Twelfth Night: A Guide to the Play (Greenwood Guides to Shakespeare)

Twelfth Night

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TWELFTH NIQHT A Guide to the Play JOHN R. FORD

Qreenwood Quides to Shakespeare

GREENWOOD PRESS Westport, Connecticut • London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ford, John R. Twelfth night: a guide to the play/John R. Ford, p. cm. — (Greenwood guides to Shakespeare) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-313-31700-3 (alk. paper) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. Twelfth night—Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Title. II. Series. PR2837.F67 2006 822.3'3—dc22 2005026167 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2006 by John R. Ford All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2005026167 ISBN: 0-313-31700-3 First published in 2006 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.greenwood.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984). 10 987654321

CONTENTS Preface

vii

Acknowledgments

xiii

1. Textual History

1

2. Contexts and Sources

17

3. Dramatic Structure

47

4. Themes

71

5. Critical Approaches

97

6. Twelfth Night in Performance

127

Suggested Readings

165

Productions Cited

177

Works Cited

179

Index

193

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PREFACE This book presents itself quite modestly, and at the same time somewhat presumptuously, as a guide to the richness and uncertainties, the music and dissonance, the hilarity and discomforts of Twelfth Night. For Twelfth Night, or What You Will is at once one of the most accessible and one of th most elusive of all of Shakespeare's plays. It has enjoyed enormous popularity in performance, yet it is often neglected by textbook anthologies, certainly by those designed for secondary schools but also by many introductory college anthologies. Its tonal mix of mirth and melancholy is often beyond the reach of performance, even though Twelfth Night, according to R. L. Smallwood, has "long been, and continues to be, among the most frequently revived of Shakespeare's plays" ("Middle Comedies" 127). Despite, or perhaps because of, the play's many successes on stage, there have been fewer movie and video productions of this play than of others by Shakespeare. Only one of those, the 1996 Trevor Nunn film, has reached a wide audience or critical applause. Twelfth Nighfs textual provenance is also something of a riddle. Because the first printing of the play is the 1623 folio, its text is often described as "superior" or "clean" and free from those problems of multiple variants that the existence of multiple quarto editions sometimes presents. And yet the text is haunted by internal inconsistencies. Is Orsino a count or a duke? Can Viola sing "in many sorts of music"? What happens to Feste in 2.3? Who is Fabian? How much time has elapsed from the beginning of the play to its end? Three hours? Three days? In a sense, of course, none of these questions matters. Clearly, this is a play that will confine itself no finer than it is. But that's the point. There's something about this play that willfully contradicts, even undoes,

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itself, until it becomes what Orsino describes as a natural perspective, that is and is not. We might start with the play's riddling title, either of them. Does Twelfth Night refer to the season of its fictional setting or to its first performance? Does such a title point to the divinity of its epiphanic glimpses or to the profanation of its festival derisions? Is the subtitle merely a nod to audiences' wavering tastes? Or does it refer to a play about the habits of our collective wills, at once stubbornly fixed and as unstable as the sea? Charles I famously rewrote the title page of his copy to call it what he willed. For him the play was simply Malvolio. The dramatic structure of the play is also both delightful and perplexing. The opening sequence of scenes in the play, whatever name we give it, has puzzled enough directors to make the switching of the first two scenes something of a performance convention. The end of Twelfth Night is just as beguiling,, "unbuild[ing]," as Anne Barton argues, "its own comic form at its point of greatest vulnerability: the ending" (171). Not surprisingly, critical interpretations of the play have been wildly diverse. Twelfth Night, or What You Will, a play so much about the riddle of reading and interpretation, h generated not a map but an atlas of misreadings, with "more lines than is in the new map with the augmentation of the Indies" (3.2.62-63). Or, as Feste puts it, nothing that is so, is so. It is not that criticism of this play has been especially wrongheaded. Just the opposite is true. Twelfth Night has provoked some of the most brilliant critical responses from some of the finest of critics, from C. L. Barber to Northrop Frye to Alexander Leggatt to Anne Barton to Laurie Osborne to Stephen Booth, to name only a few. It is more accurate to say that this play, more than any other by Shakespeare, challenges and empowers critics to participate in its field of play. If Hamlet can be said to be not merely mad in itself but the cause that madness is in critics, then there is something in the language and moods of Twelfth Night that licenses corruptors of words. I would like to explore the many ways that this play maps out not only the energies of pleasure and of "play," in every sense of that word, but also the weariness of guilt and satiety that are the costs of such indulgence. As Feste reminds Orsino, "pleasure will be paid, one time or another" (2.4.70). Such a study should be alive, not only to verbal, structural, thematic, and performance issues within the play, but also to the presence of those same issues in critical writings about the play. The questions raised by these issues particularly resonate in performance. Consequently, although this book has a chapter dedicated to performance history, all the chapters are sensitive to the ways that questions about text, sources, dramatic structure, themes, and critical approaches are realized, challenged, or mirrored in performance.

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How do performances of Twelfth Night redefine an audience's sense of itself and its decorum? How do performances implicate us in the burdens of mirth? Critics and playgoers alike comment on how uneasy the audience is made to feel. But is that uneasiness caused, as Ralph Berry suggests, by audiences' culpable allegiance with the revelers? Or is it caused, as Stephen Booth suggests, by audiences' secret sympathy with Malvolio's desire to shut down the boisterous all-night party next door? How does our conscious awareness of the complex heteroerotic and homoerotic dynamics between Viola and Orsino, or between Viola and Olivia, relate to our capacity to "misplace" or forget Antonio for so much of this play? Or how does our capacity to remember Malvolio's threats—not just to the on-stage revelers within the play but to our desire for comic fulfillment from the play—shift our status from detached spectators to involved participants? How do performances make that metamorphosis easier or more vexed? When, for example, Andrew Aguecheek, in his sour epiphany, hears of Sir Toby's actual feelings for him, a contempt that is defined and nurtured by comic distance, where does that distance leave us? For that matter, at what point do individual acts of laughter and mockery define an "us"? When do "we" first laugh? Is it as early as 1.3, when a perplexed Aguecheek assures Sir Toby that he would never undertake to accost Maria in this company, a statement often accompanied in performance with a gesture identifying "us" as "this company"? Are we laughing at Sir Andrew or at ourselves? In a 1994 performance by ACTER at Clemson University, the actor playing Feste entreated not just his fellow Illyrians but also members of the audience for money. We responded by tossing coins onto the stage and across the auditorium with such festival energy that we began to threaten the decorum and even the safety of the performance. Feste had to calm us down while at the same time stoking the fires of the on-stage revelry. Is there recognition in our mirth? How articulate is our laughter? In a play so full of fustian riddles, how can our critical responses be anything other than audience responses provoked by and included in the festival rhetoric of this play? How can we, either as audiences or critics, possibly resolve the contradictions of this play except, like Malvolio, by "crushing" them a little, until they bow to us? I have tried to write the kind of book I would want to read. That involves meeting two quite different goals. This should be a book that clearly and usefully guides readers toward a comprehensive understanding of Twelfth Nighfs rich and diverse elements. But I hope, just as passionately, that thi book will introduce readers to the inscrutable, unknowable mysteries of this play. Consequently, I am writing to a mixed community of students, teachers, and scholars. The first two categories, however, would probably

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make up a good percentage of my audience. Such an audience would benefit from a clear introduction to some of the play's more significant themes of gender, disguise, identity, sexuality, language, revelry, etc., as well as an overview of some of the play's textual problems, and of some of the critical approaches that Twelfth Night particularly invites. At the same time both students and teachers should benefit from a study that examines how many of these issues have been realized in vividly suggestive ways in performances, under the pressure of different actors, directors, spaces, audiences, and the choices that resulted from each. Here especially I would hope to interest an even wider audience, one perhaps more familiar with critical and textual issues but interested in the many ways performances not only interpret a text but refashion it. Such performative refashionings are particularly rich for Shakespeare's plays, where the illusion of textual authority we look for, whether in modern editions or in their quarto and folio antecedents, is actually no more than the record of myriad and contesting performance choices. Chapter 1 examines issues of textual history and the textual difficulties of Twelfth Night. It also offers a comparative description of the distinguishing features of a number of editions available to readers. This is the shortest chapter in the book; it could have been shorter. Twelfth Night is remarkably free of the many kinds of textual and editorial cruxes that characterize so many of Shakespeare's plays. And yet, for all its "cleanness," the textual problems it does have serve to introduce the reader to the remarkable collaborative and creative processes that move a play from page to stage or, perhaps, from stage to page. Such a strange idea that not only might a text create a performance but a performance might create a text is best illustrated by Laurie Osborne's study of eighteenth-century performance editions of Twelfth Night. A performance edition is Osborne's definition of a text that was created out of the multiple performance choices of a particular production, the published text of an adaptation. Yet, only a short time later, that performance text would become the "source text" against which some new production would define a new Twelfth Night, recording its performance choices to create a new printed text of this "new" adaptation of Twelfth Night. And on it goes. Chapter 2, "Contexts and Sources," invites us into the heart of Shakespeare's imaginative process. Far from being the solitary writer idealized in romantic descriptions such as Shakespeare in Love, Shakespeare borrowed freely from a wide range of sources for all of his plays, and certainly for Twelfth Night. Judging from the numerous detailed echoes fom his sources, Shakespeare must have written his plays with books all around him, even if all traces of that library have now vanished. Shakespeare was

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a bold and mischievous borrower. And yet, a study of Shakespeare's use of those many sources, oddly enough, defines the nature of Shakespeare's creative originality. Twelfth Night borrows from a number of sources. Wha is most revealing about that borrowing, however, is not what Shakespeare took, but what he chose to leave behind; or what he felt compelled to add; or how what he discovered in separate story lines borrowed from separate sources creates a surprising balance, an integrity, in Twelfth Night. The same observations might be made of Shakespeare's use of the cultural contexts—beliefs, social practices, controversies—that both shaped Twelfth Night and yet were themselves critiqued and sometimes transformed by Twelfth Night. Chapter 3, "Dramatic Structure," and Chapter 4, "Themes," share a somewhat permeable border. The chapter on dramatic structure looks at how Shakespeare shaped the many elements that make up Twelfth Night, and how that shaping helped create the rich antitheses and dramatic poise that define the paradoxical world of this play. Chapter 4, "Themes," looks in particular at an element of that structural design, the interplay of thematic questions that address one another throughout the play. Such a design creates not merely an aesthetic symmetry, but also an oppositional arrangement of thematic voices, qualifying and interrogating one another. Often the playful or rhetorical representation of one theme invokes what seems to be its mirror image, but is actually a kind of unassimilable shadow or "other." So, for instance, the complex androgyny that enables Orsino's and Viola's relationship invokes the equally ambiguous sexuality that disables that of Antonio and Sebastian, Viola's twin. Similarly, the empowering resourcefulness of Viola's male disguise is countered, not only by the pain and paralysis that such a disguise enforces on Viola but, as Jean Howard and others have pointed out, by the fact that Viola "herself is played by a boy, enjoying the resourcefulness of his disguise. Chapters 5 and 6—"Critical Approaches" and "Twelfth Night in Performance"—are also complementary. The chapter on critical approaches looks at the ideological and aesthetic lenses through which Twelfth Night continues to be reunderstood, reinvented, and the chapter on performance history looks at how these same critical struggles manifest themselves in sharply different performance realizations of Twelfth Night. Problems of identity and the psychology of revelry have produced several archetypal and psychoanalytic studies. Issues of sexuality and gender construction welcome feminist and sexual approaches, which have fueled, or been fueled by, several gendered and sexualized—sometimes "queer"—productions. Similarly, the play's political concerns with class and the politics of theatrical revelry have made Twelfth Night stagings particularly accessible

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to Marxists and historicists, new and old. These two chapters, then, reveal the interdependent and necessary relationship between two often antagonistic commentators of Twelfth Night: scholars and theater practitioners. I am interested in all of these approaches. But I am particularly interested in examining how usefully "performance-based criticism" has been able to explore, not only these individual themes realized (or not) in performance, but also a play whose very life consists of the powers and pleasures of theatrical performance, the forces that impede it as well as the political and social features of its aesthetic fulfillments. Twelfth Night is, above all a play about playing. And yet, throughout the play, there is the continual sense that the strains of excessive revelry and mockery threaten to "break the sinews of [its] plot" (2.5.62). At the height of the comic plot against Malvolio, when the mad humor of the play has reached its most delightful achievements, Fabian allows that "[i]f this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction" (3.4.108-09). Fabian is, of course, completely right. But there is much to be said for improbable fictions. The book concludes with a short bibliographical essay on suggested readings that discuss a number of these questions in thoughtful and provocative ways.

ACKNOWLEDQMENTS Writing is a much less lonely activity than we might expect. It is a pleasure to think of the many people who have helped this project reach fruition. I wish to thank Delta State University for providing me with a sabbatical at an important stage in the development of this book and also for its generous support of my scholarship over the last several years. I am especially grateful to Delta State's provost, John Thornell, and to my chair and friend, Dorothy Shawhan, both of whom throughout this project have provided constant support and encouragement. I also wish to thank George Butler of Greenwood for his patience and helpful suggestions along the way. A number of libraries and archives have offered generous and thoughtful support. I wish to thank in particular the staff at Delta State University's Roberts-LaForge Library, as well as the staff at the Shakespeare Centre Library, Stratford-upon-Avon. I am also immensely grateful for the invaluable education and excitement offered by Ralph Alan Cohen's 1995 NEH Summer Institute that awakened my interests and competency in performance criticism, especially performance and criticism of Twelfth Night. I want to thank Ralph Alan Cohen, Alan Armstrong, Andrew Gurr, Stephen Booth, Margaret Maurer, Walter Cannon, and all others in that Institute, especially those members of the Twelfth Night group. Other teachers and scholars have deepened my understanding of both critical and performative features of Twelfth Night. Some of that large group would include the late Jim Andreas, Herb Coursen, Alan Dessen, Jeanne Addison Roberts, Sam Crowl, Catherine Loomis, Miriam Gilbert, Joanne Walen, my colleagues, past and present, at the University of Maine and Delta State University, especially Susan Allen Ford, whose sense and sensibilities have allowed her, and me, to appreciate a much wider landscape of

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Shakespearean delights. The support, confidence, and love I have received from my family and friends—Aliens as well as Fords—has been inspiring. Dave Daniel has been an unflagging source of confidence and Protestant ethic. All of these friends and colleagues have kept me on my feet throughout this long project and, in so doing, kept me on the windy side of care. The same might be said of the Cleveland, Mississippi, Police Department, whose prompt recovery of my stolen computer, containing a completed draft of the book, provided another kind of support. For this relief, much thanks. Finally, I owe immeasurable gratitude to Susan Allen Ford, who, despite the press of her own many commitments, offered so much of her time, her grace, and her mind, as bounteous as the sea. Whatever strengths there are in this book owe their existence to her keen critical and intelligent eye. The weaknesses, which are, of course, entirely my own, are less visible, thanks to her presence. But to praise her for particulars is to miss the general. I am lucky to live and write within the orbit of her large and most comprehensive soul. This book is dedicated to my three greatest teachers: Susan Allen Ford, the late John F. Ford, and the late Eileen F. Ford, who, at long last, will get some of the credit she deserves.

1 TEXTUAL HISTORY Much of the comedy of Twelfth Night derives from the unperturbed confidence of Illyrian readers in their own capacity to understand and interpret texts that are riddled with corruptions and uncertainties. Malvolio is particularly certain that the love letter he reads is indeed authentically written by Olivia because he is certain of her hand. He "recognizes" the calligraphy of Olivia's writing style—the way she makes her "c's, her u's, and her t's." He is particularly confident that he recognizes her "great P's" (2.5.71-72). Moreover, he is equally certain that the object of the letter's desirous declarations is, in fact, himself, despite the absence of any specific references to Malvolio in the letter, and despite the number of words and phrases that seem garbled. Malvolio is convinced that however unreadable this letter may appear, there is, nonetheless, a retrievable authoritative text beneath these words that he can penetrate, even if he has to "crush" the text "a little" to do it (2.5.117). His reasoning is based on three kinds of evidence: a holographic examination of the manuscript itself, topical hints (the letter variously identifies the writer's love as a "servant" and a "steward"), and Malvolio's own editorial skills at piecing out the imperfections of such garbled text as "MOAI." Malvolio concludes that such an unintelligible word was meant to refer to him because "every one of these letters are in my name" (2.5.117-18). Malvolio, of course, is a particularly bad reader. Olivia herself warns Malvolio that he is prone to misread evidence because he is "sick of selflove" (1.5.73) and therefore reads what he wills. And yet Malvolio's reading practices involve him in some of the same hazards of textual scholarship and editorial intervention that have characterized Shakespeare's plays since the beginning of their printed life.

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Confident in more than 400 years of scholarly textual tradition, we may find that our own assumptions about the Shakespearean texts we read are no less secure than Malvolio's. Perhaps no other secular body of work has achieved the canonical authority that Shakespeare's plays have enjoyed. Indeed, Russ McDonald argues that Shakespeare's "works have almost assumed the status of religious documents" (Bedford Companion 194). Yet the textual integrity of those works is anything but stable. In fact, it is difficult to ask the simplest questions about the identity and attribution of Shakespeare's texts. As Thomas L. Berger and Jesse M. Lander point out, "[w]hile writers of every sort—poets, dramatists, essayists, satirists—left behind manuscripts, the only 'manuscript' in Shakespeare's hand may be the 147 lines in Sir Thomas More, a play in manuscript in the British Library" (395). And scholars are divided about Shakespeare's participation in that text. Instead of "authentic" fair copies of these plays, there are often multiple quarto versions of single plays, published over a period of several years. Shakespeare's plays were published, for the most part, in two formats, folio and quarto, each named after the manner in which the pages of the volume were constructed. A number of plays were published as quartos, whose pages were formed by folding the large printing sheets twice. These editions cost about sixpence each, about six times as expensive as the price of standing-room admission to the Globe (Maguire 585). Often, as we will see, there were multiple versions of a single play in quarto, the quality of which varied greatly. Shakespeare's own company, the King's Men, were concerned enough about the quality of many of the texts of plays already in circulation that, in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death, two of Shakespeare's colleagues with the King's Men, John Heminges and Henry Condell, joined printers Edward Blount and Isaac Jaggard to produce a large Folio edition (the printing sheet folded once) to commemorate Shakespeare's achievement and to correct some of the errors they had perceived in the earlier quartos. The Folio collection was considerably more expensive than the quarto versions, costing about 1 pound. Moreover, the folio format, usually associated with works of serious poetry, philosophy, and theology, lent an element of prestige to both these popular plays and to their creator. The First Folio of 1623 was followed, less than 10 years later, by the Second Folio (1632), essentially a reprinting of the 1623 Folio—except, as we will discover, for some small but significant textual changes either deliberately or accidentally introduced. The Third Folio (1662) essentially followed the Second Folio, although a year later it was revised to include Pericles and six other "apocryphal" plays. That folio was itself reprinted in 1685 as the Fourth Folio (Sanders 19).

Textual History

3

But the sheer multiplicity of editions and the unevenness of quality, even within the Folio, raised a number of challenges for early editors. Of the 38 plays generally ascribed—or ascribed in large part—to Shakespeare, 20 were never published during the dramatist's lifetime. Of those 18 plays that were published by 1616, many, as we have seen, existed in multiple printed editions, often radically different from one another. The most idiosyncratic of those quarto versions, such as the 1597 Romeo and Juliet, the 1600 Henry V, the 1602 The Merry Wives of Windsor, and the 1603 Hamlet, were known for most of the twentieth century as "bad quartos," significantly shorter than other printed versions of the play and marked by major differences in style, structure, and sometimes coherence. Consider what might be the most famous and most "Shakespearean" lines in the canon, the opening lines of Hamlet's famous third soliloquy. Here are the lines as they appear in the second quarto (1604-1605) and the first Folio (1623), identical except for some minor differences in punctuation and capitalization: To be, or not to be, that is the question, Whether tis nobler in the minde to suffer The slings and arrowes of outragious fortune, Or to take Armes against a sea of troubles, And by opposing, end them (Bertram and Kliman Q2, 122) In the first printed edition of the play, the 1603 quarto, however, these famous lines are somewhat less recognizable or at least dislodged from their expected place: To be, or not to be, I there's the point. To Die, to sleepe, is that all? I all: No, to sleepe, to dreame, I mary there it goes, For in that dreame of death, when wee awake, And borne before an euerlasting Iudge, From whence no passenger euer retur'nd, The vndiscouered country, at whose sight The happy smile, and the accursed damn'd. (Bertram and Kliman 123) Which version is authentic, that is, the product of the author William Shakespeare? The title pages of the differing versions of Hamlet make claims for different kinds of authenticity. The second quarto makes its claim on the basis of a literary text that is both more substantial and closer to Shakespeare's intentions: "Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much/againe as it was according to the true and perfect/Coppie"

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(Bertram and Kliman 7). The 1623 Folio, although prepared, in part, by Shakespeare's own colleagues from the King's Men, makes a similar claim for authenticity based on an uncorrupted literary text, in this case anthropomorphically restored to life, its text now "cured and perfect of its limbs": "where (before) you were abused with diverse stolen and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious imposters that exposed them: even those are now offered to your view cured, and perfect of their limbs; and all the rest, absolute in their numbers, as he conceived them" (qtd. in Maguire 587, emphasis added). However, the "bad" 1603 quart also makes a claim for authenticity, but on radically different grounds. The text is claimed to be authentic, not because its language is closer to what Shakespeare wrote but because its language was closer to what the King's Me performed on specific stages: "As it hath beene diuerse times acted by his Highnesse ser-/uants in the Cittie of London ; as also in the two V-/niuersitie. of Cambridge and Oxford, and else-where" (Bertram and Kliman 7). These various multiple texts also raised vexing questions of authorial integrity. Several theories have emerged that try to account for the many differences from one printed text of a play to another. These differences were sometimes attributed to a rival company's attempt to "bootleg" the play, relying on an actor's imperfect memory, or an audience member's hurried notes, complicated by the inevitable errors introduced through hasty publication. Did the different versions, then, reflect the hands of different upstart crows, filching from the work of one another in the ruthless competitive heat of the theater business? Or were the textual differences attributable to errors introduced at the printing house? Might a prompter during a particular production have expanded or cut the "Book of the play," either to give an actor more time to enter a scene or to prepare the play for touring with a smaller cast? (G. Williams 81). Or were the changes the result of revision? Grace Ioppolo has argued that the presence of textual inconsistencies or even contradictions in Twelfth Night, such as the change from Viola to Feste as principal singer, or the occasional emendation of religious oaths to their secular variants, might be signs that the play had undergone some revision. Those revisions, Ioppolo explains, may have been made in response to changes in company personnel (as in the first instance) or to certain acts or injunctions, such as the Act of 1606 against profanity (as in the second instance) (82, 79). Indeed, there are so many opportunities for textual corruption or, at least, textual difficulty that, as another scholar observes, "We should be surprised only that the texts we have do not contain more obvious mistakes than they do" (McDonald, Bedford Companion 201).

Textual History

5

To an extent, these textual problems are misleading. Much of the difficulty in securing an unambiguous text written by a clearly marked author assumes a misplaced understanding of the peculiar nature of a dramatic text, as well as that of dramatic authorship. Does a performance seek to realize on stage the "truth" of a printed text? Or is the printed text itself merely notes for—or a record of—a performance text, or texts? The very idea of printing plays, ever since Ben Jonson's bold publication of his plays into a Folio text in 1616, has been regarded as a strange mix that, for an increasing number of scholars, constitutes an attempt to accommodate the contradictory elements of two different and resisting forms. In the process such "contrasting media—the fluidity of drama and the fixity of print—collide" (Maguire 582). After almost 300 years of sometimes idiosyncratic editorial practices, there have been, in the twentieth century, two major attempts to establish a consistent theoretical basis for editing early modern plays. Both philosophies attempted to provide editorial practice with a sound methodological set of principles, but these two methodologies were based on opposite assumptions about the mixed nature of a theatrical text. In the early years of the twentieth century, the work of a number of scholars, principally that of Peter Alexander, W. W. Greg, R. B. McKerrow, and A. W. Pollard, became the basis of what became known as the "New Bibliography." These scholars and others brought a kind of scientific method to the study of Shakespeare's texts. Through painstaking study of such various issues as the linguistic features of texts, the theatrical practices of Shakespeare's time, the procedures of the printing house, and sometimes of individual compositors, these scholars sought to achieve a theoretically sound set of principles with which to "produce a definitive edition of the works" (Sanders 25). Their work was followed by that of Fredson Bowers, G. Walton Williams, and others. The substantial knowledge these scholars provided about the procedures of early modern printing, as well as early modern theatrical conditions, was not only important in itself but established a clearer symbiotic relationship between text, theatrical practices, and printing house procedures. Similarly, such systemic linguistic analysis applied to variant texts provided a sounder theoretical basis for distinguishing one printed edition of a play from another. Still, although the New Bibliographers were acutely aware of the interdependent relationship between performance and text, the purpose of textual scholarship was still to uncover an authoritative text. Since the 1980s, however, there has been a growing tendency among bibliographical scholars to adjust their goal from finding a single, authoritative text for each play to

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examining the specific natures and purposes of multiple versions of a play. Such a shift implies a new definition of "text," as well as of "author." Increasingly, scholars have come to define the "text" of a play as a term that embodies the multiple forms, from revision to performance to adaptation, that the play takes on throughout its theatrical life. Similarly, those multiple editions might be the result of conscious revision, either by the writer or by the company. George Walton Williams, speaking of the manifold textual "difficulties" posed by the quarto and Folio editions of King Lear, stated in 1985 that "[a] small and growing body of authority holds that the quarto and the Folio represent two versions of the Lear story conceived by Shakespeare in forms organically different in aim and artistic perception" (81). Thus, although manifold opportunities for error still remain, the definition of textual error has become more circumspect and more organically connected to the protean nature of plays themselves. At the same time the nature of authorship and hence authority has changed. Increasingly, scholars are defining all plays, not just those written by multiple hands, as collaborative works. Sylvan Barnet gives us a sense of how complicated the nature of authorship could become simply by describing briefly the series of transactions in the evolution of a play from page to stage. "A playwright sold a script to a theatrical company. The script thus belonged to the company, not the author, and author and company alike must have regarded this script not as a literary work but as the basis for a play that the actors would create on the stage" ("Shakespeare" xlv). A play such as Twelfth Night is constructed—and revised—not merely by its nominal author, Shakespeare, but by other actors in the company, by prompters, or even by later companies that would acquire the play. As Thomas L. Berger and Jesse M. Lander remind us, "[t]heater is, of course, always a collaborative enterprise, and rarely does all that an 'author' writes actually make it onto the stage in performance. Actors and managers adapt and change what an author writes to suit the conditions of the stage, the abilities of the actors, the composition of the audience, the dictates of a monarchial (and thus despotic) government, and even the weather" (398). To a certain extent this understanding of the writer of an early modern play as being merely one of several authorial hands is not that different from twentieth-century attitudes. Only when we think of texts such as novels or poems are we likely to conceive of a writer as one who possesses sole artistic responsibility for the work. But, as Berger and Lander suggest, if we think of other kinds of texts, such as television scripts, our definition of "author" more closely resembles that of the early modern period. "Who are the 'authors,'" they ask, "of, among other programs, 'Cheers,' 'The Mary Tyler Moore Show,' 'Seinfeld,' and 'The Simpsons'?" (413 n.3). Because

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Shakespeare's role in this collaborative process was many-faceted— a writer, an actor, and a shareholder—he may have had more influence in the disposition of his plays than other writers enjoyed. Still, the absence of Shakespeare's name from the title page of several of his plays requires some modification of our understanding of dramatic authorship. The comparison to television scripts illuminates another feature of plays, their relatively low status in the hierarchy of artistic forms. Several scholars have noted the difference between the careful attention Shakespeare gave his poems, as he shepherded them into print, and his seeming indifference to the process of publishing his plays. One could argue that the real act of publishing—that is, making publicly available—Shakespeare's plays occurred when they were performed on stage, not printed in quarto or folio (Maguire 582). Moreover, the idea of reading plays had not yet become popular although, as scholars have pointed out, the publication of Shakespeare's plays, especially in the expensive and prestigious Folio form, would do much to create such a reading appetite (G. Williams 92). In the early seventeenth century, though, as Norman Sanders points out, "[i]t would appear that in England plays were not considered as 'literature' at all until Ben Jonson produced his Folio of plays in 1616" (17). It is interesting that Jonson's motivation for publishing his plays was to secure for himself a stronger claim for artistic ownership as well as prestige. Given the seemingly limitless opportunities for textual uncertainty that could occur at any stage of this collaborative process of authoring the "text" of Twelfth Night—even when we keep in mind these more ambiguous definition of "text" and "author"—it is remarkable how few textual difficulties Twelfth Night presents. W. W. Greg referred to the state of the text as "unusually clean (qtd. in Lothian and Craik). Elizabeth Story Donno, in her New Cambridge edition, describes the text as "a superior text" (41). Other editors are no less enthusiastic. Herschel Baker, in his Signet edition, refers to the text as "if not immaculate, so clean and tidy that it presents almost no problems" (105), and later, even more effusively, as "one of almost unexampled purity" (105). One reason for the unusual clarity of Twelfth Nighfs text may be that the 1623 Folio edition is the only early modern edition of the play. There are no "bad" quartos or any other alternative versions of the play to compete with the Folio for authority. Moreover, as already noted, that Folio text is remarkably free of errors. Scholars speculate that the source copy used by the Folio editors was especially reliable, though they find it reliable for different reasons. Some scholars, like George Walton Williams, think that the Folio used as its source text the "Book of the Play," or promptbook, of Twelfth Night, used by the company to mark entrances, exits, and blocking (86). Many of the Folio's locations of entrances and exits, for

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Twelfth Night

example, show the signs of someone knowledgeable about the requirements of staging. For example, the entrances are marked several lines before an incoming actor would speak his first lines, rather than just immediately before those lines. The additional lines give the actor enough time to move from one of the entrances at the rear of the stage to within earshot of the other actors. The editor of the New Penguin Twelfth Night, M. M. Mahood, also cites evidence that the stage directions indicate that the author of the Folio edition was someone familiar with the staging of this play. The stage directions Malvolio within warn "the actor playing Malvolio," just as a prompter might, "to get ready for the 'dark house' dialogue" (185). Other scholars, such as Roger Warren and Stanley Wells, point out that these same theatrical characteristics might indicate that the source text was written either by Shakespeare himself or by a scribe copying a Shakespearean draft (74). At any rate the Folio text of Twelfth Night benefits not only from the singularity of its textual "cleanliness" but also from the certainty that whoever prepared the text for the Folio—whether a prompter, Shakespeare, or a scribe—was not only a painstaking editor but also one deeply versed in the constraints of theatrical practice. Despite the clarity of its 1623 Folio text, however, Twelfth Night did not take long to acquire an increasingly sullied, or sallied, look. For one thing, there is evidence that, despite the unavailability of any other "Shakespearean" versions of the play, the Folio text of Twelfth Night indicates a play in the process of revision. There are a number of inconsistencies in characters' names, shifting time schemes, and other details that suggest that Shakespeare may have changed his mind, departing from an earlier version while leaving behind some traces of the original. For example, several times during the first two acts, Orsino is referred to as Duke in the speech headings and stage directions. But afterward he is always referred to as Count Orsino. That may be, as Robert K. Turner, Jr. has suggested, because Shakespeare wanted to eliminate the social difference between Orsino and Olivia, allowing Orsino to take on some of the more romantic and youthful qualities associated with Shakespeare's other comic counts (134). Another sign of revision occurs in 1.2, when Viola confides to the sea captain her plan to serve in Orsino's court: she asks him to "present me as a eunuch to him—/ ... for I can sing,/And speak to him in many sorts of music" (1.2.56-58); yet at no time in the play does she sing. Some scholars see this change too as evidence of a revision made necessary by the unexpected arrival of Robert Armin, known for his singing, to play the role of Feste. There are other such contradictions scattered throughout the play. In 2.3, after Malvolio has threatened the revelers with dismissal, and Maria has announced her "device," she assigns to Sir Toby and Sir Andrew

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their roles in this "sport royal" to entrap the steward with a forged letter. "I will plant you two, and let the fool make a third, where he [Malvolio] shall find the letter" (2.3.146-147). But when the gulling scene does take place, two scenes later, Feste is nowhere to be seen. Instead, Fabian, a character new to the play, appears to "make a third." Could Shakespeare, as some have speculated, have decided to limit Feste's active involvement in the gulling of Malvolio in order to allow the fool to preserve a balance between his role as comic conspirator and his more detached role as ironic commentator? It is true that Feste does return to taunt Malvolio, in 4.2 and 5.1, but he does so with increasing wariness, once declaring to Toby and Andrew that he will "tell my lady straight" of their assault on "Cesario," another time offering to fetch Malvolio "light and paper and ink" (4.1.25, 4.2.100). None of these seeming inconsistencies necessarily proves the case for revision, but the instabilities these "contradictions" create are consistent with the unique ambiguities that define theatrical performance; that is, a play is both the performance of a text and, at the same time, a volatile text itself in a continuous state of evolution, much as a song is defined both by its historical composition and by its history of performances. At the same time, the text of Twelfth Night has undergone other kinds of evolution, some more welcome than others. Some of these changes have to do with the changing editorial practices, starting with the second Folio of 1632 and continuing throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Indeed, modern readers of Twelfth Night might be surprised to learn that the text they were reading had departed in many ways from the play's only sourcetext, the 1623 Folio edition. That is because a number of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century editors had added, deleted, or revised textual passages that those editors had considered troublesome. Moreover, these changes were often unacknowledged or barely acknowledged. In several cases those changes were motivated not because the original Folio language was clearly flawed but because it violated the decorums of the editor and the culture in which he wrote. Laurie Osborne in particular has written about such aggressive editorial intervention that goes beyond clarifying what a character says to changing the meaning of the character's words and hence changing our perception of that character. Take, for example, Viola's soliloquy after Malvolio returns the ring that Viola purportedly has given Olivia. Viola's comments reflect on both the subversive power of her disguise and her own self-consciousness of her ambivalent gender identity. Here are the lines as they appear in most modern editions of the play: None of my lord's ring? Why, he sent her none; I am the man; if it be so, as 'tis

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Twelfth Night Poor lady, she were better love a dream. Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness, Wherein the pregnant enemy does much. How easy is it for the proper-false In women's waxen hearts to set their forms! Alas, our frailty is the cause, not we, For such as we are made of, such we be. (2.2.21-29)

The speech, however, reads differently in the First Folio, especially the sentence about "our frailty": "Alas, O frailtie is the cause, not wee,/For such as we are made, if such we bee" (Osborne, Twelfe Night 57). Osborne argues that the editorial changes in both lines have altered the meaning of Viola's words. In the first Folio language, Viola's reference to "frailty" is to a human, not merely a feminine, trait. It could refer in part to the behavior of "proper-false" (i.e., deceptively attractive) men like Orsino, who implant their forms in Viola's waxen heart. But, especially if we keep in mind the "if of the second line, the passage could equally describe Viola's playful but sympathetic awareness of the effects of her "properfalse" disguise on Olivia's waxen heart. Moreover, Viola's lines in the first Folio reveal an meta-theatrical awareness that her disguise is "properfalse" on more than one level, for Viola's own feminine identity is itself a disguise shaped by the boy actor who plays her. By emending "O frailty" to "our frailty," however, the Second Folio editor and many who followed defined "frailty" as a distinctively feminine trait, even though throughout Shakespeare's plays (Hamlet's "frailty, thy name is woman" notwithstanding), the term is usually defined either as a masculine or a human trait (see Osborne, "Editing," esp. 215-218). Further, by changing the placement of a comma in the second line and altering the first Folio's "if to "as," editorial intrusion has effectively "close[d] down both identity and performance possibilities in the comedy" (220). These changes and others, Osborne concludes, distort and simplify the text of this play in two important ways. First, they have contributed to a sentimental and conventionally feminine construction of Viola that first Folio language does not necessarily support. In fact, these emendations seem responsible for a whole tradition of demure textual and theatrical Violas. Second, these changes seem to work against the textured richness of "a comedy that consistently demonstrates how fluid the boundaries of the self can be" (220). The difficulties of reconciling multiple quarto and Folio editions of a single play, then, as well as the problems of editorial intrusion, are related concerns that indicate how powerfully, if silently, textual questions shape our understanding of more interpretive issues such as characterization,

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theme, and stylistic and imagistic analysis. In addition, both kinds of textual and editorial hazards have, since the 1980s and 1990s, resulted in an increasing disinclination on the part of both scholars and textual editors to "correct" textual ambiguities. That constraint has shown itself in two quite different kinds of editorial practice. Scholars are more willing to accept the plurality of texts that result from collaborative acts of artistic creation and the revisions and performance adjustments that are an inevitable feature of such a fluid and metamorphic art form. Textual errors may certainly occur; however, there's no longer a presumption that textual differences from one edition to another imply the existence of a single, "authoritative" master text. And textual editors are much more circumspect about intervening in dialogue and stage directions that seem illogical or indecorous, knowing that the "errors" may be defined more by the cultural assumptions of the editor than by actual corruptions in the text. Both of these practices, scholarly and editorial, have helped shape a new theoretical approach known as "unediting" Shakespeare (Marcus). The fluid and interdependent relationships among text, performance, and interpretation, as Laurie Osborne has observed, define themselves most radically in performance texts (Trick). These editions of a play simultaneously define that play as both changeable text and fluid performance. Beginning in the eighteenth century, a production of a play like Twelfth Night, after undergoing the necessary cuts, changes, and expansions to form the promptbook that reflected the playtext of that production, would then formally be edited into a new text, called a performance edition, that would both reflect that particular performance of Twelfth Night with all its emendations and at the same time constitute a text of its own, published and sold in bookstores simply as Twelfth Night. The audience for these printed texts would be, to a certain extent, those spectators who wanted a permanent record of something close to the play they attended. But readers who had not seen that particular production might also purchase the text, not as a historical record of a particular staging of the play, but simply as a copy of the play itself. Thus text and performance have literally become one. Moreover, if that performance text was popular enough, a subsequent production of Twelfth Night might take up as its source text, not one of the several scholarly editions available, but the performance text itself, which had now become both the theatrical record of a previous performance and the source text of a future one. That performance text would then be cut, expanded, and marked to become a new promptbook. And on the evolution goes, from promptbook to performance to text to promptbook, etc. These performance texts, consequently, provide a valuable living cultural history of a play's transformations. Moreover, Laurie Osborne, who has

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written extensively on performance editions, points out that such ambiguous texts allow us to "emphasize the negotiations between textuality and performance that mark all drama as a genre on the edge of two distinct material enactments" (Trick, xvii). The power of dramatic performance, especially a Shakespearean performance, is its fluid, ambivalent energy. On the bare stage of the Globe Theatre, given the collaborative "imaginary puissance" shared by Shakespeare the writer, the actors, and the audience, every space could become any place. On a thrust stage under universal lighting, any chance encounter between actor and audience could change the "text" of that day's performance. A compositor's error in a printing house may single handedly construct one of Shakespeare's most memorable lines, whether sullied or solid. Such fluidity need not weaken or corrupt a text; rather it may animate the infinite variety of potentiality within that text. If we recall Hamlet's insistence that a play holds the mirror up to nature, we might also remember that nature is always in motion, and moreover, "traveling] in diverse paces with diverse persons" (AYLI 3.3.261-02). It seems appropriate in a chapter that discusses textual issues to look briefly at the wide variety of scholarly and popular editions of Twelfth Night presently available. Because Twelfth Night is one of only 18 of Shakespeare's plays to be originally published in the 1623 First Folio edition without first appearing in quarto form, editors are not faced with the problems of "bad" or even multiple quarto editions of the play that vie with the First Folio for textual authority. With a text so remarkably "clean," wide differences do not mark the editing of the several available editions of Twelfth Night. Nonetheless, these texts enjoy different features that make them more or less convenient for readers. One valuable resource for comparing the features of the many editions of the play, whether in the several scholarly anthologies of Shakespeare's plays presently in print or in single editions of Twelfth Night, is Ann Thompson's Which Shakespeare? A User's Guide to Editions. Written in 1992, Thompson's book is necessarily dated, missing, for example, a number of revised editions published subsequently. Nonetheless, it remains a valuable resource, its intelligent, detailed comparative analysis giving students and teachers a clear basis for choice. A useful, though much briefer, comparison of the major Shakespeare anthologies occurs in Peter Holland's 1997 article in the TLS ("Reade him"). Twelfth Night is available in a number of general anthologies of Shakespeare's plays. These volumes can often be quite expensive, but they may, in fact, prove a thriftier choice if Twelfth Night is taught as part of a large survey of Shakespeare's plays and poetry. The second edition

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of The Riverside Shakespeare, under the general editorship of G. Blakemore Evans and J.J.M. Tobin, in addition to providing solid general discussions of twentieth-century Shakespeare criticism, Shakespeare's texts, and the chronology and sources of the plays, also has a number of valuable appendices that include expanded discussion, including illustrations, of Shakespeare's plays in performance, as well a number of early modern contextual records, documents, and allusions. Each play is preceded by scholarly introduction by a well-known critic, in the case of Twelfth Night an excellent introduction by Anne Barton. The Bevington Shakespeare (5th ed.) edited by David Bevington, includes an insightful and updated introduction of Twelfth Night (all introductions are by Bevington). The edition also includes a "visual portfolio" of full-color illustrations depicting contemporary life in early modern England; a discussion of the history of Shakespeare's plays in performance is augmented by illustrations from different productions. The Oxford Shakespeare, edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, has received much attention for bold and controversial editing decisions, either regarding the two texts of King Lear or the substitution of Oldcastle for Falstaff in the two parts of Henry TV and Henry V Part of their goal, as expressed in the General Introduction, is to offer editions of the plays "as they were originally performed ... and that we attempt here to present with as much fidelity to his intentions as the circumstances in which they have been preserved will allow" (Wells and Taylor xv). This edition includes a substantial General Introduction by Stanley Wells, who also wrote short, one-page introductions to each play. In addition, Wells has primary editorial responsibility for Twelfth Night. The volume includes passages from and accounts of contested Shakespeare plays such as Sir Thomas More and Cardenio and prints several of Shakespeare's plays under their contemporary titles rather than their more familiar titles (e.g., All Is True in place of Henry VIII). The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus, is based on the Oxford texts. Its strong general introduction offers historical—often new historicist—contexts for the plays, as well as discussions of Shakespeares life and the condition of early modern theater. There is also a collection of early modern documents and an extended discussion of Shakespeare's stage by Andrew Gurr. Each play is preceded by an introduction by one of the editors. Stephen Greenblatt's introduction of Twelfth Night blends an astute and engaging reading of the play with a historicist's attention to such early modern matters as the performance of identity, sexual identity, social mobility, and Puritanism, as well as a short discussion of the play's major sources.

