(no subject)
My Shakespeare essay, which I am slightly proud of in spite of a howler in the second paragraph and the weakest conclusion in existence. But I'll fix that tomorrow.
Not many things on the earth are funnier than incongruity-moments when what we expect and what we see are so radically different that we cannot help but laugh. One might paraphrase John Buchan’s definition of Romance, “Incongruity is strangeness flowering from the commonplace” (Buchan 1928, p 44). It may be strange and shocking, it may turn everything upside-down and smile (like both Malvolio and prim Patience-on-a-monument) at grief, but it is only funny because it contrasts so strongly with the real world. In Twelfth Night, Shakespeare paints a picture of a world where everyone has gone inexplicably mad, nothing is exactly what it seems, and conventions are turned on their heads for laughs.
On the face of it, “Twelfth Night” is a rather odd name for a play taking place in a fantasy land at no explicitly-stated time of year. People today still assume the play was written for the feast of Twelfth Night, although no conclusive evidence seems to exist to suggest it. On the other hand, it is my contention that the philosophy and traditions of Twelfth Night resound loudly throughout the play.
Twelfth Night, celebrated on the “twelfth day of Christmas,” on January 5th, was celebrated in memory of that time God came to earth, paradoxically, as a baby. Such topsy-turvy incongruity grew to incorporate some aspects of the Roman Saturnalia festival, an orgy of misrule. On Twelfth Night in Elizabethan England, roles were reversed. Masters became servants and servants became masters. The Twelfth Night Tart was made with a bean in one slice; the person who got that slice was crowned King or Queen of Misrule and presided over the wild festivities (Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare n.d.) It is this atmosphere of cheerful anything-goes misrule and drunken headiness that pervades Shakespeare’s play.
Illyria, the play’s setting, seems to be at once a real place and a legend. It exists, but nobody knows much about it, so in their minds it becomes a place very much like Elizabethan England, but with the delightful strangeness of some idyllic Arcady. Instead of youthful, artistic-looking shepherds and sweet, jewelled shepherdesses speaking in elegant verse, however, Illyria is peopled with characters straight out of the English world who mug up foreign phrases, refer to English landmarks such as St Bennet Hithe, and could have stepped straight out of any Twelfth Night party in the country. It is at once far removed from and strangely like England, giving it a fantasy feeling where the playgoer might nevertheless feel at home.
But perhaps the most striking parallel is the fact that they have Twelfth Night in Illyria too, and the most striking difference is that in Illyria, it rules year-long; it pervades everything, and is so omnipresent that it is never even named.
Without this element of madness, the play would sound quite like every other melodramatic faux-Italian romantic comedy ever heard of, with a decorous and passionate hero in Orsino and a heroine beautiful but stony-hearted-although for good reason (Summers 1983). Then some miracle happens (Orsino saves Olivia from runaway horses? Robbers? A heartless sorcerer?) and the pair live happily ever after, right? Wrong. It’s Twelfth Night, and all that is turned upside-down and shaken up and twisted inside-out so many times and in so many unusual ways that the whole play becomes a dazzling twist of eye-confusing colours-like a whirligig or spinning mirror (Bloom 1999).
In a play titled Twelfth Night written in the spirit of Twelfth-Night antics, one might expect to find surprising reversals, and indeed they are there. Servants become masters, masters become servants, wise men fall into folly and fools rise to wisdom, women and men cross over into untrodden territory and peer through the eyes of the other sex for a while. But in Shakespeare’s hand, the reversals never stay still; they are always changing into yet another contradiction; they go from insanity to hilarity to bathos to imminent tragedy, only to bounce back to hilarity again. These simpler reversals are just the materials with which he knits his comedy.
When the play opens, the Duke is sighing out his hopeless love like a good romantic lead, except that not only does he seem to be thoroughly enjoying his melancholy, he also doesn’t seem to be in any hurry for it to end-and he has its imagery hopelessly mixed up (Summers 1983). Olivia, meanwhile, has dramatically declared her intention of remaining celibate to mourn her brother (it should be noted that such resolutions in Shakespeare are always a sign of impending matrimony; compare with Love’s Labours Lost). But then Viola comes to Illyria, at once sane and insane; showing up the madness of Orsino’s romantic fervour and Olivia’s grief for her brother by her own silent love and measured grief-and yet, dressed as a young man and employing her own topsy-turvy wit (Summers 1983).
