Act Five

Conclusion

By Dennis Abrams

————————-

Boy oh boy, do I love this play.  After doing the reading for my posts, I sat down and reread the whole thing – just for the sheer enjoyment of it.  Fresh, funny, beautifully written…what more could anyone want?

A couple of observations:

Loved Fabian’s line in Act Three, “If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.”

I was amazed to read (I can’t find the source right now) that Shakespeare coined the word “comedian.”

——————–

From Tanner:

“So what then, finally, of Shakespeare’s Illyria?  It is not Verona, or Messina, or Arden – not Windsor either, though one can imagine Sir Toby drinking with Falstaff at the Garter Inn. In Ovid, it is where shipwrecked Cadmus lands, not knowing that his daughter, Io, has been both saved and transformed. Bullough suggests that this vague place on a little-known coast allowed Shakespeare to mix Mediterranean romance plausibly with Northern realism (not that many Elizabethans would have known or cared, Illyria was on the coast of Yugoslavia – at this time of writing, unhappily more renowned for atrocity than romance).  There is no alternative realm in this play – no forest, no Belmont; but there is a running contrast between the elegant, rather melancholy-mannered court of Orsino, where people speak verse (there is much rather Italianate talk of manners and courtesy); and the much more easy-going, belching, swigging, knock-about household of Olivia, where prose predominates (except when infatuation drives Olivia into poetry). The atmosphere at court seems dominated by music and melancholy, while over at Olivia’s house there seems to be a permanent nocturnal drinking party. Maria is, certainly, ‘as witty a piece of Eve’s flesh as any in Illyria” and the joke she plays on Malvolio is perhaps the funniest thing in Shakespeare, no matter how often seen or read (at least, that is my experience). But there is a feeling that the revels have gone on for too long. There is no more revealing moment than when, having had ‘sport royal’ with Malvolio and fooled him ‘black and blue,’ Sir Toby suddenly says to Maria, ‘I would we were well rid of this knavery.’ To use a chilling line of Emily Dickinson’s, ‘the jest has crawled too far.’ Laroque is perhaps too grim when he detects ‘the boredom of a world grown old’ and says that, here, ‘festivity seems doomed to sterile, boring repetition. The veteran champions of festivity have become the pensioners of pleasure. The Puritans may be odious and malicious, but the old merrymakers are plain ridiculous.’ This is, arguably, too censorious a view.  But you see his point. There is something pathetic about poor, exploited Sir Andrew (‘for many do call me fool’), and I have a good deal of sympathy with Dr. Johnson’s view that it is unfair to mock his ‘natural fatuity.’ Sir Toby, seen rather generously by Barber as ‘gentlemanly liberty incarnate,’ is agreeable inasmuch as he is festivally anti-Malvolio and pro-cakes and ale; but his unscrupulous abuse of Sir Andrew’s mindlessly trusting gullibility is unattractive, and he reveals a brutally unpleasant side in his final exchange with him. They have both been wounded by Sebastian, and Sir Andrew, rather sweetly, says – ‘I’ll help you, Sir Toby, because we’ll be dressed together.’ Sir Toby’s very unsweet response is:

Will you help – an ass-head and a coxcomb and a knave, a thin-faced knave, a gull?

These are his last words to Sir Andrew, who is not heard from again. Not nice.

Assorted Illyrians, then, repeating fixed routines until they are disrupted into new life  by the arrival of Viola and Sebastian from the sea. But Feste the clown seems to come from somewhere else again. Barber says ‘the fool has been over the garden wall into some such world as the Vienna of Measure for Measure,’ and that feels right. He is not as bitter or cynical as Touchstone. He sings, he fools, he begs; he talks nonsense for tips. But you feel that he has seen a wider, darker world than the predominantly sunny Illyria. ‘Anything that’s mended is but patched; virtue that transgresses is but patched with sin, and sin that amends is but patched with virtue.’ You don’t acquire that kind of shrewd, worldly knowingness by tippling with Sir Toby. When Olivia starts by saying ‘Take the fool away,’ he nimbly turns the tables on her saying ‘Misprision in the highest degree. Lady, cucullus non facit monarchum. That’s as much to say as, I wear not motley in my brain. There is no taking away of this fool; he will be there to the very end, when, quite decisively, he has the last words. ‘Misprision’ is a good defining word for what is going on around him, as people are constantly mis-taking themselves or others. The cowl does not make the monk in his Latin tag; and he is anything but a fool in his brain. The male outfit does not make the man, either, as Viola will both learn and demonstrate. Just what people do wear in their brains is, of course, a matter of continuously increasing interest for Shakespeare. There is another glance at Viola-Cesario when Feste is persuaded to put on a gown and beard to play the curate, Sir Topas, and further madden Malvolio. ‘Well, I’ll put it on, and I will dissemble myself in’t, and I would I were the first that ever dissembled in such a gown.’ Orsino, more correctly than he knows, says approvingly to his new page, Cesario – ‘all is semblative a woman’s part.’ Viola later admits to Olivia that she is ‘out of my part.’ What is or should be, her ‘part’ – is she most herself when she is ‘sembling,’ or when she is ‘dissembling?’ People are often not what they seem, and seldom just what they wear. Among other things, Feste serves to open up doors onto problems of identity.

He opens up words, too; or rather, he shows that they are infinitely malleable, and can be made to do anything.  Anyone who can say, as he does to Malvolio concerning the dark room in which he is imprisoned – ‘it hath bay windows transparent as barricadoes, and the clerestories toward the south north are as lustrous as ebony’ – clearly has language completely at his disposal. He calls himself Olivia’s ‘corrupter of words’, and inasmuch  as he can seduce words into doing anything, break them up this way and that, it is an apt enough self-designation. It is Feste who provides one of the key images of the play when he remarks to Viola: ‘To see this age! A sentence is but a chev’ril glove to a good wit. How quickly the wrong side may be turned outward!’ Quite a lot of things get turned inside out, or are reversed, in this play; just as there is ‘midsummer madness’ in the depths of winter. Wandering between court and house, fooling and singing for a living but profoundly unattached, Feste can truly say – in this most liquid of plays – ‘I am for all waters.’

There is bad blood between him and Malvolio from the beginning, as you would expect between the humourless and vain would-be social climber and the professional anarch.  Malvolio starts by sneering at Feste – ‘Unless you laugh and minister occasion to him, he is gagged.’ Malvolio sounds an uncomfortably discordant tone in Ilyria, rather as Shylock does in Venice. There are, indeed, similarities between these two figures (I have seen it suggested that, in his depiction of the sober but unpleasantly grasping Jew, Shakespeare was actually aiming at the figure of the contemporary Puritan businessman).  Whether or not Malvolio is a Puritan is hardly relevant. As Barber says of him, he is more of a businessman who ‘would like to be a rising man, and to rise he uses sobriety and morality.’ It is curious that Shakespeare allows the releasing of ‘THE MADLY USED MALVOLIO’ to occupy the last part of the play, while Viola stands silently by. Malvolio, of course, fills the traditional role of the kill-joy spoilsport who is scapegoated out of the final happy ensemble. Though it has to be said that, compared with the flood of marriages which concludes As You Like It, this is a rather reduced and muted ending – with half the characters absent and the main hero and heroine completely silent. Feste gets his dig into the infuriated Malvolio – ‘And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.’ Whether we think he has been ‘most notoriously abused,’ or whether, with Fabian, we think his punishment – for his ‘stubborn and uncourteous parts’ – ‘may rather pluck on laughter than revenge,’ will depend on individual weighings. He is certainly not the broken man that Shylock is, as he storms out crying ‘I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you!’ Indeed, we may take Barber’s neat point: ‘One could moralize the spectacle by observing that, in the long run, in the 1640s, Malvolio was revenged on the whole pack of them’ (he is referring to the closure of the theaters by the Puritans.)

For all the spreading wonderment in the last Act, we have a sense that this is comedy on the turn. There is that shockingly violent outburst from Orsino, when he thinks his Cesario has secretly married Olivia:

But this your minion, whom I know you love,

And whom, by heaven I swear, I tender dearly,

How will I tear out of that cruel eye

Where he sits crowned in his master’s spite.

Come, boy, with me. My thoughts are ripe in mischief.

I’ll sacrifice the lamb that I do love

To spite a raven’s heart within a dove.

There is an ugly side to the man, for all the elegance of his court, and the refinement of his manners. A comparably ugly side is revealed to Sir Toby, when he turns so unpleasantly on Sir Andrew. There is the strange silencing of Viola, as well as the unappeased fury of Malvolio. There is even that surgeon, who, when he is needed, it turns out has been drunk since eight in the morning – which sounds something more than festive. The Duke speaks of ‘golden time’ at the end, but the glow is fading. Feste, clearly aware of life’s rougher weather, ends the play with his song about the wind and the rain, with its reiterated reminder that ‘the rain it raineth every day.’ As a matter of fact, he leaves one verse out,

He that has and a little tiny wit,

With heigh-ho, the wind and the rain,

Must make content with his fortunes fit,

Though the rain it raineth every day.

But he, or someone very like him, will sing it to the truly mad King Lear, during conditions which are unimaginable in Illyria. (King Lear, III, ii, 74-7)

And finally, from the book Shakespeare on Stage, the great actor Derek Jacobi (great despite his views that Shakespeare didn’t really write his own plays) is interviewed about playing the role of Malvolio.  Some highlights:

It’s quite fashionable to call Malvolio a tragic part. Do you think there’s anything to that?

I do think he makes an extraordinary journey, and is punished beyond his due. He puts himself in the firing line, but what they dish out to him is way over the top. They try to send him made, it gets out of control. In that sense he’s a tragic figure. And by the end when he talks of revenging himself, I think he really means it. His life has taken a very, very different course to what it would have done. And I think he’ll be dedicated to ruining the marriages.

Malvolio is much described. All sorts of epithets are attached to him, from a ‘rascally sheep-biter’ to being ‘sad and civil.’ Did they help you as you were approaching the part?

And a Puritan. Yes, I think they did. We experimented at first with having him a class lower than anybody else, and an ex-military man. There are remnants of it still – my haircut is one of them. And we thought that he was newish to the household, he’d not been there for long, which made him even more of an outsider. We tried the military thing that when to people he tended to bark at them. I came on like a barking sergeant major, with ‘Let’s be ‘aving yer’ and son. Well, that and being lower class didn’t work. It lasted about three days until Michael Grandage and I both decided at the same time that it wasn’t working. So the upright-rod-down-the-back, rather remote, rather cut-off persona is the one we went for.

How much were you able to imagine Malvolio’s life outside the play, or what he might have been before?

Well, we stayed with the idea that he had been an army man. He’d been used to giving orders rather than receiving them. So it was an odd situation for him. It made him a bit introverted, and a little bit harsher than he would have been with those under him, because he had to take orders from Olivia. And Sir Toby, of course. So anybody like Maria or Feste would get it in the neck from him, as compensation.

He’s an odd mix, isn’t he, because he’s got the efficiency of a military man, but his head’s full of strange fantasies.

Yes. That moment when Maria says he’s practicing behaviour to his own shadow.  [MY NOTE:  I LOVE that line.] That’s very odd. He has fantasies of being Count Malvolio, of being above his station. So he’s very class-conscious.

Very. Did you model your performance on anyone, or take it direct from the text?

Oh, from the text. I did have somebody in mind when we were rehearsing it, only because he sat like an elephant on my shoulder, and that was Donald Sinden. He was a famous Malvolio, especially for one particular bit of business, which we obviously couldn’t do.

What was that?

It had to do with the set. You know the moment when he’s fantasizing about sending his men off to bring Sir Toby to him, and he says ‘I frown the while, and perchance wind up my watch…’ Sinden brought out his watch and started to wind it, then looked at the time. There was a sundial on the set. He looked at it and back at his watch, then went and altered the sundial. Huge laugh. That was the big moment, it made his Malvolio famous….

…

How does a person become so deluded?

The word ‘mad’ occurs a great deal in the play, and I don’t think it’s accidental. There’s a degree of…not mental aberration exactly, but certainly a mental twist in Malvolio. At times he seems hardly human. There’s a strange mentality to the man that keeps him apart from other people, and shackles him into his own head.  I don’t think he’s made, ever, but he is highly eccentric.

…

So you get to the smile.

He has several attempts at smiling. When he eventually achieves a smile it’s as if he’s wrenched it up from his guts. It’s come from somewhere deep inside him, and ended up in his mouth. And it sticks there. He’s very proud of it and carries it off into the wings.

…

On to the prison.  A very dark scene, isn’t it.

Yes, very dark.

What started as a merry jape gets out of hand. Was it ever funny, that scene?

No.

The Elizabethans enjoyed bear-baiting. Maybe cruelty was funnier to them than it is to us today?

Well, yes, and they used to go and see people in Bedlam. I think for the plotters it’s fun, up to a point. But then Sir Toby says ‘My stock with Olivia now is so low that we’d better stop all this.’ At which point Feste agrees to Malvolio’s plea to let Olivia know what happened to him, by giving him ink, pen and paper.

…

Your last scene could be subtitled ‘Hell hath no fury like a Malvolio scorned!’ But is it is more in sorrow or in anger?

He comes on in a bad state. He cannot believe Olivia would be responsible for this, but she is the one he comes on to blame. He assumes it’s all her fault for having written that letter. He cannot understand why she did so. He obeyed every part of it. And as a result she threw him into prison, into this dark room, and tried to drive hi mad. Why?  He’s in a very bad state at that moment. He’s tearful. He’s outraged. He’s incredibly hurt. Then Olivia says ‘It wasn’t me, it was Maria.’ And Maria (in our version) confesses that it was her and Sir Toby. Then Feste joins in, sending him up and saying ‘Remember what you said about me a while back?’ During that time I think he travels from this deep hurt, this deep embarrassment, this deep shame, to boiling fury. And when he says ‘I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you,’ he means it.

This last scene is the only time Malvolio speaks in blank verse. Is that helpful? Shakespeare often goes into verse when he wants to heighten the emotional temperature, doesn’t he?

Yes. But when you actually speak it, it doesn’t sound like verse, it sounds like prose. And one of my theories about Shakespeare )because I’m so anti Peter Hall’s ‘dah-de-dah-de-dah’ stuff) is to treat the prose as poetry and the poetry as prose. At least it works for me.

…

Most of Shakespeare’s leading characters achieve some kind of resolution at the end of his plays, but I’m not sure Malvolio does.

No, I don’t think he does. You’re left wondering. If he means his last line – ‘I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you’ – which presumably includes Olivia, then they’d better watch their backs, all of them.

Have you any idea what happens to him next? Does he stay there?

I don’t think he can stay there. Olivia says ‘He hath been most notoriously abused.’ And Orsino says ‘Someone go after him and call him down,’ but I don’t believe he’s in the market for calming down. I think he will start playing his own game. Doing his own gulling. He will make those marriages hell if he can. He may even do something at the weddings. I don’t know. He will plan something. I think there is life after, for Malvolio. I hope there is. I want him to be revenged, because what they did to him, although it came out of his own character faults, went too far. Punishment should be meted out to them.

And with that, we come to the end of Shakespeare’s final true comedy, Twelfth Night.  What did you all think?  Did you enjoy it?  Did it make you laugh?  Do you think Malvolio will really seek his revenge?  Can Viola and Orsino possibly be happy?  Share your thoughts!

