Twelfth Night

by William Shakespeare

  "Nor Wit nor Reason Can My Passion Hide"

  Gender confusion stands at the very heart of the amorous adventures and comic love-plots in the drama of the age of Shakespeare. The confusion starts from the fact that on the Jacobean stage all the marriageable young women's parts in plays like Twelfth Night and As You Like It were written to be played by boys ... Boys dressed as girls, girls dressed as boys, and (on stage) boys dressed as girls dressed as boys, all apparently add to the delicious pleasure of the erotic chase. Outside the close confines of marital love, family and reproduction, gender-bending is the name of the game--"as you like it," or "what you will."74

  The influential Polish critic Jan Kott asserted that "Illyria is a country of erotic madness."75 As evident as it may seem to a modern audience, this aspect had not been explored until the 1970s.

  Peter Gill's sexually charged revival in 1974 was dominated by a large image of Narcissus--"a continuous reminder to the audience of the themes of ambiguous sexuality and erotic self-deception":76

  All are intoxicated with their own reflections, and the function of Viola and Sebastian is to put them through an Ovidian obstacle course from which they learn to turn away from the mirror and form real attachments.77

  There is nothing at all equivocal about the physical relationships. Orsino hugs Cesario to his breast with rapturous abandon: Antonio is plainly Sebastian's long time boy friend: and Viola all but tears her hair in anguish at Olivia's unfulfilled passion for her.78

  Demonstrative physical contact pointed to the nature of the developing relationships. As Orsino sat listening to music, lounging on cushions, Viola/Cesario sat between his legs. On his asking Cesario if he had ever been in love, they playfully rolled around:

  The Duke is young and lolls about panting and sighing, half-dressed, a sexy man, all male comradely affection with his courtiers, arms around them, head on shoulders on the huge Habitat cushions. And among them, Viola, small, white and utterly frozen as he fondles her/him while he talks about this other love--frozen not just with horror but with tense, deliberately fraught repression.79

  Jane Lapotaire played a very boyish Cesario. She said, "Viola takes her boyhood very seriously--she has to in order to survive."80 Olivia's reaction to the reunion of Sebastian and Viola was comical. Wardle described her as "licking her lips at the sight of the interchangeably delicious twins": "her 'Most wonderful!' brought the house down. On 'Cesario, come!' Orsino caught the wrong twin. Olivia as she moved away with Sebastian, looked back half wistfully at Viola, perhaps wishing that it were after all possible to have both."81

  It was not until 2001 that such an overtly sexual reading was revisited: Lindsay Posner "cleverly locates his production in the Edwardian age of uncertainty, when young feminists and suffragettes were derided as unwomanly and dandyish male aesthetes reckoned no better than effeminate":82

  Orsino's caressing of Cesario's head as they listen to the "food of love" seems far from blameless. When we first meet Sebastian, Viola's long-lost twin, he's getting himself together after a romp on a large bed with Antonio ... the butch black sailor who's plucked him from the waves. Can this really be the Sebastian who will resolve all by taking Cesario's place in Olivia's bed and maybe even in her affections? As for Matilda Ziegler's simpering Sloane of an Olivia, the kiss she plants on Viola in the denouement suggests the root cause of her trouble was that her real taste had always been for laddish lasses in uniform. Much of this is amusing enough ... but the rather tactless outing of sexual ambivalence undermines the subtlety of Shakespeare's own games with the chemistry of love.83

  3. Peter Gill production, 1974: John Price as Orsino (right) lolling on cushions as Jane Lapotaire as Viola is "small, white and utterly frozen ... not just with horror but with tense, deliberately fraught repression."

