Notes on Twelfth Night, Act I

Confession time: if you tell me your favourite Shakespeare play, I will judge you by your choice. If you pick The Tempest, Richard II or Othello, you’ll get a small inward nod from me – if you go with Much Ado, Richard III or Macbeth, I hate to say it but my conclusion will be that most likely you haven’t read much Shakespeare, or don’t like him that much. And don’t even get me started on Marx claiming that Timon of Athens was his favourite play… Anyway, if you say that Twelfth Night is your favourite play, the chances are we’re going to get along. It might be the closest Shakespeare ever got to perfection. It’s the play that balances all of the elements of Shakespearean comedy most succinctly: gender and identity, love and loss. It also has the best fool.

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The play opens with the usual Shakespearean trope of a Petrarchan lover, where we can instantly see that there’s something phony about their love: Orsino twice uses images of purging in his first two speeches, as well as the corrupting power of the sea. There is a strong and vivid connection running through Shakespearean comedies (including the romantic comedy elements of Romeo and Juliet) between water and femininity. Feminine heroes like Rosalind and Juliet compare their loves to the sea, while being opposed by men who associate liquid with weakness (note Orsino’s term ‘eye-offending brine’). In such cases, the woman teaches the man to love, and also to let go of his rock-like ego and dissolve into the human flux. Shakespeare may have been influenced by the depiction of women as the fabric of society in Aristotle’s Politics, which he could have read, if not in the original, then in bastardised form. Tellingly, the rigid and the adaptable characters differ in their use of Ovid: Orsino asks Viola to stand at Olivia’s doors until her ‘fixed foot shall grow’, or take root, whereas Viola in fact vows to Olivia that she will make ‘the babbling gossip of the air’ call her name. Shakespeare derived much of his vision of identity from Ovid’s transformations, as well as the sheer interiority of the female voices of lament in Ovid’s Heroides. Small wonder, then, that he gives the women of his comedies a depth and fluidity unmatched by the men.

Melancholics like Hamlet and Romeo love to pun, and so in Orsino’s play on ‘hart’ the joke isn’t so much the pun itself as the trope of the cliched lover more in love with words than anything else – something like jokes about emos today. We are told that Olivia, too, keeps her love alive with melancholy. Orsino’s line, ‘Love-thoughts lie rich when canopied with flowers’ comes close to some of the shallower definitions of love in The Symposium. Twelfth Night differs from other Shakespearean comedies such as Midsummer Night’s Dream, Measure for Measure etc. in that it doesn’t have an unfair rule imposed at the beginning that needs to be overcome: instead, there’s an atmosphere of decay and illusion that is immediately brightened by the arrival of the wise heroine, who emerges, of course, from the sea. I’m not sure how much we should look into the dead brother theme, in which both Viola and Olivia have (or believe themselves to have) lost a brother. All I will say is that both this play and Winter’s Tale share a ‘resurrection’ scene at the end, with both being written very soon after Shakespeare lost his son Hamnet, a twin, and a decade later his mother and brother.

There is an interesting bit of Calvinism in the first couple of scenes that the rest of the play will develop. When it is revealed that Olivia ‘like a cloistress’ keeps to herself, we are reminded of Calvin being against cloistering (which is also attacked in Measure for Measure), while through lines such as ‘it is perchance that you yourself were saved’ and ‘What else may hap, to time I will commit’, we are reminded of Calvin’s attitudes towards free will. Sir Toby then appears, announcing through ‘care’s an enemy to life’ that he is an Epicure, the spirit of comic excess which must not be allowed to run away with the play. Maria, meanwhile, is the clever servant straight out of Plautus. In terms of the scheme of the four humours that was dominating Elizabethan comedy after Jonson and Chapman, Sir Toby and Sir Andrew are phlegmatic (Olivia later reproves Sir Toby for his ‘lethargy’); Sir Andrew’s remark about beef doing harm to his wit is derived from Galen. Their garbled astrology at the end of the scene again reminds us of a Calvinist picture of fate. It is worth remembering that the ceiling of the Globe was decorated with astrological signs. This theme of the lack of free will is continued in the very next scene with references to Orsino’s ‘humour’ and ‘I know thy constellation is right apt’ – but most of all in the fact that Viola is forced into the role of wooing on behalf of the man she loves.

The final movement of the act sets out the cast of characters. Fools, like actors themselves, had a strange status in the Renaissance world, being close to the rich and powerful yet always subject to their wills. The fool is introduced with references to being hanged or fired (‘as good as a hanging’) for his absence, which gives a sinister undertone to Olivia’s order, ‘Take the fool away’. The fool’s prayer to wit – ‘Those that think they have thee do very oft prove fools’ is very similar to Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, as are his words about it being foolish to mourn those in Heaven. The fool represents Erasmus’s form of Christian folly, in which those who know themselves to be fools in the face of God are the most wise. This paradoxical ‘foolish wit’ is extremely important to Shakespearean comedy, in which the flexible and modest always outwit the stiff and vain. Malvolio is Shakespeare’s second most memorable example of this latter type, after Shylock. It’s possible that he might be a caricature of the arrogant Ben Jonson, who had been taking potshots at Shakespeare recently in the Poet’s War. Viola, after some enjoyable metatheatrical gags about ‘conning’, ‘play’ and ‘part’, induces Olivia to fall in love with her, in a situation that borrows from Lyly’s Galatea. There are some more topical references that it’s difficult for a modern audience to catch: ‘If God did all’ is stock Elizabethan satire on make-up (see: Hamlet) but it also references the sinful idea of departing from God’s plan; Olivia’s itemisation of her looks, meanwhile, parodies the Petrarchan blazon so beloved by lovers such as Orsino. The act ends by referring to the Calvinist theme of the lack of free will: ‘Fate, show thy force. Ourselves we do not owe. / What is decreed must be, and this is so.’ The characters who will be punished, we shall see, are those who refuse to accept this reality. The characters who will be changed are those who have only been able to see a very small part of this reality, thanks to being blinded by humours which shall be purged.