This scenario is more in keeping with Twelfth Night’s retrospective elements, especially when we consider that “Count Orsino” translates to “Earl Little Bear.”103 Baited by his “desires, like fell and cruel hounds,” Orsino raises the same familiar ghosts as Malvolio does. Although he was sometimes referred to as a “great Beare,” Leicester deferred to his older brother, the Earl of Warwick, describing himself and Ambrose to Elizabeth as “your Ursus Major and Minor, tied to your stake.”104 Satirists followed suit when they called the earl a “Bearwhelp.”105 With his telltale name, his dashing nephew, and his Petrarchan posturing, Orsino evokes the more romantic aspects of the elegant earl who had courted Elizabeth in the guise of “Deep Desire” and whom “dogges” had wanted to see “fast chained to a stake, with muzzle-cord, collar, and ring, and all other things necessary” for his amorous efforts.106 Unlike this bear-like target of Elizabethan satire, and unlike his counterpart Malvolio, Twelfth Night’s “little bear” avoids the humiliation of a protracted public baiting. He deviates further still from historical and satiric precedent when he secures the marriage conventional to the ending of romantic comedy. If the Malvolio plot caters to “men of judgment,” the Orsino plot helps Shakespeare mount a defense of the “autumn judgments” that Jonson had mocked.
All those references to bearbaiting signal Shakespeare’s interest in engaging the same audiences about the same subjects as Jonson, although with different ends, and arguably greater success. By the turn of the century, bearbaiting, like the related words “device” and “sport” used in Twelfth Night, had become linked with the genre for which Jonson professes a “caninum appetitum” (Every Man Out, induction, 305).107 Thomas Middleton’s Microcynicon: Six Snarling Satires (1599) and William Goddard’s A Mastif Whelp with Other Ruff-Island-lik Currs Fetcht from Amongts the Antipedes. which Bite and Barke at the Fantasticall Humorists and Abusers of the Time (1615) show that satirists habitually figured attacks on actual persons as a form of dogging.108 When Thomas Dekker accused Jonson of being “a Ban-dog” that bites after collaborating with Nashe on the tantalizingly titled Isle of Dogs (1597), Dekker hinted at the reason that this play ran afoul of authorities, namely its satiric treatment of real people.109 Although homonymically Jonson may have “loved dogs,” the Elizabethan authorities did not share his enthusiasm. Jonson later acknowledged that Isle of Dogs was censored for glancing at “particular persons.”110 We may never know why the play raised the government’s hackles or whom it targeted, but Jonson was instrumental in furthering the association of personal satire with “dogs [that] do bark” (Cynthia’s Revels, 3.3.29).
Jonson is a particular target of Twelfth Night for other reasons, including the fact that he arrogates unprecedented powers to satirists. His “public, scurrilous, and profane jester” Carlo Buffone is a “bandog” who specializes in “absurd similes” that “swifter than Circe . . . transform any person into deformity,” for example (Every Man Out, “Characters,” 19–20; 1.2.185–86). The comparative allusion to Circe invokes the public debate about the queen’s transformative powers to insist on the satirist’s superior abilities. Through their “absurd similes” satirists can degrade even the men elevated by the queen, a point Buffone makes and illustrates. According to a credible anecdote, Jonson based the character on Charles Chester or Jester, an “impertenent fellow” who had provoked Ralegh into sealing his “mouth . . . with hard wax.”111 In Every Man Out, Puntarvolo plays Ralegh to Carlo’s Charles. The Petrarchan, Ovidian, and Arthurian affectations of this “vainglorious” courtier—back from hunting deer, the self-identified “knight errant” finds himself “planet-struck” by his wife, a “brighter star than Venus” (“Characters,” 11; 2.2.120, 105–6)—are “tedious” (2.2.135) because they borrow from the stale discourses of the Elizabethan court.112 Constituted of the same “play-particles” as Puntarvolo, Orsino mitigates such satiric depictions of the queen’s courtiers.
