolish acquiescence to nature's order, it unequivocally condemns passivity. Throughout the play the positive aspect of folly is associated with the notion of spending one's talents, of sharing one's gifts with the world. The notion of sharing talents appears often in Shakespeare, and most notably in the early sonnets, which exhort the young man to procreate and thereby increase nature's store.⁹ In the language of Sonnet #4:

Nature's bequest gives nothing but doth lend,
And, being frank, she lends to those are free.

Nature's ideology here seems distinctly socialistic—to those who share, more will be lent. Or, as a popular collection of ethical sentences put it: “God will increase that little that thou hast, if thou purposest to giue of that little.”¹⁰ The play's emphasis on giving is apparent in its stage-business as well as in its plot and language; coins, purses, jewels, and rings are constantly being exchanged.

The most telling reference in the play to folly's talents is a remark by Feste: “Well, God give them reason that have it, and those that are fools, let them use their talents” (I, v, 13-14). The implication of Feste's oblique remark is that God may well give reason to those who have it, because no one in fact does possess it. The category of “those that are fools” includes everyone. The fools of the world must live by using their talents. Giving is the proper fruition of folly.

A brief and very selective glance at Erasmus' Praise of Folly may help to illuminate Shakespeare's concerns in Twelfth Night. Erasmus' personified Folly is the self-appointed scourge of Stoical restraint, and she identifies herself with the natural world of impulse, passion and energy. She defines herself as the principle which makes life and its constricted possibilities not only tolerable, but even fun. “Would life without pleasure be called life at all?” she asks.¹¹ Constantly she reminds us of how harsh life would be without the amelioration of folly. Through her banter and foolery runs an awareness, as in the comedies, of the sorrow and limitation to which man is born. Unlike all the other gifts of the gods, folly is available to all (p. 135).

In the wisdom of her folly she realizes that the examined life is hardly life at all, much less worth living. For Folly, pleasure and delusion are synonymous. She would agree with Mark Twain's exhortation: “Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.”¹² Folly proceeds to inform us, with characteristic immodesty, that she is the only begetter of all social bonds; without the illusions which she bestows beneficently on man, everyone in his wisdom would scorn love, friendship, marriage, and even procreation (pp. 111-13). It is folly's deluded happiness which makes fellowship and sharing possible. She argues, in short, that all of life is nothing more than a play of folly. The world is a great stage of fools, and folly is its producer, director, and ever-diligent prompter.

Erasmus' Folly tells us that without folly life is a sombre play, that our illusions and self-love make life bearable, that folly ministers to our infirmity. Twefth Night dramatizes and concretizes the Erasmian notion that life is but a play of folly. In the microcosmic “wooden O,” the Globe Theatre, the price of a penny turns Erasmus' metaphor into reality. In Twelfth Night Feste, the professional fool, defends the significance of foolery (to say nothing of his job) against the attacks of Olivia and Malvolio. It is Feste who states the hallowed transvaluation which places Folly above Wisdom:

Wit, an't be thy will, put me into good fooling. Those wits that think they have thee do very oft prove fools, and I that am sure I lack thee may pass for a wise man. For what says Quinapalus? “Better a witty fool than a foolish wit.”

(I, v, 29-33)

Shakespeare frequently uses Feste as a chorus to comment on various renderings of his theme, but to catalogue his remarks on folly is not itself enough. The notion of folly and its talents pervades the play—shaping its plot, individuating its characters, and supplying some of its dominant symbols.

The first two scenes of Twelfth Night have the impact of expanded metaphors, since their distinct environments suggest the contrasts which shape the play's values. The first scene gives us the Duke's too-famous “If music be the food of love” speech and an attendant's revealing description of Olivia's elaborate plans to “season a brother's dead love.” The second scene presents Viola's conversation with the Captain about her shipwreck and the possibility of her brother's survival, and it concludes with her plans to disguise herself and attend the Duke. The rhythm joining the scenes is a common one in Shakespeare: they move from elegant verse to expository prose, from court to country, from the artifice of fashionable poses to the elemental strife of nature. Also, the scenes contrast two quite different attitudes toward life—a prudence which is sterile, since it is isolated from nature and human community, and a folly which is fruitful, since it is open to the hazard of nature and human relationship.¹³