In her disguise, Viola is the best example of Shakespeare’s constant reversal and re-reversal. Not only is she sane and insane, man and woman; she is also, in a way, both twins mixed together-or, one twin retaining both identities. (Not until further into the play, when Viola is forced by Olivia’s impatience and Sir Andrew’s duel to distinguish her feminine identity and keep it from slipping into the androgynous Cesario, does Sebastian emerge as the male twin). She is, moreover, doubly a reversal in the servant-master relationship with Orsino and Olivia. She is on one level the confidante and go-between, so often overlooked in romantic comedies, who has become the real heroine; and on another level, she is the servant who becomes through love the mistress of Orsino and the master of Olivia. Malvolio thinks Olivia is in love with him, but Cesario is the servant she loves, even though Cesario is neither Cesario not really a servant, being Viola, a young woman of gentle birth-and sometimes not even Viola, but Viola’s brother!
Malvolio’s situation is similar. Olivia’s household, which we learn so much about, is clearly divided into two sections: Malvolio, the sober steward, and those in alliance against him. Malvolio’s speeches themselves are, until the gulling scene, quite reasonable and dignified; Maria calls him a “kind of puritan,”-a respectable sort of religion-and he seems, all in all, to be simply in the unenviable position of carrying his mistress’s orders to those who will see his interference as uncalled-for and officious. But then we see another side of Malvolio-the fact that he is hopelessly in love with himself. His religion, his passion for Olivia, his staid and reverend demeanour are no more than a way of displaying his own wonderful qualities . Maria says, “It is his grounds of faith that all that look on him love him” (II.iii. 141-2). Malvolio has set himself up as a wise man, and he has become a fool-in stark contrast to Feste, whose foolery is a shrewd wisdom: his disguise as Sir Topas is at once a reversal and a fulfilment of Feste’s nature.
The impossibly-named duo of Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek are also paradoxical. Sir Toby should probably be Olivia’s father-figure and Sir Andrew is after all, a suitor-but they spend more time carousing with the servants than in Olivia’s company. The servants themselves, Maria and Fabian, are strangely (or suitably, considering the play’s title) above themselves-they scheme and conspire with their mistress’s uncle, berate the steward, and show no respect whatsoever for their mistress beyond what is necessary to keep their jobs.
But then Shakespeare elevates this giddy company above the sober steward-gives them a resounding victory over him; turns the fool into the priest, the carouser into the solicitous head of the family, and marries the maid to the knight, while plunging Malvolio into madness and impotent fury. “Alas, poor fool, how have they baffled thee!” cries Olivia (V.i. 364)-but it isn’t Feste she is addressing.
Even this situation does not last long, however! The timid Viola turns unexpectedly into the indignant Sebastian, and Sir Toby and Sir Andrew end up on the bottom of the quickly-spinning wheel yet again. From respected uncle to carouser, from carouser to successful practical joker, from joker to attentive caretaker of madmen, from caretaker to comic butt once again-Sir Toby is never a winner or loser for long. One can’t help but think of Feste’s spinning-top image, “this whirligig of time” (V.i 371-2). Comedy and tragedy, male and female, winner and loser, master and servant chase each other round and round in ever-narrowing circles.
But even in Illyria, misrule cannot do wholly without rules. The fool is Sir Topas, and the “puritan” is the self-loving and possibly mad fool, yet the roles of priest and puritan and fool and madman are themselves unchallenged. Viola dresses as a man for a while, but in the end she will return to her women’s clothes to become a wife. None of this reversal of male and female, master and servant, wise and fool, sane and mad, would make any sense unless those things themselves had particular, objective meanings-inside the play as well as outside. Malvolio is, actually, a self-loving fool. Viola is, actually, a girl; her alarm at the prospect of a duel is something Cesario cannot face out. The Duke rules Illyria, however irresponsibly he mopes; Olivia’s house has a steward and servants, and however unruly they may be, however Shakespeare shakes them and pushes one down and another up, the whole point of it is that all of them are more or less on a level-all of them are paid servants. The madness of the play operates within a sane perspective. Olivia’s plight is only funny because Viola is unalterably a girl, despite her disguise. We laugh because of the incongruity-Olivia thinks she’s in love with a man, but the man is a woman. If there was real lesbian feeling, it would be poignant rather than hilarious. It is a peculiarity of this kind of humour that if the fancy is detached from real life, it ceases to be funny. The Bishop of London riding an elephant would arouse no surprise in New Delhi. In the middle of Piccadilly, however, it becomes remarkable. Olivia is funny because she is ‘in love’ with a girl; Malvolio is funny because he is a steward; Feste is funny because he is a fool, in spite of his wisdom; and Sir Andrew is funny because he is a suitor and a coward and a dullard.
