Twelfth Night – A. J. Drake's Shakespeare Site

Act 1, Scene 1 (743-44, Duke Orsino luxuriates in his idealistic love of Countess Olivia, or perhaps of love itself; a messenger reports that Olivia is in mourning for her departed brother and won’t be seen for an excessive period of seven years.)

Duke Orsino of Illyria and Countess Olivia are both creatures of idealistic excess, determined to pursue their passions: he to love her, and she to mourn for her departed brother. Olivia, says Valentine in reporting back from her to Orsino, is determined in all she does for seven years “to season / A brother’s dead love, which she would keep fresh / And lasting in her sad remembrance” (744, 1.1.29-31).

Duke Orsino seems to understand that he and Olivia are kindred spirits. He claims at the beginning that he would surfeit himself with love to be rid of it, in the same way that overindulgence in food generates disgust with eating: “If music be the food of love, play on. / Give me excess of it that, surfeiting, / The appetite may sicken and so die” (743, 1.1.1-3). But that hardly seems to be the effect of his attitude.

Rather, Orsino seems to be “in love with love,” and, as an aesthete, a kind of chemist whose material is human emotions who might win the approval of Oscar Wilde and his circle, his desire is instead to live perpetually in a realm removed from time, chance, and change. [1] It is perhaps odd, then, that he represents his love of Olivia as turning destructive inside of him, like “fell and cruel hounds” (744, 1.2.21) that pursue him as if he were Actaeon turned to a stag. [2] But then, this sounds more like the conventional sonneteer’s passion than the real article.

Orsino’s attitude entails risk in that if persisted in too long, it will become a trap. Those who stylize and extend natural human passions certainly run this risk, and there’s no shortage of warnings to heed: the advice given by Claudius and Gertrude to the brooding prince Hamlet in Act 1, Scene 2 of Hamlet may come from compromised sources, but it is reasonable counsel: mourning has its temporal and emotional limits, and when those aren’t respected, sorrow goes from being duly “obsequious” to transgressive, even destructive: it becomes a denial of life. [3]

But then, Illyria is the rarefied realm in which the lover Orsino and the mourner Olivia aim to live, so as Anne Barton suggests, there’s no need for the characters in Twelfth Night to remove themselves entirely to a Green World or other magical space. They are in one already, and the ordinary laws of life don’t apply. Illyria runs strangely parallel with the order of human desire. [4]

Still, the harmony isn’t complete. Feste almost continually reminds us that this order is not the only one with which we must reckon: he neither affirms that desire can run parallel with the world nor denies it altogether. Viola’s strategy rivals Feste’s in its wisdom in that she commits her cause to time, not taking for granted or dismissing any possible eventuality at the outset of the play.

Later, Malvolio will remind us of this problem in a much less tolerant manner, and even that lord of misrule Sir Toby will show some wisdom about the dangers of pursuing one’s pleasure without check: he will taunt Malvolio rather severely, but—in part for the perfectly selfish reason that he fears he has already caused himself some trouble with Countess Olivia—stop short of engaging in prolonged cruelty. Sir Toby is a prankster with a fair degree of common sense, and, at least arguably, a healthy conscience.

Act 1, Scene 2 (744-46, Viola is shipwrecked in Illyria, and fears that her twin brother has drowned; the ship’s Captain tells her about Orsino and Olivia, and Viola settles on dressing as a young man and serving the Duke as a page; the rest of her plan, she says, time will bring to pass.)

Viola and the Sea Captain converse after her shipwreck, and he gives her hope that her brother Sebastian may have made it to shore: “I saw your brother, / Most provident in peril, bind himself / … / To a strong mast that lived upon the sea …” (744, 1.2.11-14). Viola admires what the Captain says about Olivia’s constancy to a lost brother (745, 1.2.35-40) and first thinks to serve her, but when the Captain indicates the difficulty of such an endeavor, she decides instead to disguise herself as a young man and serve Duke Orsino.

Perhaps Viola takes Olivia’s grief as a model for her own, should her brother turn out not to have survived. But the more compelling reason she gives for deciding to disguise herself is that she “might not be delivered to the world, / Till I had made mine own occasion mellow / What my estate is” (745, 1.2.41-43).

Others may be after a more permanent refuge, but Viola plans to use her musical abilities to recommend her service to the Duke as a page, and for the rest, she commits her cause to the fullness of time, saying, “What else may hap, to time I will commit” (746, 1.2.59). [5]

Viola’s willingness, even determination, to commit her hopes to the fullness of time and the buffetings of chance is a key attitude for Shakespeare’s comic heroes and heroines, and it makes her a fine exemplar of such a heroine: her perspective comes from, and calls for, wisdom and generosity of spirit, for openness to what life brings. Selfish characters lack these qualities and spend most of their time trying to control everything and everyone around them. That strategy seldom yields happy results, even in a comic play.

Act 1, Scene 3 (746-49, Olivia’s uncle, Sir Toby, has brought the very silly Sir Andrew Aguecheek to his niece’s estate and means to promote him as her suitor; Sir Andrew doubts his chances, but Toby encourages him to give it a try.)

Sir Toby Belch operates on a different principle from the ones enunciated by either Olivia or, to some extent, by Viola. This principle becomes evident when he expresses his impatience with his niece: “What a plague means my niece to take the death of / her brother thus? I am sure care’s an enemy to life” (746, 1.3.1-2).

When Maria tells him, “confine yourself within the modest / limits of order” (746, 1.3.7-8) in Olivia’s household, Sir Toby scoffs: “Confine! I’ll confine myself no finer than I am. / These clothes are good enough to drink in, and so be these / boots, too” (746, 1.3.9-11). Sir Toby, who is something of a gourmand and a “riotous knight” like Jack Falstaff in the Henry IV-V plays, is committed to the pleasure principle, and most particularly to his pleasures.

This self-regarding wildness in Sir Toby doesn’t diminish the fun he brings to the play, but at times his conduct introduces a note of moral ambiguity that would otherwise be absent from the play aside, of course, from Malvolio’s patent selfishness.

That said, we should also consider Sir Toby’s function in a broader context: in Anglican tradition, the “Twelfth Night” referenced in the play’s title is January 5th, the last day of the Christmas celebrations that begin on December 25th. This day is followed by the Feast of Epiphany on January 6th, which commemorates the visit of the Magi or three wise men to see the infant Jesus. [6]

At least during the Catholic Middle Ages in England, one of the feasts that occurred during this twelve-day period was the Feast of Fools, during which a Lord and Lady of Misrule would be chosen to preside over the merrymaking and reversal that occurred during the Christmastide holidays.

Both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I (the latter after the Catholic Queen Mary had briefly revived the tradition) banned this feast out of Protestant disdain for the licentiousness with which it had come to be associated, [7] but still, it’s something that Shakespeare and his audience would have known about, and while Twelfth Night does not refer directly to the holiday beyond the play’s title itself, it shares the ambience of the fabled season of merrymaking.

