SOURCE: Logan, Thad Jenkins. “Twelfth Night: The Limits of Festivity.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 22, no. 2 (spring 1982): 223-38.

[In the following essay, Logan claims that Twelfth Night—despite its ostensible depiction of a festive and happy resolution—contains glimpses of the darker side of human desire.]

In a recent article, Richard A. Levin has remarked on the existence of “two alternate approaches to Shakespearean comedy”: the one, exemplified by the work of C. L. Barber and Northrop Frye, focuses on the comedies as celebrations of social order, in which the protagonists are engaged in growth and self-discovery; the other, practiced by W. H. Auden, Harold C. Goddard, and Jan Kott, finds in the plays a “serious treatment of psychological states” and a “negative comment about social conditions.”¹ Levin attributes this bifurcation in critical response to the fact that our response to the plays is fundamentally complex, and it is the complexity of our response to Twelfth Night that I mean to discuss here. I propose to consider the play as a Saturnalian comedy which evokes in its audience a recognition of the limits of festivity by abolishing such limits in the stage-world of Illyria. While my thesis may not please those who view Twelfth Night as a comedy of romantic education and moral redemption, I am in fact attempting to demonstrate that the divergent approaches cited by Levin may (in some sense) be reconciled if we posit that the locus of growth and self-discovery is the audience.

In Twelfth Night Shakespeare presents us with a world given over to pleasure, intoxication, and freedom. Any accurate interpretation must acknowledge the thematic importance of festivity, and critics like Barber, Leslie Hotson, L. G. Salingar, and John Hollander have provided valuable insights in this respect.² Yet none of these critics has dealt quite adequately with the particular nature of festivity in this play, and my concentration on the dark side of the carnival world of Twelfth Night should be viewed as a supplement to their interpretations. It is clear that festive experience permits of distinctions: a New Year's Eve party, a Christmas dinner, and a wedding are all festive occasions, but constitute different experiences. Similarly, from a point of view of structure, the formal features which lead Barber to characterize a comedy as “festive” may be discovered in many plays, but crucial differences among the plays exist within that framework. The experience of Twelfth Night is very different from that of As You Like It or Midsummer Night's Dream, plays in which a critic may find similar dramatic elements and a number of formal analogues; I conceive the identifying, distinctive experience of Twelfth Night to be a function of the nature of festivity in that play. As its title suggests, the world of this play is a night world, and festivity here has lost its innocence.

Leslie Hotson has noted that the subtitle “what you will” recalls the motto of the Abbaye de Thélème: “fay ce que vouldras.”³ The phrase suggests that a fundamental concern of the play is what one critic has called “multiple pleasures and wills to pleasure.”⁴ Jan Kott, in a brilliant though idiosyncratic assessment of Twelfth Night, asserts that sex is the theme of the play;⁵ this is accurate enough but it is incomplete, since the secondary plot is highly significant in terms of stage time, and that plot is not primarily centered on sexuality, but on a set of drives that have to do with food, drink, song, dance, and fun. “Revelry” is probably as good a term as any to describe these particular sorts of pleasure, and I will use it in this essay to refer specifically to them. The relationship between the two plots is, in part, dependent on the fact that revelry and eroticism are closely allied; they are the two faces of Saturnalian experience.⁶Twelfth Night, then, is an anatomy of festivity which focuses in the main plot on sexuality and in the sub-plot on revelry; the subtitle implies that these are what we, the audience, want.

It is crucial to recognize that the play makes an appeal to our own drives toward pleasure, toward liberation from the restraints of ordinary life. This is not, finally, an immoral play, but its authentic morality can only be discovered if we are willing to make a descent into the night world: its meaning remains opaque if we insist on seeing at every moment in every play a conservative, Apollonian Shakespeare. (We will do well to remember that Dionysus is the presiding genius of the theater.) Twelfth Night is not an enticement to licentious behavior, but it is an invitation to participate imaginatively in a Saturnalian feast.

A pervasive atmosphere of liberty and license is established by the opening scenes. The first thing we recognize about Illyria is that it is a world of privilege and leisure in which the aristocracy are at play. Goddard, whose vision of the play is in many ways similar to my own, calls Illyria “a counterfeit Elysium” (p. 302), and characterizes its citizens as parasitical pleasure-seekers, partly on the grounds that any aristocratic society is founded on “the unrecognized labors of others” (p. 303).⁷ Certainly, there are only two characters in the play who seem to have any work to do: they are Feste and Malvolio, whose positions in the social world will be discussed at greater length; for most of the characters, leisure is a way of life. There are no rude mechanicals here. Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, and Maria are clearly not members of the lower class, although the conventions of comedy and Shakespeare's usual practices have sometimes led directors to make that mistake about them.⁸ That the characters of the sub-plot are themselves members of the aristocracy is a significant feature of this play. Olivia and Orsino are at the very top of the social hierarchy; they are young, rich, elegant, and fashionable. The captain who rescues Viola suggests something of their éclat in his initial description of Orsino:

And then 'twas fresh in murmur (as you know,
What great ones do, the less will prattle of)
That he did seek the love of fair Olivia.

