Missing Fathers: Twelfth Night and the Reformation of Mourning by Suzanne Penuel welfth Night (ca. 1602) begins and ends with references to dead fathers whose link to the action of the play is clearly significant Tand significantly unclear. A lady richly left by one father is eroti- cally paralyzed. Another of slightly lower status, also fatherless, leaves the family home. The fathers reveal themselves merely in traces: Olivia’s is mentioned in an aside telling us that he was “a count / That died some twelvemonth since,” and Viola notes hers just in passing until act 5, when she and Sebastian verify each other’s identities. One might as- sume that this paternal absence would free the plot from being the sort that Jonson crafted, with the older generation hovering over the libidos of the young. After all, the casual approximation of “some twelvemonth since” suggests the count’s insignificance, and the quantitative play on “count” and “account” underscores the imprecision of the dating and the wealth of the estate left Olivia by her father. But rather than cele- brating post-adolescent freedom, the play reverberates with the sense of familial loss that accompanies entry into the sexual adult world. That loss is a social lacuna, literalized as paternal death. Less subtle than the appearances of the fathers whose mentions book- end Twelfth Night in acts 1 and 5 is Twelfth Night’s twinning and dou- bling. The shipwrecked dyad of Viola-Sebastian replicates Viola’s dual identity as herself and her transvestite alter ego Cesario; it also copies the similarity of Viola’s and Olivia’s names and circumstances, with the two quasi-anagrammatic women mourning for brothers. Even the doubled recounting of Olivia’s circumstances, the mistaking of Feste William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1985), 1.2.36–37. All subsequent references to the play are paren- thetical. 74 © 2010 The University of North Carolina Press Suzanne Penuel 75 for Sir Topas, and Maria’s handwriting for Olivia’s repeat the trope. The twinning in Twelfth Night functions as a response to death. A double is most obviously a form of spatial repetition, with one person or image duplicated in another place. However, it can also be chronological repe- tition: someone from the past is copied into the present, as is the case in the play. This essay will discuss doubling in Twelfth Night, its connec- tions to the ambivalently longed for figure of the early modern father, and the multiple implications of that longing. A response to a specifi- cally post-Reformation hunger, I will argue, the double takes its force from changes in mourning rituals that accompanied the decline of En- glish Catholicism. It serves as a testament to the power of the father- child tie and ultimately as a fantasy of its replacement. DEATH AND THE DOUBLE That Twelfth Night concerns itself with death is a familiar observation; mortality makes its entrance in the first scene even with the evidently healthy young Orsino, who wishes for music so that “his appetite may sicken and so die” (1.1.3). “That strain again,” he requests, “it had a dying fall” (4). As with Hamlet, first performed around the same time, dying is the alpha and omega of the play. But unlike Hamlet, Twelfth Night concludes with the promise of marriage. It also ends not with the more typically comedic references to pregnancy but with a song that On doubling as an omen of death, see Karl Miller, Doubles: Studies in Literary His- tory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 416. For an analysis of the double as death-denying in nineteenth- and twentieth-century German literature, see Otto Rank, The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study, tr. Harry Tucker, Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971), 77–79. Sigmund Freud, writing on the topic four years after Rank, concurs that the double functions as a denial of death; he notes that “probably the ‘im- mortal’ soul was the first ‘double’ of the body” (“The Uncanny” [1919], in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. and trans. James Strachey, vol. 17 [London: Hogarth, 1955], 235). Thad Jenkins Logan counts thirty-seven allusions to death (“Twelfth Night: The Limits of Festivity,” Studies in English Literature 22 [1982]: 236). Anne Barton observes that these references increase in frequency as the play progresses. See her Introduction to Twelfth Night, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Miff- lin, 1974), 406. David Willbern, among others, has commented on the play’s focus on mortality. See his “Malvolio’s Fall,” Shakespeare Quarterly 29 (1978): 85–90. See James Calderwood (Shakespeare and the Denial of Death [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987]) for an examination of the ways in which Shakespearean characters seek immortality by join- ing with large collectives; the dynamic I describe in this essay is similar to that discussed by Calderwood, albeit on a more intimate scale. 