Shakespeare- a Complete Introduction

by Michael Scott

  Greenblatt, S. (1992: 72), Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Oxford: Clarendon Press

  Greenblatt argues that the play has to be considered not in isolation but by ‘swerving’ into historical contextual narratives. He subsequently elaborates this view by extending his research into historical medical transsexual accounts of the period. Although this is a somewhat strained, if not obscure, correspondence of interest in relation to the play itself, it nevertheless offers a critical corrective and an alternative reading to Barber.

  There is some validity in both viewpoints. Barber was writing at a time when the ‘sexual revolution’ of the last decades of the twentieth century that questioned the notion of ‘basic security’ in assumptions, description, articulation or judgement of ‘norms’ was in its infancy. But Greenblatt’s position isn’t beyond question, either. Kiernan Ryan (Ryan [2002: 25], Shakespeare), challenging the new historicist approach, suggests that we go back to the text itself as an active element in an historical process. With Twelfth Night you may wish to take this suggestion further by investigating the structural foundation that makes the play work dramatically.

  Shakespeare’s structural formula in this play not only allows the development of a good story, as the audience likes it, but offers an even more complex depiction of character development, and also of emotion, social satire, sexual humour and ambiguity, while the audience is encouraged to make of it what they want or ‘what you will’. So the subtitle of the play is drawn to our attention. Interestingly, John Marston also wrote a play called What You Will, possibly in the same year, almost as if the two dramatists were shadowing one another.

  ‘What if?’

  Let us experiment, using ‘what you will’ in the context of ‘what if?’ We can imagine a scenario in which a playwright, knowing his sources, which are various, and mapping out his play, asked himself: what if we have a duke who is infatuated with self-love and who professes love for a wealthy woman of a slightly lower social status than himself? What if she rejects him, just as Elizabeth I rejected Philip of Spain? What would he do? A man of self-love – let me (Shakespeare) call him Orsino (a foreign dignitary of that name had recently visited London) – and, given the attribution of the name, a ‘young cub’, how would he react?

  But let me (Shakespeare), having encountered a number of narratives of this kind, complicate it further. What if, at the time of this rejection, a young woman is shipwrecked on a land that I will call Illyria, as it sounds like, but is not, Elysium (Heaven)? What if she thinks her brother, who could be her twin, has drowned and gone to Elysium, but unknown to her has also survived? What would she do to survive in this strange land? What if we call the two women by similar names, making a connection between the two, even in the letters of their name, providing within the narrative parallels a thematic element that suggests a relationship? The first could be Olivia, as in the olive tree, with its connection to the Christian tradition of sadness manifest in relation to the death of Christ. The second woman, the shipwrecked one, we call Viola, a violet being the pure flower of tranquillity, now saddened by death and believing herself to be in danger in an alien land.

  By asking ‘What if?’ we may develop an understanding, not of the way Shakespeare actually created his play, but of the narrative itself. At its centre there are two women who are both sad and in mourning, but whose names interact by a kind of metathesis with each other, thus providing a correspondence between the two.

  We can, of course, introduce further complications into this speculative model. What if there is another potential lover? Just as Olivia is not equal in status to Duke Orsino but rejects him, what if the chief steward of her household, not someone of her station, also believes that she can love him but, like the Duke, is vain and deluded in his desire? Let him even have the letters of her name, Olivia, embedded within his own, ‘Malvolio’, rendered incongruous by the prefix ‘Mal’ (bad). He can be a Puritan who manipulates her mourning in an attempt to become indispensable to her but is frustrated by her anarchic relative Sir Toby Belch and members of her household who are temperamentally and diametrically opposed to him: frivolous, easy-going, self-indulgent, fun-loving. One of these can be a visitor, a ridiculous figure desperate to woo Olivia – Sir Andrew Aguecheek – who is manipulated by her uncle, Sir Toby, an archetypal self-indulgent corpulent Falstaffian figure.