Our next play – Troilus and Cressida

My next post – Sunday evening/Monday morning – Sonnet #132

Act Three

By Dennis Abrams

—————————–

Act Three:  Olivia confesses her love to Cesario/Viola but Viola lets her know that it cannot be returned.  Noting Cesario’s apparent success with Olivia, the frustrated Sir Andrew is persuaded by Toby to challenge him to a duel. But Olivia now has another suitor:  Malvolio, who hopes to win her by following the bizarre instructions supplied in the letters.  Olivia, perhaps not surprisingly, believes him to be mad and asks Sir Toby to keep an eye on him. The duelists are about to begin their fight when they are interrupted by Antonio, who has arranged to meet Sebastian. Mistaking Cesario/Viola for Sebastian (!), Antonio cannot understand when his friend fails to recognize him.

————————-

From Bloom:

“Olivia, properly played, can dazzle us with her authority, and with her erotic arbitrariness, but no audience conceives for the affection it accords to Viola, disconcerting as Viola turns out to be. The two heroines are oddly assorted, and Shakespeare must have delighted in the imaginative labor he gives us when we attempt to understand why Olivia falls in love with the supposed Cesario. There is little congruence between Viola’s love for the egregious Orsino and Olivia’s love for Orsino’s witty but reserved go-between.  Olivia’s passion is more a farcical exposure of the arbitrariness of sexual identity than it is a revelation that mature female passion essentially is lesbian. I have been told of one production in which Sebastian pairs off with Orsino, while Olivia and Viola take each other.  I do not want to see it, and Shakespeare did not write it.  But here, as elsewhere, earlier and later, Shakespeare complexly qualifies our easier certainties as to sexual identity. In the dance of mating that concludes the play, Malvolio is not the only unfulfilled aspirant. Antonio does not speak again in the play after he cries out, ‘Which is Sebastian?’ Like the Antonio of The Merchant of Venice, this second Antonio loves in vain.

Olivia, when we first encounter her, elaborately mourns a dead brother; doubtless this is authentic, but it serves also as a defense against Orsino’s turbulence. Her mournfulness disappears when she meets Cesario and loves at first sight. Since Olivia is just as crazy as Orsino, perhaps any handsome young man without aggressive affect might have done as well as Cesario. Shakespeare’s acute sense that all sexual love is arbitrary in its origins but overdetermined in its teleology is at the center of Twelfth Night.  Freud thought that all object-choice (falling-in-love) was either narcissistic or a propping-against; Shakespeare’s understanding is closer to a black-box theory, except that after erotic crashes, rather than airplane crashes, the box cannot be recovered. ‘Even so quickly may one catch the plague?’ is Olivia’s rhetorical question after Cesario’s first exit, and she answer’s herself with: ‘Fate, show thy force; ourselves we do not owe,’ where ‘owe’ means ‘control.’ Her second interview with the supposed Cesario gives us our largest sense of a nature that only heightens our interest and attraction as its self-indulgence touches sublimity. To possess Olivia’s authority, and yet indulge in such a vulnerable self-surrender, is to excite the audience’s sympathy, even its momentary love.

Olivia:  Stay:

I prithee tell me what thou think’st of me.

Viola:  That you do think you are not what you are.

Olivia:  If I think so, I think the same of you.

Viola:  Then think you right; I am not what I am.

Olivia:  I would you were as I would have you be.

Viola:  Would it be better, madam, than I am?

I wish it might, for now I am your fool.

Olivia: [Aside] O what a deal of scorn looks beautiful

In the contempt and anger of his lip!

A murd’rous guilt shows not itself more soon

Than love that would seem hid. Love’s night is noon. –

Cesario, by the roses of the spring,

By maidhood, honour, truth, and everything,

I love thee so, that maugre all thy pride,

Nor wit nor reason can my passion hide.

Do not extort thy reasons from this clause,

For that I woo, thou thereafter hast no cause;

But rather reason thus with reason fetter:

Love sought is good, but given unsought better.

Viola:  By innocence I swear, and by my youth,

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

And so adieu, good madam, never more

Will I my master’s tears to you deplore.

Olivia:  Yet come again: for thou perhaps mayst move

That heart which now abhors, to like his love.

(III.i.139-66)

It is a set piece that demands two great actress skilled at romantic comedy, particularly in the exchange of the four monosyllabic lines (141-44), which admit of several meanings.  The audience is likely to esteem both roles equally here: Viola’s for its deftness is deliciously absurd situation, Olivia’s for its boldness. Shakespeare himself is highly outrageous, here as elsewhere in Twelfth Night. The proleptic self-parody is particularly jarring in Viola’s ‘I am not what I am,’ to be appropriated from her by the least Viola-like of all characters, Iago. Both Viola and Iago travesty St. Paul’s ‘By the grace of God, I am what I am.’ In Shakespeare’s madly shrewd plot, Olivia is on the right course, since Viola’s twin brother will yield to the countess with a readiness startling even in this play. The monosyllabic exchange turns upon issues of rank and of concealment. Viola reminds Olivia of her high status, and Olivia insinuates that Viola conceals her own noble birth. ‘I am not what I am’ both concludes this and also alludes to Viola’s sexual identity, which renders heavily ironic Olivia’s ‘I would you were as I would have you be.’ That makes utterly ambiguous Viola’s replay, an exasperation of spirit at the exhaustion of maintaining a drama-long lie. This superb dialogue is summed up by the climax of Olivia’s aside: “Love’s night is noon,’ which she intends to mean that love cannot be concealed, yet this line makes us wonder what, then, is ‘love’s day?’

The revelers and practical jokers – Maria, Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek – are the least sympathetic players in Twelfth Night, since their gulling of Malvolio passes into the domain of sadism. Maria, the only mind among the three, is a high-spirited social climber, Olivia’s woman-in-waiting. S he is tough, a little shrill, fiercely resourceful, and immensely energetic. Sir Toby is Belch, just that; only an idiot (there have been many such) would compare this fifth-rate rascal to Shakespeare’s great genius, Sir John Falstaff.  the yet more dubious Sir Andrew is lifted bodily out of The Merry Wives of Windsor where he is Slender. Both Belch and Aguecheek are caricatures, yet Maria, a natural comic, has a dangerous inwardness, the only truly malicious character in Twelfth Night.  She coolly considers whether her stratagems will drive Malvolio mad and concludes: ‘The house will be the quieter.’

Malvolio is, with Feste, Shakespeare’s great creation in Twelfth Night; it has become Malvolio’s play, rather like Shylock’s gradual usurpation of The Merchant of Venice. Charles Lamb shrewdly considered Malvolio a tragicomic figure, a Don Quixote of erotomania. That suggests a great truth about Malvolio; he suffers by being in the wrong play for him. In Ben Jonson’s Volpone or The Alchemist, Malvolio would have been at home, except that he would have been another Jonsonian ideogram, caricature and not character. Shakespeare’s Malvolio is more the victim of his own psychic propensities than he is Maria’s gull. His dream of socio-erotic greatness – ‘To be Count Malvolio’ – is one of Shakespeare’s supreme inventions, permanently disturbing as a study in self-deception, and in the spirit’s sickness.  As a satire upon Ben Jonson himself, Malvolio derives from the great comic playwright and satiric poet only a moral pugnacity. The depravity of the will in Malvolio is a flaw of the imagination, or what you will. Marxist criticism interprets Malvolio as a study in class ideology, but that reduces both the figure and the play. What matters most about Malvolio is not that he is Olivia’s household steward but that he so dreams that he malforms his sense of reality, and so falls victim to Maria’s shrewd insights into his nature.

The censorious Malvolio, or sham Puritan, is only a screen image that masks his desire to have greatness thrust upon him. Essentially, Malvolio is cursed by the dangerous prevalence of his imagination, and not by the rigid class structures of Shakespeare’s world. He and Maria loathe each other, but actually would be a proper match of negative energies. Instead, Maria will achieve the brutally drunk Sir Toby, and Malvolio will find only alienation and bitterness.  It is difficult to overestimate Malvolio’s originality as a comic character; who else in Shakespeare, or elsewhere, resembles him? There are other grotesques in Shakespeare, but they do not begin as normative worthies and then undergo radical transformations.

Malvolio’s downfall is prophesied when we first see him, in a grim exchange with his adversary, the wise fool Feste:

Olivia:  What think you of this fool, Malvolio, doth he not mend?

Malvolio:  Yes, and shall do, till the pangs of death shake him. Infirmity, that decays the wise, doth ever make the better fool.

Feste:  God send you, sir, a speedy infirmity, for the better increasing your folly!

The infirmity is there already, as Maria surmises:

The devil a Puritan that he is, or anything constantly, but a time-pleaser, an affectioned ass, that cons state without book, and utters it by great swarths: the best persuaded of himself, so crammed (as he thinks) with excellencies, that it is his grounds of faith that all that look on him love him: and on that vice in him will my revenge find notable cause to work.

That accurate portrait of an affected time server is one of the most savage in Shakespeare. What happens to Malvolio is, however, so harshly out of proportion to his merits, such as they are, that the ordeal of humiliation has to be regarded as one of the prime Shakespearean enigmas.  Even if a poet’s war with Ben Jonson was the occasion for creating Malvolio, the social crucifixion of the virtuous steward passes the possible bounds of playful literary rancor. Several other roles in Twelfth Night are technically larger than Malvolio, he speaks only about a tenth of the play’s lines. Like shylock, Malvolio captures his drama by his ferocious comic intensity, and by the darkness of his fate. Yet Malvolio cannot be termed a comic villain, as Shakespeare evidently intended Shylock to be.  Twelfth Night is not primarily a satiric attack upon Jonson, and it seems clear that Malvolio, again like Shylock wonderfully got away from Shakespeare. The play does not need Malvolio, but he has no choice: Shakespeare has inserted him into a context where he must suffer.

Since Malvolio’s very name indicates that he wishes no one well but himself, our sympathy is bound to be limited, particularly because of the high hilarity his discomfiture provokes in us. To see the self-destruction of a personage who cannot laugh, and who hates laughter in others, becomes an experience of joyous exuberance for an audience that is scarcely allowed time to reflect upon its own aroused sadism.  Harry Levin, dissenting from Charles Lamb, thought it was weakness to feel sorry for Malvolio:

‘As a sycophant, a social climber, and an officious snob, he well deserves to be put back in his place – or, as Jonson would have it, in his humor, for Malvolio seems to have a Jonsonian rather than a Shakespearean temperament.’

That is unassailable, and there Malvolio is, in Shakespeare’s superb comedy.  Baiting Malvolio, Levin argued, was not sadistic but cathartic: it enacted again the ritual expulsion of a scapegoat. Well, yes and no: the comic spirit perhaps requires sacrifices, but need they be so prolonged?

Malvolio matters partly because he is so sublimely funny, in fearsome contrast to his total lack of what we, not being Jonsonians, call humor.  But there is an excess in his role, which greatly challenges actors, who rarely can handle his enigmatic aspects, at their most complex after he reads Maria’s forged note. Transported by the supposedly amorous hints of Olivia, he bursts into a rhapsody that is one of Shakespeare’s finest outrages:

Daylight and champaign discovers not more! This is open. I will be proud, I will read politic authors, I will baffle Sir Toby, I will wash off gross acquaintance, I will be point-device the very man. I do not now fool myself, to let imagination jade me; for every reason excites to this, that my lady loves me. She did commend my yellow stockings of late, she did praise my leg being cross-gartered, and in this she manifests herself to my love, and with a kind of injunction drives me to these habits of her liking. I think my stars, I am  happy. I will be strange, stout, in yellow stockings, and cross-gartered, even with the swiftness of putting on. Jove and my stars be praised! – Here is yet a postscript. [Reads] Thou can’t not choose but know who I am. I thou entertain’st my love, let it appear in thy smiling, thy smiles become thee well. Therefore in my presence still smile,d ear my sweet, I prithee.  Jove, I thank thee, I will smile, I will do every thing that thou wilt have me.

Do we shudder a touch even as we laugh? The erotic imagination is our largest universal, and our most shameful, in that it must turn upon our overvaluation of the self as object. Shakespeare’s uncanniest power is to press perpetually upon the nerve of the erotic universal. Can we hear this, or read this, without to some degree becoming Malvolio? Surely we are not as ridiculous, we should insist, but we are in danger of becoming so (or something worse) if we believe our own erotic fantasies, as Malvolio has been tricked into doing.  His grand disaster comes in Act III, Scene iv, when he arrives in the presence of Olivia:

Olivia:  How, now, Malvolio!

Malvolio:  Sweet lady, ho, ho!

Olivia:  Smil’st thou? I sent for thee upon a sad occasion.

Malvolio:  Sad, lady? I could be sad: this does make some obstruction in the blood, this cross-gartering, but what of that? If it please the eye of one, it is with me as the very sonnet is: ‘Please one, and please all.’

Olivia:  Why, how dost thou, man? What is the matter with thee?

Malvolio:  Not black in my mind, though yellow in my legs. It did come to his hands, and commands shall be executed. I think we do know the sweet Roman hand.

Olivia: Wilt thou go to bed, Malvolio?

Malvolio: To bed? Ay, sweetheart, and I’ll come to thee.

Olivia: God comfort thee! Why dost thou smile so, and kiss thy hand so oft?

Maria: How do you, Malvolio?

Malvolio: At your request? Yes, nightingales answer daws!

Maria: Why appear you with this ridiculous boldness before my lady?

Malvolio: ‘Be not afraid of greatness’: ‘twas well writ.

Olivia: What mean’st thou by that, Malvolio?

Malvolio: ‘Some are born great’ –

Olivia:  Ha?

Malvolio: ‘Some achieve greatness’ –

Olivia: What say’st thou?

Malvolio: ‘And some have greatness thrust upon them.’

Olivia: Heaven restore thee!

Malvolio: ‘Remember who commended thy yellow stockings’ –

Olivia: Thy yellow stockings?

Malvolio: ‘And wished to see thee cross-gartered.’

Olivia: Cross-gartered?

Malvolio: ‘Go to, thou art made, if thou desir’st to be so’ –

Olivia: Am I made?

Malvolio: ‘If not, let me see thee a servant still.’

Olivia: Why, this is a very midsummer madness.

It is a duet for two great comedians, with Malvolio obsessed and Olivia incredulous. After Olivia departs, asking that Malvolio ‘be looked to,’ we  hear in him the triumph of the depraved will:

Why, everything adheres together, that no dram of a scruple, no scruple of a scruple, no obstacle, no incredulous or unsafe circumstance – what can be said? – nothing that can be can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes. Well, Jove, not I, is the doer of this, and he is to be thanked.

Shakespeare carefully keeps Malvolio a politic pagan here, as well as a dazed egomanic, unable to distinguish ‘the full prospect of his hopes’ from reality.”

—————————–

And finally, a bit from Tanner:

“I have not mentioned Sebastian, but he of course is Viola’s other half; Shakespeare here, once again, having recourse to the ‘divisible indivisibility’ of identical twins, though this time of opposite sexes. This multiplies and deepens the thematic possibilities of identity and gender confusion when one twin decides to go same-sex. This move in turn allows Viola an experience, a perception, not vouchsafed to the other cross-dressing heroines – the possible dangers of this device.

Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness

Wherein the pregnant enemy does much.

With identical twins, Shakespeare can put on stage the apparently bewildering phenomenon whereby one is two, and two are one. It is a visible rendering of the more ineffable two-into-one mystery of marriage. In one case literally, in the other metaphorically, therein is number slain (The Phoenix and the Turtle).

