Twelfth Night (2 page)

Shakespearean comedy often imagines a journey from the secure womb of the family to a world of shipwreck and isolation, and thence to the bond of marriage. The characters lose themselves to find themselves. Broken families are restored in the same instant that new families are anticipated through the pronouncement of love vows. The climax of
Twelfth Night
is one of the great reunion scenes, as the parted twins are joined:

The language is richly suggestive of one made two and two made one, of the cleft apple from the
Symposium
’s myth of origins, and of the workings of nature combined with the trick of art (a “perspective” was a distorting glass that created the optical illusion of one picture appearing as two). In a single action, brother and sister find both each other and their object of desire.

And yet. The peculiar poignancy of
Twelfth Night
comes from the sense that there are many losses even in this moment of wonder. Antonio, who has been like a brother and even a lover to Sebastian, is left alone. Malvolio has been humiliated just a little too far. The union of Sir Toby and Maria leaves Sir Andrew isolated—he was adored once, too, but we cannot imagine that he will be again. And Feste is there to sing another sad song of time and change. Above all, Cesario is no more: Orsino closes the dialogue by addressing Viola by her boy-name one final time before she assumes her female garb and becomes his “fancy’s queen.” But “fancy’s queen” is the very language of that shallow courtly love with which Orsino had tried to woo Olivia: the language that Cesario cast off when he/she began speaking in his/her own voice. In the closing moments of the play, Viola does seem to revert to the silence and passivity of orthodox female behavior.

What is going through her imaginary heart at this moment? Even as Sebastian and Orsino are found, Cesario is lost. Could Viola be saying goodbye to the feigned twin into which she has made herself?

The name “Cesario” suggests untimely birth—as in “Cesarean section,” a baby “from his mother’s womb untimely ripped”—but the character undergoes an untimely death. A few months before starting the comedy of
Twelfth Night
, Shakespeare completed his deeply meditated tragedy of
Hamlet
. There are unfathomable crosscurrents at work here: in creating and destroying Cesario, perhaps Shakespeare too is saying a goodbye. To his own Hamnet. Viola is diminished when bereaved of her invented second self. Was this Shakespeare’s delayed response to poor Judith’s desolation on the loss of her twin?

In preparing to direct the play for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2009, Gregory Doran, himself a twin, noticed a coincidence neglected by nearly all the legion of Shakespeare’s biographers and critics. Hamnet and Judith Shakespeare were baptized on 2 February, the feast of Candlemas (which celebrates the presentation of the baby Jesus in the Temple in Jerusalem—a fitting moment for the baptism of a treasured first son). And it was on that very same festival day seventeen years later, 2 February, Candlemas, that
Twelfth Night
was performed (the earliest performance of which we have a record) before the law students of the Middle Temple in 1602. Malvolio describes Cesario/Viola as “Not yet old enough for a man, nor young enough for a boy. As a squash is before ’tis a peascod, or a codling when ’tis almost an apple: ’tis with him in standing water, between boy and man.” On 2 February 1602, Judith was in standing water between girl and woman. By turning Viola into Cesario and allowing Sebastian to return from the devouring sea of death, Shakespeare allowed himself the consoling fantasy of a seventeenth birthday reunion for his own separated twins.

A more immediate occasion for the play’s meditations on love and identity seems to have been Shakespeare’s friendly rivalry with Ben Jonson. Shakespeare had been writing courtship comedies for many years when Jonson came onto the theatrical scene at the end of the 1590s with a more hard-edged satirical vein of drama that tapped into the psychology of “humours”—the idea that aberrant behavior (which is readily comic and worthy of satire) could be attributed to an excess of a particular passion or obsession or to temperamental imbalance (too much choler or melancholy). Jonson seems to have fallen out with Shakespeare’s acting company early in the new century. At this time he wrote a play called
The Fountain of Self-Love, or Cynthia’s Revels
for the Children of Her Majesty’s Chapel, the “boy-actors” company that, to judge from a famous piece of dialogue in
Hamlet
, was perceived by Shakespeare and his fellows as something of a threat to their own prestige. Jonson’s double title was innovative and not a little pretentious: Shakespeare may well have been mocking it with
Twelfth Night, or What You Will
(his only double title). In pricking the bubble of inflated language, as he habitually does, Feste may be glancing at Jonson’s verbosity. “I might say ‘element,’ but the word is over-worn”: “element” is a key word in Jonson’s humoral lexicon. And again, in response to Antonio’s “I prithee vent thy folly somewhere else,” Feste says “Vent my folly! He has heard that word of some great man and now applies it to a fool. Vent my folly!” Since
The Fountain of Self-Love
contains such phrases as “vent thy passion” and “vent the Etna of his fires,” “some great man” might almost be Jonson.

The fountain in Jonson’s play is that of Narcissus, who drowned while trying to kiss his own reflection. Shakespeare’s Illyria is also a place of self-love. Yellow-stockinged Malvolio in particular is a Narcissus figure, but there is also a certain vanity about Orsino as he plays the role of the courtly lover. Viola, by contrast, is the opposite of a self-lover. She comes back from drowning and speaks in the voice of the desiring woman whom Narcissus neglected:

As intimated by the “reverberate hills” and the echo effect “ ‘Olivia!’ O,” the “babbling gossip of the air” alludes to the mythological figure of Echo, who pined away as a result of her unrequited love for Narcissus.

