Twelfth Night

If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more:
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou,
That, notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,
Of what validity and pitch soe'er,
But falls into abatement and low price,
Even in a minute: so full of shapes is fancy
That it alone is high fantastical.
Act 1, 1.1-15

Every major character in Twelfth Night experiences some form of desire or love. Duke Orsino is in love with Olivia. Viola falls in love with show more Orsino, while disguised as his pageboy, Cesario. Olivia falls in love with Cesario. This love triangle is only resolved when Olivia falls in love with Viola's twin brother, Sebastian, and, at the last minute, Orsino decides that he actually loves Viola. Twelfth Night derives much of its comic force by satirizing these lovers. In the lines that open the play (above), Shakespeare pokes fun at Orsino's flowery love poetry, making it clear that Orsino is more in love with being in love than with his supposed beloveds. At the same time, by showing the details of the intricate rules that govern how nobles engage in courtship, Shakespeare examines how characters play the "game" of love. Viola (as Cesario) has the following lines in Act 1, scene 5:
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!' O, You should not rest
Between the elements of air and earth
But you should pity me. (251-259)

Twelfth Night further mocks the main characters' romantic ideas about love through the escapades of the servants. Malvolio's idiotic behavior, which he believes will win Olivia's heart, serves to underline Orsino's own only-slightly-less silly romantic ideas. Meanwhile, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Sir Toby Belch, and Maria, are always cracking crass double entendres that make it clear that while the nobles may spout flowery poetry about romantic love, that love is at least partly motivated by desire and sex. Shakespeare further makes fun of romantic love by showing how the devotion that connects siblings (Viola and Sebastian) and servants to masters (Antonio to Sebastian and Maria to Olivia) actually prove more constant than any of the romantic bonds in the play.

But there is more than love and desire in this amazing comedy. At the opening when Viola is shipwrecked in Illyria she bemoans that she cannot join her lost twin brother Sebastian in Elysium. Illyria is not Elysium however it reminds those familiar with As You Like It of the Arcadian forest of Arden. In both plays the setting is otherworldly--a place apart from the rest of civilization.

There is also melancholy, for several characters in Twelfth Night suffer from some version of love-melancholy. Orsino exhibits many symptoms of the disease (including lethargy, inactivity, and interest in music and poetry). Dressed up as Cesario, Viola describes herself as dying of melancholy, because she is unable to act on her love for Orsino. Olivia also describes Malvolio as melancholy and blames it on his narcissism. It is this melancholy that represents the painful side of love.

Perhaps more central to this play in particular are the themes of deception, disguise, and performance. With these themes Twelfth Night raises questions about the nature of gender and sexual identity. That Viola has disguised herself as a man, and that her disguise fools Olivia into falling in love with her, is genuinely funny. On a more serious note, however, Viola's transformation into Cesario, and Olivia's impossible love for him/her, also imply that, maybe, distinctions between male/female and heterosexual/homosexual are not as absolutely firm as you might think. When you recall that the players in Shakespeare's Globe were all men and boys these issues become both more humorous and serious at the same time. You may get a more vivid idea of this theme by viewing clips of the recent all-male production of Twelfth Night starring Mark Rylance.*

This play rivals As You Like It for the title of the best of Shakespeare's comedies. While I prefer the former, there are complexities of love and desire mixed with questions of sexual identity that make this comedy a fine way to experience and enjoy Shakespeare. show less

A case of mistaken identity is always a good time. I'm embarking on the Shakespeare 2020 challenge, and starting off with a comedy is always a great idea, in my book.

This year, I'll be looking for spaces to integrate queer, womanist identities, and the characters of Antonio, Malvolio, Clown, and Maria provide plenty of fodder for consideration.

Questions I have: is Maria a villain or an opportunistic agent? And is this bad?
Is Malvolio a bad guy or misunderstood?
Are the Duke (and possibly Viola) queer?

"This fellow is wise enough to play the fool… This is a practice As full of labour as a wise man's art…" (pg. 64)

Shakespeare's comedies always seem to enjoy a more ambiguous reputation than his tragedies. Whereas, once the peculiarities of language are overcome, dramatic schemes and actions like those in Macbeth, Hamlet and King Lear can be readily identified and appreciated by modern audiences, it is often much harder to parse the worth of one of the Bard's comedies. That they do have worth – The Merchant of Venice and The Taming of the Shrew are ingenious satires, and A Midsummer Night's Dream is metaphysical drunkenness – is why so many readers and lovers of the theatre make the effort to meet them halfway, or sometimes more show more than halfway.