How have you made division of yourself?

An apple cleft in two is not more twin

Than these two creatures. Which is Sebastian?

(V,i,222-4)

says Sebastian’s loyal lover, Antonio (and that incidentally, is the last we hear from him. Like that other spokesman for homosexual devotion, also names Antonio – in The Merchant of Venice – he is just vaguely left out of things at the end as others pair up, or leave.)  The Duke’s response to the seemingly impossible phenomenon is famous:

One face, one voice, one habit, and two persons –

A natural perspective that is and is not.

(V,i,216-17)

Just before Sebastian enters, poor Andrew comes rushing in with his broken head, claiming that seemingly cowardly Cesario has turns out to be ‘the very devil incardinate’ (V,i,k182-3). He surely means ‘incarnate’ but ‘incardinate’ is happier than he knows, since it would mean ‘without number’ (a point made by William Carroll), which fits someone who is apparently both one and two, and, as a ‘eunuch,’ nought – hence, no ‘cardinal’ number will serve. With reference to ‘incarnate’ commentators sometimes make the point that the Twelfth Night marked the Eve of Epiphany, which saw the announcement of another yet more mysterious incarnation. This might seem a little far-fetched, were it not for Sebastian’s strange response when Viola accuses him of being the spirit of her dead brother.

     A spirit I am indeed,

But am in that dimension grossly clad

Which from the womb I did participate.

It is a strange way of saying, I am still a body; but the somewhat hieratic turn of phrase does indeed invoke a reminder of God putting on flesh – which is, I suppose, the ultimate two-in-one miracle. Certainly, the last scene of the play, while not in any way explicitly religious, should gradually be bathed in a sense of expanding wonder.

This wonder is connected with the sea – as it will increasingly be in Shakespeare’s last plays. The sea is the most unstable element of mutability and transformation; people crossing the sea often undergo strange sea-changes. On land, it can surge into people’s metaphors. The play starts with Orsino asking for ‘excess’ of music, so that ‘surfeiting,/The appetite may sicken and so die.’ Shakespeare is to refer to ‘the never-surfeited sea’ (The Tempest III, iii, 55), and it not surprising that Orsino’s melancholy insatiability turns his thoughts seawards.

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.

He is both right, and very wrong. The sea drowns, but it can also save and renew. As the very next scene reveals, Viola ‘entered’ the sea, was wrecked, but has been ‘saved’; and, so far from falling into ‘abatement and low price,’ will bring some much-needed quickness and freshness to stagnating Illyria. She thinks her brother drowned, though the Captain last saw him holding ‘acquaintance with the waves,’ riding them ‘like Arion on the dolphin’s back.’ The dolphin, famously, shows his back above the element he lives in (see Antony and Cleopatra V, ii, 89-90). Feste making a contemporary joke of it, says to Viola-Cesario ‘Who you are and what you would are out of my welkin; I might say ‘element,’ but the word is overworn’ But he is right; fresh-from-the-sea Viola effectively comes from another element (as does her brother, Sebastian, who, we will learn, was ‘redeemed’ from the ‘rude sea’s enraged and foamy mouth.’ The sister ‘saved,’ the brother ‘redeemed,’—the words are, surely, not idly chosen.) (‘I am not of your element’ says Malvolio to, really, everyone, III, iv, 130, and that’s true, too – he is in a bleak, unpeopled, self-incarcerating element of his own making – imaged by the darkened room in which he is imprisoned to cure his ‘madness.’) Sea-going touches everyone’s speech: ‘she is the list of my voyage,’ ‘you are now sailed into the North of my lady’s opinion,’ ‘board her, woo her, assail her,’ ‘Will you hoist sail, sir?…No…I am to hull here a little longer.’  There are also Olivia’s copious tears, which we hear about before we see her – ‘she will veiled walk,/And water once a day her chamber round/With eye-offending brine,’ ‘brine’ serving to bring the sea into the house. Sebastian also weeps for a lost sibling – ‘She is drowned already, sir, with salt water, though I seem to drown her remembrance again with more.’ Even landlocked Sir Toby is like a ‘drowned’ man when he is ‘in the third degree of drink.’ The play is, as it were, awash with liquidity. Viola, we recall, started out as ‘standing water.’ And it is her words on learning of the possible salvation of her brother which, above all, determine the atmosphere at the end of the play.

    O, if it prove,

Tempests are kind, and salt waves fresh in love!

This is probably the most defining sentence in Shakespearian comedy: salt becomes fresh; wreckage generates love; the world turns kind. Briney blessings.”

———————–

Your thoughts on Twelfth Night?

————————-

Our next reading:  Twelfth Night, Act Four

My next post:  Friday night/Saturday morning

——————

Enjoy

Act Two

By Dennis Abrams

————————–

Act Two:  Sebastian has survived (surprise!) – rescued by Antonio – although he, too, thinks his twin is dead and resolves to head for the court of Orsino.  Meanwhile…Viola/Cesario has fallen in love with Orsino.  And Olivia’s house…Sir Toby and Sir Andrew are carousing with Feste, despite a warning from Maria, Olivia’s maid.  The revelry comes to a crashing halt, however, when Malvolio, Olivia’s steward, storms in, complaining about the noise and threatening to throw them out.  As soon as he leaves, the revelers plan to take revenge:  Maria comes up with a scheme whereby, with the help of forged love letters, Malvolio will think that Olivia is madly in love with him. The plan works:  Malvolio discovers the anonymous letters and, assuming they are addressed to him, begins to dream of a life as Olivia’s husband.

————–

Anne Barton, “As You Like It and Twelfth Night:  Shakespeare’s sense of an ending”:  “An improbable world of hair’s-breadth rescues at sea, romantic disguises, idealistic friendships and sudden, irrational loves. This is not quite the country behind the North Wind, but it approaches those latitudes.”

———————–

So while it appears that Orsino is in love with love and Olivia rejects the whole idea, before long, both of them find themselves in love, but the consequences are unexpected.  Both fall for Viola – someone who is, in the strange logic of the play and Shakespearean comedy both “maid and man.”  But before Twelfth Night actually gets there, other craziness has to ensue.  Because also bent on maximizing their own experience – though on a much “lower” level than Orsino – are the ever so aptly named Sir Toby Belch, Olivia’s drunken cousin, and his companion Sir Andrew Aguecheek.  Perpetually low on funds because of his riotous lifestyle (not unlike Falstaff), Sir Toby cultivates the rich Sir Andrew for the very reason that he is embarrassingly dim:  persuading him to make a doomed attempt to win Olivia’s love, Toby hopes to sponge of poor hapless Sir Andrew for as long as possible.  After all, as he patiently explains, there is a great deal of revelry to do:

Sir Toby:  Not to be abed before midnight is to be up betimes, and diliculo surgere, thou knowest.

Sir Andrew:  Nay, by my troth, I know not; but I know to be up late is to be up late.

Sir Toby:  A false conclusion. I hate it as an unfilled can. To be up after midnight and to go to be then is early; so that to go to bed after midnight is to go to bed betimes.

“Let us therefore,” Toby robustly concludes, “eat and drink.”  In doing so he draws attention to the spirit caught in the play’s title: “Twelfth Night” was the closing feast of the Christmas season and its crazed climax.  Historically, it was a medieval celebration that survived until the eighteenth century, an occasion upon which “misrule” (the inversion of social hierarchies) and carnivalesque license were allowed full voice.  Turning night into day with drinking and dancing, Sir Toby does his best to help Twelfth Night the play into Twelfth Night the festival.

Not everyone, though, is willing to let that happen.  When Sir Toby’s midnight revelry threatens to spin out of control, Olivia’s puritanical retainer Malvolio bursts in and furiously demands that they bring the proceedings to a halt.  Sir Toby is appalled that a jumped-up “steward” should have the nerve to say anything of the kind, but it is Malvolio’s fellow servant Maria – urged on by Sir Toby (of course) – who hatches a satisfying (albeit cruel) revenge: she will write a letter to Malvolio, supposedly from Olivia, hinting that she wishes to become more intimate with him. The plot takes off immediately, and the letter itself is a true comic masterstroke. Casually coming across it while out taking the air, Malvolio is convinced that his chance for glory has finally come. “By my life, this is my lady’s hand,” he exclaims – then begins to puzzle away at the cryptic message it expresses:

‘I may command where I adore.’ Why, she may command me. I serve her, she is my lady. Why, this is evident to any formal capacity. There is no obstruction in this. And the end – what should that alphabetical position portend? If I could make that resemble something in me. Softly – ‘M.O.A.I’

Malvolio has come across the central riddle of the letter: the mysterious phrase “M.O.A.I.”:

‘M.O.A.I.’ This stimulation is not of the former, and yet to crush this a little, it would bow to me, for every one of these letters are in my name…I do not now fool myself, to let imagination jade me; for every reason excites to this, my lady loves me.

Malvolio does not ‘fool’ himself, at least not entirely, but he does make a fool of himself by being so easily – and on such implausible grounds – that Olivia loves him. Like Orsino, he too has fallen in love with a reflection of his own figure: as Olivia astutely realized, he is “sick of self-love” (1.5.86).”

————–

From Bloom:

“The largest puzzle of the charming Viola is her extraordinary passivity, which doubtless helps explain her falling in love with Orsino.  Anne Barton usefully comments that Viola’s ‘boy’s disguise operates not as a liberation but merely as a way of going underground in a difficult situation.’  There is an air of improvisation throughout Twelfth Night, and Viola’s disguise is part of that atmosphere, though I rather doubt that even Shakespeare could have improvised this complex and beautiful play; his careful art works to give us the aesthetic effect of improvisation. Viola’s personality is both receptive and defensive: she offers ‘the shield of a greeting’ (John Ashbery’s phrase). Her diction has the widest range in the play, since she varies her language according to the vagaries of others’ speech. Though she is as interesting in her own subtle was as are the unfortunate Malvolio and the reluctant fool, Feste, Shakespeare seems to enjoy keeping her as an enigma, with much held always in reserve. The ‘high fantastical’ Orsino perhaps attracts her as an opposite; his hyperboles complement her retincences. If there is any true voice of feeling in this play, then it ought to be hers, yet we rarely hear that voice. When it does emerge, its pathos is overwhelming:

Make me a widow 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.

[1.v.272-80]

The speech’s effect is ironic, since it prompts Olivia’s falling in love with the supposed Cesario. For Viola, this lament proceeds from a different irony: her absurd dilemma in urging Orsino’s love upon Olivia, when her own desires are exactly contrary to such a match. What breaks through these ironies is the deepest, most plangent element in Viola, but also perhaps an intense suffering, ancient or recent, in Shakespeare himself. Call Viola a repressed vitalist, alive with Rosalind’s intensity, but constrained from expressing her strength, perhaps because she mingles her identity with that of her twin brother, Sebastian. The ‘willow cabin’ threnody beats with this innate strength, singing its rejected love songs ‘loud even in the dead of night.’ By this point in the play, we are accustomed to Viola’s charm, but her personality, subdued on the surface, now intimates its resilience and its remarkable and persistent liveliness. ‘You might do much,’ Olivia responds to her chant, and speaks for the audience. In this cunning echo chamber of a play, Viola prophesies her imaginary sister in her own later dialogue with Orsino:

Viola:  My father had a daughter loved a man,

       As it might be perhaps, were I a woman,

       I should your lordship.

Duke:            And what’s her history?

Viola:  A blank, my lord: she never told her love,

But let concealment like a worm i’ the bud

Feed on her damask check: she pin’d in thought,

And with a green and yellow melancholy

She sat like Patience on a monument,

Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?

‘Blank’ is a Shakespearean metaphor that haunts poetry in English from Milton through Coleridge and Wordsworth on through Emily Dickinson to Wallace Stevens.  Here it means primarily an unwritten page, a history never recorded; elsewhere in Shakespeare ‘blank’ refers to the white mark at the center of a target.  Since this pined-away sister is a surrogate invention of Viola’s, there may be a hint also of an unhit target, an aim gone astray.  The speech has in it the seeds of some of William Blake’s most piercing lyrics, including ‘The Sick Rose’ and “Never Seek to Tell Thy Love,’ dark visions of repression and its erotic consequences. Both elegiac utterances, made by Viola to Olivia and to Orsino, are powerfully apotropaic: they are meant to ward off a fate that she courts by her passivity, from which she seems not able to rally herself.”

————————-

And to continue from Tanner, and his look at Viola as bisexual/epicene…

“’Epicene’ comes from epi – (close up) koinos (common). Epicene nouns, in Greek and Latin, are words which have only one form for both the masculine and feminine case – for example, poeta is morphologically feminine and grammatically masculine, and refers to a poet of either sex. We can say, then, that it elides marks of sexual difference, and brings two into one. This is what Viola, for her own reasons, set out to do. ‘Hermaphrodite’ is, of course, Hermes plus Aphrodite, and refers to a being who has all the sexual characteristics (and equipment) of both sexes, and thus transforms one into two. Such a natural anomaly would be something of a monster. Yet it is just such a being that Viola finds herself, impossibly, turning into. As she recognizes, when she refers to herself as a ‘poor monster’:

What will become of this? As I am man,

My state is desperate for my master’s love.

As I am woman (now alas the day!),

What thriftless sighs shall poor Olivia breathe?

At the start, we saw Viola wavering between the Countess and the Duke – this way or that way? At the end she tells her brother what has happened since their separation:

All the occurrence of my fortune since

Hath been between this lady and this lord.

–which we might also hear as saying, I have spent my time being something between a lady and a lord. When Viola-Cesario first makes her way to Olivia’s house, Olivia asks Malvolio ‘Of what personage and years is he?’ Malvolio has a rather elaborate answer:

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. (1,v,155-8)

This reminds me of the image Antony uses for Octavia:

     The swan’s-down feather

That stands upon the swell at the full of tide,

And neither way inclines.

Twelfth Night is one of the most watery of Shakespeare’s plays, so Malvolio’s image is particularly appropriate.  We may feel that young Viola, fresh from the sea, is sexually still labile, not yet fully differentiated; that, for the moment, she ‘neither way inclines’ (I need hardly point out, by now, how having a boy actor play the girl would add to this effect).  But Malvolio’s description also points, however unawarely, to another figure who is of central importance in this play – Narcissus.  Once again, we are back with Ovid.  Here is how he describes Narcissus:

Narcissus had reached his sixteenth year

And seemed both man and boy; and many a youth

And many a girl desired him…

Drinking from a pool, he sees:

A form, a face, and loved with leaping heart

A hope unreal and thought the shape was real.

Spellbound he saw himself…

He falls in love with his own ‘fleeting image’ and Ovid comments:

You see a phantom of a mirrored shape;

Nothing itself…

In Ovid’s account, he simply pines away on the bank, and after his death it turns into a white and yellow flower. But there also grew up a version of the myth which had Narcissus drowning trying to kiss and embrace his own reflection. It is this version which Shakespeare draws on in both his major poems:

Narcissus so himself himself forsook,

And died to kiss his shadow in the brooke.

(Venus and Adonis)

That, had Narcissus seen her as she stood,

Self-love had never drowned him in the flood.