Jonsonian comedy is peopled by narcissists.
Twelfth Night
responds with an astonishing exploration of the relationship between knowledge of self and sympathy for others—which we might call “echoing”—in the composition of human identity. “I am not what I am”; “Be that thou know’st thou art”; “I swear I am not that I play”; “Ourselves we do not owe”; “Nothing that is so is so”; “You shall from this time be / Your master’s mistress.” These paradoxes and promises are the word-music of Illyria that “gives a very echo to the seat / Where love is throned.”

The play begins with what sounds very like a fifteen-line unrhymed sonnet, spoken in the voice of an archetypal Renaissance lover, an aficionado of the great Italian poet Petrarch’s sonnets in praise of his lovely but unobtainable Laura. This kind of love thrives on unrequitedness. The poet-lover uses imagery of music and the sea, of food, of rising and falling. Such language is typical of the vogue for sonneteering in the 1590s: every self-respecting Elizabethan poet had a sheaf of sonnets to his or her name. Like the conventional sonneteers, Orsino alludes to figures from classical mythology, in his case Ovid’s Actaeon hunted down by the dogs of his own desire for lovely but chaste Diana. When Olivia appears, Orsino says that “heaven walks on earth,” which is just what an orthodox sonneteer would say. He revels in the “sovereign cruelty” of his stony lady, as all Petrarchan lovers do.

But he is then thrown by the beauty of a lovely boy. The audience, however, knows that Cesario is really Viola, a girl in disguise, and that the body parts so lovingly blazoned by Orsino really are the “woman’s part”—except they are not, since (at least the majority of) the audience also knows that Viola is a part written for a boy actor. “Thou dost speak masterly” says Orsino in response to Cesario’s eloquence. In so doing, he allows himself to become the master mastered by the servingman. Or rather the boy. Or is that the girl? Or the boy actor?

Orsino claims that a woman’s love is of less value than a man’s because it is driven solely by “appetite,” which may be sated, whereas his capacity for desire is infinite:

Here he again resembles a sonneteer, whose love is limitless because it is defined by being unrequited. And when he reappears at the end of the play, Orsino duly speaks another of his fifteen-line sonnets, this one ending with the most hackneyed rhyme in the sonneteer’s repertoire:

But then he discovers that Cesario is really Viola and he is able to resolve the tension—which is also the tension of Shakespeare’s sonnets—between love for a lovely boy and desire for a woman:

If Orsino is the conventional Elizabethan sonneteer, Olivia is parodist of the genre. The sonneteer customarily enumerates his lady’s beautiful body parts, one by one in that device known as the “blazon.” Olivia enumerates her own: “I will give out divers schedules of my beauty. It shall be inventoried, and every particle and utensil labelled to my will: as,
item
, two lips, indifferent red:
item
, two grey eyes, with lids to them:
item
, one neck, one chin and so forth.” But then love—for Cesario—catches up on her and she finds herself deploying the blazon in all seriousness: “Thy tongue, thy face, thy limbs, actions and spirit, / Do give thee five-fold blazon.” She begins to wish that “the master were the man”—or the man her master. Viola, meanwhile, gains a voice by becoming Cesario. In the sonnet form, the object of desire is just that, an object. In
Twelfth Night
, Viola, desired by both man and woman, is a feeling subject. Vulnerable, and thus forced to become an actor (“I am not that I play”), she soon finds herself in the situation of desiring the man she has been sent to persuade to love someone else—an analogous twist to that of Shakespeare’s sonnets, which begin with the speaker persuading the fair youth to marry, then dissolve into the speaker’s own love for the youth.

Sonnet 20 startlingly begins “A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted / Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion.” There is only one other phrase in the literature of the age that may be readily compared with the coinage “master-mistress”: Orsino’s “Your master’s mistress.” Perhaps as good an answer as any to the hoary old question of the identity of the lovely youth to whom the bulk of Shakespeare’s sonnets are addressed is “a figure who resembles Cesario.”

Twelfth Night
is an extraordinary exploration of the permutations of desire or, to use the terminology of an Elizabethan admirer of Shakespeare called Francis Meres, of “the perplexities of love.” Both Orsino and Olivia love Viola in her disguise as Cesario. Viola loves, and wins, Orsino, while Olivia has to settle for Sebastian. Orsino insists on continuing to call Viola Cesario even after he knows that she is a woman. Sebastian is puzzled, though grateful, to find himself whisked to the altar by the wealthy and beautiful Olivia, but he cannot have had time to fall in love with her. The person who really loves him is Antonio, who reminds him that for three months, “No interim, not a minute’s vacancy, / Both day and night did we keep company.” He follows his beloved despite the risk to his own life: “But come what may, I do adore thee so, / That danger shall seem sport, and I will go.” Like a sonneteer, he speaks of being spurred on by his “desire, / More sharp than filèd steel” and, again, of paying “devotion” to “his image, which methought did promise / Most venerable worth.” He is rewarded for his devotion by being left alone and melancholy, again in the exact manner of a sonneteer turned away by his frosty mistress. It is very easy to imagine Antonio going away at the end of
Twelfth Night
and writing something on the following lines, addressed to Sebastian: