SOURCE: “Shakespeare's Poesis: Use and Delight in Utopia,” in Comic Persuasion: Moral Structure in British Comedy from Shakespeare to Stoppard, University of California Press, 1987, pp. 24-40.

[In the following essay, Rayner examines the moral dimensions of appetite, virtue, and love in Shakespeare's comedy Twelfth Night.]

Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?

Twelfth Night

Virtue and appetite, sobriety and revelry, respectability and knavery, constancy and mutability: the opposition of moral conditions like these defines a fundamental moral tension in many comedies. Comedy often operates out of the collision of desires and restrictions. And appetite in its various manifestations (lust, hunger, greed) is the bodily version of the moral condition. It is the corporeal principle of desire, the irreducible human reality that comedy as a genre tends both to indulge and restrain. In the extreme and exaggerated form of comedy, we have farce, in which the potential of the body's appetites breaks the boundaries of realism to become the almost pure action of Appetite that consumes social or ethical restraints in the delight of excess. In a more reduced form, comedy brings the appetite into the drawing room with the tea and toast or cucumber sandwiches that signify the larger desires of human nature within the genteel domain of social intercourse and the “higher love.”

As a general statement about the action of comedy, we might say that it customarily indulges human appetites—revels in them, so to speak—as it tries simultaneously to socialize them. Corporeality and society are not mutually exclusive spheres: from one perspective comedy is especially suited to bringing the body into society. It aligns the isolated and isolating attributes common to animals and humans (the body's needs, its appetitive nature) in a functional social pattern. Sometimes the realignment requires a modification of the appetites themselves, so that a character, either by reform or retribution, is brought “out of his humor” into a moral equilibrium. Ben Jonson's comedies usually punish the human appetites with ridicule. Other comedies incorporate appetite into their societies, which are then revitalized and rejuvenated by its vigor, as when the youthful lovers finally overcome all obstacles to their desires. The moral theme of appetite and virtue is an attenuation of a deeper tension between chaos and order, between the potentially limitless hunger of the biological being and the limitations imposed by the group on the individual.

In comedy, this moral theme is at the heart of the contradiction in the form itself between indulgence and restriction. The contradiction recalls an old comic dilemma: is comedy good because it rewards virtue and punishes vice or because it releases the individualized delight that is necessarily repressed by society? One defense of comedy suggests that it teaches us not what to imitate but what to avoid: we learn through the example of ridicule. Another defense suggests that comedy is a social cathartic: we celebrate our appetitive nature vicariously, in a context without consequence, and delight in the structure of revelry.¹ Comic misrule cleanses the society of personal passions by indulging them in a controlled structure.

Toby Belch's rhetorical question to Malvolio in the epigraph of this chapter suggests that puritanical virtue will never socialize appetite (cakes and ale).² The mere presence of virtue does not guarantee any transformation or modification of appetite. The ethical structure represented by Malvolio's presence cannot restrain the revelry of Sir Toby and his friends. In fact, that ethical structure invites the retribution of the revelers on its representative, and that retribution is the focus of much of our delight. It is too simple, really, to say that Twelfth Night offers a straightforward dialectic between virtue and revelry or sobriety and appetite, or that Shakespeare leads us to some “moral” sense of revelry.³ The play is certainly like a revel. It celebrates in song, in dance, and sometimes in drunkenness. Malvolio is an obvious moral foil. But does the potential sympathy for Malvolio at the end of the play overtake the previous censure? The resolution of this kind of ethical question will inevitably rest in ethical taste: one can almost always make a play conform to one's own ethical attitudes, sympathies, and ideas of justice and retribution and fairness. Characters like Malvolio and Shylock are subject to constant revision, a revision that depends not so much on their function in the play as on an external perception of equity, fairness, or sympathy. Likewise, Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew is subject to currents of ethical taste that can shift and color her function in the comedy or at least turn the play toward specific commentary. Part of the problem in examining the moral structure of Shakespeare's comedy is that the moral themes are both obvious and transparent, as though we could see through them to the specific images and actions of the play or, conversely, as though we could see through the images and actions to the moral themes. Shakespeare makes his images moral and his morals imagistic, so that we do not know precisely what we are seeing or hearing; we know only that image and moral quality are both present.