(The Rape of Lucrece)

‘O, you are sick of self-love,’ Malvolio’ – these are the first words Olivia speaks to her steward, and we learn from Maria that he likes ‘practicing behavior to his own shadow.’ He is, indeed, a very obvious study in narcissism in a comically exaggerated form (even his grotesque crossgarters are the Narcissus colour – yellow, as pointed out by Jonathan Bate). But there is subtler and more serious narcissism in the leading figures in Illyria – Olivia and Orsino, both in danger of drowning in various forms of self-love. the indeterminate, could-seemingly-go-either-way, Viola-Cesario will change all that.  Prior to her arrival, we feel that a curious stasis, or even stagnation, prevailed in Illyria – the sterile repetitious self-direct, self-obsessed emotions of the Duke and Countess going, growing, nowhere. Viola proves to the crucial catalyst for change, emergence, grown. She herself, despite her ‘standing-water’ status and appearance, is decidedly not a Narcissus. She is more reminiscent of the other key figure in the myth – Echo. Echo was a nymph who used to distract Juno’s attention by her talking, while Jove had his way with other nymphs. As a punishment, Juno reduced her powers of speech to the ability to repeat the last words of any voice she hears. Echo falls in love with Narcissus, who rejects her in disgust. Echo takes her shame to the woods, ‘yet still her love endures and grows on grief.’ She wastes away and is finally just a discarnate voice, left to echo the wailing of the water dryads, mourning the death of Narcissus. There is something of all this in two of Viola’s key speeches, when she is, as it were, talking indirectly about her love, since her disguise has reduced her to something of an echo (repeating Orsino’s overtures to Olivia, and Olivia’s rejections to Orsino). Unlike Echo, she can release herself, anonymously, in lyric flights of poetry. What would she do if she loved Olivia?

Make me a widow 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!’

As Jonathan Bate says, ‘babbling gossip of the air’ is effectively an explicit reference to Echo, but the beauty of the poetry is all her own. No wonder Olivia reacts with ‘You might do much.’ After all her proud, house-bound, self-bound, posturing mourning for her brother, this is, perhaps, her first encounter with a genuinely felt and powerfully expressed emotion of love, and, her narcissism cracked open, she finds it irresistible.

Similarly, there is something of the faithful though fading Echo in her account of the hopeless love suffered by her imaginary sister, indirectly, of course, describing her own. ‘And what’s her history?’ asks the Duke, confident that no woman’s love could match his own.

A blank, my lord: she never told her love,

But let concealment like a worm i’ the bud

Feed on her damask check: she pin’d in thought,

And with a green and yellow melancholy

She sat like Patience on a monument,

Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?

Her answer has some general force.  The history of women is all too often ‘a blank’; theirs tend to be the unwritten lives – ‘hidden from history,’ as they say. And Viola also feels blanked out, having made herself invisible as a woman in front of the man she now loves. But from the deep feeling in her words, we surely agree that this is ‘love indeed.’ Characteristically, the Duke’s only response is to ask if the sister died or not.  He cannot hear the cadences of true feeling, preferring his own music-fed moods of languorous sentimentality and affected infatuation.  Viola remains something of a hapless Echo to Orsino to the end.  His emergence from narcissism is extremely peremptory, if indeed it happens.”

————————

Our next reading:  Twelfth Night, Act Two

My next post:  Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning

Act One

By Dennis Abrams

————————-

MAJOR CHARACTERS

Orsino, Duke of Illyria

Valentine and Curio, Orsino’s servants

Viola, a shipwrecked lady (later disguised as Cesario)

Sebastian, her twin brother

A Sea Captain

Antonio, another sea captain

Olivia, a countess

Maria, Olivia’s servant

Sir Toby Belch, Olivia’s uncle

Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Sir Toby’s companion

Malvolio, Olivia’s steward

Fabian, Olivia’s servant

Feste, Olivia’s clown

A Priest

—————–

DATE

Performed at London’s Middle Temple (a law college) on February 2, 1602, Twelfth Night was probably written a year earlier – soon after Hamlet.  There are numerous allusions that tie it to this date, though an independent record of an unnamed entertainment performed before Elizabeth I on Twelfth Night 1601 is thought unlikely to be this one.

———————–

SOURCES

Menaechmi, by the Roman comedian Plautus, ultimately provides the twins story (as it did The Comedy of Errors) while the love interest derives from a sixteenth-century Italian play called Gl’lngannati (The Deceived) which Shakespeare could have read from any number of Italian and English versions.

———————–

TEXTS

The play was first printed in the 1623 Folio (F1) in an unusually trouble-free text (especially when compared to Hamlet) and was probably set from a scribe’s copy.

———————-

Act One:  The Illyrian court is at a standstill – Duke Orsino is in love.  Unfortunately though, the object of his affections, Olivia, is in mourning for her brother and remains aloof and distant.  Orsino is not the only one in pursuit of Olivia: her uncle Sir Toby Belch has persuaded his friend, the rich but somewhat dim-witted Sir Andrew Aguecheek, to present himself as a suitor.  MEANWHILE, on the coast of Illyria, two survivors of a shipwreck, Viola and the Sea Captain, are discussing what to do. Convinced that her twin brother Sebastian has drowned, Viola decides to disguise herself as a young man, Cesario, and serve at Orsino’s court.  She rapidly becomes a favorite of the Duke, who uses her as a go-between in his courtship of Olivia. The plan goes horribly awry, however, when Olivia finds herself more charmed by the messenger than by the messenger.

Like Shakespearian comedies before and after it, Twelfth Night begins sadly. There has been a shipwreck – one of Shakespeare’s ever-malevolent storms – with just a handful of survivors.  The lady Viola, her sea journey cruelly interrupted, finds herself in a strange and possibly hostile land.  Apart from the captain and sailors who accompany him (none of them reappears in the play), she is alone.  And bereaved:

Viola:  What country, friends, is this?

Captain:  This is Illyria, lady.

Viola:  And what should I do in Illyria?

            My brother, he is in Elysium.

Although she is terrified to think of it (and the Captain gently tries to convince her otherwise), Viola’s brother is apparently drowned; although he may be in a better place, she is stuck here on earth.  Like the Antipholus brothers in The Comedy of Errors, Viola and her brother – his name is Sebastian – are identical twins(!), and from this impossible set-up Shakespeare spins one of his most moving comedies. Though she cannot know it yet, Viola’s similarity to her sibling (the thing that causes her such pain in this scene) is something that will deliver her from sadness, and ultimately (and I don’t think I’m giving anything away with this) reunites them both. Opting to “conceal” herself by dressing as a youth – a youth who naturally resembles her brother – Viola travels to the Illyrian court, like many a hero of romance before, in order to seek her fortune.  It as though she leaves the mourning solitary sister behind on the beach: in her new garb (and identity), Viola propels herself into a comic world of mysterious disguises, capricious love and crazy topsy-turvydom.

Twelfth Night, as befits its place in Shakespeare’s canon (it was written around the same time as Hamlet), continually bridges worlds that are both comic and tragic.  Soon after Viola arrives we are shown the household of the Illyrian countess Olivia, also in mourning.  Shakespeare clearly means the parallels between our two heroines to be uncanny:  not only is Olivia’s name a near-anagram of Viola’s, she too is grief-stricken for a dead brother.  Yet her long-absent fool Feste gently reminds his mistress that perhaps it is time for her to rejoin the living. “Good Madonna,” he asks, “why mournest thou?”

Olivia:  Good fool, for my brother’s death.

Feste:  I think his soul is in hell, Madonna.

Olivia:  I know his soul is in heaven, fool.

Feste:  The more fool, Madonna, to mourn for your brother’s soul, being in heaven.

Feste tries to laugh his mistress out of her sadness: comedy has the potential to heal grave emotional wounds, and with the clowns reappearance in Illyria the cast of Twelfth Night discovers, with Olivia, that to find happiness you first have to make yourself happy. The irony is that, before the play is out, there will be more “fools” on the stage than Feste.

However, not all the sadness at the opening of Twelfth Night strikes such grave notes.  Elsewhere in Illyria, Duke Orsino is mournful with love – worse, he is mournful with love for Olivia, who will not even begin to listen to his pleas for mercy.  In fact the play begins with Orsino (although there is a long stage tradition of opening with the shipwreck), and with some of the most-quoted lines in all of Shakespeare. “If music be the food of love,” he calls out to his musicians, “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 over 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.

Orsino wants nothing less than too much: he demands “excess” in the hope that somehow it will cure his “appetite” for tears by killing it.  Although he is in love, he begs to be out of it, though he listens to music, he wants it to stop. “So full of shapes is fancy,” he reflects to himself, “that it is alone in high fantastical.” Orsino is in love with love itself – and with the power of his own “fantastical” imagination.

—————————

From Bloom:

“The hidden heart of Twelfth Nightlies in Shakespeare’s seriocomic rivalry with Ben Jonson, whose comedy of humors is being satirized throughout. Ancient Greek medicine had posited four ‘humors”: blood, choler, phlegm, and bile.  In a person harmoniously balanced, none of these are evident, but the dominance of any indicated severe character disorders. By the time of Jonson and Shakespeare, pragmatically there was a simpler notion of just two humors, choler and blood. The choleric humor resulted in fury, while the sanguine temperament exercised itself in obsessive lust, frequently perverted. Popular psychology diffused this duality into easy explanations for every kind of flummery or affectation, Jonson’s targets in his stage comedies.

In some ways, this debased theory of humors resembles our everyday vulgarizations of what Freud termed the unconscious. The choleric humor is roughly akin to Freud’s Death Drive or Thanatos, while the sanguine humor is like the Freudian Eros.

Shakespeare generally mocks these mechanical operations of the spirit; his larger invention of the human scorns this reductiveness. He takes therefore the Feast of the Epiphany, the Twelfth Night after Christmas, as the occasion for an ambiguous comedy of revels that involves a practical joke upon the choleric Malvolio, a figure so Jonsonian as to suggest the choleric Ben himself.  The sanguine Will gives us What You Will, the spirit of Saturnalia that popular praxis had made out of the initially pious rejoicing of Epiphany, the manifestation of the Christ child to the Magi. Cheerfully secular, like almost all of Shakespeare, the play of ‘what you will’ makes no reference whatsoever to Twelfth Night. We are not at Christmas season in the very odd dukedom of Illyria, where the shipwrecked Viola passively and hilariously achieves perhaps not her happiness but certainly ours.  We open, though, not with the charming Viola but at the court of Duke Orsino, where that sublimely outrageous lover of love, sanguine to an insane degree, ravishes our ears with one of Shakespeare’s most exquisite speeches.

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.

Shakespeare himself have been pleased by Orsino’s opening metaphor, since Cleopatra, five years later, repeats it when she badly misses Antony: ‘Give me some music; music, moody food/Of us that trade in love.’ Orsino, far more in love with language, music, love, and himself than he is with Olivia, or will be with Viola, tells himself (and us) that love is too hungry ever to be satisfied by any person whatsoever. And yet the first eight lines of this rhapsody have more to do with music, and by extension, poetry, than with love. That ‘dying fall’ is a cadence that echoes throughout subsequent English poetry, particularly in the Keats-Tennyson tradition. Orsino, indeed ‘high fantasical’ (very high), asks for excess of music though not of love, but his metaphorical intensity implies that ‘’Tis not so sweet now as it was before’ pertains to sexual passion also. He will surpass even this self-revelation when speaking to Viola, in her disguise as his boyish go-between Cesario, appointed to carry his protestations of passion to Olivia. Supreme hyperbolist as he is, here Orsino touches the sublime of male fatuity:

There is no woman’s sides

Can bide the beating of so strong a passion

As love doth give my heart; no woman’s heart

So big, to hold so much: they lack retention.

Alas, their love may be call’d appetite,

No motion of the liver, but the palate,

That suffers surfeit, cloyment, and revolt;

But mine is all as hungry as the sea,

And can digest as much. Make no compare

Between that love a woman can bear me

And that I owe Olivia.

[II.iv.94-104]

Out of context, this is even more magnificent than the opening chant, but as this merely is Orsino, it is wonderfully comic grandiloquence. Though he is minor compared with Viola, Olivia, Malvolio (how their names chime together), and the admirable Feste, Orsino’s amiable erotic lunacy establishes the tone of Twelfth Night. Despite his amazing self-absorption, Orsino genuinely moves the audience, partially because his High Romanticism is so quixotic, but also because his sentimentalism is too universal to be rejected:

O, fellow, come, the song we had last night.

Mark it, Cesario, it is old and plain,

The spinsters and the knitters in the sun,

And the free maids that weave their thread with bones

Do use to chant it: it is silly sooth,

And dallies with the innocence of love,

Like the old age.

[II.iv.42-48]

There is also Orsino’s wonderful inconsistency, when he is moved to speak the truth:

For boy, however we do praise ourselves,

Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm

More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn

Than women’s are.

[II.iv.32-35]

Poor Malvolio would be happier in some other play, while Viola, Olivia, and especially Feste would find appropriate contexts elsewhere in Shakespeare. Orsino is the genius of his place; he is the only character the exuberant madness of Twelfth Night accommodates.”

————————

From Tony Tanner:

Viola:  I am not that I play. Are you the lady of the house?

Olivia: If I do not usurp myself, I am.

[I,v,182-4]

Olivia: I prithee tell me what thou think’st of me.

Viola: That you do not think you are what you are.

Olivia: If I think so, I think the same of you.

Viola: Then think you right. I am not what I am.

Olivia: I would you were as I would have you be.

Viola: Would it be better, madam, than I am?

[III,i,140-45)

“Julia dressed as a page-boy in order to follow and serve her faithless lover, Proteus (The Two Gentlemen of Verona); Portia dressed as a man to enter the male world of the law and rescue her husband’s friend; Rosalind adopted ‘a swashing and martial outside’ to reduce the dangers to two helpless women fleeing into the forest from the court (As You Like It). But Viola, in what is sometimes called the last of Shakespeare’s ‘happy comedies,’ gives no clear reason for assuming male disguise. After being rescued from the shipwreck, she finds herself without role and direction in a strange land. ‘And what should I do in Illyria,’ she rhetorically asks the good captain who has saved her. She asks who governs in Illyria and learns about Orsino and his love for the lady Olivia. After being told that Olivia has ‘abjured the sight/And company of men,’ Viola responds:

O that I served that lady,

And might not be delivered to the world,

Till I had made mine own occasion mellow,

What my estate is.

The Captain points out apparently insuperable difficulties, and Viola switches to the Duke.

I prithee (and I’ll pay thee bounteously)

Conceal me what I am, and be my aid

For such disguise as haply will become

The form of my intent. I’ll serve this duke.

Thou shalt present me as an eunuch to him;

It may be worth thy pains.

The Arden editors comment that this indicates ‘neither a deep-laid scheme nor an irresponsible caprice’ and add in a footnote: ‘Till I had made mine own occasion mellow’ will pass in the theater.  There is, and can be, no sound reason given for her taking service with either Olivia or Orsino; this is simply required by the plot, from which Shakespeare has dropped the original motivation of the heroine’s disguise (to serve the man she secretly loves. Shakespeare can set his plot in motion in any way he wants, and he is under no obligation to provide motivated reasons for opening actions. But since the theme of a woman dressing up as a page or servant to gain proximity to a man is a very familiar one from a number of sixteenth-century plays and narratives (mainly Italian), and since her motive is always the fact that she already loves that man, Shakespeare’s decision to drop that traditional reason, indeed to obscure if not erase motive altogether, is perhaps worth a little more consideration than a parenthesis in a footnote.

