By giving this undignified scenario a scatological bent, Twelfth Night enhances the leveling effect of its satire. Peter Smith argues that the riddling “M.O.A.I.” in Maria’s letter form “a deliberate echo of the title of The Metamorphosis of A Iax.” And indeed, there is a logic to having Malvolio spell out “the abbreviated title” of this obscene work, since it intimates that Elizabeth’s steward was as well-informed about his lady’s “great Ps” as Olivia’s steward claims to be.74 In discussing “close vault” privies in Ajax, “my Lord of Leicester” objects to the contraption on the grounds that in “a Princes house where so many mouthes be fed, a close vault wil fil quickly.”75 The earl’s concern about the vast quantity of waste produced at court spoofs the “exquisite combination of intimacy, degradation, and privilege” Gail Kern Paster identifies in her discussion of Malvolio as “belonging to the body servants of the great.”76 Improving on an old pun, Ajax collapses serving Elizabeth with servicing her privies. The narrator is “so wholly addicted to her highnesse service” that he “would be glad, yea even proud, if the highest straine of my witte, could but reach, to any note of true harmony in the full consort of her Majesties service, though it were the basest key that it could be tuned to. . . . If men of judgement thinke it may breed a publike benefite, the conceit thereof shall expell all private bashfulnesse.”77 His tongue-in-cheek “publike” discussion of the queen’s great P’s, meant specifically to appeal to “men of judgement,” is among the numerous precedents for the Malvolio plot in Twelfth Night.
Twelfth Night was probably written or rewritten with an eye to pleasing these same “men of judgement,” since it was performed at the Middle Temple on February 2, 1602.78 Its more salacious moments recall the verse satires popular at the Inns of Court, like Thomas Nashe’s The Choice of Valentines; or Nashe, his Dildo (1592–93?) or John Marston’s The Metamorphosis of Pygmalions Image (1598), both of which elaborated with pornographic panache on the contradictions inherent in a cult of virginity that employed tropes of sexual service. Like Jonson’s comical satires, or Harington’s Ajax, these verse satires catered to and cultivated a “simultaneous enthrallment with and distaste of court culture.”79 Government authorities evidently regarded this development as a threat, since they censored key works by Marston, Middleton, Nashe, and others through the Bishop’s Ban of 1599.80 Significantly for my purposes, the average age of those banned was thirty and the average age of those doing the banning was sixty-three.81 The period’s pornographic satire was especially appealing to younger Elizabethan men-about-town, in other words, who used it to indulge their negative perceptions of the aging court.
Twelfth Night’s outré material, its legal terminology, its shafts aimed at Jonson, and its reference to the “bay windows transparent as barricadoes” of the Middle Temple Hall (4.2.36–37)—all appear designed with these disgruntled young men in mind.82 Anthony Arlidge proposes that in “laughing at Malvolio’s social pretensions,” the Middle Templars “would also have been laughing at themselves, for there were few better places than the Inns of Court to climb the greasy pole of social advancement.”83 I think it even more likely that they were laughing at their elders. Harington’s pamphlet and Jonson’s comedies show that jokes about Elizabeth’s favorite men—even those who were long dead—were de rigueur at the Inns of Court, and for good reason. All three of the queen’s “upstart” favorites had launched their storied careers from the Inns of Court. Chosen Revels Prince by the Inner Temple in 1561–62, Robert Dudley brought Gorboduc—a play meant to advance his courtship of the queen—to the Twelfth Night feast of 1562. Christopher Hatton’s handsome personage had attracted Elizabeth’s attention on the same or a similar occasion.84 The last of the queen’s carpet knights, the Middle Templar Walter Ralegh, who had been knighted on Twelfth Night in 1585, had probably attended the 1597/98 Twelfth Night festivities, “play-particles” of which found their way into both Every Man Out and Twelfth Night.85 When Feste alludes to “King Gorboduc” (4.2.14) in a play called Twelfth Night performed at Middle Temple, the joke invokes this institutional history, reminding audiences of the men who had greatness thrust on them by the queen. The fantasy of election by a powerful woman may have retained its allure for this younger generation, since John Webster, a likely attendant at the Middle Temple performance of Twelfth Night, would go on to write The Duchess of Malfi (1612–13), which grants the steward Antonio the aristocratic marriage denied the steward Malvolio.86 After Essex’s rebellion, however, Elizabeth for all intents and purposes isolated herself, and none in attendance that night could hope to follow the great favorites’ path to promotion. This state of affairs seems to have generated a good deal of resentment, which the Malvolio plot exploits.