Sir Toby Belch functions much like a Lord of Misrule in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, keeping alive for contemporary Christmas festivities the memory of this ancient pagan and early Christian tradition. [8] Sir Toby’s role is apparent from the lines earlier quoted, and it becomes still clearer when we see him jesting with Sir Andrew Aguecheek.

Evidently, Sir Toby wants to send the dupe Andrew in pursuit of Olivia for his own fun and profit. He doesn’t have much respect for Andrew, and he doesn’t take the other characters too seriously, either. But a further point is that as far as Toby is concerned, one love object is as good as another; he doesn’t share the exclusivity we find in Orsino or in Viola. Sir Toby sets Andrew after Maria as practice for his future pursuit of Olivia, eliciting only Sir Andrew’s foolish mistake in thinking that the word “accost” is the lady’s name (747, 1.3.48).

True, Sir Andrew goes out of his way to prove Toby wrong, repeatedly making a fool of himself when his benefactor would like to turn him into a rake, and make a decent profit from gulling him over his hopes for Olivia as well. Nonetheless, Sir Toby stands for a generalized pursuit of happiness, for a rounding off and leveling of discrimination and judgment in choosing the objects of one’s desires.

Desire, for Sir Toby, is the key component in a pleasure-yielding system: the point is simply to be part of the system. Anne Barton is right to say that Sir Toby exists on his own time and that he has banished ordinary time from his life. [9] But he’s also quite accepting of his own and others’ imperfections, and he insists that Sir Andrew ought not hide his talents as a dancer but should instead use them to the fullest extent: “Wherefore are these things hid?” asks an incredulous Sir Toby; “Is it a world to hide / virtues in?” (748, 1.3.112, 117-18)

Act 1, Scene 4 (749-50, Duke Orsino commissions Viola as “Cesario” to woo Olivia for him; Viola accepts, but at once realizes that this is a trap, for she already loves Orsino.)

Intimacy strikes up immediately between Duke Orsino and Viola (disguised as “Cesario”). The Duke believes his suit will prosper if he carries it forward with Viola/Cesario as his intermediary. The youth’s fresh appearance, he supposes, will redound to his credit: “It shall become thee well to act my woes. / She will attend it better in thy youth” (749, 1.4.25-26). We might also note that Orsino wants Viola/Cesario to do all the “loverly” things that he himself seems not to have been doing, or at least not well.

Orsino adds a comment about Viola/Cesario’s feminine appearance: “Diana’s lip / Is not more smooth and rubious. Thy small pipe / Is as the maiden’s organ, shrill and sound, / And all is semblative a woman’s part” (749-50 1.4.30-33). Viola realizes immediately what a trap her gender disguise has become: “I’ll do my best / To woo your lady” she says to the Duke, but as an aside to us, she admits, “Yet a barful strife; / Whoe’er I woo, myself would be his wife” (749-50, 1.4.30-33, 40-42). [10]

Act 1, Scene 5 (750-56, Feste “proves” that Olivia is a fool; the steward Malvolio insults Feste; Sir Toby announces that “Cesario” has just arrived at Olivia’s estate, and she grants him a private audience; even as “Cesario” pleads Orsino’s case, Olivia falls in love—with Cesario; Olivia sends Malvolio after this supposed young man with a ring, on the deceptive premise that he left it with her for Orsino’s sake; Olivia tells Malvolio to invite Viola/Cesario back.)

We are introduced to the rest of the main characters: Olivia, Maria her maid, and Feste. Feste’s initial words show us yet another perspective on the sway of the passions and the imperfections to which human beings are liable: “God give them wisdom that have it; and those / that are fools, let them use their talents” (750, 1.5.13-14), he says to Maria, implying that a fool should strive to become even more foolish—though the word may not mean the same thing to Feste as to the supposed non-fools of the world, the “normies” who subscribe unreflectively to the regular order of things. [11]

Feste’s foolery, indeed, turns out be a species of wisdom, and wisdom sets a person apart, though it does not necessarily result in hostility against one’s fellows, or society in the broader sense. We will find that other characters are more immediately subject to the vicissitudes of that biblical dynamic duo “time and chance” than is Feste, and they must shift as they can, while Feste himself remains a constant in the play.

His wisdom consists partly in being able to formulate claims such as the challenging one he offers Olivia in an attempt to prove she deserves his title: “Anything that’s mended is but patched. Virtue that trans- / gresses is but patched with sin, and sin that amends is but / patched with virtue” (751, 1.5.41-43). This pithy suggestion also seems to imply that moral states are not permanent, which gives it a hint of Montaigne’s skepticism. [12]

Feste considers Olivia a fellow fool because of her over-grieving for the loss of her brother. In her quest for a perfectly stylized kind of mourning, this lovely absolutist risks the passage of her beauty, in itself a remarkable if transient thing of perfection. Feste seems to understand that in this saucy world there is no permanent strategy to be found; there is only mending of virtues with vices and vice versa; there is accommodation and negotiation between one person and another, and (to use a modern term from economics) one must always consider the “opportunity cost” of one’s choices, one’s actions.

Feste’s attempt to prove his patron Countess Olivia a fool also constitutes a kind of self-defense, a delineation of the relative value of his perspective, his place in Illyria, as a paradoxically respected fool.

Respected by most, that is. Enter one Malvolio, puritan killjoy: “I marvel your ladyship takes delight in such a bar- / ren rascal. I saw him put down the other day with an ordi- / nary fool that has no more brain than a stone” (752, 1.5.75-77) is his pronouncement to Olivia regarding Feste. Olivia, however, is wise to Malvolio’s excessive reliance on rigid virtue. He is filled with self-love, she says, and his earnestness is a bore: “There is no slander in an allowed / fool, though he do nothing but rail, nor no railing in a / known discreet man, though he do nothing but reprove” (752, 1.5.85-87).

Olivia also seems to be leading Orsino on—she’s curious to see what his next move as an importunate, fantastical suitor will be: “We’ll once more hear Orsino’s embassy” (753, 1.5.155). His new intermediary, Viola/Cesario, wins Olivia’s interest immediately and her love almost at first sight. In the classical manner of attraction, she is struck with the youth’s beauty and graceful ways: what happens to her is sudden, and she has no control over it.

As Malvolio says, Viola/Cesario is a fair youth, one “in standing water / between boy and man” (753, 1.5.148-49). As suggested above, this liminality is probably in part what makes Viola/Cesario attractive to Olivia. “He” is not a fully grown man like Duke Orsino.

The outcome of the Duke’s comic miscalculation is predictable: Olivia goes for the “eye candy” Orsino has proffered and not for him. Orsino has given Viola/Cesario license to establish a sense of intimacy with Olivia, and it is just this intimacy that bonds people together and makes them apt to fall in love.