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The three most valuable single-text scholarly editions of Shakespeare's plays are the Arden, New Cambridge, and Oxford series. Each is fully annotated with ample introductory space given to such matters as text, sources, performance history, and critical history, as well as to a helpful critical introduction. In each edition, however, the emphasis is somewhat differently proportioned. The New Cambridge edition, edited by Elizabeth Story Donno, has an especially rich assessment of performance history of Twelfth Night, as well as a number of production photographs that give a sense of the look of various stage and film performances. The 2004 "updated" edition features a new introduction by Penny Gay. The Oxford edition, edited by Roger Warren and Stanley Wells, while also offering useful analysis and photographs of several productions of Twelfth Night, has a helpful and extended discussion of the themes of the play, getting at the nature of "Illryia," the play's treatment of several categories of love and desire, as well as subsections on "Viola and Olivia," "Viola and Orsino," and "Antonio and Sebastian." There is also a discussion of the changing roles of Malvolio and Feste in the play's design. Subsumed under these thematic topics are helpful discussions of the play's elusive tone and unity, changing critical and performance approaches to the play, as well as issues of the play's genre and sources. There is also a fine appendix tracing the sources of the variety of music in the play: songs, snatches of songs, and lyrics. Finally, there is the Arden Shakespeare edition of Twelfth Night, co-edited by J. M. Lothian and T. W. Craik, who, at Lothian's death in 1970, put the edition together, aided by Lothian's notes and an incomplete draft of the project. Its substantial introduction contains extended discussion of the play's critical history as well as its production history, a sceneby-scene analysis of the play, and shorter treatments of text, dating, and sources. There are also two appendices: one a reproduction of Riche's Of Apolonius and Silla and a second tracing the origins of the play's songs. In addition several less expensive and less scholarly but still useful editions are available. The Signet Twelfth Night, edited by Herschel Baker, has a helpful introduction and notes by Baker and a longer "Overview" of Shakespeare's plays by the general editor, Sylvan Barnet. In addition the edition includes short notes on textual problems and sources. It also reprints one of the more likely sources of the play, Of Apolonius and Silla, as well as a range of critical responses: essays or excerpts by Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Harley Granville-Barker, Linda Bamber, Robert Kimbrough, and Jean E. Howard. The New Penguin edition of Twelfth Night, edited by M. M. Mahood, offers an insightful and engaging introduction, a commentary at the end of the play, an account of textual variations from the First Folio text, and a short but valuable

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analysis of the provenance of the songs. The New Folger Library edition, edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine, offers notes on each facing page, as opposed to the Signet edition's practice of footnotes and the New Penguin's endnotes. Readers may find that one of these methods may offer less distraction from their reading than would others. In addition to the notes, the New Folger also has a brief summary of each scene. The New Folger offers three appendicies: "Textual Notes," consisting of a list of variants from the 1623 First Folio; a "Modern Perspective" from a contemporary critic, in this case an essay by Catherine Belsey; and a brief but useful annotated bibliography. Finally, the newly reedited and reissued Pelican text, edited by Jonathan Crewe, includes an essay on "The Theatrical World" of Shakespeare, a short discussion of textual issues, a brief note on the authorship question, a short reading list, and a general introduction to Twelfth Night. Three other single-text editions of Twelfth Night deserve note. The Shakespeare Originals First Editions series text of Twelfth Night is a reproduction of the first printed edition of the play, in this case, the 1623 First Folio. Edited and introduced by Laurie E. Osborne, this volume would be especially useful as a supplementary text to one of several contemporary editions of the play. Guided by Osborne's fine introduction, readers can discover the textual uncertainties that inhabit even a text as "unusually clean" as the 1623 First Folio of Twelfth Night ("Introduction" 14). In much of he writing Osborne has shown how such volatility in the text of such canonical writing opens Shakespeare's plays to rewarding discussion. The Cambridge School Shakespeare text of Twelfth Night, edited by Rex Gibson, might be especially valuable for those students, either in high school or university, who do not have much experience reading Shakespeare's plays. Each edition has commentary exploring textual, interpretive, and contextual issues. Most useful is Gibson's performance emphasis, which encourages students to imagine how particular lines or exchanges might be performed in a variety of ways on stage. Often Gibson suggests classroom activities, as when he invites students to imagine several ways to act out 1.2: "How does Malvolio return the ring? Invent a way for Malvolio to return the ring in a way that suits his personality. In one production he slipped it over his long staff of office and let it slide slowly down to Viola's feet. Speak 'receive it so' and lines 11-13, as you explore the various possibilities" (38 n. 1). Such tactics allow readers an ownership over Shakespeare's language as they experience for themselves the plurality of its theatrical realizations. Finally, there is Bruce R. Smith's excellent edition of Twelfth Night: Texts and Contexts, part of the "Texts and Contexts" series edited by

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Twelfth Night

Jean E. Howard. Using the David Bevington edition of the play from his Complete Works of Shakespeare (4th ed.), Smith's goal is to help a reade. experience the several lines of interdependence connecting text and context in Twelfth Night or What You Will. With eloquence, passion, and scholarship, Smith engages readers in a collaborative imaginative act: not merely to understand the cultural contexts that gave shape and meaning to an early modern audience's reception of Twelfth Night but to experience the energies and pressures of these contexts as we might experience the sensual powers of Shakespeare's text. What must it have been like, Smith keeps asking, to see such a play in such a world? That sense of wonder and naive excitement animates complex and sophisticated discussions of those cultural assumptions that shaped early modern reading habits, understanding of music, sexuality, Puritanism, household economies, madness, etc. Smith is seeking a fusion of text and context: not merely to ask how a play so fraught with misdirected sexual signals and ambivalent desires helped define codes of sexual identity, but also to ask how a knowledge of such ambivalent sexualities might help us participate in the mix of pleasure, humor, or anxiety an early modern audience might take in the unexpected erotic signals between Orsino and Viola, Viola and Olivia, and Sebastian and Antonio. All of these pairs of lovers were, of course, personated by young male actors. Would the audience feel any illicit, transgressive pleasure in watching the erotic entanglements of male actors even as their suspension of disbelief allowed them to imagine a cross-dressed "woman" like Viola feeling passion for Orsino? In a world where social status was becoming an increasingly fluid determinant, how might an early modern audience understand, enjoy, or fear the social uncertainty of Orsino? Viola? Maria? Malvolio? This is indeed a remarkable edition of Twelfth Night, one that brings together Bevington's authoritative text along with Smith's valuable commentary synthesizing careful analysis of the play and knowledgeable insight into the contextual dimensions of its cultural frame.

2

CONTEXTS AND SOURCES When John Manningham wrote in his diary his thoughts after seeing Twelfth Night performed at Middle Temple Hall in 1602, what first inter. ested him was the play's resemblance to earlier works: "At our feast we had a play called 'Twelfth Night, or What you Will,' much like 'The Comedy of Errors' or 'Menaechmi' in Plautus, but most like and near to that in Italian called Tnganni'" (qtd. in Smith, Twelfth Night 2). Manningham's emphasis on earlier versions of Shakespeare's story reveals something about the pleasures and expectations that shaped early seventeenth-century audiences' engagement with a new play. What they most valued was not a play's uniqueness, but its competitive imagination as it transformed an old story. CONNING WITHOUT BOOK Like most creative playwrights of the early modern period, long before the advent of modern copyright laws, Shakespeare drew freely and imaginatively from the wealth of materials—printed, performed, oral—available to him. This does not mean that Shakespeare was not an original artist but that in the light of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetic theory, creativity was rooted in the classical practice of imitation, what Robert Miola has called "the creative imitation of others" (2). As Miola argues, "According to this theory, a poet demonstrated originality not by inventing new stories but by adapting extant, particularly classical, ones. The genius lay not in the invention but in the transformation" (2). In the light of such collaborative definitions of artistic creation, Robert Greene's warning to other university-trained writers, that there was among them "an upstart crow,

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Twelfth Night

beautified with our feathers" (qtd. in Schoenbaum 5), reveals more about the envy and elitism of Greene than the artistic thievery of Shakespeare. Such a notion of artistic originality is not as alien from our own culture as one might think. Listen to a jazz composition as it takes a "standard" number and then reworks its melodies, rhythms, and lyrics into something rich and strange. Duke Ellington, a great admirer of Shakespeare's work, composed a suite of pieces, Such Sweet Thunder, reweaving threads from. a number of Shakespeare's plays into "original" Ellington compositions. The title of Ellington's suite is, of course, "stolen" from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Nighfs Dream. And to complete this creative cycle, in 2000, Mercedes Ellington, an accomplished choreographer and the granddaughter of Duke Ellington, helped create Play On!, a musical reworking of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, using the music of Duke Ellington. To examine Shakespeare's sources, then, is to imagine the nature and something of the process of his collaborative genius. Merely to list the works Shakespeare used is to imagine Shakespeare's library, whose inexhaustible resources enabled, not the retention of knowledge, but the release of art. Although not a single book from that library remains and, as Stanley Wells observes, Shakespeare left no books in his will, nonetheless, the sheer number of quotations and allusions in his work—biblical, mythological, classical, literary, historical, topical—encourage if not compel scholars to dream of such a library. Wells himself thinks of Shakespeare as "a man of the study, a man who needed books, perhaps even libraries, who worked ... at a desk or table, surrounded by books—big, heavy books such as Holinshed's Chronicles or Plutarch's Lives, books that, however capacious a memory he may have had, must sometimes have been open before him as he wrote" (A Life 33). Peter Greenaway's film Prosperous Books, as Robert Miola has noted, "envisions the playwrigt. as a magician, conjuring the fantastic story and its characters into existence through the act of reading" (164). Looking at Shakespeare's use of those sources invites us into Shakespeare's own "working-house of thought" (Hen. V, 5.0.23). Twelfth Night, probably written in the years 1599 through 1601, draws from a wide range of sources, though scholars disagree about which particular sources Shakespeare used. Perhaps the two most useful critical summaries of the arguments for and against particular sources are found in Kenneth Muir's The Sources of Shakespeare s Plays and Geoffrey Bullough's compendious eight-volume Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, which includes ample selections from the major sources. This chapter owes much to the comprehensive and often groundbreaking study of a vast range of potential source material by these two scholars.

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Bullough has made available most of those source materials, either in part or in whole—sometimes translating them—in his appendices. As Muir and Bullough both point out, part of the difficulty of isolating specific sources is that, given a literary and theatrical culture that celebrated such intertextual genealogy, what G. K. Hunter describes as "a communal creativeness" (58), it can be extremely difficult to distinguish a work that specifically influenced, say, Shakespeare's shaping of the Viola-Orsino love plot from a work that is merely in the tradition of cross-dressed female heroines acting as amorous ambassadors for the men they love. Moreover, many of these sources are translations, sometimes very free translations, of earlier works. To get a hint of such riddling attribution, we need go no further than one of the plays John Manningham identified unambiguously as one of the sources of Twelfth Night. When Manningham described Twelfth Night as "most like and near to that in Italian called Tnganni,'" he was actually referring to a. family of interre lated plays (Donno 5), such as the 1531 anonymous GVIngannati and the several translations and variants it inspired: Nicolo Secchi's GVInganni (1562); Curzio Gonzola's 1592 version, also called GVInganni; and Les Abuses, a 1543 French translation of GVIngannati by Charles Estienne, which itself was performed in 1595 in a Latin version called Laelia. Each of these works contains tantalizing partial echoes of Twelfth Night, some times of phrasing, sometimes of plot or character details. Yet at the same time, every work put forward as a potential source for Twelfth Night resists identification with Shakespeare's play in important ways. Complicating the question of how accessible these works might have been to Shakespeare is the issue of Shakespeare's knowledge of foreign languages and classical learning. Ben Jonson's appraisal of his rival as one who had "small Latin and less Greek" has for almost four centuries helped define Shakespeare as a great "natural" genius, "fancy's child," but a man little versed in matters of scholarship and languages. Jonson's words, however, need to be understood in their context. If we measure Shakespeare's learning by the yardstick of Jonson's prodigious education, as well as that of the university trained poets and playwrights, then Shakespeare's formal scholarship is more limited. But it is important to remember that Shakespeare's "grammar school" education would have allowed him to become "as well qualified in Latin as a modern classics graduate" (Wells, A Life 13). It consisted of, by our standards, wide and deep reading in classical literature, as well as more modern writers, an emphasis in rhetoric, and some training in languages. On the basis of the plays themselves, Shakespeare had a strong command of Latin. In addition, Shakespeare's quoting of and verbal playing with several passages

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of French and, perhaps to a lesser extent, of Italian in plays such as The Taming of the Shrew, Henry V, and Twelfth Night show some dexterity h modern European languages. Shakespeare, then, was linguistically fluent enough to read many of his sources in their original languages (see Miola 168, Muir 6). As Russ McDonald puts it, "Shakespeare's classical learning was respectable for the age in which he lived, and for the age in which we live, it was formidable" (Bedford Companion 148). "O this learning, what a thing it is!" So says Gremio as he widely misreads what he takes to be Lucentio's wide scholarship early in The Taming o the Shrew (1.2.159). And indeed, Shakespeare's learning, and the voracious reading appetite that fueled it, reveals very little about a play as multifaceted and as musically and thematically balanced as Twelfth Night. What is much more interesting is not what Shakespeare read but how he read, and to what end. Aside from additions and deletions he might have made, are there larger strategies of reading, both more resistant and more synthetic, that allowed for his wholly new conception of these inherited characters, plots, themes, and pieces of language? How did imagination body them forth? Scholars usually arrange the many earlier versions of both the OrsinoViola crossed-dressed love plot and the comic episodes of mistaken identity, especially involving twins, in three categories: earlier plays, consisting mainly of the "Inganni-Ingannati" family; prose fictions; and Shakespeare's own earlier work, especially The Comedy of Errors and Two Gentlemen of Verona. Most of these sources anticipate the Orsino-Viola love plot nd. the comic pattern of mistaken identity, although there are some glimpses of the Malvolio subplot and occasional linguistic echoes. In each case, however, these similarities serve to illuminate important transformations of structure, context, characterization, and tone. BESTOWING TIME ON THE TONGUES GVIngannati, or "The Deceived," an anonymous Italian play performed in 1531 by a Siena literary society named "the Intronati" or "Thunderstruck by Love" (Bullough 271), is a witty, brash, often bawdy urban comedy about as far from the rich tonalities of Twelfth Night as one migh imagine. Shakespeare might have read the play in Italian or in its French (Les Abuses, 1543) or Latin (Laelia) translations. G. K. Hunter points out that Shakespeare might have seen the Latin version, when it was performed in Cambridge in 1595 (62). Many years earlier, William Winter made a similar argument about the likelihood of Shakespeare seeing not the Latin translation but the original Italian play on tour in England. Winter observes that "in 1577-78 a company of Italian actors performed in London, and

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also before Queen Elizabeth, at Windsor, and that 'GITngannati,' being a popular play, was certainly included in the repertory of that company" (6). Whether Shakespeare saw GVIngannati or its Latin translation, he certainly made use of its many plot details but little use of its tone. Those two plays tell, more or less, a story like Viola's—but as Sir Toby might imagine it. GVIngannati is both set and originally performed during the last days of Carnival time in Modena, Italy. In fact, there are multiple references to "Twelfth Night" and "Epiphany," which might have suggested a title for Shakespeare's play. The storyline itself is best understood, as its Prologue feared it might be, as "a mixed salad." On the one hand, it is filled with details that strongly link it to Twelfth Night; on the other, almost all of its elements—characterization (especially of Lelia, the Viola figure), theme, and tone—offer themselves as foils that establish a clear pattern and purpose to Shakespeare's emendations. The play takes place at the moment of its original performance, the end of Carnival, 1531, fusing both the characters' and the audience's awareness of the end of festival life. As a result, much of the confusion in GVIngannati, as is the case with Twelfth Night, is rooted both in the topsyturvy spirit of carnival revelry and in a growing sense that the end of holiday festival is near, that, as Feste puts it, "what's to come is still unsure" (2.3.43). In fact, one might say that the plotting of GVIngannati is itself an example of festival disarray, beginning as it does in the midst of narrative business. Much of the story is presented as exposition, either by the Prologue or by Lelia herself in discussion she has with her nurse, Clemenzia. Four years earlier, during the sack of Rome, the wealthy Virginio had lost both his money and, he thought, his son Fabrizio. Virginio and his daughter, Lelia, then fled to Modena, where she met a young gallant named Flamminio. Lelia fell in love with Flamminio, who returned her love. Lelia confides to her nurse that despite her modest behavior, Flamminio's "frequent visits continued,... he making now some gesture and again an amorous sign, sighing, wooing, gazing long at me" (GVIngannati 295). Their love, however, was interrupted by Virginio's decision to return to Rome with his daughter in an unsuccessful search for his lost son. When Lelia returned to Modena, she discovered that not only had Flamminio forgotten about her, but, as Lelia tells her nurse, "all his care and devotion were set on winning the love of Isabella" (295). Determined, nonetheless, to be near her love, Lelia escapes the convent where she had been imprisoned by her father, disguising herself as a man. She then offers to serve Flamminio, who immediately sends Lelia to woo Isabella in his behalf. When Isabella receives Lelia, now called Fabio, she immediately falls in love with the servant, as in Twelfth Night Olivia will fall for Cesario.

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Meanwhile, two events concur. Virginio, hoping to recover his fortune, has offered his daughter in marriage to the rich senex Gherardo, who happens to be Isabella's father. At the same time, Lelia's lost brother Fabrizio arrives at Modena from Rome in search of his sister, wearing clothing identical to Lelia's disguise. Virginio, who by now has heard of Lelia's disguise and intentions but nothing of Fabrizio's arrival, encounters his son, mistakes him for the disguised Lelia, and locks "her" up in Isabella's bedroom, where the two immediately have sexual relations, "their arms round each other, kissing and cuddling" (328). As in Shakespeare's play, when Flamminio assumes that his servant has betrayed him, he thinks of violent retribution against Lelia, although in earthier language than Orsino might have used: "I shall cut off his lips and his ears, and dig out one of his eyes, and put them all in a dish and send him in to give it to her. I'll see that she gets tired of being kissed by him" (329). Finally, after a series of mistaken identities, the two couples are correctly united—although with nothing like the wondrous recognition scene we have in Twelfth Night. Aside from these plot connections, several other similarities suggest that Shakespeare likely read GVIngannati or // Sacrificio, its companion play, also by the same company. There is in // Sacrificio a character named Malevolti, who "sang about the false promises of happiness made him by Love and how he now wished to punish the deceiver" (Bullough 270), a name and situation vaguely anticipating Malvolio. Both Fabio's name and Fabrizio's might have given Shakespeare the idea for Fabian. Lelia was 13 years old when, as she thinks, she loses her brother. In Shakespeare's play we learn that her father died "when Viola from her birth /Had numbered thirteen years" (TN 5.1.228-229). Flamminio's sudden, thunderstruck, passion for Isabella might anticipate Sebastian's for Olivia. In fact, in both plays the lovers' passionate violence is often expressed in terms of madness, and both in her soliloquies and in dialogue with Flamminio, Lelia's words partially anticipate Viola's. Yet if the similarities suggest that Shakespeare might have borrowed from GVIngannati, the differences help map out Shakespeare's creative directio. The multitude of resemblances between Lelia and Viola, for example, help define the nuances of Shakespeare's character. Like Lelia, Viola is intelligent and quick to sense the irony of her situation. But where Lelia is self-interested, Viola balances her passion with her selflessness, her quick wit with her deference to Time, which also creates a larger, more spiritual space for Shakespeare' play. Consider two parallel moments in the two plays. Both GVIngannati aand Twelfth Night depict the heroine caught as her love's romantic ambassador i a situation that works against her own interests. But, unlike Lelia, who uses cunning to redirect Flamminio's romantic desires, Viola's selfless actions to cure

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Orsino often exacerbate her dilemma. By contrast, when Isabella declares her love to "Fabio," the disguised Lelia encourages Isabella on the condition that she reject Flamminio's entreaties. As Lelia confides her plan to the nurse, both the content and the style suggest a tougher, more unabashedly self-interested schemer, not without appeal but an appeal more to, say, Jonson's or Middletons city comedy tastes than to Shakespeare's: "Do you think a woman in love is unhappy to see her beloved continually, to speak to him, touch him, hear his secrets, observe his habits, discuss things with him, and be certain at least that, if she doesn't enjoy him, nobody else does either?" (296). Another shared verbal connection between the two heroines also serves to emphasize Shakespeare's radically different artistic strategy and goals. Like Viola, Lelia invites Flamminio to imagine a suitor not unlike herself: "Is there not in all this city some lady or other who deserves your love as much as she? Has no other woman pleased you but Isabella?" (310). When Flamminio replies that he once loved Lelia but now hates her, Lelia seems to faint, "an opportunity," Bullough dryly observes, "Shakespeare does not take" (280). Yet Shakespeare's changes suggest something more than a more restrained aesthetic taste. They also serve to illuminate Viola's interiority. Lelia's goal in this exchange is slyly tactical, to remind Flamminio of her own value without endangering her disguise. Viola's purpose, however, is to awaken Orsino from his self-endeared romantic fictions without declaring either her identity or her love. Viola's famous "Patience on a monument" speech (2.4.106-14), then, is not so much a hint to Orsino as an image of her own committed silence, meant for Orsino to understand one way and herself and the audience quite another. Finally, Lelia has a soliloquy that bears some resemblance to Viola's "How will this fadge" speech (2.2.14-38). But the differences are much more telling, suggesting, not just a different kind of character but a different, more interiorized, style of characterization. Here is Lelia just after putting off another of Isabella's advances: "On the one hand I am having fun at the expense of her who believes me a man, on the other I should like to get out of this scrape, and I don't know what to do. Isabella has already got as far as kisses; at the first opportunity she'll go farther, and I shall find that I've lost everything. That will certainly happen when the fraud is discovered. I'll go and ask Clemenzia" (309). Here is a similar moment in Twelfth Night. As Viola begins to undersand the implications of Malvolio's forceful return of Olivia's ring, she also begins to appreciate the "wickedness" of her disguise in a soliloquy that brings out a simultaneous sense of interest, empathy, alarm, and cautious playfulness. I left no ring with her: what means this lady? Fortune forbid my outside have not charmed her!

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Twelfth Night She made good view of me, indeed so much That, methought, her eyes had lost her tongue, For she did speak in starts distractedly. She loves me sure; the cunning of her passion Invites me in this churlish messenger. None of my lord's ring? Why, he sent her none; I am the man; if it be so, as 'tis, Poor lady, she were better love a dream. How will this fadge? My master loves her dearly, And I (poor monster) fond as much on him As she (mistaken) seems to dote on me. What will become of this? As I am man, My state is desperate for my master's love; As I am woman—now alas the day!— What thriftless sighs shall poor Olivia breathe? O time, thou must untangle this, not I; It is too hard a knot for me t'untie. (2.2.14-23, 30-38)

The energy in Lelia's soliloquy is all physical and situational. A quickwitted and resourceful heroine finds herself in a tight spot partly of her own making and partly the result of the brisk pace of a world of competing schemers around her, the adrenaline of New Comedy. The movement of Viola's lines works differently, drawing us inward as she is caught in a tangle of identities in a play about the mysteries of identity and at the same time propelling us outward into a world that cannot be fadged in a play about the mysterious powers of Time. In fact, in Twelfth Night, Shakespeare seems to have lost interest in those external obstacles to love and happiness that abound, not only in all of these source plays, including GVIngannati, but also in many of Shakespeare's earlier comedies. In Twelfth Night there are no scheming old parents like the fathers in GV Ingannati, Virginio and Gherardo, no convents with lock and key to keep heroines chaste, although there is a dark house—but that's another plot. In Twelfth Night, the only obstacles to love and happiness are interior, within the lovers themselves, sick with self-love and self-absorption. Shakespeare's representation of Sebastian's sudden discovery of passion for Olivia, for example, shares little of GV Ingannati s interest in the physical explicitness of the offstage encounter between the two lovers, or indeed in whether their love has been consummated at all. Instead, Shakespeare seems more interested in exploring the psychological processes of desire than its physiological effects: For though my soul disputes well with my sense That this may be some error, but no madness,

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Yet doth this accident and flood of fortune So far exceed all instance, all discourse, That I am ready to distrust mine eyes, And wrangle with my reason (4.3.9-14) And yet, to examine GVIngannati merely as a flawed precursor of Twelfth Night is to misrepresent the remarkable achievements of the earlier play, to see it with a distempered appetite. GVIngannati itself is a play that stands in a tradition, inheriting and transforming earlier works. As scholars such as Leo Salingar and Robert Melzi point out, in the long tradition of comedies of identical-twin madness, a tradition reaching as far back as Plautus, GVIngannati and its heroine Lelia represent a more complex and textured treatment of both theme and characters. For Salingar, "Lelia's story preserves a balance between courtly idealism and Renaissance skepticism; she is the first seriously romantic heroine on the Renaissance stage" (Shakespeare and the Traditions 217). For Melzi, too, GVIngannati is much more than a faile attempt at Twelfth Night. Instead, it establishes a significant departure from both Plautus and Italian Renaissance traditions of romantic comedy, moving toward increasing interest in "the psychological complexity of [the Viola character] as it evolves from the original Italian play down to Shakespeare's Twelfth Nighf'(6S). Later adaptations and translations of GVIngannati may also have influenced Twelfth Night. Occasionally the phrasing and details in the variants of the Italian play are actually closer to Shakespeare's text than the original. As with GV Ingannati, however, the apparent similarities serve to imply the coherent elements of Shakespeare's personal artistic design. Bullough has pointed out that two plays by Nicolo Secchi, GVInganni and VInteresse, "include a woman disguised as a man and helping the man she loves to woo another woman" (274). Moreover, in both cases the heroines relate to their loves the story of a woman who suffered for her unrequited love. Helen Andrews Kaufman goes even further, arguing that Secchi's GVInganni may have been a more useful source for Shakespeare than the earlier GV Ingannati, finding elements in Secchi's play "which are not to be found in GVIngannati or any of its derivatives" (273). Kaufman is particularly interested in Secchi's treatment of his disguised romantic heroines: Ginevra/Ruberto, the heroine of GVInganni and Lelio (a girl brought up as a boy), the heroine of VInteresse. "These two girls show the same combination of wit, vivacity and warm-heartedness which characterizes Viola" (273). Muir, however, although agreeing with Kaufman's skepticism about the likelihood of GVIngannati as a major source of Twelfth Night, is equally skeptical about Secchi's later versions, either GVInganni

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Twelfth Night

or UInteresse. Bullough also concludes that these resemblances between Twelfth Night and Secchi's plays are not substantial, although he notes th in a later version of GVInganni (1592) by Curzio Gonzaga, "the disguised girl calls herself 'Cesare,'" a closer anticipation of Viola's adopted name, Cesario (274). Uncertainty and contradiction lie at the heart of any source study, any attempt to imagine the evolutionary line of thought, feeling, and imagination that traces out the processes of Shakespeare's art, the transformations inherent in Prospero's books. In fact, the search itself is not without some irony, as scholars, searching for the "true" lineage of Twelfth Night, find themselves lost in an archival Illyria of look-alike plays, each one seeming to have made division of itself. Perhaps our epiphany must be simply to recognize the mysterious unknowability of Shakespeare's imagination. And yet there is some unity to this disparate evidence. At the very least, these plays establish a rich living tradition of themes, characters, plot lines, motifs that for generations—centuries if we look back to Plautus's Menaechmi—have resonated in the minds of playwrights and their audiences, who time and again have urged these writers to remember the tale again, with advantages. It seems clear that Shakespeare saw and remembered many of these works. But did he recognize GVInganni in the mirror of GVIngannati? Or was it the other way round? Particularly enigmatic and compelling are those plays that share only general motifs with Twelfth Night yet out of which emerge names uniquely found in Shakespeare's play but not in the other possible sources: Cesare, Olivia, Violetta, and Malevolti. HERE FOLLOWS PROSE Scholars are much more consenting in their evaluation of a second groupof possible sources, prose translations of these earlier Italian plays. Shakespeare might have had access to several of these tales, including Matteo Bandello's Novelle (1554), Cinthio's Hecatommithi (1566), and Belief orest's Histoires Tragiques (1579). After all, Shakespeare would draw on both Cinthio and Belleforest for Othello and Hamlet. The narrative closest to Twelfth Nigh, however, is generally agreed to be Barnabe Rich's tale "Apolonius and Silla" in Rich His Farewell to Militarie Profession (1581), although, again, all roas seem to lead back to Italy. Herschel Baker's "genealogy" of Rich's story is a particularly vivid demonstration of the transformations of a story and, as Baker puts it, "of the free and easy ways of sixteenth-century writers: Rich found the tale (which he eked out with incidental and unacknowledged pilferings from William Painter's Palace of Pleasure, a big collection of stories first published in 1466) in Pierre de Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques (157),

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which was translated from Matteo Bandello's Novelle (1554), which was based on GV Ingannati" (109). Barnarbe Rich's "Apolonius and Silla" is unique among these other sources in several ways. It is an English work and therefore much more easily accessible to Shakespeare. Also, although, as with all these potential sources, there are significant differences between this work and Twelfth Night, nonetheless Rich's story offers a wider range of similarities, not just in situation but, to a larger extent than the others, in characterization, relationships, language, and mood. "Apolonius and Silla" is clearly derived from its French and Italian sources, but Rich's story anticipates Twelfth Night much more closely than any of the Italian plays. Duke Apolonius, returning home to Constantinople after fighting the Turks, is caught in a tempest and forced to land in Cypress. There he is welcomed by Pontus, the lord and governor of Cyprus, and his daughter, Silla, who "had the sovereignty amongst all other dames, as well for her beauty as for the nobleness of her birth" (112). Silla has a brother, Silvio, now fighting in the wars in Africa, who so closely resembles her "that there was no man able to discern the one from the other by their faces, saving by their apparel, the one being a man, the other a woman" (118). Meanwhile, Silla has fallen in love with Apolonius, who, "coming but lately from out the field from the chasing of his enemies" (113), is indifferent to Silla's pleas and quickly returns to Constantinople, despite the fact that Silla "used so great familiarity with him, as her honor might well permit, and fed him with such amorous baits as the modesty of a maid could reasonably afford" (112). Silla resolves to follow Apolonius and establish herself as his servant. Aided by her faithful servant Pedro, who poses as her brother, the two secure passage on a ship bound to Constantinople. While at sea, the ship's captain, aroused by Silla's beauty, threatens to rape her if she will not marry him. Silla is about to take her life when "there suddenly fell a wonderful storm" (115), which destroyed the ship and all those on it except for Silla, who is miraculously washed safely ashore. Silla has survived by clinging to the captain's sea-chest, "which by the only providence of God brought her safe to the shore" (116). Opening the chest she discovers an array of the captain's suits from which, "to prevent a number of injuries that might be proffered to a woman," she adopts a male disguise and "call[s] herself Silvio, by the name of her own brother" (116). Silla then seeks out Apolonius, who, "perceiving him to be a proper smug young man" (116) immediately employs her to woo the widow Julina on his behalf. For her part Julina, like her Shakespearean counterpart Olivia, falls passionately in love with "Silvio."