In the first scene Duke Orsino manifests the constricting prudence of isolating oneself in a world of artifice. Associated with his need for artifice is a self-dramatizing passivity. Thus, his language alternates between magniloquent gesture (he apostrophizes four times), and languorous, cloying sweetness (his stock of adjectives seems limited to “sweet,” “rich,” and “fine”). In his sybaritic self-indulgence, he intends to bombard his sensorium, so that “surfeiting, / The appetite may sicken, and so die” (I, i, 2-3). Passivity and lassitude seem to be central ingredients in his notion of love. Images of downward motion dominate his speeches, and it soon becomes apparent that he is a connoisseur of love's dying falls. Whatever enters into the sea of his love, he tells us, “falls into abatement and low price / Even in a minute” (I, i, 13-14). As he leaves the stage, his intention is to lapse into “sweet beds of flow'rs” (I, i, 41).

Although Olivia will have nothing of the Duke, the description of her plans for mourning suggests that the two of them are kindred spirits. Like the Duke, she has adopted a role and intends to play it to the hilt. Her role also is passive and life-denying; she will savour her sorrow and use the brine of her tears to season and indeed pickle “a brother's dead love” (which is not the same as a dead brother's love). The languor of the Duke finds its counterpart in Olivia's unnatural rigidity; for seven years (no more, no less) she will impose on herself the regimented life of a cloistress and “water once a day her chamber round / With eye-offending brine” (I, i, 30-31). Doubtless, she will place saucepans in strategic places, so that her tears won't streak the furniture. Implicit in Olivia's scenario is a callow contempt for time and nature. She must learn the lesson that Benedick learns in Much Ado about Nothing; as Don Pedro says of Benedick's tidy plans: “Well, you will temporize with the hours” (I, i, 244).

The second scene of the play carries us from the sea of Orsino's hungry love and from Olivia's briny tears to the driving element that casually splits ships in two. The cloistered world of the Duke's canopied bowers and Olivia's chamber gives way to a liquid world of hazard. The sea symbolizes the relentless reality which both Orsino and Olivia have structured their lives to avoid. But their self-indulgent roles are a luxury which chance doesn't afford Viola. She must set aside her sorrow for her brother and get on with the difficult business of living. The briskness of her language stands in sharp contrast to Orsino's prolixity and suggests the pressure of the moment:

And what should I do in Illyria?
My brother he is in Elysium.
Perchance he is not drowned. What think you, sailors?

(I, ii, 3-5)

Though Viola realizes that “nature with a beauteous wall / Doth oft close in pollution” (I, ii, 48-49), yet she takes the calculated risk that the Captain's mind accords with his trustworthy appearance. She must rely on other people to survive. With surprising rapidity, she formulates an ad hoc plan of action—to disguise herself and serve the Duke. Viola realizes the hazard of the future, but she still manages to commit herself resolutely to it: “What else may hap to time I will commit.” Unlike the Duke and Olivia, Viola opens herself to the processes of time and nature. Using imagery that suggests childbirth and maturation of fruit, she hopes that she might not

                                                  be delivered to the world,
Till I had made mine own occasion mellow,
What my estate is.

(I, ii, 42-44)

Her final words to the Captain suggest her stance toward life: “I thank thee. Lead me on” (I, ii, 64).

As many critics have noted, the movement of Shakespearean comedy is toward community; in the final scene congestion takes on symbolic value. Twelfth Night is no exception; it opens with its central characters in isolation and it reaches its resolution when they come together. The principal human agent for creating this community is Viola. This is not to suggest, however, that she foresees the happy consequences of her actions. Until the final scene, Viola has every reason to fear that her disguise has begotten disaster. When she realizes that Olivia loves her, Viola invokes a higher power to resolve what seems a hopeless dilemma: “O Time, thou must untangle this, not I; / It is too hard a knot for me t'untie” (II, ii, 39-40). Not only does her disguise as the page Cesario lead a woman to fall in love with her, but it also prevents the man she adores from recognizing her proper sex. Yet Shakespeare also suggests that the delusions created by Viola's disguise serve a positive function, since they draw Orsino and Olivia out of themselves and into the world. Paradoxically, Viola's disguise creates a hard knot of cross-purposes which both entangles the three characters and releases them from themselves.¹⁴

