[In the following essay, Thomson links the music of Twelfth Night—its lyricism as well as its musical interludes, ballads, and catches—to the prominence of hypothetical speeches by various characters, contending that the multiple “if” clauses in the play are part of Shakespeare's orchestration of the dialogue.]

When Henry Irving, monarch of the late Victorian stage, revived Twelfth Night in 1884, the first night audience at the Lyceum was unimpressed. Some of them even hissed. For Clement Scott, reviewing the production of ‘this extremely difficult work’, the audience's response was proof of the fact that Twelfth Night ‘is rather for the book-worm than the playgoer’ and whatever blame was to be attached to the proceedings ‘belonged to the play, and decidedly not to its interpreters’. Irving's Malvolio, looking like ‘some grey and crafty old fox’, was categorized by Scott as ‘quaint’, and Ellen Terry's Viola, ‘an admirable blending of poetic fancy and unforced humour’, was ‘enchanting’.¹ But the Victorian temper could not accommodate Twelfth Night. The lack of credibility, which had attracted Dr Johnson's censure, was a major obstacle. Feste was another. Nineteenth century audiences could make very little of the Shakespearean Clown, occupationally alienated, alarmingly irreverent, often ribald and even socially subversive. But the sexuality of Twelfth Night may have been the major bugbear. The new permissiveness of Edwardian England had intervened by the time Granville-Barker staged his fine production at the Savoy in 1912, and later audiences have inherited an awareness that the play is one of Shakespeare's sure-fire theatrical successes. The sophisticated middle-class audiences who fill (or half-fill) British theatres in the twentieth century can accommodate more easily than their grandparents could the shocking fact that a love-play so utterly lacking in innocence can yet be lyrical.

Twelfth Night begins and ends with music. The first affective sounds of the play are not verbal but instrumental. The significance can be well appreciated if we attempt to reconstruct the opening moments of a performance at the Globe in the first decade of the seventeenth century. After the theatre trumpets and, perhaps, the knocking of the stage have alerted the audience to the actors' readiness, the musicians strike up behind or above the empty platform. They play ‘that lascivious, amorous, effeminate, voluptuous music’ which the disapproving William Prynne associated with the theatre of his time.² After a few chords, a stage door opens, and the entrance of a group of extras in livery announces to the audience that the scene is set in a great man's house. The great man himself has the first words:

If music be the food of love, play on …

The conditional mood takes account of a renaissance debate about the nature of music, of the links between the music of the spheres and the musica humana of a well-ordered commonwealth. But the amorous Orsino's interest is less highminded. What he is questioning is the capacity of musica instrumentalis to stir the human spirit. ‘Just as certain foods delight the palate, so in music diverse consorts stir up in the heart diverse sorts of joy, sadness, or pain,’ wrote Thomas Wright in his treatise on The Passions of the Mind (1604). The ‘overture’ to Twelfth Night prepared its first audience more concretely than it can hope to prepare a modern audience for a play whose tone would encompass romantic extremes of joy and anguish. As he listens to the music, Orsino experiences the longing for release from love (but not quite yet, please), as well as a premonition of the emptiness that follows release. His progress through the play is foreshadowed in the music that introduces it. The highly wrought language of his first speech is designed to be a verbal accompaniment to the melody, and the melodic pull on the words continues even when the music has been silenced. In Twelfth Night's main plot, an aspiration towards harmony challenges, and eventually triumphs over, the logic of cause and effect. Against this lyrical urge, the sub-plot provides a counterpoint of bawdy ballads, catches, and discords; whilst Feste, licensed by his singing ability to establish a mood in extension, or even in contradiction, of the dreamily conditional, provides a sung commentary on mutability and evanescence.

