Shakespeare's Poetical Character in Twelfth Night

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Last Updated August 15, 2024.

SOURCE: Hartman, Geoffrey H. “Shakespeare's Poetical Character in Twelfth Night.” In Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, edited by Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, pp. 37-53. New York: Methuen, 1985.

[In the following essay, Hartman examines Shakespeare's use of poetic language, punning, and wordplay in Twelfth Night.]

1

Writing about Shakespeare promotes a sympathy with extremes. One such extreme is the impressionism of a critic like A. C. Bradley, when he tries to hold together, synoptically, Feste the fool and Shakespeare himself, both as actor and magical author. Bradley notes that the Fool in Lear has a song not dissimilar to the one that concludes Twelfth Night1 and leaves Feste at the finish-line. “But that's all one, our play is done …” After everything has been sorted out, and the proper pairings are arranged, verbal and structural rhythms converge to frame a sort of closure—though playing is never done, as the next and final verse suggests: “And we'll strive to please you every day.” Bradley, having come to the end of an essay on Feste, extends Twelfth Night speculatively beyond the fool's song, and imagines Shakespeare leaving the theater:

the same Shakespeare who perhaps had hummed the old song, half-ruefully and half-cheerfully, to its accordant air, as he walked home alone to his lodging from the theatre or even from some noble's mansion; he who, looking down from an immeasurable height on the mind of the public and the noble, had yet to be their servant and jester, and to depend upon their favour; not wholly uncorrupted by this dependence, but yet superior to it and, also determined, like Feste, to lay by the sixpences it brought him, until at least he could say the word, “Our revels now are ended,” and could break—was it a magician's staff or a Fool's bauble?2

The rhetoric of this has its own decorum. It aims to convey a general, unified impression of a myriad-minded artist. Shakespearean interpreters have a problem with summing up. Leaning on a repeated verse (“For the rain it raineth every day”), and more quietly on the iteration of the word “one” (Lear: “Poor Fool and knave, I have one part in my heart / That's sorry yet for thee”; Feste: “I was one, sir, in this interlude; one Sir Topas, sir, but that's all one”), Bradley integrates Shakespeare by the deft pathos of an imaginary portrait. Today's ideological critics would probably purge this portrait of everything but Shakespeare's representation of power-relations and hierarchy. Such critics might note that the portrait's final question serves only to emphasize the artist's marginality, his loneliness or apartness, as if by a secret law of fate being an artist excluded Shakespeare from social power in the very world he addresses.

The relation of “character” in the world (domestic or political) to “poetical character” (the imaginary relations to that same world which make up our image of a particular artist) is always elusive. Especially so in the case of Shakespeare, of whose life we know so little. A myth evolves, given classic expression by Keats, that the mystery or obscurity enveloping Shakespeare's life is due to the fact that a great poet has no “identity,” that he is “everything and nothing”—as Bradley's evocation also suggests. John Middleton Murry's book on Shakespeare begins with a chapter entitled “Everything and Nothing” in which Murry explores his reluctant conclusion that “In the end there is nothing to do but to surrender to Shakespeare.” “The moment comes in our experience of Shakespeare when we are dimly conscious of a choice to be made: either we must turn away (whether by leaving him in silence, or by substituting for his reality some comfortable intellectual fiction of our own), or we must suffer ourselves to be drawn into the vortex.”3

The focus moves, in short, to the character of the critic, determined by this choice. Can we abide Shakespeare's question? Does the critic have a “character” of his own, or is he simply a bundle of responses accommodated to a special institution or audience: university students and dons, or other drama buffs, or the general public? Unlike Eliot, say, or Tolstoy, Murry has no body of creative writing to back up the importance of his interpretive engagements. There is, nevertheless, a sense that the critic's identity is formed by his selfless encounters with artists of Shakespeare's stature.

The “vortex” that threatens readers, according to Murry, includes the fact that Shakespeare delights as much in Iago as Imogen (Keats's words); and to shuffle off our ordinary conceptions of character—in Murry's phrase, the “mortal coil of moral judgment”—is both painful and necessary. Always, Murry claims, “when Shakespeare has been allowed to make his impression, we find the critic groping after the paradox of the poetical character itself as described by Keats.” In an earlier essay, closer to Bradley's era, Murry had already put the problem of Shakespeare criticism in terms that showed how aware he was of reactions to the “vortex.” He rejects the “‘idea’-bacillus” that reduces Shakespeare to universal themes or the creation of character-types, yet he refuses to relinquish his rigorous quest for “the center of comprehension from which he [Shakespeare] worked.” Programmatic as it is, Murry's statement of 1920 remains relevant:

Let us away then with ‘logic’ and away with ‘ideas’ from the art of literary criticism; but not, in a foolish and impercipient reaction, to revive the impressionistic criticism which has sapped the English brain for a generation past. The art of criticism is rigorous; impressions are merely its raw material; the life-blood of its activity is in the process of ordonnance of aesthetic impressions.4

The rejection of impressionism leads, if we think of Eliot, and of Murry himself, simply to a more rigorous formulation of the paradox of the impersonal artist. For Murry it meant comparing Christian and post-Shakespearean (especially romantic) ways of annihilating selfhood. Blake becomes even more crucial for such a formulation than Keats. G. W. Knight also joins this quest. Other rigorous escape routes, that lead through impressionism beyond it, make Shakespeare's language the main character of his plays, the everything and nothing. Empson's colloquial fracturing of Shakespeare's text, from Seven Types through Complex Words, as well as Leavis's emphasis on the “heuristico-creative quality of the diction” avoid, on the whole, totalizing structures. Rigor consists in having the local reading undo an established symmetry.

