Twelfth Night
William Shakespeare
The RSC Shakespeare
Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen
Chief Associate Editors: Heloise Senechal and Jan Sewell
Associate Editors: Trey Jansen, Eleanor Lowe, Lucy Munro, Dee Anna Phares
Twelfth Night
Textual editing: Eric Rasmussen
Introduction and Shakespeare's Career in the Theater: Jonathan Bate
Commentary: Eleanor Lowe and Heloise Senechal
Scene-by-Scene Analysis: Esme Miskimmin
In Performance: Karin Brown (RSC stagings), Jan Sewell (overview)
The Director's Cut (interviews by Jonathan Bate and Kevin Wright):
Sam Mendes, Declan Donnellan, and Neil Bartlett
Editorial Advisory Board
Gregory Doran, Chief Associate Director,
Royal Shakespeare Company
Jim Davis, Professor of Theatre Studies, University of Warwick, UK
Charles Edelman, Senior Lecturer, Edith Cowan University,
Western Australia
Lukas Erne, Professor of Modern English Literature,
Universite de Geneve, Switzerland
Akiko Kusunoki, Tokyo Woman's Christian University, Japan
Jacqui O'Hanlon, Director of Education, Royal Shakespeare Company
Ron Rosenbaum, author and journalist, New York, USA
James Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literature,
Columbia University, USA
Tiffany Stern, Professor of English, University of Oxford, UK
2010 Modern Library Paperback Edition Copyright (c) 2007, 2010 by The Royal Shakespeare Company All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of
The Random House Publishing Group, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York.
MODERN LIBRARY AND THE TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.
"Royal Shakespeare Company," "RSC," and the RSC logo are trademarks
or registered trademarks of The Royal Shakespeare Company.
The version of Twelfth Night and the corresponding footnotes that appear in this volume were originally published in William Shakespeare: Complete Works, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, published in 2007 by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-1-58836843-0
www.modernlibrary.com
v3.1
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
"How Have You Made Division of Yourself?"
The Fountain of Self-Love
Master-Mistress
About the Text
Key Facts
Twelfth Night, or What You Will
List of Parts
Act 1
Scene 1
Scene 2
Scene 3
Scene 4
Scene 5
Act 2
Scene 1
Scene 2
Scene 3
Scene 4
Scene 5
Act 3
Scene 1
Scene 2
Scene 3
Scene 4
Act 4
Scene 1
Scene 2
Scene 3
Act 5
Scene 1
Textual Notes
Scene-by-Scene Analysis
Twelfth Night in Performance: The RSC and Beyond
Four Centuries of Twelfth Night: An Overview
At the RSC
The Director's Cut: Interviews with Sam Mendes, Declan Donnellan, and Neil Bartlett
Shakespeare's Career in the Theater
Beginnings
Playhouses
The Ensemble at Work
The King's Man
Shakespeare's Works: A Chronology
Further Reading and Viewing
References
Acknowledgments and Picture Credits
INTRODUCTION
"HOW HAVE YOU MADE DIVISION OF YOURSELF?"
"What is love?" asks Feste the clown in one of his songs. It is a very old question. One of the most influential answers to it comes from ancient Greece in the imaginary voice of the comic dramatist Aristophanes in Plato's dialogue called the Symposium. Love, says Aristophanes, is a quest, a journey in search of our lost other half.
The idea is explained by way of a story about human origins. Originally there were not two sexes but three--male, female, and a mixture of the two called androgynous. Furthermore, the original humans were round, with four hands, four feet, and two faces. Humankind then began to have presumptuous ambitions. We rose up against the Olympian gods. Zeus therefore decided to weaken us by cutting us in two, "like an apple halved for pickling." So now we have two legs, two arms, one face, and the sensation that we are only half ourselves. We yearn and wander, hoping that one day we will find the other half that is literally our soul mate. If the original whole of which you are a half was male, your desire will be for another male (as seems to be the case with Antonio in this play--and Orsino when he falls for "Cesario"?); if female, another female (Olivia desiring the disguised Viola?). These two orientations are what we now call homosexual.
