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TWELFTH NIGHT AS A FESTIVE COMEDY

One of the few plays of Shakespeare that is mentioned in a contemporary performance,


Twelfth Night was seen by London law student John Manningham in February 1602, at the
Middle Temple Hall. He wrote in his commonplace-book: ‘at our feast wee had a play called
Twelve Night, or What You Will, much like the Comedy of Errors, or Menaechmi in Plautus,
but most like and near to that in Italian called Inganni’. The literary source material of the
play was obviously delightfully familiar to the educated men of the audience; and the
similarity of the ‘screens’ entrance end of the hall to the back wall of the Globe’s stage meant
that it would have been easy for Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, to
give a one-off performance for the lawyers’ winter feast in the candlelit hall.

Illyria and/or London

The play’s setting in Illyria, however, seems more warm and exotic than Manningham’s
wintry London. ‘What country, friends, is this?’ asks Viola as she enters the play (1.2.1).
Coming from Messaline (a fictional place, possibly derived from the Latin name for
Marseilles), Viola thinks of ‘Illyria’, the coast of the eastern Adriatic (today Dalmatia and
Albania) as strange and potentially dangerous. The sea-lanes of Illyria were famous for
pirates, and the play has one such, Antonio, who tells the audience that he ‘adores’ Sebastian,
whom he has rescued from the shipwreck that separated the twins. This ‘salt-water thief’, as
Orsino calls him (5.1.69), is also, evidently, a romantic and generous man who knows his
way around an Illyrian city remarkably like the London of Shakespeare’s day: he
recommends that Sebastian stay at the ‘Elephant’ public house ‘in the south suburbs’ (3.3.39)
– which was in London near the Globe Theatre and in reality not a very reputable place.
While Orsino’s great house is an Italian-style court, embracing a leisurely life of music,
hunting and literary love-fantasies, Olivia’s is more like a genteel English establishment, with
its garden and a population of servants and hangers-on who – lacking a male head – make her
house ‘an alehouse’, in Malvolio’s disapproving words (2.3.89).

Topsy-turvydom

‘What You Will’, the play’s alternative title, might refer to the festive ‘misrule’ of Twelfth
Night, 5–6 January, the traditional last day of Christmas festivities and thus the final party
before the return to a wintry workaday world. It is easy to see in the drunkenness and
rowdiness of Sir Toby Belch and his companions a desire for the party never to stop – he is
always calling for another ‘stoup of wine’, and observing that ‘not to be abed after midnight
is to be up betimes’ (2.3.1–2). This rumbustious scene sets up the play’s popular secondary
plot, the gulling of Malvolio, Olivia’s house steward. The play does not mention Christmas,
or Candlemas (the February feast on which Manningham saw the play), but Maria does label
Malvolio a ‘Puritan’, which was a strong term in the politics of religion in 1600. Puritans
were anti-theatre, anti-drinking and feasting, and anti-Catholic. Such winter feasts as
Christmas, Twelfth Night (commemorating the visit of the three Wise Men to the baby Jesus)
and Candlemas (the feast of the presentation of the Christ Child in the temple) were strongly
associated with the ‘Old Religion’, Roman Catholicism, which had caused such conflict in
16th-century England.[1] Twelfth Night’s ‘wassailing’ is in fact an even older, folk and pagan
tradition, with the Lord of Misrule (here embodied in the rowdy English knight Sir Toby
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Belch) signifying that the ‘normal’ world and its behaviour were turned upside down for the
duration of the feast. In this light it can also be argued that Viola’s dressing in male clothes,
and Malvolio’s fantasy that he (a servant) can become the husband of his lady Olivia, are also
examples of the world turned upside down.

Riddles and puzzles

Language, too: as Viola says, ‘How quickly the wrong side may be turned outward!’ (3.1.12–
13). Twelfth Night is a punning, riddling play (which no doubt the young lawyers of Middle
Temple appreciated). Its plot depends upon deliberate confusions between apparently
identical twins – though they can’t actually be identical, as they are male and female; the
heroine, Viola, chooses to dress like her brother Sebastian as a living memorial of him. In
disguising herself as a boy in order to survive in a foreign land, and taking service with the
noble Duke Orsino, she assumes the personality of a witty young courtier, engaging in
riddling and banter with everyone she encounters. To Olivia, who has fallen instantly in love
with this ‘boy’, she says, ‘I am not what I am’ (3.1.141); and a dialogue in the same scene
with the play’s clown, Feste, seems to reveal that he is the only person in Illyria to have his
suspicions about ‘Cesario’: ‘Who you are, and what you would, are out of my welkin’.
(3.1.57–58)

Endings

The action of the play is, in Viola’s words, an ‘untangling’ of this topsy-turvy situation of
‘what you will’: ‘O Time, thou must untangle this’, she says in soliloquy (2.2.40). The play is
full of references to time passing; the audience is being primed to recognise unconsciously
that the two hours of confusion will come to a satisfactory resolution. Or will it? Sir Toby and
Maria’s revenge on the ‘madly-used Malvolio’ (5.1.311) for stopping their party has
culminated in his appearing in yellow stockings, cross-gartered, ‘a fashion she [Olivia]
detests’ (2.5.200), and attempting to woo Olivia with most inappropriate language and
gestures. Yet when he is put in the ‘dark house’ (a treatment for mad persons in the period),
and desperately calls out for ‘light’ so that he can write his justification of his behaviour, the
scene (Act 4, Scene 2) in which Maria and Feste tease him is one in which it is impossible to
ignore the cruelty to an innocent (if deluded) person. Manningham thought the Malvolio story
‘a good practise’, and it was undoubtedly the most famous role in the play throughout the
17th and 18th centuries, but productions of the play in recent decades have recognised and
explored the bullying behaviour by a dominant group of characters, and Malvolio has more
often than not become a distressingly abused and tragic figure. His situation is certainly not
resolved by the play’s end: in a chilling moment after the revelations, recognitions, and
romantic unions of Act 5, he is brought on to make his complaint of mistreatment, and when
the clown laughs at him, he exits with the threat, ‘I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you’
(5.1.378). It is almost as though Shakespeare had a premonition of the triumph of the English
Puritans in the first half of the 17th century. A certain melancholy for the passing of a merrier
Old England of ‘cakes and ale’ (2.3.116) and of life and young love underpins this festive
comedy, and seems to be evoked in Feste the clown’s final song, with its very English
chorus, ‘The rain it raineth every day’ (5.1.369).

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