  Zoe Waites and Matilda Ziegler decided that on the line "Love sought is good, but given unsought is better" (3.1.157):

  Olivia should kiss Viola ... Lindsay's suggestion was that after Olivia initiated the kiss, Viola, rather than pulling away instantly, should respond for a brief moment. Lindsay's intention was to highlight the sexual ambiguity that reverberates through the play ... Although Viola's instinct might initially be to pull away, the experience of such a loving kiss became fleetingly seductive for her too. Brimful as she is with love for Orsino, she is living with her own unexpressed erotic charge and readiness, and the joy, or comfort, of sensual human contact is not to be underestimated!84

  The relationship between Antonio and Sebastian in recent times has often been played as a sexual one. Director John Caird believes that this is a vital misreading:

  [Antonio] deserves gratitude, friendship, filial love--all the most pure things. In other words, he has built Sebastian into something of an idol, and that is one of the most powerful forms of love there is. But if you make it sexual ... then you diminish the other much more important aspects of the play that surround it.85

  4. Lindsay Posner production, 2001: Ben Meyjes as Sebastian "getting himself together after a romp on a large bed with Antonio ... the butch black sailor who's plucked him from the waves" (with Joseph Mydell as Antonio).

  Conversely, Terry Hands believes that "It's a wonderful mirror to the Orsino-Cesario relationship ... but also enables us to see doom very clearly in front of our eyes and to relate that to the other love stories in the play."86

  Antonio sees things as they are, deals in the everyday realities of a relationship, while the lovers discover perhaps more heady and ambiguous truths by dalliance and impulse. Antonio is as much an outsider in his way as Feste and Malvolio are in theirs ... The lovers swirl and exit, perhaps still wrongly paired, it matters not; but they leave Antonio stranded in front of the painted Narcissus, a baffled figure.87

  It seems that in the last fifty years all possible sexual permutations have been explored. But does the overt imposing of a sexual reading on every character connected with the love plot provide maybe one dynamic too many? John Caird, who directed Twelfth Night for the RSC in 1983, pointed to what he felt was key about Viola's male/female persona:

  Viola puts on men's clothes and behaves like a boy, she finds out what life is like in both camps, and by the end of the play she is more sexually complete than she was before. The male and the female have been married in her. Sebastian is going through a similar sort of journey. He is having a relationship of one sort or another with a man in which his masculinity is made passive.88

  It is only on breaking the social conventions of their sex that the characters can meet on a spiritual level outside the affectations of courtly love. We see Orsino reverting to type when he refers to Viola as his "fancy's queen." The formulaic modes of communication which had been broken down by Viola's disguise appear to be reinstalled. Cesario, the catalyst of sexual turmoil, has gone, leaving behind him self-awareness--an understanding of both male and female aspects of the self, for all the lovers involved. As a Lord of Misrule he has been more successful than Feste.

  "This Fellow Is Wise Enough to Play the Fool"

  The Fool knows that the only true madness is to recognize the world as rational.89

  Between the worlds of festivity and reality, self-delusion and sanity, sits Feste. He has been played variously as the orchestrator of the play's action, knowing commentator on the folly of the lovers, and even elevated "to an almost superhuman position."90 This enigmatic character is "rarely played as genuinely funny."91 The melancholic nature of his songs and his bitterly humorous remarks place him outside the "comic" plots, with the effect that in many productions the play is depicted from Feste's viewpoint. Prefiguring Shakespeare's Fool in King Lear, his witticisms attempt to awaken various characters to their "irrational" behavior, the affectations that keep them from reality: Olivia from her mourning, Orsino from his romantic delusions. Maria and Sir Toby use him to mock his true function when confronting Malvolio as "Sir Topas" with the converse aim of turning a sane but deluded man into a madman.

  In an innovative reading of th
e part for Michael Boyd's 2005 production, Forbes Masson played Feste as an integral part of the play's action rather than the usual external observer. An extra dimension was given to the subplot by Feste's obviously hopeless love for Maria. The theme of unrequited love was extended to engulf his world and infiltrate his songs, with the effect that he is commenting as much on himself as on the Orsino-Viola-Olivia love triangle. After the interval we intruded on Feste alone at the piano playing a beautifully pained and sonorous melancholy song, the same he played for Orsino at the start of the play. On Viola's entry he started, as if caught betraying something of himself that he'd rather not show. Not the usual eager force in the plot to bring about the downfall of Malvolio, he walked off the stage in disgust at Maria's device, instantly seeing through her prank as a means to Sir Toby's bed. Painfully aware that he was losing her affection fast, Feste was kept dangling and manipulated by Maria with intimate touches and kisses. Reluctantly he plays the part of "Sir Topas," hoping that the trick will win her favor. One had the sense that Feste knew the inevitable upshot of the plot but, a victim of fate and his own affections, had to play out the game.