What initially appeals to Olivia, perhaps, is the freshness or the newness of Viola/Cesario: the fact that “he” still seems to be all potential, a being still to be determined. The Countess is open to something new, and a bond of intimacy is established very quickly, probably when Viola/Cesario says with delicious gender-irony at the beginning of their conversation, “Good beauties, let me sustain no scorn. I / am very comptible even to the least sinister usage” (753, 1.5.162-63). It is men, Viola/Cesario implies, who are typically over-sensitive about the reception they get from others.

The passage in which Olivia unveils her face at the request of Viola/Cesario is worth notice: “we will / draw the curtain and show you the picture,” says the Countess, and she goes on to describe her face as an accurate portrait that will “endure wind and weather” (755, 1.5.214-15, 219).

This description is true enough, although it makes sense to hear Feste’s song at the play’s end as a comment on the limitations of such endurance: “the wind and the rain” (797, 5.1.376) are always at work, breaking down what seemed timeless, and we are put in mind of Feste’s earlier conversation with Olivia, in which he mused that beauty, ever-perishable, is “a flower” (751, 1.5.45). [13] In truth, Olivia both sets herself forth as a work of art and then sends up such sentiment, offering to give out “div- / ers schedules of my beauty,” replete with all the relevant “items” (755, 1.5.225-27).

As the conversation continues, Viola/Cesario’s rhetorical boldness shows Olivia the way to give in to her own passions: “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” (755, 1.5.246-49).

By the end of the scene, Olivia will be madly in love, and unable to comprehend Viola/Cesario’s reluctance, so she will have to turn to the stratagem of the ring (756, 1.5.282-86) to ensure the future presence of this new object of her desire. Her sudden change of heart shows in her final lines of the scene: “Fate, show thy force. Ourselves we do not owe. / What is decreed must be, and be this so” (756, 1.5.292-93). Olivia knows that a great transformation is working inside of her, but like Viola accepting time’s dispensation, she welcomes the change.

What keeps Olivia from loving the Duke, aside from the rather flimsy one of dedication to her brother, which goes away the moment she meets Viola/Cesario? The play does not explain her rejection of Orsino, although we might venture that perhaps he’s too available and too obviously pursuing her. All she says is that Duke Orsino is “A gracious person. But yet I cannot love him. / He might have took his answer long ago” (755, 1.5.244-45).

One theme of interest in Twelfth Night is its exploration of how we choose our erotic objects, or how they choose us. Discrimination and rejection are two main ways of eventually finding one’s favored object of desire, and here in Twelfth Night we are given to understand that Olivia considers herself and Orsino too alike in their tendencies towards idealistic extremes to make a good match. Or at least that seems a plausible observation.

ACT 2

Act 2, Scene 1 (756-57, Viola’s brother Sebastian has also survived the shipwreck off the Illyrian coast, and makes his way towards Duke Orsino’s court; Antonio, a sailor who saved Sebastian from drowning, takes a liking to him and follows him at considerable risk to himself since he has enemies in Illyria’s court.)

Antonio, who had rescued Sebastian from the ocean earlier, instantly forms an unbreakable bond with him. Antonio insists he will follow Sebastian to the Duke’s Court, no matter what the danger to himself: “But come what may, I do adore thee so / That danger shall seem sport, and I will go” (757, 2.1.41-42).

Act 2, Scene 2 (757-58, Malvolio tracks Viola/Cesario down and hands “him” the ring; Viola, upon reflection, realizes that Olivia loves “Cesario”; now the three of them—Olivia, Orsino, and Viola/Cesario, are caught in a love triangle from which Viola sees no way to escape.)

By this time, Viola is in a state almost as extreme as that of Olivia and Duke Orsino since she loves the latter and is loved by the former in the guise of Cesario. It’s hard to see how Viola has any more control over the course of events than others in this play, but some advantage, it’s reasonable to suggest, stems from her disguise and the perspective it lends.

Twelfth Night is not a comedy of the humors, [14] but it is a comedy of our inevitable frailty in the presence of strong passions. First, Viola sees that her adoption of a gender disguise is a trap that’s leading her towards frustration: “I am the man…. / Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness / Wherein the pregnant enemy does much” (758, 2.2.24, 26-27).

Secondly, Viola is able to generalize from her own experience: “How easy is it for the proper false / In women’s waxen hearts to set their forms. / Alas, our frailty is the cause, not we, / For such as we are made of, such we be” (758, 2.2.28-31). The “we” here is “women,” but it isn’t hard to extend the point to capture a sense of the fragility and changeableness of general humanity. [15]

Viola’s abilities do not, however, make it possible for her to extricate herself from the difficult situation she is in. The characters in Twelfth Night do not have so much control over themselves or events. All Viola can really say with honesty, therefore, amounts to a prayer: “O Time, thou must untangle this, not I. / It is too hard a knot for me t’untie” (2.2.39-40).

Act 2, Scene 3 (758-62, Sir Toby, Andrew, and Feste are drinking, singing, and playing music in a room at Olivia’s estate; Maria tries to quiet them down, and then in marches Malvolio, who threatens to throw them out of the house; an offended Sir Toby calls Malvolio out for being a puritan; Maria hatches a plot involving a forged letter designed to convince Malvolio that Olivia is romantically interested in him.)

This is another comic scene between Toby, Andrew, and Feste. Toby has been drinking and jesting as usual. First comes a delightful parody of philosophical discourse: Toby: “To / be up after midnight and to go to bed then is early. So that / to go to bed after midnight is to go to bed betimes. Does not / our lives consist of the four elements?” (758, 2.3.6-9) To which Andrew replies, “Faith, so they say. But I think it rather consists / of eating and drinking” (759, 2.3.9-10). A Sir Toby signature watch would be an interesting contraption!

Next comes a call for some music. [16] Feste’s song suggests that love sees only the joy of the present, that deferral and indeed any attempt to banish time are of no account: “In delay there lies no plenty, / Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty. / Youth’s a stuff will not endure” (759, 2.3.48-50). In this song at least, Feste acknowledges the fragile condition of humanity, but he sanctions neither puritanical prudence nor face-value interpretation of pastoral idylls such as Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.” [17] It’s worth noting that by now, Olivia has come around to the carpe diem side of the ledger.

Sir Toby, Maria, and Andrew are offended at Malvolio’s killjoy demands that they stop making so much merriment in Olivia’s home: “Do ye make an alehouse of my lady’s / house, that ye squeak out your coziers’ catches without any / mitigation or remorse of voice? Is there no respect of place, / persons, nor time in you?” (760, 2.3.83-86) Malvolio goes after these noisy celebrants with just short of the ire that Jesus showed towards the moneychangers in the Temple. [18]

In return, Toby’s put-down of Malvolio is a classic: “Art any more / than a steward? Dost thou think because thou art virtuous, / there shall be no more cakes and ale?” (761, 2.3.105-07) Sic semper—thus always—to prigs! Maria’s letter scheme to get revenge against Malvolio immediately wins the admiration of Sir Toby and Sir Andrew.