Another form of rigor, historical scholarship, can be outrageously speculative. (The trend was always there in the work of editors who unscrambled perplexing expressions or normalized daring ones.) One might escape the Shakespearean vortex by discovering a firm historical emplacement for the plays, by clarifying their occasion as well as the characters in them. The work of referring the plays back to sources mysteriously transformed by Shakespeare (minor Italian novellas, or poetics derived from Donatus and Terence, such as the “forward progress of the turmoils”5) gives way to an ambitious reconstruction of a particular, sponsoring event. The quest for the identity of W.H. or the Dark Lady or the exact festive occasion of Twelfth Night exerts a prosecutory charm that attests to the presence of character in the critic-investigator (that stubborn, scholarly sleuth) as well as in Shakespeare the historical personage. Consider what the ingenious Leslie Hotson does with the “jest nominal,” or play on names. It is as intriguing as anything ventured by newfangled intertextualists.

Hotson claims in The First Night of Twelfth Night that the figure of Malvolio is a daring take-off of a high official in Elizabeth's court: Sir William Knollys, Earl of Banbury and Controller of her Majesty's household. This aging dignitary, we are told, had become infatuated with a young Maid of Honor at Court, Mall (Mary) Fitton. In the “allowed fooling” of Twelfth Night festivities, “old Beard Knollys,” suggests Hotson, “is slaughtered in gross and detail.” Here is his description of how it was done:

while exposing both the Controller's ill-will—towards hilarity and misrule—and his amorousness in the name Mala-voglia (Ill Will or Evil concupiscence) Shakespeare also deftly fetches up Knollys' ridiculous love-chase of Mistress Mall by a sly modulation of Mala-Voglia into “Mal”-voglio—which means “I want Mall,” “I wish for Mall,” “I will have Mall.” It is a masterpiece of mockery heightened by merciless repetition, with the players ringing the changes of expression on “Mal”-voglio … it will bring down the house.6

The play becomes a roman à clef, and so delivers us from a verbal vertigo it exposes. Shakespeare's improvisational genius, moreover, his extreme wit and opportunism, may recall the methodical bricolage by which earlier mythmakers, according to Lévi-Strauss, sustained their tale. Here it explicitly pleases or shames the ears of a court-centered audience. Yet this shaming or delighting is not necessarily in the service of good sense or the status quo, for it can subvert as well as mock and purge. The one thing it does, as in the case of the Controller, is to acknowledge the law of gender—of generation and succession—which, as Erasmus saw, compels us to play the fool. Such allowed slander, whether or not reinforced by Elizabethan festivities, by periods of compulsory license, also penetrates Shakespearean tragedy:

Even he, the father of gods and king of men, who shakes all heaven by a nod, is obliged to lay aside his three-pronged thunder and that Titanic aspect by which, when he pleases, he scares all the gods, and assume another character in the slavish manner of an actor, if he wishes to do what he never refrains from doing, that is to say, to beget children. … He will certainly lay by his gravity, smooth his brow, renounce his rock-bound principles, and for a few minutes toy and talk nonsense. … Venus herself would not deny that without the addition of my presence her strength would be enfeebled and ineffectual. So it is that from this brisk and silly little game of mine come forth the haughty philosophers.7

2

Generation and Succession are so fundamental to almost all classes and types of humanity that to reduce them to their verbal effects might seem trivializing. Yet, as Erasmus's Folly hints, the very category of the trivial is overturned by these forces. The “striving to please every day,” which is the fate of the player, is equally that of lover and courtier. It quickens even as it exhausts our wit. It points to a relentless need for devices—words, stratagems. More is required than a “tiny little wit” to sustain what every day demands.8

There exist eloquent characterizations of Shakespeare's understanding of the common nature of mankind. As Bakhtin remarks of another great writer, Rabelais, there are crownings and uncrownings at every level.9 No one is exempt, at any time, from that rise and fall, whether it is brought on by actual political events or social and sexual rivalry, or internalized pressures leading to self-destructive illusions and acts. The vicissitudes of Folly and Fortuna go hand in hand. Yet no conclusions are drawn; and it does not matter what class of person is involved—a Falstaff, a Harry, a King Henry; a clown, a count, a lady; a usurper, a porter. What happens happens across the board, and can therefore settle expressively in a language with a character of its own—apart from the decorum that fits it to the character of the person represented. The pun or quibble, Shakespeare's “fatal Cleopatra,” is a quaint and powerful sign of that deceiving variety of life. Hazlitt, following Charles Lamb, remarks that Elizabethan “distinctions of dress, the badges of different professions, the very signs of the shops” were a sort of visible language for the imagination. “The surface of society was embossed with hieroglyphs.”10 Yet the showiest and most self-betraying thing in Shakespeare is the flow of language itself, which carries traces of an eruption from some incandescent and molten core, even when hard as basalt, that is, patently rhetorical.