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Twelfth Night

The relationship between "Apolonius and Silla" and Twelfth Night is more ambiguous than those of the other earlier works. For all of these sources, the role and will of parents frame the narrative, but in Twelfth Night parents are conspicuously absent. As with GVIngannati and its kindred plays, in "Apolonius and Silla," there is some kind of prior relationship between heroine and hero, although, unlike Lelia's, Silla's love is unrequited. Viola, by contrast, resolves to serve Orsino in masculine attire before she becomes attracted to him, motivated more by empathy and curiosity than by romantic self-interest. Similarly, the sexually violent sea captain seems to belong more to the physical action of the Italian plays than to the interiorized world of Twelfth Night. Still, there are stronger hints of Shakespeare's play here, not only in the shared details of plotting but in elements of characterization, tone, and theme. The presence of not one but two shipwrecks in Rich's story establishes not only a shared detail of plotting in Rich and Shakespeare but, more interestingly, a hint of what will become for Shakespeare a strong pattern of thematic imagery. In "Apolonius and Silla," as in Twelfth Night, the abrupt turn into a world of improbability is brought about by a "sudden" and "wonderful" sea storm. There is a hint of the miraculous in Rich's term "wonderful," a mystery beyond the reach of rationality, a spirituality that, for Shakespeare, will become a central feature of both the misconceptions and the recognitions in Illyria. Viola will invoke that tone several times, especially in the recognition scene, and it will be parodied throughout the Malvolio subplot. There is not quite that sense of wonder in Rich, certainly not in whatever "recognition scene" there might be between Silla and Julina, when Silla reveals her feminine identity by "loosing his garments down to his stomach, showfing] Julina his breasts and pretty teats" (128). Still, there is a hint of mysterious and kind tempests in Rich, despite the moralistic certainties of Rich's intrusive narrator. And Silla's character is also less opportunistic than her earlier counterparts, more in tune with the romantic heroine Shakespeare has written. In fact, the more closely we examine the relationship between these two works, both the similarities and the differences, the more we appreciate the usefulness of Rich's story for Shakespeare's original and synthetic mind. In his "Argument" for the tale, Rich speaks of his theme, passionate yet unrequited love, in terms of imagery of drink and overindulgence: "There is no child that is born into this wretched world but before it doth suck the mother's milk it taketh first a sup of the cup of error, which maketh us, when we come to riper years, not only to enter into actions of injury, but many times to stray from that is right and reason; but in all other things, wherein we show ourselves to be most drunken with this poisoned cup,

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it is in our actions of love ... " (110). What for Rich is a metaphor of error brought about by the intoxications of desire and passion will become for Shakespeare a radical symbol, ubiquitously present in the language of Twelfth Night, of that play's ambivalent design. Often that imagery of drunkenness and surfeit will identify and explore different kinds of error brought about by self-love and romantic posturing, as it does in Rich. So Malvolio is "sick of self-love ... and taste[s] with a distempered appetite" (1.5.90-91), while Orsino, imagining music as "the food of love," wishes for "excess of it, that surfeiting, / The appetite may sicken and so die" (1.1.1-3). Later, Orsino will criticize women's incapacity for love in gustatory terms: "They lack retention" (2.4.92). And Sir Toby and Sir Andrew are, of course, simply drunk. But surfeit and drunkenness have a more mysterious power in Twelfth Night that is simply not present in Rich. Drunkenness, literal or metaphorical, may provoke error, but it is also part of a festive energy that will bring about epiphany. C. L. Barber has pointed out that the transgressive energies of holiday surfeit and mockery actually help strengthen and authenticate the social order and values they seem to attack in that such festive excess "could provide both release for impulses which run counter to decency and decorum, and the clarification about limits which comes from going beyond the limit" (13). We are all "natural perspectives," a mysterious tangle of opposites. If we are to see ourselves aright, we need a double vision. Responding to Olivia's warning that his foolery grows "dry"—that is, stupid—and "dishonest," Feste calls out for drink and motley: "Two faults, Madonna, that drink and good counsel will amend. For give the dry fool drink, then is the fool not dry; bid the dishonest man mend himself; if he mend, he is no longer dishonest; if he cannot, let the botcher mend him. Anything that's mended is but patched: virtue that transgresses is but patched with sin, and sin that amends is but patched with virtue" (1.5.33-40). There is little hint, either in Rich's story or in any other source, of either the Malvolio subplot or the Sebastian-Antonio story. Sometimes, however, Shakespeare specifically rejects particularly malicious details in Rich's romantic plot, apparently not wishing to darken his Viola story with excessive violence, only to sublimate some of that malevolent energy by "patching" it into a secondary plot. In "Apolonius and Silla," when the duke hears from his servants a rumor that "Silvio" has betrayed him and is wooing for himself, he responds by imprisoning him in a dungeon, where Silvio lingers for some time. In Twelfth Night, Orsino attacks Viola with rhetorical, not physical, violence. Here, as with the Rich's lecherous sea captain, Shakespeare seems interested in the psychological connection between romantic idealism and violence but without allowing actual

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physical violence to disturb that plot's delicate emotional balance. Instead, the imprisoning of Silla in a dungeon will be displaced into a subplot, with the imprisoning of Malvolio in a "dark house." In so doing, Shakespeare allows the two plots to "converse" with one another, as often happens in his multi-structured plays. One plot will work as a kind of minor key countermelody to another, suggesting the darker, or in some cases more hopeful, possibilities. Such counterpoint also helps establish the exquisitely balanced "Chekhovian" tone so often heard in Twelfth Night. In other plays such as The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Othello, or The Winter s Tale, Shakespeare explores more directly and explicitly the disturbing evolution from Petrarchan compliment to violent action, but here we have only the suggestion of what could happen if Orsino were to allow the "savage jealousy" within him full scope. One other piece of evidence links Shakespeare's Twelfth Night to Rich's "Apolonius and Silla." As is appropriate for a play so absorbed with words—their pleasures, their corruptions, their pretenses, their pain—this last evidence is purely verbal. Four words—"coisterell," "garragascoynes" (gaskins), "pavion" (pavin), and "galliarde"—occur in both Rich's Farewell and Shakespeare's Twelfth Night that rarely appear in any other Shakespeare play (Lothian and Craik xvi-vii). All four words relate to revelry, often to dancing and noise. When Feste, playfully argues with Maria that he "is resolved on two points," Maria, punningly taking "points" to mean not arguments but fasteners for trousers, warns him that if his points fail to hold, his gaskins will fall (1.5.19-21). Sir Andrew dreams of expertise in a galliard, a lively dance (1.3.97-98). Early in the play, in a boisterous defense of drinking and revelry, Toby announces to Maria that "he's a coward and a coistrill that will not drink to my niece till his brains turn o'th'toe like a parish top" (1.3.33-34). At the end of the play, when the spirit of revelry has grown burdensome, a drunken and bruised Sir Toby, who earlier had announced that his "very walk should be a jig" (1.3.105), condemns "Dick Surgeon" for his tardiness, inching his way toward his battered patient Toby at the pace of a slow dance, or a "passy-measures pavin" (5.1.185). These four words, then, get at the heart of the subplot's ethos. More important, they get at the heart of an insatiable hunger for words that apply to all the characters in Twelfth Night and to their creator as well. When Sir Andrew listens to Cesario's love talk, he hastily scribbles down all the gorgeous words he hears: "'Odours,' 'pregnant,' and 'vouchsafed'; I'll get 'em all three all ready" (3.1.76-77). Sir Andrew's eager words often provoke laughter in performance. But is there that much of a difference between Sir Andrew's intemperate hunger for words and his author's? Shakespeare's

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plays possess and are possessed by language. With an open stage and universal lighting, these plays are driven by language. "Shakespeare's works," according to Stanley Wells, "use an exceptionally large vocabulary of anywhere between 20,000 and 30,000 words" (For All Time 147), the mark of a prodigious reader. What pleasure it is to imagine such a reader, deep in Rich's narrative, suddenly writing down these strange, wonderful words: coisterell, garragascoynes (gaskins), pavion (pavin), and galliarde; I'll get 'em all four all ready. SELF^BORROWINGS The last category of source material for Shakespeare was his own work. If Shakespeare was an "upstart crow," he was at least consistent, for some of his most interesting borrowings came from his own material. In fact these self-borrowings reveal a certain artistic restlessness in Shakespeare. In almost any play he writes there is an element of re-vision and experimentation. The play that most clearly anticipates Twelfth Night is, as John Manningham remembered, The Comedy of Errors. But other plays, including The Merchant of Venice, Love's Labours Lost, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and As You Like It, are also eviden In one of his earliest plays, The Comedy of Errors, probably written sometime between 1588 and 1594 and itself influenced by Plautus's Menaechmi, Shakespeare experimented with the permutations and combinations of mistaken identity when two sets of identical twins, the two Antipholi of Ephesus and Syracuse and their servants, also identical twins, the Dromio of Ephesus and the Dromio of Syracuse, find themselves crisscrossing one another's steps in the crowded port city of Ephesus. Although The Comedy of Errors features a broader, more physical, comedy, there are, nonetheless, intimations of themes and imagery that Shakespeare will explore more substantially in Twelfth Night (Scragg, Shakespeare's Mouldy Tales 35). In both plays the ambiguity of identity and relationship is explored in terms of the elusive properties of water. In both plays, a sea tempest dissolves the coherence of self and relation. Subsequently, in both Illyria and Ephesus, the comic confusion of repeated mistaken identities brings into thematic focus the volatility, the fragility, of identity. In a sense, then, the errors of mistaken identity are not errors at all but acknowledgments of a more elusive complementary sense of self shared by the twins. As Antipholus of Syracuse puts it: I to the world am like a drop of water, That in the ocean seeks another drop,

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Twelfth Night Who, falling there to find his fellow forth, (Unseen, inquisitive) confounds himself. So I, to find a mother and a brother, In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself. (1.2.35-40)

Similarly, Adriana protests that her quarrels with Antipholus of Ephesus have threatened the "undividable, incorporate" mystery of their shared self: For know, my love, as easy mayst thou fall A drop of water in the breaking gulf, And take unmingled thence that drop again Without addition or diminishing, As take from me thyself, and not me too. (2.2.122, 125-29) In Twelfth Night also the sea, with its creative and dissolving powers, and its hints of tidal providence, swirls about the language and the action of the play. Viola hints at these spiritual powers when she hopes, against reason, that Antonio's mistaking Cesario for Sebastian might be a sign that her brother, the very mirror of herself, may yet live: He named Sebastian. I my brother know Yet living in my glass; even such and so In favour was my brother, and he went Still in this fashion, colour, ornament, For him I imitate. O if it prove, Tempests are kind, and salt waves fresh in love. (3.4.330-35) The Comedy of Errors is usually regarded as less complex than Twelfth Night. Examining the differences in Shakespeare's interest in the two plays' similar confusions is itself instructive. As Leah Scragg points out, "[w]hereas the emphasis in the earlier work is on the humour of the situations to which the confusion between the siblings gives rise, in Twelfth Night the dramatist explores the psychological effects of the misunderstandings, and the emotional problems that the mistaken assumptions of the characters pose" ("Source Study" 378). Still, in Comedy of Errors there are intimations of the rich complexity of tones that mark the later play. Shakespeare, for example, may have remembered the antagonism between Syracuse and Ephesus when he establishes Antonio's long history of enmity with Orsino: "I have many enemies in Orsino's court" (2.1.45). In fact, in Trevor Nunn's film version of Twelfth Night, Nunn expands Antonio's private quarrel with Orsino to a wider war between Messaline and Illyria, making the connection between the two plays even stronger.

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Sometimes, as with Trevor Nunn's film, a production will awaken echoes between two plays that had been mute. For many years conventional wisdom denigrated The Comedy of Errors as a slender play that resembled Twelfth Night only superficially, anticipating the physical, knockabout humor of the mistakings but lacking the tone or texture of Twelfth Night. Tim Supple'ss remarkable 1996 Royal Shakespeare Company production of Errors allowed its audience to see a much more complex play. The performance was staged in the intimate space of The Other Place, depriving the audience of the distance it needs for farce. In the moments before the play began, we could discern a solitary figure chained to some upstage wall. It was Aegeon, waiting for daybreak and judgment. Thus from the opening of the production the comic spirit of the play was infused with sadness and the possibility of death. Moreover, the quality of Ephesus, defined by Eastern music and costume, gave to the play a feeling of otherness, a mysterious world on the edge of probability, a world of miracle and danger. This was the Ephesus St. Paul might have known, alien and mysterious. It was difficult to sense how runs the stream. Twelfth Night does, however, go beyond The Comedy of Errors in sera important ways. There is in the later play a more sustained investigation into the psychology of error, the myriad ways we see with a distempered appetite, or what we will. Moreover our capacity to become, no less than Malvolio, imprisoned by what we will raises larger questions of our capacity ever to understand who we are. Having the identical twins who are also of different genders allowed Twelfth Night an opportunity Errors doesn't have: to explore definitions of gender and gender difference. Indeed, the presence of Antonio and his intimate attachment to Sebastian allows this play to explore, not just different kinds of sexuality but different fusions of masculine and feminine presence in both heteroerotic and homoerotic attractions. Here Shakespeare may have been influenced by another of his earlier plays, The Merchant of Venice, as it explored the unrequited homoerotic attraction of another Antonio to Bassanio. In Twelfth Night, at the moment when Viola is most entrapped by her usurped masculine attire, she wonders—in terms Galen would understand—what wisp of a difference defines male and female. "Pray God defend me!" she pleads as she cowers before the masculine attire of Sir Andrew. "A little thing would make me tell them how much I lack of a man" (3.4.302-03). What to make, this play seems continually to ask, of a diminished thing? A number of Shakespeare's other early plays, including Love's Labor s Lost, The Merchant of Venice, and especially The Two Gentlemen of Veron may have contributed to certain themes of Twelfth Night, as well as to Shakespeare's interest in gender and the attractions and dangers of lyrical

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poetry. In Love's Labor's Lost there is a hint of Twelfth Night's interestin the sublimation of erotic energy and social engagement into an idealized self-love, although the comic strategies of the two plays are inverted. The King of Navarre and his court decide to retreat from the world of love for the sake of an idealized world of learning and truth. In Twelfth Night the Duke Orsino is resolved to retreat from the world for the sake of an idealized love. In both plays the consequence of such redirected desire is that characters fall in love with the linguistic medium of either love or knowledge. This infatuation with words is something both plays simultaneously satirize and celebrate. So in Love's Labor's Lost characters dream of a banquet of language even as they succeed in stealing only the scraps, and in Twelfth Night Orsino luxuriates in lyrical love metaphors, knowing that "Love-thoughts lie rich when canopied with bowers" (1.1.41). In both plays it takes corrupters of words—the women, especially Rosaline, in the first play, Feste and Viola in the second—to expose the hollowness of taffeta phrases. Love's Labor's Lost anticipates Twelfth Night in yet another way. Both plays end in a minor key as certain events that festive rhetoric fails to accommodate, the death of the princess's father and the implacable anger of Malvolio, awkwardly disturb the rituals of comic closure. "Our wooing doth not end like an old play; / Jack hath not Jill," Berowne complains at the end of Love's Labor's Lost (5.2.862-63). In fact the last words of that play dissolve any vestige of comic community, as everyone, men and women, actors and audience, exit separately: "You that way; we this way" (5.2.923). Similarly, in Twelfth Night Malvolio's cry for revenge, a threat that in performance often includes the audience, occurs just at the moment when characters and audience are celebrating the reconciliation of brother and sister, lover and lover. Often the inclusive harmony at the end of a Shakespearean comedy will be strained by the presence of characters and situations that either refuse or are not permitted to join in the celebration and hence in the community the play has ratified. Egeus, at least in the quarto edition, is absent at the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream as Don John is at the end of Much Ado About Nothing. Jaques, declaring that he is "for other than for dancing measures" (5.4.193), refuses to join in the dance at the end of As You Like It. But these exits do not seriously threaten their comic conclusions. One may indeed argue that these characters' very resistance to the happy ending strengthens the emotional credibility of these endings. However, the presence of death or ill will, or, in the case of The Merchant of Venice, the exile and humiliation of Shylock, do threaten everything the comedies have attempted to achieve, for such resistance involves states of mind

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that are hostile to the spirit of comedy. Much has been written about the presence of this anti-comic spirit in Twelfth Night. But the sober endings of these earlier plays might suggest that Shakespeare was experimenting with the limits of comedy long before writing Twelfth Night. By the time Shakespeare had written Twelfth Night, he had already expermented with the usefulness of cross-dressed heroines to explore the nature and boundaries of both gender definition and sexuality. The law against actresses appearing on stage made cross-dressed actors a necessity. But Shakespeare used that prohibition to allow multiple cross-dressings as the boy actor playing Viola would then impersonate "Cesario." Consequently, many of his plays, especially the comedies, explore social and psychological codes of masculinity and femininity while provoking in the audience an ambiguous emotional and erotic response. But of all the crossed-dressed heroines in plays before Twelfth Night, Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona isthe only one who, like Viola, wears masculine disguise so that she can put herself at the service of Proteus, the man she loves, who immediately employs the heroine to act as a go-between, pleading his case for Sylvia, Julia's rival. Consequently, both Julia and Viola find themselves more ensnared by their disguises than, say, Rosalind or Portia, both of whom remain in command of the sexual confusion they create. Although Julia in disguise does not have to suffer the amorous attractions of her rival, as does Viola with Olivia, nonetheless Julia's gender disguise, like Viola's, admits a certain vulnerability that, to an extent, qualifies the sexual and satirical powers these female characters enjoy through their usurped masculine attire. Indeed, for Michael Shapiro, each of Shakespeare's cross-dressed comedies represents a more ambitious experiment than its predecessor: Three earlier plays stress the masculine side of the boy heroine's disguised identity. Two use pert Lylian pages and the third a doctor of the law. In part, the vigor of these male personas supports the assertiveness the heroine needs to control the outcome of the play. In Twelfth Night, Shakespeare enlarged the male persona that the boy heroine assumed along with male disguise. At times, the actor playing Viola displays Ganymed's audacity if not Balthazar's commanding resourcefulness. At other times, the role calls for different aspects of boyishness: delicacy and shyness. (143)

We may or may not believe in the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wildfowl, but the characters in Twelfth Night are haunted by namesakes from earlier plays. D. J. Palmer speculates that while writing Twelfth Night, Shakespeare might have exploited even the names of characters from earlier plays. Thus Viola's brother, Sebastian, the other half of the "natural

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perspective" the two create on stage together in 5.1., shares a name with Julia's disguised persona. Similarly for Palmer, Antonio, whose passionate loyalty and love toward Sebastian establishes both an ideal of love and a barrier to marriage, might have reminded Shakespeare of another Antonio whose isolation at the end of The Merchant of Venice gave a melancholic strain to that play (12). MANY SORTS OF MUSIC Any discussion of the sources of Twelfth Night should include some reference to the many songs and fragments of songs included in the play. Music, as discussed in Chapter 3,is an essential element in Twelfth Night. It creates the sweet and languid tone of Orsino's sentimental fantasies, as he imagines himself in love with Olivia, as well as the frenetic pace and mood of the scenes of revelry. In the hands of Feste, the principal singer of all these songs, music becomes a deft satiric tool, mocking the sentimentality of Orsino, but also the fecklessness of the revelers, and the secret and hypocritical desires of Malvolio. Many of the songs, in fact, invoke the delicate balance of tones that, for many critics and audiences, defines the unique blend of the play's emotional experience. Although most commentators agree about the importance of music in Twelfth Night, there is much uncertainty about the source and provenance of that music. Did Shakespeare write the lyrics of the play's songs? Or did Shakespeare merely appropriate existing songs that bore some resemblance to a theme or a character in the play? Was the music composed by the more notable musicians of the day, composers such as Robert Morley and William Byrd? Or were these songs part of the anonymous popular culture of the period? A number of valuable twentieth-century studies of the music in Twelfth Night have addressed many of these questions. Such scholarship includes the work of Edward W. Naylor in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as later studies by John Long and Peter J. Seng. Recently two other useful studies of Shakespeare and music have emerged: Fletcher Collins' brief but useful Songs from Shakespeare's Repertory and Ross W. Duffin's insightful Shakespeare's Songbook. Each offers perceptive speculation on the texts and musical settings of the songs of Twelfth Night. There are two categories of song and song references throughout the play. There are whole songs, or larger segments of songs, sung by Feste, such as "O Mistress Mine," the "Hold Thy Peace" catch, "Come Away, Death," "Hey Robin," and Feste's epilogue song "When That I Was and a Little Tiny Boy." In addition to these songs there are a number of fragmented

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lyrics, usually sung by Toby, Feste, and Andrew, songs fueled by ale and limited by memory: isolated lines or song titles that occur to one of the revelers in the heat of the moment and then vanish. Several of these scholars, especially Duffin, have looked carefully at the lyrics of these songs merely alluded to in the text, in the process teasing out lyrics that turn out to have a sharply ironic aptness to the song's listeners or participants. Scholars generally agree that these allusive references to songs are generally to songs not written by Shakespeare but that are used opportunistically. Many of these references occur in 2.3, when Feste and Toby use their wits to taunt Malvolio with the license of lyrics. The "Hold Thy Piece" catch, for example, can be traced to "three early versions ... and it is impossible so say which one was used in the play" (Duffin 200). Later in the scene, when Malvolio reproves the caterwallers with a supercilious "Is it even so," Toby and Feste respond by setting Malvolio's sober words to festive music, a music that absorbs Malvolio's words into the rhythm and rhyme of Robert Jones's song about a rejected lover: Farewell dear love since thou wilt needs be gone, Mine eyes do show my life is almost done, nay, I will never die so long as I can spy, there by many mo' though that she do go, There be many mo' I fear not, Why then let her go, I care not. (Duffin 138) Other borrowed lyrics work similarly, creating a verbal environment so volatile that almost any phrase can quicken into song, a song that mocks either Malvolio or the revelers themselves. Sometimes Shakespeare borrows from plays such as Peele's 1595 Old Wives' Tale, as with "Three merry men be we," or from other popular songs. When Toby calls Malvolio a "Peg-a-Ramsey," he is likening Malvolio to the central figure in a folk ballad that, in some versions, features a young girl in yellow hair and in others a man in yellow stockings (Duffin 303). Other borrowings are aimed at the revelers. "There dwelt a man in Babylon" is from a ballad registered in 1562 about the Biblical story of Susanna and the Elders, whose holy lyrics are here transformed into a drinking song. Perhaps the most ironic of all of Shakespeare's borrowed lyrics in Twelfth Night is spoken by the enemy of lyric. When Malvolio, in yellow stockings, complains of the constriction of the blood imposed by his lover's garb, he sighs out a lover's consolation: "Please one and please all" (3.4.21-22). Malvolio is reciting a line from a 1592 broadside,

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anonymous but signed "R.T."—perhaps the initials of Richard Tarleton, the famous comedian, ballad-writer, and former member of Shakespeare's company—about a young lover speculating on the extravagant garments of young lovers. As Duffin observes, "Malvolio's insecurity about the cross-gartering causes him to explore the subject with Olivia and brings to his mind this song in which alternative garments figure prominently" (316). Here's a sample verse: Be they rich, be they poor, is she honest, is she whore, Wear she cloth or velvet brave, doth she beg or doth she crave, Wear she hat or silken call, Please one and please all, Please one and please all (Duffin 315) The evidence that Shakespeare wrote some of the more extended song lyrics is somewhat stronger, though still not always certain. Most scholars agree with Long's judgment that "O Mistress Mine," was probably written by Shakespeare, as the tone and style of the song is of a piece with its verbal environment (Long 169). Seng also believes that the song consists of "Shakespeare's words" (100). Duffin does speculate, however, that "[i]t seems likely that Shakespeare was quoting a popular song or at least a popular tune, but which tune?" (287). The musical setting for this song might be from either Morley or Byrd, both of whom include such a song title (though not the lyrics) in their collections, even if the stanza forms of both Morley's and Byrd's songs are different from Shakespeare's (Seng 100, Duffin 287). Fletcher adds that "Morley's publication of his book of instrumental pieces, without words, preceded Shakespeare's play by a year or two, as did the same popular book with 'It was a Lover and his Lass.' This coincidence suggests that both tunes may be Morley's and were borrowed by Shakespeare" (44). There is less evidence that "Come Away, Death" was written by Shakespeare. Elizabeth Story Donno points out that "[although the original music is not known, it was clearly a folk song" (83, n. 48). Seng also points to the traditional elements of the song, reminiscent of the "content and character of the chansons de toile" (110), as Orsino himself acknowledges. The case for Shakespeare's authorship of Feste's epilogue song is also somewhat ambivalent. Warburton in his 1747 edition of Shakespeare's plays deemed "[t]his wretched stuff not Shakespeare's but the Players!" (qtd. in Seng 123). Long, too, believes that Feste's epilogue is probably a popular song, not written by Shakespeare, to which was added the final

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stanza referring to the play" (180). On the other hand, both Seng and Duffin see evidence of Shakespeare's hand in the song (Seng 124, Duffin 449). The evidence, then, that the song lyrics in Twelfth Night are original to Shakespeare is, not surprisingly, mixed, suggesting that Shakespeare might have been as larcenous with his musical antecedents as he was with his other sources. What is unmistakable, however, is the artful and original uses he made of such imitation. WHAT COUNTRY, FRIENDS, IS THIS? Finally, there is another category of sources for Twelfth Night: not so much the textual predecessors that might have influenced Shakespeare's composition as the contextual ties that rooted Twelfth Night in the social and cultural practices and assumptions of its time. Many of the themes and indeed much of the humor of Twelfth Night are rooted in contextual ideas and practices that define the characteristics of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English life. Malvolio's ridiculous attire, for example, his yellow stockings and cross-garters, although humorous enough as a token of Malvolio's benighted self-love, takes on a different coloration in the context of the sumptuary laws of the period that restricted different kinds of fabrics and colors to members of a particular social status. Similarly, the festive hostility toward Malvolio, "a kind of Puritan," as Maria calls him, takes on deeper and darker resonance in the context of the religious antagonism between Catholics and Protestants, as well as between Protestants and Protestants, reflected in the growing tension between Queen Elizabeth's Anglican court and the more radical Protestants who dominated city government. Furthermore, in a government with a state-sanctioned religion, any religious conflicts took on national and international political overtones, whether in the continuing conflicts between Protestant England and Catholic Spain or France, or in the incipient conflicts within England that would eventually result in civil war and a transformation of the balance of power between monarchy and parliament. Other features of Twelfth Night, such as the play's many instances of gender confusionor.

the strong same-sex bonds (or apparent same-sex bonds) between severall pairs of characters, are more interesting in the light of the period's ambiguous attitudes toward gender and sexual definitions. ALL IS SEMBLATIVE A WOMAN'S PART Some of these same fears also attended early-modern concerns about both gender and sexual boundaries. The proclamation prohibiting women

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actors from appearing on stage in England resulted in the practice of boy actors playing female roles. The prohibition derived, in part, from the concern of many moral authorities that the presence of men and women on stage might not only provoke lewd activities both on- and off-stage but that female actors intrinsically threatened the essential difference between the sexes. The all-male "solution," however, did little to assuage such conservative anxieties, merely replacing the fear of men and women mingling promiscuously on stage with an even more horrific possibility that such female impersonation might awaken homoerotic desires on both sides of the stage. This very uncertainty, however, provided Shakespeare and his contemporaries with a rare opportunity to explore on stage the indeterminate pressures that resisted any clear boundary between men and women, as well as that between heteroerotic and homoerotic desire. For example, when Orsino assures Viola/Cesario that, despite her masculine "reality," she nonetheless exhibits sufficient feminine touches, he sets in motion a set of wild, unruly readings of Cesario's gender that Orsino cannot even begin to acknowledge: For they shall yet belie thy happy years That say thou art a man: Diana's lip Is not more smooth and rubious; thy small pipe Is as the maiden's organ, shrill and sound, And all is semblative a woman's part. (1.4.29-33)

In twentieth-century productions of Twelfth Night, where Viola is usually played by an actress, Orsino's lines are read as intuiting an essential feminne presence behind Viola's masculine disguise. But in an early seventeenthcentury production of the play, where Viola would have been performed, or "personated," by a boy actor, Orsino's "perception" of Cesario's "true" identity is much more ambiguous. For Shakespeare's audience, beneath Cesario's exterior may lie certain "feminine" internal traces of Viola. But, more important, beneath Viola's femininity might appear certain masculine traces of the boy actor. To whom was Orsino—or for that matter the audience—responding? For an early modern audience, at the root of such ambivalence was a cultural uneasiness about the difference between male and female. Moralists and anti-theatrical critics continued to attack the cross-dressed theater for desecrating the fixed and essentialist differences between the genders. But early modern science, building on Galen's ideas, questioned that clear difference. Bruce Smith observes that "[according to Galen, female genitalia inside the body are merely the inverse of male

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genitalia outside the body—implying that early modern men and women saw one sex where we today see two" (Twelfth Night 14). If the theories of ancient scientists such as Galen troubled the clear distinction between men and women, so theories of erotic desire at times seemed to collapse the distinction between heterosexual homosexual targets of desire, especially when that object was a sexually indeterminate youth. In Twelfth Night both Olivia and Orsino "refer to ['Cesario'] as a 'youth'—who could be male or female—and both fall in love with him/her/him in that uncertain guise. Viola /'Cesario' strikes both suitors as fetchingly androgynous" (Smith, Twelfth Night 14-15). The passionate attachments between Antonio and Sebastian and between Olivia and Viola/Cesario/Sebastian are further examples of homoerotic desire as a variant of heteroerotic desire. What disturbed early modern cultural definitions of both gender and sexuality, then, was precisely what allowed Shakespeare to explore, through the transformative resources of theater, the ambiguity of gendered and sexual identities: the deep uncertainty about whether either identity is essential or constructed, fashioned, and performed. ART THOU ANY MORE THAN A STEWARD? Early modern England was simultaneously a culture obsessed with the strict enforcement of boundaries of class or status and, not surprisingly, a culture marked by significant social fluidity. The clear-cut boundaries of status within the old feudal system (aristocracy, gentry, yeoman, servant, etc.) were beginning to lose their meaning as the feudal economy began to give way to the structure of early capitalism, especially in a large urban center like London, where the servant of a childless landowner or burgher might inherit either land or business. Men or women from one social stratum might marry into another, a strategy attempted successfully by Maria and unsuccessfully by Malvolio. Such social untidiness brought much anxiety. As Russ McDonald has pointed out, in the late sixteenth century there were a number of efforts to enforce the old social distinctions by imposing sumptuary laws that codified appropriate clothing for different social categories: "Because for centuries differences in dress had been a reliable register of hierarchies of class and position, the blurring of these distinctions and the rapid changes in fashion were alarming to political authorities. The social order depended on knowing who belonged in what slot, and in an age when the complete attire of a gentleman was available to anyone with the cash to purchase or the wit to steal it, the complications of dress were seen as a threat to that social order" (Bedford Companion 232-33).

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I AM NOT THAT I PLAY Perhaps the one institution that most destabilized the fixed definitions of gender, sexuality, or status, as well as the clothing that marked those distinctions, was the theater, where actors daily refashioned themselves into kings and beggars, burghers and servants, men and women with a simple change of wardrobe. It is difficult to imagine just how important the theater was to the daily lives of Londoners. In a typical week it is estimated that approximately 10 percent of the entire population of London attended a play (Day 6). A deeper fear for anti-theatrical critics was that actors might corrupt not merely themselves but indeed whole audiences by demonstrating that the outward signs that designated categories of people were merely arbitrary signs and flourishes. These are, Hamlet would say, "but the trappings and the suits," that, moreover, as Feste would say, could be turned inside out, like a chev'ril glove. In Twelfth Night Malvolio defines himself as the enemy of festive role-playing, and hence of theater. The enmity between the revelers, particularly Feste, and Malvolio, then, must be seen, at least in part, as a microcosm of a bitterly fought struggle between the very institution of theater and its radical Protestant critics who meant to destroy it. Politically, the theater found itself at the center of a struggle between court and local authorities. City officials were often supported by, indeed often composed of, puritan critics. Both groups strongly resented the intrusiveness of an autocratic and centralized national government into their local jurisdiction and did what they could to resist regal authority. The theater became a kind of counter in that struggle. Local authorities were, of course, hostile to what they considered the immoral and corrupting influence of theatrical performance. But even more threatening were the social disruptions that could always result when upwards of 3000 citizens, apprentices, and other unruly elements of the city were gathered at one theater, intoxicated by drink and sexual desire as they listened to actors perform their fantasies and excite their emotions. Listen to Stephen Gosson, one of the more well-known sixteenth-century anti-theatrical critics. Gosson especially decried the presence of prostitutes, who "to celebrate the sabbath flock to theatres and there keep a market of bawdry. Not that any filthiness in deed is committed within the compass of that ground, as was done in Rome. But that every wanton and his paramour, every man and his mistress, every John and his Joan, every knave and his quean, are there first acquainted" (qtd. in Evans, Elizabethan-Jacobean Drama 20). Citing the twin dangers of civil disturbance and contagious diseases, especially plague, the city restricted theaters to an ambiguous geography

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at the edges of city jurisdiction known as the liberties, either south of the city, across the Thames in Southwark, or north of the city in Shoreditch. When plague counts exceeded or, in some cases, merely approached 30 deaths in a week, the city would shut down the theaters until the plague rate had receded, sometimes for as long as six months to a year (Evans, Elizabethan-Jacobean Drama 335). Actors were also considered vagrants and subject to arrest. These harsh city measures, especially the temporary closing of the theaters, were not entirely without justification. Russ McDonald points out that "virulent outbreaks of plague ravaged London between 1592 and 1594 and again in 1603, when more than 30,000 people died (in a population of just over 200,000)" (Bedford Companion 124). Still, the closing of the theaters certainly served the interest of local authorities, and it may not be unreasonable to speculate that, although the health dangers may have been real, the severity of the threat and the length of the closings may have been prompted by both political and medical concerns. The monarchs, both Elizabeth and James, on the other hand, were great supporters of the theater, as were many of the nobility. In part this was simply because both Elizabeth and James enjoyed performances, often inviting Shakespeare's company to perform at court. In fact, of the three recorded performances of Twelfth Night before 1640, one is to a court performance. The court and members of nobility, in addition to their continued patronage of theater performances, were at times also patrons of the actors themselves, providing both economic security and protection from city vagrancy laws. Actors who enjoyed such patronage were defined as the servants or "men" of that patron. So until Queen Elizabeth's death in 1603, Shakespeare and his fellow actors were designated as the Lord Chamberlain's Men. After Elizabeth's death, James I declared himself the patron of Shakespeare's company, now the King's Men. Interestingly, both Elizabeth and James defined themselves as actors, public performers on a political and national stage. Did early modern theater, then, serve the political interests of the court? Critics are sharply divided on this question. Some scholars argue that theater secured royal authority by "containing" or redirecting potentially threatening aggression or criticism into theatrical pleasure. Others argue that theater offered a subversive and collective voice that critiqued an authoritarian government. In fact, theater proved to be much too ungovernable and unpredictable a force to support either definition. In Twelfth Night the puritan-like Malvolio is certainly held up to ridicule. But do the aristocratic figures in that play—Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, even Orsino—fare much better? After all, the character whose vision the play most endorses, Feste, is, like the theater he inhabits, ungovernable,

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unpredictable, living within the "liberties" of the play's social hierarchy and serving the interests of none. He mocks Malvolio, Orsino, Olivia, and Toby with equal comic zeal. Feste, like the theater, resists all attempts to assimilate him. He remains dangerous and unpredictable, the corruptor of all their words. Shakespeare may also have benefited from the creative output of members of his own company, especially Robert Armin, who joined the Lord Chamberlain's men in late 1599. M. C. Bradbrook cites one of Armin's standard comic routines about two boys playing at counters, which turns on multiple definitions of the word "points": lohn: Boy: John:

I ha' ne'er a counter. I'll give thee one for a point. Do, and I'll play hose go down. (56)

That scene, of course, anticipates the exchange Armin himself, as Feste, will have with Maria as the two banter in 1.5: Feste: Maria:

I am resolved on two points— That if one break, the other will hold; or if both break, your gaskins fall. (1.5.19-21)

This chapter began with a paradox—Shakespeare's profoundly original conception of the classical artistry of imitatio. It ends with an equally multiply constructed sense of his professionalism. We've seen Shakespeare as a man of books, surrounded by, and inspired by a lost library of readings. But he is also a man living in the spacious coordinates of his own imagination, giving a local habitation and a name to everything he absorbs and bodies forth. Bradbrook's example reminds us of yet another facet of that strange originality, a mind shaped by, sustained by, theatrical attentiveness, one who always "observe[s] their mood on whom he jests" (3.1.52). His genius is shaped by the collaborative energies of performance and the response it generates. If you do not minister occasion to him, he is gagged. When Malvolio announces to the audience "the full prospect of [his] hopes" (3.4.72), that despite vast differences in class and temperament, or "complexion," he is certain that "my lady loves me" (2.5.137), he feels the need to provide some precedent, a source that will account for, legitimate, the imaginative scene he creates. "There is example for't," he offers. "[T]he lady of the Strachy married the yeoman of the wardrobe" (2.5.34-35). We should be wary of such source study. Examining the rich variety of possible sources available to Shakespeare, even if one is careful to discriminate among

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degrees of "availability," in no way results in a linear line of creativity from source to source to source to Shakespeare. We will not find a precedent for Shakespeare's creativity. There is no "example for't." What we can suggest, tentatively, is a richly varied culture of characters, motifs, language, and themes that define a highly volatile tradition out of which Shakespeare's individual talent emerged. We can also, more tentatively, speculate about how Shakespeare read, what attracted him in these works and what did not. Robert S. Miola, for example, discovers a number of readerly habits implicit in Shakespeare's use of his reading—that he read competitively, eclectically, resistantly; that he seemed interested in the ethical and psychological contexts of the plots he appropriated (152-164). But finally Shakespeare's works resist such exploration even as they invite it. Despite the many Viola-like characters who might have interested Shakespeare, there are none who could be mistaken for Shakespeare's Viola. And there is certainly no Feste, or trace of him, in any of the sources. Yet Feste is often regarded, sometimes with Viola, as the shaping consciousness at the center of Twelfth Night. Malvolio, too, remains elusive, unaccounted for by any character in any of the sources, even the one named Malevolti. Yet Malvolio, the enemy of Twelfth Night revelries, is essential to Twelfth Night. One of the strangest ironies of this anti-theatrical critic is that a play he would have despised simply could not survive without him. If Feste embodies the comic ambitions of Shakespeare's play, Malvolio embodies its limits. Their antagonism creates the synergy of Twelfth Night. But where did Malvolio originate? What is the source of such a resistant, compelling figure? There are, of course, several "kinds o f Puritans that he resembles and a number of social aspirants among the urban legends of Shakespeare's London who might offer themselves as example for Malvolio's hopes. But Malvolio himself has no example, no source. Sam Mendes's 2002-2003 production of Twelfth Night, starring Simon Russell Beale as Malvolio, included a playful, meta-theatrical gesture that parodied our search for evidence in a play about the elusiveness of ocular proof. As the audience delighted in Malvolio's high fantastical reading of the forged letter, the steward suddenly turned toward us. Sensing our skepticism, he assured us of the "example" of his social ambitions. As he insisted that "the lady of the Strachy married the yeoman of the wardrobe," he suddenly produced a newspaper and pointed to the relevant article for proof. But the newspaper was too far away for the audience to see the evidence. In Beale's gesture, that production was parodying our obsessive desire to solve one of this play's great cruxes, a desire no less

intemperate and no less elusive than Malvolio's own. Significantly, despite an extensive scholarly search, conducted over hundreds of years, no one has

yet identified the Lady of the Strachy or the yeoman of the wardrobe.