Although Jonson avers himself greedy “to catch at any occasion that might express his affections to his sovereign,” his mockery of the aging court undermines his praise of the “Blessèd, divine, unblemished, sacred, pure / Glorious, immortal, and indeed immense” Elizabeth (Every Man Out, 5.6.79–80).113 And at every turn Jonson identifies Shakespearean forms of theatricality with the “old stale” (4.3.237) targets of his political satire. His attempts to usurp Elizabeth’s royal authority are thus also attempts to establish artistic supremacy over Shakespeare. Eager to revise old models of subject and sovereign relations, Jonson proposes an alliance of sovereign and satirist, in which the (young) satirist’s masculine judgment compensates for the (aged) sovereign’s feminine lack of judgment. While the comical satires appeal to virile rational faculties, the “old” new comedy caters only to effete pleasures, “servilely” fawning on the audience’s “applause” (Every Man Out, induction, 55).114 By his personification, Jonson links old-style romantic comedies with old-style courtiers. When Macilente likens the ladies’ shallow preferment of well-clad revelers over men of sober judgment to their worship of “my lord chancellor’s tomb” (3.3.22), he also equates effeminate theatricality with bygone royal favorites, acknowledging Christopher Hatton’s “gravity, his wisdom, and his faith / to my dread sovereign” only in passing (3.3.23–24). The female “comet” at which Jonson’s court gallants “wonder,” meanwhile, recycles Shakespearean comic repartee “of the stamp March was fifteen years ago” (3.3.119–21). And Captain Shift, the Falstaff clone, prides himself on having “seen Flushing, Brill, and the Hague with this rapier, sir, in my Lord of Leicester’s time” (3.1.299).
Despite their rejection of the tired tropes of new comedies, Jonson’s comical satires rely on that most old-fashioned of mechanisms, election by a queen, for closure. Indeed, Jonson defended the controversial 1599 ending to Every Man Out by explaining “there hath been precedent of the like presentation in divers plays” before.115 While this may be true, Jonson’s comedies substantially revise the relationship between the queen-figure and her elect man. Like Macilente, Criticus becomes Cynthia’s chosen “minion” (Cynthia’s Revels, 4.5.26) by play’s end, deputed to pass judgment and impose punishment on other courtiers. In contrast to Lyly’s sovereign goddess, this much weaker Cynthia needs help to “distinguish times / And sort her censures” (5.5.186–87). Criticus is better equipped to decide who is fit and “Unfit to be in Cynthia’s court” (4.6.33) than she is. The goddess accepts his advice, acknowledging that “Princes that would their people should do well / Must at themselves begin, as at the heads” (5.5.257–58). In proposing that the queen’s judgment needs masculine correction, Jonson aligns himself with the polemicists who justified their attacks on the queen’s men as invitations to commit “the noble act of justice.” These arguments were grounded, as Jonson’s satires are, on the misogynist assumption that Elizabeth’s feminine passion distorted her judgment. Leicester’s Commonwealth warns against “the general grudge and grief of mind, with great mislike” generated on account of the “excessive favor showed to” Leicester “so many years without desert or reason,” noting that “the grief and resentiment thereof doth redound commonly in such cases not only upon the person delinquent alone, but also upon the sovereign by whose favor and authority he offereth such injuries.”116 For all its startling insinuations, the passage reflects the common view, shared by Jonson, that “the Prince is a publique person, and therefore ought to be without private affection and respect, or partialitie.”117 By combatting the effects of regal partiality, Criticus enacts a “fantasy of wish-fulfillment” in which advancement at court reflects “learning and moral probity” rather than personal charisma—values that Leah Marcus argues Jonson saw himself as embodying and that he hoped would “earn him the place of royal favorite.”118
Insofar as satire renders up private matters for public discussion, it is a perverse reenactment of the favorite’s desire for intimacy with “great ones.” Although Jonson does not seem attuned to this irony, Shakespeare is. The Falstaff pl
ays endorse the idea that the critical detachment of theatrical audiences enables them to compete with their monarch in the exercise of “right wits” and political “good judgments” (Henry V, 4.7.47–48). But in Twelfth Night “private affection” and “excessive” emotion define all participants in the bearbaiting scenario, including the dogs who become interchangeable with the bears they pursue. From Valentine to Feste to Orsino, characters react to the perception of favoritism by the bitter show of “grief and resentiment,” passions that turn out to be as distorting as “excessive favor.” Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, and Feste all loathe Malvolio because he is Olivia’s favorite, and their own good fortunes depend on securing or maintaining her favor for themselves. Like Orsino, they are motivated by the desire to act out against the “instrument / That screws” them from what they take to be their “true place” in Olivia’s “favor” (5.1.122–23). The rancorous resentment of Olivia’s “minion” (5.1.125), far from distinguishing the other men from the ambitious steward or the upwardly mobile twins, implicates them in their own judgments. When Orsino suspects Viola of having usurped Olivia’s affections, he calls her a “dissembling cub”—that is, a younger, craftier, smaller bear: “what wilt thou be,” he asks, “when time hath sow’d a grizzle on thy case? (5.1.164–65). As a “cub” Viola is quite literally the “Count’s youth” (3.2.34). The “whirligig of time” (5.1.377), which raises Viola and Sebastian aloft, ensures Orsino’s demotion to a snarling dog, who threatens to “tear” Viola to pieces (5.1.127). The proliferation of “coxcomb[s]” and “assehead[s]” (5.1.205–6) at play’s end further attest to the ready transformation of baiters into baited.119