(I.ii.32-34)

Even the shipwrecked twins are well-off; Sebastian is amply provided for by the doting Antonio upon his arrival in Illyria, and Viola has somehow emerged from the sea with enough gold to pay the captain “bounteously.”

The wealth and social position of the characters are important in several ways and should be established clearly in production; besides setting the action in a framework of aristocratic values, pleasures, and mores, they contribute a great deal to a sense of liberation and license. Characters are, in part, free to pursue “what they will” because they can afford to do so. The financial conditions upon which Illyrian revelry depends are made explicit by Sir Toby: “Let's to bed, knight. Thou hadst need send for more money” (II.iii.182 and 183). Along with economic freedom, the social status of the main characters allows them to pursue pleasure according to their fancy. Orsino is attended by courtiers who provide him with music, and presumably with “sweet beds of flow'rs,” on command; Olivia speaks to Cesario / Sebastian from a position of power, arranging rendezvous as she chooses. Her disorderly kinsman and his guest may be threatened by her displeasure, but they are apparently in no danger from any sort of civil authority; in the brawl that follows the practical joke played on Viola and Sir Andrew, it is only the outsider, Antonio, who is arrested.

Political power is, in fact, vested in Orsino; as the Duke of Illyria, he might be expected to function as the parent-figure in Northrop Frye's model of the structure of comedy.⁹ From his first speech, however, it becomes clear that Orsino is not going to embody principles of law, order, and restraint in this comic world. In fact, there are no parents at all in Illyria, as Joseph Summers has cogently noted.¹⁰ Here, the social order is in the hands of youth, and wealth and power are at the service of youth's pursuit of pleasure.

It is Malvolio, of course, who fills the dramatic functions of the senex and the blocking figure, but what is curious about Malvolio in this respect is that he is a servant of Olivia. In a comic world noticeably lacking parents, Malvolio becomes a parent figure insofar as he performs some characteristic parental roles: it is he who tells the revellers to be quiet and go to bed. Yet Malvolio is a remarkably ineffective blocking figure; he shows himself powerless to control Sir Toby and Maria, much less to inhibit the actions of the lovers. The figure who stands for law and order in this play is not only made the butt of practical jokes, but is, in the structure of the play's society, only an employee. As such, he has no real authority: his “parenting”may be made use of by Olivia when it is convenient, and dispensed with when it is not. No one is morally or legally compelled to obey Malvolio; certainly no one is inclined to do so, nor is anyone inclined to share his stolid, earnest, workaday consciousness.

In the course of the play, the sort of consciousness that Malvolio embodies is literally locked away in the dark. His imprisonment is a striking emblem of the psychic reversal that underlies Saturnalian festivity: impulses that are normally repressed are liberated, while the controls of the super-ego are temporarily held in check. What gives Illyria its distinctive atmosphere is our sense that in this world such a reversal is a way of life. For most of the characters, everyday is holiday. Festivity is the norm here, and misrule is the order of the night.

The audience of Twelfth Night participates imaginatively in an experience of psychic liberation, but does not share the “madness” of the Illyrians; in Freudian terms, our ego and super-ego continue to function normally. There are modes of awareness available to us that are not available to the characters (we hold, for example, the keys to all riddles of identity in this play), and we retain an integrity of consciousness that the characters do not. Freud, of course, conceived of art as a transformation of unconscious fantasy material into a publicly acceptable form;¹¹ while a Freudian theory of art tends to be limited and reductive, it provides a useful model for an audience's experience of Twelfth Night. Fantasies of love and anarchy, given free rein in Illyria, are presented on the stage, made present for our contemplation as well as our imaginative participation. It is as though we are allowed to be at once asleep and awake; our own fantasies, “what we will,” are newly discovered to us. The sorts of things we learn about the night-world of the psyche are profoundly disturbing. Festivity turns out to be fraught with dangers and complications: Eros mocks the individual; Dionysis is a god of pain as well as a god of pleasure.

