[In the following essay, Dennis suggests that the self-deceptions practiced by Orsino and Olivia in Twelfth Night are both related to vanity, specifically as self-glorification in Orsino's case and narcissism in Olivia's case.]

More than most of Shakespeare's comedies, Twelfth Night is so rich in meaning that no single critical perspective seems to be able to encompass and unify all the issues that the play raises. In recent years, however, some very illuminating attempts at interpretation have been made. Perhaps the most convincing total view is presented by Joseph Summers in his essay, "The Masks of Twelfth Night."¹ For Mr. Summers the play is about the masks or guises which men assume, consciously or unconsciously, that prevent the discovery or expression of their real natures. Most of the masking here is the result of self-deception. Orsino may believe that he is really in love, but his stylized melancholy as a lovesick suitor suggests that he is more intrigued with the idea of being a lover than with any particular woman, that he confuses a conventional role with real emotion. Olivia may believe that her grief for her dead brother is sincere, but her extravagant plans for mourning suggest more a determination to fulfill some social ideal of the grieving lady than a need to express a grief she actually feels. And Sir Andrew and Malvolio, seduced by cruder notions of ideal upperclass behavior, make pretensions to a cultivation of manners and nobility of character which are bathetically crude and unjustified. The wisest characters in the play, Mr. Summers argues, avoid self-deception by consciously adopting their masks as necessities. Viola must adopt the disguise of a boy to protect herself, having been cast ashore friendless in a foreign country. And Feste, although he wears no motley in his brain, must assume the professional role of the fool to make his living in the world, using the license of his role to point out the various self-deceptions in the other characters. None of the masks are fully removed until the romantically magical appearance of Sebastian, which undeceives the Duke and Olivia and makes Viola's mask no longer necessary. But even then Malvolio and Sir Andrew are unreformed, and Feste, yielding to the demands of his vocation, must preserve his role to the end.

I have summarized Mr. Summers' position here not to refute it but to build upon it, for I agree with most of his contentions. What I want to do in this essay is to place the self-deceptions of the characters in more specifically moral terms, to talk about the kinds of self-centeredness that underlie the confusion of feelings with social conventions. This approach will help make more clear the close relations between the major and the minor characters, and will finally bring into prominence the religious dimensions of the play that are often neglected.

In discussing the delusions of the major characters, Mr. Summers asserts that the causes of Orsino's roleplaying are "boredom, lack of physical love, and excessive imagination."² Though all of these causes are operative, the play also encourages us to judge his posturing in moral terms as a kind of self-glorification. Orsino is vain. He loves in the grand style because he wants to display to others the exquisiteness of his own emotions. All his actions, all his words are public. Never speaking once in soliloquy, he usually has as an audience for his moodiness all the retainers of his court. Even when he goes off to muse in quiet about love, at the end of the first scene, he makes it clear that his courtiers are to accompany him:³

Away before me to sweet beds of flowers.
Love thoughts lie rich when canopied with bowers.

(I.i.39-40)

Apparently even his silent reveries are meant to impress others. If he prefers Cesario above the other courtiers, the reason seems again to be vanity. For he sees in the delicate and sensitive boy, in whom "all is semblative a woman's part" (I.iv.34), a particularly appreciative audience for his polished refinement as a lover. On one occasion, in fact, just before sending Cesario on his second mission to Olivia, he tells the boy specifically to follow the example of his master when he falls in love:

Come hither, boy. If ever thou shalt love,
In the sweet pangs of it remember me;
For such as I am all true lovers are,
Unstaid and skittish in all motions else
Save in the constant image of the creature
That is beloved.

(II.iv.15-20)

The irony here is that the pupil to whom Orsino pretentiously offers instruction is a far better lover than the teacher. For the selfless woman beneath the boy's clothes loves humbly in complete secrecy, not vainly in the public eye, and proves her love not by words but by deeds, serving Orsino by aiding his suit to another woman.