The source of this phenomenon in Shakespeare can be defined by what I have called poesis. I include in this term the sense that language as a made thing, a fashioned object, is, at least in the Renaissance, a form of knowledge. It is the ground of what Michael Foucault has called the preclassical episteme. Language is still joined to its objects; there is no separation of words and things, because the world is knowable by the relations of things, by analogy, by “convenience” or proximity, by the conjunction of visible signs and invisible objects. In this field of episteme, words belong to things as part of their nature; they are not only signs. Nature is whole; it rounds back on itself and can therefore be known by a system of correspondence. Foucault says that the idea of the microcosm is fundamental to this form of knowledge.

As a category of thought, it applies the interplay of duplicated resemblances to all the realms of nature; it provides all investigation with an assurance that everything will find its mirror and its macrocosmic justification on another and larger scale; it affirms, inversely, that the visible order of the highest spheres will be found reflected in the darkest depths of the earth.⁴

This epistemological ground necessarily includes a mixture of “magic and erudition” because the knowledge of an object consists of a compilation of all that is seen, heard, or written of it.⁵Poesis, as I define it, is thus not only a signifier of a world but also an interpreter/creator of a world. Poetic language gives a location to the “natural” correspondence between words and things, images and moral qualities. If the cosmos can be understood on the basis of analogy, resemblances, and correspondence, poesis can ground an analogue in a single word, illuminating the whole by the part. It is through poesis that a moral theme can be traced by images.

In Twelfth Night, for example, the moral/imagistic ground is established immediately, beginning with Orsino's opening speech that equates music, food, and love. The equation develops through the play; it proliferates. From the beginning we collect references to food and drink, appetite, music, love, and sea. The images and references become repetitious, like a musical motif. To put it another way, they become encyclopedic, as though the play were compiling all the possible variations on the equation. Orsino's appetite for love is ready to surfeit, but it is insatiable; his love is as capacious and inconstant as the sea; he is drunk and ready to sicken and so die with love. Sir Toby makes the oceanic theme physical: he has an unquenchable thirst for ale and will drink toasts to Olivia “as long as there's passage in my throat and drink in Illyria” (1.3.39-40). Malvolio, too, is “sick of self-love”; he “tastes with a distemper’d appetite” (1.5.90-91). The repeated references to appetite, sickness, drink, delirium have little to do with the action or structure of the play but a great deal to do with the moral world of the play. Language centers the action and interprets it through a specific set of images and qualities. Moreover, the play compiles an encyclopedia or natural history of the connection between appetite, sickness, drunkenness, and love through its characters and its language. The moral anatomy of this world is not in the structure of the action as much as in the collection of analogies.

Illyria is a watery world. Within that world, the court of Orsino and the household of Olivia are two self-enclosed monuments of self-deception. As many people have already noticed, the dominant images in Twelfth Night are of fluidity: the sea, drink, tears, water, ale, urine, rain.⁶ In addition to Toby's drink, there are Olivia's tears; there is Feste's remark, “I’m for all waters” (4.2.63); there is Orsino's love, “all as hungry as the sea” 2.4.100); and the play ends with the song whose refrain is “the rain it raineth every day.” To this fluid environment are opposed images of constancy and confinement. “I would have men of such constancy put to sea” (2.4.76), says Feste of Orsino. When Feste is called a “dry fool,” he replies that “drink and good counsel will amend; for give the dry fool drink, then is the fool not dry” (1.5.43-44). Malvolio's physical imprisonment corresponds to the rigid nature of his virtue. Similarly, Olivia lives in a self-imposed confinement of grief, and Orsino is bound by the chains of love. Viola's image of “Patience on a monument” is one of the most striking examples of constancy in the play. Shakespeare's images define the moral scope of his plays by defining the physical characteristics of an image or set of images. In the reiterated references to both water and confinement he defines a moral system without resorting to sermons. The images are emblematic, much like the medieval or Renaissance illustrations that both teach the unschooled and delight the scholar. The advantage of the emblem is that it functions both as a sign for a moral problem and as a concrete instance of that problem. It is at once a specific image and an abstruse puzzle.