That resentment extended to ladies who vainly make men dream of advancement. Indeed, the bearbaiting “device” (3.4.140) in Twelfth Night operates like the “straw-devices” of slanderers mentioned by Jonson (Cynthia’s Revels, 3.3.6) or the “slanderous devices” that the Privy Council had objected to in the 1580s.87 It implicates Olivia in a public shaming; “you wrong me,” Malvolio snarls at her “and the world shall know it” (5.1.302–303). Earlier in the play, when speaking to Cesario about the favors she has granted him, Olivia compares her honor to a baited bear:
Under your hard construction must I sit,
To force that on you in shameful cunning
Which you knew none of yours. What might you think?
Have you not set mine honor at the stake,
And baited it with all th’unmuzzled thoughts
That tyrannous heart can think? (3.1.115–20)
Olivia’s keen sense of being on a stage, vulnerable because of her gender and sexuality, subject to “hard construction” and “baited . . . with all th’unmuzzled thoughts / that tyrannous heart can think” expresses something of the shock that court figures must have felt when they found themselves objects of public speculation by satirists. Olivia openly calls bluff on Jonson’s disingenuous claim that only a “hard construction” would find topical reference in the scenarios of satire, like the one in which “a countess” who has “graced” men “beyond all aim of affection” is humiliated (Every Man Out, 2.3.328, 228–32).88 Branding those who set her sexual “honor at the stake” as tyrants, Olivia casts the satiric processes that result in popular judgments as a usurpation of royal authority.
Viewed in the context of the performance at Middle Temple, Twelfth Night stages the revenge of a “whole pack” (5.1.378) on a domineering woman and the men “so wholly addicted to her service” that they are willing to strike the “basest key.” Olivia is punished not just because she pretends to “social” and “bodily autonomy,” as Paster and others argue, but also because she presides over an erotic meritocracy.89 Audience members who laugh at the Malvolio plot become participants in this baiting, which Sir Toby likens to a form of legal judgment when he considers that “we may carry it thus . . . till our very pastime, tir’d out of breath, prompt us to have mercy on [Malvolio]; at which time we will bring the device to the bar” (3.4.137–39). As we saw in previous chapters, anticourt polemicists promoted the idea that public figures could be brought to trial in the court of public opinion. Toby imagines tiring of this familiar “pastime,” which Twelfth Night plays out to the point of exhaustion. The taste of surfeit that attends the baiting of Malvolio reflects a sense that “the joke . . . goes too far,” to quote Ralph Berry, and that it goes on for “too long.”90 By indulging the satiric impulse to the point of surfeit, Twelfth Night generates the feelings of remorse and regret that darken its mood. Even Feste’s fooling “grows old” (1.5.110–11), although the weary clown is the only one attuned to what Anne Barton calls the “realities of death and time.” His melancholy final song underlines that aging, the bodily process by which time hastens us toward death, is among the play’s principal concerns.91
Twelfth Night is not just a satire—it is also a romantic comedy, which hews to its own time by depicting “the follies” of the age