When the role-playing of Orsino is seen as a function of his vanity, one notices a specific connection between him and Olivia's other declared suitor, Sir Andrew Aguecheek. The disparity between Sir Andrew's oafishness and his expectations of becoming a complete gentleman only magnifies the disparity between Orsino's actual self-involvement and his extravagant claims to suffer the emotions of real love. Both men are prompted by a vain desire to impress the world with their refinement. And their both being rejected as suitors by Olivia suggests an even closer connection in their deficiencies as lovers. What makes Sir Andrew ridiculous as a suitor is not only his boorish stupidity but also his obvious unconcern with the woman he is pursuing. He pays court to Olivia simply to fulfill the role of the gentleman, not because he is emotionally attracted to her, and thus is ready to "accost" and "board" Maria the minute Sir Toby suggests it. For if the aim of courtship is only to polish one's manners, almost any woman will do. In this way he helps make it more obvious that Orsino is attracted not to Olivia but to some disembodied image of a woman in his mind, an image which he creates only to stimulate impressive poses in himself

Both men are thus encapsulated by their imaginations. They pay court to Olivia, it should be noticed, not directly but through intermediaries, Sir Andrew through Sir Toby and Orsino through Viola. For direct contact might have the painful effect of forcing them to subordinate their ideal programs to the dictates of a real lady. Too engrossed in perfecting their own images for public approval, they cannot relate at all to people around them. Sir Andrew's self-imprisonment is more grossly obvious since the discrepancy between his view of himself and the view others have of him is so tremendous, but he only exaggerates aspects of Orsino's isolation. As Sir Andrew is mocked consciously by his friend Sir Toby, so Orsino is exposed unconsciously by his servant Cesario, who gives him a real object of love whom he is too self-engrossed to perceive. Indeed, in his treatment of Cesario, Sir Andrew appears no more foolish than the Duke. Where Andrew admiringly writes down Cesario's rhetoric for future use, awed by terms like "odours," "pregnant," and "vouchsafed" (III.i.100), Orsino compliments his servant on his "masterly" speech (II.iv.23), seeing in it a proof that the boy can appreciate his master's professional love-longings. And where Sir Andrew wants to frighten off his supposed rival Cesario in a duel, Orsino for one moment at the end of the play wants to kill Cesario in cold blood, when his vanity is hurt by the boy's apparent marriage to Olivia. It is hard to tell here who is more shut off from reality. Only when the Duke decides to give up the woman who doesn't love him for the woman who does can he be said to move out of the mental prison which his vanity has constructed.

Like the Duke's posturings as a lover, Olivia's exaggerated grief for her dead brother is motivated by a vain desire for displaying her sensibilities; but since she is soon cured of her affectation by Feste's wit and by falling in love with Cesario, it may at first be difficult to see her as being as self-involved as Orsino. Yet if we look closely at her love for Cesario, we find that it is not a natural attraction ousting artificial ideals, but a reflexive relation in which Olivia loves an image of herself. The fact that Cesario is really a woman disguised as a man suggests not only that Olivia has been "charmed" by a mere "outside," as Viola says (II.ii.19), but also that she is engaging in a form of narcissism. She loves someone of her own sex because she is too self-involved to love an object that is totally distinguished from herself. That particular aspect of herself which she finds mirrored in Cesario seems to be her proud imperviousness to love. In Cesario's resistance to her charms, in his courteous but plain-spoken criticisms of her character, she finds an ideal image of her own haughtiness to Orsino. In loving him she therefore pays tribute to the beauty of her own Petrarchan detachment. Thus the more scornful Cesario becomes, the more she dotes on him. "Oh, what a deal of scorn looks beautiful / In the contempt and anger of his lip," she exclaims as her advances are rebuffed on one occasion (III.i. 157-58), charmed by the kind of disdain in which she herself has taken pride. This reflexiveness of her love for Cesario is emphasized overtly in a symbolic way by the fact that the names "Olivia" and "Viola" are anagrams, each containing the same letters. For to Olivia, Viola is not a separate person but an anagram of herself, a reflected compendium of her own imagined virtues. To the reader, of course, Viola is more of a moral contrast to Olivia than a moral complement. With no taint of narcissism, she loves a man generously and selflessly without any hope of immediate return.

