‘I am not what I am’
Carnival and Lent in Twelfth Night
Looking forward and looking back:
Janus and January
‘Twelfth Night Merrymaking in Farmer
Shakeshaft’s Barn’ (Phiz, c. 1840)
Recap: Carnival
Shrove Tuesday
May Games
Misrule (Christmas – especially Twelfth Night)
From Philip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (1583):
‘First, all the wildheads of the parish, conventing together, choose
them a grand captain (of all mischief) whom they ennoble with the
title of “my Lord of Misrule”, and him they crown with great
solemnity, and adopt for their king. … And in this sort they go to
the church (I say) and into the church (though the minister be at
prayer or preaching) dancing and swinging their handkerchiefs over
their heads in the church, like devils incarnate, with such a
confused noise, that no man can hear his own voice.’
Recap: Carnival
According to Michael Bristol:
‘Central to the experience of Carnival is a particular use of
symbols, costumes and masks, in which the ordinary
relationship between signifier and signified is disrupted and
conventional meaning is parodied.’ (1983: 641)
For Mikhail Bakhtin, carnival ‘offers the chance to have a new
outlook on the world, to realize the relative nature of all that exists,
and to enter a completely new order of things’ (1965: 34).
In the carnival of the Renaissance period, says Bakhtin, ‘the world
is seen anew, no less (and perhaps more) profoundly than when
seen from the serious standpoint’ (1965: 66).
Recap: Carnival
As we saw last week, the Puritans of the period took a dim
view of both carnival and theatre:
‘… some spend the Sabbath day (for the most part) in frequenting
of bawdy stage-plays and interludes, in maintaining Lords of
Misrule (for so they call a certain kind of play which they use),
May games, church-ales, feasts, and wakes: in piping, dancing,
dicing, carding, bowling, tennis-playing: in bear-baiting, cockfighting, hawking, hunting, and such like; … whereby the Lord
God is dishonoured, his Sabbath violated, his word neglected, his
sacraments contemned, and his people marvellously corrupted
and carried away from true virtue and godliness.’ (Philip Stubbes,
The Anatomie of Abuses, 1583)
Carnival and the Elizabethan stage
Robert Weimann argues that ‘although the
[carnivalesque] ceremonies were gradually discontinued,
their spirit survived in the gaiety, the “immoderate and
disordinate Joye,” of the Elizabethan clown, jig dancer,
and “ieaster”’ (1987: 23-4):
‘…his study is to coin bitter jests, or to show antique motions,
or to sing bawdy sonnets and ballads: give him a little wine in
his head, he is continually flearing and making of mouths; he
laughs intemperately at every little occasion, and dances about
the houses, leaps over tables, outskips men’s heads, trips up his
companions’ heels, burns sack with a candle, and hath all the
feats of a Lord of Misrule in the country.’ (Thomas Lodge,
Wits Miserie, 1596)
Twelfth Night and carnival
Bakhtin describes ‘the essential carnival element in
the organization of Shakespeare’s drama’:
‘This does not merely concern the secondary, clownish
motives of his plays. The logic of crownings and
uncrownings, in direct or indirect form, organizes the
serious elements also.’ (1965: 275)
Twelfth Night’s title, of course, has festive and
carnivalesque associations.
Sebastian, towards the end of the play, asks, ‘Are all
the people mad?’ (4.1.26)
Twelfth Night and carnival
In Bakhtinian fashion, Twelfth Night might be
characterised as a play which explodes traditional
categorisations and hierarchies.
As Karin S. Coddon argues:
‘In Twelfth Night demarcations between male and female,
master and servant, libertine and moralist come into
festive – and not so festive – collision.’ (Coddon 1993:
309)
Carnival and Lent (Pieter Bruegel, 1559)
Sir Toby Belch
MARIA. …you must confine yourself
within the modest limits of order.