In emphasizing the masculine competition for a place in Olivia’s affection, Twelfth Night presents the resentment of favorites as a distempered form of self-love. Since this resentment is the product of thwarted desire, the play’s ban-dogs are invested in the same structures of desire as the bears they bait. Malvolio is “dogg’d” (3.2.76) for acting on a fantasy held in common—not just “the dream of acting the part of a gentleman,” of “laying claim to higher status,” as Greenblatt would have it, but the much more specific Elizabethan dream of being preferred by a powerful woman.120 Like Jonson’s Criticus, the participants in Malvolio’s baiting believe that their “sport” enacts a form of justice, that it enforces civilized constraints of behavior, that it protects class and generational hierarchies. Shakespeare reframes it as a violent revenge instead, “a savage jealousy” that “savors nobly” only to those who give in to it (5.1.119–20). Fabian defends the “device against Malvolio” by claiming that it “may rather pluck on laughter than revenge” (5.1.360–66). But Fabian’s defense would have rung hollow to Sidney, whose presence also haunts this play, and who saw laughter “at deformed creatures” as “most disproportioned to ourselves and nature.”121 On one end of the spectrum, comedy resembles a scapegoating mechanism in which social revenge is exacted from individuals charged with breaking decorum.122 Pushed far enough it approaches what Frye calls “a lower limit,” “the condition of savagery, the world in which comedy consists of inflicting pain on a helpless victim,” and shades into something altogether different, like the revenge tragedies that haunt the final moments of Twelfth Night.123 When the unregenerate Malvolio threatens all assembled, the medicinal qualities that Jonson claims for satire are shown to work like the poisons of revenge tragedies instead.124 If the bearbaiting “device” has a self-perpetuating power in Twelfth Night, its ability to reproduce itself involves the spread of complicity and guilt, a contaminating process that leaves some audience members “ashamed” of themselves, as Ralph Berry is.125 Unlike Fabian, or Jonson for that matter, Shakespeare had second thoughts about the ethics of engaging in such “sportful malice” (5.1.365).
Twelfth Night gives the satiric impulse free reign but in a way that undermines the satirist’s normative claim to moral and intellectual superiority.126 Since characters are versions of one another, efforts to draw lines, arrive at distinctions, or establish standards founder. In the Falstaff plays the old knight’s isolation renders judgment possible; Hal and Poins, or Mistress Ford and Mistress Page, can bait Falstaff without finding themselves implicated in this baiting. Because Falstaff only is guilty of the generational and gendered transgressions associated with the court, his baiting results in the reassertion of commonly held norms and values. But the elaborate system of similitudes linking the characters of Twelfth Night challenges attempts at stable judgments. As Berry points out, “the movement upwards is caricatured in Malvolio, but the others demonstrate it too. There is a general blurring of social frontiers in Olivia’s household, and this contributes to the frictions and resentments of the play.”127 If Falstaff stands for judgment, Malvolio stands for the limits of judgment. According to satiric norms, Malvolio deserves punishment for thinking he can convert sexual appeal into sociopolitical advantage. But what about Maria, Sebastian, or Viola, then? Or any Elizabethan intent on advancing himself by serving a powerful woman in some base function, as Leicester, Hatton, Harington, Jonson, Shakespeare, and the lawyers of Middle Temple did? How, under such circumstances, can anyone claim with certainty to tell the dog from the bear? In provoking these questions, Twelfth Night performs a metatheatrical version of what Sidney claims is the highest function of comedy: opening the satirist’s “eyes” by having “his own actions contemptibly set forth.” Taking his cue from Leicester’s brilliant nephew, who had ample reasons to distrust “people who seek a praise by dispraising others,” Shakespeare proposes that “instead of laughing at the jest” we “laugh at the jester.”128
Although it reproduces the patterns of the Falstaff plays, Twelfth Night thus comes to a more skeptical evaluation about the discourses of embodiment that marked the advent of the public sphere. The slanderous “pastimes” associated with this phenomenon assume an uncontrollable life of their own in this play. Like the sea described by Orsino in the first scene, “nought enters there, of what validity or pitch so’ever, / But falls into abatement and low price / Even in a minute” (1.1.11–13). The play’s maritime images of ravenous, indiscriminate hunger combine with its multiple references to dogs to evoke yet another myth, that of Scylla, the monstrous creature furnished with a ring of baying dogs’ heads for a waist. The licentious, satiric, and pornographic works of disgruntled Elizabethan subjects sought redress for the perception that serving a queen was an emasculating condition. Like Malvolio, the queen’s great favorites became scapegoats for the regime itself because they epitomized this condition, which was common to all Elizabethans. The barking authors of satires sought to distinguish themselves from these submissive men by placing limits on their monarch’s sovereignty. When they unmuzzled their “tyrannous” thoughts, these “substractors” may well have gone about bringing to light a worse alternative. As Olivia points out in one of the play’s many oblique allusions, “If one should be a prey, how much the better / To fall before the lion than the wolf!” (3.1.128–29). In these days of media-fueled resentment and toxic masculinity, Shakespeare’s old-fashioned comedy can seem oddly prescient in expressing reservations about the new forms of “sportful malice” transforming Elizabethan society.