Only if your original was androgynous will you be drawn to the opposite sex, as Viola is to Orsino--and Sir Toby, who has the play's largest role, to Maria. When one of us meets his or her other half, "the actual half of himself," then, the Symposium explains, "the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and one will not wish to be out of the other's sight even for a moment: these are the people who pass their whole lives together, and yet they could not explain what they desire of one another."
A myth of this kind is a piece of storytelling that answers to a profound and enduring human belief: that we are somehow incomplete without love, without a partner. And that in an ideal world we would all have exactly the right partner. We know viscerally that desire and reproduction are forever bound to conjunction and splitting: two people join as one in the act of love; we are made out of a mixture of X and Y chromosomes, of male seed and female egg, of two distinct genetic lines.
If love is a quest for an idealized version of our own selves, it is easy to understand our fascination with twins. They seem to be the living embodiment of the single self split in two; the extreme case of conjoined twins vividly conjures up the Symposium's tale of the original human as an unhalved apple. At the same time, a certain anxiety has always been attached to the phenomenon of twins. In ancient Greece it was assumed that a woman who bore twins must have been impregnated by two different men. Some mythical twins represent idealized unity--as with Castor and Pollux, the "gemini" or heavenly twins who symbolize perfect friendship--but others represent opposition or splitting. A nymph in Ovid's Metamorphoses has twins fathered by Apollo, god of music and light, and Mercury, god of theft and shady dealings; a pair of girl twins in Edmund Spenser's epic romance of Shakespeare's time, The Faerie Queene, respectively embody chastity and eroticism; in another of Ovid's poems, the Fasti, a girl called Lara is raped by Mercury and bears the Lares Compitales, who become guardians of the crossroads. These twins become symbolic of how the story of our lives is made of a perpetual sequence of choices, as alternative ways open before us.
Perhaps the most potent of all narratives about twins are those in which a brother and sister are separated soon after birth, meet when they are grown up and fall passionately and unashamedly in love with each other: Siegmund and Sieglinde, as portrayed in Richard Wagner's Die Walkure, might be considered Western culture's highest exemplar of the motif. Brother-sister incest was sometimes explored in the Renaissance theater--m
ost notably in John Ford's darkly brilliant 'Tis Pity She's a Whore--but Shakespeare steered away from this dangerous matter. His way of recreating the Symposium's originary androgyne was by cross-dressing Viola as "Cesario," the lovely boy actor with whom both man and woman, both Orsino and Olivia, fall in love. Puns on "woman's part" and "small pipe" (meaning both voice and male sexual organ) leave no doubt that alluring androgyny is implied here:
For they shall yet belie thy happy years,
That say thou art a man: Diana's lip
Is not more smooth and rubious, thy small pipe Is as the maiden's organ, shrill and sound,
And all is semblative a woman's part.
William and Ann Shakespeare's twins, Judith and Hamnet (alternatively spelled Hamlet), were born in February 1585. Their father's fascination with the dramatic possibilities of double selves is apparent from his early Comedy of Errors, where he adapted a classical story about separated male twins and mistaken identity, but complicated it by giving the brothers servants who are also identical twins. Then in the summer of 1596, the eleven-year-old Hamnet died. Shakespeare had lost his only son and Judith would be forever bereft of her second self. Though we should always be wary of inferring authorial autobiography from the words of fictional characters in a play, there is an inescapable poignancy to the images of loss in Twelfth Night: when Feste sings of sad cypress ("Come away, death") or Viola alludes to a funeral monument, it is tempting to think of Shakespeare's own lost boy. Olivia mourns a brother, while Viola assumes that hers has been drowned. When she takes a male disguise and "becomes" Cesario, it is as if she impersonates her own opposite-sex twin: "I am all the daughters of my father's house, / And all the brothers too." She herself explains that the lost Sebastian is the model for her performance of male behavior ("For him I imitate").