SIR TOBY. Confine? I’ll confine myself no
finer than I am. These clothes are good
enough to drink in, and so be these
boots too; an they be not, let them hang
themselves in their own straps. (1.3.7-12)
Compare Falstaff: ‘out of all order,
out of all compass’ (1 Henry IV,
3.3.19)
Twelfth Night, Filter, 2008 (2010 revival)
Sir Toby Belch
Lord of Misrule?
‘I am sure care’s an enemy to life’
(1.3.2)
Ambiguous identity
Terry Eagleton argues that Sir Toby
‘is a rampant hedonist, complacently
anchored in his body, falling at once
“beyond” the symbolic order of
society in his verbal anarchy, and
“below” it in his carnivalesque
refusal to submit his body to social
control’ (1986: 32).
Twelfth Night, Filter, 2008 (2010 revival)
Sir Toby Belch
‘The grotesque body’
‘Laughter degrades and
materializes… To degrade also
means to concern oneself with
the lower stratum of the body,
the life of the belly and the
reproductive organs’ (Bakhtin
1965: 20-1).
Twelfth Night, Filter, 2008 (2010 revival)
A twist on the morality play?
Remember the Vices from Mankind:
NOW-A-DAYS. Leap about lively! Thou art a valiant man;
Let us be merry while we be here!
NOUGHT. Shall I break my neck to show you sport?
NOW-A-DAYS. Therefore, ever beware of thy report!
NOUGHT. I beshrew ye all! Here is a shrewd sort;
Have thereat then, with a merry cheer!
Here they dance
MERCY. Do way! do way this revel, sirs! Do way!
NOW-A-DAYS. Do way, good Adam? Do way?
This is no part of thy play. (75-83)
A twist on the morality play?
SIR ANDREW. Shall we set about some revels?
SIR TOBY. What shall we do else – were we not born under Taurus?
SIR ANDREW. Taurus? That’s sides and heart.
SIR TOBY. No, sir, it is legs and thighs: let me see thee caper. Ha,
higher! Ha, ha, excellent! (1.3.130-7)
MALVOLIO. My masters, are you mad? Or what are you? Have you no
wit, manners, nor honesty, but to gabble like tinkers at this time of
night? Do ye make an alehouse of my lady’s house, that ye squeak
out your coziers’ catches without any mitigation or remorse of
voice? Is there no respect of place, persons, nor time in you?
SIR TOBY. We did keep time, sir, in our catches. Sneck up! (2.3.83-90)
Malvolio
MARIA. Marry, sir, sometimes he
is a kind of Puritan.
SIR ANDREW. O, if I thought
that I’d beat him like a dog.
SIR TOBY BELCH. What, for
being a Puritan? Thy exquisite
reason, dear knight.
SIR ANDREW. I have no
exquisite reason for’t, but I
have reason good enough.
(2.3.135-40)
I, Malvolio, Tim Crouch, 2011
Malvolio
Malvolio as anti-theatrical Puritan:
MALVOLIO. I marvel your ladyship takes delight in such a barren rascal…
I protest, I take these wise men, that crow so at these set kind of fools,
no better than the fools’ zanies. (1.5.79-85)
SIR TOBY. Dost thou think because thou art virtuous, there shall be no
more cakes and ale? (2.3.110-11)
Of course, the festive world of the play turns the Puritan
Malvolio into his very opposite…
OLIVIA Why, this is very midsummer madness. (3.4.54)
The Malvolio paradox
FABIAN. If this were played upon a stage, now, I could condemn
it as an improbable fiction. (3.4.125-6)
Director Tim Carroll describes Malvolio’s gulling scene as a
‘game’: it asks its audience ‘to be complicit in accepting
something which is literally unbelievable’ (2008: 38).
There are generally two games being played concurrently
during this sequence:
the onstage observers’ game is to remain hidden from
Malvolio whilst indulging in behaviours that jeopardise their
cover;
at the same time, the object of Malvolio’s game is to persuade
both himself and the audience that the words of the letter
refer to him.