According to Leslie Hotson, for Shakespeare and his original audience “what the Dalmatian-Croatian Illyria brought to mind was thoughts of wild riot and drunkenness.”¹² In the sub-plot of Twelfth Night, as in the Bacchic rites, what riot and drunkenness lead to are violence and cruelty.¹³ Among all Shakespeare's comedies, it is only in Twelfth Night and As You Like It that there is literally blood on the stage. It is characteristic of the violence in the former play to be artificial in the sense of being invented by the characters themselves rather than necessitated by the movement of the plot or brought in from outside the comic world by a villain. In As You Like It, for instance, violence is created by the wicked Duke Frederick or by the encounter of man and nature. Because the violence of Twelfth Night, at least that which we see on the stage, is directly or indirectly effected by an appetite for diversion, there is always an element of superfluity about it that is curiously disturbing; it is like the underside of play. Violence in this play is optional, chosen, “what we will.”

Freud has taught us that cruelty is the genesis of practical jokes.¹⁴ Whether or not Malvolio deserves his treatment at the hands of Maria, it seems to me that her sadistic impulses towards him are obvious.¹⁵ Once he has been gulled into smiles and yellow stockings, her response to him is “I can hardly forbear hurling things at him” (III.ii.81). Her “sportful malice” creates a web of illusion that is, up to a point, very funny indeed. Yet from the moment Malvolio cries out “they have laid me here in hideous darkness” (IV.ii.29 and 30), he begins to claim a share of the audience's sympathy. His plight is too close to our own nightmare fears, his language too evocative, for us to feel quite comfortable laughing at him. The feeling that the joke has gone too far is voiced by Sir Toby: “I would we were well rid of this knavery” (IV.ii. 67-68). The game threatens to come real: “We shall make him mad indeed,” objects Fabian, to which Maria responds, “The house will be the quieter” (III.iv.133-34). She has, she says, “dogg'd him like his murtherer” (III.ii.76-77), and she is in earnest in her perpetration of psychic violence. That Maria bears the name of the Virgin is another example of the reversal characteristic of Saturnalian festivity.

Once Malvolio has fallen prey to the machinations of the revellers and to his own fantasies, Sir Toby's idea of a good time is to set Cesario and Sir Andrew at one another. He does not, of course, expect blood to be spilled—certainly not his own—but he has not reckoned with encountering the energies of Sebastian. Energy is precisely what he does encounter, however, and it leaves him and his companion broken and bloody. The play discovers to us the fact that festive revelry is likely to unleash psychic forces that are not easily controlled. In the metaphoric language of stage action, the wounded revellers function both in terms of myth and in terms of quotidian experience: in one sense, they are suffering the predictable consequences of a drunken brawl; in another, they remind us that the rites of Bacchus culminate in bloodshed.

There is within the play world one character who provides an ironic commentary on revelry, who seems to know that the pursuit of pleasure can be destructive, and who leads the audience toward a recognition of the emptiness of festive excess. Paradoxically, this is Feste the jester, whose name and office closely associate him with the festive experience. Festivity, as I have suggested, is the conceptual and experiential link between the sub-plot and the main plot; similarly, Feste acts in the play as a link between different sets of characters, moving freely from one group to another, like the spirit of festivity incarnate in the world of Illyria. But oddly, festivity itself, as incarnate in Feste, seems to participate in the principle of reversal characteristic of the play, and hover on the verge of becoming its opposite.

As Feste moves through the world of Illyria, he challenges our assumptions about festivity and foolery; he suggests not only that the fool is the only sane person in this world, but also that festivity is not as satisfying an experience as we might imagine. All three of his songs direct our attention to aspects of experience we might prefer to forget: death, the swift passage of time, and the fact that, on the whole, life is likely to bring us more pain than pleasure. Feste does not often amuse us, or the other characters; we do not often laugh with him—he does not give us occasion to do so. He seems to be, on the whole, rather an unhappy fellow. He is first discovered to us as an employee who may be dismissed; like Malvolio, Feste is a professional. Festivity is work for him, and it is evidently work which has become tiresome. He appears on stage as though he is returning from a long absence; his first words are “Let her hang me!” in response to Maria's scolding that his absence has displeased Olivia. It is easy to imagine Feste played as though he were disillusioned, cynical, and bored. Olivia herself calls him “a dry fool,” says he grows dishonest, and tells him “your fooling grows old, and people dislike it” (I.v.110). Feste is distanced from the other inhabitants of Illyria because he is immune to the lures of drink, love, fantasy, and the distortions they create: he seems to have known these things and come out the other side. The festive experience is his trade; it holds no mysteries for him, and no delights.

