Twelfth Night
second lecture
TN as festive comedy
Comedy and disorder
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Orsino’s disordered emotions.
Viola’s desperate situation
Toby’s opinion of Olivia’s mourning: 1, 3.
Itself a disordered opinion?
And he an example of disordered living?
Aguecheek as wooer.
Feste’s absence: I, 5.
Anger of Olivia toward fool.
Enmity of Feste and Malvolio, ll. 77ff.
More disorder
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Olivia’s disordered love.
Disordered merriment of II, 3.
Reversal of night and morning.
Noise, song, drink.
Malvolio’s objection: 87ff.
Maria’s disordered affection for Toby: l.
180.
Comedy as Courting
• All Shakespeare’s comedies concern the
in-between world leading up to marriage.
• A psychic world of instability.
• Love as profoundly disorienting.
• Producing extravagant behavior.
• Unsettled identity of lovers.
• The necessity of disorder and exploration?
Twelfth Night and courting
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Variety of wooers of Olivia
Aguecheek as wooer of Olivia.
Malvolio as wooer of Olivia: II, 5.
Orsino as wooer of Olivia: Feste’s opinion of his
mind: II, 4 73.
• Orsino and men’s fancies: II, 4, 39.
• But his opinion of the character of women’s love:
II, 4, 94.
• Olivia’s sense of her own “madness”: III, 4, 13.
Malvolio’s “madness”
• His name.
• He stands out against the festivity, merriment.
• Maria: “Marry, sir, sometimes he is a kind of
Puritan.” II. 3, 140.
• Or not: 146ff.
• Only “serious” character in play?
• His dream of social climbing.
• Malvolio the “shadow side” of Shakespeare’s
own dream of advancement? (Greenblatt)
Rationality of Malvolio’s madness?
• Contrast of his sobriety and appearance.
• Yellow stockings, cross gartered
More cross-garteringg
Toby’s revenge?
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Malvolio’s transformation: III, 4, 6ff.
Olivia’s concern for him: ll. 64-65.
His soliloquy: 66ff
Bear-baiting?
“Go hang yourselves all! I am not of your
element.”
• Fabian: “If this were played upon a stage now, I
could condemn it as an improbable fiction.”
• “His very genius hath taken infection of the
device.”
And Feste’s revenge
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More bear-baiting: Feste as parson: IV, 2
Does it go too far?
Toby’s wish to have it over: l. 69ff.
Feste doubling of his role.
Are they trying to drive Malvolio mad?
But Malvolio seems to remain relentlessly
sane.
• Audience’s sympathies?
Malvolio’s structural role
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Olivia’s attempt to correct the wrong: V, 1, 290ff.
His almost tragic pathos: 338ff.
He becomes the scapegoat of the comedy,
the one who carries the weight rancor and ill
humor.
• Should he at this point accept his comic role and
laugh?
• But he rather bears the ill humor off the stage
with a curse: “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack
of you!”
• To whom analogous in Merchant?
Feste as jester
• Immediately in opposition to Malvolio.
• And to Olivia? Why to Olivia?
• Viola and the Fool: III, 1: “a sentence is
but a cheverill glove to a good wit.”
• Melancholy sense of what words become.
• “I am indeed not her fool, but her corrupter
of words.”
• Viola on the “work” of the fool: 61ff.
Feste’s music
• What to make of his songs?
• They seem curiously “throw-away” in
terms of their lyrics.
• “Carpe diem” at II, 3;
• Heavy-duty sadness and love at II, 4.
• Imparting a kind of generalized
melancholy?
• Final song – what to make of it?
Disorder and violence
• Psychic violence suffered by Antonio: V, 1,
76ff.
• Orsino’s threatened violence, V, 1, 117ff.
• And to Cesario: 129ff.
• Cesario’s unintended violence to Olivia.
• “His” rejection by Orsino: 164ff.
• Actual violence to Aguecheek and Toby.
• Final violence is the only threatened
revenge of Malvolio
Recognition scene
• Shakespearean comedy ends in marriage(s).
• And so here: Viola/Cesario is interchangeable
with Sebastian, Cesario/Viola acceptable to
Orsino.
• But the real conclusion is the revelation of the
sister and brother,
• which very slowly unfolds: V, 1, 226ff.
• And in fact the brother-sister revelation allows
“nature” to prevail (sorry, Antonio): “Nature to her
bias drew in that.”
• And allows the marriages.
Except Malvolio
• His entry at this point and the revelation of
the trickery against him.
• Does it invite him to reconciliation?
• Does his rejection of that cast a shadow
over the conclusion?
• Feste’s song seems to reject thematic
closure.
• Leaving us with both the satisfaction of a
comic ending and a sense of openendedness?