Olivia's narcissism is mirrored in an exaggerated way by the narcissism of her steward Malvolio, who is "sick of self-love" (I.v.97). Whereas Olivia loves an object who represents herself, Malvolio, still more involuted, loves only grandiose fantasies of his own greatness. More proud than vain, more self-involved than either Orsino or Sir Andrew, Olivia and Malvolio do not even require an appreciative audience to further their self-esteem. They are their own audience. Olivia can therefore live somewhat apart from the life of her retainers, unlike the Duke; and Malvolio can afford to offend the retainers with his prudish spleen. To both, the world outside their imaginations is only a distraction. Thus Malvolio's rudeness is often only an extension of his mistress's. He is discourteous to Cesario partly because he has no respect for anyone but himself, but he also is following his mistress's proud orders to turn away all missions of courtship. And Viola includes both mistress and steward when she asserts, "The rudeness that hath appeared [in me] have I learned from my entertainment" (I.v.230-31). In the same way Malvolio is following orders when he tries to quiet the merry-making of Sir Toby. If the noise offends his inflated dignity, it also disturbs his mistress's self-indulgent grief and her subsequent self-worshiping love for Cesario. This connection is reinforced later when Olivia points out the similarity of her own melancholy and Malvolio's apparent madness, after he appears before her smiling without cause: "I am as mad as he, / If sad and merry madness equal be" (III.iv.14-15).

For the reader, of course, the common denominator of their disorders is not madness but pride. Such parallelism is underscored by the introduction of the device of the anagram in the trick played on Malvolio. For the name that Maria's letter gives to Malvolio's inflated idea of himself is MOAI, and, as Malvolio says, "every one of these letters are in [my] name" (II.v.153). His proud identification of himself with the MOAI of the letter, with the darling of his mistress and the Fates, is a grotesque image of Olivia's reflexive love for her anagram Viola. And Malvolio's name itself tells us of his relation to his mistress. For "Malvolio" suggests not only "bad will" but, anagrammatically, "bad Olivia."⁴ Malvolio represents what Olivia might become if she had no sense of humor, no ability to detach herself from her own follies. Not until Olivia marries Sebastian can she be safely said to repudiate the Malvolio within her, and even this event may at first appear to be more of an accident than a sign of inner change. But Sebastian seems to defend the reality of her growth when he asserts that "nature" moved her to marry him and not Cesario (V.i.267). Presumably her instincts are able to distinguish the man from the woman even though her conscious wits are befuddled. Nature seeks its complement, not its reflection. Poor Malvolio, however, does not change. Sir Toby and his friends try in a comic way to exorcise his pride by exorcising from his possessed mind the father of pride, the Devil; but he is too immured in his self-love to be shaken by this humiliation.⁵

Because "nature" helps Olivia to break out of her self-involvement, we may be inclined to see the greatest contemner of unnatural ideals in the play, Sir Toby Belch, as the wisest man in Illyria. His celebration of the demands of the flesh and the simple joys of conviviality is an effective antidote to the excesses of artificial love that betray his niece and the Duke. Toby is too committed to the pleasures of food, drink, and social merriment to be drawn into the solipsistic worlds of vanity and narcissism, and his joke on Malvolio is a fitting reprisal against all unnatural forms of delusive self-involvement. And yet with all his naturalness, Toby never achieves any deep attachment to the world of men around him. If he is taken in by no grandiose images of himself, he is nevertheless thoroughly selfish. Living mainly to satisfy his physical wants and willing to manipulate others for his own comfort, he is just as self-involved and self-confined as the more introverted protagonists. Surely in his role as a go-between for Sir Andrew to Olivia he is opposed in every way to selfless Viola as she exhorts Olivia to love the Duke. Viola serves because she loves Orsino, Toby because he wants Sir Andrew's money. Viola disguises her love and engages in a service that if successful will spoil her happiness; Toby disguises his contempt for his declared friend in order to dupe him more thoroughly. His opposition to Viola is emphasized overtly when he tries for his own amusement to discomfit her and Sir Andrew by arranging a duel between them. This plan is frustrated, it should be noticed, by the appearance of another moral foil to Sir Toby, Antonio, who has risked his life in coming to Illyria in order to accompany and protect his beloved friend, Sebastian. To be sure, Toby's Sir Andrew may not deserve such dedication, and he is partly responsible for his own duping. But Toby aggravates his friend's vanity by his constant praise, encouraging him to pursue Olivia even when Sir Andrew wants to give over the enterprise. And Toby treats his niece poorly as well. Though he knows Sir Andrew is a fool, he is willing to bother Olivia with Andrew's troublesome courtship, and perhaps is even willing to have her marry him, if it will further his own comfort. Though we can call Toby a clear-sighted rogue who never deceives himself about his own intentions, we cannot finally overlook his egotism. Even his shrewdness is qualified toward the end of the play when his mistaking Sebastian for Cesario leads to his being beaten. The world proves too mysterious to be approached simply through practical intelligence.