Feste and Malvolio are, as we might expect, antagonists. They quarrel early in the play, and in the last scene Feste recalls that quarrel, taking special pleasure in Malvolio's humiliation and the part he has played in it. There seems to be a good deal of personal rancor in his “And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges” (V.i.376, 377). The experience of dislike is not a common one in Shakespeare's comedies, and its appearance here is disturbing. Feste also does not like Viola, who makes a serious mistake about his nature; “I warrant thou art a merry fellow, and car'st for nothing.” His response is a cold one: “Not so, sir, I do care for something; but in my conscience, sir, I do not care for you. If that be to care for nothing, sir, I would it would make you invisible” (III.i.26-30). The straightforward statement of dislike, of a motiveless personal hostility, sounds a new note in the comic world; it is, of course, Feste who at the end of the play will lead us out of that world.

There is a similar moment of “dis-integration” when Sir Toby reveals his true feelings about Sir Andrew: “Will you help?—an ass-head and a coxcomb and a knave, a thin-fac'd knave, a gull!” (V.i.206-207). There is never much sense of a human community established in Twelfth Night. Friendship is not a significant structural feature of the main plot, as it is in Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It. The revellers' fellowship is broken by the end of the play, and they do not participate in the happy ending. We are, admittedly, told that Sir Toby has married Maria, but we do not see them together on stage at the end. Antonio, so far as we can tell from the script, is never released from arrest, and Malvolio leaves the stage in anger. Critical notions that the end of the play is a vision of harmony and communal integration seem to me totally unjustified.¹⁶ A social community based on charitable love is never created in Twelfth Night; here, erotic love does not become a figure for charity, and marriage does not symbolize a universal harmony.

“What is love?” asks Feste. The conclusions we are led toward by the action of Twelfth Night are not, on the whole, happy ones. Sexuality in Illyria is mysterious and illusive. “What are we? What would we?” are questions the play sets for its audience. In Feste's lyric, love is the immediate gratification of desire: “Then come kiss me sweet and twenty.” The play, however, begins with a stalemate: desire is frustrated, and fantasies conflict. Orsino wants Olivia, Olivia “will admit no kind of suit.” It is the characteristic situation of courtly love; the roles Olivia and Orsino choose to play are familiar ones. In the course of the play, Shakespeare leads us from conventional modalities of love to a discovery of other erotic truths. This discovery is effected by the relationship of the four lovers as it is played out in the stage-world.

Part of the extraordinary appeal of Viola and Sebastian (and they have been almost as attractive to critics as to the characters in the play) comes from their air of innocence. Both Olivia and Orsino explicitly use the word “youth” on almost every occasion when they speak to or about Cesario. The twins bring a special vernal quality into the play; it is their appearance that breaks the stalemate established in the first scene. They are, in a sense, the green world. A significant number of critics assume that they teach Olivia and Orsino the meaning of love, and redeem the world into which they enter.¹⁷ I believe that such an interpretation does not sufficiently acknowledge our experience of the erotic aspects of the play. It is important, first of all, to notice that both Viola and Sebastian are androgynous.¹⁸

Throughout the play we are compelled to pay attention to Viola's shifting sexual identity. We see her first as a girl, and watch her make decisions about how to present herself to the world; the idea of disguise thus becomes prominent, and entails the awareness that we ordinarily determine gender by dress, by appearance. The possibility of disguise suggests that there is something arbitrary about identity, and a disguise that involves a change of gender similarly suggests that our apprehension of sexual identity is mutable and susceptible to illusion. After her first scene, Viola never again appears to us as anything but a boy; unlike Rosalind, she does not re-assume her “woman's weeds” at the end of the play. A number of lines in the play draw attention to her disguise. The most notable is Orsino's description:

                                        Diana's lip
Is not more smooth and rubious; thy small pipe
Is as the maiden's organ, shrill and sound,
And all is semblative a woman's part.

(I.iv.31-34)

A modern audience perceives this as a moment in which Orsino is close to discovering the “truth” about Cesario; Shakespeare, however, must have written the lines assuming that Orsino would deliver them to a boy disguised as a girl disguised as a boy. Viola, in fact, seems to be both a boy and a girl, and is romantically involved with both a man and a woman.

Sebastian also combines characteristics of both genders, Although I have remarked on his energy, Sebastian says of himself (on parting with Antonio), “I am yet so near the manners of my mother, that upon the least occasion more mine eyes will tell tales of me” (II.i.40-42). In relation to both Antonio and Olivia, Sebastian takes a passive, classically feminine role; he enjoys their attentions, and allows them to present him with lavish gifts. Now in one sense Antonio is a nurturing parent-figure, and again the principle of reversal is operative; the parent is subservient to the child: “If you will not murther me for my love,” cries Antonio, “let me be your servant” (II.i.35-36). Antonio not only speaks to Sebastian like a doting parent, however, but also like a lover. Against Sebastian's wishes, he has followed him to Illyria:

I could not stay behind you. My desire
(More sharp than filed steel) did spur me forth,
And not all love to see you (though so much
As might have drawn one to a longer voyage)
But jealousy what might befall your travel.