Considering her speech to the Captain, Barber admires ‘the aristocratic, free and easy way she [Viola] settles what she will do;’ and later, ‘Viola’s spritely language conveys the fun she is having in playing a man’s part, with a hidden womanly perspective about it. One cannot quite say that she is playing in a masquerade, because disguising just for the fun of it is a different thing. But the same sort of festive pleasure in transvestism is expressed.’ Twelfth Night concluded the twelve days of Christmas festivities which traditionally was a period of ‘misrule,’ when the world could, temporarily, be turned upside down, or inside out (like Feste’s glove), and clothes, genders, and identities swapped around. (See Francoise Laroque on this.) So ‘festive pleasure in transvestism’ seems to point in the right direction. But I am intrigued that Viola should resolve to go as a ‘eunuch.’ Some editions will tell you that Shakespeare dropped this idea, or simply forgot about it. But I wonder if he did. For instance, when the letter from ‘THE UNFORTUNATE UNHAPPY’ REMINDS Malvolio that ‘Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ‘em,’ it is engaging in a barely submerged parody of the biblical verse:

‘For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother’s womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.’

(Matthew 19:12)

Something is going on in this play about what it is to be, and to fail to be, properly gendered; what it is for nature to draw to her ‘bias,’ or swerve from it. I think Viola’s resolve to enter Illyria as a eunuch will stand a little more pondering. Ruth Nevo can see that it matters, and she interprets it in her own way. Noting Viola’s ‘ambivalence’ about whom to serve, she writes:

‘But she does not fly to the Countess Olivia for succour, woman to woman, despite her sympathy for a fellow-mourner. Instead she chooses to be adventurously epicene in the Duke’s entourage. Viola escapes her feminine state but at the cost of a (symbolic) castration; it is a eunuch (to account for her voice) that she will ‘sing,/And speak to him in many sorts of music.’

(Tanner’s italics). William Carroll also raises the question – ‘But why a eunuch?’ – and his answer is instructive:

‘Shakespeare’s initial choice of the eunuch role may have been for pragmatic reasons. ‘Cesario’ would not be sexually identified and as a neutral figure could more easily become a confidant of Olivia. But somewhere along the way, Shakespeare changed his mind and dropped the idea, perhaps because Viola is already a eunuch as far as Viola goes; and a man playing a eunuch affords comic possibilities, but a woman playing a eunuch – nothing.  As the play continues, we see that Cesario must in fact be essentially bisexual, not neuter, as Viola is both firm and flexible, both committed and disengaged.’

Suppose we think of this play as centering on a figure who sets out to be ‘adventurously epicene’ and discovers that s/he is, has to be ‘bisexual, not neuter’ – the would-be eunuch who became the inadvertent hermaphrodite. How or why might a great romantic comedy emerge from such a proposition, it might be asked? That is what I will try to explore.”

More in my next post:

An Introduction

By Dennis Abrams

Bittersweet, lyrical, and deeply emotional, Twelfth Night has long been thought of as perhaps Shakespeare’s most “perfect” comedy.  Written shortly after Hamlet and As You Like It, its mood is delicately posed:  while its title seems to promise carnival misrule, what the play offers us is grave and searching as well as riotously funny.  It also stands at the very center of Shakespeare’s career as a dramatist – looking back to the twinned chaos of The Comedy of Errors and the knockabout laughs of Falstaff while seeming to anticipate the miraculous resolutions of two of the late romances:  Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale.  As so often in Shakespearian comedy, here romantic love is both plague and cure – at the climax of the action nearly everyone on stage is in love with the wrong partner, and unscrambling the mess takes formidable, not to say mischievous dramatic skill.  The insanity of desire is a major theme in Twelfth Night (one of Shakespeare’s favorites – think about Midsummer…), and so is its potential to humiliate, as we will see in the subplot of a household servant, Malvolio, who is tricked into falling for his employer:  it’s a story that Shakespeare does not allow to end happily.

Tellingly, this is the only play of Shakespeare’s to be equipped with an alternative title, What You Will; this play teases its audiences with dizzying implausibilities alongside searching and very real insight into human nature.

It’s a marvelous play.

From Bloom:

“Despite my personal preference for As You Like It, which is founded on my passion for Rosalind, I would have to admit that Twelfth Night is surely the greatest of all Shakespeare’s pure comedies.  No one in Twelfth Night, not even Viola, is so wholly admirable as Rosalind.  Twelfth Night or What You Will probably was written in 1601-2, bridging the interval between the final Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida.  There are elements of self-parody in Twelfth Night, not on the scale of Cymbeline’s self-mockery, but holding a middle ground between Hamlet’s ferocious ironies and the rancidity of Troilus and Cressida, most memorably expressed by Thersites.

Shakespeare, I suspect, himself acted the part of Antonio both in The Merchant of Venice and in Twelfth Night, where the homoerotic second Antonio travesties the first. But most of Shakespeare’s earlier comedies are quarried in Twelfth Night, not because Shakespeare slackened at humorous invention, but because the zany spirit of ‘what you will’ dominated him, if only as a defense against the bitterness of the three dark comedies just after: Troilus and Cressida, All’s Well That Ends Well, and Measure for Measure. An abyss hovers just beyond Twelfth Night, and one cost of not leaping into it is that everyone, except the reluctant jester, Feste, is essentially mad without knowing it. When the wretched Malvolio is confined in the dark room for the insane, he ought to be joined there by Orsino, Olivia, Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Maria, Sebastian, Antonio, and even Viola, for the whole ninefold are at least borderline in their behavior. The largest fault of every staging of Twelfth Night I’ve attended is that the pace is not fast enough. It ought to be played at the frenetic tempo that befits this company of zanies and antics.  I am a little sorry that Shakespeare used Twelfth Night as his primary title; What You Will is better, and among much else means something like “Have at You!”

Not that Twelfth Night is a high farce. Like all the other strongest plays by Shakespeare, Twelfth Night is of no genre. It is not of Hamlet’s cosmological scope, but in its own very startling way it is another ‘poem unlimited.’ One cannot get to the end of it, because even some of the most apparently incidental lines reverberate infinitely. Dr. Johnson, rather irritated with the play, complained that it rendered ‘no just picture of life,’ but by the grand Johnsonian test it certainly is ‘a just representation of general nature.’ I worship Johnson, particularly on Shakespeare, and suspect that his own perilous balance, the fear of madness, made him seek rational design where none exists.

‘Viola seems to have formed a very deep design with very little premeditation: she is thrown by shipwreck on an unknown coast, hears that the prince is a bachelor, and resolves to supplant the lady whom he courts.’

That is not at all like Viola, even though she evidently falls in love at first sight of the crazy Orsino. We wince at most Shakespearean matches, and this may be the silliest, altogether unworthy of the integral, good-natured, only somewhat wacky Viola. Twelfth Night, though, refuses to take itself seriously, and we would do it violence by such realistic expectations, except that Shakespeare’s invention of the human surges with astonishing mimetic force in this play.  Its most absurd characters, Orsino included, open inward, which is disconcerting in a farce, or a self-parody of previous farces. Malvolio obviously does not possess the infinitude of Falstaff or Hamlet, but he runs away from Shakespeare, and has a terrible poignance even though he is wickedly funny and is a sublime satire upon the moralizing Ben Jonson. Shakespeare is still closer to Hamlet’s mode than to Measure for Measure’s: subjectivity and individuality, his invented distincts, are the norm of Twelfth Night. I think the play is much Shakespeare’s funniest, more so than Henry IV, Part One, where Falstaff, like Hamlet after him, is intelligent beyond intelligence, and so provokes thoughts that lie too deep for laughter. Only Feste in Twelfth Night has any mind, but everyone in the drama pulsates with vitality, most mindlessly Sir Toby Belch, the least truly Falstaffian of roisterers.

C.L. Barber classified Twelfth Night as another ‘festive comedy,’ but he accurately added so many qualifications as to place the festive motif in considerable doubt.  A Feast of Fools touches it limits soon enough; Twelfth Night expands upon any rereading, or even in a less than brilliant performance. The play is decentered; there is almost no significant action, perhaps because nearly everyone behaves involuntarily. A much funnier Nietzsche might have conceived it, since forces somewhat beyond the characters seem to be living their lives for them.”

———————–

From Marjorie Garber:

“Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night, or What You Will takes the first half of its title from the English holiday celebrated on the evening before January 6 – the Twelfth Day of Christmas, otherwise known as the Feast of the Epiphany. According to Christian tradition, this was the time when the Magi, the three wise men, journeyed from the East to Bethlehem, bearing offerings for the infant Christ.  The word ‘epiphany’ has a more general meaning, denoting a revealing manifestation, a sudden flash of insight, or a sudden recognition of identity. On the biblical Feast of the Epiphany it meant the showing of Christ to the Magi, a manifestation of godhead. In England, Twelfth Night was a feat of misrule, a festival of eating and drinking, during which masques and revels were presented. A large cake with a bean or a coin baked into it was served to the assembled company, and the person whose slice of cake contained the coin became the Christmas King, the Lord of Misrule. What You Will, the second half of the play’s title, speaks both to this customary season of topsy-turvy revelry and to the space of fantasy and wish fulfillment that was the early modern playhouse. Like Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It – and many similarly self-dismissive titles of plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries – this apparently deprecating phrase can come back to bite. If some of the play’s characters do find that their fantasies come true, others are punished for daring to have fantasies as well.

Twelfth Night was first presented as a private entertainment at the Middle Temple, a law school in London, in 1602, and the play as we have it shows a number of evidences of its Christian festival origins. The fool in this play whose name – Feste – suggests the spirit of feasting, is constantly speaking about wise men. In act 1, scene 5, for example, addressing ‘wit,’ he observes that while man who think they have wit are often fools, ‘I that am sure I lack thee may pass for a wise man.’  Wise men who crow at fools, in Malvolio’s words, are no better than the ‘fools’ zanies,’ the fools’ fools. And the Countess Olivia, the lady of the house and Feste’s employer, is the biggest fool of all. Feste undertakes to prove this in a wonderful little piece of fool’s patter (to which we might compare Lear’s Fool’s equally deft demonstration of the ‘sweet and bitter fool.’

Feste:    Good madonna, why mournest thou?

Olivia:  Good fool, for my brother’s death.

Feste:    I think his soul is in hell, madonna.

Olivia:  I know his soul is in heaven, fool.

Feste:   The more fool, madonna, to mourn for your brother’s soul, being in heaven. Take away the fool, gentlemen.

There is an echo of the Twelfth Night occasion, too, in the name Viola chooses for her disguise, ‘Cesario,’ the king. ‘Cesario’ will become the ‘one self king’ Olivia wishes to rule her, and, unmasked as Viola, ‘Cesario’ will participate with Sebastian in a real epiphany, or discovery, as the two reveal…

Typically, though not always, Shakespearean comedy encloses a transforming middle world – what Northrop Frye, thinking of the forest plays in particular, called a ‘green world.’ There is no forest here, no Belmont world of music and art, no realm of fairies. Instead we have, on the one hand, a world of madness and dream, a relatively familiar world of mistaken identity and playing and disguises, like that found in The Comedy of Errors or Love’s Labour’s Lost, and, on the other hand, what amounts to an invasion from without. Instead of the court world going to the forest, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or As You Like It, in Twelfth Night we have the spectacle of a ship foundering off the coast of Illyria, a sea world invading a land world. This is the comic pattern of Much Ado About Nothing, where outsiders – in that case, soldiers and lovers – come to a fixed place and change it. Indeed, it is the pattern of The Comedy of Errors, where all the action takes place in Ephesus.  But in Twelfth Night the ‘outsiders’ not only bring the comic elements of energy, desire, and fruitfully mistaken identities; they also bring key elements from another literary genre: romance. The world of romance invades the world of comedy.

Romance, the genre of Shakespeare’s late plays, was a popular Elizabethan mode. Among its signature elements were shipwrecks, the rediscovery of lost brothers and sisters, physical marks of recognition, and rebirths from the sea. A fundamentally narrative genre, which would eventually give rise to the modern novel, romance always turns on epiphany, and on moments of rebirth. These elements, it is worth noting, were also present in the farcical Comedy of Errors, the plot of which turns on separated twins, lost and found parents, a shipwreck, and the miracle of rebirth, all with a definite Christian undertone. In Twelfth Night Shakespeare returns to this basic pattern, as he will have recourse to it yet again in The Tempest, near the end of his career.  But in Twelfth Night he makes an important change from the earlier Comedy of Errors design, by making his ‘identical’ twins of different sexes.  By doing this he is able to combine an old theme with a newer one, the theme of rebirth with the theme of sexual love and growth, and the freeing and educative function of erotic ambiguity and sexual disguise.  Viola as a boy, though carefully described as high-voiced and clear-complexioned, is able to educate both Orsino and Olivia in love, as Rosalind did Orlando in As You Like It, because she is herself in a middle space, in disguise, and in both genders. Once again the fact that boys actors played the roles of women on the public stage meant that a boy played a young woman playing a boy – one reason for the plentiful reminders in this play that ‘Cesario’ is not a man, but a woman in disguise. If the audience were to make the same ‘mistake’ as Orsino and Olivia, there would be no comedy, and no play. But if Orsino and Olivia did not make this crucial error, falling in love with the elusive and delusive ‘Cesario,’ they would learn nothing.  There would be no romance, and no play.”

This one’s going to be fun.

————————-

Our next reading:  Twelfth Night, Act One

My next post:  Tuesday night/Wednesday morning

Enjoy.

SIR ANDREW
‘Twere as good a deed as to drink when a man’s
a-hungry, to challenge him the field, and then to
break promise with him and make a fool of him.
SIR TOBY BELCH
Do’t, warrior: I’ll write thee a challenge: or I’ll
deliver thy indignation to him by word of mouth.
MARIA
Sweet Sir Toby, be patient for tonight: since the
youth of the count’s was today with thy lady, she is
much out of quiet. For Monsieur Malvoliok, let me
alone with him: if I do not gull him into a
nayword, and make him a common recreation, do not
think I have wit enough to lie straight in my bed:
I know I can do it.
SIR TOBY BELCH
Possess us, possess us; tell us something of him.
MARIA
Marry, sir, sometimes he is a kind of puritan.
Except for that one time he went through Pon-Farr
SIR ANDREW
He went where? And how far?
SIR TOBY BELCH
Why, my good Klingon, heardst thou not the lurid escapades of our virtuous Vulcan?
SIR ANDREW
Methinks I have not.
MARIA
It was naught but seven years ago that,
Malvoliok, drunk on hormonal lust,
Didst give in to his wild, raging humors
And mistake the commander for his spouse.
SIR TOBY
I’ve heard say that purest Olivia
Upon adjourning to her chamber suite
Did find one Malvoliok in her bed
With lust in his eye and sweat on his brow
His mouth a-leering and fingers clawing.
Intruder Alert! She thus broadcasted,
At once he pounced, her phaser – blasted
Let it be said, in faith, that I, for one
Am sad to say ’twas only set to stun.
SIR ANDREW
For this offence to exalted Olivia,
I’ll set my fists to kill.
Though, perhaps, She did mean to keep
Him alive for some exquisite reason
Therefore who am I to shorten the cur’s suffering?
MARIA
As to his suffering, to this I’ll add;
The devil a Vulcan that he is, or any thing
constantly, but a time-pleaser; an affectioned ass,
that cons state without book and utters it by great
swarths: the best persuaded of himself, so
crammed, as he thinks, with excellencies, that it is
his grounds of faith that all that look on him love
him; and on that vice in him will my revenge find
notable cause to work.
SIR TOBY BELCH
What wilt thou do?
MARIA
I will drop in his way some obscure epistles of
love; wherein, by the colour of his ear, the shape
of his leg, the manner of his brow, the expressure
of his eye, forehead, and complexion, he shall find
himself most feelingly personated.
I can emulate the Commander’s style of phrasing as
precisely as a phaser bolt strikes an ensign, and can
easily obtain her command codes.
SIR TOBY BELCH
Excellent! I smell a device.
SIR ANDREW
I have’t in my nose too.
SIR TOBY BELCH
He shall think, by the letters that thou wilt drop,
that they come from the Commander, and that she’s in
love with him.
MARIA
My purpose is, indeed, a horse of that colour.
SIR ANDREW
And your horse now would make him an ass.
MARIA
Ass, I doubt not.
SIR ANDREW
O, ’twill be GLORIOUS!!!
MARIA
Sport royal, I warrant you: I know my physic will
work with him. I will plant you two, and let Fabiola
Make the third, where he shall find the letter:
observe his construction of it. For this night, to
bed, and dream on the event. Farewell.