The Malvolio paradox
Donald Sinden documents his performance in John Barton’s 1969
production in his chapter of Players of Shakespeare 1, noting
numerous playful exchanges with the audience.
For example, when Malvolio reads the word ‘steward’ in the letter,
he shows it to the audience:
‘They obviously don’t believe him, so he shows them the very word
and mouths it a second time (laugh 3). Fools! He is patently
wasting his time on them – they only laugh.’ (1985: 58)
Jonathan Holmes points out that Sinden ‘predicates his
characterisation on the play-acting of those he is addressing, which
as his account makes clear includes the audience as much as, and
perhaps more than, his onstage addressees’ (2004: 29-30).
Feste
FESTE. I am gone, sir,
And anon, sir,
I’ll be with you again,
In a trice,
Like to the old Vice,
Your need to sustain… (4.2.123-8)
The social status of fools (and
indeed of players) is at once ‘both
high and low’ (2.3.40).
A wandering figure, Feste belongs
both to the locus of the play world
and the platea of the Elizabethan
audience.
Twelfth Night, Propeller, 2012
Feste
VIOLA. Art not thou the Lady Olivia’s
fool?
FESTE. No indeed, sir, the Lady Olivia
has no folly… I am indeed not her
fool, but her corrupter of words.
(3.1.30-5)
‘Feste’s entrance … is coloured not
only by the unauthorized absence
from Olivia’s household, but also by
his defiant resistance (‘Let her hang
me’) to Maria’s interrogations about
his whereabouts, even under the
threat of hanging or
unemployment.’ (Coddon 1993:
315)
Twelfth Night, Propeller, 2012
Wise fools and foolish wits
‘This fellow is wise enough to play the fool’ (3.1.59)
‘Better a witty fool, than a foolish wit’ (1.5.32-3)
Feste and Olivia’s ‘Take the fool away’ exchange (1.5.35-68)
disrupts categories of folly and wisdom in a carnivalesque manner.
This same disruption is later brought to bear on Malvolio:
MALVOLIO. Fool, there was never a man so notoriously abused. I am as well
in my wits, fool, as thou art.
FESTE. But as well? Then you are mad indeed, if you be no better in your
wits than a fool. (4.2.89-92)
OLIVIA. Alas, poor fool, how have they baffled thee! (5.1.366)
Carnival and Lent in Twelfth Night
What is love? ’tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present
laughter;
What’s to come is still unsure:
In delay there lies no plenty;
Then come kiss me, sweet and
twenty,
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.
Twelfth Night, dir. Trevor Nunn, 1996
(2.3.46-51)
Carnival and Lent in Twelfth Night
The play stages a conflict between the force of selfdenial and the more joyful spirit of liberation.
VIOLA. …She pined in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief. (2.4.112-15)
OLIVIA. Why then, methinks ’tis time to smile again. […]
The clock upbraids me with the waste of time. (3.1.1259)
Gender inversion
Three couples exhibit same-sex attraction in the play:
Olivia/Viola, Orsino/Cesario, and Antonio/Sebastian.
Casey Charles argues that
‘…this theme functions neither as an uncomplicated
promotion of a modern category of sexual orientation nor,
from a more traditional perspective, as an ultimately contained
representation of the licensed misrule of saturnalia. The
representation of homoerotic attraction in Twelfth Night
functions rather as a means of dramatizing the socially
constructed basis of a sexuality that is determined by gender
identity.’ (Charles 1997: 122)
Gender inversion
Complicating this, of course, is the fact that Viola-as-Cesario
would have been played by a boy actor.
Boy actors already challenged Elizabethan England’s sense of
stable gender identities: anti-theatricalists frequently complained
that boys dressed as women provoked illicit sexual desire.
Stubbes again:
‘Our apparel was given us as a sign distinctive to discern betwixt
sex and sex, and therefore one to wear the apparel of another sex
is to participate with the same, and to adulterate the verity of his
own kind.’
