or, What You Will
One other random thought based on the previous post (and the fact that someone was just asking me whether I recommended the Trevor Nunn film of Twelfth Night, which started a conversation about Toby Stephens). Plus I have to get my Shakespeare squee in somewhere, since I'm not teaching it this term:
So, Orsino, right? I think my favorite Orsino so far is actually when I saw Jo Stone-Fewings play him at Stratford-upon-Avon in 2001 (my only trip to Stratford, alas and well-a-day!), precisely because he's so far the only Orsino I've seen who wasn't super-lugubrious (well, except for stoned Rastafarian Orsino, but we DO NOT SPEAK OF HIM). He was so chipper and expansive about being "in love with love" that you couldn't help but be drawn in.
I mention this because my students so far have been fairly anti-Orsino, and lots of other people are too, and I understand that, except I sort of love him because he's so ridiculous. He's all highflown rhetoric and elaborate Ovidian imagery, and failing to listen to anything anybody says because he's too busy shaping the world he wants through his language. 1.1 is the best example of this, probably: when Curio says "Will you go hunt, my lord?" and Orsino replies, "What, Curio?" I always think that Orsino is just holding his breath there, *hoping* to high heaven that Curio will say something that gives him room for a pun. And when Curio says "The hart"--oh, it is on. "Why, so I do, the noblest that I have..." Look at me, I am Actaeon! (Incidentally, this is another problem I had when teaching Shakespeare this last term--my students' unfamiliarity with stories from Ovid. I was obsessed with Bullfinch's Mythology when I was ten or so, plus I had high-school Latin, so I tend to forget that this is an issue. Still, it would have helped if they'd bothered to read the footnotes after I asked them about a reference, instead of just staring at me blankly.) Olivia says of Orsino, in 1.5, "He might have took his answer long ago," but if he did that--well, he wouldn't be Orsino.
The thing is, he's not alone in that, not by a long shot. And I think part of the reason that I love Orsino is that he embodies that quicksilver Illyrian slipperiness with words, that "corruption of words," if you like, just as fully as anyone else does, from the captain in 1.2 on down. (The exceptions are those who are too slow or too inflexible to play: Sir Andrew and Malvolio.) I can't fault Orsino for linguistic excess unless I'm also willing to fault Viola, Feste, and pretty much everyone else in the play. And as for his "I cannot be so answered"--well, Olivia's plenty willing herself to keep hoping language will change her world and win Cesario over: when "Cesario" says "I pity you," Olivia comes back with "That's a degree to love," as though just saying it will make it so ("O say so, and so be!" as she will say later to Sebastian). Even Viola, practical in all things else, plays with the word "perchance" in 1.2 until it becomes hope; says "I my brother know / Yet living in my glass" as though the present tense of "Yet living" will make it true. That's Illyria, all around, and I adore it.
(And I've always been of the opinion that the thing that's crucial about 2.4 is that Orsino finally manages to *listen* to someone: "But died thy sister of her love, my boy?" He's directing his attention outside of himself, for once. And *that's* how you know that this mysterious boy Cesario has really gotten to him--and why I always have to hold myself back from just arguing with my students when they say that everything about the pairings at the end of the play is just opportunistic. I also think that since Cesario = Sebastian, "Even such and so / In favour was my brother," etc., it does work on an emotional level that Olivia takes Sebastian. Clearly I am naive and there is nothing to be done with me. But I like my naivete, so there.)
The other thing about Orsino, though, is that he gives himself away with small words. When he's *finally* confronted, face-to-face, with Olivia's scorn, he blusters and talks in hyperbolic verse that's rather tortured in its word order (and contains the Latinate words "uncivil," "ingrate," and "unauspicious"):
You uncivil lady,
To whose ingrate and unauspicious altars
My soul the faithfull'st off'rings hath breathed out
That e'er devotion tendered--" (5.1.108-111)
--and then he falters into wretched little monosyllables: "what shall I do?" (5.1.111). Poor Orsino. And when he thinks "Cesario" has betrayed him, he doesn't even begin with bluster, but goes straight for poetic simplicity--after first calling Cesario "sirrah," when he's called him "Dear lad" and "boy" and "my boy" throughout the whole play. That switch, which is contemptuous in context--"Her husband, sirrah?"--always breaks my heart. Poor Viola!
And so, finally, the thing that I *actually* wanted to write about: in that last scene, when Orsino is stepping up and claiming his "share in this most happy wrack," he can only say "thee" to "Cesario." It's "Boy, thou hast said to me a thousand times" and "Give me thy hand," but when he addresses Viola, it's "Your master quits you" and "the mettle of your sex"--because he doesn't really know her yet, in a way. And that hesitance wins me over, especially in contrast with the usual...bigness, I guess, of his speech.