T. S. Eliot called such images the “suggestive” or “evocative” aspects of Shakespeare's language,⁷ but they are also self-evident images. They bear content that is subject to interpretation, but they do not “interpret themselves.” The images are significative, but they are also instances of knowing. An image of “fluidity” is an instance of “fluidity,” not as an object specifically but as a quality. Because Shakespeare's images pervade his plays and fill them not with objects but with qualities, he creates a “rhetorical” world in qualitative terms.

The metaphoric potential of an image leads us, as audiences, to build bridges from the qualities of the images to the qualities of a “world” and hence begin to attach moral qualities to the actions of characters. In Illyria, for example, we see Orsino's love “all as hungry as the sea” and begin to attach moral qualities to a human situation, arriving at both a “character” for Orsino and a moral “problem” for the play. Through similes, images, or analogies, we begin to locate the problem indicated by the poesis as a problem of character or situation. Orsino's problem thus seems to be a languishing love and an appetite for melancholy. In his first speech, he seems to be asking for an end to his appetite for love, hoping that if he feeds it, it might die. But like all lovers who enjoy the exquisite torture of being denied, he is also in love with denial, or at least with the agitation and excitement that denial creates.

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 belov’d.

(2.4.17-20)

From such speeches we begin to create a “being.” We begin to say that Orsino “is” such and such a kind of person. He “is” a romantic, lugubrious lover, transfixed by the image of perfection, a self-contained monument to romantic love.

When Viola tells Orsino her image of someone in love, we see different qualities:

she pin’d in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sate like Patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief.

(2.4.112-15)

The speech not only describes an abstract virtue but also adds that virtue to our sense of Viola's complexity as “character”; furthermore it comments on the static quality of Orsino's love. In the play—above and beyond what the characters say about themselves—Viola is all activity, moving between court and household. Orsino is a passive lover for all his agitation. His love is an agitation in a static state; Viola's love is a constant, a monument of patience in action. We sense here, then, a Viola who has an “inside” and an “outside”: constancy or patience “within,” action and deeds “without.” Orsino's condition causes him to mistake the appropriate object of love. Viola's condition enables her to function in the realm of actuality. The qualitative contrast between Viola's love and Orsino's is thus generated by language and transferred to character and situation. In moral or psychological terms, we could say that agitated stasis and transfixed activity form the paradox of love in this play. The insatiable, self-consuming love of Orsino's appetite immobilizes him; the antidote for his immobility is the constancy and patience of Viola's active love. We extrapolate moral and emotional value as well as psychological complexity from the capacity of language to design without designating. From the total pattern or design that the language creates, we derive a value-laden world of characters and actions.

Characters locate contrasting values for us, but some difficulties arise when we try to judge the moral meaning of the play on the basis of the characters’ values. The “problems” of Twelfth Night are not solved by right ethical decisions or by the punishment of malefactors. The opposition either of Orsino's languishing love and Viola's active love, for example, or of virtue and appetite as a moral theme is not subjected to judgment. In neither opposition is one element really preferable to the other, for both are realities of the larger condition of the play. Sir Toby's question to Malvolio does not deny virtue, nor does it mean that the play speaks only for cakes and ale and the virtue of revelry. Such a simplistic ethical dialectic belongs to an analytic vision of society and value. Shakespeare has a synthetic vision: he does not necessarily deny the possibility of ethical choice or rightness but finds ways to implicate various possibilities in the unity of the whole.