The paradox works on another level, not just within the play. In England, Twelfth Night comes only once a year: to paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, “The spectacle may be mad, but the spectator must be sane” (1958, p 251). The English Twelfth Night gives meaning to the perpetual Illyrian Twelfth Night. Because, in England, masters are masters and servants are servants, the play works. In a strictly egalitarian society, in a society where men and women were homogeneous, and nobody bothered to distinguish between wise men and fools, the play would lose all meaning. But in its context of an orderly England, the land of Misrule, the perpetual Twelfth Night of Illyria, can thrill and entertain for a while-even if you don’t bother to sift through to the bottom of every twist of colour and flash of light from the mad whirligig.
“Our play is done,” sings the fool. Return to England in winter, where tomorrow morning everyone will wake up in their proper place as master or servant, and the world will progress as staidly as ever-or, at least, until next Twelfth Night.
References:
Bloom, H 1999, ‘Twelfth Night’, in Shakespeare: The invention of the human, Fourth Estate, London.
Buchan, J 1928, The runagates club, Nelson, Edinburgh, p 44.
Chesterton, GK 1958, The man who was Thursday (1907), in A GK Chesterton Omnibus, Methuen, London, p 251.
Shakespeare, W ‘Twelfth Night, or What You Will’, in Abrams MH et al, Norton Anthology of English Literature, 7th ed., vol. 1, WW Norton, New York & London.
Summers, JJ 1983, ‘The masks of Twelfth Night’ (1955), in Shakespeare: Twelfth Night, a casebook, DJ Palmer (ed.). Macmillan Press, London.
Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare n.d., American Players Theatre, Spring Green, Wisconsin, viewed 10 May 2006,
EDIT: How'd THAT happen?...all fixed, anyway.
EDIT AGAIN: Oh, btw, Roselet, the Bishop of London has nothing to do with your New Delhan bf...
Not many things on the earth are funnier than incongruity-moments when what we expect and what we see are so radically different that we cannot help but laugh. One might paraphrase John Buchan’s definition of Romance, “Incongruity is strangeness flowering from the commonplace” (Buchan 1928, p 44). It may be strange and shocking, it may turn everything upside-down and smile (like both Malvolio and prim Patience-on-a-monument) at grief, but it is only funny because it contrasts so strongly with the real world. In Twelfth Night, Shakespeare paints a picture of a world where everyone has gone inexplicably mad, nothing is exactly what it seems, and conventions are turned on their heads for laughs.
On the face of it, “Twelfth Night” is a rather odd name for a play taking place in a fantasy land at no explicitly-stated time of year. People today still assume the play was written for the feast of Twelfth Night, although no conclusive evidence seems to exist to suggest it. On the other hand, it is my contention that the philosophy and traditions of Twelfth Night resound loudly throughout the play.
Twelfth Night, celebrated on the “twelfth day of Christmas,” on January 5th, was celebrated in memory of that time God came to earth, paradoxically, as a baby. Such topsy-turvy incongruity grew to incorporate some aspects of the Roman Saturnalia festival, an orgy of misrule. On Twelfth Night in Elizabethan England, roles were reversed. Masters became servants and servants became masters. The Twelfth Night Tart was made with a bean in one slice; the person who got that slice was crowned King or Queen of Misrule and presided over the wild festivities (Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare n.d.) It is this atmosphere of cheerful anything-goes misrule and drunken headiness that pervades Shakespeare’s play.
Illyria, the play’s setting, seems to be at once a real place and a legend. It exists, but nobody knows much about it, so in their minds it becomes a place very much like Elizabethan England, but with the delightful strangeness of some idyllic Arcady. Instead of youthful, artistic-looking shepherds and sweet, jewelled shepherdesses speaking in elegant verse, however, Illyria is peopled with characters straight out of the English world who mug up foreign phrases, refer to English landmarks such as St Bennet Hithe, and could have stepped straight out of any Twelfth Night party in the country. It is at once far removed from and strangely like England, giving it a fantasy feeling where the playgoer might nevertheless feel at home.