Structurally too, the repetitions by which we discover an intent—a purposiveness—do not resolve themselves into a unity, a “one” free of sexual, hierarchical or personal differentiation. Feste's “one” is an Empsonian complex word, which seeks to distract us, by its very iteration, into a sense of closure. Yet there is never an objective correlative that sops up the action or organizes all the excrescent motives and verbal implications. Feste's phrase is found, for example, in the mouth of another clown figure, Fluellen, in a scene one could characterize as “Porn at Monmouth” (Henry V, IV.vii). The scene, through the solecisms and mispronunciations of Fluellen, his butchery of English, makes us aware of what is involved in the larger world of combat, to which he is marginal. The catachresis of “Kill the Poyes and the luggage!” expresses the cut-throat speed with which matters are moving toward indiscriminate slaughter. An end penetrates the middle of the drama; the grimace (if only linguistic) of death begins to show through.

Yet even here, as the action hits a dangerous juncture, as decisions become hasty and bloody, this verbally excessive interlude slows things down to a moment of humorous discrimination. Fluellen draws a comparison between Harry of Monmouth and “Alexander the Pig” of Macedon (Henry V, IV.vii). That “big” should issue as “pig” is a fertile and leveling pun, which the macabre turn of this near-graveyard scene could have exploited even more; but the uncrowning of Alexander in Fluellen's mouth leads to a series of images (mouth, fingers, figures) that suggest a “body” less mortal than its parts. Harry's transformation into King Henry, and Fluellen's comparison in his favor—that Harry's bloodthirsty anger is more justified than Alexander's—appear like a jesting in the throat of death, a vain distinction already undone by the battlefield context that levels all things, as by an earthy vernacular, or quasi-vernacular, that can slander all things in perfect good humor.

It seems impossible, then, to describe the poetical character of Shakespeare without raising certain questions. One concerns the character of the critic (choices to be made in reading so strong and productive a writer); another what happens to language as it nurtures a vernacular ideal that still dominates English literature. A third, related question is whether what that language does to character and to us can be summed up or unified by methodical inquiry. Does an “intellectual tradition” exist, as Richards thought, to guide us in reading that plentiful “Elizabethan” mixture? “The hierarchy of these modes is elaborate and variable,” he writes about sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature. To “read aright,” Richards continues, “we need to shift with an at present indescribable adroitness and celerity from one mode to another.”11

By “modes” Richards means different types of indirect statement, which he also characterizes as “metaphorical, allegorical, symbolical,” yet does not define further. In some way they are all nonliteral; at least not directly literal. Like Coleridge, whom he quotes, Richards is impressed by the role that “wit” plays in Shakespeare's time, although he does not discuss the complicit or antagonistic and always showy relation between wit and will. He simply accepts Coleridge's thesis on wit and Shakespeare's time:

when the English Court was still foster-mother of the State and the Muses; and when, in consequence, the courtiers and men of rank and fashion affected a display of wit, point, and sententious observation, that would be deemed intolerable at present—but in which a hundred years of controversy, involving every great political, and every dear domestic interest, had trained all but the lowest classes to participate. Add to this the very style of the sermons of the time, and the eagerness of the Protestants to distinguish themselves by long and frequent preaching, and it will be found that, from the reign of Henry VIII to the abdication of James II, no country ever received such a national education as England.12

Yet Coleridge's notion of “national education” may be too idealistic—Arnoldian before the letter. It downplays the subverting character of Shakespeare's wit, one that is not put so easily in the service of the nation-state and its movement toward a common language. The “prosperity of a pun,” as M. M. Mahood calls it, in what is still the most sensitive exploration of the subject,13 offended rather than pleased most refiners of English up to modern times. “Prosperity” may itself covertly play on “propriety,” which is precisely what a pun questions. The speed and stenography, in any case, of Shakespeare's wordplay in the comic scenes undoes the hegemony of any single order of discourse, and compels us to realize the radically social and mobile nature of the language exchange. And, unlike the novel (which allows Bakhtin his most persuasive theorizing), these scenes display less a narrative or a pseudonarrative than oral graffiti. Verbally Shakespeare is a graffiti artist, using bold, often licentious strokes, that make sense because of the living context of stereotypes, the commedia dell'arte, and other vernacular or popular traditions.

Is it possible, then, to see Shakespeare sub specie unitatis, as the younger Murry thought? “There never has been and never will be a human mind which can resist such an inquiry if it is pursued with sufficient perseverance and understanding.”14 Yet in this very sentence “human mind” is fleetingly equivocal: does it refer only to the object of inquiry, Shakespeare's mind, or also to the interpreter's intellect, tempted by the riddle of Shakespeare? The later Murry too does not give up; but now the unity, the “all that's one,” is frightening as well, and associated with omnia abeunt in mysterium: all things exit into mystery.15

It seems to me there is no mystery, no Abgrund, except language itself, whose revelatory revels are being staged, as if character were a function of language, rather than vice versa. More precisely, as if the locus of the dramatic action were the effect of language on character. Twelfth Night will allow us to examine how this language test is applied. If we admire, however ambivalently, the way Iago works on Othello by “damnable iteration” (cf. Falstaff: “O, thou hast damnable iteration, and art indeed able to corrupt a saint” (1 Henry IV, I.ii.90), or the way Falstaff shamelessly converts abuse into flattery, we are already caught up in a rhetoric whose subversive motility, moment to moment, can bless or curse, praise or blame, corrupt words or (like Aristotle's eulogist) substitute collateral terms that “lean toward the best.”16 It is this instant possibility of moving either way, or simultaneously both ways, which defines the Shakespearean dramatic and poetical character. In Twelfth Night, with Feste a self-pronounced “corrupter of words” (III.i.37), and Malvolio's censorious presence, the verbal action challenges all parties to find “comic remedies,” or to extract sweets from weeds and poisons.17

3

“Excellent,” says Sir Toby Belch, “I smell a device.” “I have't in my nose too,” Sir Andrew Aguecheek echoes him (II.iii.162). Toby is referring to the plan concocted by Maria, Olivia's maid, of how to get even with the strutting and carping Malvolio, steward of the household. The device is a letter to be written by Maria in her lady's hand, which will entice Malvolio into believing Olivia is consumed with a secret passion for him, his yellow stockings, cross-garters and smile. The device (not the only one in the play—Bertrand Evans has counted seven persons who are active practisers operating six devices)18 succeeds; and Malvolio, smiling hard, and wearing the colors he thinks are the sign commanded by his lady, but which she happens to detest, is taken for mad and put away.