  Complications and conflict

  These ‘what ifs’ provide a recipe for the conflict, which is the essential ingredient of good drama. But the playwright includes a few more ingredients: a fool who stands apart and yet simultaneously can engage with every level of the society that the play depicts, and who comments on what he sees, while at the same time willingly participating in the events. Shipwrecked Viola can dress in similar clothes to her apparently dead brother and she calls herself Cesario (‘little Caesar’) because she was ripped from the sea as if new born (caesarean). Her brother can be named Sebastian, after the saint who, according to Christian tradition, was shot with arrows for his love of God and left for dead, only to be revived to health by Irene. Sebastian is also the same name that the faithfully passionate Julia takes in her disguise in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. His name, of faithful love, is a foil to those of the others: Toby, Malvolio and Toby’s gull Sir Andrew Aguecheek, who, in trying to profess his love to Olivia, is simply ignored. Sir Andrew can even be made to pick a fight with the girl pretending to be the man Cesario, with whom Olivia has fallen in love. The boy actor, feigning female reticence but pitted against a cowardly adversary, raises expectations of a future encounter, which makes for farcical, appealing comedy.

  Creating and animating a tableau

  Now we have the ingredients of the play but, reader, you might like to try an experiment. Go back over the above discussion again and create a tableau in which each image is frozen in juxtaposition with the others as if in a painting. In your mind’s eye, just look for a moment at that painting, which can be called ‘What You Will’, ‘Twelfth Night’ perhaps. After considering the image for a while, animate those frozen figures and we have the play in action in accordance with the Shakespearean formula.

  We start with the problem relating to the threat of multiple deaths. We have a geographical relocation, in that Viola is washed up on a strange shore and is motivated, for her own protection, to disguise herself as a man who gains service in Orsino’s court. In the search for her own identity, she tries to teach Orsino what love is, and in the process she falls in love with him. He, for his part, begins to depend on her, thinking her a man, and sends her to woo Olivia on his behalf. Olivia instantly falls in love with the cross-dressed Viola/Cesario. Confusion reigns; the Fool acts as a commentator on the various events; a trick is played on the other aspiring lover, the Puritan Malvolio, by Sir Toby and the maid Maria who is named after the revered Mother of God.

  All either delude themselves or struggle to find out who they really are. Sebastian, the twin brother, meanwhile, is saved from the sea and, like Antipholus of Syracuse in The Comedy of Errors, is mistaken for his twin but this time it is a twin sister (who in her disguise looks like her brother). In the errors of Twelfth Night and the topsy-turvy world that it depicts, humour and sadness, love and injustice, redemption and aggression all mingle.

  All these issues are resolved in the end by the exposure of all the errors in a single concluding scene. Secretly, Olivia has persuaded Sebastian to marry her, thinking him to be Cesario. The Duke himself now arrives to try to court Olivia, but this time in his own person. Cesario is with him and Olivia, thinking Cesario is her newly wedded husband, reveals to Orsino that she is married to his servant. He responds by turning on her and on Cesario with the violence of the adolescent whose character has been threatened with exposure throughout the play. The concept of accepting all these images together, as you might do with a complex painting, may help you to grasp the totality of this intricately designed play, where one image, and even each reflection,
reflects another. So the play progresses, drawing you towards its ‘most wonderful’ (5.2.210) self-reflective discovery.

  Meanwhile, Sebastian, a faithful agent of true love, has fought with Sir Toby and now appears on stage at the same time as Viola. It is one of the great recognition scenes in Renaissance drama, a moment of quiet anagnorisis, and its emotional power affects audience and dramatic characters alike, as Sebastian recognizes his lost twin sister:

  Do I stand there? I never had a brother;

  Nor can there be that deity in my nature

  Of here and everywhere. I had a sister,

  Whom the blind waves and surges have devour’d:

  Of charity, what kin are you to me?

  What countryman? What name? What parentage?