The effect on an audience of so considerable a reliance on music is incalculable, although it is the task of those who manage the performance—in the modern theatre, composer, director and designer—to calculate it. What we can say with some confidence about Twelfth Night, as we can say, for example, about the calling to life of Hermione's statue in The Winter's Tale or of so much of The Tempest, is that Shakespeare envisaged and was prepared to exploit the sensual invasion of what is increasingly known, in clumsy modern parlance, as ‘music theatre’. It is not only in its songs and consorts that Twelfth Night declares its reliance on music. Emrys Jones has brilliantly analysed the movement of the latter scene (II. v.), for example, observing its timing ‘musical in its strictness’, and ‘the abrupt scuffling interjections of the concealed spectators, who supply a kind of comic bassoon accompaniment to Malvolio's unctuous ‘cello’.³ The play has contrasting vocal parts, whose observance in performance is almost compulsory; Sir Toby and Malvolio in the bass/baritone range, Sir Andrew a nasal tenor against the purer tenors of Orsino and Sebastian, Olivia, reaching for contralto but startled by love into her true soprano, Viola mezzo-soprano throughout, however as Cesario she may cling to the lower register, and Maria, whose voice must be comically linked to her diminutiveness, either squeaky or improbably gruff in one so small. At its lyrical heights, the language of love moves through recitative to aria, as when Viola/Cesario expresses to Olivia her own concealed desire on Orsino's behalf:

If I did love you in my master's flame,
With such a suffering, such a deadly life,
In your denial I would find no sense;
I would not understand it.
OLIVIA:
                                                            Why, what would you?
VIOLA
Make me a willow cabin at your gate,
And call upon my soul within the house;
Write loyal cantons of contemned love
And sing them loud even in the dead of night;
Halloo your name to the reverberate hills
And make the babbling gossip of the air
Cry out, ‘Olivia!’

(I. v. 285-95)

It is not adequate to say of this that Viola is speaking blank verse. Musical notation would be almost as helpful as scansion in persuading the actress to understand its possible impact.

I have already noted that Twelfth Night begins in the conditional mood. We can go further. The conditional, either directly or ironically deployed, is the fundamental mood of the play. After the opening scene has explored the territory of Orsino's love-sickness (‘If I could control Olivia as I can control my music …’), I. ii. poses and only half rejects a possibility, ‘If Sebastian were alive …’. ‘Your niece will not be seen,’ complains Sir Andrew Aguecheek at I. iii. 114-15, ‘or if she be, it's four to one she'll none of me’ The odds are longer than Sir Andrew allows, but ‘if Sir Toby can influence Olivia …’. By this flimsy conditional, Sir Andrew's behaviour—and his expenditure—are motivated throughout the play. At I. iv. 19-20, Viola/Cesario warns Orsino: ‘If she be so abandoned to her sorrow / As it is spoke, she never will admit me.’ In the next scene(s)he is admitted. Olivia is not so abandoned to her sorrow as she thought she was. But, far from being destroyed, the conditional mood is intensified ‘If you were the devil, you are fair,’ Viola admits (I. v. 272), and she begins her exquisite wooing with ‘If I did love you in my master's flame …’ (I. v. 285). But Olivia's mind is firm, unless … ‘Unless the master were the man …’ (I. v. 315). In II. i., Viola's speculation is answered, for the audience at least. Sebastian is alive, though wishing he were not. It is Antonio who provides the disquieting conditional here: ‘If you will not murder me for my love, let me be your servant’ (II. i. 36-37). The conditional clause may sound like a throw-away, but III. iv. will bring it perilously close to fulfilment. Olivia's ring contributes a physical aspect to the conditional mood in II. ii. Malvolio introduces it by dropping the love-token; ‘If it be worth stooping for, there it lies in your eyes; if not, be it his that finds it’ (II. ii. 16-17). As a ring, it is presumably valuable, but Viola/Cesario shares with the audience the secret knowledge that it is worthless as a love-token. II. iii. ends with a flurry of conditional clauses, identifying the carelessness with which Sir Toby gulls Sir Andrew:

SIR Andrew:
If I cannot recover your niece, I am a foul way out.
SIR Toby:
Send for money, knight: if thou hast her not i' the end, call me cut.
SIR Andrew:
If I do not, never trust me, take it how you will.

(II. iii. 203-8)

Irony dominates the conditionals of II. iv., from Orsino's ‘if ever thou shalt love …’ (II. iv. 15) to Viola's:

My father had a daughter loved a man,
As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman,
I should your lordship—

(II. iv. 109-111)

It is this irony that double-dyes the second half of the play, supplying the drama in Olivia's elliptical conditional:

But would you undertake another suit,
I had rather hear you to solicit that
Than music from the spheres.

(III. i. 120-122)

and the whole ensuing dialogue, as well as in Sebastian's euphoric:

What relish is in this? how runs the stream?
Or I am mad, or else this is a dream:
Let fancy still my sense in Lethe steep:
If it be thus to dream, still let me sleep!