  At the end of the play when Feste lamented that "the whirligig of time brings in his revenges," he intimated that the revenge was also upon him. Maria had married and carried away the leglessly drunk Sir Toby, and he has incurred the displeasure of Olivia for his part in the deception of Malvolio. His final song was sung with anger and helpless frustration. Starting with a beautifully sung lament, the tone changed after the first verse and he angrily spat out the words "knaves and thieves" and "toss-pots still had drunken heads." Seeing him used and cast aside by Maria for a particularly vile and drunken Sir Toby, the audience were made painfully aware till the end that the clown who strives to please us every day suffers while we laugh:

  5. Forbes Masson as Feste in Michael Boyd's 2005 production: "After the interval we intruded on Feste alone at the piano playing a beautifully pained and sonorous melancholy song."

  In his chequered suit and with every weary mark of distress writ large upon his whited face, Forbes Masson gives as affecting a performance as I can remember. He sings exceptionally well, accompanies himself on a pub piano and gets the balance between pain and redemptive levity exactly right. He perfectly captures the pathos of his rejection by Meg Fraser's cruelly teasing Maria before magnificently picking up his spirits with "I am gone, sir, and anon, sir."92

  Nigel Hess, the composer for the 1994 Ian Judge production, pointed out that the songs contained in the play are hugely emotional and important and that the actor playing Feste has to be a skilled singer. "Every time Feste sings everybody on stage says, 'What a beautiful voice.' It has to be like that."93 The difficulty of finding an actor talented enough to take on the role of Feste and sing has made this phenomenon a rarity. In 1969, though, Ron Pember, in a highly praised performance, "sang his songs with the gritty voice of the modern, unaccompanied folk-singer."94 Probably the most vicious Feste on the RSC's stage, Pember brought in an element of class consciousness, which accounted for the bitter essence at the heart of the character:

  He was a working man among the leisured classes, deeply critical of their behaviour and bitterly dissatisfied with his own ... [He] spoke like a Londoner, dressed like a faded Harlequin now reduced to busking, and hinted always at a radical's social distaste for the antics of privilege. He despised the effeteness of Orsino's court, and his angry assumption that Viola considered him a beggar ... had all the spikiness of class-pride ... He was discomforting, an outsider, almost malevolently saturnine, defying the sentimental response to Malvolio's plight by pressing home his final accusations with heartless accuracy in Act V.95

  The most effective, highly praised performances of Feste came from interpretations that focused on the more bitter, melancholic aspects of his character. Difficulties with the accessibility of his "jokes" have led to a conscious move away from Feste as "comic" fool to a focus on his more serious function within the play. At his most sublime, the pain he imparts to the audience derives from the fact that Feste sees the world too clearly. In every aspect of light he sees darkness, in every character of worth he sees a flaw. As a melancholy entertainer, a corrupter of words, aware of the follies of love and class, Feste can remind us of Shakespeare himself, who strives to please his audience regardless of the pain that they and he are subject to when the festivities are over, when the play has ended.

  The critic Anne Barton believed that, from a modern perspective, this comedy with its great undertow of melancholy linked the two halves of Shakespeare's working life:

  The play crowns, almost summarizes, the nine Elizabethan comedies he had already produced. Children separated at sea, a heroine forced to disguise herself as a boy, the wise fool, a girl who reluctantly woos her own rival in love, ill considered vows, confusion between twins: these are only a few of the themes which Twelfth Night picks up and elaborates from its predecessors. At the same time, this comedy prefigures the final romances.96

  Twelfth Night was also written around the same time as Hamlet, with Shakespeare's other major tragedies, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, still ahead of him and, in its mixture of comedy and tragedy, foreshadows the so-called problem plays, All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure. As Janice Wardle points out, Twelfth Night is:

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

  A Natural Perspective, that is and is not.

