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Subject: ENGLISH Class: B.A. Part 11 Honours, Paper-111[DRAMA] Topic: INTRODUCING 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, 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, , 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 (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.

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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 , , 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 , or the twelfth

4 night of the 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 in the play. Twelfth Night is one of Shakespeare’s so-called transvestite comedies, a category that also includes As You Like It and . 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 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 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-- 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 subplot, but none of them is very convincing. Sir Toby,

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Maria, and the luckless steward seem to have sprung largely from Shakespeare’s own imagination.

GENRE

Twelfth Night can be considered a model 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, and Sir Andrew provide plenty of comic relief in the form of ridiculous rhymes, songs, , 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.

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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. 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 , 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. 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. Sir Toby and the others find this fantasy hysterically funny, of course—not only because of Malvolio’s unattractive personality but also because Malvolio is not of noble blood. In the class system of Shakespeare’s time, a noblewoman would generally not sully her reputation by marrying a man of lower social status

PLOT ANALYSIS

Twelfth Night is a play about desire’s power to override conventions of class, religion, and even gender. Several characters begin the play

9 believing they want one thing, only to have love teach them they actually want something else. Orsino thinks he wants Olivia, until he falls in love with Viola (dressed as Cesario.) Olivia thinks she wants to be left alone to mourn her brother, until she also falls in love with Cesario. She then thinks she wants Cesario, until she meets Sebastian. Malvolio thinks he wants to be a straight-laced Puritan, until the prospect of Olivia’s favor causes him to act like a fool. As Twelfth Night is a play about overturning the social order, the most sophisticated characters prove to have the least self-knowledge, while the least sophisticated characters easily see through the pretensions of their so-called superiors. Desire acts as a leveling force, forcing characters to gain self-knowledge. Orsino realizes his love for Olivia is misguided, Olivia abandons her vow not to love for seven years, and Malvolio is revealed as the pompous jerk he really is. Feste the Fool has the last word, ending the play with a bittersweet song suggesting the darker aspects of reality lurk under the frivolity and merriment of the play. Because the play is primarily about the power desire has over people, love-struck characters who cannot come together provide both the forward momentum and the source of conflict in Twelfth Night’s plot. The first conflict we encounter involves Orsino and Olivia. In the first scene, we learn that Duke Orsino believes himself very much in love with Olivia. Olivia, on the other hand, is determined to mourn her brother’s death and has sworn to stay cloistered for seven years without showing her face. She will therefore not accept the overtures of a suitor (at least

10 not this one). We immediately suspect the sincerity of the two characters’ decisions. Duke Orsino, for instance, seems enamored more by the idea of pining for Olivia than the actuality of courting her, and would rather outsource the hard work of his romance to an emissary like Cesario. Similarly, Olivia’s grief is showy and self-conscious. Both characters are frozen in their self-regard, and require some external force to activate them. Viola’s arrival incites change in the other characters. Of the main characters, she is by far the most willful, and serves as an obvious contrast to Olivia and Orsino. Unlike Orsino and Olivia, Viola is purposeful and decisive: she knows what she wants and she sets about trying to get it. Her actions are propulsive, setting the story in motion, whereas the actions of Orsino and Olivia are reactive. In Act I, scene v, Viola, disguised as Cesario, sets off to woo Olivia on Orsino’s behalf. The interchange between Orsino, Cesario, and Olivia set up the central conflict of the rest of the play, and introduce the idea that love and desire can transcend gender. Olivia believes Cesario is a boy, but as Orsino says, Cesario makes a very feminine boy: “all is semblative a woman’s part.” (I.iv.). Despite (or because of) Cesario’s resemblance to a woman, Olivia falls in love, while Cesario is developing feelings for Orsino. None of the lovers’ affections are requited, and Viola’s disguise as Cesario has complicated the plot to the point that even Viola feels helpless to untangle the mess: “It is too hard a knot for me to untie!”

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In Act II, scene one, Sebastian and Antonio are introduced and the audience learns that, rather than drowning at sea, Sebastian is alive, and believes his sister, Viola, is dead. Sebastian’s announcement of his plan to go to Duke Orsino’s court increases the dramatic tension, as the audience understands a reunion of the siblings is inevitable. Once Sebastian arrives in Illyria, he lashes out violently against Sir Andrew and Sir Toby, and accepts Olivia’s amorous advances. The characters think Sebastian is Cesario and treat him accordingly, while Sebastian has no idea why he is being treated this way. The audience knows the reason behind the misunderstanding, increasing the tension as we wonder when the plot will finally untangle. Meanwhile, Viola unwittingly betrays Sebastian’s friend Antonio. The mayhem increases further with Maria, Toby, and Andrew’s plot to humiliate Malvolio, whose bizarre behavior gets him locked up. The riotous pile-up of confusion and mistaken identities further strains the precarious configuration of love interests and Viola’s struggle to uphold her identity as Cesario. Something must break and soon, the question is just when and where this crack will take place.

Once all of the characters are present in one place in Act V, the exposure of identities becomes both inevitable and imminent. Once Cesario and Sebastian are seen together, Viola’s disguise is no longer tenable. Rather than being dismayed by the revelation of Viola’s deception, neither Olivia nor Orsino seems to mind having been fooled by her. Olivia is just as happy married to Viola’s twin, Sebastian, while Orsino is eager to marry

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Cesario now that he knows Cesario is really a woman. Curiously, Orsino seems in no hurry for Cesario to change back to into a dress. Olivia and Orsino’s ease in switching their emotions (Olivia from one person to another, Orsino from friendship to romantic love) substantiate our sense from the beginning that both characters are somewhat shallow and fickle. More importantly, the play ends happily for Viola, who is reunited with her beloved brother and joined in marriage with her beloved Orsino. The play ends with a series of marriages (Viola and Orsino, Olivia and Sebastian, Maria and Sir Toby) that untangle the confusion and restore order and civility to Illyria.

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By:

Prof Sunita Sinha Head, Department of English Women’s College, Samastipur L.N.M.U. Darbhanga Mob: 9934917117 E mail: [email protected] Website:www.sunitasinha.com