  Viola replies simply:

  Of Messaline: Sebastian was my father;

  Such a Sebastian was my brother too:

  So went he suited to his watery tomb.

  …

  If nothing lets to make us happy both,

  But this my masculine usurp’d attire,

  Do not embrace me, till each circumstance

  Of place, time, fortune, do cohere and jump

  That I am Viola…

  (5.1.222–7, 228–30, 245–9)

  Within this lengthy recognition scene, which the above quotation draws out a little, we see the traditional elements of classical anagnorisis, including, for example (as in the later play Cymbeline), a physical identifier used to substantiate the characters’ claims – (VIOLA) ‘My father had a mole upon his brow./(SEBASTIAN) And so had mine’ (lines 238–9). But there is also added a Christian reference to resurrection, though in this case it is secularized. As after death, the resurrected Christ forbids those who first see him from touching him, so here, Viola, unlike Rosalind in As You Like It, instructs Sebastian not to embrace her until the truth of what has happened has been finally confirmed.

  Key idea

  Anagnorisis is being gently fused with a secularized expression of the deepest Christian ‘mystery’: resurrection. The impact on the original audiences, consciously or unconsciously, must have been immense and, despite the greater secularization of our own society, this conclusion still retains its emotional power.

  ‘This is I’

  The mature Shakespearean plays, whether comedy or tragedy, insist on exploring the identity of the self – something that, as we have already seen, Shakespeare began to address in The Comedy of Errors. In Hamlet, written possibly in the same year as Twelfth Night, the prince returning to Elsinore reveals himself at the graveside of his love, Ophelia: ‘This is I,/Hamlet the Dane’ (5.1.255–6). In the comedy of Twelfth Night, the twin sister who discovers that her brother is not dead leads to the proof of her own identity: ‘That I am Viola’ (5.1.249). These statements of the substance of the name are confirmations of sanity, self-reconciliation and of community and knowledge. Yet how does the actor or actress playing the respective parts rehearse themselves into an understanding of the fictional character they are portraying?

  They do so, of course, by their training, their technique and accomplishment as professional actors. The directors, in assisting them in any given performance, usually try to find a ‘through-line’ for the play as a whole, an interpretative logic that will provide a consistency in communication. For example, Sir Peter Hall, founding director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, summed up Twelfth Night for his 1958 production by telling his actors that the play ‘like all the comedies, is about growing up’. It is a typical all-embracing simple statement by a director who has to engage his cast with a dominant idea that will provide the glue, the consistency that will cement the various elements of the production together.

  For his 1970 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Peter Brook similarly held to the unifying idea of the play’s ‘rough magic’, a phrase coined by Shakespeare himself in The Tempest. As with Brook in 1970, so Hall in 1958 felt he needed to break away from stereotypical productions, presenting a challenge to the cast and ultimately to the audience. John Barton attempted to do the same thing with his famous production 11 years later, where – quietly, softly, magically, with a cadence of joy in her throat – Judi Dench’s Viola finally acknowledged her name, in what proved to be an almost Chekhovian interpretation of the play with its comic blend of outrage and subtlety.

  As these examples show, characterization comes from the text but it is created through the actor, who is a product of his or her own age, charged with reinterpreting a centuries-old malleable text. Hall’s and Barton’s productions today would not hold the same force as they did in 1958 or 1969, largely because the tastes and expectations of modern audiences have changed. So let me refer you to a more recent stage interpretation.

  Spotlight

  The 2012 RSC production directed by David Farr, with Jonathan Slinger as Malvolio, revealed a cruder, though still effective, bawdy humour in a more explicitly dangerous environment in which Viola literally came out of a reservoir of water. A director might advise the actor playing Malvolio that, while the characters of Viola and Olivia are experiencing the tribulations of youth, his harsh Puritanism is the result of a persistent victimization that makes it difficult for him to learn from experience. It was this that David Farr may have felt was what the characterization needed to communicate to an audience. In the text, Malvolio is imprisoned, a Puritan duped to the point of madness by a Saturnalian. But he is no less ‘human’ in characterization than the Saturnalian himself. Jonathan Slinger’s bawdy exposure in the yellow stockings scene was reflective of a character ‘caught out’ by his own sexual desire – a comically modern Priapus.