And in conclusion: Oh, Shakespeare. Why are you so awesome?
So, Orsino, right? I think my favorite Orsino so far is actually when I saw Jo Stone-Fewings play him at Stratford-upon-Avon in 2001 (my only trip to Stratford, alas and well-a-day!), precisely because he's so far the only Orsino I've seen who wasn't super-lugubrious (well, except for stoned Rastafarian Orsino, but we DO NOT SPEAK OF HIM). He was so chipper and expansive about being "in love with love" that you couldn't help but be drawn in.
I mention this because my students so far have been fairly anti-Orsino, and lots of other people are too, and I understand that, except I sort of love him because he's so ridiculous. He's all highflown rhetoric and elaborate Ovidian imagery, and failing to listen to anything anybody says because he's too busy shaping the world he wants through his language. 1.1 is the best example of this, probably: when Curio says "Will you go hunt, my lord?" and Orsino replies, "What, Curio?" I always think that Orsino is just holding his breath there, *hoping* to high heaven that Curio will say something that gives him room for a pun. And when Curio says "The hart"--oh, it is on. "Why, so I do, the noblest that I have..." Look at me, I am Actaeon! (Incidentally, this is another problem I had when teaching Shakespeare this last term--my students' unfamiliarity with stories from Ovid. I was obsessed with Bullfinch's Mythology when I was ten or so, plus I had high-school Latin, so I tend to forget that this is an issue. Still, it would have helped if they'd bothered to read the footnotes after I asked them about a reference, instead of just staring at me blankly.) Olivia says of Orsino, in 1.5, "He might have took his answer long ago," but if he did that--well, he wouldn't be Orsino.
The thing is, he's not alone in that, not by a long shot. And I think part of the reason that I love Orsino is that he embodies that quicksilver Illyrian slipperiness with words, that "corruption of words," if you like, just as fully as anyone else does, from the captain in 1.2 on down. (The exceptions are those who are too slow or too inflexible to play: Sir Andrew and Malvolio.) I can't fault Orsino for linguistic excess unless I'm also willing to fault Viola, Feste, and pretty much everyone else in the play. And as for his "I cannot be so answered"--well, Olivia's plenty willing herself to keep hoping language will change her world and win Cesario over: when "Cesario" says "I pity you," Olivia comes back with "That's a degree to love," as though just saying it will make it so ("O say so, and so be!" as she will say later to Sebastian). Even Viola, practical in all things else, plays with the word "perchance" in 1.2 until it becomes hope; says "I my brother know / Yet living in my glass" as though the present tense of "Yet living" will make it true. That's Illyria, all around, and I adore it.
(And I've always been of the opinion that the thing that's crucial about 2.4 is that Orsino finally manages to *listen* to someone: "But died thy sister of her love, my boy?" He's directing his attention outside of himself, for once. And *that's* how you know that this mysterious boy Cesario has really gotten to him--and why I always have to hold myself back from just arguing with my students when they say that everything about the pairings at the end of the play is just opportunistic. I also think that since Cesario = Sebastian, "Even such and so / In favour was my brother," etc., it does work on an emotional level that Olivia takes Sebastian. Clearly I am naive and there is nothing to be done with me. But I like my naivete, so there.)
The other thing about Orsino, though, is that he gives himself away with small words. When he's *finally* confronted, face-to-face, with Olivia's scorn, he blusters and talks in hyperbolic verse that's rather tortured in its word order (and contains the Latinate words "uncivil," "ingrate," and "unauspicious"):
You uncivil lady,
To whose ingrate and unauspicious altars
My soul the faithfull'st off'rings hath breathed out
That e'er devotion tendered--" (5.1.108-111)
--and then he falters into wretched little monosyllables: "what shall I do?" (5.1.111). Poor Orsino. And when he thinks "Cesario" has betrayed him, he doesn't even begin with bluster, but goes straight for poetic simplicity--after first calling Cesario "sirrah," when he's called him "Dear lad" and "boy" and "my boy" throughout the whole play. That switch, which is contemptuous in context--"Her husband, sirrah?"--always breaks my heart. Poor Viola!
And so, finally, the thing that I *actually* wanted to write about: in that last scene, when Orsino is stepping up and claiming his "share in this most happy wrack," he can only say "thee" to "Cesario." It's "Boy, thou hast said to me a thousand times" and "Give me thy hand," but when he addresses Viola, it's "Your master quits you" and "the mettle of your sex"--because he doesn't really know her yet, in a way. And that hesitance wins me over, especially in contrast with the usual...bigness, I guess, of his speech.
And in conclusion: Oh, Shakespeare. Why are you so awesome?