MARIA:

• Is a participant in the play’s subplot.
• Is a cunning bartender.
• Her antagonist is Malvoliok.
• Devises a prank on Malvoliok, initiates the phony love letter ploy against Malvoliok.

MARIA + SIR ANDREW + SIR TOBY AUDITION SCENE
ACT II. SCENE III. PG. 19-20

SIR ANDREW
‘Twere as good a deed as to drink when a man’s
a-hungry, to challenge him the field, and then to
break promise with him and make a fool of him.
SIR TOBY BELCH
Do’t, warrior: I’ll write thee a challenge: or I’ll
deliver thy indignation to him by word of mouth.
MARIA
Sweet Sir Toby, be patient for tonight: since the
youth of the count’s was today with thy lady, she is
much out of quiet. For Monsieur Malvoliok, let me
alone with him: if I do not gull him into a
nayword, and make him a common recreation, do not
think I have wit enough to lie straight in my bed:
I know I can do it.
SIR TOBY BELCH
Possess us, possess us; tell us something of him.
MARIA
Marry, sir, sometimes he is a kind of puritan.
Except for that one time he went through Pon-Farr
SIR ANDREW
He went where? And how far?
SIR TOBY BELCH
Why, my good Klingon, heardst thou not the lurid escapades of our virtuous Vulcan?
SIR ANDREW
Methinks I have not.
MARIA
It was naught but seven years ago that,
Malvoliok, drunk on hormonal lust,
Didst give in to his wild, raging humors
And mistake the commander for his spouse.
SIR TOBY
I’ve heard say that purest Olivia
Upon adjourning to her chamber suite
Did find one Malvoliok in her bed
With lust in his eye and sweat on his brow
His mouth a-leering and fingers clawing.
Intruder Alert! She thus broadcasted,
At once he pounced, her phaser – blasted
Let it be said, in faith, that I, for one
Am sad to say ’twas only set to stun.
SIR ANDREW
For this offence to exalted Olivia,
I’ll set my fists to kill.
Though, perhaps, She did mean to keep
Him alive for some exquisite reason
Therefore who am I to shorten the cur’s suffering?
MARIA
As to his suffering, to this I’ll add;
The devil a Vulcan that he is, or any thing
constantly, but a time-pleaser; an affectioned ass,
that cons state without book and utters it by great
swarths: the best persuaded of himself, so
crammed, as he thinks, with excellencies, that it is
his grounds of faith that all that look on him love
him; and on that vice in him will my revenge find
notable cause to work.
SIR TOBY BELCH
What wilt thou do?
MARIA
I will drop in his way some obscure epistles of
love; wherein, by the colour of his ear, the shape
of his leg, the manner of his brow, the expressure
of his eye, forehead, and complexion, he shall find
himself most feelingly personated.
I can emulate the Commander’s style of phrasing as
precisely as a phaser bolt strikes an ensign, and can
easily obtain her command codes.
SIR TOBY BELCH
Excellent! I smell a device.
SIR ANDREW
I have’t in my nose too.
SIR TOBY BELCH
He shall think, by the letters that thou wilt drop,
that they come from the Commander, and that she’s in
love with him.
MARIA
My purpose is, indeed, a horse of that colour.
SIR ANDREW
And your horse now would make him an ass.
MARIA
Ass, I doubt not.
SIR ANDREW
O, ’twill be GLORIOUS!!!
MARIA
Sport royal, I warrant you: I know my physic will
work with him. I will plant you two, and let Fabiola
Make the third, where he shall find the letter:
observe his construction of it. For this night, to
bed, and dream on the event. Farewell.

MARIA:

• Is a participant in the play’s subplot.
• Is a cunning bartender.
• Her antagonist is Malvoliok.
• Devises a prank on Malvoliok, initiates the phony love letter ploy against Malvoliok.

SIR ANDREW AGUECHEEK:

• Is a participant in the play’s subplot.
• Is an idiotic carousing Klingon.
• Is a simple-minded friend of Sir Toby.
• Attempts to court Commander Olivia, but he has no chance of success.
• Is thought to be a complete idiot.

SIR (OFFICER) TOBY BELCH:

• Is a participant in the play’s subplot.
• Is a drunken Klingon.
• Is a Starfleet officer.
• Rowdy behavior, practical jokes, drinks heavily, late-night carousing.
• Friends with Sir Andrew, mostly for the purpose of having a drinking buddy.
• Is drunk throughout the play and gives full vent to his whims and passions.
• Is allied with, and eventually marries, Maria. Together, they bring about the triumph of fun and disorder (which Sir Toby embodies) and the humiliation of the controlling, self-righteous Malvoliok.

Dear Friends and readers,

Only one year behind! I’m so often decades behind (I fell in love with the Poldark mini-series and books 2 years ago), that to be 10 to 15 years late is nothing (I’m just now mesmerized by Prime Suspect). Sir Toby Belch (Shakespeare’s Twelth Night) said to be up betimes (past midnight near dawn) is to be up early, so I say to be belated by one year is to be on time. To be accurate, I’ve blogged twice about the mini-series already, once in response to Ebert who apparently identifies with Mr Carson, the butler (Think of me as the dead or absent maid) and once in response to the first episode of the second season this time where I or someone like me might figure in the Downton imaginary (Downton Abbey as Amos ‘n Andy). These though were personal; tonight while not forgetting that all art is propaganda (Orwell), and remaining sincere and frank, I mean to be generally descriptive.

*********
Episode 1

Among the first shots of Maggie Smith as Violet, Dowager Duchess

I began by capturing four long far shot stills, the opening of the train rushing through forest and countryside, past stream in the gloaming of the evening, the first shot of the Dowager Duchess (quite like a portrait) and Robert Crawley, Lord Grantham (Hugh Bonneville) and present duchess, Cora, Lady Grantham (Elizabeth McGovern) seen walking against the green sward as Mr Carson (Jim Carter) walks up to them to give them the message from a telegraph:

I enjoyed it the way I often do costume drama, mini-series rhythm I should say emphatically — so when I am critical it should be understand I am evaluating. (I don’t understand how it reduces enjoyment to understand what we are taking in.)

It had all the familiar motives and plot-devices of the type, too much so. The story was Pride and Prejudice: Lord (Hugh Bonneville — very good insofar as he could be) and Cora, Lady Grantham (Elizabeth McGovern made too coy — she simpered – she was playing a stupid or not very bright woman and that’s how she did it) had no sons so the entail goes to another relative.

As episode opens, this near heir has died on the Titanic and now the eldest Grantham daughter, Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) who was engaged to him is free. She couldn’t give a damn and does not want to wear mourning. The second daughter, plainer, clearly did like this now dead heir and cousin, Lady Edith her name (Laura Carmichael), at any rate resents Lady Mary’s indifference to his demise. Now the estate and money to support it (which comes from Cora, Lady Grantham’s portion) will go to a third cousin, once removed. Lord and Lady have 3 daughters to marry (5 was perhaps too obvious and cost more) and now it’s not so easy. Lord Grantham will not fight the entail as it’s useless he and his lawyer, Murray think.

Much Trollope here — though the name Crawley signals Thackeray’s presence (as in Vanity Fair). Cora — from Trollope’s Pallisers — was married by Lord Grantham for her money and he grew to love her as the years passed. A little dialogue of reminiscence tells us that (like Lady Glencora McClusky), this American Cora’s dowry was enormous. Fellowes is also remembering Palliser’s heir, Lord Silverbridge’s marriage to an American young woman, an Isobel (a popular name in the 1880ss). The situation by Trollope delved into and developed at much much great length (at least 7 long novels)i is presented shallowly, superficially here. In the first three episodes allusions to Trollope make it clear Trollope’s novels are an important source: “it was just like a Trollope novel!” says one character in Episode 3. And as with Austen’s P&P, Fellowes just makes is a shallow sketchy paradigm. Cora was not a common Edwardian name — though Isobel (Mrs Crawley, played by Penelope Wilton) was and the first name of the American heiress just referred to).

A neighborhood hunting club run from Grantham (from episode 3)

The larger encompassing structure is patently Upstairs/Downstairs, only so much more luxurious. The castle is Highclere in Hampshire. The servants up early, serving like crazy, the kind of imitative pattern, the important butler, Mr Carson (Jim Carter replacing Gordon Jackson as Mr Hudson) who cares intensely about the family and decorum; a housekeeper, Mrs Hughes (Phyllis Logan replacing Angela Baddeley as Mrs Bridges who though was also cook). So it went. I note the hero, exemplary & dominating male in the first season of the 1970s UD was the butler; now it’s the rich Lord Grantham.

Some of it very well done. The shots wonderful. Not so much the dialogue which needed more work and the actors more rehearsal. Viewers can pour what they want into these paradigms, come away with what lessons they want. For example, the servants’ rooms so bare, the space they exist in not theirs at all (and this is made explicit more than once); they get up early and have to rush about cleaning, serving the family. The cliches make it broad and easy to take in. Buyt Maggie Smith as dowager did not ham it up and delivered with quiet pizzazz whatever bon mots were going.

As in the 1970s a chief maid, Rose (Jean Marsh, one of the people who conceived of the original series) was central so here Anna Smith (Joanne Froggart) and her side-kick, Gwen (Rose Leslie). To them are added a scullery maid, Daisy (Sophie McShera) there to be bullied by Mrs Patmore, cook (Leslie Nicol). An extra “good” footman, here naive (as he was not in the 1970s) William Mason (Thomas Howes). Everyone given second names — as they were not at first in the 1970s Upstairs Downstairs.

There were new elements and they were striking and effective. For example, the story of a disabled man: the new valet, Mr Bates (Brendan Coyle) who the servants are put off by and two, Sarah O’Brien, Lady Grantham’s lady’s maid ((Siobhan Finneram) conspire to blacken, even trip up (done by a sleaze of a footman, Thomas Barrow played by Rob James-Collier) and insist is not keeping up his end.

So two sets of scenes placed in the plot-design swirl around this: we see how Lord Grantham does the right thing, nearly firing this his ex-bat man who desperately needs a job, at the last moment says, no, he stays. Now this was touching and progress: we are to feel for the disabled and see how he’s given a hard time by his society. But the way the program avoids real toughness was here too. To limp is an easy disability to feel sorry for. Nothing non-conformist here. He was even a Vet (Boer War). Who went after him: the mean servants so it’s the lower orders with the apparently careless unfeeling Cora backing them up. Still we did feel the lack of flexibility towards someone disabled, and it was done with quiet tact.

Another: the highest person in the episode was a Duke of Crowborough (played by Charlie Fox [easy to confuse with Lord Evelyn Napier, played by Brendan Patricks]. Crowborough who has heard the heir of the family has died and rushes over to put his bid in for the hand of Lady Mary. Straight out of Trollope this character with the important except that he was a total lout and shit, not just vacillating over his place in the hierarchy. He decamps hastily when once he learns Lady Mary not to inherit. This does suggest a sort of attack on hierarchy. Against this Grantham has a noble soul. Napier is also regardless of other people’s feelings (an important value in this mini-series). Crowborough takes Lady Mary for a walk in the house to the servants’ quarters upstairs and to the side of the house. She was made nervous and uncomfortable by this; she is aware they are people and this is their at least temporary private area, if bare, cold, stigmatized. The whole sequence very believable. Crowborough couldn’t care less about perhaps barging in. These people have no dignity, no humanity like his to him. He also couldn’t care less about the landscape — didn’t want to go outside for a walk. A bad sign. The name is allegorical too (a crow, referring both to the instrument and the bird — such birds are intelligent by the way).

A third: open homosexuality. We discover the shit footman, Thomas is a previous lover of this Duke’s — not just homoerotic as in Trollope. The scene is humanly speaking between two ugly people. Duke trying to take advantage, and Thomas then countering with a blackmail attempt. Duke grabs his letters back and throws them in fire. No evidence. It does move too quickly and crudely — one of the flaws of this first season.

Blackmail was a problem for gay men. These are both nasty cold mean people and that has nothing to do with their gayness — but it should be acknowledged that to the popular audience the film-makers are clearly reaching for this could be an anti-gay person sequence. I think it’s really partly progress. At least this alternative sexuality is visible. We see the young men kiss and homosexuality becomes another form of sex going on. This is something we would not have seen even in the 1990s even – and certainly not on TV.

And of course I like Matthew Crawley, Dan Stevens (a favorite with me since the 2008 S&S and his role in Line of Beauty and the good psychiatrist in latest Turn of the Screw) and Mrs Crawley, his mother who despite her misgivings leaps at the chance of this inheritance and a place in county society, complete with house and servants. The new heir and his mother are first seen in a middle class flat in Manchester. He a lawyer (gasp! works for a living — Trollope stuff there).

Telling perhaps the typology? in that 2009 Turn of the Screw, Michelle Dockery was the imprisoned and exploited governess, with Stevens as her failed savior. Will these roles be repeated in this permutation? Stay tuned.

Conventional in these sorts of things the person I found I could bond easiest with was Anna. I liked Mr Bates too. A kind of sub-couple to Lord and Lady Grantham and this is new too — if the servants were made primary at first in Upstairs Downstairs, there was no equivalent of the Bellamys and the son, while prone to get maids pregnant, was sensitive, intelligent, no lout. I can see that parallels stories will be developed throughout the series. I found myself interested by Edith and Daisy.

Julian Fellowes wrote the originating script for Altman’s Gosford Park; Fellowes will be the one continual presence throughout the episodes. He must have written them as a group before they began shooting because I can see this is not a matter of new stories for each episode, with the series evolving as it moves on in the way of the 1970s Upstairs Downstairs; from inception this has some over-arching pattern.

************
Episode 2: comic idealism; a celebration of community

Anna and Gwen talking earnestly to one another in their attic room

I like the second episode better than the first — though I begin to see how much of this mini-series is unreal or exaggerated. It was funnier than Episode 1 and all about the individuals in the house — developing them as individuals.

What was so good was the feeling generated. It reminded me in feeling
and ideals of the two recent Cranfords — Jim Carter and Brendon Coyle were in those too. They were (as this mini-series is apparently going to be) a celebration of community. In that it opposes itself to much we find ourselves surrounded by today, as did those Cranfords. This message is much more explicit than anything in the older Upstairs Downstairs (much the subtler series) and probably functions as an antidote to our world today. This is a series where we learn we cannot go it alone. So, what’s not to like? That this socialistic message is got up withni the aesthetics of simplified justified hierarchies?