(III.iii.4-8)

Like Viola, Sebastian is involved in erotic relationships with both a man and a woman.

The twins' androgyny may be, as some critics have suggested, related to their youth and innocence, but it also makes any romantic relationship into which they enter suspect. As soon as Viola/Cesario becomes an object of desire, we are drawn into the night world. Insofar as Viola is a girl, her encounters with Olivia inevitably suggest lesbianism; insofar as Cesario is a boy, all his relations with Orsino suggest homosexuality. Barber, in attempting to deal with this issue, assures us that “with sexual as with other relations, it is when the normal is secure that playful aberration is benign.”¹⁹ Undoubtedly, but what sexual relation can we perceive as normal in Illyria?

What we see on stage in the course of the play is a delirious erotic chase; Viola pursues Orsino who pursues Olivia who pursues both Viola and Sebastian, who is pursued by Antonio. Salingar has noted that “the main action of Twelfth Night, then, is planned with a suggestive likeness to a revel.”²⁰ Indeed. And the sort of revel it is most like is an orgy. Ordinarily, sexual experience is private, and involves two partners. In orgiastic experience, the number of possible sexual partners is multiplied, and distinctions of gender become less important. On the stage, we see Sebastian erotically linked with Antonio and Olivia, Orsino with Cesario and Olivia, Viola with Orsino and Olivia, Olivia with Viola and Sebastian. For the spectators of this “whirligig,” and for the characters caught up in it, the complexities of eroticism in Illyria are dizzying.

There never is, needless to say, a real orgy; the playwright is in control of the revels, after all, and the comedy ends in marriage; sexual energy is channelled into appropriate social institutions. In Barber's words, “delusions and misapprehensions are resolved by the finding of objects appropriate to passions.”²¹ Well, yes. Orsino marries Cesario, who loves him, and Olivia marries a man. But by this time passions have so slipped their moorings in terms of objects of desire (who, for example, does Olivia love?) that this finding of objects appropriate to passions seems rather like a game of musical chairs. My point is that the marriages at the end of Twelfth Night do not convince us that sexuality is ever ordered and controlled with regard to the individual in society.

In the final scene Olivia and Orsino claim their partners. There is no doubt, from an audience's perspective, who is in control here: Olivia and Orsino are older and they possess social status that the twins do not; they further control the scene in the special theatrical sense of having most of the lines. Olivia has already, by the last scene, engineered a marriage with the complaisant Sebastian. Having effected her own wedding by sheer force of will, it is Olivia who moves at the end of the play to arrange the betrothal of Viola and Orsino:

My Lord, so please you, these things further thought on,
To think me 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.i.316-19)

Orsino embraces her offer, and takes Viola's hand. It is important to remember that if we saw this scene in a theater, we would see him take Cesario's hand; the actor is still dressed as a boy, as he is some moments later when Orsino leads him from the stage.

Throughout the play, Olivia and Orsino are self-absorbed, self-willed and self-indulgent creatures: there is no evidence that they change significantly as a result of their encounters with the twins.²² Orsino's last words, like his first, are about himself: “But when in other habits you are seen, / Orsino's mistress, and his fancy's queen” (V.i.387-88). He is still speaking of “fancy.” Orsino's anagnorisis seems to involve only the recognition that if he cannot have Olivia he may as well take Cesario: “I shall have share in this most happy wrack” (V.i.266). Similarly, there is no reason for an audience to believe that Olivia has made meaningful discoveries about the nature of love. If she was headstrong and reckless in loving Cesario, it is hard to see her as docile and prudent in her relations with Sebastian. At the end of the play, as at the beginning, Olivia is doing precisely what she wants to do.

While Olivia and Orsino have not really learned anything about love during the play, we in the audience have. As I have suggested earlier, when external obstacles to the pursuit of love are removed, as they are in Illyria, it is the nature of passion itself that lovers must contend with. “Bright things come to confusion” readily enough in our world without the interference of blocking figures. Love, first of all, can be unrequited. It is, horribly enough, possible to love someone who—for no good reason—just does not return that love. Olivia makes it perfectly clear:

                                        I cannot love him,
Yet I suppose him virtuous, know him noble,
Of great estate, of fresh and stainless youth;
In voices well divulg'd, free, learn'd, and valiant,
And in dimension, and the shape of nature,
A gracious person. But yet I cannot love him.