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DRAMATIC STRUCTURE Examining the possible sources of Twelfth Night reveals something of the extraordinarily rich collaborative "conversation" between Shakespeare and a wide range of early modern writers. It offers us that glimpse into Shakespeare's imagined library. Observing how Shakespeare used the stories, the genres, and the languages he inherited, however, offers something more. Shakespeare's physical life is somewhat documented, but his creative life is not, at least not directly so. In the absence of letters, journals, drafts, and holographs, however, the cumulative evidence of Shakespeare's reshaping and rephrasing of his inherited material also offers us a glimpse, not of an imagined library, but of an imagination at work. Even allowing for the extensively collaborative nature of writing and "publishing"—that is, making public—plays, nonetheless two features of Shakespeare's writing, his dramatic structure and his language, help distinguish Shakespeare's voice from the multitude of other voices with which he worked. Shakespeare achieves the complex structure of Twelfth Night through a number of strate gies. The twin titles of this play about sameness and difference help establish the work's bipolar character. But Shakespeare's use of music, genre, scenic groupings, and plotting are also important shaping strategies. Shakespeare interweaves at least four different plot threads in Twelfth Night. The first story, a tale of loss and miraculous recovery, is one that Shakespeare will revisit throughout his career. Twins, of different genders yet described as identical, are separated in a shipwreck and, unknown to one another, survive, both arriving at the same place, Illyria, where each is mistaken for the other, provoking a series of errors both comic and poignant. At the same time another story unfolds involving Orsino, the ruler of Illyria, and his unrequited love for the Countess Olivia. Olivia, however,

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has a story of her own. After the deaths of her father and her brother, Olivia has vowed to retreat, "like a cloistress," to her chamber, isolated from the world and especially from male suitors for seven years. A fourth story involves a comic revenge plot that swirls about Olivia's household, as a group of revelers conspires to humiliate the Puritan-like Malvolio, who uses his authority as steward to suppress their festive enjoyment, a carnival of cakes and ale. Of course, these separate plots quickly entangle themselves in and out of each other's narratives so that the complicated fusion of stories itself takes on the shape of festival riot. Malvolio, for all his Puritan probity, will fall in love with Olivia—or at least with the prestige of her social position. Viola, having disguised herself as a boy in order to serve Orsino, quickly falls in love with her master, who himself feels a strange attraction toward his page. These lines of sexual desire grow more convoluted as Viola/Cesario, sent by Orsino to woo Olivia in his name, becomes "himself the object of Olivia's sudden declaration of love, as the countess just as suddenly abandons her vow of seven years of celibate mourning. Somehow these entangled and entangling plot threads will weave together a unified yet multi-vocal narrative, like free maids weaving their thread with bones. The two titles of this play, Twelfth Night and What You Will, offer aood place to begin, for they suggest a variety of shaping opportunities for this opalescent play. The phrase "Twelfth Night" itself refers to two sharply diverse, yet oddly interdependent, rituals important to the religious and social life of early modern England: the Feast of the Epiphany and the Feast of Fools. The Feast of the Epiphany, of course, is a sacred holy day in the Christian calendar, celebrating the world's providentially directed awakening from deception and falsehood into the truth of the Incarnation. The mystery of the Incarnation is embodied in the paradoxical doubleness of Christ, as the one figure reconciling the Old and New Testament, the first and second Adam, is made visible for the first time to ordinary men. Such a sacred model might anticipate a purposeful plot movement from error and folly to truth. Critics have often noted the many religious images in the play (see, for example, Hunt). And indeed, there is in the mood of the play's final recognition scene, when the two distinct yet identical twins are revealed to the inhabitants of Illyria for the first time in the play, something of the spiritual wonder of epiphany. When Viola first sees Sebastian, she thinks she sees a spirit. "A spirit I am indeed," he answers. And then he proceeds to untangle that mystery in terms of yet another mystery, that miraculous reunification, both Platonic and Christian, of the body with the soul: "But am in that dimension grossly clad/Which from the womb I did participate" (5.1.220-22). Even Fabian, hardly a figure of

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spiritual prescience, nonetheless senses something of the miraculous in that moment, what he calls "the condition of this present hour" (5.1.336). At the same time, however, the title also refers to the Feast of Fools, that irreverent celebration of error and comic mischief, where, for the duration of the festival, ordinary laws and social decorum are suspended, identities are lost behind masks and other usurped attire, the entire social hierarchy is inverted, and the most highly regarded of social actions is the prodigious consumption of cakes and ale. Such a model would seem to support a quite different kind of comic structure, one without any clear purpose or understanding, but, instead, to borrow from the play's second title, a play that satisfies what its audience collectively "wills": a fluid, unstructured series of indulgent and pleasurable scenes, something that might resemble what Samuel Pepys thought he saw on stage: "a silly play, and not related at all to the name or day" (3.6). Even as astute a judge as Samuel Johnson dismissed Twelfth Night for its lack of structure, a play whose admittedly delightfu comic plot nonetheless "wants credibility" and "exhibits no just picture of life" (7.326). And yet, as scholars such as C. L. Barber have long ago established, the Feast of the Epiphany and the Feast of Fools, the sacred and the profane, were not only compatible but necessary to one another. The Church sanctioned these unholy revelries perhaps because it realized that the comic mockery and social dislocations of the secular holiday in some way prepared the society for the spiritually transformative and renewing miracle celebrated by the holy feast. Paradoxically, what would seem to be practices disruptive to the religious and social order, such as mockery, excess, and disguise, actually participated in the renewing of those orders. By subjecting both the self and the social and religious structures to such irreverence, revelers could examine these familiar laws and mores from a new and wrcfamiliar perspective, resulting in what C. L. Barber defined as a "release" from and consequent "clarification" of those strictures (6-10). Disguises, then, could result in a clearer understanding of the self, just as mockery and transgression could result in a renewed legitimacy of social and religious authority. It is part of the strangeness of comedy, as Maurice Charney has observed, that opening oneself up to the ethos of holiday can result in a profoundly moving sense of wonder. "Strange, splendid things happen to you in comedy if only you are sufficiently open and receptive—'loose,' as we might say" (155). SWERVING If we think, then, of both the sacred Feast of the Epiphany and the profane Feast of Fools as suggesting a structure for Twelfth Night, we come

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closer to accommodating the paradoxical energies of this play. The disguises, misunderstandings, mistaken identities, and unlicensed excess that mark the action of this play are simultaneously chaotic "errors" that need to be untangled and actions that bring about the play's numerous epiphanies. Orsino's wild declarations of love to Olivia, especially when delivered through Cesario, whose male exterior nonetheless suggests to Orsino that "all is semblative a woman's part" (1.4.33), are certainly evidence of both Orsino's self-love and his sentimental mistaking of Olivia. Yet these very "mistakes" can be seen to foreshadow Orsino's earliest, preconscious recognition of his attraction to his messenger, Cesario, through whom, if not to whom, these passionate words are addressed. Similarly, although Olivia's sudden and powerful attraction to Viola/Cesario's "masculine usurped attire" constitutes unmistakable evidence of her sentimental blindness, that same mistaken desire could mark the first stage of the "clarification" of both her irrational passion and its object in the figure of Sebastian. As Sebastian himself observes at the end of the play, "So comes it, lady, you have been mistook./But nature to her bias drew in that" (5.1.243-44). "Nature is an unbalancing act," Stephen Greenblatt offers. Sebastian's metaphor is drawn from the game of bowls. The bias, or weight, "implanted" in the ball causes it to "swerve" away from its intended target toward its "destined" one. "Swerving," Greenblatt concludes, "is not a random image in the play;

it is one of the central structural principles of Twelfth Night" (68). At the same time, both Orsino's confused attraction to Cesario and Olivia's passionate declarations to the same messenger may prefigure something profoundly complex about the androgynous elements of sexual desire. As Sebastian darkly reveals to Olivia in the play's final scene, "You would have been contracted to a maid;/Nor are you therein, by my life, deceived;/ You are betrothed both to a maid and man" (5.1.245-47). Indeed, as one critic has observed, even the priest's comically detailed and meandering mistaking of the marriage vows between Olivia and Cesario "is also the final blessing of the marriage of Olivia and Sebastian" (P. Williams 195): A contract of eternal bond of love, Confirmed by mutual joinder of your hands, Attested by the holy close of lips, Strengthened by th'interchangement of your rings, And all the ceremony of this compact Sealed in my function, by my testimony. (5.1.145-50) The play's alternate title, What You Will, although perhaps a playful con cession to the indulgent tastes of Shakespeare's audiences, also suggests

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a more purposeful focus and design. This is very much a play about "will," especially in the sense of desire and especially sexual desire that such a word evoked in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century listeners. The play's various plots, then, can be seen to map out equally various displays of excessive will and its consequent effects on understanding and selfknowledge. The comic mistakings of all these Illyrians can be traced to various kinds of self-love and wish-fulfilling fantasies. Early in the play, Olivia mildly reproves Malvolio, reminding him that his self-absorption has infected the clarity of his appreciation of others. When Malvolio dismisses Feste's foolery, Olivia replies, "O you are sick of self-love, Malvolio, and taste with a distempered appetite" (1.5.73-74). And in fact, even before Malvolio reads the first line of Maria's forged letter, his own self-indulgent vanity has seduced him into believing the likelihood of his overpowering desire, not so much for Olivia's love as for power. "To be Count Malvolio!" he fantasizes as he imagines himself Olivia's husband, luxuriating in his "branched velvet gown," as "[s]even of my people, with an obedient start" summon Sir Toby to face Malvolio's judgment (2.5.30, 40, 49). Olivia herself, of course, is also affected by a distempered appetite, two appetites in fact, fantasies of romantic grief, as well as romantic desire, that both prove equally blinding. Her willingness to submit to Feste's ironic catechism, however, helps establish an essential difference between her "distemperature" and that of Malvolio, Orsino, Sir Andrew, and others. From the beginning of this play, Olivia reveals a generosity and a capacity to laugh at herself that distinguishes itself from Malvolio's—and for that matter, Orsino's—selfishness, allowing for a clarity and recognition, much as the irreverent mockery in the festivals that preceded holy events in the church calendar "clarified" the sense of miracle and renewal at the heart of a religious event such as Twelfth Night. The seemingly random

operations of desire in this play—what you will—eventually will map out—recognize—the nuanced and mirrored structures of Twelfth Night. LOVE SONGS AND SONGS OF GOOD LIFE Twelfth Night is a miracle of music and balance. It contains some of the funniest moments in Shakespearean comedy. Malvolio's letter-reading scene in Olivia's garden is a comic delight. The play can also be deeply— and sometimes shallowly—melancholic. Several other moments in the play, especially the recognition scene in 5.1, where at long last Viola and Sebastian rediscover one another and themselves, evoke an almost religious wonder. Additionally, the play also explores a cruelty, latent within its comic pleasures, so disturbing that both characters and audience often

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experience ethical discomfort, sometimes even shame. How shall we find the concord in this discord? Critics and directors, at a loss to articulate the poise that holds together what Michael Billington describes as possibly "Shakespeare's most perfect comedy" (ix), often resort to terms such as Mozartian and Chekhovian, evoking artists renowned for their delicate tonal and compositional balance. Peter Hall and John Barton, whose 1958 and 1969 productions of Twelfth Night have set the standard for twentieth-century performances, both defined the play in terms of its exquisite balance of musical tones: delight and melancholy, romance and satire, generosity and cruelty. Michael Billington, for example, praised "John Barton's unremitting exploration of text and sub-text, his detailed exploration of character, and his well-nigh perfect achievement of the balance between comedy and tears. It was the most Chekhovian Twelfth Night most of us had ever seen" (Billington xxi). Sylvan Barnet, summing up the general critical response to the Peter Hall production, used the same adjective, "Chekhovian," and a second term, "autumnal," to describe that production's delicately mixed "seasons" ("Twelfth Night" 172; see also Berry, Changing Styles, esp. 116-118). That musical balance is both seductive and elusive. Even directors who have had great success with the play feel a need to return to its complex harmonies a second, even a third, time. John Barton, after his critically acclaimed 1969 production, revived that production, with some new actors, in 1970 and again in 1971. Michael Billington, after talking to Peter Hall in the mid-1980s about his 1958 production of Twelfth Night, wrote that "even now, thirty years on, Hall is contemplating a return to this most Mozartian of comedies" (xx). That so many directors and commentators would think of both the themes and dramatic structure of Twelfth Night in musical terms is not surprising Music is one of the most important organizing features of this play. Bruce Smith may well speak for many when he argues that "[w]ith the possible exception of The Tempest, written late in Shakespeare's career, Twelfth Night is Shakespeare's most musical play" (Twelfth Night 156). As such scholars as John Hollander, John H. Long, Edward Naylor, Peter J. Seng, and, most recently, Ross W. Duffin have pointed out, music plays a vital role in all of Shakespeare's plays. Nonetheless, Twelfth Night represents a special case. It is, for example, the only Shakespeare play to begin and end with music. As John Hollander has observed, not only are there songs and instrumental performances carefully arranged throughout the play, but music, practical as well as speculative, is also central to the metaphoric design of the play ("Role of Music"; Untuning 154-161). The particular lyrics and melody of each song are also significant, not only because they often establish theme and mood, but also because the music always occurs

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within a dramatic and psychological context. To appreciate the contributions of any of Feste's songs, for example, we need to consider to whom Feste sings that song and why. Feste considers himself as a "corrupter of words," often in conversation parodying the pretentious, sentimental, or self-indulgent language of his listeners. As Viola well knows, these are the parodic skills that establish both Feste's "wisdom" and his corrective wit: This fellow is wise enough to play the fool, And to do that well craves a kind of wit; He must observe their mood on whom he jests, The quality of persons, and the time. (3.1.50-53) Feste's songs are no less strategic. The two verses he sings of "O Mistress Mine" (2.2.33-38), the first indulgent and wish-fulfilling, the second chilled by the shadow of carpe diem, work effectively to parody Sir Toby's and Sir Andrew's delusions about both love and good life. By contrast, Feste's singing of "Come Away Death" to Orsino and Viola provokes somewhat different responses in the two auditors that help define complex lines of likeness and difference. When Orsino hears such sentimental lyrics as "My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,/0 prepare it./My part of death no one so true/Did share it" (2.4.53-56), he thinks, of course, of himself as the quintessential lover martyred. But for Viola, who believes that her brother is drowned, the same lyrics provoke sad thoughts of her twin brother's "death," a difference often sharpened in performance. And yet, such emotional and romantic music simultaneously scores their halfconscious discovery of their growing attraction toward one another. In this case, music creates a kind of subliminal performance, a dreamy rehearsal of their later recognition scene, whereby the audience glimpses a psychological metamorphosis otherwise unrealizable on stage, especially such a presentational stage as Shakespeare's. Moreover, songs, such as these two, can often work to define structure, linking separate moments or separate characters we might not otherwise associate. Feste's "O Mistress Mine," sung to Andrew and Toby in 2.3, and "Come Away Death," sung to Orsino and Viola, disguised as Cesario, in 2.4, together offer a good example of such structural symmetry. The two songs invite us to consider these two quite different pairs of characters from two different plot lines as mirrored figures: various poseurs, both in their ability to "speak masterly" in the bookish art of love and their equally adept appropriation of "masculine usurped attire." Trevor Nunn, in his 1996 film of Twelfth Night, achieved this structural balance somewhat differently although he also used music. Nunn fused the two

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scenes together by allowing the camera to cut back and forth between Orsino and Viola in Orsino's house and Sir Toby and Sir Andrew in Olivia's. To heighten the mirroring effect, Nunn had both pairs of auditors listening to the same tune, "O Mistress Mine," as the magic of cinematography collapsed the physical distance between the two households into one shared musical moment. In his introduction to his published screenplay to Twelfth Night, Trevor Nunn writes of the power of music, especially in this play, to bring into thematic balance the lyrical, romantic love plot of Viola and Orsino and the more satiric comic subplot involving what Malvolio refers to as "the lesser people." Nunn explains: "I could yoke together Orsino and Viola with Olivia, with Toby, Aguecheek and Maria all listening to the same evocative Feste music, thereby pulling the theme of the two plots into closer contact" (n.p.). Similarly, when Feste sings "Hey, Robin" to Malvolio, trapped in a dark house, the song's lyrics—"My lady is unkind, perdy./Alas, why is she so?/She loves another" (4.2.61, 63, 65)—create, of course, a sharply satiric commentary on Malvolio's presumptions as Olivia's lover. However, Shakespeare is also using the song to suggest an unexpected satiric link between Malvolio and Orsino, two self-obsessed characters not often connected, thereby complicating our assessment of both. Not only is music arranged throughout Twelfth Night in such a way as to provide a design for this play, but the idea of music is particularly apt for Twelfth Night, whose very title evokes festival songs and merriment and whose complex plots, multiple tones, and divided audience responses test the generic limits of comedy. For Shakespeare and his contemporaries, music was essentially comic in its capacity to transform the accidental, even chaotic noise of human experience into a purposeful design, the artist's replication of the cosmic harmony of the spheres, turning all our sounds of woe. Even in tragedies such as Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, or in histories such as Richard II, Shakespeare often used music to sugges the possibility of harmonic order somewhere just outside the reach of tragedy. But Shakespeare's comedies exult in music, their language immersed in musical references and their action often choreographed into music and dancing, especially at the end of the play, as if to link the social harmony the characters find with something larger, more cosmic: the music of the spheres. Once again, despite its musical bounty, Twelfth Night represens a special case. Like the character Malvolio within the play, the music of Twelfth Night threatens its own harmonic order from within, not only by accepting into its design elements of death, malice, and exclusion, all hostile to comedy, but also by allowing both its on- and off-stage revelers to experience not just the limits of comedy, but the tedium, even the distaste, of comic revelry itself.

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DYING FALLS As is often true in Shakespeare's comedies, Twelfth Night ends with music, but here again the balance is different. In comedies such as A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, or As You Like It, to name just a few examples, music is used, especially at the end of the play, to celebrate the harmony and inclusiveness that comedy can achieve. If some characters, such as Jaques in As You Like It, are "for other than for dancing measures" and choose not to join the communal dance, their absence, while qualifying the general happiness, also validates the comedy's achievement by calling attention to all those who do join in the harmony. But in Twelfth Nightboth Malvolio's harsh cry of revenge, often directed to both characters and audience, and the ending's isolation and downright neglect of several characters—Antonio and Sir Andrew in particular—have a much darker effect on the play's comic resolution, much like the effect that Shylock's exit has on the festive conclusion at Belmont. There is no communal dance at the end of Twelfth Night. On the contrary, many characters in this final scene exit separately or, like Maria, are not even present. Instead, Feste, alone on stage, sings a song to the audience about the disillusionments that attend each stage of life in the society we are about to rejoin amid the wind and rain outside the theater: foolish things, shut gates, failed marriages, drunken heads. At the end of the song, Feste's tone renews itself, just a bit. Our play may be done, but Feste's last lines offer us an invitation to join him again for another performance, where, he promises, "we'll strive to please you every day" (5.1.385). If the synesthetic pleasures of the music that opens the play, with its "sweet sound/That breathes upon a bank of violets,/Stealing and giving odour" (1.1.5-7), lead us into a world of pleasurable illusions and indulgence, Feste's song, at the end of the play, leads us out to the reality of wind and rain. It is, however, a gentle exile. The very lyrics that expel us from the "sweet sounds" of Illyria are themselves the fulfillment of a beautifully wrought musical structure, ending with just the hint of a dying fall. It is appropriate that such testing of this play's own comic and harmonic powers would be both articulated and measured by music. The result is "the most complex structure which Shakespeare had yet created" (Summers 10). Genre and its expectations also offer Shakespeare a structure that he both embraces and resists. For Shakespeare, tragedies and comedies require a different degree of focus and a correspondingly different plot structure. His tragedies, as their titles suggest, are intimate explorations of a single consciousness, or at least a limited number of characters, as each character struggles with the consequences of his or her flawed humanity and the

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equally flawed, and restricted, moral choices that must follow. We might think of titles such as Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet, or Romeo and Juliet. A sense of community is important in tragedy, if only to establish a social and political ethos in which the tragic figure must live and act, but the primary focus of tragedy is on the individual. The plot line of a tragedy, then, tends to be linear, following the necessary chain of consequences that must follow, inalterably, from human action. Shakespeare's comedies, on the other hand, work differently. Their titles, characteristically, are thematic and communal, allowing an audience the emotional and aesthetic distance to measure, and mock, varieties of social folly. Whereas tragedies require a community to contextualize individual action and suffering, comedies, by contrast, are all about community. Although comedies such as As You Like It, Love's Labor's Lost, or Much Ado About Nothing may include some of Shakespeare's more memorable characters, we are less interested in the individual than in the group. Like Puck, we stand back, detached, to observe "what fools these mortals be." Because in his comedies, Shakespeare protects us from the irreversible consequences of human and social error, comic plots tend to be less linear. Instead, we move from place to place, observing different social groups that illustrate different degrees or varieties of social error and, finally, of social reconciliation. Time presides over Shakespeare's comedies, as it insistently does over the tragedies; but it is a different kind of time. In tragedies, Helen Gardner explains, time "urges the hero onwards to fulfill his destiny." However, "[i]n Shakespeare's comedies time goes by fits and starts. It is not so much a movement outwards as a space in which to work things out" (155). As a result, comic plots are more circular, even wandering, mapping out one kind of communal space against another, such as the Forest of Arden versus the court in As You Like It or Venice versus Belmont in The Merchant of Venice. Each space embodies a set of value or possibilities, valuable yet incomplete in itself. The meandering plots of these plays, wandering in and out of these opposed worlds, eventually discover a space that includes both. In Twelfth Night there is something like that meandering in the casual movement from Orsino's household to Olivia's. Still, the external geography of this play is much less encoded with significance than in the earlier comedies. Hence, the excursions from Orsino's house to Olivia's do not suggest a corresponding movement from one world of values to another, as the movement from, say, the court to the Forest of Arden in As You Like It certainly does. In Twelfth Night, as Feste confides to the sexually disguised Cesario, "[f]oolery, sir, does walk about the orb like the sun; it shines everywhere" (3.1.32-33). C. L. Barber has pointed out that "[i]t is

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amazing how little happens in Twelfth Night, how much of the time people are merely talking, especially in the first half, before the farcical complications are sprung" (242). More so than in Shakespeare's other comedies, in Twelfth Night these spaces become more internalized, subjective landscapes of imaginative inebriation and sobriety. But Twelfth Night also belongs to a more particular group of comedies Twelfth Night, like many of the comedies that preceded it—As You Like I Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Nighs Dream, The Taming of the Shrew—, owes its shape to the generic constraints of romantic comedy, a genre that creates its own strange balance. On the one hand, romantic comedies celebrate the powers of romantic love to overcome parental or societal opposition; on the other hand, these comedies mock what they celebrate, holding the conventions of love, gender identity, and social mores up to gentle satiric scrutiny. We might think of Rosalind in As You Like It parodically instructing Orlando in the finer ars of masculine wooing. In many ways Twelfth Night fits this pattern, offering a simultaneous awareness of the liberating and confining powers of both sexual disguise and irrational passion. We have, for example, Olivia's wonderfully clear-headed exegesis of Orsino's affected love texts at the very moment that she falls in love with Cesario's affected masculinity. At least in one way, however, Twelfth Night is radically different from these other romantic comedies. There is, as noted in our discussion of sources, no parental opposition to the fulfillment of the lovers' desires in this play. In fact, there are no parents. As a result, the plot in Twelfth Nigh seems to move in precisely the opposite direction from the plots of these other plays. As Alexander Leggatt puts it, "[n]ot sinceThe Two Gentlemen of Verona has there been such emphasis on the pains rather than the peasures of love; not since Love's Labour's Lost have we been so aware that love's means of expression are unreliable. It is as though the ground won in the intervening plays—and most notably in As You Like It—has been deliberately surrendered" (221). Joseph Summers, also contrasting Twelfth Night to its most likely comedic predecessor, As You Like It, makes a similar observation. Twelfth Night, he points out, seems to begin exactly where most romantic comedies end: "[a]ll the external barriers to fulfillment have been eliminated in what becomes almost a parody of the state desired by the ordinary young lovers, the Hermias and Lysanders—or even the Rosalinds and Orlandos" (2). Moreover, such a greater emphasis on the operations of individual consciousness suggests Shakespeare's experimentation with comic forms, as he seems to push the limits of comedy, ever so slightly, into a different kind of world, where the focus on individual consciousness and suffering offer muted intimations of tragic concerns.

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Such an inversion of genre is appropriate to the special nature of Illyrian frustration. If the lovers in these earlier plays are so fettered by social conventions that they become estranged from themselves, the characters in Twelfth Night are so "sick with self-love" that they become estranged from any possibility of social engagement. If the Illyrian inhabitants are also cut off from an understanding of themselves, it is because they are too ready to see themselves, and others, through the filter of their own conventional definitions, whether those conventions are social or literary in nature. So Malvolio cannot appreciate Feste's foolery because, Olivia tells him, "you are sick of self-love, Malvolio, and taste with a distempered appetite" (1.5.73-74). Likewise, the romantic Orsino, though he seems the antithesis of the Puritan Malvolio, nonetheless shares something of Malvolio's self-willed isolation. Orsino can appreciate neither Olivia nor Viola because he is so self-absorbed with his own romanticized image of a lover. Most of the characters in this play are so smitten with various kinds of self-love that they are incapable of transcending their own narrow perspectives. All of these characters have a remarkable talent for misreading, mistaking, and misunderstanding, as the several comic incidents of misread letters and mistaken identity attest. In a play surfeited with images of sickness and appetite, Feste and Viola are the "doctors" who minister to their patients through wit, song, or mockery designed to allow these characters both to empathize with another and to laugh at themselves. Between the two, Feste and Viola engage in private conversation with every major character in the play, establishing the pair as central, not only to the themes of Twelfth Night, but to its structural balance as well. Their encounters map out what coordinates there might be in a play given over to matters for a May morning. Small wonder that when Feste and Viola do meet, near the center of the play, their banter has a sharp, competitive edge to it, like

a pair of dramatic collaborators, appreciative yet wary. SINGING BOTH HIGH AND LOW Finally, any discussion of the dramatic structure of Twelfth Night must acknowledge the extraordinary compositional balance Shakespeare gives to his scenic arrangement. Although any edition of Shakespeare's plays, including the 1623 First Folio, will organize the plays into a five act structure, most scholars believe that those act divisions were anachronistically imposed on the plays by later editors, especially those plays performed in public theaters. James E. Hirsch, building on William T. Jewkes's earlier study of act and scene divisions in Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, points out that "of the 74 plays for the adult companies printed between 1591 and

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1607,5 plays by Ben Jonson are the only ones that are divided into acts" (4). For Shakespeare, the scene provided the play's basic organizational structure, arranging and unifying both the various actions within a single scene and the larger patterns revealed in the relationships among scenes. There are 19 scenes in Twelfth Night. Feste's epilogue might make a twentieth. These scenes can be grouped into three-, four-, or five-scene units, each designed to replicate the overall movement of the play from isolation to a limited community. The first five scenes, for example, make up such a rhythmic unit, as we move from isolated characters imprisoned in their own self-absorption to larger, more inclusive scenes of social interaction. These scenes also work to implicate the audience in those same processes of misreading that plague the characters. Finally, this scenic grouping, as with others that follow, allows Shakespeare to discover a unifying structure that holds together diverse and apparently isolated comic episodes. Such a synthetic moment occurred in John Barton's 1969 RSC production of Twelfth Night, complicating the audience's "clear" transition from Malvolio's dark house scene to Sebastian's questioning of his own sanity. Michael Billington remembers that "as Sebastian comes downstage with 'this is the air, that is the glorious sun,' we hear faintly, from underground, the baffled sobbing of Malvolio..., allowing the mood of one scene to linger into the next" and suggesting a surprising psychological link between two sharply distinct characters and the equally distinct plots they inhabit (xxiii). Such tactics seem appropriate in a play suffused with unexpected recognitions, large and small. The first two scenes have a special relationship. One of the conventions of an opening scene is to provide an audience with exposition that will shape its introduction to characters, relationships, societies, and themes. But often Shakespeare begins his play by deliberately withholding vital expository knowledge the audience needs to feel in command of the fictional world it is entering. Instead, the audience experiences the atmosphere of a world it cannot understand. In the next scene the audience receives the exposition it needs to measure this new world, but not before it has been affected by the mood and tone of the play. This immersion into the mood of a play can be so disorientating to audiences that productions often choose the safer route and reverse the order of the first two scenes. In Macbeth, for instance, the weird sisters' equivocal questions, marked by repetition and the dangerous excitement of the trimeter verse, immediately seduces us into a ritualistic, highly sensual world before we know what we're doing. Not until the next scene do we learn something about the characters and the ethos of this new world that might allow us to guess

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at the difference between fair and foul. But by then it's too late. We are, like Macbeth, "rapt." Similarly, as Richard II opens, we find ourselves in a bewildering trial, in which characters we haven't met accuse one another of crimes we do not comprehend, while the presiding authority, the king, seems unable to judge. Such a scene requires of us a judgment, yet we have no capacity to judge. Lacking any clear moral criteria to measure what we see, we find ourselves in the very position as Richard's impotent critics. It is not until the second scene, as John of Gaunt talks to Gloucester's widow, that we begin to glimpse the hollowness of kingly authority and justice in Richard's England. Twelfth Night also opens by throwing us headlong into an atmospheric world we cannot begin to understand. Yet from the opening words, we can feel its appeal with all our senses. As a result, the play's first scene creates in the audience a mysterious double response. We critique the comic excesses of the speakers as we fall under the spell of the words that they speak. The play opens with one of the most beautiful passages in Shakespeare: If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it, that surfeiting The appetite may sicken and so die. That strain again, it had a dying fall; O it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour. (1.1.1-7) It is an extraordinary comic moment. Orsino's language is so outlandish that any audience could hardly forbear hurling things at him were we not quite so caught up in such wondrous poetic music. Joseph Summers puts the matter nicely when he admits that "only our own romanticism can blind us to the absurdities in his opening speech" (3). We never lose that odd confluence of indulgence and judgment. Later in the play, we will, like several of the characters, be similarly divided from ourselves, increasingly critical of the "sportful malice" directed against Malvolio even as we become, as audience, more deeply implicated in that comic attack. The play's second scene shakes us out of one reverie into another. The first words we hear are Viola's, newly emerged from the shipwreck that appears to have claimed her brother's life, drowned in a different kind of "eye-offending brine." In fact, although references to the sea, perhaps this play's most central symbol, wash from the first scene into the second, its linguistic and psychological effects could not be more different. For Orsino the sea is a convenient and sentimental image that suggests that

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"spirit of love" within himself: his own "high fantastical" capacity to love, his "retention," as he will later put it to Viola. But for Viola that same image embodies mysterious, even religious, powers outside herself and to which she freely submits. Viola's sea has something of the same spiritual suggestiveness as another central image, Time. There is a new energy in this scene that surprises us with its freshness, after all that hot house imagery of 1.1. Both that energy and freshness are, oddly enough, strengthened by a sense of restraint, or at least of balance. Viola's words are marked by a tempered inclusiveness. Viola's deep mourning for her brother is part of a wider range of emotional vitality that allows room for pragmatic intelligence, resourcefulness, curiosity, a wary suspicion of appearances, playful wit, empathy, and a faith in the untangling powers of "Time." The effect of this scene on the audience's engagement with the play is startling. If in the opening scene our judgment is seduced into the delicious but megalomaniac processes of Orsino's lyricism, here we become radically expanded to recognize a wild multiplicity of thought and feeling as we participate in the centrifugal energy of Viola's intelligent selflessness. It is not exactly a shift from a romantic to a realistic consciousness. There is plenty of room for dream and desire in Viola's language. But those dreams and hopes coexist with a matter-of-fact awareness of dreaming and hoping. There is also in this multiple consciousness our first hint of her mirrored resemblance to her brother, who will, like his sister, survive the storm through a fusion of resourcefulness and faith, "[cjourage and hope both teaching him the practice" (1.2.13). Again and again, Viola's grief is interrupted by her generous interest in the particular circumstances and concerns of others. "Who governs here?" "What is his name?" "Orsino! I have heard my father name him./He was a bachelor then." "What's she?" "O that I served that lady." "I'll serve this duke" (1.2.24,26,28-29,35,41,55). Although thesefirsttwo scenes are both part of the Orsino-Viola plot, nonetheless they represent the two antithetical poles of consciousness, even romantic consciousness, between which the play will oscillate. Love for Orsino is centripetal, a powerful gravitational force that pulls its objects of desire into a solitary and sentimentalizing self in love with itself in love. The force of Orsino's declarations of love inevitably leads him to isolation and self-regard: "Away before me to sweet beds of flowers/Love-thoughts lie rich when canopied with bowers" (1.1. 40^4-1. On the other hand, love for Viola is a centrifugal force always leading away from self-consciousness into action and engagement. The sequence of early scenes also modulates our expectations of other characters. Throughout the first four scenes, for example, we keep hearing references to Olivia, although we never see her until 1.5. As a result,

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we too begin to acquire habits of imagining Olivia through the filter of our expectations—what we might call an Illyrian point of view. In other words, even as we mock Orsino's, or later Malvolio's, constructions of Olivia, we too are creating, imagining, an Olivia through the powers of our own fancy. We first hear of Olivia through Orsino's and Valentine's own romantic phrases. We hear Orsino report that when he first saw her, "she purged the air of pestilence" (1.1.20). We learn from Valentine that, smitten with grief for her brother's death, Olivia will "[l]ike a cloistress ... veiled walk,/And water once a day her chamber round/With eye-offending brine; all this to season/A brother's dead love" (1.1.28-31). Although we may suspect such over-wrought language, we have no other way of seeing Olivia. Viewing Olivia through the filter of such romantic constructions, we have little choice but to spy on her, like Actaeon. Such sharp dislocations in the audience's knowledge and expectation in these early scenes, however, lose much of their effect in productions—stage or cinematic—that for the sake of expositional clarity or the requirements of scenery reorder the play's opening scenes, beginning instead with Viola's emergence from the sea (1.2) and then moving to Orsino's court. These early scenes are filled with anticipations of Olivia, all quite different because each vision is filtered through a different consciousness and hence a different "appetite," tempered or distempered as the case may be. The Olivia we imagine through Viola and the sea captain is nothing like the martyr to grief, the "cloistress," that Valentine and Orsino wistfully conceive. The captain describes her in brief, matter-of-fact terms that emphasize Olivia's moral and familial rather than her Petrarchan features: "A virtuous maid, the daughter of a count/That died some twelvemonth since, then leaving her/In the protection of his son, her brother,/Who shortly also died" (1.2.36-39). The captain mentions Olivia's seclusion from men, but his language is again direct and modest, without any of the figurative excitement we've come to know in Orsino's household. In fact, Olivia's behavior is described with great caution, the parenthetical "[t]hey say" given more emphasis by its position at the beginning of a line, even suggesting a touch of rational skepticism, as the captain goes on to say, "for whose dear love /(They say) she hath abjured the sight/And company of men" (1.2.39-41). Similarly, for Viola, Olivia's behavior is appealing not so much because it is romantic but because is seems so practical, perhaps even suggesting to Viola the usefulness of a disguise that might protect her own grief from being "delivered to the world" too soon: O that I served that lady, And might not be delivered to the world

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Till I had made mine own occasion mellow What my estate is! (1.2.41-44) The next scene, 1.3,findsus closer to Olivia, in her own house, in fact. But, as before, she is absent, requiring us to imagine her from yet another point of view, that of her servant, Maria, and Illyria's only two examples of knighthood, Toby and Andrew. We see her as a level-headed mistress of her own house. We learn from Maria, for example, that Olivia "takes great exceptions to [Sir Toby's] ill hours," which may, in fact, "undo" her uncle, consanguinity or no (1.3.4, 11). In this scene, we return to a romanticized construction of Olivia, but this time it is the hapless Sir Andrew Aguecheek, not Orsino, doing the romanticizing. Once Sir Toby assures him that he is still in the race, Aguecheek reviews his credentials: "I am the fellow o'th' strangest mind i'th'world: I delight in masques and revels sometime altogether" (1.3.92-93). This moment creates a comic foil or, as Joan Hartwig might put it, a parodic analogy (4-6) to the parallel moment in 1.1., where Orsino declares his love and, in so doing, his credentials as a lover. Here the comparison works to the disadvantage of both would-be suitors of Olivia. Sir Andrew reveals himself from the start to be a slow student in the school of love, especially when his halting love rhetoric is compared to Orsino's more polished and extravagant poetry. In this world where verbal dexterity is the currency of social accomplishment, Sir Andrew must, again and again, "send for more money." Sir Andrew solicits high fantastical words of others only, as Hamlet would say of Osric, to get "the tune of the time," and he often fails at that. "What is 'pourquoi'T Andrew desperately asks Toby, "Do, or not do?" (1.3.77). But at the same time the very appropriateness of the comparison makes us realize that Orsino shares more with Sir Andrew than he—or we—might have thought. Again, as so often happens in this play, we glimpse a surprising recognition between two seemingly opposite figures, as if Sir Andrew's words did indeed give the very echo to the seat where self-love is born. In the next scene (1.4), returning to Orsino's court, again the focus is on the yet to be seen Olivia. And again the language that presents her is the well-rehearsed language of conventional love poetry. Orsino urges Cesario to "act" his desires and woes, to "[s]urprise her with discourse of my dear faith" (1.4.25). But this time the Olivia we see and hear is more complex than in 1.1. This is partly, of course, the consequence of the audience's memory of Viola's and the captain's discussion of Olivia in 1.2. But the audience is also cued by Viola's skeptical questioning of Orsino's romantic strategies, a questioning that invites both Orsino and the audience to imagine Olivia's point of view: "Sure, my noble lord, /If she be so abandoned to her sorrow/As it is spoke, she never will admit me" (1.4.17-19).