If we try to choose between the value of appetite and the value of virtue, for example, we impose a judgment on the play that the play does not call for, one that in fact diminishes the inclusiveness of possibilities. Suppose we try to divide the play between virtuous characters and actions and appetitive ones. We will find not a division but a range of virtues with various characteristics. Olivia, to be sure, is a “virtuous maid, daughter of a count,” but her hunger blinds her to the “reality” of Cesario's identity. Malvolio is virtuous in his way; he is in fact virtuous to the point of self-righteousness, and the extreme makes him ridiculous. Orsino is “appetitive” yet is clearly one of the romantic centers of the play. Sir Toby is insatiable yet affirms the value, if not the virtue, of the revel. We discover not an ethical dialectic between virtue and appetite but a catalogue of the kinds and degrees of each. The very inclusiveness of this “world” makes certain ethical questions inappropriate.

The moral questions that arise over the gulling of Malvolio, for instance, indicate the extent to which we presume both the presence of an ethical question and the “corrective” nature of comedy. We often seek a moral justification for that mean treatment of Malvolio at the hands of the clowns. He is, of course, too puritanical, too full of pride and self-deception, too much a spoilsport, and too rigidly virtuous. He deserves his comeuppance. On the other hand, he is merely doing his duty to Olivia; the rogues of the household are out of control and morally decadent. Their game suggests a deep cruelty. From either perspective we are passing a sympathetic and ethical judgment: and either our sympathy creates an ethical system or our ethical system creates our sympathy.

The “dramatic” answer, of course, is that Malvolio “works.” His punishment is an aspect of the play's comedy, and we can maintain the possibility of an ethical attitude (he receives his just deserts or is cruelly treated) but must take into account the aesthetic perspective, or the purely “formal” aspect, of comic punishment. Such punishment is part of the performance pleasure in the tradition of comedy, an attenuation of the old “lampooning mode.” The source of that pleasure may be our own latent aggressiveness, which we would rather not acknowledge, but at the very least we are asked to momentarily suspend judgment in favor of comic pleasure.

I do not mean to suggest that there is no moral residue in Malvolio. He deserves his punishment, but at the same time that punishment is malicious. Although we would hate to see him revenged, his final cry for revenge is justified. His departure threatens to spoil the spirit of the final moment. Like Shylock, he is a problem character. Like Jaques and Shylock, he leaves a trace element of moral ambiguity. Yet that, too, is an aspect of inclusiveness in Shakespeare's moral scheme. The corrective or analytic comedy leaves no moral residue. It is far more efficient in its clarification of virtue and vice. The comic world of Shakespeare is less efficient in its retribution than a Jonsonian world but perhaps more completely satisfying.

The illusion of a complete world in Twelfth Night is created by thematic pattern. We feel that Illyria is homogeneous in spite of its diversity because its inhabitants and their actions all revolve around a structural theme. Because the actions of Sir Toby and his friends have no direct effect on the actions or events of the romantic couples, some people feel that in strictly narrative terms this is a divided play. But Olivia and Viola are no less exempt from appetite as love than Toby is exempt from appetite as drink. Indeed, Olivia's love for Cesario is a version of the delirium that Viola feels for Orsino and that Toby exhibits in his perpetual drunkenness: they are all at least “one draught above heat.” The sameness in their conditions is distinguished only by degree and proportion, with the result that degree and proportion constitute the normative order of the world of the play, above and beyond the specific ethical content of characters or action.

One of the distinguishing elements of the “utopian” comedy is the sense of place that it creates, the sense of a space in which actions are qualitatively coherent though logically or ethically inconsistent. The thematic space encloses characters and maintains some autonomy from them. We know, for example, as soon as Viola's brother Sebastian enters Illyrian space that a symmetry is complete and the conclusion is inevitable, just as we know that when Oliver enters the forest of Arden, his conversion is necessary and probable. Probability, however, depends on the convention of the artifice, not on its verisimilitude. The traditional form that celebrates the capacities for transformation through artifice is the pastoral, and Shakespeare's comedies are rarely far from the pastoral scheme. Illyria is not exactly Arcadia, yet as a locale it has the pastoral attributes that stop time, confuse identities, allow for the indulgence of love and celebration, and remind us that there is death, even in utopia.