(Every Man Out, induction, 15) as the folly of age. And the ridiculed Malvolio is not the only character who violates generational decorum. Until that antique clock upbraids Olivia for wasting time, most Illyrians ignore the fact that “youth’s a stuff will not endure” (2.3.52). Sir Andrew, who prides himself on how his leg looks dancing a galliard, prefers not to “compare” himself to “an old man” (1.4.118–119). But a “dry hand” signals “age and impotence;” in Sir Toby’s felicitous locution, Andrew is an “old boy” (3.2.8).92 This oxymoron, which recalls the boys who cross-dressed like old men to depict old men behaving like boys in Endymion, indicates that misrule in Illyria does not result from gender or class reversal only. The play’s adult males are all old boys, aging usurpers of youthful privileges, generation-bending counterparts of the gender-bending twins. In its focus on these elderly “boys quarreling over worthless things and . . . engrossed in childish preoccupations,” Twelfth Night evokes Petrarch’s “ninety-year-old little boys,” whose “most notable folly . . . was his desire to continue to have love affairs.”93 Barber argued long ago that “madness” is the play’s operative word.94 In the particular sense of a disrespect for the limits set by time, madness is a condition affecting not just Malvolio, but all Illyrians, including Olivia, who acknowledges being “as mad” as her steward (3.4.14).95
If literary critics rarely comment on Twelfth Night’s preoccupation with aging, theatre practitioners have long been alert to it. Twelfth Night is often staged as a fin-de-siècle affair, in which an old order exhausts itself, an interpretation that involves the use of aging actors. So John Barton’s influential production (1969/70), which highlighted the “elegiac” elements in the play, cast Maria as an elderly woman desperately eager to secure a marriage.96 Trevor Nunn’s melancholy 1996 film featured several aging males in the cast, including Nigel Hawthorne (Malvolio), Mel Smith (Sir Toby), and Ben Kingsley (Feste). And in Tim Carroll’s recent production for the Globe (2012–13), all major parts, with the exception of the twins, were performed by actors well beyond the third age, the period that Ralegh identifies as appropriate for indulging in “days of love, desire, and vanity.”97 Orsino (Liam Brennan) was in his early fifties, Malvolio (Stephen Frye) in his mid-fifties, and Sir Andrew (Roger Lloyd Pack) in his late sixties—all “old boys” in hot pursuit of Mark Rylance’s Olivia. Crowned, heavily made-up, and dripping with pearls, this regal lady conjured up images of aging and raging queens appropriate to the play’s subject matter. According to the New York Times reviewer, even modern-day American spectators found themselves “thinking of . . . Elizabeth I.”98
While the all-male cast of the Globe production showcased the play’s gender-bending effects, the advanced median age of the actors highlighted generational transgressions, contrasting the dignified behavior of the twins to the undignified behavior of their elders. Besides unleashing the satiric potential of the play, this production made visible the unusual configuration of the generational conflict in Twelfth Night, in which two youthful outsiders struggle to integrate into an alluring social elite constituted of aging celibates. Even without the difficult business of Malvolio’s disruptive final line, this represents a substantial revision of the argument of new comedy as explained by Northrop Frye, in which the younger generation endeavors to replace the older generation, not to mate with it. Twelfth Night’s odd swerves from convention follow its preoccupation with the Elizabethan past, albeit in an unexpected way. Like Jonson’s comical satires, Twelfth Night caters to a desire to see old men beaten “before [their] whore” (2 Henry IV, 2.4.257). But this punitive spectacle, satisfying to theatergoers eager for a specific kind of satiric fare, is amended by the twin youths who embrace Olivia and Orsino, redeeming them—and the court figures they evoke—from the general curse of resentment.