(IV. i. 64-67)

I have the impression that the word ‘if’ occurs with suggestive frequency in Twelfth Night. Outside the work of Chekhov, few successful plays have relied so heavily on the peculiarly evasive conditional mood; and it is no accident that Chekhov's delicately textured tragi-comedies have been so often discussed in musical terms. The conditional mood, because of its tendency to float towards silence, reaches out in the direction of music.

My belief is that Shakespeare, having tackled the theatrical problems of providing Twelfth Night with effective musical interludes, found his attitude to his material changed. An episodic story became in his mind a thing of dreams and themes, its title borrowed from the Feast of the Epiphany, the celebration of a mysterious revelation generously offered and joyfully received. It was not a matter of conscious decision so much as an exercise of the free imagination. It would be anachronistic to ascribe to Shakespeare a musical sophistication beyond his age's scope. We will not find in Twelfth Night, as some have found in Chekhov, an approach to symphonic form. But it is worth observing, and observing to the point of ‘finding strange’, that the play begins and ends with music. My final contention is that the conduct of the story is consistent with this musical framing.

Two themes, crudely divisible into an ‘Olivia’ theme and a ‘Viola’ theme, are repeated with variations through the play. The boldly dominant one, almost from start to finsih, is the Olivia theme. Olivia is, after all, the declared romantic centre, ‘loved’ by three men (Orsino, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Malvolio), loving a fourth (Cesario), and the eventual love-prize of a fifth (Sebastian). I. ii. introduces the Viola theme in a minor key, and circumstances conspire to keep it there. But Viola, not Olivia, is the true centre of the play. That centrality will be confirmd in the final act, but we know it by II.iv., when her delicately poised responses to Orsino lift her out of Olivia's range. What we may not remember in the pressing world of the theatrical present is how we found it out. Shakespeare has worked openly, but with discretion. The ordering of the scenes in Act One has silently advised us:

• Scene 1—We meet Orsino. He talks of Olivia.
• Scene 2—We meet Viola. She talks of Sebastian and Orsino.
• Scene 3—We meet Olivia's household, but not yet Olivia.
• Scene 4—Viola talks with Orsino about Olivia.
• Scene 5—Viola talks with Olivia about Orsino.

From now on, the Olivia theme can never be played in isolation from the Viola theme. An Act which has seemed to be dominated by the ill-starred love of Orsino and Olivia, has been, in subtle fact, dominated by Viola/Cesario. Her dominance is never as sure as Rosalind's in the Forest of Arden, largely because Viola spends most of the play on the verges of misery, but her hold grows stronger with the unfolding action. It is the Olivia theme that has receded to a minor key for its last appearance in Act Five, out-manoeuvred even by the ‘recognition-music’ of Viola and Sebastian. Beneath that recognition-music, the Viola theme reasserts itself, now in the major key, as she reverts to the womanhood that completes the story. Shakespeare's extraordinary achievement here is to make Sebastian, whom we have scarcely seen, the instrument of Viola's reversion, not as a deus ex machina but as a legitimate part of the play's orchestration. His method can be briefly outlined.

We first hear about Sebastian when the Captain tells Viola:

                                                            I saw your brother
Most provident in peril, bind himself
(Courage and hope both teaching him the practice)
To a strong mast that liv'd upon the sea;
Where, like Arion on the dolphin's back,
I saw him hold acquaintance with the waves
So long as I could see.

(I. ii. 10-16)