The sense that place can be distinguishable from character identifies Shakespeare's utopian perspective. The fictional “world” effects “character” more than characters create the world. Choice and action in Shakespeare's characters are not the agents of development and change. Orsino does not learn the nature of true love any more than Sir Toby learns moderation. It is not, finally, left to Viola to resolve the confusions of identity. Resolution comes quite specifically through the agent of time, which is another way of saying through the impersonal action of the narrative.

O time, thou must untangle this, not I,
It is too hard a knot for me t’untie.

(2.3.40-41)

The invocation to Time addresses the impersonal elements in the structure of the artifice. Time changes the situations of the characters, but it does not alter their ethical status. A Jonsonian play, by way of contrast, does not ask time to untangle the knots of complication; it asks only that the character conform to a projected moral order or be punished for lack of conformity. In Jonson, an ethical logic determines the “quality” of the world. This determination may be entirely appropriate for an ethical diagnosis of human nature, but it binds Jonson's world to the logical unities of time and place.

In Shakespeare the causality of action is not bound to temporal logic and sequence but to the thematic logic of the fictional space. That space has a magic quality because it is free of temporal causality in the same way that poetry is free of the temporal logic of discourse. Illyria is an ideal world not because characters are morally perfect or because wishes are fulfilled but because it coheres as a fiction. If we transfer our habit of making ethical judgments about characters (appropriate in a Jonsonian world) to Shakespeare’s, we tend to say Olivia “learns” the limits of grief, or Orsino “learns” the true value of love, or Malvolio “learns” through punishment about excess. But because the play is not structured on the logic of ethical choices, Shakespeare appears to have no moral program for the appetitive nature of humans in love. As a result, we “learn” more about love and appetite in humans than about humans in love.

The distinction is important because it keeps us from looking too closely for either psychological or moral consistency in Shakespeare's comic characters. Shakespeare is able to objectify elements of human experience as an almost autonomous arena in which characters operate. The fictional world of theme and artifice, not a standard of ethical probity, creates the comic norm. And that norm is a matter of proportion and decorum, which are the province of the artist.

Twelfth Night designates artifice as a norm through the character of Feste. In her reprimand to Malvolio, Olivia implicitly links morality to artistry, suggesting that generosity and a free disposition give one a right sense of proportion.

O, you are sick of self-love, Malvolio, and taste with a distemper’d appetite. To be generous, guiltless, and of a free disposition, is to take those things for bird-bolts that you deem cannon bullets. There is no slander in an allow’d fool, though he do nothing but rail; nor no railing in a known discreet man, though he do nothing but reprove.

(1.5.90-96)

With a strictly ethical norm, we judge Malvolio as a “bad” character, who comes straight from a Jonsonian comedy for punishment, and Feste as a “good” character, generous and guiltless. But as Olivia suggests in her speech, ethical order is less a matter of content than of proportion. Malvolio's lack is as much aesthetic as it is moral. The allowed fool, like the allowed fiction, is exempt from the charge of slander. The artful fool, unlike the discreet man, knows that the difference between bird-bolts and cannon bullets, between fiction and reality, is a matter of proportion and taste.

Both Olivia and Viola are “normative” characters in an ethical sense: they “are” virtuous, deserving, honorable, and reasonably sensible. But the play does not rest on the trials or proofs of their virtues any more than on the proofs of Toby's drunken antics. The ethical constitution of the romantic figures may satisfy us, but those characters are simply part of the narrative “generator,” so to speak. They move us along to a fitting narrative conclusion, but that conclusion is no more than we expect. In addition, some of our interest in the lovers as characters comes from the differences between them and the pattern they create as varying instances of the appetite/virtue/love theme. That theme creates an ethical space, a qualitative location for the action of the play. But Feste is at the center of this ethical space, in the eye of the storm, not because he is an “ethical” character but because he is the one figure who perceives the totality of the action.