Malvolio is easy prey because he is vain about his looks and seems to think he deserves a quick promotion to a higher social rank: without in the least countenancing the holiday’s pleasant goings-on, he is in deadly and permanent earnest about Twelfth Night’s license to change one’s rank.

Maria says she will succeed because this puritan hypocrite is “so crammed, as he thinks, with excellencies— / that it is his grounds of faith that all that look on him love / him” (761 2.3.138-40). Her plan is as follows: “I will drop in his way some obscure epistles of love, / wherein by the color of his beard, the shape of his leg, the / manner of his gait, the expressure of his eye, forehead, and / complexion, he shall find himself most feelingly personated” (762, 2.3.143-46).

Andrew, however, is most concerned with his suit to Olivia failing and leaving him out of funds: “If I cannot recover your niece, I am a foul way / out” (762, 2.3.168-69). This makes Andrew easy prey for Sir Toby, who can’t resist manipulating such a mark. He is also an easy mark for Feste, by the way, who suits his foolery to the wit of his hearers—in Andrew’s case, utterances bordering on nonsense will often do.

Act 2, Scene 4 (762-65, Orsino asks for a song as a curative for his love-sick soul; he and Viola/Cesario debate whether men or women are more capable of love; Feste sings of love and death; during their renewed discussion, Viola-as-Cesario tells Orsino a tale about his supposed sister that hints at Viola’s love for him; the Duke doesn’t quite follow this story, and sends Viola/Cesario off on another embassy to Olivia.)

Viola/Cesario and the Duke discuss love matters, and he opens up to her while Feste plays some music for them. Orsino admits that men’s love is less constant than women’s love: “Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm, / More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn, / Than women’s are” (763, 2.4.31-33). But the Duke is playing the importunate suitor, and his subsequent remarks are contradictory. He insists that no woman could possibly love as strongly as he loves Olivia: “There is no woman’s sides / Can bide the beating of so strong a passion” (764, 2.4.90-91).

To this claim, Viola/Cesario alludes cryptically to her own love for Orsino, and insists that “We men may say more, swear more, but indeed / Our shows are more than will. For still we prove / Much in our vows, but little in our love” (765, 2.4.113-15). [19]

In between this argument’s halves, Feste’s song connects love with death, the ultimate in consequences: “Come away, come away, death, / And in sad cypress let me be laid. / Fly away, fly away, breath, / I am slain by a fair cruel maid” (763, 2.4.49-52), and afterwards he warns the Duke, “pleasure will be paid one time or / another” (764, 2.4.68-69). [20]

Act 2, Scene 5 (765-69, Malvolio finds Maria’s scarcely concealed letter in Olivia’s garden and takes the bait: the hidden Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, and Fabian watch Malvolio kindle with pride and hope for advancement when he finds the letter, which tells him to smile broadly, wear yellow stockings “cross-gartered” because Olivia likes that look, and treat Sir Toby with gruff condescension; Maria and the other conspirators are beside themselves with joy at how well things are going thus far.)

The conspirators turn Malvolio into a fool in a reverie. Maria is certain that the puritan will become “a con- / templative idiot” once he gets wind of the letter (766, 2.5.16-17), and she isn’t disappointed. Even before he spies out the letter, Malvolio is waxing hopeful: “To be Count Malvolio” (766, 2.5.30) and “to have the humor of state and … / telling them I know my place as I / would they should do theirs …” (766, 2.5.47-49).

Things go from absurd to more absurd once the letter comes into reading range: Malvolio muses on the inscription, “’I may command where I adore, / But silence, like a Lucrece knife, / With bloodless stroke my heart doth gore. / M.O.A.I. doth sway my life’” (767, 2.5.94-97) and goes on to ponder the significance of “Some are born great, / some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon / ’em” (769, 2.5.126-28). To succeed, Malvolio need only don yellow stockings, cross-garter them, smile like a fool, and be rude to Sir Toby—which latter he does already (768-69, 2.5.133-35, 151-53).

Sir Toby predicts that Malvolio, when he is finally disabused of his delusions of grandeur, will run mad (769, 2.5.168-69). This hyper-critical moralist has become just another foolish lover. He’s a minor comic version of Euripides’ Pentheus in The Bacchantes, [21] to be destroyed by the Dionysian revelers whose fun he tried to tamp down. (Except that Pentheus didn’t get to wear cross-garters and yellow stockings.)

Indeed, a hint of violence had entered the picture earlier with the mention of Lucretia: Malvolio recognized the letter as Olivia’s because the seal bore an impression of Lucrece, the noble Roman wife who killed herself after being raped by Sextus Tarquinius, son of the last Etruscan king Tarquinius Superbus: “By your leave, / wax. Soft—and the impressure her Lucrece with which / she uses to seal. ‘Tis my lady!” (764, 2.5.83-85)

Malvolio is no Tarquin, but he is prideful, and he intends to move beyond his proper station in life (that of a steward) by means of a most improper and self-aggrandizing suit to his employer.

Malvolio has been convinced by Maria’s bogus letter that “greatness” has simply been “thrust upon him,” if only he will make the proper gestures and dress right. A darker impression might be that like so many deniers of life, Malvolio means to set up a rival order of perfection against the imperfect world around us all; what else is that but pride, a self-deluded desire for autonomy to cover one’s fear and emptiness?

ACT 3

Act 3, Scene 1 (769-73, Viola/Cesario judges Feste’s wit while on the way to another audience with Olivia, and then meets Sir Toby and Sir Andrew; Olivia sends everyone but Viola-as-Cesario away and confesses her love to him; the answer Olivia receives takes the form of a gender-riddle, which she understandably can’t unpack.)

In conversation with Viola/Cesario, Feste declares himself not the Countess Olivia’s fool but her “corrupter of words” (770, 3.1.31), and when he’s through making his jests, Viola points out that playing the role of fool requires much perceptiveness: “to do that well craves a kind of wit. / He must observe their mood on whom he jests, / The quality of persons, and the time …” (771, 3.1.54-56).

In Feste’s case, “folly” is appropriate: it’s his way of maintaining perspective in a strange and contradictory world, and it allows him to do something like what a courtier must do: engage with various people at a level and in a manner that suits them and him. In a sense, then, the fool and the courtier are equally stable and versed in the vital discipline of recognizing decorum, even if a fool sometimes mocks the rules themselves. But in those who are wise in the usual way, folly and word-hashing may bring them into discredit.

Olivia continues to wear her passion on her skirt-sleeve. She admits to Viola/Cesario that the ring business was a device meant to augment a sense of intimacy between herself and the youth: “I did send, / After the last enchantment you did here, / A ring in chase of you” (772, 3.1.103-05), and asks, “Have you not set mine honor at the stake … ?” (772, 3.1.110)

To Olivia’s confession that “Nor wit nor reason can my passion hide” (773, 3.1.143), Viola/Cesario can only speak in riddles thanks to the bind into which her gender-disguising has put her, giving only this frustrating response to love-stricken Olivia: “I have one heart, one bosom, and one truth, / And that no woman has, nor never none / Shall mistress be of it, save I alone” (773, 3.1.149-51).