This is why I happily dismissed my doubts about Twelfth Night and why, even though this play doesn't have the deeper worth of those other Shakespeare comedies I mentioned above, I cannot fault it. The clue to Twelfth Night's essence is in its title, which has no bearing on the content of the play: 'Twelfth Night' is a day of festivities, a date in early January to mark the end of the Christmas period. To this end, Shakespeare's light romp of mistaken identities, bawdy language and plenty of sing-song, was meant as just a piece of fluff for Queen Elizabeth's court. The equivalent of one of our Boxing Day TV repeats as we pig out on Quality Street.

Despite this light remit, Shakespeare can't help but be erudite, dexterous and interesting. For all its mistaken identities and merry pranking, it is one of the easiest Shakespearean comedies to follow. It's tidy and it's never dull and it's one of Shakespeare's more quotable plays. Its success in doing all this well means this piece of fluff has survived, through the skill of its author, for much longer than would otherwise be expected. After all, while some, like Hamlet and Macbeth, are born great, and others like The Merchant of Venice and King Lear achieve greatness, some, by virtue of sharing such company, have greatness thrust upon them. Twelfth Night is one of the latter. show less

Twelfth Night ranks up with A Midsummer Night’s Dream when you are looking at Shakespeare’s comedies that have been produced and adapted to death. While this play about disguising your gender and falling in love and mistaken twins play have played better in he 1600s, these days there’s a lot to say about the underlying sense of homophobia, bullying, and implied transphobia of having a character dress in drag for the audience’s entertainment. Fortunately because it’s a play, there are ways of interpreting this for the stage that can alleviate some of the problematic elements.

While Twelfth Night isn’t my favorite of Shakespeare’s plays, it is a familiar one. Viola and Sebastien are shipwrecked separately in a strange land. show more Each assumes the other is dead. Viola seeks employment with Count Orsino as a boy after being denied as a lady in waiting for Olivia, and Sebastien takes his sweet time coming to town with the wanted man Antonio. The last two acts of the play are all about confusion of identity and proclamations of love. It’s a bit unbalanced, leaning heavily into Viola’s charade for much of the early par of the book.. What’s more, I was a little bit surprised to find that Sir Toby Belch et al made up quick a lot of the scenes. Shakespeare’s comedic trios more often support the lovers than upstage them (in my interpretations).

As when any play, I found myself assessing the characters and asking myself who I’d want to play. For me, I still fall into the comedy instead of the leads – Viola is very flat and Olivia too changeable for my tastes. This comedic trio was certainly not my favorite, and even though I pinpoint Maria as the mastermind… they’re all bullies. Each of these characters spend a lot of time complaining about Olivia’s court, and go to great pains to make a fool of Malvolio… to the point where’s essentially locked up. It’s in poor tastes, especially from a mental health perspective.

All this said, I am impressed by the care taken in the language. Twelfth Night is certainly witty, for all its flaws. Sometimes, I would find a single line would make me chuckle. Even though the plot is quite predicable (all these comedies follow the same line of new people arrive + avoidable confusion and trickery = marriages galore), the language is impressive even this many years later. Because I’ve read quite a lot of Shakespeare, I don’t have much trouble with the language and some of the antiquated terms, but the Folger’s editions have wonder accompanying explanations for anyone less comfortable with the work.

As a raw piece of material, Twelfth Night is lacking sheerly due to its reliance on problematic material to produce the comedic elements. However, there are some things to be appreciated in the language of the play. It also must be noted that this play is approximately 400 years old, and as such even the problematic elements are ripe for discussion and analysis. If you haven’t experienced Twelfth Night, I would still recommend it as long as you are going in with the knowledge of how outdated the material is, just to experience Shakespeare’s witticism. It’s a short book because it’s a play, so all dialogue. I tend go into most plays with a director’s mindset, imaging the possibilities of how it could unfurl on stage. Twelfth Night is ripe with possibilities. show less

Shakespeare's last great romantic comedy combines the wit of the other great comedies with some rather mean-spirited slapstick more reminiscent of his very first comedies. The first is provided largely by the male-impersonating heroine who finds herself, as an intermediary between lovers, becoming the true object of affection from both lovers. The slapstick is provided by Sir Toby Belch, a small-scale Falstaff, and his idiot friends, who make life miserable for a major domo whose Puritanism does not protect him from vanity and desire. I loved it, despite the bullying.