Expanding on ambiguities already present in his portrayal of Falstaff, Shakespeare splits this source material in Twelfth Night, refashioning the age-in-love trope by calling attention to its reproducibility and to its generic malleability. Multiple allusions establish a dizzying number of precedents for the aging lovers of Twelfth Night, ranging from the historical Leicester to Lyly’s devoted lover to Shakespeare’s own lecherous old knight to Jonson’s benighted courtiers. This wealth of models shows the innovative performances of Elizabeth’s favorites to be radical not just because they prompt public debate or provoke judgments but also because they serve as “example[s]” and inspire imitations, including those of the satirist and of the comic dramatist. Ralegh, who knew a thing or two about the process by which “greatnesse” might be achieved, explains in “Of Favorites” that if “one man acted ill his part / Lett an other mend the play.”99 The emulation of former favorites can lead to refinement; where Malvolio acts “ill his part,” Orsino is the “other” who “mend[s] the play.” Orsino lacks the social ambition and mercenary motives that deform most Elizabethan iterations of the aging lover, since his “love, more noble than the world, / Prizes not quantity of dirty lands” (2.4.81–82). Mocked by other characters, he is spared by the play itself, which displaces his less attractive traits, like “self-love” or “narcissism and potential effeminacy,” onto Malvolio.100 By providing these mirrors more than one of the queen’s favorites, Shakespeare counters one-sided accounts of the court’s impact on English culture and underlines the logical glitch in Jonson’s attack on the probability of romantic comedies, showing that these could reflect the dreams which structured Elizabethan political reality.
Olivia describes her suitor as “of great estate, of fresh and stainless youth” (1.5.259), which may appear to disqualify Orsino for the role that I am here proposing. Yet Orsino’s views on marriage show that he is older than Olivia. A proponent of letting “still the woman take / An elder than herself” (2.4.29–30), he is “elder” than Olivia, who in turn is “elder” than Viola. We are encouraged to think Olivia “cannot love” Orsino (1.5.262) because of his age when Toby explains that “She’ll not match above her degree, neither in estate, years, nor wit; I have heard her swear’t” (1.3.109–11). Orsino sends Cesario to Olivia because he thinks she would reject “a nuntio’s of more grave aspects” (1.4.28), a fear shown to be warranted when Olivia decides to “show favor” to Cesario because he is a “youth” (3.2.19). Shakespeare endows Orsino with a substantial past, which links him not just to the seasoned Antonio but also to Viola’s deceased father, who reported to his young daughter that Orsino “was a bachelor then” (1.2.29). Olivia’s suitor is uncle to a daring “young nephew Titus,” old enough to have been injured in the naval skirmish with Antonio (5.1.63). All this backstory dates Orsino, identifying him with an older generation of men, including Malvolio and Sir Andrew. That Orsino has remained a bachelor indicates an unwarranted delay and even a breach of marital norms; “he might have took his answer long ago,” Olivia shrewishly observes (1.5.263).
Through a verbal demotion of his duke, Shakespeare strengthens the parallels between this aging “Count Orsino” (1.5.101) and the “overweening rogue” who dreams of being made “Count Malvolio” (2.5.29, 35). The captain in 1.2 first identifies Orsino as “a noble duke” who governs Illyria (1.2.25), a man whose “favors” causes others to be “advanc’d” (1.4.1–2), not one who need beg favors for himself. Yet Orsino speaks like “an aspiring courtier,” Leonard Tennenhouse observes, and negotiates “sexual relations which completely overturn his position of political superiority in relation to Olivia.”101 If Orsino’s Petrarchan rhetoric is hard to reconcile with that of a “Duke . . . in love with a Countess,” perhaps he is not a duke after all, just as Olivia is not really a countess. Only the captain refers to Orsino by this title. Other characters refer to Orsino as “the Count” who “woos” Olivia (1.3.107–8). Sir Toby assures Sir Andrew that “she’ll none o’ th’ Count” (1.3.109–11), for example, and Olivia consistently calls her unwanted suitor “Count Orsino”—“if it be a suit from the Count, I am sick, or not at home” (1.5.107–8). Cesario is identified as “the County’s man” by Olivia
(1.5.301; 3.1.100), Olivia’s servant (3.4.57–58), Maria (2.3.132), and Sir Toby (3.2.34). And Antonio remembers having fought “‘gainst the Count his galleys” (3.3.26) when he is arrested “at the suit of Count Orsino” (3.4.326–27).102 A preponderance of evidence thus reframes Orsino’s relationship to Olivia as one in which a “Count Orsino” courts a maiden “princess” (5.1.299).
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