The association with Arion, whose music charmed the dolphin that saved his life, follows appropriately on the consort of the previous scene as well as offering Sebastian a part in the music of the play. But it is very much a solo part. Until Act Four he is held in isolation from all but Antonio, himself an isolate, and he lives in a time-scheme that has not even a fictional reality. II i., Sebastian's first scene, is structurally linked to I. ii., Viola's first scene. In the silent cinema, they might have been connected by an admonitory, ‘Meanwhile, on another stretch of Illyria's sea-coast …’. But within the duration of the play Viola has already had time to establish herself as Orsino's favourite, and to flutter the sad heart of Olivia before Sebastian passes through the stage door into the story. If there is any explanation for his delayed arrival in Illyria, Shakespeare has not troubled to give it. Clearly he felt no need to. The play is not ready for Sebastian until it has established Viola. His introduction is timed by the story, not by the clock. The Globe audience could accommodate the disparity between Viola's time and Sebastian's. It is asked to do so throughout the play. They have to be held apart until the story allows their bringing together. At the end of II. i., Sebastian tells Antonio, ‘I am bound to the Count Orsino's court’ (II. i. 45). If he were to go straight there, the play could end in II. ii., or certainly in II. iv. Instead, he disappears until III. iii. Logic would demand some explanation of his failure to reach Orsino's court. Shakespeare ignores it, turning Sebastian, in the period that has elapsed during his off-stage scenes, from a purposeful visitor to an idle tourist: ‘what's to do? Shall we go see the reliques of this town?’ (III. iii. 18-19). Once again, Shakespeare offers no explanation for the apparent discrepancy. The scene serves only two ends. It keeps the audience aware of Sebastian's proximity to the leading characters, and it permits the exchange of a property that will be important later—Antonio's purse. The first is the more essential. In the timing of the story, Sebastian must be gathered in towards the denouement. He has so far inhabited only his own places in only his own time. The setting for III. iii is singular, a somewhere-street occupied by the play's two strangers It is not until IV. i. that Sebastian strays into the time and place of the other characters. Antonio beats him to it by about eighty lines, and perhaps (at the Blackfriars, if not at the Globe) an interval. What has become, for the audience, the ‘real’ world is a bewilderment to the two time-travellers. Antonio thinks himself rejected by his friend. Sebastian is quizzed by a jester who claims to know him, struck by a gangling idiot he has neither seen nor spoken to before, and invited indoors by a beautiful woman who shows every outward sign of loving him. ‘Are all the people mad?’ (IV. i. 29). Sebastian's resolution to accept ‘this accident and flood of fortune’ (IV. iii. 11) provides the solution Viola had hopelessly hoped for in the soliloquy that concludes II. ii. … The words of that scene's final couplet are significant: ‘O time, thou must untangle this, not I, / It is too hard a knot for me t'untie’. It is Sebastian who does time's job. Mysteriously out of time with the play's events until his final entrance, he then harnesses time and introduces harmony. He is crucial to the play's dramatic syntax, and astonishingly at ease—the only character other than Feste who is.

Before turning to Sebastian's final entrance—the moment at which time will stand still and yield to harmony—we have two small irregularities to consider. They take us back to the parting of Sebastian and Antonio in III. iii., and to their surprisingly detailed plans; surprising, that is, in a play not much concerned with details of time and place. This is how the scene ends:

ANTONIO:
                              Hold, sir, here's my purse.
In the south suburbs, at the Elephant,
Is best to lodge. I will bespeak our diet
Whiles you beguile the time, and feed your knowledge
With viewing of the town. There you shall have me.
SEBASTIAN:
Why I your purse?
ANTONIO:
Haply your eye shall light upon some toy
You have desire to purchase; and your store,
I think, is not for idle markets, sir.
SEBASTIAN:
I'll be your purse-bearer, and leave you for
An hour.
ANTONIO:
                    To the Elephant.
SEBASTIAN;
                                                                                I do remember.

At the Elephant in one hour. Nothing could be more specific. But Antonio does not stay at the Elephant. Half an hour later by his own timing (V.i. 96), he has found his way to Olivia's house, rushed to protect ‘Sebastian’ from Sir Andrew Aguecheek only to be denied, and have his purse withheld, by ‘that most ingrateful boy’ (V. i. 81). Poor Antonio, after stalking through the comedy like a grumbling bass in search of escape into a grand opera, has stumbled into a farce and tipped it towards tragedy. Meanwhile the real Sebastian is looking for him:

                              Where's Antonio, then?
I could not find him at the Elephant,
Yet there he was, and there I found this credit,
That he did range the town to seek me out.