(First, a word about the edition. A colleague of mine was appearing in an am-dram (but far from hum-drum) production of Twelfth Night. If the play were to be half as much fun as baiting his superstitions about The Scottish Play, then it would prove to be an entertaining evening. I didn’t know the text and I consider that, with Shakespeare, you need to have read the play beforehand, so you to know prithee from your privy and hence when to laugh at an appropriate or inappropriate place, depending on what sort of message you wish to convey to your theatre date (my message, by the way, no matter the play, is constant: come the interval, you will be treated to a command performance of my impression of a gin seeking missile). So I ordered show more the text on Amazon and, being somewhat cheap, went for the cheapest version that was a Penguin (keeping just this side of respectability). Plain cover, not the greatest type setting in the world and, I suspect, would go from ‘loved’ to ‘well loved’ to ‘foxed’ to ‘f***ed’ if you used it night after night in rehearsals, especially if you nursed the sort of crush on the girl playing Viola that results in sweaty palms. But, to be fair…two quid! You can’t even get a pint for two quid. I’d say it’s a bargain, the glossary alone is worth the money, it’s like a phrase book for time travellers but, even better, it allows one to choose an Elizabethan word a day to re-introduce into common usage. Tomorrow it shall be ‘fadge’ (meaning: turn out). So that this would be a fairly thrifty way of stocking up on essential plays, broadening your Elizabethan tongue and shocking the hell out of people you are in conversation with.)

Twelfth Night is a comedy. We know this because it has mistaken identity, confused lovers, a clown and a woman disguising herself as a lad (slap thigh) with hilarious consequences. Reading through, I found it pretty dry stuff. This play, as the title suggests, is supposed to be performed after Christmas. Revelry, to be sure, occurs. Indeed one of the characters is so committed to revelry that if he were around today he’d be the darling of the tabloids and have his own suite at the Priory. There are the other hallmarks of a Shakespear play, such as wonderful language and the still-fresh delight of reading a passage and finding, hiding there, a phrase now in common usage but, before spoken at The Globe, never heard. There’s also obvious efforts to please the rabble (obviously I loved those bits). So I dutifully read it and trundled off to the theatre.

Revelation ensued. Here was the play as it was meant to be. The words, not tethered to 100% recycled paper by a printer in Croydon but given full, firm and flavoursome body by enthusiastic actors who strutted and fretted upon the stage for the amusement (and we were amused) of a sold out theatre who sweated and chortled in our seats in the tiny, crowded, over-hot theatre, loving every second. This was alchemy, they had turned print into gold – something I thought only publishers did.

My mistake had been to read the play in silence. These are words for speaking aloud. If you read it alone, read aloud, and do the voices; it makes a world of difference*. Got a family? Great, now is the time to exploit your children, get them to speak the lines aloud. Only got boys? No problem, tell them that in Elizabethan theatre, men played the women’s roles too. This will mean that your kid gets a head start in the works of the greatest dramatist on the planet, and, when he tells his mates at school the next day, gets the cool nick-name ‘TV’ for the rest of his life!

Read it aloud, even if it means putting on a performance to an audience of you. Because, it is true - the play’s the thing.

*On reading aloud on public transport: tricky. At best, you’re going to look like a nutter. At worst, sinister. All depends on your choice of material. Avoid erotica. show less

One of Shakespeare's finest comedies, Twelfth Night, was written at the same time as Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida, and while it shares their fascination with sex, death and confused identities, its exuberant comedy and linguistic inventiveness rises above the introspection of these plays. Viola and her twin brother Sebastian are separated in a storm that washes them both up at different points on the shores of Illyria. Believing each other to be dead, both attempt to survive by using their wits. Viola cross-dresses and enters the service of the lovesick Orsino, in love with Olivia, an heiress in mourning for the loss of her brother. Orsino's saucy young page Cesario (Viola) soon falls in love with "his" master, who tells "him", "all show more is semblative a woman's part". Unfortunately, while Viola falls in love with Orsino, Olivia falls in love with her alter ego, Cesario, while also being pursued at the same time by her pompous servant Malvolio. Olivia's house is also turned upside down by the antics of her drunker uncle, Sir Toby Belch, and the whole crazy situation reaches boiling point when Sebastian reappears. Despite the madcap plot, Twelfth Night remains one of Shakespeare's most complex and inventive comedies, fascinated with questions of cross-dressing, gender confusion, language and inversion, as well as retaining a darker edge to some of its laughter. --Jerry Brotton show less