Against that which easily may be read as justifying conformity and coercion to bow to the group will, I’d say the note is tolerance more than giving up individual wants or desires. Were it the later, the tone would be more melancholy. We see the characters tolerate one another — and with kindness sometimes too, and even dignity. Comfort there, and Bonneville as Lord Grantham makes this explicit in his speeches just in case we didn’t get the message.

Matthew Crawley bicycles to work

Living in the US, I don’t get to see these film adaptations regularly, or we get only a select group of them so I can’t tell whether this outlook is found in other of these concoctions (combinations of books and themes and plot-designs and characters) since say 2005 or 6. I did see it adumbrated in the 1999 Aristocrats mini-series which was really a kind of Little Women in luxurious-rich neoclassic taste 18th century guise.

I concede that I don’t know enough about medical operations and suspect what we saw Dr Clarkson (David Robb) perform with the help of Mrs Crawley — save a young villager’s life — was much simplified; a number of the problems the lower class characters had were too easily solved by the active benignity of the upper class ones. It was rather like a child’s fiction, built to create little parables: Lord Grantham just dismisses the blackmailer; Matthew Crawley gets a new job as a lawyer in the town so easily; Mrs Crawley has the training of an expert nurse, but the number of instances of kindness, of giving in to accepting the “other” was genuinely appealing. How Mr Carter’s past (low class, low status wandering family) was accepted by Mrs Hughes and Mr Bates forgave Mr Carter. Crawley learning to make his butler feel useful — that was a bit much to take. We are to be grateful when the privileged allow us to serve them hand-and-foot. Still, the point made was we all need to be useful, to be appreciated. Not much allowed in 2012. I melted. And they were careful not to allow the dowager duchess (the type straight out of Trollope – obtuse, snobbish, carelessly making life hard for others yet we are to like her) is not allowed to do any real harm or inflict any real hurt. The other characters stop her in time.

Small personal delights: Daisy, the young scrubmaid under the thumb of the hard-worked cook is so sweet and when (usually sneering) Thomas danced with her, it was touching. She is of course showing her youth in preferring the manipulative hypocritical Thomas to the good- hearted innocent William. Daisy. I wanted to name my older daughter Marguerite & call her Daisy. My mother was horrified. It was to my mother a low class name — whoever imagines the US is class-free lives in a thick fog of delusion. I’ve been sorry I didn’t call her Daisy but maybe it would’ve been a stigma. And Mrs Crawley’s first name is Isobel. So is my younger daughter — my father said it had a regal ring to his ears (!). I do like the name Anna too — even considered it in dreams of a third daughter. I’m watching out for any Alices or Lauras or Veronicas

None of these negates my knowledge of my mother-in-law’s experience as a lower governess in a great house where the last feeling that was dominant was good-fellowship according to my mother-in-law. To be in service was to be in servitude. A reality check from Pamela Horn, The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Servant: a maid collecting water from pump. perhaps helped by groom. One of many laborious tasks carried out by servants of the era:

Someone who could keep this size-staff was unusually well-off in Victorian times; note how each person is made to hold the implements of his or her work, his or her insignia:

One girl remembered her first job as a “tweeny” as “hell:”

But I did not suffer at the hands of my emloyees, but at the hands of fellow servants. There was far more class distinction and bullying and misery below stairs than can be told in a letter.

It’s worth repeating my mother-in-law had a nervous breakdown at the end of a year and one-half and after World War Two a 5 and 1/2 full time day job in Woolworth’s was riches (a salary!), freedom (time you controlled once the job was done), private space compared to what she had known. See also Another Maggie Smith.

Downton Abbey is escapist fairy tale.

Taken on its own terms, they are not spending enough time on the shots. This second episode the actors appeared to be much more rehearsed, but I discovered the movie does not lend itself to spontaneous snaps. You have to be alert to capture a perfect one and I got hardly any. In the case of Ang Lee say or Joe Wright you can snap any time any way and it comes out lovely, graceful, or pointed in meaning in a satisfying way. Not here. I did get one of Penelope Wilton meeting for the first time with Lord Grantham They shake hands: both are exemplars of the good people doing their best — fitting in and so on.

The first meeting of the two branches of the Crawleys (Penelope Wilton’s open face is perfect)

*********
Episode 3: rape slid over

Lady Mary as very pretty seen by the men at the hunt

True to Trollope’s attitudes we have an ambiguous rape slid over in this one. This one was more melodramatic again and there were a few story lines which are going to be spun out over at least this season.

Lady Mary is emerging as heroine: I suppose it’s easier and inevitable than make the 2nd, Lady Emily or 3rd Lady Sybil (Jessica Brown-Findlay), the heroine. Lady Mary is taken in (I allude to Austen’s Mary Crawford who says marriage is a “take in”) by the handsome rakish Turkish aristocratic type, Kemal Pamuk (I can’t find the name or actor in the list on IMDB), brought along by Napier, another Trollope male type (Fellowes may also reads Napier who was a conservative political historian and politician). Lady Mary (Trollope again) did not fall in love with Napier (unlike John Grey from Can You Forgive Her? not very worthy) but instead goes for the “wild” man (I am alluing now to an opposition between types of men as Trollope suggests young women see them in Can You Forgive her?). We are to believe women want males who punish them.

Downton Abbey is made by men (directors all and producers almost all men). So it’s not surprise that when the Turkish guy with no connections that the young woman of the house hardly knows sneaks his way into the her room and forces her down on the bed, she just melts.

Things go awry though — and if the rape is not presented accurately — there is poetic justice. Pamuk blackmails his way into her room. Thomas tried to force sex on this, lout No 2, who did not yield but himself coerced Thomas (lower status, more vulnerable) to let him into Lady Mary’s room after threatening to expose Thomas as a gay male. After a rough-housing scene with Lady Mary, Pamuk appears to drop dead after fucking or nearly fucking Lady Mary (we are to believe she began to want this bullying treatment). A real scene might have had an attempted rape and he die. Then he would have deserved it. I wondered if in an earlier script it was not) and next thing she is running frantically because what if he is found in her room? Her reputation!!! to make a long story short (not done truly comically because they didn’t have the nerve), she, her mother and Anna drag the corpse to his room to be found therein the morning.

So Lady Mary is set up for blackmail, exposure, and shame.

Dan Stevens as Matthew Crawley begins to look like decency itself. Alas, for reasons I don’t get except Lady Mary is pretty (but so is Edith), Matthew prefers Mary to Edith These are a very conventional group of characters. Edith likes Matthew Crawley and takes him round to churches. It’s clear he is hankering after Lady Mary though he enjoys the tour. I wish for her to meet an archaeologist and go on digs. I liked the moments of their tour around the village and its churches.

An unusual moment for Edith thus far: she invites Matthew to come with her and is reaching out; most of the time she is presented as sullen and too eager for a man

The full secondary story here was of Mr Bates buying himself an iron frame and trying to make himself walk in a non-limping (non-crippled) way using it, but only torturing himself and ending up with a much wounded leg was touching. His physical weakness parallels the young man who died suddenly. But (part of the series good feeling) everyone who learns of this cares and is kind to him. Lord Grantham wants to help him. Finally he succumbs to Mrs Hughes’s insistent kindness; she gets him to reveal his leg to her. The closing scene of the episode is him throwing the ugly device away. The moral: he has to learn to accept himself.

Mrs Hughes and Mr Bates on the edge of the Downton estate

But remember in the real world he would have been fired probably unless Lord Grantham really felt for him as a batman in the Boer war. I wondered if in the original script more was made of this WW1 experience.

Then there’s a third story set afoot and done with intelligent quiet irony: Gwen, the lower maid, aspires to be a secretary, to leave “service.” The other servants (especially Miss Obriend) ask if she’s above them, the Duchess thinks it’s nicer in a great house than job for long hours in a dark office. This is supposed to be funny. I liked how Lady Sybil felt for Gwen. Most houses were arduous repressive hard work and humbling — the typewriter Gwen has saved up for and practices on at night is like telegraph, we saw at the opening of the first episode, a sign of this dawn of the modern era.

Her story is given the usual false turn we see daily when she is told by Mr Bates she can change her life completely. Mr Bates tell her this, but we see she doesn’t believe it. Doesn’t know how to reach anyone, and she is told the space she lives in is not hers, not to practice typiing on or keep her machine in. She’s allowed to on sufferance. It is her property, that is what is recognized.

Gwen’s typewriter

I noted all the intimate scenes of master/mistresses and servants: talking, advising. The (good) servants are the fount of wisdom in this mini-series. Good thing we have some less nice people among the servants too — though it’s pernicious that the worst people in the house are Thomas, a homosexual footman (whom Mrs Patmore describes as “troubled”) and Mrs O’Brien, the lady’s maid, dressed in witch-like black with an ugly hat (so too does Edith have bad hats — see the Hats of Downton Abbey). A piece of misogyny (recalling daytime soap operas) where a lower class woman, is the worse person around.

This is from a later episode in Season 2 where Miss OBrien had been humanized: she warns Mr Bates

But again see the underlying jarring values of this series: steadily anti-bullying, anti-exploitation of others in just about every area shown, and steadily idealizing the wealthy and powerful. Only the two bad guys (Thomas and OBrien) are mocking bullies and they are rendered harmless by the goodness of the Granthams who stay above the fray and instinctively make the right decisions. If you believe all this, I’ve a bridge I could let you have dead cheap …

************

To conclude, Downton Abbey (Highcleere mansion) in Trollope is Gatherum Castle (Sudeley castle).

Trollopians will remember that Lady Glen and Plantagenet dislike the gigantic Gatherum with necessary huge staff intensely; it’s a huge barn, un-home-y, a task to operate. They open it up when he becames Prime Minister because it is big enough to entertain rich & powerful people in large groups, to have parties, balls, golf and arrow-shooting going on all at once. It can function as a hotel. At the same time, Plantagenet as Duke of Omnium finds he is forced to spend money making it look fashionable for others; the renovations strike him as ruining the gardens, absurd. He hides out in it.

Lady Glen as Duchess becomes a hostess (and of course he does not like
that). She is in collusion with her housekeeper, a French cook (often drunk) and doesn’t know all the staff anymore. Some of the funniest ironic sequences are of the Duke wandering about in the landscape (he is an idealized character) and the Duchess managing her hotel.

We see the purpose of such a house is politicking, to show how
powerful & influential you are. And here we have another lacunae in
DA: not only is it understaffed, it has no use. Lord Grantham were he real would be politicking, using his influence; there would be scores of men not just showing up (inexplicably) for a hunt, but for a hunt as part of many days’ networking. We get nothing whatever of this. Fellowes sticks strictly to domestic life. And that is not real. Even rich people don’t throw their money away. The house was a central of power through patronage.

By contrast, Altman’s Gosford Park was smaller, the equivalent of Matching Priory, the place the Pallisers called home. Matching is big enough to politick in too (you have small groups of more intimate friends). The Palliser film-makers used Sudely Castle for both: they photographed it so that it would look smaller for Matching Priory, & showed its full extent from another angle for Gatherum.

Trollope himself never misses a chance to satirize in a kind of
saturnine way what Gatherum is. In Dr Thorne (the 3rd Barsetshire novel) Frank Gresham is made miserable there, snubbed the first time we go there — with him. Fellowes erased this.

Lord and Lady Grantham greeted by staff (Elizabeth McGovern another of the many actresses who starve themselves to be so frail)

Next Downton Abbey blog: Season 1, Episodes 4-6

Ellen

Maria confronts the Clown, Feste who has been AWOL

MARIA

Yet you will be hanged for being so long absent; or,
to be turned away, is not that as good as a hanging to you?

Clown

Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage;

Feste prepares to meet his mistress, Olivia.

‘Better a witty fool, than a foolish wit.’

Olivia orders “the fool” to be taken away, but Feste calls Olivia “the fool”  Olivia demands an explanation

Clown

Good madonna, why mournest thou?

OLIVIA

Good fool, for my brother’s death.

Clown

I think his soul is in hell, madonna.

OLIVIA

I know his soul is in heaven, fool.

Clown

The more fool, madonna, to mourn for your brother’s
soul being in heaven. Take away the fool, gentlemen.

Maria informs Olivia that there is a messenger at the gate demanding audience. Sir Toby is holding him.

OLIVIA

Fetch him off, I pray you; he speaks nothing but
madman:

Sir Toby enters

OLIVIA

By mine honour, half drunk. What is he at the gate, cousin?

SIR TOBY BELCH

A gentleman.

OLIVIA

A gentleman! what gentleman?

SIR TOBY BELCH

‘Tis a gentle man here–a plague o’ these
pickle-herring!

Olivia asks the fool….

OLIVIA

What’s a drunken man like, fool?

Clown

Like a drowned man, a fool and a mad man: one
draught above heat makes him a fool; the second mads
him; and a third drowns him.

Viola enters, disguised as Cesario.

 VIOLA

Most radiant, exquisite and unmatchable beauty,–I
pray you, tell me if this be the lady of the house,
for I never saw her: I would be loath to cast away
my speech, for besides that it is excellently well
penned, I have taken great pains to con it.

Olivia dismisses Maria and hears Viola alone

OLIVIA

Give us the place alone: we will hear this divinity.

Exeunt MARIA and Attendants

Now, sir, what is your text?

VIOLA

Most sweet lady,–

OLIVIA

A comfortable doctrine, and much may be said of it.
Where lies your text?

VIOLA

In Orsino’s bosom.

OLIVIA

In his bosom! In what chapter of his bosom?

VIOLA

To answer by the method, in the first of his heart.

OLIVIA

O, I have read it: it is heresy. Have you no more to say?

VIOLA

Good madam, let me see your face.

OLIVIA

Have you any commission from your lord to negotiate
with my face? You are now out of your text:

She draws her veil

VIOLA

‘Tis beauty truly blent, whose red and white
Nature’s own sweet and cunning hand laid on:
Lady, you are the cruell’st she alive,
If you will lead these graces to the grave
And leave the world no copy.

OLIVIA

O, sir, I will not be so hard-hearted; 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.

Viola insists that Orsino loves Olivia

OLIVIA

How does he love me?

VIOLA

With adorations, fertile tears,
With groans that thunder love, with sighs of fire.

OLIVIA

Your lord does know my mind; I cannot love him:
Yet I suppose him virtuous, know him noble,
Of great estate, of fresh and stainless youth;
In voices well divulged, free, learn’d and valiant;
And in dimension and the shape of nature
A gracious person: but yet I cannot love him;
He might have took his answer long ago.

Olivia sends Viola back to Orsino, yet something has changed in her cold manner.

OLIVIA

Get you to your lord;
I cannot love him: let him send no more;
Unless, perchance, you come to me again,
To tell me how he takes it. Fare you well:
I thank you for your pains: spend this for me.

VIOLA

I am no fee’d post, lady; keep your purse:
My master, not myself, lacks recompense.
Love make his heart of flint that you shall love;
And let your fervor, like my master’s, be
Placed in contempt! Farewell, fair cruelty.

Alone, we realise why Olivia has changed her manner

OLIVIA
Thy tongue, thy face, thy limbs, actions and spirit,
Do give thee five-fold blazon: not too fast:
soft, soft!
Unless the master were the man. How now!
Even so quickly may one catch the plague?
Methinks I feel this youth’s perfections
With an invisible and subtle stealth
To creep in at mine eyes. Well, let it be. 

She has fallen in love with Viola, who she believes is a man, or youth called Cesario.