(I.v.257-62)

Orsino responds, “I cannot be so answer'd,” and continues to long for what he cannot have in a particularly elegant, “poetical” fashion. Olivia, faced with rejection by Cesario, takes a more active approach; her “headstrong potent fault” finds expression in direct, aggressive confrontation with Cesario. It is Viola whose response to loving without requital has become best known:

                              She never told her love,
But let concealement like a worm i' the bud
Feed on her damask cheek; she pin'd in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sate like Patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief.

(II.iv.110-15)

It has been argued that this is not really an accurate description of Viola; perhaps it is exaggerated, but certainly Viola's reaction to loving one who loves another is of this same kind; she waits for “Time” to resolve a painful situation made more painful by her concealed identity. It seems to me very peculiar to regard this as a norm or an ideal, as some critics suggest.²³

At last, of course, Viola has her reward; Orsino's love for Olivia, which could “give no place, bide no denay,” suddenly turns to her. That love can so turn is another of its characteristics that Twelfth Night discovers to us; again, it is an old truth. Here, in a comic structure, love's capriciousness works toward a comic resolution of the plot. Orsino can, after all, love Viola; Olivia can just as well marry Sebastian as Cesario. Yet Dr. Johnson's objection to Olivia's marriage is, as one might expect, lucid and to the point.²⁴ Only in myth and ritual are twins the same person, and while the stage world is, in part, a mythic realm, theater—and Shakespeare's theater in particular—is closely bound to the empirical, naturalistic world the audience inhabits. In that frame of reference, Olivia abandons her vow of chastity to pursue the first new man she meets, marries his (her) twin brother by mistake, and seems willing to transfer her affections to a man she does not know because he looks like the one she fell in love with.

The crucial point is this: at the end of the play we perceive that love really has little or nothing to do with personality. It is, as Kott has said of love in As You Like It, an electric current that passes through the bodies of men and women, boys and girls.²⁵ Passion violates identity. That this is true in terms of the individual's consciousness is a truism. “Ourselves we do not owe,” cries Olivia, succumbing to her feelings for Cesario. The action of Twelfth Night suggests that it is not only the personality of the lover that is disrupted by passion: it is personality itself, the whole concept of unique, distinct identity. Cesario, the beloved, is both Viola and Sebastian; it really doesn't matter. Olivia and Viola are ultimately as interchangeable as their names suggest. As in Spenser's Garden of Adonis, forms change, but Form remains; here, however, the “Form” is not a structure or a pattern, but energy, energy which propels individuals, sometimes agianst their will, toward others who may or may not be so moved. Such, it seems to me, is love in Twelfth Night.

Shakespeare has made similar suggestions about the nature of love in As You Like It and Midsummer Night's Dream, plays which also deal with psychic liberation; yet these plays do not lead us to a dark vision of the psyche. Nor do they have the melancholy tone of Twelfth Night; the language of this comedy is unusual in being not bawdy but grim. There are remarkably few ribald puns in Twelfth Night; by my count, there are twenty-nine references to madness in the play, twenty-two references to disease, twenty-five to devilry, and thirty-seven to destruction and death. The play's somber language would seem to be at odds with its festive structure; in my view, the structure and language are particularly compatible given the nature of festivity in Twelfth Night.

One difference between Illyria and the Wood of Athens is that in the wood, powerful and ultimately benevolent beings exist to set things right, beings who are intimately allied with, indeed embodiments of, the natural world. Illyria is a city, not a forest. In Twelfth Night, unlike As You Like It and Midsummer Night's Dream, festivity is divorced from pastoral, and this is crucially important to our experience of the play, since it means that sexuality is not perceived in relation to nature.

The concept of nature which the Renaissance inherited from the Middle Ages made a distinction between material phenomena (natura naturata) and an organizing principle (natura naturans); the latter was conceived as a structuring energy which, under Divine Providence, brought the physical phenomena into existence and patterned their being. As a manifestation of natura naturans, sexuality may wreak havoc in individual lives, but pursues its own ends of fertility and generation.²⁶ Thus, as in Midsummer Night's Dream, a loss of identity can result from being subsumed in forces greater than the conscious self; personality may be blurred or erased by these forces, but finally they are beneficent in that they drive towards the preservation of life. The multiple marriages at the end of As You Like It provoke even from Jacques the comment (the realization), “these couples are coming to the ark.” But in Twelfth Night, the absence of pastoral distances festivity from fertility, just as the absence of bawdry distances sexuality from a simple, homely pleasure that all humans share with the beasts.²⁷ Illyria is beautiful, aristocratic, and sterile.

