Physiological Shakespeare

Twelfth Night concerns itself with the well-being of human lovemaking. Orsino and Olivia, in their hothouse self-regards, impart the lassitude of this to their respective households, while the castaways, Viola and Sebastian, despite the uncertainty of their predicaments on the beach, preserve intact an élan vital prompting from them immediate action, bringing about prompt effect. Exogamy, so we will learn from this, has a decisive advantage of vitality over endogamy when it comes to partnering in Illyria. And for all that the action of the play centres on two Illyrian households, the comedy in its conventional course towards “All’s well that ends well” takes us outward to those arrivals from beyond the seas for life’s renewal.

Moreover, in Twelfth Night, authority, that elusive power in a person to organise effect, is found natural and vital in the most vulnerable castaways, and enervated in duke and countess, just those ranks where we expect to find it inured. Of course the context is comedy; here is a play written for the twelfth night of Christmas, last of that “Season of Misrule” when masters and mistresses waited upon their servants in a topsy-turvy of conventional order. With this in the air, how lightly, how brilliantly Shakespeare depicts the innate degree of authority in his people. How concisely the play’s first two scenes, in their juxtaposition, prepare us for the portrayal of these things.

For here in Scene 1 is Illyria’s ducal court, languorous, surfeited, unhappy. Duke Orsino’s love-ambassadors have failed to gain access to Countess Olivia. Uh? Love ambassadors? Can one imagine Romeo or Richard III sending deputies to declare their loves? What’s going on at the pathological level in this infatuated Duke? But then, for all his rank, Orsino shows no hint of a natural authority whereby his presence, proxy or otherwise, might be effective. Instead, he is a focus for the court’s debility. We note his wordplay on hart is laboured, and the very plod of his iambics communicates his court’s torpor, laced as these are with the opiate imagery of violets, and the hallucinogenic invocations to fancy. Here is a court so very … what? Nimbin? Both he and the court require the presence of a self-possessed woman.

Certainly established authority here is prostrate, attendants humour the master and await directions. And this English twelfth-night-of-Christmas audience would have been exquisitely attuned to the character of this febrile authority in a manner that we, four centuries along the flight from court powers, cannot hope to equal. There’s some animation in the imagery that is invoked; the sea, that ungovernable element, gets mentioned, and it will be from the sea that deliverance comes, did Orsino but know it.

Then lo! Suddenly, in Scene 2 we are beside the sea, that edge of bare existence where Viola and the sea-captain have been cast up. Yet here is no helplessness, no ill-morale. Here are decisions, and a new animation in the verse, following its iambic base, but playing the speech of emergency. And immediately we note Viola’s brisk natural authority in her relations with the sea-captain. For all they are castaways, they are quick to construct an agenda. And as they do, quiet connections are made with Scene 1. We hear that Viola and Olivia are alike in having “dead” brothers they grieve for. While Olivia’s loss is actual and Viola’s grief, we shall learn, is mistaken, it is Viola’s sense of loss that is the more credible, that it is Viola who is doing the actual as opposed to pretended living. Then we are reminded that there’s music, that food of love tralala, and she tells us she will restore her fortunes by disguising herself as a eunuch and singing for her supper.

Is Viola’s determination to wear male disguise artificial, a mere subservience to the needs of the plot? The critic Tony Tanner (in my New Everyman edition of the play) asserts that, unlike other Shakespearean women who adopt male disguise in the comedies—Portia, Rosalind, Julia—Viola provides “no clear reason for assuming male disguise”. Pooh! She gives cogent reason (I.ii.43–44), and it is because, resolutely, she will be her own person until she knows her estate, and by inference, her heart, as she wishes that she

    … may not be delivered to the world,

Till I had made my own occasion mellow,

What my estate is.

And sure enough, by Scene 4 she has established herself as a presence at court, entrepreneur of what might be her prospects. She is pert. She is unabashed in her views, though her crispness has been infected by the court to the degree she has been smitten by Orsino. Why, one asks, with this drip? Yet here is Shakespeare’s sorcery!

For here is the very quick of his eye as to where and how authority—whether it is the power to direct others or to direct the self—flows and is checked in individuals. This quickness of eye for where and how authority lies, is one key to why Shakespeare’s people are so exquisitely resolved. Uncannily he could seize upon the innate calibre of each intelligence and from that understanding, allow the full dimension of each singularity to flow to its consequences and responsibilities. And these two scenes, contrasting enervation and vitality, establish all this … physiology in less than five pages of this rambunctious play.

