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“Introducing Twelfth Night” 1 Subject: ENGLISH Class: B.A. Part 11 Honours, Paper-111[DRAMA] Topic: INTRODUCING TWELFTH NIGHT Lecture No:166 By: Prof. Sunita Sinha Head, Department of English Women’s College Samastipur L.N.M.U., Darbhanga “INTRODUCING TWELFTH NIGHT” WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE The most influential writer in all of English literature, William Shakespeare was born in 1564 to a -successful middle-class glove-maker in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. Shakespeare attended grammar school, but his formal education proceeded no further. In 1582 he married an older woman, Anne Hathaway, and had three children with her. Around 1590 he left his family behind and traveled to London to work as an actor and playwright. Public and critical acclaim quickly followed, and Shakespeare eventually became the most popular playwright in England and part- 2 owner of the Globe Theater. His career bridged the reigns of Elizabeth I (ruled 1558–1603) and James I (ruled 1603–1625), and he was a favorite of both monarchs. Indeed, James granted his company the greatest possible compliment by bestowing upon its members the title of King’s Men. Wealthy and renowned, Shakespeare retired to Stratford and died in 1616 at age fifty-two. At the time of his death, literary luminaries such as Ben Jonson hailed his works as timeless. Shakespeare’s works were collected and printed in various editions in the century following his death, and by the early eighteenth century his reputation as the greatest poet ever to write in English was well established. The unprecedented admiration garnered by his works led to a fierce curiosity about Shakespeare’s life, but the dearth of biographical information has left many details of Shakespeare’s personal history shrouded in mystery. Some people have concluded from this fact and from Shakespeare’s modest education that Shakespeare’s plays were actually written by someone else—Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford are the two most popular candidates—but the support for this claim is overwhelmingly circumstantial, and the theory is not taken seriously by many scholars. 3 SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS In the absence of credible evidence to the contrary, Shakespeare must be viewed as the author of the thirty-seven plays and 154 sonnets that bear his name. The legacy of this body of work is immense. A number of Shakespeare’s plays seem to have transcended even the category of brilliance, becoming so influential as to affect profoundly the course of Western literature and culture ever after. TWELFTH NIGHT Shakespeare wrote Twelfth Night near the middle of his career, probably in the year 1601. Most critics consider it one of his greatest comedies, along with plays such as As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Twelfth Night is about illusion, deception, disguises, madness, and the extraordinary things that love will cause us to do—and to see. TITLE Twelfth Night is the only one of Shakespeare’s plays to have an alternative title: the play is actually called Twelfth Night, or What You Will. Critics are divided over what the two titles mean, but “Twelfth Night” is usually considered to be a reference to Epiphany, or the twelfth 4 night of the Christmas celebration (January 6). In Shakespeare’s day, this holiday was celebrated as a festival in which everything was turned upside down—much like the upside-down, chaotic world of Illyria in the play. Twelfth Night is one of Shakespeare’s so-called transvestite comedies, a category that also includes As You Like It and The Merchant of Venice. These plays feature female protagonists who, for one reason or another, have to disguise themselves as young men. It is important to remember that in Shakespeare’s day, all of the parts were played by men, so Viola would actually have been a male pretending to be a female pretending to be a male. Contemporary critics have found a great deal of interest in the homoerotic implications of these plays. SOURCES As is the case with most of Shakespeare’s plays, the story of Twelfth Night is derived from other sources. In particular, Shakespeare seems to have consulted an Italian play from the 1530s entitled Gl’Ingannati, which features twins who are mistaken for each other and contains a version of the Viola-Olivia-Orsino love triangle in Twelfth Night. He also seems to have used a 1581 English story entitled “Apollonius and Silla,” by Barnabe Riche, which mirrors the plot of Twelfth Night up to a point, with a shipwreck, a pair of twins, and a woman disguised as a man. A number of sources have been suggested for the Malvolio subplot, but none of them is very convincing. Sir Toby, 5 Maria, and the luckless steward seem to have