In strict ethical terms, Feste is an anomalous presence. If this were a morality play with a morality structure, he might well be seen as a Vice figure. But Twelfth Night reaches beyond a simple moral dialectic, and Feste has none of the perverse antic disposition of a character like Mosca in Volpone. He has, however, some of the same freedom. Moreover, in Feste we can see how vestiges of a morality structure or corrective comedy can open out on the larger vistas of Shakespeare's comedy. Feste has no “character” per se, no project, no apparent needs, no attachments, yet he is a crucial spokesman for the play. I do not mean he is a spokesman for Shakespeare's intent, any more than the other characters are. They all take their place in the scheme of the whole. But Feste is an oddity. He is a dramatis persona without any desires. He moves freely between Olivia's household and Orsino's court but is always, somehow, in his own place. His commentary is specific but also impersonal. His humor is light and playful, but he carries with him the reminder of death. Moving unattached through the play, he sings songs that honor both the carpe diem aspect of love (“Come and kiss me sweet and twenty”) and its deathly aspect (“Sad true lover never find my grave to weep there”). Feste embodies the moral themes of the pastoral: the interpenetration of time and timelessness, love and death, life and art. Like the gravestone in Arcadia, he recalls “Et in Arcadia Ego,” but he does not diminish the momentary pleasures of the art form that celebrates desire, passion, appetite, love. His presence rather heightens that momentary celebration and makes it more valuable because of its fragility. He combines the pleasure and pain of finity that is the particular domain of the clown/comedian/performer.

duke:
There's for thy pains.
clown:
No pains, sir, I take pleasure in singing, sir.
duke:
I’ll pay thy pleasure then.
clown:
Truly, sir, and pleasure will be paid, one time or another.

(2.4.67-71)

Feste is an emblematic character for this comedy. Twelfth Night oscillates precariously between what we commonly call the two phases of Shakespeare's canon. Even as it is comic and celebratory and directed toward the happy alignment of couples, it also foreshadows the disintegration of innocence in The Merchant of Venice, All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida. Feste foreshadows the darker ironies of these comedies, but the action of Twelfth Night leads to the happy and uncomplicated alignment of couples. Pleasure will be paid, but in the meantime there is song and celebration. Feste is both a reveler and an ironic commentator. More than that, however, he demonstrates in an extreme way how Shakespeare keeps characters in proportion to his themes. Lacking either a specific motive or a personal drive in the action of the play, Feste is the internal ironic voice of the play speaking directly to us. His distance from the other characters coincides with their full acceptance of him in their midst: he functions both inside and outside the play. He is the singer, the performer, the poet who keeps revelry and irony in the proper degree. He is the emblem of comic pleasure always aware of the limitations and cost of that pleasure. As the singer-poet represents poesis, so Feste locates the analogic proportion between the transitory/permanent nature of love and appetite in performance and the transitory/permanent nature of life. Moreover, Feste signals us that language itself both creates and disintegrates. “A sentence is but a chev’ril glove to a good wit” (3.1.12). Feste, as he tells Viola, is not Lady Olivia's fool but her “corrupter of words.”

Poesis lies midway between the usefulness of language as fixed and cognitive and the delight of language as transient and suggestive. Words both bind meaning and loose it on the world, but the bonds are not absolute, and as Viola says, “They that dally nicely with words may quickly make them wanton” (3.1.14-15). The bonds of words and things, such as “my sister's name” and “my sister,” have been “disgrac’d,” so Feste “would therefore my sister had no name” since “to dally with that word might make my sister wanton.” We are amused to think that the imaginary bond between the word and the thing (such as sister) might be so effective. It is less amusing to consider that the “thing” might have no effect, that is, effective meaning, on the word; but if the bond does not truly exist, then the loss is mutual.

The words of the play create a cognitive world of qualities: love and appetite, as hungry as the sea. Language brings into being what never existed, yet we still feel “loss” at the end of the play with Feste's “But that's all one, our play is done.” Our pleasure in language is only partially derived from the illusion of a world as an “object” created by words. That pleasure, in Shakespeare's poesis, comes from language that is not identical to reality and that allows us respite from actuality. We pay for that pleasure with a sense of loss, but that very cost makes the experience acute. Moreover, Feste as fool and clown embodies that experience, for he is the emblem of revelry and death conjoined. It is Feste who, in celebration, continually reminds us that death is still a reality, that pleasure will be paid, that youth's a stuff will not endure. In the revels scene at Olivia's house, Sir Toby sings, “But I will never die”; Feste answers, singing, “Sir Toby there you lie”; Malvolio adds, speaking, “This is much credit to you” (2.3.106-8), either as a sarcastic comment on all their tomfoolery or as an acknowledgment of the truth in Feste's statement. Shakespeare's perspective is inclusive and ironic because it recognizes the place and function of death and finity in the idealized ethical structure of love and marriage. The development of the narrative toward an ethical structure is countered by the loss and disintegration inherent in performative transience: but loss as much as structure is a source of delight.