As the play unfolds, we encounter, as it were, sites of vitality in other characters, in Sir Toby and Maria, for instance, agents of Misrule whose authority lies in directing circumstances to dissipated, lewd or mischievous ends and, by this direction, highlight the ineffective authority of Countess Olivia to order matters in her own household. And just as Orsino’s ardour for the countess is self-reflecting, so too is her sterile grief for her deceased brother. Here is sickness of the ego in both cases, and by the end of Act 1, the argument has declared itself. Renewal will come from outside the tribe, not from any match within it.

Now, the principal newcomers, Viola and Sebastian, are twins, and as elsewhere in Shakespearean comedy (A Comedy of Errors) twins are the dramatist’s instrument for destabilising relationships and weaving that distinctively Shakespearean fabric of a mutable reality. We know these twins are true for all Antonio, Olivia and Orsino will believe them false. So here, on this Night of Misrule, we have represented to us the fickleness of the world simultaneously with the portrayal of its parts of loyalty and resilience.

Here is the extraordinary Shakespeare lens. Contradictory truths will inhabit the same moment, and a convention of twins loose in a love story will permit this double vision. It is the condition of reality throughout the plays and narrative poems. As the clown observes, “Nothing that is so is so.” (IV.i.9) And yet … and yet character discloses itself with such an apparently high degree of resolution.

Attraction, repudiation, prank, impertinence and duping, the misrule of Twelfth Night proceeds with the quicksilver shimmer of life itself. By Act V, the boys and girls have sorted themselves out, Love has found its way, and three marriages are impending, comedy fulfilling its pledge of all’s well that ends well … almost.

Then Malvolio delivers the most unsettling line in the play (V.i.380): “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you!”

At this the ill-used steward exits, having decisively subverted the comic satisfaction to be had from the closure of the love stories. And here is Misrule at an altogether more disconcerting level.

For Malvolio troubles us. Puritan caricature he may be, with “distempered appetite” and pretensions that cause his downfall. Yet nothing apart from his name suggests conspicuous ill-will. Was the name conferred upon him? Is he that perennial member of a community more acted upon than allowed to possess a self? And while Maria is a minx in her pranksterism, I think we may glimpse the devil-figure in Sir Toby from his unabashed sponging on Aguecheek. Here’s malice (III.iv.301–2).

Of course the play does not end on the note of Malvolio’s resentment—there’s a song to take us out. But the presumably loyal servant does exit, knowing he has been ill-used and his authority as steward in a patrician household has been effectively subverted. Furthermore he knows Illyria knows it. His “distempered appetite” has infected our own sense of the fun. We cannot trust that malice has not been bred here.

Many of Shakespeare’s comedies carry this reminder, not that life beyond prank-and-flirt is inevitably moiled. Rather, it is that the Real, in its fugitive texture, is a dance between patterning and its subversion by unwelcome detail and incident. So we witness the classic comic routines burl along until, say, in As You Like It, we watch Jaques perversely choose dejection over fellowship. Or in Love’s Labour’s Lost we encounter the sudden pall in the frolic when Marcade tells the Princess her father is dead. And what, in the conclusion of Measure for Measure, are the prospects for a happier Vienna when its flighty Duke compels marriage between Angelo and Mariana, then casually scoops up Isabella for his bride, the play ending before she can supply an acceptance? Like the Oriental carpets where a deliberate flaw is woven into the pattern, Shakespeare weaves these discords into his fabric.

So Malvolio’s sense of injury leaves us unhappy even as we rejoice in the resolving loves of Orsino, Viola, Olivia and Sebastian. And this unease is integral to the comedy. Vitality has arrived from across the seas to animate Illyria’s two patrician households, but there has been a malignancy left in the community that will feed upon itself. A servant, on the one Tudor day of the year of reversal and privilege, has had his presence-in-the-world subverted by prank and collusion. The Season of Misrule indeed.

Yet in our unease, we know that Shakespeare has found how reality touches us with an ambiguous texture, joy qualified by awareness of others’ disaffection, just as his scrupulous watch on human behaviour aligns us with the living of his people, their veritable hmphs and sighs, their scent and the rhythms of their breathing.