Not that Twelfth Night concludes on the violent notes that haunt it. The characters who are able to recognize and acknowledge their similarities to one another manage to escape with their dignity partially restored. When Olivia movingly identifies herself with a baited bear, she inspires Viola to “pity” (3.1.123). Olivia claims “that’s a degree to love,” a claim that Viola denies because “very oft we pity enemies” (3.1.123–25). Olivia confirms the wisdom of Viola’s observation, when she in turn finds it in her heart to pity Malvolio, who has publicly accused her of having wronged him, exposing her to “much shame” (5.1.308). Olivia’s “Alas, poor fool, how they have baffled thee” shows her recognition that he has been “notoriously abus’d” (5.1.369, 379), as she herself is. The structures of kinship among the characters encourage moments of kindness that
unsettle satiric judgment. If Twelfth Night gives us in Malvolio a courtly servant become communal enemy, it also asks us to feel an adulterating compassion for this troubled and troubling butt of ridicule. Readers from Charles I to Charles Lamb to Ralph Berry have modeled their responses to Malvolio on Olivia’s, finding that something about the play’s “design” forces us into “reversing” the satirical “judgments” it initially provokes.129 The claim that “none can be call’d deform’d but the unkind” (3.4.368) gets at this aspect of the play, and conveys an abiding skepticism regarding the satirist’s task as Jonson defined it: to use the stage as a “mirror” where the audience might see “the time’s deformity / Anatomized in every nerve and sinew” (Every Man Out, induction, 116–19). Twelfth Night undermines the credibility of the satiric tradition it draws on, offering a critique of the “whole pack” of writers dogging the Elizabethan government, and urging us to temper our judgments of public figures with compassion.
It also generates a revised version of satiric materials, which values the aging lover for his longstanding and controversial association with the performative arts. Shakespeare does not seek to persuade, correct, or provoke rational judgment in his portrait of Orsino. The traits he ridicules in Malvolio he aestheticizes in Orsino, who is a poet and a lover, rather than a lunatic.130 While all of Olivia’s suitors think about courtship in theatrical terms, Orsino is interested in this performance as an end in itself. A playwright of sorts, he unclasps “the book even” of his “secret soul” to the boy actor Cesario, giving him tips on how not to be “denied access,” and appreciatively noting that “it shall become thee well to act my woes” (1.4.14–16, 26). The pleasure that Orsino takes in refining this performance helps shield him from the ridicule endured by Malvolio, as does the fact that we never see Orsino courting Olivia in person. This omission allows audiences to respond to the lyrical count on grounds other than the ones proposed by satirists. If Orsino fails as Olivia’s lover, he succeeds as an artist, since his intended “audience” (1.4.18) proves receptive to his “book,” albeit not in the way he had hoped. His actual audience is even more susceptible. Like the “little western flower, / Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound” (2.1.166–67) in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Viola is transformed by the erotic energies Orsino misdirects at a fair vestal. Insofar as her enraptured response serves as model for our own, Orsino “seduces rather than convinces,” as all nostalgic creations do.131 His desire for Olivia may be vain, in that it produces no biological issue, but it inspires Viola’s affection and engenders the play’s strange, melancholic beauty.
Age in Love Page 18