The principal source of Twelfth Night's tale of siblings lost and found, and of a cross-dressed servant sent to woo on behalf of a master whom she loves herself, was a novella by Barnaby Riche called "Apollonius and Silla." There the brother and sister who are the originals for Viola and Sebastian are not twins but "the one of them was so like the other in countenance and favour that there was no man able to discern the one from the other by their faces, saving by their apparel, the one being a man, the other a woman." Critics sometimes express puzzlement that Shakespeare makes so much of the resemblance between Viola and Sebastian, given his presumed personal knowledge that boy-girl twins are not identical. In modern terminology, it is generally accepted that monozygotic fertilization is always same sex (in fact, recent research has shown that in certain rare cases of genetic abnormality it is possible to have boy-girl monozygotic twins). But Riche's original premise reveals the absurdity of this criticism of the plot: siblings don't even have to be twins to look remarkably alike.
One of the greatest challenges for a writer is to imagine what it would be like to be a member of the opposite sex. The particular demand faced by Shakespeare and the boy actors who played his women's parts was to get beyond the age's conventions of proper female behavior, which commended silence and submissiveness. "Cesario" is partly a device to give Viola an active voice, to enable her to break the shackles of passivity. But the lovely combination of quick-witted facility, wonder, and vulnerability with which she slots into her impersonation is something more than a reaction to social convention or codes of propriety. In terms of the play's imaginary world, Viola plays Cesario so effectively because of her prior knowledge and love of Sebastian--this is what allows the otherwise implausible conceit of Olivia's marrying Sebastian in the belief that he is Cesario. In terms of the play's creative origin, it is tempting to speculate that the germ was sown by Shakespeare's observation of the intuitive understanding between his twins as they learned to speak and to play together.
Shakespearean comedy often imagines a journey from the secure womb of the family to a world of shipwreck and isolation, and thence to the bond of marriage. The characters lose themselves to find themselves. Broken families are restored in the same instant that new families are anticipated through the pronouncement of love vows. The climax of Twelfth Night is one of the great reunion scenes, as the parted twins are joined:
ORSINO One face, one voice, one habit, and two persons, A natural perspective, that is and is not!
...
ANTONIO How have you made division of yourself?
An apple cleft in two is not more twin
Than these two creatures....
The language is richly suggestive of one made two and two made one, of the cleft apple from the Symposium's myth of origins, and of the workings of nature combined with the trick of art (a "perspective" was a distorting glass that created the optical illusion of one picture appearing as two). In a single action, brother and sister find both each other and their object of desire.
And yet. The peculiar poignancy of Twelfth Night comes from the sense that there are many losses even in this moment of wonder. Antonio, who has been like a brother and even a lover to Sebastian, is left alone. Malvolio has been humiliated just a little too far. The union of Sir Toby and Maria leaves Sir Andrew isolated--he was adored once, too, but we cannot imagine that he will be again. And Feste is there to sing another sad song of time and change. Above all, Cesario is no more: Orsino closes the dialogue by addressing Viola by her boy-name one final time before she assumes her female garb and becomes his "fancy's queen." But "fancy's queen" is the very language of that shallow courtly love with which Orsino had tried to woo Olivia: the language that Cesario cast off when he/she began speaking in his/her own voice. In the closing moments of the play, Viola does seem to revert to the silence and passivity of orthodox female behavior.
What is going through her imaginary heart at this moment? Even as Sebastian and Orsino are found, Cesario is lost. Could Viola be saying goodbye to the feigned twin into which she has made herself?
The name "Cesario" suggests untimely birth--as in "Cesarean section," a baby "from his mother's womb untimely ripped"--but the character undergoes an untimely death. A few months before starting the comedy of Twelfth Night, Shakespeare completed his deeply meditated tragedy of Hamlet. There are unfathomable crosscurrents at work here: in creating and destroying Cesario, perhaps Shakespeare too is saying a goodbye. To his own Hamnet. Viola is diminished when bereaved of her invented second self. Was this Shakespeare's delayed response to poor Judith's desolation on the loss of her twin?