Anne Barton is right to suggest that Viola’s disguise doesn’t exactly liberate her in the way that, say, Rosalind’s disguise does in the green world of As You Like It. [22] It buys her some time and affords her some perspective, but it isn’t exactly freedom to experiment at will that Viola gains in her disguise as “Cesario” in Illyria.

Act 3, Scene 2 (773-75, Sir Toby bucks up Sir Andrew, who is becoming frustrated about Olivia: the thing to do, advises Sir Toby, is to challenge “Cesario” to a duel; Sir Andrew leaves to write a challenge to give Cesario; Maria reports that Malvolio is carrying out the letter’s instructions precisely.)

Fabian stirs up Sir Andrew (773, 3.2.15-16, 22-25), and Sir Toby shows his contempt for Sir Andrew’s lack of valor here, admitting that he’s taken him for a considerable sum already: to Fabian he says, “I have been dear to him, lad, some two thousand / strong or so” (774, 3.2.47-48).

Andrew is more Sir Toby’s quarry than his protégé. The following advice Toby gives Andrew is worth quoting: “Taunt him with the license of ink. If thou thou’st him / some thrice, it shall not be amiss, and as many lies as will / lie in thy sheet of paper … / set ’em down, go about it” (774, 3.2.38-41). In fact, that is Sir Toby’s game all through the play: to fleece Sir Andrew. “A fool and his money,” as the saying goes….

We can find genuine exemplars of male heroism in Shakespeare (Hotspur in 1 Henry IV, for instance, or Macduff in Macbeth), but here, as elsewhere, there’s strong awareness that male posturing is an ancient profession: the semblance of valor often substitutes successfully for the thing itself. Shakespeare’s plays are amply populated with what Rosalind in As You Like It calls “mannish cowards” who stare down the world until it blinks: they “outface it with their semblances.” [23]

Act 3, Scene 3 (775-76, Antonio arrives in town to watch over Sebastian, and explains why he is in danger here in Illyria; he lends Sebastian his purse and makes his way to the inn where they are both staying, while Sebastian goes on a tour of the city.)

Antonio remains a faithful friend to Sebastian, and has followed him to town save him from danger in spite of the peril to himself since, as he explains, “Once in a sea-fight ’gainst the Count his galleys / I did some service” (775, 3.3.26-27). Antonio lends his new friend his purse for spending money (775, 3.3.38): another act indicative of a strong bond between the two.

Act 3, Scene 4 (776-784, Malvolio, smiling and yellow-cross-gartered, makes his pitch to Olivia; she thinks he has run mad and entrusts him to the tender care of Sir Toby, who promptly ties him up and dumps him into a pitch-dark room; Sir Toby intends to deliver Sir Andrew’s letter to Cesario personally. (SYNOPSIS CONTINUES …)

Malvolio, now drawn entirely beyond himself and vulnerable, makes his unintentionally comic pitch to Countess Olivia, which consists mainly of smiling bizarrely and mentioning with pride his yellow stockings (776, 3.4.11-13, 19-22), and will be carted off to a dark cell as a madman. Olivia professes the greatest concern for the poor lunatic’s welfare: “Good Maria, let this fellow be looked to” (777, 3.4.57).

Oddly, though, she will forget about him until nearly the end of the play. Malvolio has no idea how much trouble he’s in, and believes his suit has been a fantastic success, thanks to Jove’s good will: “Nothing / that can be can come between me and the full prospect of / my hopes” (777, 3.4.74-76). [24] It’s true that courtship casts one in a role, but it’s a role for which creativity seems essential. Malvolio is simply following a script that renders him absurd, and his responses to Olivia are little more than patches of popular songs and ballads.

At this point, Sir Toby thinks he can play out the jest at his own pace: “Come, we’ll have him in a dark room and bound” (778, 3.4.122). How long will the torment last? It can continue, says Sir Toby, “for our pleasure and his penance till our very pastime, / tired out of breath, prompt us to have mercy on him …” (779, 3.4.124-25).

Sir Andrew is now spurred on to challenge Viola/Cesario as a rival suitor. As so often, Shakespeare makes fun of masculine pretensions to high honor and mastery of violence: neither Sir Andrew nor Viola/Cesario is any kind of fighter, but at least the latter knows better than to suppose otherwise. Words take the place of violence. Sir Toby advises Andrew to draw his sword and begin swearing copiously since very often, he says, “a terrible oath, / with a swaggering accent sharply / twanged off, gives manhood more approbation than ever / proof itself would have earned him” (779, 3.4.159-61).

Part of Sir Toby’s fun will be to cure the malady described by means of a homeopathic remedy: putting two pretenders together in a ridiculous duel. Sir Toby is enjoying himself, and devises to deliver Sir Andrew’s challenge in person (ignoring the letter) and thereby frighten Viola/Cesario beyond all measure. More than that, “This will so fright / them both that they will kill one another by the look , like / cockatrices” (780, 3.4.172-74).

After practically begging Fabian and Sir Toby to mollify the fearsome Sir Andrew, Viola puns to herself, “Pray God defend me. A little thing would make / me tell them how much I lack of a man” (782, 3.4.271-72). Viola recognizes that her disguise is more than ever a trap: this situation can’t go on much longer.

While all this planning is going on, Olivia admits her fear to Viola/Cesario that she has been reckless, has “said too much unto a heart of stone, / And laid mine honor too unchary on’t” (780, 3.4.179-80). She has risked her honor, but perhaps more importantly, to speak this way is to risk being confronted with the reverberation of one’s own unrestrained passion as a kind of madness. Viola/Cesario again tries to redirect Olivia’s love to another object, her/his master, Orsino, as if to assert the interchangeability of love-objects (780, 3.4.191).

To Sir Andrew, Sir Toby hypes the martial prowess of Viola/Cesario, just as shortly before he had done the same in playing fencing promoter with Viola/Cesario about the alleged lethality of Sir Andrew. Just as the fight seems to be starting, Antonio soon arrives and takes it upon himself to maintain Viola/Cesario’s part in the quarrel: “I for him defy you” (782, 3.4.282), whereupon he is challenged by an incredulous Sir Toby and then arrested for piracy by the Duke’s officers (782, 3.4.286-87, 294-95).

Drawn into the craziness that is Illyria, Antonio believes Sebastian is betraying him because Viola/Cesario won’t hand over the purse Antonio had given Sebastian a while back, now that he needs the money in it for bail (783, 3.4.314-16). “Thou hast, Sebastian, done good feature shame” is the only utterance Antonio can summon in his amazement (783, 3.4.333). He is upset that such a beautiful form, he says, seems so capable of housing an evil interior: “Virtue is beauty, but the beauteous evil / Are empty trunks, o’er-flourished by the devil” (783, 3.4.336-37).