(IV. iii. 4-7)

It is the only occasion in the Sebastian/Antonio sub-plot on which Shakespeare has attempted to cover his tracks. If it is a pandering to plausibility, it seems scarcely worth the effort. The only effect, perhaps it is the intended one, is to make the previous timelessness and placelessness of the pair stand out in clearer relief. The second irregularity comes with the entrance of Sir Andrew and Sir Toby at V. i. 175. When are we to suppose that Sebastian gave Sir Toby ‘a bloody coxcomb too?’ Not in IV i, when Sir Andrew is soundly beaten, unless Sir Toby is uncomplainingly bleeding through IV. ii. … An off-stage battery so soon after the splendid on-stage confrontation of IV. i., is a strangely tired device. All that can be said is that it allows Sebastian to make his magnificently timed final entrance with an easy excuse for noticing no one but Olivia: ‘I am sorry, madam, I have hurt your kinsman’ (V. i. 219). But a better pretext for this important blinkering would not have been hard to find. It seems likely that Shakespeare was careless of all but the entry itself.

This is one of the magical stage moments in the history of English comedy. Wycherley's The Country Wife has one which operates in reverse, and which may serve to illustrate by contrast Shakespeare's achievement. The concern in Wycherley's play is to avert the threat of sudden illumination. Its focus is Margery Pinchwife, innocent among sophisticates, fresh from the discovery of sex that her husband could not provide, dancing dizzy to the tune of Horner's whore-pipe—and here they all are, saying that Horner is impotent. Why are they telling lies? How can Dorilant, who ought to know better, call Horner ‘an arrant French capon?’ She can stand it no longer: ‘'Tis false, sir, you shall not disparage poor Mr Horner, for to my certain knowledge …’. ‘Oh, hold!’ shouts Lucy. ‘Stop her mouth!’ whispers Mrs Squeamish. And the country wife is forced to participate in the face-saving lie. It is a tableau of deceit, magnificently painted. Had Margery Pinchwife completed her sentence, she would have ‘created’ two cuckolds, two fornicators, two adulteresses and a lecher. The society of the play could not bear so much truth. Quite differently in Twelfth Night, everyone looks at Sebastian. His entrance removes the scales from the eyes of all the on-stage characters. The question we ask just after that magical frozen moment in The Country Wife is ‘what would have happened if Margery Pinchwife had completed her sentence?’ The question we ask in Twelfth Night is ‘what would have happened if Sebastian had not arrived?’. So much of this final scene has nudged improbably close to utter disaster. Orsino's turning on Cesario/Viola is as savage as Oberon's on Titania—and with a vital difference. Unlike the Indian boy, Viola is a character we know and love, but like him she is the innocent victim of a lovers' vicious quarrel. What is threatened as Orsino holds his Cesario before the woman who claims Cesario as hers is the kind of crossfire death which can, in O'Casey and other Irish dramatists, turn hilarity into horror:

But this your minion, whom I know you love,
And whom, by heaven I swear, I tender dearly,
Him will I tear out of that cruel eye
Where he sits crowned in his master's spite.
Come, boy, with me, my thoughts are ripe in mischief.
I'll sacrifice the lamb that I do love
To spite a raven's heart within a dove.

(V. i. 123-129)

For fifty lines or so, with the tethered Antonio standing like Iago silent at the side, there seems an outside chance that an Arcadian romance may terminate in an Illyrian bloodbath. So much of the play has circled round the anguish of rejection: Olivia rejects Orsino, Sir Andrew and Malvolio; Viola rejects Olivia and Antonio; Feste as Sir Thopas rejects Malvolio; we have just witnessed the rejection of ‘Cesario’ by Orsino and of Sir Andrew by Sir Toby: now the rejections are over. Twelfth Night is full of occasions on which one human being moves in hope towards another only to be met by a rebuff. They speak to our experience where memory least likes to linger. But all that is suddenly changed when the stage door opens, and Sebastian walks onto the platform. His own obliviousness of the desperate tension which he breaks is a masterly embellishment, but the entrance itself is the true mark of the actor-dramatist. It is based on an apprehension of the difference between the actor within the tiring house waiting for his cue, and the actor opening the door to show himself to an audience. The effect need not be lost on modern stages, but the arrangement of the Globe platform, and the time it took for an actor to travel from the stage door, must have enhanced it. When Sebastian is suddenly slotted into the whole scheme of the play, time has, as Viola said it must, untangled the knots. It is a conclusion as musically satisfactory as mathematics, as mathematically precise as music.

Notes

1. Clement Scott, From ‘The Bells’ to ‘King Arthur’, London, 1897, pp. 267-73

2. Prynne's Histriomastix was published in 1632

3. Emrys Jones, Scenic Form in Shakespeare, Oxford, 1971, pp. 24-7