The comic structure gives a particular direction to the thematic consistency. As a theme, that is, love and time are most purely developed in the lyric voice and the emotional experience of the single poet. Taken out of the singular and personal voice and brought into the social context of comedy, the theme is modified and qualified. Comedy socializes the singularity and isolation of a personal emotion, but it thereby threatens to alter the experience. The individual can no longer dwell alone with his feeling. In many ways, Orsino is not a member of the comic community in Twelfth Night. He remains an isolated, melancholy lover until the very end of the play. If the pressure of isolation becomes too great, love can lead to tragedy, as it does for Othello. One can easily imagine, however, that were Othello to bring his jealous passion into the community, to share it with his society, not just with Iago, it would quickly appear to be a comic passion. Because he holds it in, his passion consumes him. The dark side of love in Twelfth Night, its deathly aspect, threatens to turn to irony. But because it is activated by the social world of Illyria, it remains comic. If only consuming and appetitive love were found there, Illyria might become the horrific and ironic world of Troilus and Cressida. But the passion of love's appetite is social and belongs to the community at large in Illyria. The paradoxes of love's change and love's permanence are set in motion there and cannot come to rest in either the carpe diem of celebration or the irony of death. Appetite and virtue, change and permanence are the moral and thematic boundaries of a social world.

In Shakespeare's utopian perspective, appetite is not restricted or restrained by society. Rather, it is found to have its own natural cycle of ebb and flow, desire and surfeit. It is a permanent fixture in constant flux. Sir Toby's appetite for cakes and ale is the corporeal manifestation of appetite that no amount of virtue will eliminate. In this Renaissance world of correspondences, resemblances, and analogies, that corporeal appetite is a likeness of the universal paradox of permanence and change and the continual progress toward the death of desire in the acquisition of its object. One can revel in an appetite because the appetite will die a natural death. Twelfth Night can celebrate delight not to escape from the reality of death and change but to acknowledge the presence of death and change in delight. The play exhibits the potential purity of comic delight in the context of an impure reality. Only Feste is aware of the impurity, perhaps, but his presence reveals the importance of revelry even in a world where death is inevitable. Because he tells us that pleasure will be paid, that “the rain it raineth every day,” and that “youth's a stuff will not endure,” we experience more poignantly the delight in the outcome of the comic structure and still witness the universal principles that belong to that structure, principles of time and timelessness, motion and stasis. Feste presents the context in which revelry and delight are useful. He helps the play to signal both that all human experience is transitory and subject to change and decay and that sometimes in imaginary structures we can experience the satisfaction of an appetite.

Notes

1. The idea of the festive comedy as a structure for a social cathartic “through release to clarification” is, of course, the basis for C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1959).

2. All quotations from Twelfth Night are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically in the text.

3. See, for example, John Hollander, “Twelfth Night and the Morality of Indulgence,” in Discussions of Shakespeare's Romantic Comedy, ed. Herbert Weil, Jr. (Boston: Heath, 1966), p. 120. Hollander usefully points out that Shakespeare “seems at any rate to have analyzed the dramatic and moral nature of feasting. … His analysis is schematized in Orsino's opening speech. The essential action of a revel is: To so surfeit the Appetite upon excess that it ‘may sicken and so die.’”

4. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1970), p. 31.

5. Ibid., pp. 32-40.

6. Hollander, “Morality of Indulgence,” p. 131.

7. T. S. Eliot, Elizabethan Essays (New York: Haskell House, 1964), p. 66.