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Although Orsino's answer—"Be clamorous, and leap all civil bounds" (1.4.20)—seems to sweep aside Viola's skepticism, nonetheless her words, rational and engaged, begin to draw Orsino out of his self-love and into a dim awareness of Viola's femininity beneath her masculine disguise. In fact, Orsino's protestations of love in this scene establish a parodic echo of a similar moment in 1.1. In both cases, his declaration of love is deflected away from its purported object, Olivia, toward something else. In the first scene, the words intended to prove a love for Olivia instead unwittingly uncover a love of himself. This time, however, Orsino's romantic expressions, influenced by Viola's compassionate words, begin to veer, with the bias of nature, from Olivia to Viola: Orsino:

Viola: Orsino:

O then unfold the passion of my love, Surprise her with discourse of my dear faith; It shall become thee well to act my woes: She will attend it better in thy youth Than in a nuncio's of more grave aspect. I think not so, my lord. Dear lad, believe it; For they shall yet belie thy happy years That say thou art a man: Diana's lip Is not more smooth and rubious; thy small pipe Is as the maiden's organ, shrill and sound, And all is semblative a woman's part. Prosper well in this, And thou shalt live as freely as thy lord To call his fortunes thine. (1.4.23-33; 37-39)

Orsino's language remains as florid as ever. In fact, the same reference to Diana that embellished his earlier description of Olivia now describes Viola's lip. The difference, of course, is that here he is looking at, and talking to, Viola. This is our first sign that Orsino has the capacity and the interest to look beyond himself. It doesn't last long. But it's a beginning. The last of this opening sequence of scenes, 1.5, plays a double structural role. It functions as a culmination of the misdirected energies of the first four scenes, as the numerous imaginative constructions of Olivia encounter, face to face, the thing itself. The Olivia we finally see baffles all rhetorical efforts to define her, whether those of Orsino or of literary scholars or of theatrical producers and directors. In fact, the choreography of mistakings and misunderstandings here is so elaborate and so symmetrical

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that this scene takes on a parodic resemblance to the scene that will conclude the play, 5.1, where the wild permutations and combinations of misunderstandings somehow break out into a series of wondrous epiphanies. We might consider how the mad events of 1.5 work, surprisingly, to bring Olivia into focus. Like Orsino, Olivia is enamored of a role she has found for herself, complete with the trappings and the suits of woe. But there the resemblance ends. Olivia's sentimentality coexists with some of the same qualities Viola possesses, particularly her wit, her interest in others, and perhaps most important, her capacity to laugh at her own indulgences. This last trait, exhibited in her enthusiastic willingness to engage in Feste's "catechism," distinguishes Olivia from the large population of other characters in this play, all benighted by a single, flattering conceit. Even when Olivia falls from one delusion into another, as when she encounters "Cesario" for the first time, there is, nonetheless, a welcome energy and directness in her wooing, a sense of modesty and risk absent in Orsino or Malvolio. But the scene is also an ironic rehearsal of 5.1, culminating in a "non-recognition" scene between Viola and Olivia, a parody of the recognition scene that will occur between Viola and Sebastian. After a series of ritual questions, much like those Viola and Sebastian ask of each other, Olivia "recognizes" her love: 'What is your parentage?' 'Above my fortunes, yet my state is well: I am a gentleman.' I'll be sworn thou art; Thy tongue, thy face, thy limbs, action, and spirit Do give thee five-fold blazon. (1.5.244-48) Olivia's words resonate throughout Twelfth Night as a kind of parodic musical motif. They of course anticipate Viola's and Sebastian's litany of recognition, also a kind of inventory of physiognomy that includes a father's mole. But Olivia's words also look forward to the gulling of Malvolio. Maria in her forged letter will present to Malvolio a flattering inventory of his own physical traits—"the colour of his beard, the shape of his leg, the manner of his gait, the expressure of his eye, forehead, and complexion"—so convincingly that the socially ambitious steward will indeed see himself "most feelingly personated" (2.3.132-34). Finally, Olivia, only a few lines earlier, has offered a brilliant parody of her own "inventory," as she responds to Cesario's argument that, were she to reject Orsino's love, she might "lead [her] graces to the grave,/And leave the world no copy" (1.5.198-99). Olivia's reply so divides herself inventorially that she indeed

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dizzies the arithmetic of memory: "O sir, I will not be so hard-hearted: I will give out divers schedules of my beauty. It shall be inventoried and every particle and utensil labelled to my will, as, item, two lips, indifferent red; item, two grey eyes, with lids to them; item, one neck, one chin, and so forth" (1.5.200-04). OBSERVING MOODS The wide-ranging echoes of Olivia's words here create a microcosm of the play's overall structure. Indeed, these patterns of reflected and refracted scenes continue throughout the rest of the play, as we move from one constricted point of view to another until Illyria spectacularly expands in the play's final scene, where plot lines and partners are finally allowed to converge. But as several critics have observed, the widely scattered and often frenzied events of earlier scenes have been gesturing toward such a communal moment for a long time. Joan Hartwig, in her study of the "analogical" relationship among Shakespeare's scenes, has argued that one effect of so many scenes establishing surprising parodic mirrors of other quite different scenes, often involving different plot lines, is to blur the clear distinction between plot and subplot, creating a tightened, more intricately balanced plot structure. "In Twelfth Night," Hartwig points out, "Shakespeare employsthe parody principle throughout the entire subplot, with the result that there is a sense of narrative necessity between these scenes and those they imitate in comic ways. Because the subplot is fully developed and ongoing, the interweaving of the primary plot with these scenes often creates a sense of cause and effect" (135). Other scholars, such as L. G. Salingar, have also observed how Shakespeare evenly distributes similar comic situations and language among a wide range of characters, "providing more numerous (and more unexpected) points of contact between them, not only in the action but on the plane of psychology" ("Design" 117). Jean Howard has also discussed this fluid structure at length, in terms of what she calls Shakespeare's "art of orchestration," where Shakespeare's rhythmic counterpoint and balance among seemingly unrelated scenes allow an audience to discover and rediscover fluid and metamorphic structures in Twelfth Night even as that same audience involves itself in the moment-by-moment circumlocutions of this play. For Howard the value of such complex "orchestrations" is to allow the audience a way out of its own self-absorption. The audience thus acquires that same double consciousness of being simultaneously inside and outside its own emotional engagements with Twelfth Night, a balanced resourcefulness that finally aligns us with the most attractive and "complete" of Illyrian characters,

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specifically Viola and Feste: "In this basic movement, subplot and main plot run parallel, and the behavior of every character seems at times to comment on the behavior of every other character" (Shakespeare's Art 176). Such mirroring scenes, however, create an even tighter unity when we consider that, for either audience or readers, one of the requirements for comprehending the story of Twelfth Night is a continuing aptitude for rec ognition. Moreover, often the salient difference between pairs of scenes is a difference in point of view, as well as a difference in the psychological processes of viewing and interpreting. Thus the audience, no less than the characters, is constantly being challenged to widen its perspective to include more than just its own points of view. When Orsino describes the strange optical experience of seeing the two identical twins at once—"[o]ne face, one voice, one habit, and two persons—/A natural perspective that is and is not!" (5.1.200-01)—he is alluding to the early modern fascination with optical games, wherein a painting such as Holbein's "The Ambassadors," or indeed any object, can reconfigure itself in multiple ways as the restlessly observant human eye discovers new designs in the object and thus new interpretive possibilities. But Orsino's words, especially given this play's preoccupation with epiphanies and interpretation, may also constitute a meta-theatrical pun about our own highly unstable practices of viewing, hearing, and interpreting this Twelfth Night. There turn out to be a number of "natural perspectives" in this play. What is involved in our recognition of identity in this play? Of gender? Sexuality? Likeness? Difference? Do we merely recognize what is "naturally" before our eyes or ears? Or do we, at least in part, construct what we recognize? Do we, as Malvolio admits, "crush this a little" (2.5.117) in order to recognize what structure we will? Little wonder that Twelfth Night provokes such disturb ing questions about the "essential" categories of class, sexual desire, masculinity and femininity, and the mysteries of human identity. FRIENDS AND FOES Those mysterious processes of recognition are given full voice in Twelfth Night's final scene, itself a wonder of dramatic structure. Although the brilliant and revolutionary Shakespearean producer Harley GranvilleBarker once dismissed it as "scandalously ill-arranged and ill-written" (28), nonetheless scholars and directors alike have grown to appreciate the final scene's complex and contradictory balances and harmonies, all leading up to the haunting and beautiful effects of Feste's epilogue-like song (see, for example, Howard, Shakespeare's Art 198-201; Leggatt 252-253; Potter, Twelfth Night 27-33). The scene is composed of a long series of

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mini-scenes, or "beats," each building in tension and complexity until it is suddenly interrupted by the arrival of a new set of characters entwined in a brand new knot. So the arrival of Antonio sets in motion a series of charges and counter-charges, all revolving around Viola, that build to such an intensity that either resolution or violence must soon follow. And then, quite suddenly, Olivia enters, facing Orsino for the first time in the play. Again, accusations and denials swirl around new confusions about Viola. But just as Orsino's sentimentality seems about to erupt into violence, Sir Andrew and Sir Toby, enraged and bloody, enter the fray, only to give way to the arrival of Sebastian, whose apologies begin to unravel, layer by layer, all of the confusions, as the characters begin to take in the double presence of Viola and Sebastian before their eyes. In effect, the scene acts as a microcosm of the play as a whole, acting out what Sebastian refers to as Nature's bias, that special providence in Twelfth Night whereby our deepening errors lead us miraculously into a sudden epiphany we neither expect nor deserve. Appropriately, this sequence of mini-scenes bring both unity and impending disruption to the end of the play. The several episodes bring together on stage what had seemed to be isolated examples of Illyrian madness in a way that, one by one, links those separate misunderstandings into a matrix of intersecting errors that will all be dissolved in the "most wonderful" presence of Viola and Sebastian facing one another—and everyone else on stage and in the audience—for the first time. Suddenly the dark glass dissolves, and, for the first time in this play, we see things face to face. But before that epiphany can occur, the succession of plot entanglements must break in on one another like a series of tempest waves that threaten to dissolve all these separate plots. What seems to be emerging is a mock unity much like that romantic nothingness Orsino longs for in 1.1, the first time we hear him speak. Orsino wishes to be absorbed into that quick and fresh spirit of love "[t]hat, notwithstanding thy capacity,/Receiveth as the sea. Nought enters there,/Of what validity and pitch soe'er,/But falls into abatement and low price/Even in a minute" (1.1.10-14). But that never happens in the play's final scene. Even Malvolio's threats of vengeance must find a place, however uncomfortably, in the larger design. Twelfth Night ends, not with Malvolio's threatened dis ruption of the comic design, nor even with Orsino's assurance of a "golden time" to come, but with Feste's song of accommodation. There will, wind and rain notwithstanding, be another play tomorrow. And the actors, Feste promises, "strive to please you every day" (5.1.385). These volatile questions also extend to our desire to recognize a design or dramatic structure to Twelfth Night itself. Shakespeare has created an exquisitely balanced and multi-centered play. Yet over the course of

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the play's production and critical history, different audiences and critics, perhaps prompted by different cultural or psychological pressures, have allowed one or another character to preside over the overall design, resulting in new interpretations, new recognitions, not only of those particular characters but also of the play itself. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for example, Viola became the center of the play. Moreover, it was a particular conception of Viola that dominated, a passive, even submissive figure of delicate sensibilities: "Patience on a monument." At other times the play seemed to belong to Sir Toby (who, after all, has the most lines) and the revelers. Such a shift in perspective brought the satiric comedy, even farce, into focus. The play became a robust celebration of that transgressive exuberance that can transform the ordinary motions of daily life into masques and revels, of corrantos and the "sinka-pace," and especially cakes and ale, all of which contributed to a nostalgic celebration of pre-Puritan "merry England." In the nineteenth century, critics such as Charles Lamb and actor-directors such as Robert Bensley and Henry Irving, recognized a much darker, even tragic play, one that focused on Malvolio's suffering and humiliation. In the mid- and latetwentieth century, Feste emerged into prominence, creating not only a sharper social satire but one colored by a twentieth-century sense of uncertainty and ambiguity (see, for example, Greif). Most recently, Viola and Olivia have emerged, rivaling Feste as the central figures of this play. But this time it is not the willowy "Patience on a monument" or a dowager countess that we have recognized. A culture absorbed with issues of gender construction and codes of entangled desire has allowed these characters to become much more active, even transgressive, figures in a play that explores the powers and limits of male and female self-fashioning, as well as the cultural forces that constrain identity and sexual identity. Themselves once "feelingly personated" by Elizabethan boy actors, these two figures have emerged as the most intelligent and articulate commentators on the mysterious and epiphanic nature of psychological, social, and sexual identities, just as they both embody the balanced composition that defines our multiply constructed selves.

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4

THEMES As we have seen, the uniquely blended tones and textures that characterize the design of Twelfth Night are in part the result of the play's carefully balanced major- and minor-key themes. These themes can be defined separately, although it is more helpful to think of them as clusters of interrelated themes, each with its own variants. One of the play's most central themes, for example, is the elusive mystery of identity. But problems of identity often intersect with other thematic issues, such as self-love, gender, sexuality, and social mobility. It is also true that who we think we are is related to how we recognize and interpret the evidence of our senses. Some of the most hilarious comic moments of this play involve the act of reading—characters reading and interpreting letters, speech, or even another character's behavior through the filters of self-imposed affectations. It is precisely this kind of psychological shaping—or sometimes censoring—that allows a Malvolio, after reading one of the most nonsensical letters penned by any Shakespearean character, to conclude with supreme confidence, "Daylight and champain discovers not more! This is open" (2.5.133). Twelfth Night explores the radical unreliability of language itself, and the conventions that give to words a communal legibility. The play's religious preoccupations are likewise ambiguous. Sometimes its mocking tone betrays an unease toward Puritanism and the anti-theatrical wars it waged. Other times the play's religious concerns are vaguer, connected to the mysterious movements of the sea, or of Time. These are powers that, with their wild providence, bring us face to face with the many epiphanies that Twelfth Night uncovers. Malvolio's anti-theatrical pressures also help to define yet another theme, this play's meta-theatrical

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interest in the nature and limits of theater, especially comic theater, rooted in those same festival excesses that characterize the energy and something of the direction of the frenetic multiple plots of Twelfth Night. In fact, this meta-theatrical theme is especially inclusive, one that informs all these other issues—identity, self-absorption, status, language, gender, sexuality, and Puritanism—finally rooting all of them in the powers of social and theatrical performance. PRACTICING BEHAVIOURS "[S]uch as I am, all true lovers are," Orsino confides to Viola (2.4.15). "I am not of your element," says Malvolio, dismissively, to those he calls "the lighter people" (3.4.105-06; 5.1.318). "Am not I consanguineous? Am I not of her blood?" (2.3.67-68), Sir Toby reassures Maria, who is concerned that his drinking and caterwauling will "undo" him from his place in Olivia's household. Sir Andrew, in a moment of self-assurance, declares to Sir Toby that he may after all be a suitable match for Olivia. "I'll stay a month longer. I am a fellow o'th'strangest mind i'th'world: I delight in masques and revels sometimes altogether" (1.3.92-93). Never, it seems, have so many characters spent so much time defining themselves to such little effect. Counter pointing this melody of confident self-assertion is a second motif, just as insistent, but one of underlying skepticism. In response to Olivia's persistent questions of identity—"What are you? What would you?" (1.5.175)—Viola finally responds, the double weight of her disguise and her brother's loss upon her: "I am not what I am" (3.1.126). When Orsino asks Cesario if his sister died of love, Viola's ambiguous response clearly depicts her own tangled identity: "I am all the daughters of my father's house,/And all the brothers, too—and yet I know not" (2.4.116-17). Feste knows too well that "cucullus nonfacit monachum" ["the hood makes not the monk"] (1.5.45-46), but later into the play even Feste, face to face with Sebastian's perfect reflection of Cesario, is no longer certain of such distinctions: "No, I do not know you, nor I am not sent to you by my lady to bid you come speak with her; nor your name is not Master Cesario; nor this is not my nose neither. Nothing that is so is so" (4.1.4-7). The characters in Twelfth Night are thus divided into two comic camps: those lost souls supremely confident in the knowledge of who they are and the more enlightened figures who know how little they know. Joseph Summers, years ago, reminded us that all the characters in Twelfth Night are masked, "for the assumption of the play is that no one is without a

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mask in the serio-comic business of the pursuit of happiness [T]he character who thinks it is possible to live without assuming a mask is merely too naive to recognize the mask he has already assumed" (3). One of the peculiar characteristics of Illyria is its confining liberty. Given the absence of either strong parental figures or established social pressures, characters are free to create their own self-limiting roles through the force of their own sentimental imaginations. Thus they become imprisoned, not by the relentless pressure of social restraints, but by an excess of freedom. Each character is allowed to luxuriate in his or her own fantastical selfimage. The result is a collection, an "anti-community"—if one may call it that—of self-involved individuals disengaged from others and paralyzed by their own unfettered appetites, or, to borrow from the play's subtitle, by their wills. The particular forms of self-delusion vary widely, though they all seem to have two common elements: isolation and studied practice. Juliet playfully accuses Romeo of kissing "by the book." But Orsino's passion is several degrees further away from human engagement than even young Romeo's. Orsino might be said to yearn "by the book." Orsino, for example, defines himself as the pattern of all lovers, dedicated to his disdainful mistress, Olivia; however, specific references to Olivia are rare. In 1.1 and 1.4, two scenes consisting almost entirely of Orsino's love declarations, he mentions Olivia's name only once, and even then his words quickly dissolve this flesh-and-blood woman into the two real objects of his attention, the goddess Diana and himself as Actaeon. Moreover, Orsino neither speaks to Olivia nor even sees her until the play's final scene. Even Sir Andrew Aguecheek shares more scenes with Olivia than does Orsino. The real focus of Orsino's love devotion is himself and "the passion of my love" (1.4.23), variously mythologized as Actaeon, or as the martyred lover of "Come Away, Death," or any of the isolated figures of romantic lovers, all stretched out in various, yet increasingly narrow, erotic and literary landscapes: sweet beds of flowers, sad cypress, black coffins. Love never draws Orsino outwards, towards another. His references are more and more self-involved, tighter and tighter centripetal coils around himself until he finally disappears in 2.4. The next time we see Orsino, in the play's final scene, he is uncharacteristically active and social, capable of bantering with Feste and even speaking with Olivia. He is as sentimental as ever, exploding at one point into the violence that is never far from sentimentality. But something or someone has aroused in Orsino an interest that ranges beyond himself. That new capacity, limited though it may be, will owe something to the influence of both Feste and Viola, as we shall see.

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Olivia also finds herself imprisoned—in a dark house—by her own sentimental self-image. That dark, romantic place, like Orsino's "sweet beds of flowers .. ./canopied with bowers" (1.1.40-41), is largely an imaginative and literary construction, although in Trevor Nunn's 1996 film it was also a literal darkness. When Sir Toby, in that film, complained to Maria that "care's an enemy to life" (1.3.2), he swept aside the dark curtains of Olivia's great room, letting in a blinding sweep of sunlight. Like Orsino, Olivia has idealized herself, not as the pattern of love but of grief. Unlike Orsino, Olivia has actually experienced grief, in the double loss of her father and her brother. But, as with Orsino's love "texts," there is something studied, practiced, and literary about her lamentation. She will "season" her grief, keep it alive by "pickling" it, in Joseph Summer's phrase (4). If Valentine can be believed—and, given the sentimental listening habits of Orsino's household, that may be a big "if"—Olivia is determined that The element itself, till seven years' heat, Shall not behold her face at ample view; But like a cloistress she will veiled walk, And water once a day her chamber round With eye-offending brine; all this to season A brother's dead love.... (1.1.26-31) Both Orsino and Olivia are determined to "season" their passion, to "cultivate" it according to a kind of learned recipe. Both descriptions dramatize the speaker's passion in isolation, unconnected to any object of passion. Just as, for Orsino, there are no specific references to Olivia—her character, her interests, even her physical features—, so for Olivia there is not a single reference throughout the play to either her father or her brother. The focus is entirely on the lover, the griever, not the object of either love or grief. These are solitary passions. Orsino imagines himself canopied with bowers, while Olivia will be the veiled "cloistress" of romance. Nonetheless, these similarities only serve to sharpen the difference between these two dreamers. Although both Orsino and Olivia reinvent themselves in sentimental roles that alienate both characters from themselves and their powers of rationality, there is in Olivia's case a thin connection between reality and fantasy. Olivia's impersonation of a "cloistress" is an artificial and perhaps over-literary response to real grief. Moreover, as a countess alone in the world, her decision to separate herself from men for seven years is neither as preposterous nor as romantic as it first appears. It is also a political decision that could provide Olivia with a somewhat wider arc of autonomy and authority, a strategy that might be

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understood either by fictional heroines in Shakespeare's plays or by a real queen outside of London. Moreover, Olivia, unlike Orsino, at times resists the confining pleasures of her mask. She's willing to submit herself to other perspectives, always a barometer of health and self-knowledge in this play. Hence, she opens herself up to Feste's parodic testing of her own romantic logic, contributing to the catechism of her own foolery: Feste: Olivia: Feste: Olivia: Feste: Olivia: Feste: Olivia: Feste: Olivia: Feste:

Good madonna, give me leave to prove you a fool. Can you do it? Dexteriously, good madonna. Make your proof. I must catechize you for it, madonna. Good my mouse of virtue, answer me. Well, sir, for want of other idleness, I'll bide your proof. Good madonna, why mourn'st thou? Good fool, for my brother's death. I think his soul is in hell, madonna. I know his soul is in heaven, fool. The more fool, madonna, to mourn for your brother's soul being in heaven. Take away the fool, gentlemen. (1.5.47-57)

Similarly, even though Olivia sends Malvolio to dismiss the "fair young man" at the gate, a gesture quite in line with her role as ideal griever, nonetheless there is something in Maria's description that prompts Olivia to lower her mask long enough to indulge her rich curiosity. Her subsequent conversation with Malvolio illustrates just how distant Olivia is from a confirmed poseur, so self-absorbed and so incurious that he doesn't even note his mistress's impatience: Olivia: Malvolio: Olivia: Malvolio: Olivia: Malvolio:

Olivia:

What kind o'man is he? Why, of mankind. What manner of man? Of very ill manner: he'll speak with you, will you or no. Of what personage and years is he? Not yet old enough for a man, nor young enough for a boy: as a squash is before 'tis a peascod, or a codling when 'tis almost an apple. 'Tis with him in standing water, between boy and man. He is very well-favoured and he speaks very shrewishly. One would think his mother's milk were scarce out of him. Let him approach. (1.5.125-35)

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Given Olivia's playful willingness to lampoon her own, and others', well-rehearsed roles, we are not at all surprised when, after listening to Cesario's presentation of Orsino's romantic exegesis, Olivia quickly adapts her perspective, offering a parody of Feste's catechism: Olivia: Viola: Olivia: Viola: Olivia: Viola: Olivia:

Now, sir, what is your text? Most sweet lady— A comfortable doctrine, and much may be said of it. Where lies your text? In Orsino's bosom. In his bosom? In what chapter of his bosom? To answer by the method, in the first of his heart. 0 I have read it. It is heresy. (1.5.180-87)

Nor are we surprised that, moments later, the very romantic idiom Olivia parodies awakens her into ardor. Opening oneself up to another perspective always involves risk and generosity, a movement outside the self into another, potentially threatening, point of view. And while there is some irony in the fact that, for Olivia, the very escaping from one limiting perspective only entangles her in another, it is important to realize that these errors spring, not from an excess of self-love, but from a willingness to be moved by another. That is why even Olivia's most absurd behavior will eventually draw her toward nature's bias. Not so Malvolio. His mask is both more complex than others' and much simpler. Before he ever reads Maria's letter, Malvolio has harbored the thought that Olivia desires him: "Maria once told me she did affect me, and I have heard herself come thus near, that should she fancy, it should be one of my complexion. Besides, she uses me with a more exalted respect than anyone else that follows her" (2.5.20-23). There is, moreover, another difference between Malvolio's fantasy of himself as a lover and Olivia's—or even Orsino's erotic fantasies. Olivia rushes headlong into an encounter with the object of her passion. Orsino's desires, by contrast, pursue himself, as if the desiring, unrequited lover of the sonnets had metamorphosed into the Count himself, who becomes a figure of Impatience on a monument, smiling at grief. Malvolio's fantasy, however, is neither to desire Olivia, nor even to desire himself desiring Olivia, but simply to imagine himself the object of Olivia's desire (see also Leggatt 241; Hollander, "Twelfth Night and the Morality" 228). There is something passionless in his smug confidence that Olivia yearns for him. "The life-force does not flow in him," Maurice Charney observes (159). Malvolio is incapable of love, laughter, and transformation and hence outside the scope of comedy.

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That self-satisfaction in his own alluring qualities—"I have limed her" (3.4.66)—, more so than the taunts and punishments of the revelers, guarantees Malvolio's exclusion from the community of misdirected desire that shapes Twelfth Night. When Malvolio does imagine himself desired by Olivia, he thinks of himself "in my branched velvet gown, having come from a day-bed, where I have left Olivia sleeping—" (2.5.40-41). I AM NOT OF YOUR ELEMENT Malvolio's self-image as the unmoved mover of others' desires demonstrates the extent to which questions of identity and self-knowledge impinge on questions of power and social status in Twelfth Night. Malvolio's fantasy of being married to Olivia allows him to recast himself into a higher position of authority and privilege: "To be Count Malvolio!" he ponders (2.5.30 emphasis added). Although Malvolio's social ambitions are both mocked and punished by the play itself, they nonetheless reflect Twelfth Night's awareness of a social order in transition. There is, we should remember, example for it. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a period of great social and economic volatility. Shakespeare himself secured for his father the title of "Gentleman." We might remember Hamlet's complaint to Horatio in the graveyard that the distribution of social titles had become so widespread as to threaten the understood structure of social hierarchy: "the age is grown so picked, that the toe of the peasant come so near the heel of the courtier, he galls his kibe" (Hamlet 5.1.117-118). Twelfthnight. is very attentive to the fluidity, and often the arbitrariness, of social rankings and categories. Bruce Smith suggests that "[p]art of the romance of Twelfth Night is the vision it offers of social mobility. The social prospects of Viola and Sebastian in Twelfth Night are quite as unsettled as the social prospects of many of the students who followed the twins' adventures in Middle Temple Hall" (Twelfth Night 9). Everyone in Illyria, its holiday spirit notwithstanding, is conscious of degree. There is, indeed, an undercurrent of social fluidity, even social unease, throughout Twelfth Night. Often the humor of the play rests on our awareness of the wide, absurd gap between the social identities of these characters and the absence of any personal qualities that might be associated with those rankings. The irony, however, points in more than one direction. It exposes those characters whose claims to social position prove suspect, but that same mockery also begins to destabilize any secure definitions of class or status, hinting at the arbitrariness of the social distinctions themselves. Of the two examples of knighthood in this play, Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, neither lives up to his social

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title—Toby is a drunk and a bully and Andrew is an inept and fearful gull—though both spectacularly live up to their names. Sir Andrew is a knight, although, as Toby concedes, "dubbed with unhatched rapier, and on carpet consideration" (3.4.200-01). Andrew wonders what went wrong with his own courtier's education. He fears he has "no more wit than a Christian or an ordinary man" (1.3.70-71). Was it too much beef? Or should he have "bestowed that time in the tongues that [he had] in fencing, dancing, and bear-baiting"? Should he have "followed the arts" (1.3.78-79)? As Alexander Leggatt wonderfully puts it, "the aspirations of Sir Philip Sidney are wedded to the capacities of Sir Andrew Aguecheek" (227). Changes in social identity are just as arbitrary. Maria's social status is, from the beginning, uncertain. Sir Toby introduces her to Sir Andrew as "[m]y niece's chambermaid" (1.3.42), but her behavior, especially her easy rapport with Olivia, suggests a more ambiguous status, perhaps a lady in waiting. But Maria, whatever her station at the beginning of the play, will marry upward, "in recompense" for her ingenious scheme against Malvolio, who himself has looked into the social possibilities of his union with Olivia: "There is example for't: the Lady of the Strachy married the yeoman of the wardrobe" (2.5.34-35). Olivia, who, according to Sir Toby, will "not match above her degree, neither in estate, years, nor wit" (1.3.89-90), inquires into Cesario's "parentage," and gets an enigmatic response: "Above my fortunes, yet my state is well:/I am a gentleman" (1.5.233-34). Indeed, Orsino's very title is mobile, beginning the play as duke but mysteriously metamorphosing into "Count Orsino." Even if, as scholars speculate, Shakespeare merely changed his mind about Orsino's title and carelessly forgot to emend the text, it is, nonetheless, a carelessness that, perchance, gets at the heart of social volatility in Twelfth Night. That social volatility is made all the more dangerous by the ubiquitous disguises in this play. One measure of the fear, during Queen Elizabeth's reign, that the use of clothing might disguise or even subvert the "natural" distinctions of social rank, is the number of sumptuary laws regulating appropriate dress for different social stations. In 1597, Queen Elizabeth issued "A Proclamation Enforcing Statues and Proclamations of Apparel," which was meant to address the chaos that can occur when the social order is obscured: "the confusion also of degrees in all places being great where the meanest are as richly appareled as their betters" (qtd. in Smith, Twelfth Night 249). Given such cultural nervousness, one can imagine the destabilizing effect, certainly of any play, where actors are always in usurped attire, their wardrobe consisting of discarded clothing given to the company by the aristocrats they served. But that confusion would be

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especially felt in a play like Twelfth Night, so replete with disguises that, as Feste himself is forced to admit, "[njothing that is so is so" (4.1.6-7). That sumptuary chaos reaches its peak, as Bruce Smith points out, in the play's final scene, where spiraling confusions are created mainly by attire: "Olivia in her mourning clothes, Orsino in a lover's dishabille, Feste in his fool's garb, Sir Andrew and Sir Toby in their revelers' gear, the priest in his robes, Antonio in his captain's clothes They make up a carnivalesque conglomeration" (237). These two themes, the dissolution of self-knowledge and the disintegration of a society's conventions, are not only intertwined but associated with a third theme, the corruption of words. Characters are unable to recognize themselves because they have seduced themselves with "high fantastical" words into believing in their own wish-fulfilling masks created by those words. But those masks, and the language that creates them, also affect the integrity of the social community. Because these fantasies are all private, even solipsistic, these self-sufficient and sentimental postures prevent isolated characters from negotiating any kind of interaction with one another. One strain of recurring humor in Twelfth Night is the experience of two characters locked in conversation, either in person or through letters, but talking past one another, their words never engaged. It might be Orsino hearing of Olivia's refusal in 1.1, Sir Andrew paying court to Maria in 1.3, or Malvolio conversing with Olivia on almost any occasion. Indeed the verbal atmosphere is so thick that even characters as self-aware and linguistically apt as Viola and Feste can find themselves befogged, as, for example, Viola conversing with Sir Andrew before their duel, or Feste trying to reason with Sebastian in 4.1. There can be no sense of community in Illyria because all discourse, the fundamental currency of social exchange, is essentially narcissistic, and hence non-negotiable. Feste, who prefers the title "corrupter of words" to "fool" (3.1.30), refuses to supply Cesario with a reason for his contention that "words are very rascals, since bonds disgraced them": "Truth, sir," Feste confides to this chev'ril glove of a "sir," "I can yield you none without words, and words are grown so false, I am loath to prove reason with them" (3.1.17-18, 20-21). One of Feste's roles in this play is to restore language as a medium of exchange. Critics have noticed how frequently money changes hands in this play (see, for example, Slights 223). Feste is involved in almost all of those exchanges, acting as a kind of broker, renegotiating the value of what has become valueless: wit, music, mockery, words, desire. "[Pleasure will be paid," Feste tells Orsino after teasing some money out of the count, "one time or another" (2.4.68). Similarly, the second verse of Feste's "O Mistress Mine," sung directly to Sirs Toby

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and Andrew, attempts to negotiate a value, not only for love but for the time that must constrain love: 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. (2.3.41-46) As these values become negotiated, so do the relationships they measure. Camille Wells Slights thinks of Feste's playful bartering as essential in knitting together a community based on reciprocal, rather than self-directed, discourse. "Thus," she points out, "the transfer of wealth from one person to another in Twelfth Night creates and expresses a wide variety of relationships—entertainer with audience, employer with employee, friend with friend, and lover with beloved" (224). Fabian's last speech in the play, not exactly a defense of the gulling of Malvolio, argue for a contextualized, measured evaluation of evidence. Nowhere in the play have we heard anything like this balanced, negotiated language: Good madam, hear me speak, And let no quarrel, nor no brawl to come, Taint the condition of this present hour, Which I have wondered at. In hope it shall not, Most freely I confess, myself and Toby Set this device against Malvolio here, Upon some stubborn and uncourteous parts We had conceived against him. Maria writ The letter, at Sir Toby's great importance, In recompense whereof he hath married her. How with a sportful malice it was followed May rather pluck on laughter than revenge, If that the injuries be justly weighed, That have on both sides passed. (5.1.334-347) Of course, seconds later, Feste resumes the language of intemperate taunts with his mimicry, first of Maria's letter, and then his talk of time's revenges. But for the moment we've heard some unthinkable rhetoric, rare words, in Illyria, suggesting a new capacity to enlarge our vision beyond the boundaries of distempered appetites: an acknowledgement of "sportful malice"; the negotiation of laughter and revenge; justly weighing injuries "on both sides passed." We'll get 'em all three, all ready.

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CORRUPTERS OF WORDS Feste embodies the comic strategies of Twelfth Night to cure, or at least to expose, the variously distempered appetites in Illyria. Like the play itself, Feste's method is to "observe their mood on whom he jests,/ The quality of persons, and the time" (3.1.52-53), and then to parody the language, form, and "expressure" that announces their self-obsessive, self-important, or sentimental "qualities." The idea is to mock his subjects out of their own willed masks. This is what Feste means when he calls himself a "corrupter of words." He becomes a mirror to his "patients," allowing them to cure themselves of their follies by seeing themselves and their behaviors from a mocker's perspective, to join in the laughter at themselves. Those subjects who have the generosity and wit to engage with Feste, to see how this fool "mends," have the best prognosis. Olivia is by far the most hopeful prospect, as we have seen. Feste has more, or less, success with the rest of his patients, succeeding to some extent even with such an intransigent egoist as Orsino, who awkwardly banters with Feste at the end of the play. With harder cases like Sir Toby and Sir Andrew, the best Feste can do in his songs and his foolery is to give them a glimpse of their limitations, a fleeting sense of time and care, that "[pjresent mirth hath present laughter;/What's to come is still unsure" (2.3.42-43). It's a limited epiphany. Moments after Feste sings his song, his two auditors are trying to make the welkin dance indeed. Still, Feste's lyrics darken the edge of the foolery. To be up late is to be up late. Only with Malvolio does Feste fail utterly, for Malvolio refuses to leave the dark house of his own self-sufficiency. Early in the play he tries to ridicule Feste's professional skills by reminding the fool that he, unlike Malvolio, is not self-sufficient: "Unless you laugh and minister occasion to him, he is gagged" (1.5.70-71). But Malvolio's failure to "minister occasion" to anyone seals his fate at the end of the play. Feste's mockery— Feste's own name suggests both "festival" and "fester"—has always been poised between playful parody and corrosive satire. With Malvolio, the balance tips entirely toward satire. If Malvolio refuses to be cured, then Feste will at least have the satisfaction of forcing Malvolio to see from the point of view of his victims. If Malvolio forces others to feel the sting of his self-righteous judgments, then he himself will be made to experience the heartless redemption of exorcism. If Malvolio treats others as if they were mad, devoid of "wit, manners, [or] honesty" (2.3.76), then he will himself be made to experience the harsh cure of madness, to be imprisoned in a dark house. And yet, however uncomfortable we may feel about the revelers' mean-spirited "sportful malice" against Malvolio, and

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there is much room for discomfort, it is also important to remember that Malvolio's estrangement at the end of the play is achieved entirely at his own insistence. Viola's captain, we discover, remains "in durance, at Malvolio's suit" (5.1.260). When, even after Olivia's generous offer that "[t]hou shalt be both the plaintiff and the judge/Of thine own cause" (5.1.333-34), Malvolio ungenerously responds that "I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you!" (5.1.355), we are listening to Malvolio's final declaration of what he wills. Feste, however, is not the only corrupter of words in this play. Viola is equally skilled at the task, bantering with Feste about wanton words, or with Orsino about the shows of "we men." Both inhabit the play's comic center, like twins. Both engage themselves with most of the other characters, holding parodic mirrors up to their natures. But the two have quite different methodologies. Comparing their two strategies might suggest something about the complementarity of these two central figures, as well as the play's own divided identity. With the notable exception of Malvolio, Feste engages his competitors with the dispassionate interest of a professional. Unlike Touchstone, his counterpart in As You Like It, Feste never joins the country copulatives. Nor is he entirely a reveler. He seems to disappear from 2.3, even as Maria announces her revenge plot against Malvolio, where, along with Toby and Andrew, "the fool," she says, will "make a third" (2.3.146). But he never does. Similarly, the ironic songs and banter that Feste gives to Orsino, although they hit home, are delivered without heat (2.4). He is decidedly unenthusiastic about his role as Sir Topas, offering his comments about the dissembling features of monks' gowns with laconic distance (4.2.4-9). He informs Olivia of Toby's quarrel with Sebastian (4.1.25-26). And in the midst of his sharply satiric song about unkind ladies, directed to Malvolio, Feste offers to secure for the steward the "light and paper and ink" he so desires (4.2.100), an offer that reflects, not so much Feste's kindness toward Malvolio as his disinterest in the personal goals of his competitors. Feste is, for the most part, a dispassionate mocker, much like the play itself, which adjusts its perspective enough to keep it on the windy side of care. What Feste offers his targets, then, at a price, is the disinterested stance of comedy itself. For the price of emotional detachment, Shakespeare's comedies offer their audiences the distance they need tosee more critically and more comically the pattern of folly within and around themselves. Thus irony, mockery, and wit, all self-estranging strategies, are, for that very reason, also instruments of self-knowledge. Viola, by contrast, offers redemption by engagement. She has something of Feste's sharp wit and is herself an expert corrupter of words—Orsino's,

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Olivia's, and especially her own. Yet, unlike Feste, Viola employs her wit most effectively from within, rather than without, emotional entanglements. Stanley Wells, describing John Barton's 1969 production of Twelfth Night, praises Judi Dench's Viola for precisely this balance, noting in particular her "brilliant fusion of a comic apprehension of an irony with a sense of deep emotion" (Royal Shakespeare 50). When we first see Viola, awash on the Illyrian coast, she speaks to the sea captain, his "fair behaviour" provoking in her a most Feste-like thought: "that Nature with a beauteous wall/Doth oft close in pollution" (1.2.47-49). Nonetheless here such world-weary sentiments merely serve to frame a bold, risktaking commitment: "yet of thee/I well believe thou hast a mind that suits/ With this thy fair and outward character" (1.2.49-51). She then proceeds to engage his assistance and his silence. Similarly, Viola's first response to Olivia's veiled melancholy is one where irony, while present, shares emotional space with compassion and self-mockery. She takes pleasure in mocking Olivia's "usurped" posturings but is equally sharp with her own. Moreover, in her strong, unswerving advocacy of Orsino's interests, there is a hint of parody in her Orsinic choice of "poetical" conceits: Olivia: Viola:

Olivia: Viola: Olivia: Viola:

Olivia: Viola:

Whence came you, sir? I can say little more than I have studied, and that question's out of my part. Good gentle one, give me modest assurance if you be the lady of the house, that I may proceed in my speech. Are you a comedian? No, my profound heart; and yet, by the very fangs of malice, I swear, I am not that I play. Are you the lady of the house? If I do not usurp myself, I am. Most certain, if you are she, you do usurp yourself: for what is yours to bestow is not yours to reserve. But this is from my commission. I will on with my speech in your praise, and then show you the heart of my message. Come to what is important in't: I forgive you the praise. Alas, I took great pains to study it, and 'tis poetical. (1.5.147-60)

This is not the self-effacing, deferential Viola, for whom so many critics have pined in thought. This is a woman who is vigorous, intelligent, sharply ironic, provocative, yet empathetic and given to self-parody. In a word, she is engaged. And as such she exemplifies an identity within which swirls all variety of thoughts and feelings, often contradictory. She could

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not distinguish herself more from the single, passive, sentimental, self-endeared attitude that seems to characterize Illyrian consciousness. In comparing these quite different comic strategies of Feste and Viola, I don't want to overemphasize their contrasts or to suggest some competitive struggle for the comic center of Twelfth Night. I hope instead to bring out their complementarity, borrowing a central term from Norman Rabkin's important study (Common Understanding 22-28). Most of the characters of Twelfth Night are estranged from an understanding of their own identities for two apparently opposite reasons. First, they are so endeared with the disguises they have chosen for themselves that they lack the emotional and aesthetic distance to recognize the artificiality and paralysis of those disguises. They need to see themselves from a disinterested point of view. But at the same time these same characters have become self-estranged because they have become so self-sufficient, so content with their own narcissistic fantasies that they cannot engage with a consciousness, a perspective, outside their own. Unable to love another, they dream of themselves in love. Unable to negotiate relationships outside their own appetites, they retreat into solitary imaginative worlds: sweet canopied bowers, circular chambers, dark houses. None of these characters is, to borrow one of Malvolio's more self-sufficient phrases, of anyone's "element." To cure themselves from the effects of their distempered appetites, then, characters need to acquire simultaneous and contradictory states of consciousness: disinterest and engagement. Feste and Viola embody those two qualities. Collectively, these two characters, through patterns of encounters that knit this play into a kind of double weave, not only accommodate these two potentially hostile values but also discover a natural perspective at Twelfth Night's thematic center. ALL IS SEMBLATIVE A WOMAN'S PART The preponderance of disguises in Twelfth Night certainly indicates he myriad possibilities of benighted self-awareness in Illyria. But they do something else as well. Such emphasis on attire reflects an early modern preoccupation with the role of clothing in establishing a "readable" gender identity no less than a "readable" social identity. Theatrical practices, particularly of boy actors playing the women's parts, greatly troubled religious and political authorities by darkening that readability. In a play such as Twelfth Night, where a boy actor played a female Viola, who herself played the role of a male "Cesario," the confusion reached dizzying proportions. At first the charge against such practices was that they desecrated the fixed "signes distinctive" that God had established between man and woman.