Viola's effect on Olivia is immediate and shattering. Significantly, Olivia allows Viola to enter her presence, even though to do so violates the oath she has just taken, only when she learns that Viola is “Not yet old enough for a man nor young enough for a boy … 'Tis with him in standing water, between boy and man” (I, v, 150-53). Because Viola is not threateningly masculine, she is allowed to enter. When Olivia identifies herself as lady of the house (“If I do not usurp myself, I am”), Viola impresses on her the need to share her gifts:

Most certain, if you are she, you do usurp yourself; for what is yours to bestow is not yours to reserve.”

(I, v, 179-80)

And a few lines later Viola states an argument familiar from the early sonnets:

Lady, you are the cruell'st she alive
If you will lead these graces to the grave,
And leave the world no copy.

(I, v, 227-29)

Olivia responds with a playfully legalistic travesty of the notion of sharing talents:

O, sir, I will not be so hard-hearted. I will give out divers schedules of my beauty. It shall be inventoried, and every particle and utensil labeled to my will. …

(I, v, 230-32)

But Viola's energetic description of how she would woo Olivia, along with the force of her beauty and sententious comments, shakes Olivia to the core. After she decides to pursue Viola's love, she soliloquizes:

I do I know not what, and fear to find
Mine eye too great a flatterer for my mind.
Fate, show thy force; ourselves we do not owe.
What is decreed must be—and be this so!

(I, v, 294-97)

Her language here is reminiscent of Viola's commitment to time and chance at the end of I, ii. Olivia realizes that her love for Viola may be misguided, and yet she commits herself to an active role in the world. Consequently, her commitment is to folly: “I do I know not what.” Viola's presence has awakened in her the crucial perception: “ourselves we do not owe.” By Act V, Olivia will be ready to love Viola's double—who can return her love. It is Olivia's folly, not a growth into self-knowledge, that leads her to Sebastian. As Sebastian memorably tells her:

So comes it, lady, you have been mistook.
But nature to her bias drew in that.

(V, i, 251-52)

Our generous delusions are part of nature's bias—they lead us along paths we don't understand, to a joy we fear to expect.

The Duke's response to the disguised Viola is less dramatic than Olivia's; the apparent masculinity which they share confines the Duke's affection to a loving friendship. And yet, in retrospect, it seems clear that the only way that Viola possibly could have reached the Duke is indirectly, through the masculine disguise which she has assumed. Just as Viola's disguise prepares Olivia for Sebastian, so it prepares Orsino for Viola's revealed feminine self, a self which he both sees and doesn't see beneath the thin disguise. The example of Viola's dedicated friendship is the proper antidote to the Duke's conception of himself as a “high fantastical” lover, for whom giddy fancy is the badge of authenticity. For instance, Viola's description of her father's daughter, who loved a man, concealed her love, and “sat like Patience on a monument, / Smiling at grief” (II, iv, 113-14) creates a tender pathos. But it also gives the Duke an example of feminine constancy, and suggests how the refusal to love results in sepulchral rigidity. As Feste's song puts it, “In delay there lies no plenty” (II, iii, 47). In the final scene, the Duke discovers the full force of his passion for Viola only in the rich confusion surrounding Olivia's betrothal to Sebastian. The Duke realizes that, unbeknownst to himself, he cares far more about losing his page than Olivia. Just as the shipwreck becomes “a most happy wrack” (V, i, 258), so the Duke's folly carries him to his happiness. In a way that the politic Polonius couldn't begin to comprehend, it is with “assays of bias” and “by indirections” that the lovers find directions out.