In preparing to direct the play for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2009, Gregory Doran, himself a twin, noticed a coincidence neglected by nearly all the legion of Shakespeare's biographers and critics. Hamnet and Judith Shakespeare were baptized on 2 February, the feast of Candlemas (which celebrates the presentation of the baby Jesus in the Temple in Jerusalem--a fitting moment for the baptism of a treasured first son). And it was on that very same festival day seventeen years later, 2 February, Candlemas, that Twelfth Night was performed (the earliest performance of which we have a record) before the law students of the Middle Temple in 1602. Malvolio describes Cesario/Viola as "Not yet old enough for a man, nor young enough for a boy. As a squash is before 'tis a peascod, or a codling when 'tis almost an apple: 'tis with him in standing water, between boy and man." On 2 February 1602, Judith was in standing water between girl and woman. By turning Viola into Cesario and allowing Sebastian to return from the devouring sea of death, Shakespeare allowed himself the consoling fantasy of a seventeenth birthday reunion for his own separated twins.
THE FOUNTAIN OF SELF-LOVE
A more immediate occasion for the play's meditations on love and identity seems to have been Shakespeare's friendly rivalry with Ben Jonson. Shakespeare had been writing courtship comedies for many years when Jonson came onto the theatrical scene at the end of the 1590s with a more hard-edged satirical vein of drama that tapped into the psychology of "humours"--the idea that aberrant behavior (which is readily comic and worthy of satire) could be attributed to an excess of a particular passion or obsession or to temperamental imba
lance (too much choler or melancholy). Jonson seems to have fallen out with Shakespeare's acting company early in the new century. At this time he wrote a play called The Fountain of Self-Love, or Cynthia's Revels for the Children of Her Majesty's Chapel, the "boy-actors" company that, to judge from a famous piece of dialogue in Hamlet, was perceived by Shakespeare and his fellows as something of a threat to their own prestige. Jonson's double title was innovative and not a little pretentious: Shakespeare may well have been mocking it with Twelfth Night, or What You Will (his only double title). In pricking the bubble of inflated language, as he habitually does, Feste may be glancing at Jonson's verbosity. "I might say 'element,' but the word is over-worn": "element" is a key word in Jonson's humoral lexicon. And again, in response to Antonio's "I prithee vent thy folly somewhere else," Feste says "Vent my folly! He has heard that word of some great man and now applies it to a fool. Vent my folly!" Since The Fountain of Self-Love contains such phrases as "vent thy passion" and "vent the Etna of his fires," "some great man" might almost be Jonson.
The fountain in Jonson's play is that of Narcissus, who drowned while trying to kiss his own reflection. Shakespeare's Illyria is also a place of self-love. Yellow-stockinged Malvolio in particular is a Narcissus figure, but there is also a certain vanity about Orsino as he plays the role of the courtly lover. Viola, by contrast, is the opposite of a self-lover. She comes back from drowning and speaks in the voice of the desiring woman whom Narcissus neglected:
Make me a willow cabin at your gate,
And call upon my soul within the house,
Write loyal cantons of contemned love
And sing them loud even in the dead of night, Hallow your name to the reverberate hills
And make the babbling gossip of the air
Cry out "Olivia!" O, you should not rest
Between the elements of air and earth,
But you should pity me!
As intimated by the "reverberate hills" and the echo effect " 'Olivia!' O," the "babbling gossip of the air" alludes to the mythological figure of Echo, who pined away as a result of her unrequited love for Narcissus.
Jonsonian comedy is peopled by narcissists. Twelfth Night responds with an astonishing exploration of the relationship between knowledge of self and sympathy for others--which we might call "echoing"--in the composition of human identity. "I am not what I am"; "Be that thou know'st thou art"; "I swear I am not that I play"; "Ourselves we do not owe"; "Nothing that is so is so"; "You shall from this time be Your master's mistress." These paradoxes and promises are the word-music of Illyria that "gives a very echo to the seat Where love is throned."