The very words “I smell a device” contain a device. Toby, mostly drunk, knows how to choose his metaphors; and Andrew, not much of a wit (“I am a great eater of beef, and I believe that does harm to my wit”), merely echoes him, which makes the metaphor more literal and so more absurd. A device is also a figure, or flower of speech; both meanings may be present here, since the content of the device is literary, that is, a deceivingly flowery letter. Flowers smell, good or bad as the occasion may be. “Lillies that fester smell far worse than weeds” (Sonnet 94). Sometimes figures or metaphors fly by so thick and fast that we all are as perplexed as Sir Andrew:

ANDREW:
Bless you, fair shrew.
MARIA:
And you too, sir.
TOBY:
Accost, Sir Andrew, accost. (…)
ANDREW:
Good Mistress Accost, I desire better acquaintance.
MARIA:
My name is Mary, sir.
ANDREW:
Good Mistress Mary Accost—
TOBY:
You mistake, knight. “Accost” is front her, board her, woo her, assail her.
ANDREW:
By my troth, I would not undertake her in this company. Is that the meaning of “accost”?
MARIA:
Fare you well, gentlemen.
TOBY:
And thou let part so, Sir Andrew, would thou might'st never draw sword again!
ANDREW:
And you part so, mistress, I would I might never draw sword again. Fair lady, do you think you have fools in hand?
MARIA:
Sir, I have not you by th' hand.
ANDREW:
Marry, but you shall have, and here's my hand.
MARIA:
Now, sir, thought is free. I pray you bring your hand to th' buttery bar and let it drink.
ANDREW:
Wherefore, sweetheart? What's your metaphor?
MARIA:
It's dry, sir.

(I. iii. 46-72)

Awkward Andrew starts with a mild oxymoron and compounds the error of his address to Mary by a further innocent mistake—the transposition of a common verb into a proper noun, which not only unsettles parts of speech but creates a parallel euphemism to “fair shrew” through the idea of “good Accost.” The entire scene is constructed out of such pleasant errors—failed connections or directions that hint at larger, decisive acts (accosting, undertaking, marrying). At line 62 the verbal plot becomes even more intricate, as Andrew strives to “address” Mary a second time. “Marry” (66) is an oath, a corruption of the Virgin's name; but here, in addition to echoing “Mary,” it may be the common verb, as Andrew tries to be witty or gallant by saying in a slurred way (hey, I too can fling metaphors around!), “If you marry you'll have me by the hand, and here it is.” (He forgets that that would make him a fool, like all married men.) Maria bests him, though, suggesting a freer kind of handling, with a new metaphor that—I think—may be licentious. What is that “buttery bar”? Probably, in function, a bar as today, for serving drinks; but could it be her breasts or … butt? That same “bar,” by a further twist or trope, echoes in Maria's “marry, now I let go your hand, I am barren” (77). No wonder Andrew, out of his range, stutters, “Wherefore, sweetheart? What's your metaphor?”

Somewhere there is always a device, or a “hand” that could fool just about anyone. Nobody is spared, nobody escapes witting. Yet it remains harmless because all, except Malvolio, play along. There is rhetoric and repartee, puns and paranomasia, metaphor upon metaphor, as if these characters were signifying monkeys: the play expects every person to pass the test of wit, to stand at that bar of language. Yet “wherefore?” we ask, like simple Andrew.

That question returns us to the poetical character. It “is not itself,” Keats wrote, “it has no self—it is every thing and nothing—It has no character.” He says other things, too, which make it clear he is thinking mainly of Shakespeare. “It lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated—It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher [a Malvolio in this respect] delights the chameleon Poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than for its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation” (letter to Richard Woodhouse, October 27, 1818).

Much depends on that word “speculation” in Keats; a “widening speculation,” he also writes, eases the burden of life's mystery, takes away the heat and fever (letter to J. H. Reynolds, May 3, 1818). You have to have something to speculate with or on; some luxury, like a delicious voice, whose first impact you remember. Speculation is making the thing count again, as with money, yet without fearing its loss.19 The Shakespearean language of wit is like that. Though penetrated by knowledge of loss, aware that the most loved or fancied thing can fall “into abatement fnd low price, / Even in a minute!” (I. i. 13-14), it still spends itself in an incredibly generous manner, as if the treasury of words were always full. However strange it may seem, while everything in this play is, emotionally, up or down—each twin, for example, thinks the other dead; Olivia, in constant mourning and rejecting Orsino, is smitten by Viola/Cesario in the space of one interview—while everything vacillates, the language itself coins its metaphors and fertile exchanges beyond any calculus of loss and gain. When I hear the word “fool” repeated so many times, I also hear the word “full” emptied out or into it; so “Marry” and “Mary” and “madam” (“mad-dame”) and “madman” collapse distinctions of character (personality) in favor of some prodigious receptacle that “receiveth as the sea” (I. i. 11). No wonder modern critics have felt a Dionysian drift in the play, a doubling and effacing of persons as well as a riot of metaphors working against distinctions, until, to quote the ballad at the end, “that's all one.”