It is particularly fitting that Sir Toby has his head cracked by Sebastian; for Sebastian, along with his sister Viola, embodies a way of life which is opposed to Toby's and which is finally vindicated in the play as the truest and most productive attitude to the world. Viola and Sebastian are genuine givers and receivers. They love each other and their friends, and, more generally, they love life in a way that enables them to maintain a receptive openness to all experience. Thus they confront the world directly, cut off from men and events neither by the appetitive selfishness of Sir Toby nor by the fantasy-loving self-involvement of Olivia, Orsino, and their comic doubles. Sebastian is, of course, somewhat mystified by the world of Illyria, where he is mistaken for Cesario; but the confusion is more the Illyrians' than his own. And when a rich and beautiful noblewoman throws herself mysteriously at his feet, his surprise does not prevent him from gladly accepting the lady's offer, from throwing himself completely into the experience. Avoiding the kind of wit that tries to manipulate the world for practical advantage, avoiding the self-centered fantasizing that prefers the inner world to the outer, Sebastian discovers a realm that is more beneficent and miraculous than the ego-ridden characters could ever imagine. The right attitude to the world is centered neither in the natural wants of the flesh nor in the artificial constructs of the imagination, but in a religious awe before the unearned bounty which the world bestows on man, an awe akin to man's perception of God's grace.

The key word in the play for this religious perception is "wonder," and though at times the marvels it discloses make it seem akin to madness, Sebastian is careful to distinguish the two states of mind:

This is the air, that is the glorious sun,
This pearl she gave me, I do feel't and see't.
And though 'tis wonder that enwraps me
thus, Yet 'tis not madness.

(IV.iii.1-4)

Although Sebastian goes on to say that the strangeness of events tempts him to call himself mad, his very ability to marvel at his experience is a sign of his sanity. For to be wise is to perceive the miraculousness of the world. This distinction between madness and wonder is crucial in Twelfth Night because those characters whose self-involvement prevents their wonder at life are shown to be tainted with various kinds of madness. Orsino declares his madness openly, for living in the irrational world of whim is part of the lover's code. His fancy, he boasts at various times, is "full of shapes," "unstaid and skittish," "giddy and unfirm" (I.i.14; II.iv. 18, 34). Olivia too acknowledges that her love is irrational. When she falls in love with Cesario, her mind seems diseased:

Even so quickly may one catch the plague?
Methinks I feel this youth's perfections
With an invisible and subtle stealth
To creep in at mine eyes.

(I.v.314-17)

And Malvolio, with his fantastic ambition aggravated by Maria's letter, engages in antics that prove him the victim of "very midsummer madness," as Olivia says (III.iv.61), and require his mock incarceration. Even Sir Toby, who is free of self-deluding fantasies, is mad in one sense. In abandoning himself to his appetities he makes his life chaotic, rejecting, as Maria says, "the modest limits of order" (I.iii.9); and when he enters drunk to tell of Cesario's arrival, Feste makes it clear that Sir Toby is "like a drowned man, a fool, and madman" (I.v.139). His self-indulgence, like that of Orsino, Olivia, and Malvolio, shuts him off from reality.

The religious awe which the loving person feels at the miraculous bounty of the world often takes the specific form of a particularly trusting attitude to fortune. Although Sebastian has been wrecked at sea and apparently lost his sister forever, he does not regard his good fortune in Illyria as a just compensation for previous misfortune but rather as the working of fate whose generosity is above and beyond his ken. His experience is an "accident and flood of fortune" that "exceed[s] all instance, all discourse" (IV.iii.11-12). And in trusting fortune here he is repeating what his sister has already done. When Viola is first cast ashore friendless, she has as much reason as her brother to curse the cruelty of chance. But instead she puts herself in a hopeful frame of mind, believing that chance may have saved Sebastian:

Viola: Perchance he is not drowned. What think you sailors?

