Twelfth Night

Overview

Written around 1601 and first recorded in performance at the Middle Temple in February 1602, where a law student named John Manningham noted in his diary that it was much like the Comedy of Errors and praised the gulling of the steward.

Twelfth Night is the twelfth day after Christmas, the end of the holiday season and traditionally a festival of misrule in which servants were served, a Lord of Misrule presided, and the ordinary order was inverted for a day. The title tells you the play’s logic: everything is upside down and everything will have to be put back.

The subtitle, What You Will, is a shrug like the one in As You Like It, and probably a rueful one: Shakespeare had used most of these devices before, and the twins come straight out of the Comedy of Errors, which came out of Plautus.

What is not borrowed is the tone. There is more music in this play than in any other, four songs and constant talk of it, and Feste’s songs are all about time passing, youth ending and the rain that raineth every day. The comedy is broad and the melancholy is constant, and they are in the same scenes.

What happens

Act 1. Three openings in quick succession. Duke Orsino, luxuriating in unrequited love for Olivia and in his own sensibility. Viola, washed ashore in Illyria after a wreck, told that her twin brother Sebastian is probably drowned, deciding to dress as a boy and serve the Duke. And Olivia’s household, where her uncle Sir Toby Belch is drinking and has installed a foolish knight, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, as a suitor to his niece in order to live off him.

Olivia has sworn to veil her face and mourn her dead brother for seven years. Orsino sends his new servant Cesario, who is Viola, to press his suit, and Viola goes, having just told the audience that she would rather be his wife herself.

Olivia, wanting to see what kind of messenger will not take no, unveils. Cesario tells her that if he loved her he would build a willow cabin at her gate and cry out her name to the hills. Olivia falls in love with the messenger and sends her steward after him with a ring he never left.

Act 2. Sebastian is alive, rescued by the sea-captain Antonio, who loves him and follows him into a city where he is a wanted man.

Viola works out the shape of the problem in a soliloquy: she loves Orsino, Olivia loves her, and Olivia will do as badly with her as she does with Orsino. Her conclusion is that time must untangle this, not she.

Then the drinking scene. Toby, Andrew and Feste the clown singing catches at two in the morning, Maria the waiting-gentlewoman trying to hush them, and Malvolio arriving in his nightgown to tell them they are behaving like tinkers. Toby’s answer, that being virtuous does not abolish cakes and ale, is the play’s motto for one half of itself.

Maria proposes the trick. She will forge a letter in Olivia’s hand, in which Olivia confesses love for someone unnamed and asks him to wear yellow stockings, cross-gartered, and to smile constantly. She knows Malvolio’s vanity well enough to know he will make the letter fit.

The box-tree scene follows, with the three of them hidden and commenting while Malvolio, before he even finds the letter, walks up and down imagining himself Count Malvolio, married three months, in a branched velvet gown, summoning his kinsman Toby to be lectured. It is the funniest scene Shakespeare wrote, and what makes it funny is that he is caught out in exactly the ambition the letter then flatters.

In between, the play’s other register: Orsino asking for an old song, Feste singing come away death, and Viola telling the story of the sister who never told her love.

Act 3. Malvolio appears in yellow stockings, cross-gartered, smiling at a woman in mourning who has just heard her steward quote riddles at her, and Olivia decides he is mad and asks Toby to look after him. Toby has him confined in a dark room.

Sir Andrew, discouraged, is persuaded by Toby to challenge Cesario to a duel, and Toby carries the challenge between two people equally terrified of fighting, embroidering the ferocity of each to the other. The duel is interrupted by Antonio, who mistakes Viola for Sebastian, intervenes, is arrested, and asks for his purse back from someone who does not know him, which he takes for the cruellest ingratitude.

Viola hears him say the name Sebastian and begins to hope.

Act 4. Sebastian, walking through the town, is attacked by Sir Andrew, who thinks he is the cowardly Cesario, and beats him soundly. Olivia arrives, apologises to the man she thinks is her page, and takes him home. Sebastian, offered a beautiful woman and a house by a stranger, concludes either that he is mad or that the world is, and goes with her. They are married within the hour.

Meanwhile Feste, disguised as the curate Sir Topas, visits Malvolio in the dark and tells him the room is full of light, that he is possessed, and asks him questions about Pythagoras. Then he drops the voice, speaks as himself, and agrees to bring paper and ink.

Act 5. Everything at once. Antonio accuses Viola of ingratitude. Olivia calls Cesario husband. The priest confirms the marriage. Orsino, betrayed, threatens to kill the boy he loves, and Viola says she would die a thousand deaths for him. Sir Andrew comes in with a broken head.

Then Sebastian enters, and the twins face each other. The recognition is slow and formal, done through questions about their father’s mole and the day of his death, and it is the still centre of the act.

The pairings resolve: Sebastian to Olivia, Orsino to Viola, whom he addresses as boy until she can get her woman’s clothes back from the captain, who is, unhelpfully, in prison at Malvolio’s suit. Toby has married Maria as a reward for the letter.

Malvolio’s letter is read and he is brought in. He shows Olivia the forgery, she says the hand is Maria’s, and Fabian confesses the whole plot and hopes it may be laughed at rather than avenged. Feste, unable to resist, reminds him of an insult from Act 1 and says the whirligig of time brings in his revenges. Malvolio says he will be revenged on the whole pack of them and walks out. Orsino says someone should go after him.

Then the stage empties and Feste sings alone: when that I was and a little tiny boy, and the rain it raineth every day.

How to read it

Read the box-tree scene and the dark-room scene together, and notice the temperature change. The same joke runs through both and stops being a joke somewhere in between, and finding where is the most useful thing you can do with this play.

Watch Viola’s Act 2 soliloquy about the knot. She is the only person in the play who understands the whole situation and the only one who can do nothing about it, and her patience is what the ending eventually rewards.

Read Orsino’s opening speech as self-indulgence, which is how the play treats it. He wants excess of music so that his appetite will sicken and die, and he is in love with an idea. He is cured by marrying a woman who has spent the play listening to him.

Pay attention to the songs. Feste’s three songs are about mortality, and they are placed in the middle of the drunkenness, the courtship and the ending. In a play this funny, the clown never once sings anything cheerful.

Ask what Malvolio has actually done. He is officious, humourless, ambitious and dislikes the fool. For this he is tricked, humiliated in front of his employer, and imprisoned as a lunatic. The play gives him no answer and nobody apologises.

And notice how Shakespeare treats class. Malvolio is punished for wanting to marry Olivia; Maria, who does the punishing, is rewarded by marrying Sir Toby, which is exactly the same ambition successfully executed.

Questions it raises

• When does the gulling of Malvolio stop being funny, and does the play know?
• Malvolio’s exit is unanswered. Can a comedy end with a grievance still open?
• Orsino falls in love with Viola within a hundred lines of learning she is a woman. Has anything changed except her clothes?
• Olivia marries a man she has known for an hour because he resembles someone else. What does the play think love is?
• Maria’s ambition is rewarded and Malvolio’s is punished. What is the difference?
• The play ends with a song about wind and rain. Why send the audience out on that?