Festivity in Twelfth Night is divorced not only from nature, but, as I have indicated, from occasion. It is not a temporary release from social restraints but a permanent condition. The Forest of Arden and the Wood of Athens are places into which people enter in the course of the play and from which they will return; there is, to paraphrase Ralph Berry, “no escape from Illyria.”²⁸ The marriages there do not seem to place erotic love in a community, or to anchor it in a social life where impulses are ordered—not necessarily repressed, but controlled and contained.

That ordering, in a healthy society, provides more, rather than less individual freedom; the ability to control drives and impulses means, for the individual, freedom from the tyranny of the unconscious, while societal restraints ultimately protect the individual from the tyranny of others. The real tragedy of Malvolio lies in the fact that in this play the principle of order has become too rigid and too perverse to accommodate pleasure. Of course we laugh at him, he is ridiculous, yet his expulsion from the comic world brings an end to “Shakespeare's Festive Comedy,” since it means that sobriety and intoxication, parents and children, workday and holiday, restraint and release, cannot be reconciled. In this way, Malvolio's exit is as disturbing as Mercade's entrance in Love's Labours Lost with his message of death. We feel, in the audience, the necessity of somehow making peace with him, and he is gone. His last line must certainly include everyone in the theater.

The play itself has discovered to us the dangers of life without the principle of order that Malvolio stands for; Feste's final song serves as a vivid reminder. The Rabelaisian ideal of freedom (the Abbaye de Thélème) only is possible when human nature can be trusted; doing what we will can be a horror if the forces that drive us are dark. In Twelfth Night Shakespeare leads us to explore the possibility that our drives to pleasure are ultimately irreconcilable with social and moral norms of goodness; it is the antithesis of As You Like It, which works from the hypothesis that people are basically good at heart. In As You Like It, the characters and the audience arrive at a restoration of the world; in Twelfth Night what the characters and the audience come to are the limits of festival, and at that extremity are violence and indiscriminate passion.

The play does not so much tell us but show us that these are what we want. It is the audience who finally approve, with their laughter and applause, the actions of the characters. I do not mean to suggest that we should not laugh and applaud, or that we should become a community of Malvolios, hostile to pleasure. This is a very funny play, and nearly all the characters—certainly including Orsino and Olivia—are enormously appealing. That is just the point. What I am suggesting is this: to delight in the pranks of the revellers is to participate vicariously in a form of Dionysian frenzy; to assent to the ending, to confirm it as a “happy” one, is to embrace the possibility of erotic love as trans-personal and trans-sexual. But the play does not wholeheartedly confirm the value of Saturnalian pleasure; if it is not sentimentalized in production, if festivity is allowed to reach its limits, then the play itself will create an awareness that “what we will” is potentially dark and dangerous.

Notes

1. Richard A. Levin, “Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, and Two Alternate Approaches to Shakespearean Comedy,” ES [English Studies] 59 (August 1978): 336-43.

2. C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1959). Leslie Hotson, The First Night of Twelfth Night (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954). John Hollander, “Twelfth Night and the Morality of Indulgence.” Sewanee Review 68 (Spring 1959): 220-38. L. G. Salingar, “The Design of Twelfth Night,” Shakespeare Quarterly 9 (Spring 1958): 117-39. All these works have been important to my thinking about Twelfth Night. My vision of the play's morality is similar to Hollander's; we differ in that he posits a surfeiting of appetite occurring in the play-world while in my view the locus of this surfeiting is the audience. The text used throughout this essay is The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

3. Hotson, p. 158.

4. David Horowitz, Shakespeare: An Existential View (London: Tavistock, 1965).

5. Jan Kott, “Shakespeare's Bitter Arcadia,” Shakespeare Our Contemporary, trans. B. Toborski (Warsaw: 1964; rpt. New York: Norton, 1974).

6. Salingar links the sub-plot and the main plot with reference to the Elizabethan trope of love as madness, and allies madness with revelry.

7. Harold C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1954), pp. 294-306. Goddard is substantially in agreement with me about the tone of the play and the characters, with the exception of Viola.

8. J. L. Styan, in The Shakespeare Revolution: Criticism and Performance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977) gives an historical perspective on productions of Twelfth Night.

9. Northrop Frye, “The Mythos of Spring: Comedy,” Anatomy of Criticism (1957; rpt. New York: Atheneum, 1969) pp. 163-86.

10. Joseph Summers, “The Masks of Twelfth Night,” The University of Kansas City Review 22 (October 1955): 25. Summers makes several interesting points, among them that Olivia and Orsino embody conventional, literary modes of love (p. 26), and that Feste “is the one professional among a crowd of amateurs” (p. 29). His interpretation of the play as a whole, however, is quite different from my own.