If a production of Twelfth Night is to realize fully the play's concern with investing folly's talents in a world of hazard, it must carefully exploit the possibilities of gait and gesture. One of the central metaphors, both in the action and language of the play, is the journey. The willingness of certain characters to journey, to wander by indirection, suggests their openness to life. The play's cloistered figures, on the other hand, employ messengers to avoid undertaking journeys themselves. Until the final scene, Duke Orsino is a virtual recluse. He is, as he says, “best / When least in company” (I, iv, 36-37), and he communicates with the world through messengers—first Valentine, then Viola. He never leaves the refuge of his palace until the final scene when his very appearance at Olivia's house suggests that he is a changed man. At the beginning of the play Olivia too relies upon messengers for her commerce with the world. She dispatches Maria and Malvolio to restrain the antics of Toby and Andrew, and she sends Malvolio after Viola to present her with a ring. The character who perambulates most in the play is Viola; her constant motion suggests her commitments. And, in the person of Feste, “Foolery … does walk about the orb like the sun” (III, i, 37).

The metaphor of the voyage is perhaps most significant in the subplot concerning the friendship of Sebastian and Antonio. The major function of this brief subplot is to infuse the reality principle into the play, to stress the risk involved in loving. Antonio has befriended the shipwrecked Sebastian, who insists that he must leave his host and search for his sister. Significantly, Sebastian says that “My determinate voyage is mere extravagancy” (II, i, 9-10), which suggests that he (and, by implication, all men) is a wanderer in a world of chance. What he doesn't know is that, hopeless as they may seem, “Journeys end in lovers meeting” (II, iii, 40).

Antonio resolves at once to follow Sebastian to Orsino's court, even though he knows the Illyrians have a price on his head for his past military exploits. His brief soliloquy before he exits reveals his commitment:

I have many enemies in Orsino's court,
Else would I very shortly see thee there.
But come what may, I do adore thee so
That danger shall seem sport, and I will go.

(II, i, 40-43)

Antonio's language and situation here recall Viola in the first act (“What else may hap, to time I will commit”), and Olivia's closing words in the previous scene (“I do I know not what …”). And, in another symbolic action, when he catches up with Sebastian in Illyria, Antonio insists that his friend take his purse. Antonio stands in the play as a paradigm for giving “without retention or restraint” (V, i, 75). But the danger is not sport, and the giving is fraught with hazard. When Antonio comes to the aid of Viola (who he thinks is Sebastian) in her quarrel with Andrew, he is immediately recognized by the law and clapped into irons. Like another Antonio who hazards himself to help a friend, he doesn't miss death by far. He is as foolish as everyone else.

The theme of sharing one's talents takes a hilariously comic direction in the person of Sir Andrew Aguecheck. In the play's cast of fools, Andrew is the thing itself, and he admirably discharges the part of the natural fool, the moron. Nature has been uncommonly parsimonious in her gifts to Andrew; he has neither good looks, not wit, nor skills to recommend him. He takes upon himself the demanding role of virile suitor, and, as his surname suggests, he is singularly ill-equipped for it. But nature has compensated for her niggardliness by bestowing upon Andrew a generous capacity for delusion. In the words of Erasmus' Folly, where nature “has kept back some of her gifts, she usually adds a little more Self-Love.”¹⁵ Andrew has the joyful obliviousness of a small boy admitted to his big brother's circle of friends—the mockery of the big people is forgotten in the ecstasy of being part of the gang. Life presents itself to Andrew's glazed eyes as glorious spectacle; as he fatuously proclaims: “I delight in masques and revels sometimes altogether” (I, iii, 101-102). And the sum of his consciousness seems monopolized by his desperate attempt to remember the big words which his friends use.

Dr. Johnson informs us, with customary forthrightness, that Andrew's “character is, in a great measure, that of natural fatuity, and is therefore not the proper prey of a satirist.”¹⁶ Johnson here is not giving folly its due; not only is Andrew not fair game for the predatory satirist, but he is a positive figure in the play. Fool that he is, he is a totally social creature and draws his sustenance from good fellowship. Whatever gifts he may have he is willing to share. It is not merely in regard to his ducats that “He's a very fool and a prodigal” (I, iii, 22). When he tells Toby of his skill at cutting capers, Toby exhorts him to share his great gifts with the world:

Wherefore are these things hid? Wherefore have these gifts a curtain before 'em? … Why dost thou not go to church in a galliard and come home in a coranto? … Is it a world to hide virtues in?