4

I think, therefore I am. What does one do about “I act” or “I write”? What identity for that “I”? For the poet who shows himself in the inventive wit of all these personae? Twelfth Night gives an extraordinary amount of theatrical time to Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and to clowning generally. These scenes threaten to erupt into the main plot, which is absurd enough, where love is sudden and gratuitous, as in Orsino's infatuation for Olivia (two O's) or Viola's for Orsino, or Olivia's for Cesario. Everything goes o-a in this play, as if a character's destiny depended on voweling. “M.O.A.I. doth sway my life” (II. v. 109). Whose hand directs this comic tumult of mistaken identities, disguises, devices, and names, that even when they are not Rabelaisian or musical scrabble (Olivia: Viola) or transparent like Malvolio (the evil eye, or evil wish) are silly attempts at self-assertion? So it doesn't really help when Sebastian in II. i. 14-18 identifies himself. “You must know of me then, Antonio, my name is Sebastian, which I called Roderigo; my father was that Sebastian of Messaline whom I know you have heard of.” We have two Sebastians, and one Sebastian is Roderigo. In addition, as we know by this point in the drama, Sebastian and Viola (that is, Cesario) are identical twins, born in the same hour, both saved from the “breach” a second time when they escape shipwreck and find themselves in a land with the suggestive name of Illyria—compounded, to the sensitive ear, out of Ill and liar/lyre. So also Viola enters the play punning, or off-rhyming. “And what should I do in Illyria? / My brother he is in Elysium” (I. ii. 3-4).

The question, then, relates to identity and destiny, or who has what in hand; it is also related to the question of questioning itself, that kind of speech-act, so close to trial and testing, and the legalese or academic lingo in a play perhaps performed at an inn-of-court. In late medieval times, from the twelfth century on, there was a shift in “pedagogical technique (and corresponding literary forms) from the lectio to the disputatio and questio … from primary concern for the exegesis of authoritative texts and the laying of doctrinal foundations toward the resolution of particular (and sometimes minor) difficulties and even the questioning of matters no longer seriously doubted, for the sake of exploring the implications of a doctrine, revealing the limits of necessity and contingency, or demonstrating one's dialectical skills.”20 Another authority writes that “Even the points accepted by everybody and set forth in the most certain of terms were brought under scrutiny and subjected, by deliberate artifice, to the now usual processes of research. In brief, they were, literally speaking, ‘called into question,’ no longer because there was any real doubt about their truth, but because a deeper understanding of them was sought after.”21 From contemporary reports of the “Acts” at Oxford when Elizabeth visited, we know that these questions and quodlibets maintained themselves at least ceremonially.22 Is Twelfth Night's subtitle, “What You Will,” a jocular translation of quodlibet? What significance may there be in the fact that in I. iii. 86-96 Toby passes from “No question” to “Pourquoi” to “Past question?” My own question is: Pourquoi these “kikshawses” (“quelques choses”)? Wherefore, Shakespeare? What's your metaphor for?

Testing and questing seem connected immemorially: it is hard to think of the one without the other, especially in the realm of “Acts” which assert authority or identity by playful display. Even the Academy participates that much in the realm of romance. But my comments are meant to lead somewhat deeper into a drama that relishes the night-side of things with such good humor. If there are low-class mistakes, as when Andrew thinks Toby's “Accost” refers to Mary's name, there are also the high-class mistakes, Orsino's love, principally, that starts the play with a fine call for music in verses intimating that nothing can fill desire, fancy, love. Its appetite is like the sea, so capacious, so swallowing and changeable. “If music be the food of love, play on.” Play on is what we do, as “Misprision in the highest degree” (I. v. 53) extends itself. Everything changes place or is mis-taken, so that Orsino believes himself in love with Olivia but settles “dexteriously,” as the Clown might say, for Viola; while poor Malvolio is taken for mad and confined in a place as gloomy as his temperament. We tumble through the doubling, reversing, mistaking, clowning, even cloning; we never get away from the tumult of the words themselves, from the “gratillity” (another clown-word, that is, gratuitousness or greed for tips, tipsiness) of Feste's “gracious fooling,” as when Andrew, probably tipsy himself, and stupidly good at mixing metaphors, mentions some of the clown's other coinages: “Pigrogromitus” and the “Vapians passing the equinoctical of Queubus” (II. iii. 23-4).

It is not that these funny, made-up words don't make sense: they make a kind of instant sense, as Shakespeare always does. Yet a sense that can't be proved, that remains to be guessed at and demands something from us. Does “equinoctial” hint at solstice or equinox festivals, if Twelfth Night was performed on the day the title suggests;23 is “Queubus” mock Latin for the tail or male, or a corruption of “quibus,” “a word of frequent occurrence in legal documents and so associated with verbal niceties or subtle distinctions” (C. T. Onions)? Did the audience know it was slang for fool in Dutch (“Kwibus”)?

The text requires a certain tolerance or liberality of interpretation: yellow cross-garters in the realm of construing, “motley in the brain” (I. v. 55). To quote Andrew—and it should be inscribed on the doors of all literature departments: “I would I had bestowed that time in the tongues that I have in fencing, dancing, and bear-baiting. O, had I but followed the arts!” (I. iii. 90-3).