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We might listen to the condemnation of Philip Stubbes, a particularly well-known anti-theatrical critic: What man so ever weareth womans apparel is accursed, and what woman weareth mans apparel is accursed also— Our Apparell was given to us as a signe 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 veritie of his owne kinde [Such crossdressers] may not improperly be called Hermaphroditi, that is, Monsters of both kindes, half women, half men. (qtd. in Levine 22) As critics such as Laura Levine have observed, however, there emerged an "increasing anxiety" (19) over the course of 60 years of anti-theatrical writing by writers such as Stephen Gosson, Philip Stubbes, and William Prynne, "that behind the charge that the boy actors' behaviour on the stage violated the 'signs distinctive between sex and sex'" (20), was the fear that there might not be any essential gender or identity at all, but instead merely—to borrow from Viola-Cesario's description of herself—"[a] blank" (2.4.106). For Levine, "[a]t the heart of the logic that endows theatre with magical powers is the idea which violates the notion of discrete and individual identity, the belief that one person can literally be turned into another" (16). The wild gender transformations, both within the fiction of Twelfth Night and in the theatrical production of that fiction, must have posed as subversive a threat to the gendered order of early seventeenth-century England as did the social cross-dressings on the stage to the social order. In a culture so rigorously preoccupied with clothing standards that it needed to publish a succession of sumptuary laws for men and women, Twelfth Night's many disguises offered, not only to the characters within the play but to the early modern audiences watching those characters, the opportunity to test out a world without such laws. Such license had the effect of subverting those codes, exposing their fragile and arbitrary authority. Cross-dressing wasn't the only on-stage tactic to question settled assumptions about gender difference. In recent years a growing number of critics have begun to see Olivia, who never wears anything but appropriate feminine attire, as an even more disturbing female character than the cross-dressed Viola; for Olivia disrupts assumptions about feminine decorum, not by what she wears but by what she does. Irene Dash, for example, notes that Viola's gender disguise, although in some ways liberating, in other ways is severely confining, often limiting Viola to silence. Olivia is comparatively more dangerous because of her "unfeminine" actions: "the woman in skirts forthrightly expresses her desire, overtly pursuing the 'youth' Cesario" (212).

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Jean Howard also points to Olivia, particularly her "sexual and economic independence" ("Crossdressing" 431), as possessing the more subversive voice in the play against conventional ideas of femininity. That voice is so subversive that, Howard argues, it must be contained. "[T]he play seems to me to applaud a crossdressed woman who does not aspire to the positions of power assigned men and to discipline a non-crossdressed woman who does" (431). But Viola is more contradictory than first appears. Viola's gender disguise is certainly more burdensome than, say, Rosalind's in As You Like Itit. restricts as it enfranchises. In Trevor Nunn's film of Twelfth Night, we watc Viola as "Cesario" in her room, alone, undoing, one by one, the multiple layers of clothing that define her masculine identity. As she does so, we can witness her relief from the burden of all that sartorial weight. On the other hand, Viola is the only one of Shakespeare's cross-dressed heroines who never changes her attire at the end of the play back to conventional feminine wear and to the patriarchal authority behind such conventions (except in Nunn's 1996 film of the play, when suddenly Viola appears in feminine attire, dancing with Illyrians as the credits roll). As a result, the disruptive, even subversive, effects of Viola's gender disguise on a patriarchal system that requires "signes distinctive" remain in play even after the performance has ended. Moreover, one might argue that her selfless desire to serve others arises not so much from the silence and confinement imposed by her masculine role but from a distinctive character trait that always propels her to move beyond herself to engage with others. Her decision to serve both Olivia and Orsino arises from a premeditated, autonomous action on her part. "O that I served that lady," she says of Olivia. When the captain tells her that such a suit "were hard to compass," Viola turns her thoughts to the Duke: "I'll serve this duke" (1.2.41, 44, 55). It is this doubleness at the heart of Viola that makes her so provocatively compelling, not only to the audience but to Orsino and Olivia as well. Michael Shapiro has observed this complexity within Viola, noting that she provokes equal passion from Orsino and Olivia, but that the two are attracted to "Cesario" for contradictory reasons: "whereas Olivia was attracted by the audacity of one who dared to be 'saucy at my gates,' Orsino finds himself drawn to the feminine qualities of his page." Shapiro concludes that "[b]y making Cesario appear both as an effeminate boy and as a saucy lackey, Shakespeare guided the boy actor toward a fresher treatment of the heroine's male disguise" (158). It is useful to consider that Viola chooses her masculine disguise, then, not so much out of necessity, as do Shakespeare's other cross-dressed heroines, but to accommodate "[t]he form of my intent" (1.2.55). It is what she wills.

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Rather than defining the locus of feminine resistance to orthodoxy in either Viola or Olivia, it might be more interesting to view these two female characters as embodying two different yet complementary strategies of feminine critique, as Irene Dash implies. "[T]he dramatist," Dash argues, "has carefully sculpted their roles as parallels—not the wealthy, self-confident, or arrogant Countess in skirts compared with the poor, clever, girl-disguised-as-a-page in breeches, but two bright, literate, young women, each with a sense of herself, each in her own way trying to cope, and each believing she has power" (212). Our idea of the two characters as opposites, Dash goes on to argue, is largely the result, not of Shakespeare, who emphasizes the equality of the two characters, but of critics, editors, and directors who have used casting, cutting, and scenic rearrangement to bring out a demurely "attractive" and "feminine" Viola who compares favorably to Olivia. "I am not," Viola is quick to remind Olivia—and us—, "what I am" (3.1.126). YOU ARE BETROTHED BOTH TO A MAID AND MAN The confusion of identities and gender that whirl through Twelfth Night, then, is in part the consequence of individual self-obsession and the mistakes in judgment and interpretation that necessarily follow. But at the same time, those confusions allow the play the opportunity to measure and cross-examine the "orderly" definitions of self and gender that defined and sometimes still define normative values. We might make the same point about the play's exploration of the mysteries of love, sexual attraction, and sexual identity. Among the wild variety of love and desire that Twelfth Night explores, the only kind of love that the play admonishes is self-love. When characters finally overcome their self-absorption and express their desire outwardly to another person, however, all kinds of erotic entanglements follow. When Orsino almost responds romantically to Cesario, to what, exactly, does he respond? Does he see through the masculine attire to the "essential" woman beneath the disguise? Is the disguise itself part of the erotic appeal? Or do the tangled lines of their desire include masculine and feminine elements? How eroticized is language in this process? Is Cesario's ability to speak "masterly" of love an element of his/her attractiveness? Similarly, to what does Olivia respond so powerfully after Viola gives her "willow cabin" declaration of how she would respond "[i]f I did love thee in my master's flame" (1.5.219)? Is Olivia fooled by Viola's masculine usurped desire? Does she see in Viola's disguise premonitions of Sebastian? Is she at all attracted to Viola's suppressed femininity? Is she drawn to

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the eroticized sounds of Viola's impassioned declaration, as Orsino is powerfully moved by Olivia's clear yet passionate rejection in 1.1? When we consider that both male and female characters would have been played by male actors, does that consideration twist these complex lines of erotic desire into much too hard a knot? Can anyone untangle these multiple threads? Should we? Shakespeare's development of the strong bond of friendship between Antonio and Sebastian invites similar questions about the complex elements of same sex friendship. The 1986 Cheek by Jowl production of Twelfth Night explored many of these questions. In an interview with Ralph Berry, director Declan Donnellan recalled that Orsino seemed to be drawn both by the "feminine" figure he unconsciously saw beneath the masculine attire and by the "masculine" figure within the masculine attire. This Orsino was so ambiguous in his longings that Viola felt obliged to "make him feel her breast... [to] acknowledge the fact that she was a woman" (Berry, On Directing 193). That ambivalence gave new interpretation to Orsino's desire to see Cesario dress up in woman's weeds. Moreover, Donnellan observed, "[h]e says that in public!" (194). Twelfth Night is fascinated by the complex interweaving that knits together bonds of passion. It is at the heart of many of these characters' confused understanding of their own sexual identity. And it is at the heart of the play's wondrous unfolding of epiphanies throughout its final scene. As Russ McDonald has observed, "[wjhatever the strength of the sexual charge, whether powerful or muted, Shakespeare was aware of it and eager to exploit the ironic discrepancies it generated" (Bedford Companion 114). Scholars, however, are more divided about the mixed sexual signals that constitute desire in Twelfth Night. For C. L. Barber, such sexually transgressive behav ior was merely a symptom of the play's topsy-turvy festive atmosphere, meant to challenge and test conventions of sexuality, not to transcend those conventions. He argues that "[j]ust 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. One can add that with sexual as with other relations, it is when the normal is secure that playful aberration is benign" (245). Recent scholars are more willing to see the passionate friendship between Antonio and Sebastian, as well as the misdirected sexual energy flowing from Orsino to Viola to Olivia, as signs of the play's experimentation with alternative, homoerotic forms of social desire that may or may not operate within a conventional heterosexual code. Joseph Pequigney has suggested that Shakespeare has provided a range of sexual identities, none of which is unambiguously heterosexual. In Pequigney's reading, the passion

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between Sebastian and Antonio is one that must accommodate Sebastian's bisexual and Antonio's homosexual desires. The love that finally emerges between Orsino and Cesario (who remains in male attire and is consistently addressed as "he") is overtly homosexual with covert heterosexual strains. The love between Sebastian and Olivia is overtly heterosexual but, as Olivia is drawn to both man and maid, Sebastian being a replacement for Viola-Cesario, it is also a love fueled by homoerotic desire. The early modern theatrical convention of cross-dressed heroines gave to an already convoluted sexuality another turn of the screw, or two. Pequigney attempts to arrange the various lovers, at the end of the play, into the following ambiguous categories. "In this comedy five actors play three male characters and two who are female, including the one disguised most of the time as male, that are love-related in the following pairs: a man (Orsino) and a pseudo-boy (Cesario); a crossed-dressed (Viola) and another young woman (Olivia); male with female (both Sebastian with Olivia and Orsino with Viola); and two men (Sebastian and Antonio). The first two pairs are sexually ambiguous, the next two move toward heterosexual unions, and the last is homosexual" (184-85). Nothing that is so, is so. Other scholars see these sexual indeterminacies in terms of Shakespeare's movement in Twelfth Night away from either heterosexual or homosexual definitions but rather toward some androgynous ideal. Such a synthesis would serve as a model not only for the multiple layers of masculine and feminine attraction that characterize any love relationship, whether homosexual or heterosexual, but also as a model for social change—freeing what Robert Kimbrough describes as these "prisoner[s] of gender" (32) into a deeper, presexual knowledge of one another, as well as a more balanced distribution of power between genders. For Kimbrough, "Viola's disguise does not turn out to be a total 'wickedness.' It merely covers those parts of her that too often prevent society from accepting women as human beings. Over the three-month span of the play, Orsino develops his instinctive liking of Cesario without having to wrestle with Viola's sex. Meanwhile, Olivia's decision to marry Sebastian is only seemingly sudden. She, too, has had three months to get to know the dominant human aspect of Viola-Sebastian" (31). Kimbrough's approach in some ways reconciles Pequigney's Freudian analysis with C. L. Barber's anthropological use of holiday festival. Although Kimbrough is more attentive to issues of undifferentiated sexuality than Barber is, nevertheless, for Kimbrough, the multiply coded sexual energies of this play become part of the play's dislocated holiday perspective that allows it to examine and correct dominant conventions of social and sexual behavior in Illyria. Like Barber, Kimbrough looks

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at apparently threatening behavior only to find out that what seemed to be erratic behavior merely mapped out the course of Nature's bias. One of the dangers of attempting to measure kinds of sexual identity in Twelfth Night is that attitudes toward the forms of sexual desire, and certainly the terms by which we measure sexual identity, have changed radically in the last 400 years. Although moral authorities such as Puritans in early modern England would be as harshly critical of homoerotic desire and activity as their twenty-first century counterparts, nonetheless the notion of a "homosexual" or a "heterosexual" identity would seem strange to them. There seemed to be an understanding that sexual identity was itself composed of homosexual and heterosexual elements. The only categories of sexual identity available to early modern thinking might distinguish those men and women for whom sexual activity was a "natural" part of procreation sanctioned by marriage and those who were promiscuous or engaged in any kind of sexual activity, whether homoerotic or heteroerotic, not sanctioned by the Church. The very word "homosexual" then is a cultural construct. Stephen Orgel writes that "the binary division of sexual appetites into the normative heterosexual and the deviant homosexual is a very recent invention; neither homosexuality nor heterosexuality existed as categories for the Renaissance mind" (59). Bruce R. Smith also argues that "[t]he structures of knowledge that impinged on what we would now call 'homosexuality' did not ask a man who had sexual relations with another man to think of himself as fundamentally different from his peers. Just the opposite was true. Prevailing ideas asked him to castigate himself for falling into the general depravity to which all mankind is subject" (Homosexual Desire 11). We also need to be cautious about the assumptions we make about the psychological and erotic effects of cross-dressed actors on an early modern audience. We know that the mere presence of transvestite actors on stage was disturbing enough to anti-theatrical writers, although, as Michael Shapiro suggests, they probably received their information second hand (147). How did the different members of the audience, measured by gender, age, class, and sexual interest, respond to whatever sexual energy was released by the bodies of young boys underneath "feminine" attire and manners? Did the double transvestite effect of boy actors playing female heroines playing boy pages have the same effect on early modern audiences as it did on later ones, accustomed to actresses, rather than boy actors, playing the pages on stage? Was the effect of such a double gender disguise, given the fact that the audience was in on the secret, more comic than erotic? Was there any element of suspension of disbelief? How much?

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These are, of course, impossible questions to answer with certainty. However, it is the very uncertainty of the audience's varied responses that mark its disturbing pleasures. We know that Shakespeare's company often expected from the audience a double consciousness, as that audience took in both an imaginative character and the material actor playing the part. The plays are filled with such meta-theatrical pleasures, such as the anecdote about Polonius and Julius Caesar in Hamlet. We can imagine how the original audiences might have responded when, in 3.2, Polonius assures Hamlet that he was an actor once—"and was accounted a good actor"—who once "did enact Julius Caesar" and was killed by Brutus (3.2.89-92). For the audience, it was a moment of high tension just before "The Mousetrap." But the audience would also have remembered that Richard Burbage, the actor who played Hamlet had also, quite recently, played Brutus, while the same actor who played Polonius also played Caesar. In Twelfth Night, such moments are fused with sexual electricity. Michael Shapiro observes that "[allthough the precise nature of the anxiety may vary with one's gender, social status, and personal experience, dramatized portrayals of sexual and emotional intimacy can be troubling because exciting and exciting because troubling" (145). For Shapiro, what is most exciting and most disturbing about the sexual energy of Twelfth Night is precisely its indeterminacy, its utter unknowability in a play that celebrates epiphany. With the additional self-consciousness of cross-dressed actors playing cross-dressed characters, that troubling excitement grows. "As separate moments in a play highlighted the discrete layers of sexual identity belonging to actor, heroine, and disguised persona, various images of hetero- and homosexual intimacy crossed the consciousness of individual spectators, arousing types of anxieties peculiar to their own personal histories" (Shapiro 144). Stephen Greenblatt, arguing from historicist rather than performative assumptions, arrives at a similar conclusion about the indeterminate origins of the performance of sexual energy. "How does a play come to possess sexual energy?" he asks. "What happens when a body is translated from 'reality' to the stage or when a male actor is translated into the character of a woman?" (87). For Greenblatt, at the heart of all identity in Shakespeare, certainly sexual identity, is an indeterminacy resistant to analysis, even historicist analysis, a kind of "Promethean heat" (88). "More than any of his contemporaries," Greenblatt continues, "Shakespeare discovered how to use the erotic power that the theater could appropriate, how to generate plots that would not block or ignore this power but draw it out, develop it, return it with interest, as it were, to the audience. And this Shakespearean discovery ... entailed above all the representation of the

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emergence of identity through the experience of erotic heat" (88). Valerie Traub also comments on what she refers to as the play's "multiple erotic investments": "The sexual economy of Twelfth Night is saturated with multiple erotic investments: Viola/Cesario's dual desire for Olivia and Orsino; Orsino's ambivalent interest in Viola/Cesario; Sebastian's responses to Olivia and Antonio; and finally, Antonio's exclusive erotic wish for Sebastian. Although Viola's initial impulse for adopting male disguise is to serve the duke as a eunuch, her status as sexually neutral dissipates as she quickly becomes both erotic object and subject" (130). A KIND OF PURITAN After Malvolio interrupts Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, Maria, and Feste at their singing, dancing, and roistering, threatening to invoke "my lady's" reprisals, Maria thinks, momentarily, of Malvolio as "a kind of Puritan" (2.3.119). Although she will quickly discard the term as soon as Sir Andrew picks it up, nonetheless, the comparison resonates. Throughout the play Malvolio will come to represent a particular kind of "ill will," the haughty, self-righteousness of the anti-theatrical attacks of the political and religious moral authorities. When Malvolio reproaches the revelers for their disruptive behavior, "mak[ing] an alehouse of my lady's house" (2.3.77), he accuses them of having "no respect of place, persons, nor time in you" (2.3.79). It is an interesting choice of words, for Malvolio is fusing together two quite separate kinds of complaints, one social, one theatrical in nature. He reproaches them for their lack of social and moral decorum, suggesting their violation of the proprieties of status, personhood, and time. At the same time, Malvolio is rebuking them for violations of theatrical decorum and restraint, even hinting at the orderliness of the classical unities that Shakespeare himself was sometimes censored for failing to observe. These were multiple charges and yet the same charge, for the resources of the theater allowed these social and theatrical violations to become interchangeable, like a chev'ril glove. On an open stage, with universal lighting, with cross-dressed actors transforming themselves into all varieties of moral, social, and sexual beings, all taking place in a multi-purpose, easily changeable space, who knows what one might see or, more disconcertingly, what one might become? What was both exciting and disturbing to early modern audiences, then, was precisely what was abominable to the anti-theatrical critics, many of whom were Puritans. The theater was particularly offensive, not merely because it displayed cross-dressed actors, nor because it depicted immoral acts on stage, nor for its blasphemies, political attacks, nor its violation of

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sumptuary laws, nor the lewd behavior it provoked in the audience, nor even that the same stage that presented immoral plays could house bearbaitings and gamings. According to Glynne Wickham, during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the terms play, sport, and game freely substituted for one another (34). The theater was abominable because it was indeterminate; it could do all these things all at once with no respect of person, place, or time. Listen to the "confused mingle-mangle" of staged activities that Philip Stubbes excoriates: "such wanton gestures, such bawdy speeches, such laughing and fleering, such kissing and bussing, such clipping and culling, such winking and glancing" (qtd. in Smith, Twelfth Night 275). Is a theater, then, any different from an alehouse? Malvolio's charge that Sir Toby and company have "[made] an alehouse of my lady's house" is by no means Shakespeare's only evocation of the dangerous indeterminacy of a playhouse that can hold both the vasty fields of France and the King's Tavern. In Measure for Measure, when Pompey surveys the inhabitants of his new "house," the prison, he not only uses vocabulary that fuses brothel, stage, and prison, but he often, in performance, seems to recognize his old colleagues and customers in the audience: "I am as well acquainted here as I was in our house of profession. One would think it were Mistress Overdone's own house, for here be many of her old customers" (4.3.1-3). And in King Lear the improbable moralist Goneril stands on a bare stage and accuses Lear of enacting an illicit metamorphosis, a transformation generated by, of all things, unlawful sexuality: "epicurism and lust/Makes [our court] more like a tavern or a brothel /Than a graced palace" (1.4.199-201). In Twelfth Night Shakespeare takes special delight in his Puritan critics, metamorphosing them, through a kind of unholy transubstantiation, into the very object of their fears, a fictional character, the unrequited lover of a cross-dressed boy, himself dressed in crossed garters and yellow stockings, a color associated both with a lover's melancholy, even madness, and with a fool's garments. Thus these harsh critics of theatrical fooling were enforced to become, through their surrogate Malvolio, a part of the caterwauling. Shakespeare, somewhat more generous than his moralist critics, allowed his audience to feel some degree of compassion for Malvolio, who, if not more sinned against than sinning, is more sinned against than we thought. At the end of the play, Feste reminds Malvolio that the moralist has been caught up in the "whirligig of time," perhaps the theatrical and festive equivalent of Nature's bias. Time will bring in his revenges, Feste taunts (5.1.354). But Malvolio will have none of it. His last words, addressed to both on-stage producers of theater and to the consumers of

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theater in the audience, threaten that "I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you!" (5.1.355). In 1642, some 40 years after the actor who had performed Malvolio first spoke these lines, the theaters, under the auspices of the new Puritan regime, would be demolished, the playing and fooling silenced, gagged. IMPROBABLE FICTIONS Malvolio, however, is not the only critic of Twelfth Night's powers of theater and comedy. As we've already seen, every one of Shakespeare's comedies challenges the assumptions of the previous comedies, imposing increasing pressure and darkness on its simplest goal, which, as Peter Quince haplessly offers, "was to please." Their happy, inclusive endings, pestered from the beginning, become increasingly fractured, testing the form's ability to liberate the play's heroines and heroes from a world of too little love, or too much fantasy, or to recover what Camille Wells Slights refers to as "Shakespeare's comic commonwealths," flawed yet redemptive communities that the play celebrates even as it critiques. There have always been characters who cannot join in the play's communal harmonies and dance, who, for one reason or another, are "for other than for dancing measures": Egeus in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shylock and Antonio in The Merchant of Venice, Don Pedro and Don John in Much Ado About Nothing, Jaques in As You Like It, to name a few. But in Twelfth Night there are so many characters excluded from the play's happy ending that they might constitute a community of their own, woeful as it might be. The song we do hear is not communal but the isolated voice of Feste. Anne Barton, contrasting the endings of As You Like It and Twelfth Night, concludes that "[o]nly with Twelfth Night did Shakespeare, apparently, lose faith in endings" that had "transfigured" the worlds of earlier comedies ("As You Like It"179). And yet what may give Twelfth Night its emotional and spiritual power may have something to do with the uneasy coincidence of doubt and wonder in the play's final moments. The doubt, isolation, pain, and even guilt that mark the tone of the play's end are also the elements of a spiritual wonder that gestures toward faith. The many references to the sea and to Time in this play should remind us of the play's attentiveness to spiritual concerns, as should the play's interest in religious vocabulary, even when those references are touched by irony. This is not the presumptuous confidence in religious approval that marks Malvolio's piety. These are vaguer signals, more tentative, even doubtful, like the image of Sebastian clinging to a broken mast, "[c]ourage and hope both teaching him the practice"

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(1.2.13), or Sebastian's acknowledgment of his soul's disguise, "grossly clad" in his human flesh (5.1.221). Maurice Hunt has also noted Twelfth Night's tendency to fuse both Christian and more generalized allusions to Providential forces: "Several of the allusions, especially those spoken by Viola, make the Christian religion represented in Twelfth Night less doctrinaire In particular, Shakespeare satirizes certain self-serving Puritan notions of Providence in order to highlight a more authoritative Providence that works generally rather than specifically through the natural causation of Time and Fortune" ("Religion of Twelfth Night" 189). In John Barton's 1969 production of the play, the audience continually heard the sea. It seemed to offer a rhythm, even a melody of sorts, that unified the play's disparate moods and themes. Stanley Wells's memory of the sound is especially striking: "[A] recording of the sound of waves beating upon a sea-shore, and of the cries of sea-birds, which, along with modulations in the lighting which made transparent and luminous the wicker walls of the stage set, opened up our imaginations to a sense of a world elsewhere, a mysteriously benevolent providence associated with the sea, with the possibility that 'Tempests are kind, and salt waves fresh in love'" (Royal Shakespeare 49). Even Malvolio's shattering promise of vengeance is constrained by something larger, as if this play knew what to make of a diminished thing. Moreover, these spiritual moments, these epiphanies, are simultaneously religious and theatrical in nature. They occur, appropriately, at those liminal moments at the edge of performance, where theater touches the world it imitates. Although the image of Feste singing his song alone on stage hardly compares to the "solitary" Rosalind as she playfully conjures a full house into applause, nevertheless Feste's epilogue may look forward to a more isolated and strained attempt to solicit an audience's "pardon." Prospero, at the end of The Tempest, knows that he must reman "confin'd," on a bare stage with no one ministering occasion, "unless I be relieved by prayer" and by "the help of your good hands" (Epi. 4,16,10). Prospero understands that both our community and our forgiveness require our shared acknowledgment of guilt: "As you from crimes would pardoned be,/Let your indulgence set me free" (Epi. 19-20). So Feste comes to recognize that "[u]nless [we] laugh and minister occasion to him, he is gagged" (1.5.70-71). As Feste invites us back into the playhouse for another performance, he promises, "we'll strive to please you every day" (5.1.385). Our community, then, is our shared implication with Feste and his absent colleagues. We are of their element. Our shared doubt marks our faith, and must suffice for our redemption.

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5 CRITICAL APPROACHES One of the first critical judgments of Shakespeare, indeed one of the first references to Shakespeare, came from his embittered professional rival, Robert Greene, who in 1592 warned his fellow university-trained playwrights that there was a new, lowbrow talent on the scene, stealing their best lines. The incident resounds with irony, given the collaborative economy of theatrical writing and performance. Greene himself, in the very language of his accusation, was parodying a line or two from Shakespeare's own 3 Henry VI: "for there is an Upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hide, supposes he is well able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a countrie" (Ingleby et al. 1.2). About 10 years later, Shakespeare would return the compliment, allowing his portentous character Polonius to parody Greene's own language: "That's an ill phrase, a vile phrase, 'beautified' is a vile phrase" (Hamlet 2.2.110), says Polonius, verbosely panning the poetic diction of the young love poet, Hamlet, a man of words, words, words. A few years later Shakespeare would borrow still more feathers from Greene, this time using Greene's Pandosto as the main source for his The Winter's Tale, and in so doing guaranteeing scholarly interest in Greene's work for close to the next 400 years. Robert Greene's response to Shakespeare's plays, though somewhat illtempered, nonetheless indicates something about the nature and origin of early Shakespeare criticism. The earliest critical responses to Shakespeare did not originate from those who thought of themselves as professional literary or dramatic critics; nor did they originate from academic disciplines. Rather, those criticisms came from the competitive energies that shaped the

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new market-driven enterprise of play performance. This was a critical culture made up of consumers and competitors: audience members, fellow poets and dramatists, and, some years later, editors and adaptors of Shakespeare's plays. So Leonard Digges, in an undistinguished commendatory verse published to introduce a 1640 collection of Shakespeare's poems, nonetheless suggested something of a mid-seventeenth-century popular regard for Shakespeare in his praise of a number of Shakespeare's plays, including Twelfth Night, focusing particularly on the subplot involving the trapping Malvolio, "that cross garter'd Gull" (qtd. in Wells, For All Time 100). A more complex collegial assessment came from fellow poets such as Sir Philip Sidney and Ben Jonson. Sidney, although admiring Shakespeare, also implicitly censured him by complaining of those contemporary dramatists who mixed tragic and comic forms: "all their plays be neither right tragedies, nor right comedies, mingling kings and clowns ... with neither decency nor discretion" (244). We might think of such mingling intrusions as the Fool in King Lear, or the Porter in Macbeth, the gravediggers in Hamlet, or the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet. Sidney also objected to another kind of "mingling": that of the indeterminacy of an open stage that could become a royal court at one moment, a tavern the next. Sidney then lists a number of offending examples, many of them residing at the heart of Shakespearean stage practices: [Y]ou shall have Asia of the one side [of the stage], and Afric of the other, and so many other under-kingdoms, that the player, when he cometh in, must ever begin with telling where he is, or else the tale will not be conceived[.] Now ye shall have three ladies walk to gather flowers: and then we must believe the stage to be a garden. By and by we hear news of shipwreck in the same place: and then we are to blame if we accept it not for a rock While in the meantime two armies fly in, represented with four swords and bucklers, and then what hard heart will not received it for a pitched field?" (243) It is tempting to imagine Shakespeare responding to such criticism in plays such as Henry V, in which the Chorus "apologizes" for imposing on the audience a "brawl ridiculous," whereby an audience must "[i]nto a thousand parts divide one man, /And make imaginary puissance" (Prologue 24-25); or when that same Chorus brazenly announces that "the scene/Is now transported, gentles, to Southampton./There is the playhouse now, there must you sit,/And thence to France shall we convey you safe/And bring you back" (2.0.34-38). A similar alchemy of great praise embedded in censure is found in the critical responses of Ben Jonson, Shakespeare's friend, competitor,

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admirer, and on occasion his harsh critic. Ben Jonson's tributary poem, "To the memory of my beloved, The Author Mr. William Shakespeare: And What he hath left us," prefixed to the First Folio of 1623, is generous and unqualified. Early in Jonson's poem, in a metaphor John Milton would famously rework in his poem introducing the Second Folio of 1632, Jonson compared Shakespeare's "Booke" to "a Monument, without a tombe." A few lines later that praise widens and deepens as Shakespeare becomes the preeminent poet of art as well as nature: Nature her selfe was proud of his designes, And joy'd to weare the dressing of his lines! Which were so richly spun, and woven so fit, As, since, she will vouchsafe no other Wit. The merry Greeke, tart Aristophanes, Neat Terence, witty Plautus, now not please; But antiquated, and deserted lye As they were not of Natures family. Yet must I not give Nature all: Thy Art, My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part. (Vickers 1.24-25) In the same poem, however, Jonson's assessment of Shakespeare was more vexed. Although Shakespeare exceeded learned contemporaries such as Lyly, Kyd, and Marlowe, for Jonson, in a judgment that would last "not of an age, but for all time," Shakespeare was nonetheless limited by his lack of learning, the "small Latine, and lesse Greeke" (Vickers 1.24). And in his Timber, or Discoveries, Jonson taxed Shakespeare for a carelessness that often attended his genius, his "honest," "open, and free nature": Shakespeare's imagination was generous and unstoppable, "wherein he flowed with that facility, that sometime it was necessary he should be stop'd" (Vickers 1.26). These criticisms by Sidney and Jonson rested on certain aesthetic assumptions, all derived from Classical literature, that would shape critical thinking about Shakespeare through the eighteenth century. The two terms seventeenth-century writers most often used to appraise Shakespeare's works were nature and art, although, as scholars such as Arthur M. Eastman and others have pointed out, both of these terms were difficult to define. Shakespeare was the great poet of Nature, who, in Milton's "L'Allegro," was "fancy's child,/Warlb[ing] his native Wood-notes wild" (133-134). For Dryden, Shakespeare had "the largest and most comprehensive soul" ("Of Dramatic Poesy" 56). He had an instinct for what was natural, what Samuel Johnson would later call, alluding to perhaps the most famous of Shakespeare's characters, "the mirrour of life" (Johnson 7.65). What he didn't

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always have was "art." Although "art" yielded quite ambiguous definitions to these Restoration and eighteenth-century critics, they knew it when they saw it. Arthur M. Eastman, writing in the mid-twentieth century, has defined the term as a balancing discipline that provided "the reason to Nature's passion, the learning to Nature's instinct More particularly, Art meant restraint according to the laws of form" (10). The chief offense consisted in some form or other of "mingling": clowns and kings, comedy and tragedy, puns and poetry, one setting and another. Such sanctions were attempts to preserve the laws of artistic integrity, hedges against an aesthetic indeterminacy and ambivalence that threatened Renaissance humanists as well as their arch-enemies, the anti-theatrical Puritans. These laws, or decorums, included the observance of classical unities, particularly the unities of time and place. According to Sidney, "the stage should always represent but one place," and "the uttermost time presupposed in it should be, both by Aristotle's precept and common reason, but one day" (243). In addition to these injunctions and the concern with indecorous mingling of various kinds, there was the matter of poetic justice. Poetry, Sidney argued, was superior to history in that history's adherence to factual accuracy sometimes allowed the good to suffer and the bad to thrive in its narratives. Poetry, by contrast, was free to create an ideal history where good was rewarded and evil punished. Such a concern with "poetic justice" continued well into the eighteenth century and is evident in Samuel Johnson's criticism of Twelfth Night's satiric treatment of Sir Andrew Aguecheek: "Ague-cheek is drawn with great propriety," Johnson admitted, "but his character is, in a great measure, that of natural fatuity, and is therefore not the proper prey of a satirist" (7.326). But Shakespeare's theater has always thrived on untidy and transgressive minglings: blank playing spaces that could be Rome one moment, Alexandria the next; blank actors' bodies that could equivocate from one gender to another; or, in the case of doubling, from one character to another. Kings not only mingled freely with clowns, but the actors who impersonated both kings and clowns were themselves classed as "servants," an ambiguous social status just barely on the windy side of vagrancy. In performance, at least, a king might always go a progress through the guts of a beggar. Needless to say, such severe critical strictures did not always succeed in taking the measure of Shakespeare's often experimental dramatic structure or of the critics' own affection for the very plays they censured. So far had discretion fought with nature that for close to two centuries critics would look on Shakespeare with wisest sorrow. Early critical responses to Twelfth Night took on many of the characteistics of the criticism of the plays as a whole. The first reference to Twelfth Night was John Manningham's appreciative diary entry, discussed earlier.