(I, iii, 112-18)

(Toby's words are of course an implicit comment on the self-imposed isolation of Olivia and Orsino, which we have seen two scenes earlier.) As always, Andrew takes Toby at his word, and the scene ends with one of the great moments of the play—Andrew vigorously executing spavined capers all over the stage.

Andrew is one of many foils (and fools) which the play sets up in opposition to Malvolio. The discrepancy between the harshness of Malvolio's fate and what the play awards to the other characters is striking, and it compels us to consider whether he has indeed “been most notoriously abused” (V, i, 368). The baffling of Malvolio, like the rejection of Falstaff and the punishment of Shylock, has occasioned so much critical debate that we should be prepared to accept the complex and perhaps ambivalent responses which it evokes. Only the most rigid of positivists would argue that there is a single “right” way to respond to Malvolio at the end of the play. But in the context of the play's examination of folly and its talents, Malvolio's function is clear: he serves as the antitype of the ideas I have been discussing. In terms of the biblical parable, he is an anomaly, a steward who refuses to share his master's talents.

More than anyone else in the play, Malvolio is associated with law. We learn, for instance, that the kind Captain who befriended Viola has been imprisoned “at Malvolio's suit” (V, i, 266-69); the closing lines of the play recall this legal action, perhaps to temper the sympathy the audience may feel at Malvolio's exit. Also, he is the zealous enforcer of law and order in Olivia's household. Ironically his insistence on order seems itself disorderly, since Twelfth Night festivities are properly a time for licensed disorder. His concern for order seems hypocritical, since his own secret desire is to violate the social order by marrying Olivia and becoming owner rather than steward. One recalls Ophelia crying out in her madness: “It is the false steward, that stole his master's daughter” (Ham, IV, v, 171-72).

Malvolio remains isolated throughout the play. His dismissal of the plotters is telling: “Go off; I discard you. Let me enjoy my private” (III, iv, 83-84). As his name suggests, he is the bad appetite, the inward-turning love; Olivia's incisive rebuke points directly to his shortcomings:

O, you are sick of self-love, Malvolio, and taste with a distempered appetite. To be generous, guiltless, and of free disposition, is to take those things for bird-bolts that you deem cannon bullets.

(I, v, 85-88)

Olivia's criticism of Malvolio here is occasioned by the anger which he has shown to Feste, and this antipathy to foolery manifests his lack of fellow-feeling. Nowhere is his lack of generosity more striking than in the way he relishes the time when “the pangs of death” will shake Feste out of his folly (I, v, 70).

Although Malvolio of course does not know it, he is the greatest fool of all in the play.¹⁷ As Viola tells us, “wise men, folly-fall'n, quite taint their wit” (III, i, 66). His delusion that Olivia loves him is monstrous, the offspring of a self-love that is more monstrous yet. The forged letter deceives him with ridiculous ease (an effect magnified by the voluble comments of the conspirators hidden in the box-tree), and he reveals his weakness when he says of the cryptic M.O.A.I.: “If I could make that resemble something in me” (II, v, 112-13). He defines the world in terms of himself, and his folly is totally unredeemed by generous impulse. His intention is to read “politic authors” (II, v, 148).