There exists a modern version of another “antic” song about the twelve days of Christmas (cf. II. iii. 85). If Twelfth Night, the climax of Christmastide rejoicing, asks that we fill up the daystar's ebb, then the emphasis falls on giving, on true-love giving. Twelfth Night, formally the feast of Epiphany, is when divinity appeared, when Christ was manifested to the Gentiles (the Magi or three kings). Presence rather than absence is the theme. Twelfth Night is not a religious play, and yet its “gracious fooling” may be full of grace. The great O of Shakespeare's stage draws into it the gift of tongues; and in addition to the legal or academic metaphors, the food and sexual metaphors, and other heterogeneous language strains, occasionally a religious pathos, impatient of all these indirections, maskings, devices, makes itself heard. “Wherefore are these things hid? Wherefore have these gifts a curtain before 'em?” (I. iii. 122-3) To the question, what filling (fulfilling) is in this fooling, the best reply might be that, in literature, everything aspires to the condition of language, to the gift of tongues; that the spirit—wanton as it may be—of language overrides such questions, including those of character and identity.

Does Orsino, the Duke, have an identity, or is he not a plaything of fancy; and is love not represented by him as both arbitrary in what it fixes on and as “full of shapes” and “fantastical” as the entire play? These people seem in love with words rather than with each other. More exactly, the embassy of words and the play of rhetoric are essential tests for both lover and object of love. When Curio tries to distract the Duke from his musical and effete reflections by “Will you go hunt, my lord?” (I. i. 16), Orsino answers, startled, “What, Curio?” meaning “What d'you say?”, which is misunderstood when Curio replies, “The hart,” after which the Duke can't restrain himself from an old quibble equating hart, the animal, and heart, the seat of love:

Why, so I do [hunt], the noblest that I have.
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.

(I. i. 18-23)

The hunter becomes the hunted; but it is also suggested (though we may not be convinced) that the Duke finds a heart in himself—a sensitivity where previously there was nothing but a sense of privilege.

We see how thorough this full fooling is. In Shakespeare the poetry—the prose too—is larger than the characters, enlarging them but also making their identities or egos devices in an overwhelming revel. The revels of language are never ended. This does not mean that language is discontinuous with the search for identity or a “heart.” Orsino's first speech already introduces the gracious theme of giving and receiving, of feeding, surfeiting, dying, reviving, playing on. Love and music are identified through the metaphor of the “dying fall” (I. i. 4), also alluding, possibly, to the end of the year; and, ironically enough, the Duke's moody speech suggests a desire to get beyond desire—to have done with such perturbations, with wooing and risking rejection, and trying to win through by gifts and maneuvers. “Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, / The appetite [for love, not just for music] may sicken, and so die” (I. i. 2-3). At the very end of the play, with the Clown's final song, this melancholy desire to be beyond desire returns in the refrain “The rain it raineth every day,” and the internal chiming of “that's all one, our play is done.” Even in this generous and least cynical of Shakespeare's comedies, love is an appetite that wants to be routinized or exhausted, and so borders on tragic sentiments.

In drama, giving and receiving take the form of dialogic repartee. Shakespeare makes of dialogue a charged occasion, two masked affections testing each other, always on guard. Usually, then, there is a healthy fear or respect for the other; or there is a subversive sense that what goes on in human relations is not dialogue at all but seduction and domination. To have real giving and receiving—in terms of speech and understanding—may be so strenuous that the mind seeks other ways to achieve a simulacrum of harmony: maybe an “equinoctial of Queubus” brings us into equilibrium, or maybe festivals, like Christmas, when there is at-one-ment, through licensed license, through the principle of “what you will,” of freely doing or not doing. (Twelve, after all, is the sign of the temporal clock turning over into One.) But the turn is felt primarily at the level of “gracious fooling” in this Christmas play. Hazlitt goes so far as to say “It is perhaps too good-natured for comedy. It has little satire and no spleen.” And he continues with an even more significant remark, which I now want to explore: “In a word, the best turn is given to everything, instead of the worst.”

5

The poetical genius of Shakespeare is inseparable from an ability to trope anything and turn dialogue, like a fluctuating battle, to the worst or best surmise. I see the dramatic and linguistic action of Twelfth Night as a turning away of the evil eye. It averts a malevolent interpretation of life, basically Malvolio's. Though Malvolio is unjustly—by a mere “device”—put into a dark place, this too is for the good, for he must learn how to plead. That is, by a quasilegal, heartfelt rhetoric, he must now turn the evidence, from bad to good. In IV. ii. 12ff. a masquerade is acted out which not only compels us to sympathize with Malvolio, making him a figure of pathos, but which repeats, as a play within the play, the action of the whole. Malvolio is gulled once more, baited like a bear—the sport he objected to. Yet the spirit of this comedy is not that of revenge, malice or ritual expulsion. All these motives may participate, yet what rouses our pity and fear is the way language enters and preordains the outcome. Shakespeare brings out the schizoid nature of discourse by juxtaposing soft or good words, ordinary euphemisms (“Jove bless thee, Master Parson,” “Bonos dies, Sir Toby,” “Peace in this prison”) with abusive imprecations (“Out, hyperbolical fiend,” “Fie, thou dishonest Satan,” “Madman, thou errest”). Malvolio is subjected to a ridiculous legal or religious quizzing: a “trial” by “constant question.” As in so many infamous state proceedings, he can get nowhere. He has to cast himself, against his temperament, on the mercy of the clown he condemned, though never actually harmed: “Fool, I say,” “Good fool, as ever thou wilt deserve well at my hand,” “Ay, good fool,” “Fool, fool, fool, I say!”, “Good fool, help me to some light and some paper: I tell thee I am as well in my wits as any man in Illyria” (“Feste: “Well-a-day that you were, sir!”), “By this hand, I am! Good fool, some ink, paper, and light.”