Even so, the mention of Sebastian is useful to Viola, who now gains some hope that her lost brother has survived: “Prove true, imagination, oh, prove true, / That I, dear brother, be now ta’en for you” (783, 3.4.342-43).

ACT 4

Act 4, Scene 1 (784-85, Feste encounters Sebastian, and mistakenly believes the young man to be Cesario; Sir Andrew and Sir Toby accost Sebastian, and to stop them, Feste goes and gets Olivia, who puts an end to the fighting and rebukes Sir Toby; Sebastian is drawn into the topsy-turvy world of Illyria when Olivia, thinking he’s “Cesario,” invites him home with her; Sebastian is confused, but delighted to receive the invitation.)

Sebastian enters and Feste is surprised to hear him deny his identity as Cesario (784, 4.1.4-7). Sir Toby nearly comes to blows with Sebastian after Sir Andrew has struck the fellow, and is only stopped by Olivia, who dismisses Toby from the field (785, 4.1.40, 42-45). Olivia invites Sebastian to her house (785, 4.1.49), and with that invitation he is formally drawn into Illyria’s topsy-turvyness, just as Antonio was in the previous scene.

Sebastian can only say, “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” (785, 3.4.56-58). His wonderment will only increase at the end of the third scene. But at the same time, at present Sebastian shows no interest in setting the record straight: this “unreality show” has placed him in an undeniably advantageous position.”

Act 4, Scene 2 (785-88, Taking his cue from Sir Toby, Feste disguises himself as the priest Sir Topas and visits the sorely confined “madman” Malvolio: Sir Topas discourses of Pythagoras and post-mortems, which is no help to Malvolio, but he agrees to bring him a pen, some paper, and a candle; Sir Toby begins to worry that he is carrying the jest too far and thereby risking his benefactress niece Olivia’s anger.)

Maria and Feste make more sport of the confined Malvolio. Feste joins the fun as an examiner of Malvolio, Sir Topas (a name probably borrowed from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales). Feste is a fool by trade, so we are treated to a dialogue between a supposed madman and a fool, with the latter easily gaining the upper hand.

Feste’s use of belief in Pythagorean transmigration as a touchstone for sanity is priceless: when Malvolio refuses to believe that “the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a / bird” (786, 4.2.48-49), Feste imperiously tells him, “Remain thou still in darkness. Thou / shalt hold th’opinion of Pythagoras ere I will allow of thy / wits, and fear to kill a woodcock lest thou dispossess the / soul of thy grandam” (786, 4.2.53-56).

This philosophical construction makes sense because after all, Malvolio’s pride caused him to denigrate those below him in rank, and Pythagoras’ doctrine implies respect for all creatures great and small. We may add hypocrisy to Malvolio’s petty crimes since, as a denier of life and upholder of rigid notions about rank and propriety, he’s quick to jump at the chance to improve his own condition. Viola commits her cause to time and reaps a reward, but Malvolio’s ill-intentioned leap nets him only isolation and mockery.

Finally, Feste taunts Malvolio with the view that he won’t believe anyone is or isn’t mad until he’s seen their exposed brains after death. For him, the jury is always out on a person’s sanity until that person dies (788, 4.2.110-11). It was a letter that got Malvolio in trouble in the first place, and Feste now honors an anguished call for “a candle, and pen, ink, and paper” (787, 4.2.77) that the prisoner may make his plight known to Olivia. Feste leaves Malvolio with a mocking song, “Adieu, goodman devil” (788, 4.2.123).

Sir Toby, however, is starting to worry about his niece’s good opinion. In 4.1., Toby had already angered Olivia with his irresponsible swordsmanship against Sebastian, whom he took for Cesario. [25] He says to Feste and Maria, “I would we were well rid of this knavery. If / he may be conveniently delivered, I would he were …” (787, 4.2.63-64). Toby realizes that his term of office as unofficial lord of misrule has a limit, and he doesn’t want to lose his place with the countess. A jest too long continued becomes cruelty, not sport or sanctioned payback.

Act 4, Scene 3 (788-89, Sebastian is overwhelmed by his current situation, though he believes he is still in possession of his wits, as is the Countess; Olivia abruptly offers a binding betrothal, and Sebastian just as abruptly reciprocates.)

In the third scene, Sebastian abruptly agrees to marry Olivia after she abruptly and secretly proposes to him. He can hardly believe his good fortune, but accepts: “I am ready to distrust mine eyes / And wrangle with my reason that persuades me / To any other trust but that I am mad— / Or else the lady’s mad” (788, 4.3.13-16). But if the latter is the case, he wonders, how is it that Olivia still has charge of her estate and servants? Surely, madness can’t be the ground of a whole society, can it?

ACT 5

Act 5, Scene 1 (789-97, Duke Orsino sends Feste to bring Countess Olivia into his presence outside her estate; officers arrive with Antonio, and he denounces Viola/Cesario to the Duke for “Sebastian’s” supposedly dishonest refusal of assistance; Olivia enters, and Orsino vents his fury that she has fallen for “Cesario” rather than him; when Viola/Cesario says she loves Orsino, Olivia calls for a priest who can affirm her assertion that she is freshly betrothed to Cesario. (SYNOPSIS CONTINUES …)

Antonio is trotted out before Duke Orsino as a prisoner, and this prisoner reproaches Viola/Cesario, whom of course he mistakes for Sebastian, over the bail money he supposedly withheld (790, 5.1.71-73). Orsino tells Antonio he must be insane since Viola/Cesario has been his page for three months (791, 5.1.93).

Next, Olivia reproaches Viola/Cesario for her alleged failure to “keep promise” with the agreement she has come to with Sebastian (791, 5.1.97).

The Duke is still upset with the obdurate Olivia: “Why should I not, had I the heart to do it, / Like to th’ Egyptian thief, at point of death / Kill what I love …” (791, 5.1.110-12) and even more upset with Viola/Cesario, whom he suspects has stolen Olivia from him altogether since she calls the youth “husband” (792, 5.1.136, 138). Of course, Orsino’s burst of supposedly near-murderous wrath is borrowed from an ancient Greek romance, so it has something of a literary cast rather than an air of menace. [26]

As if things couldn’t get any more confusing, in rushes Sir Andrew calling for a surgeon to treat Sir Toby, who has been slightly injured by Sebastian (792-93, 5.1.165-70). Now the play’s misrecognition dilemmas begin to resolve since Viola/Cesario is sincerely confused at the accusations Sir Andrew levels: “Why do you speak to me? I never hurt you” (793, 5.1.178).

Sir Toby rails at Sir Andrew, calling him “an ass-head and a coxcomb, and a / knave, a thin-faced knave, a gull!” (793, 5.1.196-97) and then in comes Sebastian himself, solicitous of Olivia for his wounding of Sir Toby and perhaps for a bit of lateness in arriving, considering their vows (793, 5.1.199-204).