OLIVIA

Run after that same peevish messenger,
The county’s man: he left this ring behind him,
Would I or not: tell him I’ll none of it.
Desire him not to flatter with his lord,
Nor hold him up with hopes; I am not for him:
If that the youth will come this way to-morrow,
I’ll give him reasons for’t: hie thee, Malvolio.

MALVOLIO

Madam, I will.

Exit

OLIVIA

I do I know not what, and fear to find
Mine eye too great a flatterer for my mind.
Fate, show thy force: ourselves we do not owe;
What is decreed must be, and be this so.

“I’m sure care’s an enemy to life.”

- Sir Toby Belch, Act 1, scene iii, Twelfth Night (William Shakespeare)

John Naughton, writing in The Observer posed the question: Why don’t we love our intellectuals?  I hope to answer that question here.

First of all, intellectuals are ugly.

It’s true.  Can you think of one attractive intellectual?  I know the temptation to say “What about Tom Stoppard? That’s a nose to love!” is well, tempting, but be realistic: there isn’t one intellectual who has ever lived who would ever make the International Most-Shaggable List, ever.

Second of all, intellectuals are smarter than the rest of us.  This is also true and an incredibly annoying fact.  Who wants to adore a smarty-pants?  It’s self-abusive and damaging to the ego.  If you must adore an intellectual, let it be one of those low-key poets or social scientists no one has ever heard of.  An obscure intellectual is a grateful intellectual most likely to dedicate all their brilliance to you, the one who saved them from a life of shaglessness.

Thirdly, intellectuals are famously incapable of not being intellectuals. Their intellectualism is as much a part of them as their underused genitalia.  Like those shriveled organs of reproductive uselessness, they stroke their intellectualism to fullness with a desperate feverishness, desirous of completion, agitating to come to some climactic point that will astonish all with its fury and potency.

Intellectuals, no matter their occupation, are forever in the act of intellectualizing, seeking reason and meaning in everything from the existence of God to nipples for men.  What purpose, the palladian?  What matter, the morphotic?  Wherefore the frenulum?  Is this picaresque chorus conative of the cosmotellurian elenctic?  Do we or do we not, will we, will we not, have we, have we not, are we, are we not, most jocund, apt and willing for this affair?  Read Twelfth Night. Of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself, what is its nature?  What do they do, these tragematopolists you seek?

The worker bee has no time for such folly, the mother of four even less.  Life comes and goes like sea breezes, with a chill and a sting and all the minutiae of the universe.  The simple answer is the best one, the most likely to be true: that you do think you are not what you are.

There is no thievery more heinous than to rob us, the normal, plaintive folk, of all that is mysterious.  They are great quarrelers with a gift for shenanigans; trust them not, these Malvolios and coxcombs of bafflement, rogues and passy measures panyn who have made havoc with the world; these malformed malcontents: these intellectuals.

“An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.”

- Albert Camus

My favorite play, hands down, is Twelfth Night. The first lines spring to my mind every now and then, and I am possessed with a desire to reread it.

If music be the food of love, play on

My sisters and friends and I used to act out scenes from this play, tripping over the unfamiliar phrasing and dissolving into laughter more often than not. I always wanted to play the Clown – I spent some time today looking for my favorite thing he says in the play, and ended up reading a large amount of it and not being able to decide. It’s all so good!

I’ve never read the complete works, so maybe I’ll add that to my list of things to do this year. I love to hold the physical book in my hands, but just in case, they’re all available online here.

Here’s a little song sung by Feste the Clown, which always seems sad to me, but very lovely:

What is love? ’tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What’s to come is still unsure:
In delay there lies no plenty;
Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

(And in the back of my head, Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew immediately pipe up with, “A mellifluous voice, as I am true knight.” – “A contagious breath.” – “Very sweet and contagious, i’ faith.”)

Happy Birthday Shakespeare!

The test is tomorrow, so to review I will type up the summaries provided by our “Folger Library” books before each scene.

Act I, Scene i
At his court, Orsino, sick with love for the Lady Olivia, learns from his messenger that she is grieving for her dead brother and refuses to be seen for seven years.

Act I, Scene ii
On the Adriatic seacoast, Viola, who has been saved from a shipwreck in which her brother may have drowned, hears about Orsino and Olivia.  She wishes to join Olivia’s household, but is told that Olivia will admit no one into her presence.  Viola decides to disguise herself as a boy so that she can join Orsino’s male retinue.

Act I, Scene iii
At the estate of Lady Olivia, Sir Toby Belch, Olivia’s kinsman, has brought in Sir Andrew Aguecheek to be her suitor.  Maria, Olivia’s lady-in-waiting, says that Andrew is a fool, and Andrew himself doubts his ability to win Olivia, but Toby encourages him to woo her.

Act I, Scene iv
At Orsino’s court, Viola, disguised as a page and calling herself Cesario, has gained the trust of  Orsino, who decides to send her to woo Olivia for him.  Viola confides to the audience that she loves Orsino herself.

Act I, Scene v
Viola, in her disguise as Cesario, appears at Olivia’s estate.  Olivia allows Cesario to speak with her privately about Orsino’s love.  As Cesario presents Orsino’s love-suit, Olivia falls in love with Cesario.  She sends her steward, Malvolio, after Cesario with a ring.

Once again, these summaries are courtesy of Folger Libraries.

Amee Vyas, playing Viola, was longtressed (a wig) and extremely, um, busty.   I did not believe for a minute that they could make her into a convincing Cesario, but boy, ace bandages do wonders.   Most interesting, though, was her ethnicity.   Dark skinned, Middle-Eastern, or Indian, my knowledge of names from that part of the world isn’t enough to let me say with any authority, but she had a striking beauty that added both to the exotic feeling of Illyria, and her own alien status in that country without making either the focus of the character.  I might also add that Matt Felten’s Sebastian, Viola’s twin/doppleganger was very pretty to look at, but the actor is just as white as they come- not to mention a foot taller than Viola.   There was no question, though, that the two were twins.  Made me wonder just how sophisticated Shakespeare’s audiences would have been- to suspend disbelief for non-alike looking actors?  Sure, we do it easily, but we’ve been trained to do it.   An Elizabethan audience wasn’t used to the conventions that we, well, consider conventions.

To read the rest of this very long post, including gushing over Matt Nitche and becoming overly neurotic about Malvolio, Shylock, & minutiae about names in religion, click below.

Ms. Vyas was strong enough in her role, but as I’ve previously mentioned, the production allowed the sexual menage-a-trois to take a backseat to the “B” storyline- Toby & his companions gulling Malvolio.   Matt Nitchie was simply wonderful.   Could not take your eyes off him, even when he wasn’t speaking.  About halfway through the finding-of-the-letter scene, I hit upon the total root of the charisma (anti-charisma?) of his interpretation.   No disrespect intended at all to Mr. Nitchie, but the performance was reminiscient of- and at times, almost a replication of- Alan Rickman’s Snape in the Harry Potter movies.   The intonation of the voice, the lingering syllables, the tight lipped contempt.   It was watching Alan Rickman do Snape, but speaking Shakespeare instead of Rowling.   Nitchie dook it deeper than imitation though, especially as Malvolio was thrust down into the asylum and eventually defeated.   Even in his wailing and misery- and he was both- he never once believed that he was, indeed, insane.  This Malvolio was perfectly aware of his belief that the ultimate tragedy of his situation in that it’s a situation that he didn’t deserve.

So we come to my re-reading of the play.  As I’ve mentioned, I’ve always put Malvolio on the back-burner, as did the authors/editors of the two editions that I read in prepping for this post.  So until I find my copy of Bloom (whom we know is fucking insane), I have to muddle through understanding him on my own. 

I don’t know if I’m as defensive of the gulling of Malvolio as my friend Dale is:

And Malvolio deserved everything he had coming to him, the fucking Puritan. No pity for him, nor should there be. He’s no Shylock.

See, on the one hand, I find less pity for Shylock than I do Malvolio.   Nerissa & Co. are protecting Antonio from Shylock’s murderous intention.  That’s one thing that I always have to remember about Shylock, especially in light of the post holocaust reading of Shylock as being persecuted.  Yes, he’s persecuted, yes, he’s mistreated, but he still is out for blood.  He will slice Antonio open without a second thought.   Shylock is forced to convert his religion, presumably, because he can’t live as a Jew in a Christian society.  But ultimately, Shylock’s conversion is a method of “saving” him in the eyes of the law, not only punishing him. 

Malvolio, on the other hand, never makes an attempt on anyone’s life; he just makes people miserable.  Toby, Feste, Andrew, Fabian, Maria (okay, EVERYBODY) hate him, and they put him through absolute torture just to put him through torture.  To classify Toby’s actions as justifiable is to classify prejudice against Shylock’s Jewishness as justifiable.   I mean, they absolutely strip Malvolio of anything resembling not just dignity, but also attempt to remove his sanity.  Is Malvolio a good character?  No, he is judgmental, but he that’s all he does- just judges; he is powerless to act, whereas Shylock has the law on his side when he goes to revenge against Antonio.

But I should be as angry with Malvolio and what he represents as I am against Governor/Vice Presidential Canidate Bunny; anyone who stands in judgment of others and then chooses to use (or worse, dismiss) that judgment in order to advance his or herself disgusts me.   Malvolio plays the part of a puritan, as discussed before, Shakespeare even goes so far to use the word “puritan” to describe him (Maria, II.3.39).  This is not a term that would be taken lightly by Shakespeare or the theater-going crowd.  In the early 1600s, puritan was as much a buzzword as “fundamentalist” is today (although I’m not suggesting they’re exactly interchangeable).   So, Shakespeare establishes Malvolio as a God-fearing Christian.  Or rather, as a closer look reveals-   perhaps he only establishes Malvolio as someone presenting himself as a God-fearing Christian.   He seems to cast of his Christian roots as soon as his fortunes begin to change.  The emphasis from below is mine:

I thank my stars, I am happy.  I will be strange, stout, in yellow stockings, and cross-gartered, even with the swiftness of putting on.  Jove and my stars be praised.  Here is yet a postscript.  ‘Thou canst not choose but know who I am.  If thou entertainest my love, let it appear in thy smiling, thy smiles become thee well.  Therefore in my presences still smile, dear my sweet, I prithee.’  Jove, I thank thee.  I will smile.  I will do everything that thou wilt have me.   (II.5.148-155)

And again:

I have limed [Olivia], but it is Jove’s doing, and Jove make me thankful….Well Jove, not I, is the [instrument of my fortune], and he is to be thanked.  (III.4.68-69; 75-76)

Has Malvolio turned away from Christian piety in public to thank the Roman God in private for his good fortune?  Only to return to beg  help from (whom he believes to be the Christian God’s intercessor), Sir Topas in the asylum, once his fortunes again turn poor?  If such is the case, then perhaps the torture of Malvolio isjust, if only to highlight his hypocrisy.  It is no secret that Shakespeare hated Puritans, (And did he thus also hate Malvolio?  Embellish the Malvolio story ONLY to humiliate him?) and this was a beautiful opportunity to expose what he thought of their piety?     

Ever the true Libra, just as I am beginning to agree that “Yes, I am happy with what happens to Malvolio,” I noticed a gloss in the Folger edition:  “Jove and God were used interchangeably.”  And then I have to wonder, to myself, “Well, if Malvolio is thanking God in private, perhaps he is indeed a tried and true puritan, and is actually not all that big a hypocrite.”  But then, I think, again, Shakespeare was a revisionist and a wordsmith.  When Shakespeare uses the word “puritan” earlier to describe Malvolio, he has to know the connotation it carries- and therefore, the use of the Roman “Jove” is neither accidental, but a direct reference to religious hypocrisy.  (By the way, although I have not been through all 3420 pages with a fine toothed comb, the Norton Complete Shakespeare, which I consider to be my authoritative source, does not gloss “Jove” as such, at least not in the main text or supplemental materials to Twelfth Night.)  So again, Malvolio gets what he deserves.

But DOES he?  If Shakespeare wanted to be as conspicuous with naming the Roman God, why not use “Jupiter” instead of Jove?  And what about the linguistic relationship between Jove and Jehovah?  I never until taking up this Malvolio question had considered the link between the two words.  At some point, Jupiter had to become Jove and Jehovah- or was it the other way around?  The finding of the answer to this question is why I wish I was at GHP again.  The kids and I would take up an entire day discussing and researching, and then the adults and I an evening discussing and drinking over, WHICH name would have been more conspicuous to an Elizabethan audience, and WHAT actual relationship and linguistic evolution would exist between Yahweh, Jupiter, Jove, Jehovah, and God.   My entire understanding of that character, and perhaps even an insight into Shakespeare and/or Puritanism, rests on the choice to use the single word “Jove.”    Damn that’s cool.

I’ll return to this when I find my Bloom, who was equally gushy over Feste the Clown, who neither the performance (which was still very good, but not directed to the forefront of the play) nor the re-reading overly endeared me to as a brilliant character.  I like him; I just don’t see the depth in him that I do in Malvolio.

Ah well, I’ll close as Malvolio does.  And as Matt Nitchie did, not by speaking to the actors on stage, in a moment of meta-character cognition- but by embracing the space and threatening the Tavern audience who had just spent two hours laughing at him: 

I’ll be revenged [here he pauses to turn and point throughout the audience- not overdone, but chilling] on the whole pack of you.   (V.1.365)

By turning my brain over and over on him, Malvolio’s certainly gotten his revenge on me.

I taught Twelfth Nightsome years ago at GHP in my Shakespeare’s Sisters course on gender identity and sexuality in Shakespeare.  Haven’t looked at it since.  My focus from the beginning was, not to discount the Malvolio/Maria/Toby/Feste storylines, the Viola/Cesario/Orsino/Sebastian/Antonio sexual storylines.

Boy, how things can change through a performance (and, as I’m doing now, a reading).  Thank god.

Matt Nitchie’s EXCELLENT Malvolio enters, late at night, in Act II, Scene 3, and chastises Maria, Toby, et. al. for their late night debauchery.   Toby, (in this particular production, a Falstaff simulacrum):

Out o’ tune, sir?  you lie.  Art any more than a steward?   Dost thout think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?  (II.3.113-115)

I, sitting in the audience, think “Oh, he’s  a damned Puritan!”  (Those of you who are Shakespeare geeks are going “duh, that’s the line,” but remember, I hadn’t read it for seven years, and had frequently paid less attention to the Malvolio storyline than the Viola one.)  Then, what should happen not 25 lines later, but:

MARIA:  Marry, sir, sometimes he is a kind of puritan.  (II.3. 139)

I was giddy beside myself (albeit, I was, as typical, alone) sitting in the audience when she said this.

But in the space in between my revelation and Maria’s line, and it was a very short one, the second I identified Malvolio as a Puritan, several thoughts and questions fired through my mind:  “Why torture Malvolio in the upcoming acts?  Does he deserve it?” and then,  “He is a criminal against this society’s culture, if not their laws.”  “His crime isn’t his Puritanism, but, rather, the imposing of his Puritanism upon Toby, et. al.  HOLY SHIT–he’s Governor/Vice Presidential Canidate Bunny, or, at least, guilty of the same (societal) crimes!  He deserves what he gets, not for his views, but for trying to get Toby, Maria, et. al. to conform to his views!”

I am halfway through my reading of Twelfth Night and have lots more to say re: Matt Nitchie’s Malvolio and this particular production.    Now to actually stop typing about it and actually read it!