Every word suddenly receives its full value. A man's life or freedom depends on it. It is not quibbled away. Yet words remain words; they have to be received; the imploration is all. “By this hand” is more than a tender of good faith, the visible sign of imploration. It is the handwriting that could save Malvolio, as that other “hand,” Maria's letter-device, fooled and trapped him. Ink, paper, and light, as for Shakespeare himself perhaps, are the necessities. They must dispel or counter-fool whatever plot has been, is being, woven.

The spectator sits safely, like a judge, on the bench; yet the reversal which obliges Malvolio to plead with the fool reminds us what it means to be dependent on what we say and how (generously or meanly) it is received. To please every day, like a courtier, lover or actor, leads us into improvisations beyond the ordinary scope of wit. It puts us all in the fool's place. It is everyone, not Feste alone, who is involved, when after a sally of nonsense Maria challenges him with “Make that good” (I. v. 7). That is, give it meaning, in a world where “hanging” and “colours” (collars, cholers, flags, figures of speech, I. v. 1-6) are realities. But also, to return to Hazlitt's insight, give what you've said the best turn, justify the metaphor at whatever bar (legal) or buttery (the milk of mercy) is the least “dry” (I. iii. 72). “The rain it raineth every day.”

Bakhtin's view, inspired by the development of literary vernaculars in the Renaissance, that each national language is composed of many kinds of discourse, dialogic even when not formally so, and polyphonic in effect, can be extended to the question of Shakespeare's poetical character. There is no one heart or one will (“Will”). Andrew's querulous “What's your metaphor?” or Maria's testing “Make it good” or the Clown's patter (“‘That that is, is’; so I, being Master Parson, am Master Parson; for what is ‘that’ but ‘that’? and ‘is’ but ‘is’?” (IV. ii. 15-17)) impinge also on the spectator/reader. Yet in this world of figures, catches, errors, reversals, songs, devices, plays within plays, where motley distinguishes more than the jester, and even Malvolio is gulled into a species of it, moments arise that suggest a more than formal resolution—more than the fatigue or resignation of “that's all one” or the proverbial “all's well that ends well.” So when Viola, as the Duke's go-between, asks Olivia, “Good madam, let me see your face” (where the “good,” as in all such appeals, is more than an adjective, approaching the status of an absolute construction: “Good, madam,” similar in force to Maria's “Make it good”), there is the hint of a possible revelatory moment, of clarification. The challenge, moreover, is met by a facing up to it. Yet the metaphor of expositing a text, which had preceded, is continued, so that we remain in the text even when we are out of it.

OLIVIA:
Now, sir, what is your text?
VIOLA:
Most sweet lady—
OLIVIA:
A comfortable doctrine, and much may be said of it. Where lies your text?
VIOLA:
In Orsino's bosom.
OLIVIA:
In his bosom? In what chapter of his bosom?
VIOLA:
To answer by the method, in the first of his heart.
OLIVIA:
O, I have read it: it is heresy. Have you no more to say?
VIOLA:
Good madam, let me see your face.
OLIVIA:
Have you any commission from your lord to negotiate with my face? You are now out of your text: but we will draw the curtain and show you the picture. [Unveiling] Look you, sir, such a one I was this present. Is't not well done?
VIOLA:
Excellently done, if God did all.

(I. v. 223-39)

I was, not I am; by pretending she is a painting, just unveiled, the original I is no longer there, or only as this picture which points to a present in the way names or texts point to a meaning. The text, however, keeps turning. There is no “present”: no absolute gift, or moment of pure being. Yet a sense of epiphany, however fleeting, is felt; a sense of mortality too and of artifice, as the text is sustained by the force of Olivia's wit. “Is't not well done?” Olivia, like Feste, must “make it good.” The mocking elaboration of her own metaphor allows speech rather than embarrassed or astonished silence at this point. The play (including Olivia's “interlude”) continues. There is always more to say.

Notes

  1. All quotations from Twelfth Night are taken from the Arden Shakespeare edition, ed. J. M. Lothian and T. W. Craik (London and New York, 1975).

  2. “Feste the jester”, in A Miscellany (London, 1929), 217.

  3. John Middleton Murry, Shakespeare (London, 1936), 17-19. At the end of his book Murry appends a short imaginary dialogue with Shakespeare, more fanciful than Bradley's surmise.

  4. “Shakespeare criticism”, in Aspects of Literature (New York, 1920), 200. Eliot's epigraph to The Sacred Wood (1921) from Rémy de Gourmont (“Eriger ses impressions en lois …”) discloses the common problem of going beyond impressionism without becoming unduly scientific (i.e. following the Taine-Brunetière tradition).

  5. Consult, for example, J. V. Cunningham, Woe or Wonder: The Emotional Effect of Shakespearean Tragedy (1951), especially “The Donatan tradition”; and Ruth Nevo, Comic Transformations in Shakespeare (London and New York, 1980).