  ‘That that is, is’

  In the text, Sir Toby engineers a bitter revenge on Malvolio by manipulating the authority to which his own superior social statues entitles him, to destroy a servile aspiring inferior. Ironically, however, Malvolio is depicted as someone who believes in the superiority of the very social order that humiliates him. The steward’s self-deception has led him to misunderstand the cruel nature of society itself. ‘That that is, is’ (4.2.14) may be a tautology in the play, as claimed by Malcolm Evans, but it is portrayed as a reality of conduct. One should not get above oneself in a hierarchical society and Malvolio’s ‘I’ll be reveng’d on the whole pack of you!’ (5.1.370) may indicate that at the conclusion he is still delusional about himself, but it also points forward to the prospect of a much more serious social upheaval that was to unfold. We might conjecture that, just as in the early twentieth century Anton Chekhov wrote the comedy Uncle Vanya, which looked towards the Russian Revolution, so in Twelfth Night there is a prophetic glance of what will occur after the feasting and comedy is over: the English Revolution and execution of the King in 1649.

  By being imprisoned, Malvolio has been deliberately kept away from the recognition scene. However, in the final scene, Olivia goes as far as her society will allow in promising him that he can be ‘both the plaintiff and judge/Of thine own cause’ (5.1.347–8). His humiliation is too great and for a moment threatens to destroy the comic resolution. Trevor Nunn’s 1996 film version of the play sees him, luggage in hand, leaving the household. It is a justifiable interpretation.

  In the end, Sir Toby conforms to the values of the society by marrying Maria and the Fool remains, just as Malvolio had accurately depicted him, an outsider within the household, an important parasitic commentator who can easily outlive his comic or nuisance value. The Fool knows that ‘the rain it raineth every day’ and that ‘truth’ is less attractive than fantasy but, unlike Malvolio, the appropriately named Feste does not delude himself into thinking that he is other than what he is. This is a comically melancholic play, in which the comedy is used to counterbalance, by means of an anarchic festivity, the seriousness of some of the issues raised.

  Key idea

  In Twelfth Night there is no place for looking back – what is dead is gone – but the present still has to define itself according to the prevailing political and social f
orces and the demands of social and religious conformity that control it. This leaves a modern audience with questions emanating from the nature of both structure and plot.

  We will never know how Shakespeare reacted as a father to the death of his son. This biographical ‘fact’ may or may not haunt this play. But behind this story something lingers. We are born, we cry, we laugh, we endure and we die – sometimes in youth but certainly in old age. It is a view of life and humanity that King Lear will later confirm. In this comedy, Shakespeare’s play confronts both life and death, bringing characters ‘back to life’ to an Illyria where self-absorption finally gives way to a recognition of the mutuality of love. The dramatic structure of Shakespeare’s play determines that this is so.

  We may ask whether he offers us a timeless or a trans-historical truth by offering hope as part of the very process of a self-recognition that gives way to love as the foundation of the social order. We may find critical help in understanding what Shakespeare attempted to do by fictionalizing a ‘what if’, but in the end he still leaves us to make of it ‘what you will’.

  9

  Critical perspectives 2: Theatrical influences on Shakespeare in performance and interpretation

  Conventional literary critical interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays focus largely on the texts, but through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first a greater interest has developed in actual performance and the meanings that it generates. During the early twentieth century two main acting styles emerged, each producing contrasting theatrical perspectives that continue into the present century. The first of these was Stanislavskian, the second Brechtian, but there has also been a movement that aims to present the plays in a manner close to the way the Elizabethans might themselves have performed them.