76 Twelfth Night and the Reformation of Mourning for many readers describes a mortal trajectory, especially in the fourth stanza: But when I came unto my beds, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, With tosspots still ’had drunken heads, For the rain it raineth every day. (5.1.378–81) The chronological progression of the first three stanzas moves from childhood to both marriage and maturity, so “beds” implies decline as much as sexuality or ordinary drunkenness. What the play does with that projection of decline is to oscillate between mournfulness for the past—and the parent—and a desire to avoid patrilineal strictures. The preoccupation with death is not least visible in Sebastian, who usually plays second fiddle to Viola in critical treatments of the play. When Sebas- tian describes his father to his friend Antonio, the lines, “He left behind him myself and a sister, both / born in an hour” (2.1.13–14), juxtapose the children’s birth and the father’s death, though Viola says later, in an unusual third-person reference to herself, that her father “died that day when Viola from her birth / Had numbered thirteen years” (5.1.229). (One critic suggests that the illeism is a form of self-objectification, an ambivalence about living and agency. However, the absence of the ex- pected “I” also serves to distance Viola from her father’s death.) Sebas- tian’s phrasing insinuates a substitution of children for parent, an in- ability to exist simultaneously, that Viola’s version softens, though the precise dating of her father’s death at her arrival to teenage years per- haps indicates a substitution of her incipient adulthood for his ended one. But the potential discrepancy between Sebastian’s and Viola’s ac- counts of their age at their father’s death bears less analysis than does Sebastian’s concluding regret, which I revisit at greater length: “He left behind him myself and a sister, both born in an hour. If the heavens had been pleas’d, would we had so ended!” (2.1.13–15). Presumably, “would we had so ended” means “I wish we had died together, just as In All’s Well That Ends Well, the pregnancy has already happened. In The Merchant of Venice, Gratiano proposes a wager for “the first boy” (The Merchant of Venice, ed. M. M. Mahood [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987], 3.2.213). For James Halliwell’s reading of Feste’s song, see Donno, ed., Twelfth Night, 5.1.366–85. Julienne Empric, personal communication, March 13, 2004. The third person also em- phasizes the duality of Viola-Cesario’s gender identity—the character speaks as Cesario here, not as Viola. Suzanne Penuel 77 we were born together; I wish I had drowned in the shipwreck along with Viola.” Sebastian wishes to trump death, his father’s real death and Viola’s supposed one, by dying. And paradoxically, he must double the dying—adding his own death to Viola’s—in order to do so. The suicidal duplication renders death less powerful. As significant as the duplica- tion, and linked to it, is the imagined leap back in history: Sebastian’s wish to erase his and Viola’s existence restores the primacy of the father whose death his words have connected to their births. The backward glance subordinates the filial present to the paternal past. In “I am bound to the Count Orsino’s court,” the formula that Sebas- tian uses to announce his departure to Antonio (2.1.31), “bound”’s most obvious meaning is that of activity, of going. However, it also suggests obligation and immobility. Usually an active, vigorous, castrating sort of young man who goes to sea, survives a wreck, evades a male suitor to fall into the arms of a titled bride, and gives his romantic rival a “bloody coxcomb” (5.1.177), Sebastian voices a longing for passivity here. Preceded by Antonio’s use of the word at 2.1.6 (“Let me know of you whither you are bound”), Sebastian’s “bound” matches the odd phrasing in line fifteen’s “Would we had so ended.” He does not say, “I would we had so edied .” H excludes himself as subject instead and selects a second verb that entails a lack of agency, just as he wishes for a lack of subjectivity in death. “End” rarely appears this way in the six- teenth and seventeenth centuries, though it occasionally does in Shake- speare.o People d not end; things do. Too, “end” is considerably more final than “die.” The term denies the possibility of afterlife.