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Manningham's responses are as interesting for what they don't include as for what they do. Ignoring the romantic main plot, with its interests in misdirected sexual desire, gender disguise, and sentimental self-fashionings, Manningham most emphasized the details of the Malvolio subplot, setting the critical pattern that most observers in the seventeenth century and much of the eighteenth century would follow. In addition to Leonard Digges's tribute to "that crosse garter'd Gull," later anecdotal evidence would reinforce a conception of Twelfth Night that would foreground the delights of the Malvolio gulling scene. More than a century later, Nicholas Rowe , in his 1709 edition of Shakespeare's plays, praised Twelfth Night with a similar emphasis on Malvolio, observing "something singularly Ridiculous and Pleasant in the fantastical steward Malvolio" (Vickers 2.195). A half century later, in 1765, Samuel Johnson also singled out the Malvolio comic scenes, noting that "[t]he soliloquy of Malvolio is truly comick; he is betrayed to ridicule merely by his pride" (7.326). It is Ben Jonson whose criticism of Twelfth Night most anticipates the critical assumptions and methodology that would later become codified as eighteenth-century critical practice. Jonson implicitly critiques Twelfth Night's dramatization of the famous recognition scene between Viola and Sebastian by declaring his own wnwillingness to stretch credulity—and casting—too far in attempting to maintain the illusion that two actors could ever be found who could convincingly play identical twins of opposite gender. Anne Barton notes that, "[u]nlike Shakespeare, Ben Jonson refused to have anything to do with the Amphitryo or the Menaechmi [both plays possible ancestors of Twelfth Night] in a theatre which could neither provide him with identical twins to play the parts, nor bypass the problem of verisimilitude by way of the mask" (Ben Jonson 31; see also Carroll 49). Jonson's own interest in social realism may have helped frame the nature of the theatrical "impossibility" here. For Shakespeare, though, such theatrical impossibilities are at the very heart of his dramaturgy, a problem more for Snout the Tinker than for his creator. You can never bring in a twin! Jonson's remarks anticipate an eighteenth-century critical temper, one that certainly celebrated the resources of imaginative play, but nevertheless expected plays to hold the mirror up to a nature that was both more material and more decorous than that which Shakespeare's plays reflected. Ben Jonson's objection, in fact, is not too far afield from Samuel Johnson's difficulty, more than 100 years later, in believing in the convenient arrival of Sebastian just in time for Olivia's "most wonderful" passion. Johnson condemned the play's final scene as an improbable fiction: "[t]he marriage of Olivia, and the succeeding perplexity, though well enough contrived to divert on the stage, wants credibility, and fails to

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produce the proper instruction required in the drama, as it exhibits no just picture of life" (7.326). Critical opinion of Shakespeare, and especially of his comedies, waned during much of the seventeenth century and even into the first decades of the eighteenth century. Among playwrights of Shakespeare's age, the work of John Fletcher and Ben Jonson was preferred, not surprising when we consider that in any age the most critically acclaimed works are often those whose poetic features are most amenable to the values that shape, and are shaped by, critical practice. If Shakespeare's plays, in general, fell into neglect, the comedies especially suffered during that period. Nonetheless, there were hints of a revival of interest in Shakespeare that coincided with sometimes harsh judgments of Shakespeare's defects. Throughout the Restoration era, Dryden in particular wrestled with his Shakespearean affections. Dryden freely admitted that "I admire [Jonson], but I love Shakespeare" ("Of Dramatic Poesy" 58). And yet, for Dryden, Shakespeare was "the very Janus of poets; he wears almost everywhere two faces; and you have scarce begun to admire the one, ere you despise the other" ("Defence of the Epilogue" 126-127). Dryden praised Shakespeare's comprehensive soul, disdained its particular errors. Other critics, as Harry Levin has observed, from John Dennis to Nahum Tate to Nicholas Rowe to Alexander Pope, shared Dryden's troubled affection for Shakespeare ("Critical Approaches" 216-217). As the eighteenth century neared its midpoint, major changes in the critical assessment of Shakespeare were taking place. Shakespeare was beginning to acquire something of the status of those very classical writers whose decorum had measured his failures. During this time Shakespeare would also emerge as England's national poet, thanks largely to the efforts of David Garrick, as well as to the renewed attention of scholars and editors. The first signs of critical restoration occurred at the beginning of the century with the publication of the first scholarly and annotated edition of Shakespeare's plays, Nicolas Rowe's 1709 edition. Rowe's work was distinguished by the care with which it attempted to restore an authenticated text. As Hugh Grady points out, Rowe's edition "was the first which went beyond reprinting the Folio, using some quarto editions to supplement the text" (270). Rowe's edition was followed by Alexander Pope's 1725 edition in which Pope acknowledged Shakespeare "as 'an Original,'" and legalized the usual dispensation by arguing that "To judge ... of Shakespear by Aristotle's rules is like trying a man by the Laws of one Country who acted under those of another'" (Levin, "Critical Approaches" 217). Eight years later, Pope's edition was followed by Theobald's 1733 edition, "the first sys tematic and 'modern' attempt at editing the plays" (Grady 270). The most

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important of all these editions was Samuel Johnson's 1765 eight-volume edition, complete with extensive scholarly annotation and commentaries to many of the plays. The application of newly emerging textual practices to Shakespeare's works, not to "improve" those works but to restore them, was the first hint of a new critical attitude toward Shakespeare. Discussions of Shakespeare's failings continued, of course; but there was a growing sense that Shakespeare's plays, rather than failing to live up to classical decorum, had a decorum of their own that needed textual and scholarly attention. Samuel Johnson, for example, "abandoned] the earlier practice of criticizing Shakespeare for not adhering to the 'three unities' of neoclassical tragic theory, instead praising Hamlet... as Shakespeare's greatest triumph in dramatic 'variety'" (Grady 271). Shakespeare's comedies were also gaining more critical attention. Twelfth Night, which had been particularly neglected during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, now had a new critical as well as performative life. Samuel Johnson, who thought that Shakespeare's "natural disposition ... led him to comedy" (7.69), praised both Twelfth Night's comicand "serious" plots, deeming the play "in the graver part elegant and easy, and in some of the lighter scenes exquisitely humorous" (7.326). Johnson was more critical about certain inconsistencies in characterization, particularly, as we have seen, that of Olivia. It was also in the eighteenth century that the practice of criticism was acquiring an increasingly self-conscious and professional status. Just as Shakespeare was being elevated to the status of National Poet, the body of critics who reinvented Shakespeare were also reinventing themselves. The establishment of standards of textual practice, as well as standards of critical judgment, derived less from classical than from English authority. That authority gained an articulate and codified voice in the publication of Samuel Johnson's commentaries to Shakespeare's plays in his 1765 edition and especially in his earlier work, A Dictionary of the English Language (1755). One of the unique features of Johnson's Dictionary was that his definitions were illustrated by quotations from English authors, quotations that exemplified not only what he termed in his Preface "pure sources of genuine diction" (Lynch 36) but also the best examples of literary, scientific, and philosophical excellence. Johnson's Dictionary, then, was more than a celebration of English language. It was also a work of criticism, a testimony to great English learning and literature. The most quoted of all these English "sources of genuine diction" was Shakespeare; every one of the 36 plays that, in Johnson's time, constituted Shakespeare's work was represented, including 20 words from Twelfth Night: "galliard," "geek," "malapert," "nonpareil," "politician," and "tillyfally" among them

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(Lynch 613). It is interesting to note that a disproportionate number of these Twelfth Night examples come from the Malvolio subplot, an element of the play Johnson would later single out for praise in his criticism. England now had its own national poet and a language with which to measure his genius. One of the features of that new critical language was an interest in "character." It was an interest that would last into the twentieth century, although the definition of "character" would radically change. For the eighteenth-century, the goal of characterization was to reflect a generalized and recognizable image of human nature. As with most eighteenthcentury judgments, the general was privileged over the particular. For the most part Shakespeare meets this standard, as articulated by Dr. Johnson, admirably: "hold[ing] up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life. His characters are not modified by the customs of particular places, unpractised by the rest of the world; by the peculiarities of studies or professions, which can operate but upon small numbers; or by the accidents of transient fashions or temporary opinions: they are the genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world will always supply, and observation will always find ... In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species" (7.62). For Samuel Johnson, "[t]he adventitious peculiarities of personal habits are only superficial dies, bright and pleasing for a little while, yet soon fading to a dim tinct, without any remains of former lustre; but the discriminations of true passion are the colours of nature" (7.70). Johnson's objection to Olivia's "uncharacteristic" shift of her desires from Cesario to Sebastian in the final scene rested on such a premise. For Johnson, Malvolio by contrast "is truly comick; he is betrayed to ridicule merely by his pride," whereas Aguecheek, although unwisely used as the object of satire, was nevertheless "drawn with great propriety" (7.326). Earlier Alexander Pope, who had edited his own edition of Shakespeare, also praised Shakespeare's characterization, though for him Shakespeare captured more the individual than the species, anticipating, at least in this sense, the definition of "character" that romantic criticism would celebrate. Pope was so struck by Shakespeare's genius for aligning his speeches to the "life and variety" of the characters who speak them that he concluded, "had all the Speeches been printed without the very names of the Persons, I believe one might have apply'd them with certainty to every speaker" (Vickers 2.404). That is high praise for Shakespeare's art, as well as his nature, even if, as editor, Pope sometimes wavered in his confidence. Dissatisfied with the opening lines of Twelfth Night, Pope "corrected" Orsino's mixed metaphor as the Count describes the sensation of being overtaken

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by music's "sweet sound" (1.1.5). Pope emended "sweet sound" to "sweet south" (i. e., the sweet south wind), thereby forfeiting the "life and variety" of both Orsino and his creator. Eighteenth-century interest in character was often shaped by the closely intertwined appeals of sentiment and moral instruction. Here Johnson was more censorious. For Johnson, Shakespeare "sacrifices virtue to convenience, and is so much more careful to please than to instruct, that he seems to write without any moral purpose" (7.71). Johnson was particularly critical of Shakespeare's violation of poetic justice in several of the tragedies, most notably Hamlet and King Lear, where the injustice of Cordelia's death so disturbed him that "I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor" (8.704). Twelfth Night also could lose "moral purpose," as in the play's satirical treatment of Sir Andrew Aguecheek, who, in Johnson's eyes, was guilty of no other sin than "natural fatuity" (7.326). On the other hand, Francis Gentleman, in his commentary on Viola's "She never told her love" passage, praised the speech in language that seemed to respond to the play's simultaneous depiction of feminine beauty and feminine virtue: "The matchless picturesque beauty of this speech is so obviously striking that to enlarge upon it would seem an insult to the reader's conception. Suffice it then to say, Shakespeare himself never surpassed it" (Vickers 6.100) Criticism of Shakespeare during the Romantic period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries underwent a revolutionary change. Influenced by such late-eighteenth century German writers such as Goethe and Schlegel, especially Schlegel's theory of organic form (Levin, "Critical Approaches" 223), a unifying principle discovered from within the poet's imagination rather than imposed from without, English Romanticism transformed not only the practices of literary criticism but its ends. To borrow the famous analogy of M. H. Abrams, the goal of an artist was not to hold a mirror up to some universal standard of "nature," or, as Samuel Johnson might put it, to a preexisting "just picture of life" (7.326). Rather, the goal of an artist was to discover within himself or herself a lamp, which would then radiate outward its own design, discovering its own artistic integrity in the process. The terms of criticism were the same as before. Critics continued to speak of "unity," or "nature," or "character," for example. But the definitions and applications of these literary terms were turned inside out, like a chev'ril glove. Unity, for example was not measured by fidelity to some extrinsic ideal but was an organic, intrinsic unity, discovering itself in the creative process. The breath of creative inspiration would course through Shakespeare's well-tuned imagination

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like wind through an Aeolean harp. Character was also an important artistic value. But, like unity, character was discovered not through mimesis but through the transformative powers of imagination. Keats, for example, like Pope before him, praised Shakespeare for his unparalleled ability to breathe life into a miraculously diverse and contradictory population of characters. But Keats meant something different from Pope. For Keats, Shakespeare's superb sense of characterization was the result of a chameleon-like quality within his consciousness that allowed Shakespeare to "negate" himself and instead to recognize within that complex self a range of characters as diverse and contradictory as Viola and Iago, Hamlet and Coriolanus. Keats called this wide-ranging generative power "Negative Capability, that is, when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason" (193). Much of the Romantic criticism of Twelfth Night is in this vein. As R. S. White has pointed out, Keats's own volume of Shakespeare is marked by underlinings that highlight "striking images and uses of language" (White, Keats 58) that map out a variety of characters and experiences, from Orsino's "Away before me to sweet beds of flow'rs;/Love-thoughts lie rich when canopied with bowers" to Sir Toby's linguistic portrait of both Sir Andrew and himself. Keats also underlines the fragment, "so much blood in his liver as will clog the foot of a flea" (58). Looking closely at the range of Keats's underlinings, White concludes "that the evidence of Keats's markings on a relatively copiously marked play like Twelfth Night shows that his interest is dispersed and opportunistic Here he is displaying pre-eminently the capacity to appreciate many different kinds of language and centres of interest in Shakespeare's plays" (White, Keats 59). What Keats particularly admires in the language of Twelfth Night is the strange unity discovered in the disorderly mingling of tragic and comic elements, "the veiled melancholy that dwells even in the very temple of delight" (White, Keats 201), a quality Keats found in some of his own poetry. This interest in the disorderly order of Twelfth Night looks forwarrd to twentieth-century practices. Similarly, Coleridge praised the opening scene of Twelfth Night not for its expositional clarity but for its abilityto create a mysterious and unifying mood. Such scenes "strike at once the key-note, and give the predominant spirit of the play, as in Twelfth Night and in Macbeth" (qtd. in Furness 8). In the nineteenth century, Twelfth Night enjoyed greater critical acclaim even as the focus of critical attention began to shift from the comic Malvolio to the romantic Viola. William Hazlitt, who thought the play "one of the most delightful of Shakespeare's comedies," praised its "sweetness and pleasantry" (313). He was specifically drawn to the "impassioned

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sweetness" (315) he heard in Viola's language. And in language that might surprise audiences accustomed to the play's darker tones, Hazlitt speculated that Twelfth Night "is perhaps too good-natured for comedy. It has little satire, and no spleen. It aims at the ludicrous rather than the ridiculous. It makes us laugh at the follies of mankind, not despise them, and still less bear any ill-will towards them" (313). And yet in his fierce ideological opposition to Kemble's conservative acting style and in his equally fierce and impassioned advocacy of Edmund Kean's revolutionary style, as well as in his willingness to read with resistance Shakespeare's writing, a practice highly uncharacteristic of that time, Hazlitt might be seen as "the Romantic precursor of resistant and radical readers of Shakespeare" (White, "Shakespeare Criticism" 283-284). Although during the early nineteenth century the romantic Viola was becoming increasingly central to Twelfth Night, for at least one critic Malvolio remained at the heart of the play. Charles Lamb's Malvolio, however, was not the delightful figure of mirth that earlier generations had admired but rather a complex character touched by "tragic interest." Inspired by what may have been flawed memories of Robert Bensley's performance of Malvolio, Lamb saw the steward less as the comic figure of a man sick with self-love and self-importance than as a powerful, dignified, doomed lover whose hubris aimed so high as "to mate Hyperion" (53). "I confess," Lamb admits, "that I never saw the catastrophe of this character, while Bensley played it, without a kind of tragic interest" (54). (For more discussion of Bensley's performance and Lamb's assessment of it, see Chapter 6.) Lamb's critique of the failure of both criticism and theatrical practice to acknowledge the darkness, even a malevolence, at the heart of comic mirth anticipates much of the criticism that characterized late twentieth-century approaches to Twelfth Night. But at the same time, Lamb himself was not entirely innocent of such theatrical erasure. In Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales From Shakespeare, the chapter on Twelfth Night makes no mention of Malvolio. Although Lamb's attraction to the tragic elements of Malvolio was in some ways an exception to the general tendency of the period to establish Viola at the center of the play, both approaches relied on a sympathetic exploration of character that often went beyond the boundaries and temper of the plays they inhabited. This was an emphasis on "character" both more subjective and more empathetic than the eighteenth century's interest. The approach had its roots as early as 1777, with the publication of Maurice Morgann's An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff, and was still flourishing well into the nineteenth century with such studies as Mary Cowden Clarke's The Girlhood of Shakespeare's

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Heroines. For such writers the characters they pursued existed somewhere "[b]etween life and art, between characters historical and characters dramatic" (Eastman 58). Nineteenth-century character studies were by no means always this sentimental. Still the psychological interest "claim[ed] for a Shakespeare character the kind of life-like transcendence of its fictional context" (Grady 275). For such critics, the plays seemed to exist for the sake of the characters who inhabited them rather than the other way around. The title of Hazlitt's important 1817 study, Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, indicates such a priority. In a sense the nineteenth century's fascination with character might seem to continue an eighteenth-century interest. But the cultural assumptions that formed a conception of "character" were strikingly different. As Hugh Grady has noted, "the interest in Shakespeare's characters inherited from the previous century took a romantic turn to become a crucial part of the romantic emphasis on the personal, subjective, and individual, eventually even finding its way into later nineteenth-century discussions of realism" (275). The emphasis on both "character" and "realism," both central elements of the highly popular novel form, may suggest something of a tendency for novelistic habits of reading and critical response to shape interpretation of a Shakespeare play. Such a fusion of artistic forms might be even likelier if one's encounter with, say, Twelfth Night took place in a study rather than a playhouse. At the same time, however, as R. S. White has pointed out, sometimes romantic interest in character could take a surprisingly destabilizing turn, faintly anticipating the resistant and deconstructive criticism that would not occur for almost 200 years. Hazlitt, White notes, "demonstrated ways of undermining notions of stable characterization in drama [by] talk[ing] of 'mixed motives' and showfing] in his theatre criticism that actors could interpret roles in politically charged ways" ("Shakespeare Criticism" 284). In the nineteenth century, then, partly because of a shift in interest from the play's satirical elements to the romantic plot with its language of imagination and sentiment, and partly because of the growing appeal of a sympathetic engagement with characters, notably characters of high moral and emotional sentiment, Twelfth Night increasingly became a play less about Malvolio and more about Viola, unless, of course, as with Lamb, Malvolio could grow into a figure of tragic pathos. Moreover, the interest in Viola was a peculiar one: her appeal was not that of the witty, playful corruptor of words who could hold her own with Feste, but of the sentimental and romantic figure that Olivia and Orsino saw, or rather heard in Viola's own high, fantastical language. This was the Viola who could "[m]ake me a willow cabin at your gate,/And call upon my soul within the house;/Write loyal

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cantons of contemned love,/And sing them loud even in the dead of night" (1.5.223-226). This was the plaintive, melancholy figure who seemed to have been born, fully formed, from the willowy lyrics of "Come Away, Death": She never told her love, But let concealment like a worm i'th'bud Feed on her damask cheek. She pined in thought, And with a green and yellow melancholy She sat like Patience on a monument, Smiling at grief. (2.4.106-11) For audiences and critics attuned to the aesthetic pleasures of sentiment and romance, such a Viola might indeed do much. One of the achievements of twentieth-century critical approaches to Twelfth Night was its success in discovering a critical language and methodology for appreciating Shakespeare's comedies. Unlike Shakespeare's tragedies, his comedies are multi-centered, inclusive almost to the degree of incoherence. "That is hot ice and wondrous strange snow!" Theseus responds after hearing of the "tedious brief scene" that Peter Quince and his "[h]ard-handed men" hope to perform. "How shall we find the concord of this discord?" (5.1.59, 56, 72, 60). Comedies discover their coherence in defiance of any rational expectation. The celebrated epiphany at the end of Twelfth Night is not so much achieved as patched together, like Festes definition of a mended soul, virtue patched with vice, or like Feste's own motley coat. We are redeemed not by catharsis but by luck. Yet there is a hint of the miraculous in that luck, a kind of bias of nature that draws us unexpectedly and undeservedly into a more or less happy resolution. The work of such critics as C. L. Barber, Northrop Frye, Alexander Leggatt, and others has contributed much to a critical discourse that can accommodate the crucial importance both of comedy's multi-centered inclusiveness and the strange efficacy of its errors. Consequently, as D. J. Palmer has observed, "[t]wentieth-century interpretations of Twelfth Night have found its particuar excellence, not in any single element of the play, but in the integration of its parts to form one perfectly balanced whole" (19). Alexander Leggatt, in the introduction to his influential study of Shakespeare's comedies, argues that the challenge of a critic assessing a comedy is to uncover not its unity but its variety: "What I have tried to do in this study, then, is to reverse one of criticism's normal interests, to seek not the internal unity of each play but its internal variety" (xii). One early sign of things to come, a shift from a critical emphasis on characterization to one of design, comes, oddly enough, from A. C. Bradley.

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Bradley, the author of Shakespearean Tragedy and an eminent and eloquent explorer of some of the great characters in Shakespeare's tragedies, also wrote an article on Twelfth Night. "Feste the Jester" is not without psychological speculation into Feste's character, whether regarding the roots of his vulnerable isolation or his limited engagement with the clusters of characters who make up Illyrian society. Indeed, Bradley sees Feste, sometimes sentimentally, as an isolated, rejected fool who takes some solace in witticisms largely ignored by others. "Outwardly," Bradley writes, "he may be little better than a slave; but Epictetus was a slave outright and yet absolutely free: and so is Feste. That world of quibbles which are pointless to his audience, of incongruities which nobody else can see, of flitting fancies which only he cares to pursue, is his sunny realm" (18). Bradley's approach to Feste even takes on some of the features of nineteenth-century character study. One might hear an echo of Lamb's attempts to confer a similar "dignity" on Malvolio. At the same time, however, Bradley is looking forward to the twentieth century's fascination with Feste's role in the play's structure. Indeed, although Bradley was clearly more concerned with character than dramatic structure in "Feste the Jester," he was, nonetheless, one of the first to see Feste at the center of Twelfth Night's design. For much of the twentieth century, critics have identified Feste as Twelfth Night's chief choreographer. Bradley was one of the first to see in Feste a hint of "the poet's own comment on the story" (17). Bradley's writings were sometimes criticized for failing to consider the theatrical dimensions of Shakespeare's plays. Yet here Bradley echoes some of the revolutionary ideas Harley GranvilleBarker was articulating both in his 1912 production of Twelfth Night and his written "Preface" to the play. Granville-Barker had argued that "[t]here runs through all [Feste] says and does that vein of irony by which we may so often mark one of life's self-acknowledged failures. We gather that in those days, for a man of parts without character and with more wit than sense, there was a kindly refuge from the world's struggle as an allowed fool" (30). Thus in the last three centuries, criticism and performance of Twelfth Night have centered on a series of figures: Malvolio, Viola, then Feste. But the twentieth century's new emphasis on Feste represented a difference, not only of degree but of kind. For eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics and audiences, Malvolio, and then Viola, represented the focus of Twelfth Night. Twelfth Night was seen as a play primarily about Malvolo or about Viola. But for many twentieth-century critics, Feste embodied not the focus but the structure of Twelfth Night. Feste, more than any other character, caught the indeterminacies, the comic incoherence, of

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this play. To use Feste's own self-characterization, he is "for all waters" (4.2.50). He engages with most every character in the play, yet remains unattached and, in many recent productions, is alone and exiled at the end of the play. He is Malvolio's chief enemy, yet a sluggish participant in the gull-catching, even offering Malvolio "light and paper and ink" (4.2.100), emblems of both the festive author and the sober authoritarian. Made up of contradictions, of patches, Feste does not so much unify this play as embody it. He is, as Barbara Everett put it, "the dangerous underminer of worldly estimates Feste is in the play to make insecure all ordinary sense of hierarchy: to clear the field for redefinitions . . . " (206). In her perceptive and engaging article on the evolution of Feste throughout the stage history of Twelfth Night, Karen Greif describes a number of productions that reinforce the twentieth century's critical emphasis on Feste's centrality. Greif notes that in Terry Hands's 1979 Royal Shakespeare Company production, for example, Feste (Geoffrey Hutchings) was "[o]nstage virtually every moment ... observing] the other characters act out their fantasies—or meet their rude awakenings— from the sidelines whenever he was not involved in the action" (75). Even more instructive is her description of Feste (Emrys James) in John Barton's 1969 Royal Shakespeare Company production: "In his lyrics and his word-games Feste reminds us of the rules that festive comedy can only temporarily suspend, but without the rancor or self-importance of a killjoy like Malvolio. And," Greif continues, "as James played him, the fool's perspective closely resembled the one Barton ascribed to his creator: realistic but 'on the whole tolerant and accepting'" (74). The twentieth century, then, proved to be a tumultuous time for criticism of Shakespeare and Twelfth Night in two quite different ways. The first wo thirds of that period witnessed a burgeoning of critical methodologies, as a number of different "schools" of critical approaches to Shakespeare's work were established. The rest of the century was characterized by a succession of ideological movements that questioned, not just the principles of the previous generation of critics, but the very premises behind what Helen Gardner once referred to in the title of one of her books as "the business of criticism." Such critiques challenged not just the limits of particular close readings but the possibility of any close reading, what Geoffrey Hartman described as "the dominion of Exegesis" (qtd. in McDonald, Shakespeare Reread 1); not just particular meanings ascribed to particular texts but the very possibility of any "essential" meaning, of any coherent text. Throughout much of the twentieth century, however, critical discussion of Shakespeare thrived along with his reputation. Moreover, as the century progressed, more attention was paid to the comedies, as we have seen.

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As in the eighteenth century, there was a renewed interest in the profession of criticism, its methodologies and goals. As R. S. White has noted, "[t]he rise of Shakespeare criticism as the 'industry' we know today was linked to the accommodation of English literature as a university subject at the turn of the century" ("Shakespeare Criticism" 282). The number of scholarly venues for Shakespeare criticism also grew steadily through much of the twentieth century. Stanley Wells notes that in 1904, the year Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy was published, "only one periodical [the German Shakespeare-Jahrbuch] devoted itself to Shakespeare" ("Shakespeare Criticism" 250). By the early 1970s, there were three additional major Shakespearean journals on the scene. Wells reports that "Shakespeare Survey has appeared annually since 1948, the American Shakespeare Quarterly has flourished for almost as long, and Shakespeare Studies made the first of its annual appearances in 1965" (250). Other journals include Shakespeare Bulletin, Shakespeare Yearbook, and The Upstart Crow. As Shakespeare criticism grew more assured, it began to discover a wider range of carefully defined critical approaches to Twelfth Night. Each had its own discipline an procedure, although many of these practices shared an emphasis on close reading and, in many instances, a faith that close reading might discover a reading, a coherent interpretation, of a play. Of all these variant forms of close reading, perhaps the most famous (and later, for many, mfamous) school was New Criticism, a term invented by John Crowe Ransom as the title for his 1941 call for a new direction in literary criticism. "For the New Critic," Russ McDonald points out, "the process of critical analysis was chiefly a search for unifying factors in the literary object," particularly those poetic features that discovered coherence out of apparent chaos: irony, paradox, ambiguity, metaphor (Shakespeare 16). Although especially well suited to the metaphysical poetry of the early seventeenth century, with its celebrated conceits and its taste for paradox and startling imagery, New Criticism was also drawn to Shakespeare's plays, partly for their dense poetic language and partly for the "authority" that Shakespeare's language and prestige gave to this new methodology (McDonald 17). Two features of the New Critical approach to Shakespeare criticism would render it vulnerable to criticism from two quite different directions. Because New Criticism was much more interested in examining the text of a literary work and less interested in its various contexts—political, social, historical, gendered—it allowed itself to become characterized as a reactionary criticism in an increasingly politicized discourse. Its conservatism was measured by its presumed disinterest in politics and its silence, a complicit silence some would argue, about the role of literary

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discourse in some of the most important issues of the twentieth century. There were, of course, conservative voices among the New Critics. But as the twentieth century came to a close, oppositional voices, as we shall see, began to impute to any critical approach relying on close reading an unacknowledged political agenda. In addition to its unwillingness to address cultural and political concerns, New Criticism, because it so privileged a literary text, was often inattentive to the performance features of a play, to the ways multiple performances of a single play problematized the very stability of a text that was essential to New Critical approaches. The new critical practices of the mid-twentieth century, whether or not they were actually "New Critical," nonetheless shared an interest in formal features of a literary text, as well as the technique of close reading. There was, for example, an increased emphasis on the language, especially the imagery, of a play. There was also a sharper interest in exploring the formal, if slippery, elements of genre that characterized individual plays, especially the comedies, which had not enjoyed the same critical attention in the past as had the tragedies. The work of G. Wilson Knight, Wolfgang Clemen, and Carolyn Spurgeon all looked at patterns of imagery to suggest a kind of dramatic unity or at least a prevalent tone in Twelfth Night. G. Wilson Knight, one of the first to note the preponderance of sea references in the play, identified a rich complexity of tones evoked by the play's equally complex imagistic design: "Here, then, we find a pattern of music, love, and precious stones, threaded by the somber strands of a sea tempest and a sea fight. Finally there is love, reunion, and joy" (126). Such complex harmonies link Twelfth Night to the late romances, "tempests dissolved in music" (127). Among the many critics who explored Twelfth Night in terms of its genre, perhaps Northrop Frye and C. L. Barber especially stand out. Both critics explored the genre of Twelfth Night in terms not merely of unifying patterns of language and action within the play but, more important, of deep structural patterns Twelfth Night shared with Shakespeare's other romantic comedies and even the late romances, toward which Twelfth Night repeatedly gestures. For Frye, many of Shakespeare's comedies share an archetypal pattern: "Thus the action of the comedy begins in a world represented as a normal world, moves into the green world, goes into a metamorphosis there in which the comic resolution is achieved, and returns to the normal world" (54). This green world, one characterized by natural rather than social order, allowed for an environment of freedom, experimentation, and self-discovery. Consequently "[t]he green world charges the comedies with a symbolism in which the comic resolution contains a suggestion of the old ritual pattern of the victory of summer over winter" (55). In some

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plays, such as Twelfth Night, "the entire action takes place in the second world" (54). As a result, Twelfth Night represents an interesting variant of Frye's comic structure, a play that, "as its title implies, presents a carnival society, not so much a green world as an evergreen one" (54). Frye's work complements the criticism of C. L. Barber, who saw in many of Shakespeare's comedies and certainly in Twelfth Night a deep structural resemblance to that of carnival, where oppressed citizens of a harsh social order were allowed a holiday in which rules were suspended, leaders were replaced by mock substitutes—Lords of Misrule—, and decorum gave way to an ethos of revelry, indulgence, and irreverent mockery of authority. Barber's scheme is an anthropologically and psychologically based version of Frye's escape to nature and its pastoral play and perceptions. For Barber, the powers of festival license have some of the same corrective and transformative effect as Frye's green world. Barber described this comic metamorphosis as the movement "from release to clarification" (6-10), as the very disorderliness of festive behavior allows the revelers a new vantage point from which to see themselves and their social order. Frye and Barber would have a far-reaching influence on the study of Twelfth Night's comedic form. Several years later these ideas are further explored in Mikhail Bakhtin's studies of the "dialogical" relationship between "grotesque" carnival and civic restoration. Still later, two other studies, Michael Bristol's Carnival and Theater: Plebian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England, and Francois Laroque's Shakespeare's Festive World: Elizabethan Seasonal EntertainmentaND the Professional Stage, would revisit the ideas of Frye and especially of C. L. Barber but in a more historicist light. Anne Barton and Julian Markels both explore the ambiguous generic features of Twelfth Night, a play situated on the limits of Shakespeare's comic vision. Barton, in her "As You Like It and Twelfth Night: Shakespeare's Sense of an Ending," contrasts the ways these two comedies allow tragic elements, especially death, to intrude into the structure of comedy. For Barton, Twelfth Night is the more daring play, pushing itself against the limits of comic closure. Julian Markels looks at Feste and the fool in King Lear, similar corruptors of words who even share different versions of the same song, as a way of measuring disquieting generic intersections between these two plays. Other critics, such as William Empson and Norman Rabkin, also looked with painstaking care at the subtlest patterns of verbal and structural arrangement, a methodology that superficially linked both writers with the school of New Criticism, which valued extremely close analysis of textual elements, especially language and imagery, on the premise that any understanding of poetry (plays were treated by this school as poems) resided

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entirely in the coherent designs that such patterns imply. But for Empson and Rabkin, close readings had the unexpected effect not of confirming the unity of a text but of destabilizing it, showing a text that restlessly argues with itself. As Russ McDonald's and R. S. White's invaluable surveys of late-twentieth century critical practice have demonstrated, both Empson and Rabkin used methods associated with New Criticism to discover, not textual unity and meaning, but something like the radical ambivalence, even equivocation, that looked forward to the tactics of deconstruction. Empson's work, especially his Seven Types of Ambiguity, also used the tactics of close reading to reveal an underlying ambivalence, indeterminacy, in language, a radical deconstruction of poetic words that Feste himself, Twelfth Night's own "corruptor of words," might have appreciated. In so doing, Empson, like Rabkin, "undermined much of the criticism of his own day, which sought to establish unitary meanings, themes, and texts ... anticipating] such 'recent' discoveries as 'indeterminacy,' lacunae, [and] deconstructive techniques" (White, "Shakespeare Criticism" 284), as well as the practices of reader-response criticism, a methodology whose goal was not to illuminate the meaning of a text but to document the competitive and creative struggle between author(s) and reader over the creation of meaning. Norman Rabkin's signature phrase was complementarity, a term borrowed from the physicist Neils Bohr, and referring to a state of mind capable of holding contradictory beliefs at the same time. Mid-twentieth century physicists were sharply divided in their understanding of the nature and motion of light, one group seeing light as the movement of discrete particles, the other as a continuous series of waves. Each theory contradicted the other, although each theory offered invaluable insight into different properties and behavior of light. For Bohr, the only possible way to comprehend such contradictory properties of light was to employ a mode of thought that itself embodied those very contradictions. So it was necessary to imagine light as being simultaneously a particle and a wave even though each definition cancelled the other. Rabkin "propose[d] to examine a number of Shakespeare's plays which are built on visions of complementarity. I hope," he explained, "to demonstrate that the poet's perhaps intuitive, certainly habitual understanding of the truth as in some sense complementary and of poetry as the proper vehicle for the conveyance of that sense of the truth is a constant in his work" (Common Understanding 27). Although Rabkin does not treat Twelfth Night at length in either Shakespeare and the Common Understanding or Shakespeare and the Pr lem of Meaning, the two books that most directly address Rabkin's ideas about complementarity, nonetheless, his approach has been hospitable to

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discussions of Twelfth Night. Indeed, such ambivalence seems aptly suited to Twelfth Night, a play that teases its audiences with "natural perspectives" at every turn. Rabkin himself explores how several of Shakespeare's comedies, including Twelfth Night, bring out the radical "doubleness of love's image": "[L]ove is both absurd and magnificent because, like art and other engagements of the imagination, it is willful, passionate, happily deceived and deceiving, unconditioned by and virtually irrelevant to reason. In Twelfth Night love is presented constantly as madness, yet aTH source of festive and liberating joy" (Common Understanding 157). In the 1970s and 1980s, other critical approaches moved from the margins of critical discourse toward the center. Feminist and new historicist readings were especially successful in reshaping discussion of Twelfth Night. Feminist critics offer simultaneously resistant and revealing analysis of the play, making sharply evident what generations of critics have somehow, incredibly, never noticed: that the efforts of male, heterosexual, white, Western critics to recognize and interpret the mirrored "universal" world that Twelfth Night holds up see only fragments of that reflection. Like the eclectic audience of Hamlet's Mousetrap, such critics recognize only what their limited, and conditioned, knowledge and experience ratifies as "true." As the voices of feminist critics grew more numerous, unfamiliar—one might even say "queer"—questions began to emerge, disrupting orthodox readings of Renaissance drama and poetry. The term queering, in fact, although originally associated with gay and lesbian critical approaches, became identified with the practice of asking any number of uncomfortable critical questions that were uncomfortable or "queer" precisely because they implicitly challenged long-held but, finally, unexamined "truths"—not just about Shakespeare's plays but about those pervasive yet collectively unconscious social assumptions that shaped both the plays and their critical reception. "Did women have a renaissance?" asked the title of Joan Kelly-Gadol's groundbreaking article in 1977 (emphasis added). Jean E. Howard questioned the conventional "truth" that gender disguise necessarily empowered women in Shakespeare's comedies, or that such disguise might "[blur] sexual difference, open[ing] the liberating possibility of undoing all the structures of domination and exploitation premised on binary sexual oppositions" ("Crossdressing" 430). The women in Shakespeare's comedies, Howard observes, whatever temporary autonomy they might have achieved in the course of the play, inevitably resubmit themselves to masculine authority and feminine dress (although Viola, uncharacteristically for Shakespeare's comic women, retains her feminine weeds, for the moment). Moreover, Howard points out that gender disguise is not, in

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itself, transgressive or threatening to patriarchal order. Olivia, for example, is much more transgressive in her aggressive pursuit of her desires than Viola is in her disguise. "[T]he play," Howard concludes, "seems to me to applaud a crossdressed woman who does not aspire to the positions of power assigned men, and to discipline a non-crossdressed woman who does" ("Crossdressing" 431). That other feminist critics, such as Linda Bamber or Catherine Belsey, are guardedly more sanguine about the subversive potential of either disguise or Shakespeare's comedies is a sign of the richness and diversity of feminist perspectives. There is no such thing as feminist criticism; rather there are feminist criticisms. In fact, feminist criticisms often worked within the structures of other critical methodologies, interrogating those methodologies, as well as the plays they critiqued. Many feminists, such as Jean Howard in The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England, share sometimes uncomfortable but often productive strategies with new historicism. Coppelia Kahn, in Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare, uses a psychological approach reinforced by a study of the play's mirroring imagery to show how the play destabilizes conventional distinctions between not only men and women but also heteroerotic and homoerotic desire by compelling audiences "to conceive of novel and conflicting ways in which sexual identity might be detached from personal identity In effect, we experience that state of radical identity-confusion typical of adolescence, when the differences between the sexes are as fluid as their desires for each other, when a boy might feel more like a girl than like a boy, or a girl might love another girl rather than a boy" (208). Laurie E. Osborne, working with the methodologies of textual and performance criticism, has explored how eighteenth-century "performance texts" and twentieth-century films of Twelfth Night have not only destabilized what was thought to be an unproblematic text but also, through cuts and scenic rearrangement, erased much of the First Folio's potentially subversive features, creating, instead, "safer" constructions of female agency, as well as of male and female homoerotic desire (Trick 78-136). Irene Dash, also looking at the politics of theatrical cuts and filmic cuttingrooms, examines how these conventions significantly reshape Twelfth Night in gendered terms, undermining the parallel social and theatrical status Shakespeare has given to both Viola and Olivia. She argues that the weight of these cuts in several staged and filmed productions of Twelfth Night falls disproportionately on Olivia, depriving her character of its rich complexity and humor and encouraging audiences to see Olivia from Orsino's masculinist point of view. The cuts involving Viola, by contrast, "soften" Viola by deemphasizing her class status and self-possession, creating a more

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conventionally attractive female heroine: demure and servant-like. Thus two characters that Shakespeare had taken some pains to equate, characters who embody two equally successful tactics of female agency, have now been distorted into two contrasting caricatures of femininity, one selfeffacing and attractive, the other aggressive and censured (211-244). A second challenge to the orthodoxy of mid-twentieth-century criticism was the rise of new historicism and its British counterpart, cultural materialism. Although new historicism is now at the center of the canon of anti-canonical literary study, practiced by countless critics in a wide range of variant forms, the movement began largely with the writings of one critic, Stephen Greenblatt. "I began with the desire to speak with the dead" (1): so Greenblatt begins his book, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, which soughIO uncover the complex lines of discourse connecting early modern writings and the political and social voices that constrained and were constrained by art, particularly dramatic art. What distinguished new historicism from old historicism was a new assumption about the relationship between a literary or theatrical text and its historical context. Rather than passively reflecting a system of political values and practices, early modern imaginative writing played an active role in the articulation and enforcement of political and social ideology. Whether that role was to abet or to resist the institutions of political power is a question that sharply divides new historicists and cultural materialists. Thus the performance of a play like Twelfth Night might be examined as a subversive theatrical resistance to conventional definitions of gender, sexuality, class, and authority or, by contrast, as a strategy that contains and redirects real political and social resistance against such enforced norms into aesthetic indulgence and pleasure. Greenblatt raises both possibilities in his discussion of Twelfth Night. If we merely mark the textual "swervings" of the plot movement, then we recognize what Sebastian says to Olivia at the end of the play: that although the action of the play seems to wander into dangerous and heretical definitions of gender and homoerotic desire, yet Nature, like a weighted bowling ball, swerves us back into socially acceptable definitions of sexual desire and its consummation. Yet if our reading of and listening to this play allows us actively to participate in the resistant, swerving movements of "nature's bias," we experience something more dangerous. In the representation of socially and sexually subversive characters on stage, as well as their unruly behavior, we find ourselves experiencing dangerous and transgressive possibilities of sexual and gendered identity and desire that last-minute reversals of plotting cannot entirely erase. But to participate in the suggestive motion and energies of Twelfth Night, we must