Captain: It is perchance that you yourself were saved.

Viola: Oh, my poor brother: And so perchance may he be.

(I.ii.5-7)

Later, Viola shows the same kind of hope with regard to her frustrated love for Orsino. As she contemplates the apparently hopeless tangle of misplaced affections, she gives up any attempt to resolve the confusion herself, and decides to rely on the power of time to bring about a happy conclusion:

O Time, thou must untangle this, not I!
It is too hard a knot for me to untie!

(II.ii.41-42)

Brother and sister, then, regard fate as a power outside their control which they must trust to right in the future, whatever inadequacies appear in the present. The less generous, more self-involved characters, however, show themselves to be incapable to making this leap of faith. They all fail to trust fortune, though they fail in different ways.

The trouble with Orsino's attitude to fortune is that he identifies it with the vagaries of his own moods, instead of regarding it as an independent power. Because of his self-centeredness the events of his world seem confined to the activities of his own imagination, and the shifts of fortune become indistinguishable from the shifting contents of his mind. Instead of trusting in external fate, he simply abandons himself to "the spirit of love" which resides within:

O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou!
That, notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, naught enters there,
Of what validity and pitch soe'er,
But falls into abatement and low price,
Even in a minute! So full of shapes is fancy
That it alone is high fantastical.

(I.i.9-15)

For Orsino the sea of love that swallows all experience is not the sea of time to which all events are subject, but the inner sea of fantasy.⁶ His abandoning himself to love is therefore not a reliance on fate to bring about his union with his beloved but a reliance on his fancy for the entertainment that results from continuous change.

Olivia's lack of humble trust in fortune is perhaps less easy to perceive. For when she finds herself suddenly in love with Cesario, she appears to believe that her fate lies in the hands of powers outside of her control:

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

(I.v.327-30)

What makes one suspicious about this statement of submission is that fate here is not so much an external force as another name for the strongest desire within Olivia. In naming fate as her master, she is simply trying to avoid responsibility for yielding to feelings which she knows to be suspect. Her apparent trust in fortune is thus really only an expression of her self-centeredness. Like Orsino she is too self-involved to think of fate as something separate from her own inner life. She confuses fortune with her own whims, with her reluctance to fight against her narcissism. Only when fortune miraculously helps to change her reflexive love for Cesario into real object-love for Sebastian does she become aware of its independent power. Then she can perceive in awe that her fate is "most wonderful" (v.i.232).

A more gross example of pride with regard to fortune is found in Malvolio's self-delusions. Malvolio, it should be noticed, sprinkles his ambitious fantasies of preferment with casual references to the power of fortune and the gods. In the crucial scene where his ambition allows him to be gulled by Maria's letter, he enters musing "'Tis but fortune, all is fortune," that his mistress should admire him and want to marry him (II.V.27); after reading the letter and applying its praises to himself, he exclaims, "Jove and my stars be praised" (II.v. 186-87); and even when Olivia has called him mad to his face, his self-infatuation allows him to exclaim smugly, "Well, Jove, not I, is the doer of this, and is to be thanked" (III.iv.91-92). Behind all these pious bows to fortune lies Malvolio's belief that he owes his supposed rise not to luck but to his irresistible merit. Though he is told in the letter that "some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em" (II.v.156-58), he is too self-loving for the "thrusting" to seem anything but an inevitable reward for his superlative talents; and indeed he has imagined the contents of the letter before he receives it. Because he is so certain of his unqualified worth, it is impossible for him to see fate as miraculous at all. A truly religious perception of the bounty of the gods is accessible only to the man who knows that he is not all-deserving, who is humble enough to see gifts as gifts, not as rewards, and so can wonder at the world's graciousness. As a result of his pride, the only fortune that Malvolio encounters is a bad one, the misfortune of his being mocked and imprisoned as a madman. Feste's taunting moral on this occasion, "And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges" (V.i.384-85), makes clear that fickle fortune always is ready to discomfit those who assume that time is their servant, a point he makes emphatically again at the end of the play in his song about the inevitability of "the wind and the rain" befouling "swaggerers."