VIOLA. Disguise, I see, thou art a wickedness
Wherein the pregnant enemy does much. (2.2.27-8)
Twelfth Night as saturnalia?
C. L. Barber:
‘The most fundamental distinction the play brings home
to us is the difference between men and women. To say
this may seem to labour the obvious; for what love story
does not emphasize this difference? But the disguising of
a girl as a boy in Twelfth Night is exploited so as to renew
in a special way our sense of the difference. Just as a
saturnalian reversal of social roles need not threaten the
social structure, but can serve instead to consolidate it, so
a temporary, playful reversal of sexual roles can renew
the meaning of the normal relation.’ (245)
Viola as liminal figure
Viola makes it clear that she is ‘acting a part’:
VIOLA. I can say little more than I have studied, and that
question’s out of my part. (1.5.171-2)
OLIVIA. Are you a comedian?
VIOLA. No, my profound heart; and yet – by the very fangs
of malice I swear – I am not that I play. (1.5.175-7)
Later, however, this becomes a more profound identity
crisis:
VIOLA. I am not what I am. (3.1.139)
Viola as liminal figure
ORSINO. Your master quits you, and for your service done him
So much against the mettle of your sex,
So far beneath your soft and tender breeding,
And since you called me master for so long,
Here is my hand. You shall from this time be
Your master’s mistress. (5.1.318-23)
ORSINO. …Cesario, come –
For so you shall be while you are a man;
But when in other habits you are seen,
Orsino’s mistress and his fancy’s queen. (5.1.381-4)
Viola as liminal figure
‘…in her hermaphroditic
capacity as man and woman…
[Viola] collapses the polarities
upon which heterosexuality is
based by becoming an object of
desire whose ambiguity renders
the distinction between homoand hetero-erotic attraction
difficult to decipher.’ (Charles
1997: 127-8)
Twelfth Night publicity image, Propeller, 2007
Twelfth Night’s ending:
saturnalian or subversive?
‘If in Twelfth Night the aristocratic order is ostensibly
reasserted in the pairings of Orsino/Viola and
Oliva/Sebastian, the refusal of the play’s closing to
recuperate two of its most disorderly subjects –
Malvolio and Feste – suggests rather less than a
wholesale endorsement of the privileges of rank and
hierarchy.’ (Coddon 1993: 309)
‘The so-called “festive comedy” concludes rather
ominously; if indeed “the whirligig of time brings in his
revenges,” it is difficult to dismiss Malvolio’s parting
threat as merely one sour note troubling an otherwise
stable social hierarchy.’ (Coddon 1993: 322)
References
Bakhtin, Mikhail (1965) Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Barber, C. L. (1972) Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Form and its
Relation to Social Custom, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Bristol, Michael D. (1983) ‘Carnival and the Institutions of Theatre in
Elizabethan England’, ELH, 50: 4, 637-654.
Carroll, Tim (2008) ‘Practising behaviour to his own shadow’, in
Christie Carson & Farah Karim-Cooper [eds] Shakespeare’s Globe: A
Theatrical Experiment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 37-44.
Charles, Casey (1997) ‘Gender Trouble in Twelfth Night’, Theatre
Journal, 49: 2, 121-141.
References
Coddon, Karin S. (1993) ‘“Slander in an Allow’d Fool”: Twelfth Night’s
Crisis of the Aristocracy’, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 33: 2,
309-325.
Eagleton, Terry (1986) William Shakespeare, London: Basil Blackwell.
Holmes, Jonathan (2004) Merely Players?: Actors’ Accounts of Performing
Shakespeare, London & New York: Routledge.
Sinden, Donald (1985) ‘Malvolio in Twelfth Night’, in Philip Brockbank
[ed.] Players of Shakespeare 1, 41-66.
Weimann, R. (1987) Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater:
Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function,
Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press.