  6. Leslie Hotson, The First Night of Twelfth Night (New York, 1955), ch. 5, “Malvolio.”

  7. Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly, tr. from the Latin, with an essay and commentary, by Hoyt Hopewell Hudson, (Princeton, 1941), 14-15.

  8. Consider, in this light, the vogue of courtesy books in the sixteenth century, of which the most famous, Baldassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, was done into English by Sir Thomas Hoby in 1561, and reprinted 1577, 1588 and 1603. Book 2 of The Courtier treats exhaustively the decorum of jesting.

  9. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, tr. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass., 1968). See especially ch. 3, “Popular-festive forms.” Bakhtin mentions the feast of Epiphany, and claims that the common element of both official and unofficial carnivals was that “they are all related to time, which is the true hero of every feast, uncrowning the old and crowning the new.” A significant footnote adds that, actually, “every feast day crowns and uncrowns.” See also Bakhtin's second chapter on “The language of the marketplace in Rabelais.” (For some amusing remarks on Shakespeare and Rabelais, cf. Hotson, op. cit., 155ff.) C. L. Barber in Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom (1959) explores the same area.

  10. William Hazlitt, Lectures on the Literature of the Age of Elizabeth (1820), ch. 1.

  11. I. A. Richards, Coleridge on Imagination (London, 1968), 193.

  12. As quoted by Richards, op. cit., 193.

  13. M. M. Mahood, Shakespeare's Wordplay (London, 1957).

  14. Murry, Aspects, 199.

  15. Murry, Shakespeare, 17-18.

  16. See Hudson, op. cit., xxiii. Also, on the related matter of “praise-abuse,” Bakhtin, op. cit., 458: “The virginal words of the oral vernacular which entered literary language for the first time are close, in a certain sense, to proper nouns. They are individualized and still contain a strong element of praise-abuse, which makes them suitable to nicknames.” On word-formation in Rabelais (often suggestive for Feste's “gracious fooling”), see Leo Spitzer, Linguistics and Literary History (Princeton, 1948).

  17. William Hazlitt, “Twelfth Night,” in Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (1817).

  18. Bertrand Evans, Shakespeare's Comedies (Oxford, 1960), 118.

  19. Just as in comedy, according to Donatan principles, turns of fortune should not include the danger of death (sine periculo vitae, cf. Cunningham, op. cit.). Since Leibniz defined music as a species of unconscious counting or arithmetic, and music enters so prominently into Twelfth Night (as musica speculativa as well as musica practica—see John Hollander, “Musica mundana and Twelfth Night” (English Institute Essays: Sound and Poetry, ed. Northrop Frye (New York, 1957)), an interesting analogy begins to form between comedy, music, and the Shakespearean language of wit. In this respect, the issues of gender difference and succession return, for the action of Twelfth Night is simply the release of Orsino and Olivia from their single state, which cannot occur without the separating out of Viola/Cesario and Viola/Sebastian (“One face, one voice, one habit, and two persons! / A natural perspective, that is, and is not!” (V.i. 214-15)). That “one” is redeemed from both singleness and duplicity: the confounding in singleness, as Sonnet 8, with its explicit music metaphor, suggests, should turn into a harmony of “parts that thou shouldst bear,” a concord of “all in one.” Cf. however Marilyn French's surprising conclusion in Shakespeare's Division of Experience (New York, 1981) that the one not in harmony, Malvolio, wins out in the end as the embodiment of society's repressive stewardship. “Constancy is required; love must lead to marriage; and marriage must lead to procreation” (123).

  20. David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago and London, 1976), 145.

  21. M.-D. Chenu, OP, Understanding St Thomas, as quoted by Lindberg, op. cit., 145.

  22. See “The Grand Reception and Entertainment of Queen Elizabeth at Oxford in 1592,” from a MS Account by Philip Stringer, printed in Elizabethan Oxford, ed. Charles Plummer (Oxford, 1877). Cf., on the quodlibets, the same collection of tracts, 18, and the unflattering description of such exercises as they still prevailed into the later eighteenth century, by Vicesimus Knox: Reminiscences by Oxford Men, 1559-1850, ed. Lilian M. Quiller Couch (Oxford, 1892), 160-7. According to J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens (1944), ch. 9, the “whole functioning of the medieval university was profoundly agonistic and ludic.” The word “Act” was formally applied to the degree exercises which conferred the Bachelor and Master of Arts. The use of “act” in Shakespeare (as in Hamlet V.ii. 346 and Winter's Tale V.ii. 86ff.) includes that sense of the presence of a conferring authority.

  23. Cf. T. H. Gaster, Thespis: Ritual, Myth and Drama in the Ancient Near East (New York, 1950). Chapter 2, especially, discerns in ritual dramas a uniform pattern of kenosis, or emptying, and plerosis, or filling. The twelve nights after which Shakespeare's play is named could reflect the agon or combat of those two tendencies: a combat to determine the character of such days, whether they are fasts or feasts, lenten (under the aegis of Malvolio) or copious. The twelve days between December 25 and January 6 have, moreover, a special relation to calendar time: they may be epagomenal or intercalary (Gaster, op. cit., 10, and cf. 369) and as such linked to an “occlusion of personality.” Yet is not all fictional time intercalary? “Twelfth Night” in Shakespeare may stand for every such day or night which requires a release of that “lease” on life which has to be annually renewed, yet which here is a human and ever-present rather than ritually determined necessity.

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Criticism: Character Studies