After dealing with characters who identify fate with their own moods or their own merits, one turns with relief to Sir Toby's practical demands on life. Making no attempt to subjectify fate, Toby is content if fortune allows him the simple pastimes of the immediate present. And yet Toby's belief that he can live for the moment suggests finally a limitation of imagination, a somewhat casual dismissal of fortune as a power not finally relevant to his own life. This skepticism seems to be articulated most directly when he discusses Sir Andrew's dancing talents in terms of astrological influences:

Sir Toby: I did think, by the excellent
constitution of thy leg, it was formed under
the star of a galliard.

Were we not born under Taurus?
Sir Andrew: Taurus! That's sides and heart.
Sir Toby: No, sir, it is legs and thighs. Let me see thee caper.

(I.iii.140-42, 146-49)

Toby's astrological references here are so patently flippant, so clearly introduced merely to puff up Sir Andrew's vanity, that they suggest just the opposite of superstition, a naturalism that views man as subject to no influences at all beyond his own control. It is obvious to Toby that he alone, and not the stars, manipulates Sir Andrew. But Toby's proud confidence that he can control people and events to satisfy his simple demands is rudely jolted at the end of the play by the miracle of Sebastian's appearance. Fortune cannot be anticipated. Wonder, not practical shrewdness, is the only adequate response, and Toby's reliance on his manipulative powers makes that wonder impossible.

A somewhat more experienced and self-critical form of naturalism is expressed at the end of the play in Feste's final song. This song is often taken as an expression of a healthy realism about the workaday facts of life which must be acknowledged after holiday wish-fulfillment, but a closer look suggests a different meaning. The misfortunes that befall the subject of the song are the results not of impractical idealism but of sensual self-indulgence. The song is a prodigal's confession, a gloomy tale of the childish man who expects the world to satisfy his appetites.⁷ The speaker lives the life of a swaggering boaster and a drunkard, an extreme mixture, perhaps, of Malvolio and Sir Toby; and the misfortunes of "the wind and the rain" which he encounters "everyday" are less an expression of the hostility of fate than the result of his own actions. There is more than enough wind in his boasting and wet in his drink to give him all the trouble he encounters, and this is all he can ever expect to encounter by confronting the world on the level of sensual demands. Feste's song recognizes the practical limits of such childish indulgence, but its earthly prudence is not the final standard of the play; for it cannot do justice to the large and open world of giving and faith where Sebastian and Viola dwell. The alternative offered to the song's perspective is not simply the temporary joy and release of secular festival but a religious wonder that reveals an existence more real, more complete, and of a higher order than common life. This is the vision man attains once he is able to break out of the confining walls of the self

Notes

¹ Joseph Summers, "The Masks of Twelfth Night," University of Kansas City Review 22 (Oct. 1955), 25-32.

² Ibid., 26.

³ Citations from Twelth Night in this essay are to The Complete Works, ed. G. B. Harrison (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968).

⁴ The anagram isn't perfect since "Volio" contains no "a"; but "Volio" and "Volia" are similar enough to suggest that the likeness is not accidental.

⁵ The special relation of the Devil to pride is specifi-cally made clear with reference to Olivia. When Viola looks at Olivia's uncovered face she says, "I see what you are, you are too proud; / But if you were the Devil, you are fair" (I.v.269-70).

⁶ The reference to the sea of time in this passage has been pointed out by D. J. Palmer in his interesting essay, "Art and Nature in Twelfth Night," Critical Quarterly 9 (1967), 201-12. In discussing several passages dealing with fortune, Mr. Palmer contends that the notion of fortune's power is central to the play's meaning. His approach differs from mine in that he sees fortune simply as the fragility and mutability of human affairs; I contend that fortune is a beneficent force and that the characters can be discriminated morally by the degree of their receptiveness to its agency.

⁷ Leslie Hotson makes the interesting suggestion that the "foolish thing" of the first stanza should be taken in the sexual sense, and that the song catalogues the three vices of drunkenness which correspond to the three ages of man, lechery, wrath, and sloth (The First Night of Twelfth Night [New York: Macmillan, 1955], 170-71). Mr. Hotson, however, regards the song primarily as a caution against Saturnalian excesses, and so he does not attempt to place it in the context of those values in the play which are higher than prudence.