11. Sigmund Freud, “The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming” (1908), rpt. in Collected Papers, 5 vols., trans. Joan Riviere (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1925), 4.

12. Hotson, p. 151.

13. The revels of the “lighter people” in Twelfth Night have perceptible affinities with the rites of Dionysus, not so much because Shakespeare was influenced by classical drama or myth, as because he was aware of certain characteristically human modes of experience. Another way of seeing this is to follow Hotson and Barber in affirming the close ties between Shakespeare's drama and traditional British forms of festivity, themselves descended from a Northwest European paganism which in many ways parallels that of the classical world. Sir James Frazer, in The Golden Bough (1922; abridged edn. London: Macmillan, 1923), provides an exhaustive commentary on the pre-Christian rituals of Europe and their structural similarity to the rites and myths of antiquity. His comments on “The Roman Saturnalia,” pp. 583-87, are particularly relevant to Twelfth Night. Robert Graves, in The Greek Myths (New York: Braziller, 1955), also draws explicit parallels between those myths and European paganism.

14. Sigmund Freud, Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious (1916), rpt. in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. A. A. Brill (New York: Random House, 1938).

15. Goddard also notes Maria's cruelty (p. 298). I disagree, however, with his conclusion that this cruelty would go entirely unnoticed by an audience in the theater.

16. In Shakespeare's Romantic Comedies (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1966), Peter G. Phialas sets forth such a view of Twelfth Night's ending. Barber states that this play “moves in the manner of … earlier festive comedies through release to clarification” (p. 242). Porter Williams, Jr., believes that “virtue, open-heartedness, and sense have prevailed” (“Mistakes in Twelfth Night and their Resolution,” PMLA 76 (June 1961): 199), and R. Chris Hassel, Jr., speaks of the creation of a “comic community of joy” in Faith and Folly in Shakespeare's Romantic Comedies (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1980), p. 162. My own sense of the ending is closer to that of G. K. Hunter, in his section on Twelfth Night in Shakespeare: The Later Comedies, Writers and Their Works no. 143, 1962; rpt. in Twentieth Century Interpretations of Twelfth Night, ed. Walter N. King (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Spectrum-Prentice Hall, 1968).

17. Walter N. King, in his Introduction to Twentieth Century Interpretations, notes that Cesario “rouses the best qualities in Orsino and Olivia” (p. 10), and concludes that “as each reaches out toward union with Cesario, each is concurrently discovering what love is and is not” (p. 9). Although Goddard conceived the ending of the play to be ambiguous, he saw the possibility that “these two beings from outside Illyria … will redeem that world by lifting it at least a little toward a more spiritual level” (p. 304). Barbara Lewalski, in “Thematic Patterns in Twelfth Night,” Shakespeare Studies 1 (1965): 168-81, sees Viola and Sebastian as types of Christ, and Hassel remarks on Viola's “ministry” to Olivia and Orsino.

18. A number of critics have dealt with androgyny in the play: see Rene Fortin, “Twelfth Night: Shakespeare's Drama of Initiation,” PLL [Papers on Language and Literature] 8 (Spring 1972):135-46; J. Dennis Huston, “‘When I Came to Man's Estate’: Twelfth Night and Problems of Identity,” MLQ [Modern Language Quarterly] 33 (September 1972):274-78; Norman Holland, The Shakespearean Imagination (New York: Macmillan, 1964), p. 185; Nancy K. Haynes, “Sexual Disguise in As You Like It and Twelfth Night,” Shakespeare Survey 32 (1979): 63-72. Kott also discusses androgyny at some length, focusing on Mircea Eliade's exploration of the symbolic value of androgyny in Mephistopheles and the Androgyne: Studies in Religious Myth and Symbol, trans. J. M. Cohen (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963).

19. Barber, p. 245.

20. Salingar, p. 127.

21. Barber, p. 244.

22. In his chapter on Twelfth Night in Shakespeare's Comedies: Explorations in Form (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), Ralph Berry argues convincingly that “they have begun neither to understand nor confront their problems” (p. 211). Berry's sense of the play is very similar to my own, although he focuses on different elements.

23. Porter Williams, Jr., for example, states that “Viola is always the touchstone” (p. 198). Summers sees her as “a standard of normality” (p. 29), while Goddard finds her “a being of higher order … a Lady from the Sea” (p. 304).

24. From Johnson as a Critic, ed. John Wain (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 189.

25. Kott, p. 273.

26. See Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask, Bollingen Series 35 (Bern: 1948; rpt. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1953), pp. 106-27.

27. Barber also notes the scarcity of “direct sexual reference” (p. 258).

28. Berry titles his chapter on As You Like It “No Exit from Arden.”