But perhaps the most striking parallel is the fact that they have Twelfth Night in Illyria too, and the most striking difference is that in Illyria, it rules year-long; it pervades everything, and is so omnipresent that it is never even named.
Without this element of madness, the play would sound quite like every other melodramatic faux-Italian romantic comedy ever heard of, with a decorous and passionate hero in Orsino and a heroine beautiful but stony-hearted-although for good reason (Summers 1983). Then some miracle happens (Orsino saves Olivia from runaway horses? Robbers? A heartless sorcerer?) and the pair live happily ever after, right? Wrong. It’s Twelfth Night, and all that is turned upside-down and shaken up and twisted inside-out so many times and in so many unusual ways that the whole play becomes a dazzling twist of eye-confusing colours-like a whirligig or spinning mirror (Bloom 1999).
In a play titled Twelfth Night written in the spirit of Twelfth-Night antics, one might expect to find surprising reversals, and indeed they are there. Servants become masters, masters become servants, wise men fall into folly and fools rise to wisdom, women and men cross over into untrodden territory and peer through the eyes of the other sex for a while. But in Shakespeare’s hand, the reversals never stay still; they are always changing into yet another contradiction; they go from insanity to hilarity to bathos to imminent tragedy, only to bounce back to hilarity again. These simpler reversals are just the materials with which he knits his comedy.
When the play opens, the Duke is sighing out his hopeless love like a good romantic lead, except that not only does he seem to be thoroughly enjoying his melancholy, he also doesn’t seem to be in any hurry for it to end-and he has its imagery hopelessly mixed up (Summers 1983). Olivia, meanwhile, has dramatically declared her intention of remaining celibate to mourn her brother (it should be noted that such resolutions in Shakespeare are always a sign of impending matrimony; compare with Love’s Labours Lost). But then Viola comes to Illyria, at once sane and insane; showing up the madness of Orsino’s romantic fervour and Olivia’s grief for her brother by her own silent love and measured grief-and yet, dressed as a young man and employing her own topsy-turvy wit (Summers 1983).
In her disguise, Viola is the best example of Shakespeare’s constant reversal and re-reversal. Not only is she sane and insane, man and woman; she is also, in a way, both twins mixed together-or, one twin retaining both identities. (Not until further into the play, when Viola is forced by Olivia’s impatience and Sir Andrew’s duel to distinguish her feminine identity and keep it from slipping into the androgynous Cesario, does Sebastian emerge as the male twin). She is, moreover, doubly a reversal in the servant-master relationship with Orsino and Olivia. She is on one level the confidante and go-between, so often overlooked in romantic comedies, who has become the real heroine; and on another level, she is the servant who becomes through love the mistress of Orsino and the master of Olivia. Malvolio thinks Olivia is in love with him, but Cesario is the servant she loves, even though Cesario is neither Cesario not really a servant, being Viola, a young woman of gentle birth-and sometimes not even Viola, but Viola’s brother!
Malvolio’s situation is similar. Olivia’s household, which we learn so much about, is clearly divided into two sections: Malvolio, the sober steward, and those in alliance against him. Malvolio’s speeches themselves are, until the gulling scene, quite reasonable and dignified; Maria calls him a “kind of puritan,”-a respectable sort of religion-and he seems, all in all, to be simply in the unenviable position of carrying his mistress’s orders to those who will see his interference as uncalled-for and officious. But then we see another side of Malvolio-the fact that he is hopelessly in love with himself. His religion, his passion for Olivia, his staid and reverend demeanour are no more than a way of displaying his own wonderful qualities . Maria says, “It is his grounds of faith that all that look on him love him” (II.iii. 141-2). Malvolio has set himself up as a wise man, and he has become a fool-in stark contrast to Feste, whose foolery is a shrewd wisdom: his disguise as Sir Topas is at once a reversal and a fulfilment of Feste’s nature.
The impossibly-named duo of Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek are also paradoxical. Sir Toby should probably be Olivia’s father-figure and Sir Andrew is after all, a suitor-but they spend more time carousing with the servants than in Olivia’s company. The servants themselves, Maria and Fabian, are strangely (or suitably, considering the play’s title) above themselves-they scheme and conspire with their mistress’s uncle, berate the steward, and show no respect whatsoever for their mistress beyond what is necessary to keep their jobs.