sprung largely from Shakespeare’s own imagination. GENRE Twelfth Night can be considered a model Shakespearean comedy in that it employs nearly every feature of the genre: a wedding, mistaken identities, misunderstandings, physical comedy, and a happy ending. Like all of Shakespeare’s comedies, the play ends with a wedding – in this case, the joint wedding of two sets of lovers: Olivia and Sebastian, and Viola and Orsino. Also as in many other comedies, the lovers are initially kept apart through misunderstandings, which lead to plot complications. Olivia falls in love with Cesario, (who is really Viola in drag,) but Viola can’t return Olivia’s love. Similarly, Viola falls in love with Orsino, who, believing Viola is Cesario, refuses to return her love. Only once true identities are revealed can the lovers unite with their appropriate partners. In addition to the preposterous plot, cross-dressing, and misunderstandings, the play abounds in silliness. While the main characters are pursuing the wrong partners, the Fool, Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew provide plenty of comic relief in the form of ridiculous rhymes, songs, double entendre, and antics. Within all the silliness, however, Twelfth Night offers an exploration of desire as a fickle, overriding force of nature strong enough to overturn the social order. 6 Shakespearean comedies often take place in societies where the social order is out of whack. In Twelfth Night, erotic desire wreaks havoc on the flimsy structure’s society has put in place. Under normal circumstances, the noble-born Olivia should not fall in love with a servant like Cesario, who (in disguise at least) occupies a lower social position. Likewise, Duke Orsino, who is pining for Olivia, should not feel an erotic pull toward Viola while she is masquerading as a boy servant. The speed and ease with which lovers shift from one object of desire to another (Orsino loves Olivia but then switches to Viola; Olivia has sworn off love to mourn her brother’s death but then quickly decides she loves Cesario; later she switches to Sebastian) underscores the erratic and all-consuming character of erotic yearning. In the play, desire hops about from person to person with little regard for social status, gender, or other limits that civil society has deemed important. At the same time, while the play concludes in a happy tone for its noble- born, heterosexual characters, palpable notes of discord remain for others. Malvolio and Antonio are two such unfortunates, left unpaired by the play’s conclusion. Malvolio has failed to win Olivia’s heart because of his lower social status and his humorless Puritanism, while Antonio’s feelings for Sebastian, which can be read as possibly homoerotic in nature, remain unsatisfied. Feste the Fool’s final song adds another dash of bitterness to what should be a cheerful end. While we are asked to rejoice at the imminent marriages of the central characters, Feste’s song reminds 7 us that marriage is difficult, long, and sometimes fails to bring about happiness: “But when I came, alas! to wive/…By swaggering could I never thrive” (V.i.). These departures from a more conventional finale are like a gentle wake-up call, rousing us from pleasant dreams and sending us back into the real world, where love (and the foolishness it engenders) is not always so harmless. THEMES Love as a Cause of Suffering Twelfth Night is a romantic comedy, and romantic love is the play’s main focus. Despite the fact that the play offers a happy ending, in which the various lovers find one another and achieve wedded bliss, Shakespeare shows that love can cause pain. Many of the characters seem to view love as a kind of curse, a feeling that attacks its victims suddenly and disruptively. Various characters claim to suffer painfully from being in love, or, rather, from the pangs of unrequited love. The Uncertainty of Gender Gender is one of the most obvious and much-discussed topics in the play. Twelfth Night is one of Shakespeare’s so-called transvestite comedies, in which a female character—in this case, Viola—disguises herself as a man. This situation creates a sexual mess: Viola falls in love 8 with Orsino but cannot tell him, because he thinks she is a man, while Olivia, the object of Orsino’s affection, falls for Viola in her guise as Cesario. The Folly of Ambition The problem of social ambition works itself out largely through the character of Malvolio, the steward, who seems to be a competent servant, if prudish and dour, but proves to be, in fact, a supreme egotist, with tremendous ambitions to rise out of his social class. Maria plays on these ambitions when she forges a letter from Olivia that makes Malvolio believe that Olivia is in love with him and wishes to marry him.
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