The punishment which Toby and Maria devise for him (to lock him up in a dark room and convince him that he is possessed by a devil) fashions multiple ironies. First, Malvolio's incarceration recalls his imprisonment of the Captain as well as the virtual isolation he has imposed on himself throughout the play. Also, the darkness of the room suggests his deluded mind; at one point he cries out “this house is dark as ignorance” (IV, ii, 45). And the business about demoniacal possession is also appropriate, since he has been possessed with self-love and since acquiring possessions has been a major aim of his life.¹⁸

Malvolio is not the only character to feel the sting of poetic justice for the manipulation of others. Andrew's plans to marry Olivia come to nothing but an empty purse, and his challenge to Viola bloodies his own coxcomb. But even with these disappointments, Andrew's folly remains invincible, his lack of self-knowledge intact. The play metes out a harsher, three-fold punishment on Toby. For his attempt to extend Carnival indefinitely, he is denied the services of Dick Surgeon, who is dead drunk at eight in the morning (V, i, 190-91). For his bullying of Viola, he has his pate cracked, courtesy of Sebastian. And, perhaps most painfully of all, he pays for his exploitation of Andrew when his erstwhile gull humiliates him by offering to help him dress his wounds (V, i, 196-99). The spirit of folly, even though it descends in the play to “sportful malice” (V, i, 355), prevents the calculation of Toby and Andrew from reaching the invidious form it assumes in Malvolio.

At the end of the play, we may feel that Viola, Sebastian, Olivia, and Orsino have had happiness thrust upon them. They have done they knew not what and discovered their hearts' joy. Their folly has allowed nature to draw them, almost in spite of themselves, to her kind bias. The conclusion is especially poignant because of its tentativeness. The play has given full exposure to the hazard of folly, and Feste's concluding song (another stanza of which the Fool sings in King Lear) reminds us that, outside the artifice of the play, the consequences of folly can be hangovers, marital strife, and beggary. The conclusion of the play becomes even more poignant when seen in the context of Shakespeare's career. In the plays which follow Twelfth Night, comedies and romances as well as tragedies, Shakespeare will not allow his central characters to escape the heavy burden of self-knowledge.

Notes

1. All Quotations of Shakespeare are from the revised Pelican Complete Works, ed. Alfred Harbage (Baltimore, 1969).

2. The Portable Mark Twain, ed. Bernard De Voto (New York, 1946), p. 274.

3. For some interesting connections between Twelfth Night and King Lear, see Julian Markels, “Shakespeare's Confluence of Tragedy and Comedy,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 15 (1964), 75-88.

4. “Comic Myth in Shakespeare,” rptd. in Discussions of Shakespeare's Romantic Comedy, ed. Herbert Weil, Jr. (Boston, 1966), p. 133.

5. For the holiday aspect of the play, see C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton, 1959) and John Hollander, “Twelfth Night and the Morality of Indulgence,” The Sewanee Review, 67 (1959), 220-38.

6. ‘Twelfth Night’ and Shakespearian Comedy (Toronto, 1965), pp. 42-43.

7. Shakespeare's Comedies (Oxford, 1960), pp. 118-19.

8. Shakespeare and his Comedies (London, 1962), p. 23.

9. “There is no idea to which Shakespeare returns more often than the doctrine taught by the parable of the talents.” Edward Hubler, The Sense of Shakespeare's Sonnets (Princeton, 1952), p. 95. John Russell Brown terms this idea in the comedies the theme of “Love's Wealth” (op. cit.).

10. William Baldwin, A Treatise of Morall Philosophie (1547), ed. Robert Hood Bowers (Gainesville, 1967), p. 179.

11. “The Praise of Folly,” in The Essential Works of Erasmus, trans. John P. Dolan (New York, 1964), p. 106.

12. The Portable Mark Twain, p. 566.

13. For the relationship between hazard and giving in The Merchant of Venice, see Sylvan Barnet, “Prodigality and Time in The Merchant of Venice,” PMLA, 87 (1972), 26-30.

14. For a similar, but fuller discussion of the fruits of deception in the play, see Porter Williams, Jr., “Mistakes in Twelfth Night and their Resolution,” PMLA, 76 (1961), 193-99.

15. The Essential Erasmus, p. 114.

16. Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. (New York, 1960), p. 81.

17. In several places the play suggests paradoxically that the characters who do not recognize folly are the true fools; cf. Feste's catechism of Olivia in I, v.

18. For the play on the demoniacal and acquisitive senses of “possession,” see RII [Richard III], II, i, 107-08. Also, Malvolio's cry that “They have here propertied me” (IV, ii, 89) ironically reminds us of his acquisitiveness.