But then Shakespeare elevates this giddy company above the sober steward-gives them a resounding victory over him; turns the fool into the priest, the carouser into the solicitous head of the family, and marries the maid to the knight, while plunging Malvolio into madness and impotent fury. “Alas, poor fool, how have they baffled thee!” cries Olivia (V.i. 364)-but it isn’t Feste she is addressing.
Even this situation does not last long, however! The timid Viola turns unexpectedly into the indignant Sebastian, and Sir Toby and Sir Andrew end up on the bottom of the quickly-spinning wheel yet again. From respected uncle to carouser, from carouser to successful practical joker, from joker to attentive caretaker of madmen, from caretaker to comic butt once again-Sir Toby is never a winner or loser for long. One can’t help but think of Feste’s spinning-top image, “this whirligig of time” (V.i 371-2). Comedy and tragedy, male and female, winner and loser, master and servant chase each other round and round in ever-narrowing circles.
But even in Illyria, misrule cannot do wholly without rules. The fool is Sir Topas, and the “puritan” is the self-loving and possibly mad fool, yet the roles of priest and puritan and fool and madman are themselves unchallenged. Viola dresses as a man for a while, but in the end she will return to her women’s clothes to become a wife. None of this reversal of male and female, master and servant, wise and fool, sane and mad, would make any sense unless those things themselves had particular, objective meanings-inside the play as well as outside. Malvolio is, actually, a self-loving fool. Viola is, actually, a girl; her alarm at the prospect of a duel is something Cesario cannot face out. The Duke rules Illyria, however irresponsibly he mopes; Olivia’s house has a steward and servants, and however unruly they may be, however Shakespeare shakes them and pushes one down and another up, the whole point of it is that all of them are more or less on a level-all of them are paid servants. The madness of the play operates within a sane perspective. Olivia’s plight is only funny because Viola is unalterably a girl, despite her disguise. We laugh because of the incongruity-Olivia thinks she’s in love with a man, but the man is a woman. If there was real lesbian feeling, it would be poignant rather than hilarious. It is a peculiarity of this kind of humour that if the fancy is detached from real life, it ceases to be funny. The Bishop of London riding an elephant would arouse no surprise in New Delhi. In the middle of Piccadilly, however, it becomes remarkable. Olivia is funny because she is ‘in love’ with a girl; Malvolio is funny because he is a steward; Feste is funny because he is a fool, in spite of his wisdom; and Sir Andrew is funny because he is a suitor and a coward and a dullard.
The paradox works on another level, not just within the play. In England, Twelfth Night comes only once a year: to paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, “The spectacle may be mad, but the spectator must be sane” (1958, p 251). The English Twelfth Night gives meaning to the perpetual Illyrian Twelfth Night. Because, in England, masters are masters and servants are servants, the play works. In a strictly egalitarian society, in a society where men and women were homogeneous, and nobody bothered to distinguish between wise men and fools, the play would lose all meaning. But in its context of an orderly England, the land of Misrule, the perpetual Twelfth Night of Illyria, can thrill and entertain for a while-even if you don’t bother to sift through to the bottom of every twist of colour and flash of light from the mad whirligig.
“Our play is done,” sings the fool. Return to England in winter, where tomorrow morning everyone will wake up in their proper place as master or servant, and the world will progress as staidly as ever-or, at least, until next Twelfth Night.
References:
Bloom, H 1999, ‘Twelfth Night’, in Shakespeare: The invention of the human, Fourth Estate, London.
Buchan, J 1928, The runagates club, Nelson, Edinburgh, p 44.
Chesterton, GK 1958, The man who was Thursday (1907), in A GK Chesterton Omnibus, Methuen, London, p 251.
Shakespeare, W ‘Twelfth Night, or What You Will’, in Abrams MH et al, Norton Anthology of English Literature, 7th ed., vol. 1, WW Norton, New York & London.
Summers, JJ 1983, ‘The masks of Twelfth Night’ (1955), in Shakespeare: Twelfth Night, a casebook, DJ Palmer (ed.). Macmillan Press, London.
Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare n.d., American Players Theatre, Spring Green, Wisconsin, viewed 10 May 2006,
EDIT: How'd THAT happen?...all fixed, anyway.
EDIT AGAIN: Oh, btw, Roselet, the Bishop of London has nothing to do with your New Delhan bf...