  Much of the play is light-hearted in character, with the comic potential of concealed and mistaken identities running rife. But the other "person" of the play is altogether less frivolous: many critics argue that the dominant mood of the play is sombre and dark, with its emphasis on self-deception and the transience of life and love.97

  Illyria is a land which encompasses all the worlds that Shakespeare inhabits: "How curious a land is this--how full of untold story, of tragedy and laughter, and the rich legacy of human life; shadowed with a tragic past, and big with future promise!"98

  THE DIRECTOR'S CUT: INTERVIEWS WITH SAM MENDES, DECLAN DONNELLAN, AND NEIL BARTLETT

  Sam Mendes was born in 1965 and began directing classic drama both for the RSC and on the West End stage soon after his graduation from Cambridge University. In the 1990s, he was artistic director of the intimate Donmar Warehouse in London. His first movie, American Beauty (1999), won Oscars for both Best Picture and Best Director. His 1998 Donmar production of Twelfth Night (staged in repertoire with Chekhov's Uncle Vanya as his valedictory shows as the theater's artistic director), which he talks about here, featured Emily Watson as Viola, Helen McCrory as Olivia, and Simon Russell Beale as Malvolio.

  Declan Donnellan is joint founder and artistic director of the highly successful theater company Cheek by Jowl, with the designer Nick Ormerod, his partner. Born in England of Irish parents in 1953, he grew up in London and read English and law at Cambridge University. He was called to the Bar at Middle Temple in 1978. For Cheek by Jowl he has directed many Shakespeare plays, including a hugely acclaimed all-male As You Like It. He has also directed for the RSC and the National Theatre, and has worked extensively in Russia, including a Winter's Tale for the Maly Drama Theatre of St. Petersburg. In 2000 he formed a company of actors in Moscow, under the auspices of the Chekhov Festival, whose productions include Pushkin's Boris Godunov, Chekhov's Three Sisters, and the Twelfth Night that he talks about here, which was brought to the RSC Complete Works Festival in 2007.

  Neil Bartlett, born in 1958, is a director, performer, translator, and writer. He was an early member of the theater company Complicite, and has directed at the National Theatre, the Royal Court, the Goodman in Chicago, and the American Repertory Theater in Boston. From 1988 to 1998 he was a member of GLORIA, with whom he created thirteen original pieces including Sarrasine and A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep; from 1994 to 2005 he was artistic director of the Lyric Hammersmith in London, where his thirty-one productions included stagings of Wilde, Maugham, Shaw, Rattigan, Stevenson, Dickens, Britten,
Shakespeare, Moliere, Marivaux, Balzac, Genet, and Kleist. He has written plays, acclaimed novels, and a book mediating gay experience through the figure of Oscar Wilde (Who Was That Man). His RSC productions include Romeo and Juliet and the gender-bending Edwardian-dress 2007 Courtyard Theatre Twelfth Night that he talks about here.

  What does the title mean to you?

  Mendes: It's a mystery to me. I can see why he chose not to call it "Malvolio" in the Folio, as it is so much larger than that, and I can see why he chose not to call it What You Will, as it sounds too much like As You Like It. But I think the title that he ended up with seems to promise a night of revelry, festivity, and disorder, and that of course is not what the play is. So I've always suspected it was a last-minute compromise!

  Donnellan: Twelfth Night, for me, is a highly significant title. Twelfth Night, or 6 January, is the occasion for the Feast of Fools when masters and servants reversed status and played each other. But more significantly Twelfth Night is also the Feast of the Epiphany. A solemn feast of the Catholic church, it is the night of the Magi's visit to the Christ child. But the significance of the visit is immense, for it was the first moment when people in our world realized who Jesus actually was. His significance was understood. This moment of realization or revelation is central to Christian thinking, as it is the moment when the immanent is made manifest. The moment of human perception of the divine. Many writers, like James Joyce, were deeply concerned with this moment, and Shakespeare's plays are full of epiphanic revelations. For example, in many of the comedies, the heroine, filled with the spirit of active love, goes into disguise and her final unmasking is epiphanic. But we don't need to know the word "epiphany" to feel what it is. Falling in love can have the quality of epiphany, of understanding not so much a new thing, as suddenly and gloriously realizing what was always waiting there. When we feel "I love you" we may also feel "I will always love you," but when that love is very deep, we may also have the uncanny feeling "and I have always loved you!" When Viola and Sebastian recognize each other in mysterious images of time, change, and death, we are moved because it connects with our own sense of falling in love, with epiphany. On the other hand, the tragedy of Othello resides in his being unable to recognize this love in Desdemona.