Orsino is astonished at the likeness between Viola/Cesario and Sebastian: “One face, one voice, one habit, and two persons— / A natural perspective, that is and is not” (793, 5.1.206-07). Nature itself, that is, seems to have produced a miracle, with no need for human ingenuity. [27] These two proceed to recognize each other for certain by means of recollections about their father from Messaline (794, 5.1.222-44). The reconciliation leaves Duke Orsino and Viola, and Olivia and Sebastian, free to marry.

There’s still one final matter to take care of: Malvolio’s discomfiture. Feste and Fabian enter with the letter that Malvolio has penned, and Feste reads it in the assembled company’s presence: “By the Lord, madam, you wrong me, and the / world shall know it” (795, 5.1.290-91, see 290-97). At last, the man himself enters on a sour note, demanding to know why he has been so abused: “Why have you suffered me to be imprisoned, / Kept in a dark house, visited by the priest, / And made the most notorious geck and gull / That e’er invention played on? Tell me, why?” (796, 5.1.329-32)

The conspirators confess, with Feste invoking “the whirligig of time” that “brings in his revenges” (797, 5.1.363), and reminding Malvolio how he had slandered him to Olivia as “a barren rascal” (797, 5.1.362) even before the insults that sparked Maria’s letter-plot in Act 2, Scene 3. Feste may be a fool, but he does not easily forget such a slander against his wit.

The Norton vocabulary gloss for “whirligig” tells us that by this word, Feste refers to a “spinning top.” This is a brilliant figure for time as both a giddy thing and yet not without meaning: the head-spinning whir of events also implies circularity, and with it the possibility of time’s ushering in moral recovery and settings-right in and through those events.

What Feste is invoking may be something like what today we would call “bad karma,” or in a Christian context, the thriftiness of the economy of sin: ill thoughts and deeds, as Saint Augustine taught, establish their own patterns; we end up with a bitter harvest from the bad seed we have sown. The conspirators are forgiven by everyone but Malvolio, who swears to be revenged on them all (797, 5.1.364), prompting Duke Orsino to send after him to “entreat him to a peace” (797, 5.1.366).

It’s not unusual in Shakespearian comedy to leave some character out in the cold, so to speak, at the play’s end. Antonio’s love for “Cesario” produces another instance of this “odd man out” situation. In As You Like It, melancholy Jaques stays behind in the Forest of Arden. In The Merchant of Venice, Antonio the merchant is constrained to give away his beloved Bassanio to the woman he loves. [28] Here in Twelfth Night, Feste maintains his aloof perspective when others are joining in hastily conceived marriages. Still more poignantly, the valiant seaman Antonio can only watch as “Cesario” reverts to Viola and marries the Duke of Illyria.

In sum, Twelfth Night is not a “problem comedy” just because of Malvolio’s sour exit: the providence that seems to guide this play is hardly as rough-hewn as the one that we may see at work in Hamlet, where Polonius is killed by mishap, poor Ophelia runs mad and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern “go to it” in England. We find out that Sir Toby has married Maria (797, 5.1.350-52). Viola agrees to wed the Duke, and Olivia has already made her vows with Sebastian. Will the happy couples ever get Malvolio to accept an apology? We don’t know.

Feste’s song ends the play (797, 5.1.375-94), and it would be worthwhile to consider the role his songs play in advancing or reflecting upon the action and characters in Twelfth Night. For now, let’s discuss how the final song sums up the play: “For the rain it raineth every day,” sings Feste, and his lyrics invoke the increasing consequentiality even of “trifles” as a person grows to maturity: the “rain” gets real. The “knaves and thieves” will find themselves left out in the wind and the rain, when men “shut their gate.”

Feste’s role, that of a fool, is perhaps the only stable one in a world turned upside down; oftentimes, the fool alone is able to maintain and offer perspective. Others in this play risk more, and gain more—especially Olivia and Viola, most likely because they have sufficient inward value to begin with, and trial by experience proves and augments that value. The shallow character Sir Andrew, by contrast, fares the worse for having ventured anything at all.

Feste, however, remains the observant, wise man he already was: he is inside the play looking around, but also inside the play looking outward at us, the audience, and he seems almost to be one of us at times. The conclusion of Feste’s song brings in a note of metadrama: “we’ll strive to please you every day” (797, 5.1.394), he says. We can always (except in time of plague) come back to the theater, where, of course, the play-realm will mediate between its own freedom and the world of time and consequence, but Feste will remind us yet again that soon we must leave.

Perhaps, then, theater is among the “patches” Feste had mentioned back in the first act (751, 1.5.41-46): what it offers by way of insight and refuge may be temporary and partial rather than permanent and absolute, but that doesn’t mean it’s of no value or not worth pursuing. The foolery in Shakespeare is seldom, to borrow a line from King Lear, “altogether fool.” [29] Feste and his kind are excellent embodiments of the suppleness and playfulness that constitute a big part of the value in dramatic exploration.

The key concern of this play, one set during a time of merrymaking and reversal, may be how we “fools of time” may gain perspective. [30] There is “a time to weep, and a time to laugh: a time to mourn, and a time to dance,” as the preacher tells us in Ecclesiastes 3:4. [31] Everything has its allotted time and purpose under heaven.

We have encountered a number of forms of stylized or excessive passion in Twelfth Night: Sir Toby’s irresponsible mirth, Duke Orsino’s romantic grandiosity, Countess Olivia’s projected long period of mourning, Malvolio the puritan’s narrow-souled, extreme ambition and self-regard. Perhaps most or all of these approaches are attempts to deny or even annul time and consequentiality. Aside from Malvolio’s selfishness, there’s no need to condemn any of these attempts, other than to suggest that some styles seem more likely, to borrow a phrase from Countess Olivia, to “endure wind and weather.”

Feste’s music and witty observations invoke both the inevitability of time and the sway of our passions, and they’re probably as close to “another way” as we are going to find in Shakespeare: they offer us a way to gain something like a permanent right-side-up perspective outside the realms of time and passion.

Theater, as noted in Feste’s epilogue, may be another way of attaining such perspective, and just as Feste reminds us of the coming and going of nature’s vast seasonal cycles (the wind and the rain keep up their activity through the ages, though men shut their doors against it), we are told that while we must pass from the theater, we can always return so long as we live.

Shakespeare seems to grant theater such regenerative power, though of course whether or not the result of our many returns is wisdom is another question. The play leaves the characters in the fantasy-bubble of Illyria, a political order that has largely made good on our opening suspicion that it exists to serve its citizens’ fondest desires, or they exist to serve its fondest imperatives, which happen to be very friendly to such desires, and there’s no talk of their leaving.

Edition. Greenblatt, Stephen et al., editors. The Norton Shakespeare: Comedies + Digital Edition. 3rd ed. W. W. Norton, 2016. ISBN-13: 978-0-393-93861-6.

ENDNOTES

*To return to exact part of the text referenced by the endnotes below, left-click on the endnote’s numbered link. By contrast, the blue scroll-up button at the bottom right of the page returns to the top of the document.

[1] The Aesthetic and Decadent Movements in Great Britain and Europe spanned from around 1860 when the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood took its inception to the late 1880s-90s (the Fin de siècle) with the advent of authors and artists (confining ourselves to the British context) such as Oscar Wilde (influenced by the literary impressionist Walter Pater), Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Symons, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, and A. C. Swinburne. The notion of “art for art’s sake” was a thread running through these movements, and the Decadents tended to reject the representation of nature and normativity as the main subjects for their art. See the Victoria & Albert Museum’s “Introduction to the Aesthetic Movement.”

[2] See Norton footnote 3 for the current play, pg. 744. See also Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book 3.165ff, where Actaeon beholds the goddess Diana bathing naked and is first turned into a stag, and then torn to shreds by hunting dogs.

[3] Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Second Quarto with additions from the Folio. In The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies, 3rd ed. Combined text 358-447. See 365, 1.2.87-94, as spoken by Claudius to Hamlet: “’Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet, To give these mourning duties to your father, / But you must know your father lost a father ….”

[4] See Anne Barton’s introduction to Twelfth Night in The Riverside Shakespeare. 2^nd edition. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1997.349-40.

[5] See Ecclesiastes 9:11. “I returned, and I saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor yet bread to the wise … but time and chance cometh to them all.” Geneva Bible, 1599. biblegateway.com. Accessed 10/13/2024.

[6] See Matthew 2:1-12. “When Jesus then was born at Bethlehem in Judea, in the days of Herod the king, behold there came Wise men from the East to Jerusalem.” Geneva Bible, 1599. biblegateway.com. Accessed 10/13/2024.

[7] The Feast of Fools drew criticism on the Continent during the Medieval Period, too; indeed, the title and tradition go back to pre-Christian times: a lord of misrule presided over a weeklong December Roman holiday called the Saturnalia, instituted as early as the third century BCE. See Brittanica’s entry on the “Feast of Fools.” See also Anne Barton’s introduction to Twelfth Night in The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd edition. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1997.438.

[8] Critics like Mikhail Bakhtin have studied such goings-on under the heading of the carnivalesque, in which the otherwise binding social structures of everyday life are comically mocked and satirized for a limited time, and then things go back to normal. See Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Indiana UP, 2009. Bakhtin’s Russian text was published in 1965, but it was mostly finished by 1940.

[9] See Anne Barton’s introduction to Twelfth Night in The Riverside Shakespeare. 2^nd edition. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1997.438.

[10] It is not difficult to see why Twelfth Night is a favorite text in the area of queer theory: the play abounds in disguisings and reflections on gender and identity.

[11] See Matthew 5:14-16. “Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill, cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick, and it giveth light unto all that are in the house….” Geneva Bible, 1599. biblegateway.com. See also the Parable of the Talents in Matthew 25:14-19. Geneva Bible, 1599. biblegateway.com. Accessed 10/13/2024.

[12] See Montaigne, Michel de. “The Inconstancie of Our Actions.” Book II, Chap. 1. of The Essays. (Renascence Editions.) Accessed 7/29/2024. Shakespeare was familiar with Montaigne’s skepticism-tinged essays, and the viewpoint on the frailty and inconsistency of human character on display in this essay would almost certainly suit Shakespeare’s own musings on the subject.

[13] The memento mori tradition was very powerful during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. See the dailystoic.com’s article on this tradition, “History of Memento Mori.”

[14] The theory of the humors traces back to the Greek physician Hippocrates (c. 460-370 BCE): the four humors or bodily fluids are black bile (associated with the element earth), yellow bile (associated with fire), phlegm (associated with water), and blood (associated with air). A balanced amount of these fluids in the body were thought to maintain health and good temperament, while an excess of the first-mentioned (black bile) could make a person depressed or irritable; excess of the second (yellow bile) angry, ill-tempered; excess of the third (phlegm) taciturn, unemotional; excess of the fourth (blood) cheerful, amorous or bold, sometimes to the point of lechery or foolhardiness. See also “Funny Medicine: Hippocrates and the Four Humours” (Vaccines Work), which offers an excellent summary and diagram. Accessed 5/14/2024.

[15] See Montaigne, Michel de. “The Inconstancie of Our Actions.” Book II, Chap. 1. of The Essays. (Renascence Editions.) Accessed 7/29/2024.

[16] See Thomas Morley’s 1600 First Booke of Ayres. ChoralWiki (cpdl.org). Accessed 10/13/2024.

[17] Marlowe, Christopher. “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.” poetryfoundation.org. Accessed 10/13/2024.

[18] See Matthew 21:12-13. In the second part of this famous passage, Jesus says to the moneychangers in the Temple at Jerusalem, “It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer: but ye have made it a den of thieves.” biblegateway.com. Accessed 10/13/2024.

[19] See Austen, Jane. Persuasion. Anne Elliott says to Capt. Harville, “All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one; you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.” Gutenberg e-text. Accessed 10/13/2024.

[20] See Thomas Morley’s 1600 First Booke of Ayres. ChoralWiki (cpdl.org). Accessed 10/13/2024.

[21] Euripides, The Bacchantes. Trans. Ian Johnston, Vancouver Island U, Canada. Accessed 10/13/2024.

[22] See Anne Barton’s introduction to Twelfth Night in The Riverside Shakespeare. 2^nd edition. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1997.440.

[23] Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. In The Norton Shakespeare: Comedies, 3rd ed. 673-731. See 685, 1.3.117-18.

[24] “In 1606 the Parliament of King James I of England passed an act banning players from ‘jestingly or prophanely […] speak[ing] or [using] the holy Name of God or of Christ Jesus or of the Holy Ghoste or of the Trinity’, or risk a £10 fine.” The source cited is “4 Statutes of the Realm 1097 1547 – 1624,” which the author of the blog The Many-Headed Monster (just cited) downloaded from https://www.heinonline.org.

[25] See the current play, 785, 4.1.40, 42-44.

[26] Norton footnote 8 for the current play, pg. 791.

[27] See Norton footnote 5 for the current play, pg. 793.

[28] Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. In The Norton Shakespeare: Comedies, 3rd ed. 673-731. See also The Comical History of The Merchant of Venice. In The Norton Shakespeare: Comedies, 3rd ed. 467-521.

[29] Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Folio with additions from the Quarto. In The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies, 3rd ed. Combined text 764-840. See 1.4.127.12.

[30] Shakespeare, William. The Sonnets. In The Norton Shakespeare: Romances and Poems, 3rd ed. 656-709. See the concluding couplet of Sonnet 124: “To this I witness call the fools of time, / Which die for goodness, who have lived for crime” (698).

[31] See Ecclesiastes 3:4. Geneva Bible, 1599. biblegateway.com. Accessed 10/14/2024.

Commentaries onShakespeare’s Comedies

ACT 1

ACT 2

ACT 3

ACT 4

ACT 5

ENDNOTES

Commentaries on
Shakespeare’s Comedies