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first, Greenblatt tells us, swerve from the formalist habits of interpretation that characterized Shakespeare criticism for much of the twentieth century. "[W]e must historicize Shakespearean sexual nature, restoring it to its relation of negotiation and exchange with other social discourses of the body. For this task it is essential to break away from the textual isolation that is the primary principle of formalism and to move outside the charmed circle of a particular story and its variants" (72-73). After looking at early modern historical anecdotes of actual crossdressing and transgressive sexual behavior and at the legal discourse they engendered—what Greenblatt calls "shadow stories that haunt the plays" (66)—, Greenblatt returns to the language and action of Twelfth Night, which suddenly seem charged with a dangerous erotic energy. The forbidden eroticism that the action of the play invited us to imagine, only to swerve toward orthodoxy at play's end, is finally discovered, recognized, in the wild energies of the play's own discourses. "[S]exual heat," Greenblatt argues, "is not different in kind from all other heat, including that produced by the imagination. Shakespeare realized that if sexual chafing could not be presented literally onstage, it could be represented figuratively: friction could be fictionalized, chafing chastened and hence made fit for the stage by transforming it into the witty, erotically charged sparring that is the heart of the lovers' experience" (89). For Greenblatt, such "verbal friction leads to a perception of the suppleness of language, and particularly its capacity to be inverted, as imaged by the chev'ril glove" (90). Shakespeare's language, then, becomes an especially dangerous form of cross-dressing: the "wrong side" of words made wanton. Common to a number of these resistant critical approaches to Shakespeare was a critique of the exclusive critical attention to details of a literary or dramatic "text" without any acknowledgment of "context." Several of the examples we have seen, especially in feminist, gender, and historicist studies, have argued for a more balanced relationship between text and context. At the same time that these new cultural studies were critiquing the earlier critical reliance on text, they were also calling attention to the textual instability of these plays, whether caused by multiple or "bad" quartos, or by editing choices, or by performance editions, in which performance choices made in a particular production, say Garrick's or Bell's Twelfth Night, would become codified in a printed text that itself might become the basis of yet another production, yielding yet another text (Osborne Trick xv-xvi). Thus, even a play like Twelfth Night, whose "clean" text is remarkably free from the presence of "bad" quartos, or for that matter of any quartos, good or bad, becomes problematical. Any conception of the play called Twelfth Night, then, would involve "the negotiations between

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textuality and performance that mark all drama as a genre on the edge of two distinct material enactments" (Osborne, Trick xvii). Thus in the late twentieth century, Shakespeare studies seemed in the midst of unprecedented redefinition of its very nature and purpose. Such reassessments were often fueled by questions that would seem to be outside the scope of literary analysis and judgment. These were questions of political ideology, social justice, and challenges to cultural assumptions about gender, sexuality, nationality, power, and language. Most contested was the nature of criticism itself, or, more precisely, the notion of a discipline of dramatic criticism isolated from its cultural context—those political, social, sexual, and material issues that shape both the creation of Shakespeare's plays and the reception of them. These new voices—feminist, new historicist, queer, Marxist, deconstructionist, postcolonialist, etc.—, themselves emanating from the contextual margins of earlier critical discourse, had a double concern: on the one hand, a critical goal to document the interdependence between Shakespeare's plays and strategies of political and social enforcement in the culture that produced, and was produced by, those plays; on the other, a political goal of eliminating or at least limiting these strategies of cultural enforcement and containment, "usually built upon the vested interests of male, bourgeois, western and white agencies" (White, Introduction 2). Thus a feminist study of Twelfth Night might examineHOW the sexual disguises in that play, as well as its preponderance of mistaken sexual identities, particularly involving Antonio, might illuminate early modern attitudes toward gender and sexual difference in their various social constructions. Or an approach integrating feminist and new historicist practices might explore how Twelfth Night uses its theatrical energies and poetic charm either to enforce or to subvert social definitions and proscriptions concerning "masculinity," "femininity," "cross-dressing," etc. A Marxist critic might be drawn to the play's social fluidity—all the characters of Twelfth Night are preoccupied with their present or future status—and the anxieties or wish fulfillments the play associates with status; or perhaps such a critic might be drawn to the many exchanges of money and gifts in the play, especially those involving Feste. To a certain extent, these larger, contextual cultural concerns have always been at the center of major changes in critical approaches to Shakespeare's texts. The eighteenth-century re-creation of Shakespeare into a bard equal in status to "the ancients" has to be understood, to some extent, in the light of the newly emerging sense of British nationhood and the aesthetic credentials required by the new nationalism. To invent a great nation it was also necessary to invent and codify a great language and a great national poet. Similarly, in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century,

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the attack on Kemble's "classical" style of acting, on eighteenth-century notions of decorum and generalized character, as well as new emphases on individualism, organic unity, imagination, and sentiment reflected more than a change of opinion about aesthetic values. Rather, those aesthetic values were themselves inextricably connected to new political and individual values raised by such nonliterary crises as the American and French Revolutions, the emergence of a middle class readership and audience, and the emergence of women writers and readers. These changes were occurring so rapidly that they carried within themselves their own dissolution. The once celebrated eighteenth-century poetic diction was displaced by what Wordsworth proclaimed "the language of ordinary men." But even as Wordsworth was writing his famous manifesto, a new generation of women writers of the 1790s and after would challenge those "ordinary men." Indeed, neither feminist nor social critiques of Shakespeare needed to wait until the late decades of the twentieth century to be heard. Some of the radical challenges in the twentieth century can be similarly understood. If Shakespeare holds the mirror up to Nature, whose nature represents Nature? Do women recognize themselves in the characterizations and languages Shakespeare had invented for them? Is the "happy ending" of a play like Twelfth Night, the transformation of independent characters like Olivia and Viola into wives, all that happy? What indeed constitutes "character"? Or "nature"? How does a person of color recognize himself or herself in Othello, or The Merchant of Venice, or TitusS Andronicus? Do the Western and Christian values that define and arbitrate the moral and aesthetic issues of Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure allow Jews and Moslems to participate in the "greatness" of such plays? Does one's position in the social or colonial or sexual order change the nature of the play's experience? Is Shakespeare for an age or for all time? The crises of late twentieth-century criticism, then, are more radical than those of earlier cultural shifts, challenging previously unquestioned assumptions about the nature of writing, reading, understanding, and language itself. Is there a text to be understood? Who is the "author" of such a text? Is it the nominal writer, Shakespeare? The countless cultural voices around him? Or does the auditor in the playhouse or the reader in the study authorize the play simply by arbitrarily imposing something called "meaning" onto that play? Given the limitations of a language that cannot escape its own self-referentiality, is it ever possible to talk of the "meaning" of Twelfth Night, entrapped as we are in a closed system of linguistic signifiers where nothing that is so, is so? Sometimes, as the warfare between close reading and contextual studies became more and

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more intense, the issue seemed to shift from a balance of text and context to the erasure of text. Not surprisingly, as some of these iconoclastic criticisms became more canonical themselves, they began to take on some of the same sins as did the formalist criticism they replaced. Increasingly, any criticism that relied on close reading of a play was defined as "New Criticism" and duly censured for fetishizing a text. And yet, as we have seen, many of these early- and mid-twentieth-century critics were as much concerned with contextual issues as were later critics. As Russ McDonald has argued, "the poststructuralist critique of exegesis has already fostered its own excesses and instances of blindness, as a number of commentators by the end of the 1980s had begun to observe. The mechanical readings of an exhausted New Criticism have been supplanted by another formula discernable especially in New Historicism, contextual essays that begin with the jar of the anecdote and then locate the text in a social or political frame The most notable result is that the wide viewpoint has perforce diminished the details of the textual object" (Shakespeare Reread 2-3). What may be emerging from the fierce cultural conflicts of the last 30 years is a new kind of critical discourse both textual and contextual. At the turn of the new century, there has been, as critics such as Russ McDonald and R. S. White have observed, a return to the practices of close reading without the comfortable certainty that such practices necessarily discover fixed "meanings" in the textual designs they recognize. Stephen Booth's term for such an inclusive practice is articulated in one of the titles of his essays: "Close Reading without Readings." Booth's method, not unlike Norman Rabkin's, is to combine close reading with a keen eye for the incoherent. Driven by a delight in the processes of reading and a simultaneous curiosity about a text's insistent indeterminacy, Booth is fascinated by the "casual, unobtrusive, substantively irrelevant relationships among meanings" that construct reading and readings. Appropriately, Booth's key terms are the music of ideas and undelivered meanings: "I talk about undelivered meanings because, instead of 'What does this Shakespeare (speech, play) mean?' my question as a Shakespeare critic is always 'Why do people care so much about these plays? What's all the fuss actually about?'" ("Close Reading" 45-46). It's a fusion of hard deconstruction and the pleasure principle. And there is something else as well: a humility and openness to textual surprise. In a chapter in his Precious Nonsense, "Twelfth Night: The Audience as Malvolio," Booth makes the extraordinary discovery that, notwithstanding the earnest conviction of audiences, that they ought to celebrate cakes and ale, nonetheless, their

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profound unease with the play derives from their identification, not with the revelers, but with Malvolio. It is not that audiences "like" Malvolio. Rather, Booth asserts, "as audience to Twelfth Night, we are regularly—if momentarily—discomfited by a recurrent need to fight back fleeting urges toward being like Malvolio—being like the character in the play whose presence makes getting into the festive spirit an issue for the characters. I think we often catch ourselves feeling distaste for festival frolic, and I for one catch myself fussing pettily about details I neither want to bother with nor want to admit being small-minded enough even to notice" (Precious Nonsense 149). Similarly, Barbara Everett, using postmodernist deconstructive tactics to uncover a radical incoherence in the play's language (starting with its irreconcilable twin titles), discovers in the fallibility and "lightness" of its language something of the "music" and the spirituality she experiences in the play. Speaking of the play's limited epiphany in 5.1, Everett concludes that its very limitations, its "lightness," shapes her wonder: "the moment affords us an awareness that even a work as light as this 'Twelfth Night, or What You Will,' is not without affiliations with the great and complex learned body of Christian-classical materials that in the Renaissance sought to define human love in terms of the spiritual life" (211). For Everett, this twinning of erotic and spiritual longing is figured in the twins' search for simultaneous identity and reunion, "the play's image of a pursuit of a kind of wholeness beyond expression and perhaps even beyond possibility" (211). Russ McDonald has shown that a number of recent critics have used techniques of close reading to pursue critical goals far different from those of the New Criticism. For McDonald, such critics demonstrate "[w]hat seems desirable at present ... [:] a dual goal of performing textual study while at the same time commenting on the theoretical implications of such a performance" (10). Helen Vendler in "Reading, Stage by Stage: Shakespeare's Sonnets," for example, employs close reading as a way of attending to multiple voices, either those within a text or between text and context, whereas Lynda E. Boose "reads the narrative of Kate and Petruchio with an eye for the issues of class and gender suggested by the fictive frame and also in the context of historical episodes having to do with the manipulation of the economically disenfranchised and the enforcement of hierarchical gender relations" (McDonald 17). Perhaps the most interesting "new" critical approach to Shakespeare's plays to emerge from the critical conflicts of late twentieth century, moreover an approach with a specific applicability to Twelfth Night, is performance criticism. Performance criticism is unique in that it takes as givens, indeed

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it requires, the very antagonistic assumptions about "text," "meaning," and "context" that seemed to threaten the very idea of dramatic criticism. Rather than stage a counterattack against postmodern assumptions, or urge a return to the security of a formalism unsullied by contextual intrusion, as some critics have done, performance criticism actually welcomes the assaults against unity, meaning, or text. Performance criticism is itself a methodology based on impossible contradictions. Like formalist criticism, it insists on examining with scrupulous detail the tiniest of performance choices and the designs or contradictions they make up. It follows the practice of "close listening" and "close watching." And yet essential to performance criticism—for that matter, essential to performance itself—is the impossibility of any such thing as a text. After every performance of Twelfth Night, Feste assures the audience that although the play is "done"—finished, solidified into a text—, nonetheless, there will be another performance tomorrow, and "we'll strive to please you every day" (5.1.384-85). So Puck assures his audience: If our text offends, then "[i]f you pardon, we will mend" (5.1. 408). Moreover, performance accepts, as a necessary condition of business, the impossibility of meaning and unity. As for the postmodern insistence on erasing any privileged boundary between "high" and "low" art, performance critics have taken that "subversive" principle as a starting point. Shakespeare is both the soul of an age and a sharp-eyed huckster of the moment, not at all averse to plucking a few feathers here and there to "beautify" his plumage. Performance criticism of Twelfth Night attempts to trace out the particu lar designs that define a particular performance performed at a particular moment in history. But that performance is, itself, merely an imagined particle existing on waves of past and future performance, not only of different productions of Twelfth Night but of different performances of the same production. Such a critic must, as did the physicists influencing Norman Rabkin, view a performance in terms of two mutually contradictory definitions: as a particle, whose text may be observed and measured, and as a wave, whose oscillation is propelled by forces of changing cultural contexts. Performance critics must try to catch the protean life of performances that will leave no trace, let alone a text. To do so, they must rely on shabbiest of critical equipment, memory. And yet, performance criticism must also be alive to context, necessarily so as each performance relies on the material conditions of its production. Decisions of casting, setting, and design are shaped by both cultural and aesthetic pressures. Actors, directors, and audiences have always come together to negotiate a play. That negotiation—really a collaboration— takes place within one cultural moment as it tries to converse with another.

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It is, of course, an impossible conversation, an improbable fiction. But it is no more impossible than the conversation Viola's sea captain witnessed in the wild waters of the tempest: I saw your brother Most provident in peril, bind himself (Courage and hope both teaching him the practice) To a strong mast that lived upon the sea; Where like Arion on a dolphin's back I saw him hold acquaintance with the waves. (1.2.11-16) To "[h]old acquaintance with the waves," Barbara Everett reminds us, "means to carry on a poised social relationship with them" (205). It means to converse "out of our element" with words that are both musical and corrupt. The reconstructed Globe Theatre's 2002 all-male production of Twelfth Night, with male actors playing the women's parts, offered such a conversation. It was to some extent a historical experiment to revive long discarded conventions. But it was much more. The recovery of certain early seventeenth-century acting conventions, themselves shaped by the cultural anxieties and pleasures of sexual indeterminacy, allowed a twentieth-century audience access into the fused text and context of an otherwise lost moment. Language and gesture, including the language of Orsino as he noticed that, in the boy actor playing Viola, "all is semblative a woman's part" (1.4.33), suddenly resonated with seventeenthand twenty-first-century cultural signals. Such indirect and misdirected conventions, like the exchanges of desire and language within the play, were wonderfully indeterminate, compellingly crossed, darkly illuminating our estrangement from, as well as our participation in, the play John Manningham saw.

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6 TWELFTH NIQHT IN PERFORMANCE The performance history of Twelfth Night is a record of that long collaborative process whereby actors, directors, and audiences have mapped out the full range of possibilities—and then some—within the multiple voices, multiple tones, and multiple structures that shape the volatile energies of this play. Except for a period in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Twelfth Night has always enjoyed at least moderate success in performance, thriving in the twentieth century. But the reasons for its success have varied widely and inconsistently from one theater generation to another, with actors and managers often adjusting the play radically to conform to prevailing aesthetic fashions. In extreme cases, such as during the Restoration, Twelfth Night, as did many of Shakespeare's plays, underwent radical "improvements" in language, tone, and structure. Such changes would recast the play into a strange synthesis of urbane, even cynical, comedy of manners and sentimentality. In time, the focus of the play would shift from Sir Toby and Malvolio to a sentimentalized Viola, then back to Malvolio again, this time a more tragic and suffering figure. Beginning with Harley Granville-Barker in the early twentieth century, directors became more willing to accommodate the discordant voices of the play rather than elevate one feature, say the romance plot or the gull-catching plot, or the tragic Malvolio to the exclusion of others. Increasingly, Feste and his songs, long ignored in productions, began to define themselves at the center of the play. The performance history of Twelfth Night reveals not only a wide variety of interpretations of this play, its themes, and its characters but also major differences about the theatrical conditions and practices that might best realize on stage the rich, multi-vocal unity of Twelfth Night. What happens to an

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audience's experience of that play when those physical and dramaturgical stage conditions are altered? Just what kinds of conventions would mediate between Twelfth Night and its several audiences? Do the spectacular conventions of visual splendor and special effects offered by the Restoration stage create one kind of Twelfth Night? Does the grand pathos of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century acting, particularly of Malvolio and Viola, create another? What are the consequences of detailed, realistic sets, culminating in the unimagined gardens and toads of Beerbohm Tree's illusionistic stage? Or, beginning with William Poel, the quest to perform Twelfth Night using the "original instruments" of Shakespeare's stage conditions? Much of what is known of the early stage history of Twelfth Night comes from a few diary entrees and anecdotes involving audience members, some court records, and a tributary poem published to accompany a 1640 collection of Shakespeare's poems (Winter 14). In one sense there's not much evidence at all of these productions, yet there's enough to indicate that the play seemed to enjoy recognition and popularity until the Puritan era. The diary entries also suggest what elements of the play were most valued, or at least most remembered. Moreover, the number of performances commissioned for special purposes, either at Middle Temple Hall or at the court, suggest a play esteemed enough to recommend itself to these special occasions years after it was first performed. Most scholars agree that Twelfth Night was probably written around 1601, just before Hamlet. Lois Potter, somewhat wistfully, wonders if the play might possibly have been written just after Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. Potter speculates that "if the comedy were later than the tragedy, it could have been an opportunity for Burbage to parody his own performance. The yellow stockings, for example, are the focus of a mock mad scene which can be compared with Ophelia's description of Hamlet's behaviour to her" (Twelfth Night 35-36). It's an attractive if unprovable possibility. Both plays are preoccupied with revealing the corruptibility of "words, words, words." The dark-house scene, where Feste inquires of Malvolio, "tell me true, are you not mad indeed or do you but counterfeit?" (4.2.96-97), would deepen and darken the parodic possibilities that Potter considers. But the evidence, as Potter herself notes, is simply not there. We should be loath to prove reason with such words. There is some evidence presented by Leslie Hotson that the first performance of Twelfth Night may have been at court before Queen Elizabeth on Twelfth Night itself in 1601. Hotson argues that the queen had commissioned a court performance on that date at Whitehall in honor of her guest, Don Virginio Orsino, Duke of Bracciano, and that the play was put on by

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Shakespeare's company, the Chamberlain's Men. Hotson's case rests on a series of topical allusions linking names and events in Shakespeare's play to details in the lives of Queen Elizabeth and her guest. Aside from pointing out the coincidence of the "Orsino" name, Hotson notes that the Duke was the father of "twins, a boy and a girl" (40). Hotson also suggests a series of links between Malvolio, the steward of Olivia's household and Queen Elizabeth's Controller, Sir William Knollys (110) that, collectively, implied that "the Malvolio plot was a joke at the expense of the Controller of the Queen's Household" (Potter, Twelfth Night 34). Hotson also cites a memorandum he discovered among the papers of the Duke of Northumberland, a manuscript from the Lord Chamberlain, the company's patron, concerning "the play after supper": To Confer with my Lord Admirall and the Master of the Revells for takeing order generally with the players to make choyse of [ ] play that shalbe best furnished with rich apparell, have greate variety and change of Musicke and daunces, and of a Subject that may be most pleasing to her Majestie. (15) Most critics value Hotson's scholarly contributions in general concerning royal performance practices, but there is widespread resistance to his specific argument about the inaugural performance of Twelfth Night. J. M. Lothian and T. W. Craig point out "that the play [specified in the memorandum] is nowhere named, nor is any hint given to its subject: it is not even known to be one of Shakespeare's" (xxviii). More criticism is aimed at Hotson's assumption that Twelfth Night would have been an appropriate compliment to the visiting Duke Orsino or his host, Queen Elizabeth, for whom the characters Orsino and Olivia were purportedly named. Lois Potter sums up this skepticism with economy: "it is difficult to see how the Orsino-Olivia story could have flattered either the real Orsino, who was twenty-eight and married, or the Queen, who was sixtyseven and antipathetic to marriage" (Twelfth Night 34). Nonetheless, Hotson raises some tantalizing questions that might link Shakespeare's play with whatever entertainment the historical Duke Orsino did or did not enjoy at Whitehall. Lothian and Craig, among others, suggest that there may have been a different kind of connection between Shakespeare's play and Don Virginio Orsino's visit than Hotson may have had in mind. As Shakespeare was writing Twelfth Night, a play so rich in mirrored persons and echoing names—Olivia, Viola, Malvolio—, another like name, Orsino, might well have occurred to him. Still there are tempting logical leaps here worthy of Illyria. Is it any more reasonable to assume

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that Orsino owes his name to Don Virginio Orsino than to assume that Queen Elizabeth's visitor owes his name to the father of the Viola figure in GVIngannati, one of Shakespeare's sources? We might remember that the GV Ingannati character's name, after all, was Virginio. The first documented performance of Twelfth Night was the one John Manningham saw on February 2, 1602, Candlemas, at Middle Temple Hall and then recorded in his diary, discovered in 1831 (Winter 2). Manningham's entry reveals some awareness of possible sources for Twelfth Night, with its references to Plautus, The Comedy of Errors, and Inganni, although he may have confused the last play with the earlier, and more likely, source, the anonymous GVIngannati, "performed by the Sienese Academy of the Intronati (the Thunderstruck') on Twelfth Night in 1531" (Donno 5). Manningham's only detailed description from the play focuses on the Malvolio subplot, especially 2.5, the gulling scene in Olivia's garden, and 3.4, the yellow-stocking scene (see Smith, Twelfth Night 2). For Manningham, the heart of the play seemed to be the scenes of festive comedy. The romantic scenes, either between Viola and Orsino or between Viola and Olivia, receive no attention. In fact, Manningham's memory of Olivia is somewhat blurred, referring to her as a "lady-widow." Manningham could have been caught up in the generalized and idealized mourning that haunts the Olivia household. He may even have been thinking of one of the chief sources of the play, Barnabe Rich's novella, "Apolonius and Silla," where the Olivia figure is indeed "a widow, whose husband was but lately deceased" (117). Or he simply could have had his mind on Malvolio, as so many other audiences had. There's one other facet of the Middle Temple Hall production that is particularly interesting. As Middle Temple was one of the several centers of legal study in London, the audience for this performance would have consisted largely of law students, their teachers, alumni, and perhaps practicing lawyers. Such a setting calls to mind the surprisingly bounteous references in the play to lawyers and the legal profession. Fabian in particular is quick to offer parodic legal advice to Andrew as he examines the hapless knight's written challenge to Cesario. At one point Fabian pretends to praise Sir Andrew's carefully chosen legal language "[t]hat keeps you from the blow of the law" (3.4.130). Further into the challenge Fabian again praises Sir Andrew's legal dexterity: "Still you keep o'th'windy side of the law. Good" (3.4.139). Feste's wit also seems particularly well aimed at his legal audience. As Sir Topas the curate, the fool may be mocking more than the clergy as he puts on his long professional gown and complains: "I am not tall enough to become the function well, nor lean enough to be thought a good student" (4.2.5-7). There is, then, a distinctly academic,

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professorial air to his portentous nonsense, high equivocal reasonings as familiar to clerics as to jurists. Moreover, in his absurd, high-fantastical descriptions of Malvolio's cell, Feste comes close to an accurate description of the Middle Temple's Great Hall, with its "bay windows transparent as barricades" and its "clerestories toward the south-north ... as lustrous as ebony" (4.2.30-31; see also Akrigg 423). For such a litigious audience, who knew how to turn a word so that "the wrong side may be turned outward" (3.1.10-11), Twelfth Night must have held particular pleasures. In fact, as Lois Potter admits, "[i]t is tempting to think that Shakespeare wrote the part [of Fabian] in the first instance for a special guest appearance by one of the law students, a link between the professional actors and the amateur revelers who were watching them" (Twelfth Night 34). "Tempting," she adds, "but pointless." Such topical references and jokes may suggest that Twelfth Night was written for that Middle Temple audience or that the 1602 performance was indeed the actual first night of Twelfth Night. But it's also possible that the company might have made modest revisions to an existing play to please a specific audience, revisions that proved successful enough to remain in the performance text. Two court records of later performances of Twelfth Night yield surprising excitement from their dusty archives. "[I]n an old manuscript preserved at the Audit Office, London," there is a record of "payment 'To John Heminges, &c, upon a warrant dated April 20, 1618, for presenting two several plays before his Majesty; on Easter Monday, Twelfth Night, the play so called'" (Winter 13). Five years later, at Candlemas, there is evidence of another court performance of Twelfth Night, referred to as Malvolio, in the journals of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels from 1623 to 1642. The entry reads: "At Candlemas, Malvolio was acted at Court by the King's Servants (Feb 2 1623)" (Salgado 40-41). That so many of the few references we have to productions of Twelfth Night up to the Interregnum should refer to royal performances at court or, in the case of the Middle Temple performance, a special entertainment "for one of the academic household's two great holidays, Candlemas" (Smith, Twelfth Night 1), attests to the value and marketability of the play as late as 1618 and 1623. Also of interest is the title of the 1623 performance: Malvolio. Such a title defines the center of interest of Twelfth Night for that period. The name reaches back to John Manningham's interest in "the good practice" with the steward (Smith 2) and forward to Charles I, who felt so strongly about his interpretive design for the play that, as William Winter puts it, "he drew the royal pen through the title Twelfth Night in [his copy of the second Folio] and wrote the name of "Malvolio" in its stead" (30).

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A quite different kind of testament to the popularity of the play as well as the seventeenth century's interest in Malvolio as comic center (Malvolio as tragic center will have to wait another two hundred years) can be seen in the final published reference to Twelfth Night in performance until after the reformation, Leonard Digges's "commendatory verses to the 1640 collection of Shakespeare's Poems" (Sprague, "Shakespeare's Plays" 199). These verses, as A. C. Sprague points out, even more than the evidence of Royal approbation, call attention to the public enthusiasm for Shakespeare's plays, "contrast[ing]," for example, "the lively appeal of Julius Caesar and Othello with the tedium of Ben Jonson's tragedies" (199). One need not accept the aesthetic assumptions behind Digges's contrast to appreciate its evidence of wide popular support for Shakespeare's plays. It is especially interesting to note the prominence Twelfth Night enjoys among Digges's examples, given the paucity of early seventeenth-century references to that play in production. Thirty-eight years after John Manningham wrote his journal entry, Digges singled out for praise the same features. Here is a taste of Digges's quality: [L]et but Falstaff come, Hal, Poins, the rest, you scarce shall have a room, All is so pestered; let but Beatrice And Benedick be seen, lo in a trice The Cockpit, galeries, boxes, all are full To Hear Malvolio, that cross-gartered gull, (qtd. in Wells, For All Time 100) Two years later, the Cockpit, the Globe, and all the other theaters in and around London would be empty. The new Puritan-dominated Commonwealth, led by Oliver Cromwell, would close the theaters in September 1642, with the publication of Parliament's First Ordinance against Stage Plays and Interludes. That edict was followed, after a succession of raids on the Cockpit and Red Bull theatres, by a second edict in 1647 (Parsons and Mason 23). The new government's announced purpose for the closures was, as A. C. Sprague has noted, to protect the populace from wartime injury, yet "it is significant that there was no move to re-open the playhouses when the fighting ceased" ("Shakespeare's Plays" 199). After all, the language of the 1642 edict, as J. L. Sty an observes, hints at divine dissatisfaction with the very institution of the theater. The edict closed the public and private theaters in the city "to appease and avert the wrath of God" (qtd. in English Stage 237). Seven years later, in 1649, the theaters had been "gutted and demolished" (Styan 237).

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The players did their best to live within the ambiguities of the new law, just as they had earlier survived within the ambiguous "liberties" of London, tracks of land of uncertain jurisdiction that skirted the city's official boundaries. The companies could technically keep to the windy side of Puritan law by charging patrons not for theatrical performances, which were, of course, outlawed, but for musical concerts, which were sanctioned by the new government. These concerts would have one very important intermission. During that intermission, the players would perform, "free of charge," popular segments of earlier plays, called "drolls." Because these drolls were not actual plays performed for public consumption but merely incidental mdfree diversions to amuse the musical patrons during the interval, they fell, barely, within the safety of legal protection. In a sense, as Gary Taylor has observed, the actors turned to the resourceful tactics they had used before the building of the first purpose-built theater, called "The Theatre," in 1576: "Deprived of their proud and ornate London theatres, in the lean years between 1642 and 1660, the actors reverted to their vagabond heritage, performing what Francis Kirkman called 'pieces of plays,' excerpts of the most popular scenes from old reliables," 26 in all ("Shakespeare Plays" 19). Three of those drolls were based on Shakespeare's plays: "The Bouncing Knight" (7 Henry IV), "The Grave Makers" (Hamlet), and "The Merry Conceited Humours of Bottom the Weaver" (A Midsummer Night's Dream) (Sprague, "Shakespeare's Plays" 199-200). There are no records of any such "droll" or "entertainment" based on Twelfth Night. When the theaters reopened in July 1660, Shakespeare's plays for a time became central to the new repertoire, but they would appear in a form that sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century audiences would not have recognized. Shakespeare's plays were performed in a strikingly different theater, with women playing the women's parts, for an audience interested in visual spectacle and spectacular stage effects, and produced by theater managers impatient to "improve" Shakespeare through radical revisions of language and dramatic structure. One of the most significant changes was the introduction of female actors on the stage. During his exile in Europe, Charles II had opportunities to see women on stage, as European countries had not banned the practice. When Charles returned to England, he urged that the two patented theater companies he had created, William Davenant's Duke's Company and Thomas Killegrew's King's Company, adopt the continental practice of using female actors. There quickly emerged a keen excitement for this new convention. Jean I. Marsden observes that shortly after actresses took the stage, there was a demand for more women's roles, and more substantial women's roles. One

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of the ways Shakespeare's plays were "reformed" was through the addition of dialogue and whole scenes: Cordelia acquires a lover; Miranda is given a sister; Lady Macduff is given almost as much prominence as Lady Macbeth ("Improving Shakespeare" 26, 25). It was not just that the plays had changed. The business itself had changed: "Actresses quickly became an important part of a production's marketability; they were as much a part of theatrical spectacle as the fine scenery and special effects that the new playhouses allowed" (Marsden 25). One feature of that "theatrical spectacle" came about through the new convention of "breeches roles" for women. The actress playing Viola or Rosalind could "disguise" herself as a boy by putting on form-fitting breeches that allowed the actress to display her body to a degree that ordinary conventions of dress would not allow. There were other "reformations" as well, all influenced partly by the exciting theatrical practices imported from the continent, but partly by paradoxical assumptions about the quality of Shakespeare's plays, works that were simultaneously "unexampled" and badly in need of "improvement." Modeled after European, especially French, architectural designs, these new indoor theaters were smaller than the old public theaters, their stages framed by proscenium arches that were already beginning to enforce— even with an apron jutting out into the audience for soliloquies and the presence of limited seating on stage—a much different, far less interactive, relationship between audience and players. Moreover, the elaborate "picture frame" stage called for more detailed scenery within the frame: more spectacle, more special effects. Much of the new scenery was generally atmospheric, often remaining in place from one play to another and thus not requiring scene changes within a play. Nonetheless, the appeal for more and more scenery, and increasingly illusionistic scenery, would continue for more than 200 years. The addition of moveable scenery, in particular, required intervals, musical interludes, and, in general, longer performances than the "two hours' traffic of our stage" promised by Romeo and Juliet's chorus. In addition to the changes in actors, architecture, blocking, and design, most of Shakespeare's plays performed in the Restoration underwent major revisions of Shakespeare's language. Shakespeare was venerated as the great poet of Nature. He was "the Man," in Dryden's famous words from his essay "Of Dramatic Poesy," "who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul" (56). Not surprisingly, as the theater profession sought to reestablish its market and authority, Shakespeare's plays dominated, at least for a time, the theatrical repertory of London. But Shakespeare's art, particularly his verbal art, was another matter entirely. His proliferation of puns, the wild, inclusive range

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of his vocabulary, and his rich, sometimes indecorous, figurative language came under special attack, as did his seemingly meandering plots and his indifference to such dramatic strictures as "poetic justice" and the classical decorums. Davenant, to whom Charles II awarded one of the two royal patents for producing plays, was also given the right to produce a number of Shakespeare's plays, which he promised to "reform and make fit for the company of actors appointed under his direction and command" (qtd. in Wells, For All Time 186). Some 19 years later, John Dryden, though a genuine admirer of Shakespeare, nonetheless defined much more sharply the "problem" faced by these "restorers" of Shakespeare in his preface to his own 1679 adaptation of Troilus and Cressida: "it must be allowed to the present age that the tongue in general is so much refined since Shakespeare's time that many of his words and more of his phrases are scarce intelligible, and of those which we understand, some are ungrammatical, others coarse, and his whole style is so pestered with figurative expressions that it is as affected as it is obscure" (qtd. in Wells, For All Time 186). Such sentiments, as Keith Parsons and Pamela Mason point out, were also evident in a 1667 revival of James Shirley's play Love Tricks, where a newly written prologue announced: In our Old Plays, the humor Love and passion Like Doublet, Hose, and Cloak, are out of fashion: That which the world call'd Wit in Shakspears Age, Is laught at, as improper for our stage. (23) These changes would radically alter an audience's relationship to all of Shakespeare's plays, most certainly to Twelfth Night, which seemed to have lost some of the popularity it had enjoyed before the closing of the theaters. After 1660, in the first decade of the Restoration, the play had a promising start with three productions, all probably adaptations by Davenant's company, with the celebrated actor Thomas Betterton as Sir Toby Belch (Winter 15). Michael Dobson speculates that the play must have seemed an attractive marketing choice to showcase the new "breeches" roles for actresses, "with Viola's disguise as Cesario transformed overnight into an opportunity to display an actress's legs in close-fitting breeches" ("Improving" 51). But Twelfth Night, like all of Shakespeare's comedies, quickly fell into disfavor. Jean Marsden explains that "the comedies appeared most frequently shortly after the theatres opened when the repertoire was limited and managers needed ready-made plays" (Re-imagined Text 164, n. 53). The diarist Samuel Pepys saw all three of those productions of Twelfth Night: one on September 11, 1661,

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at the Opera, with the King in attendance; another time on January 6— Twelfth Night—, 1662, at the Duke's House; and a third on January 20, 1669. Although John Downes, a fellow actor in Davanent's company and later a theater historian, approved of Davanent's production, praising its "mighty success by its well Performance" (qtd. in O'Dell 1: 38), others did not share his praise. Pepys disliked all three performances although, as his diary entries repeatedly make clear, his eye was as much turned to attractive women, either on stage or in the audience, as it was to "some necessary question of the play." Indeed, Pepys saw no point to this play, calling it on one occasion "a silly play, and not related at all to the name or day" and on another "one of the weakest plays that ever I saw on the stage" (Salgado 50, 53). After its 1669 adaptation, the play fell silent for more than 70 years, perhaps, in part, because the merger of the two royal companies in the early 1680s, "sharply reduce[ed] the number and variety of plays being staged" (Marsden, "Improving" 29). Moreover, for many years, extending well into the eighteenth century, Twelfth Night, along with Shakespeare's comedies in general, suffered neglect at the hands of audiences and companies more interested in Shakespeare's tragedies. In 1703, Twelfth Night underwent a second adaptation, equally doubtful, this time by William Burnaby (Dobson, "Improving" 51). Burnaby's radical adaptation, retitled Love Betray'd; or, The Agreeable Disappointment, represents an extreme version of Restoration "improvement." "Part of the Tale of this Play," Burnaby tells his readers in his preface, "I took from Shakespear, and about Fifty of the Lines; Those that are his, I have mark'd with Inverted Comma's, to distinguish 'em from what are mine" (n.p.). It was Burnaby's hope that the transitions between Shakespeare's words and Burnaby's own would be smooth enough "to make 'em look as little like Strangers as possible." Here is an example of Burnaby's "smooth" integration of these two voices. The opening lines of Shakespeare's play have been displaced to the first lines of Act II, where a melancholy Moreno (the Orsino character) complains to his page Cesario. The quotation marks are Burnaby's attributions of Shakespeare's borrowed words: Moreno:

If Musick be the Food of Love, play on! Give me excess of it, that surfeiting The Appetite, may sicken, and so die. But oh! in vain, the pleasing Sounds once o'er Are lost for ever—! No Memory recalls The Pleasure past, but that which wounds us lives! How true a Wretch is Man? (14)

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Burnaby's adaptation was poorly received both by audiences and critics. Arthur Sprague has dismissed the play as "a negligible piece" (Shakespearean Players 3), and his judgment is universally echoed. O'Dell referred to it as an "impertinence" (1:81), whose verbal "improvements" necessarily fail "because Shakespeare's poetry reduced to prose—and such prose!—loses all reality and is neither fish, flesh, nor good red herring" (1: 83). Love Betray'd fared no better with audiences. After its February 1703 performance, it was revived only once, in 1705, lasting for a single performance. Burnaby himself seemed to acknowledge the play's failure, as he blamed the play's poor reception on the failure of the management of Lincoln's Inn Fields "to supply a concluding masque" (Donno 25). Burnaby indeed had grand but unrealized ambitions for Love Betray'd, hoping that his reinvented text "could serve as a libretto for an opera or a masque" (Campbell 904). More radical transformations, such as William Wycherley's The Plain-Dealer or Pierre Marivaux's The False Servant, both of which used Twelfth Night more as a source than as a text in need of correction, fared somewhat better. Wycherley's play (1677) is a cynical retelling of Shakespeare's, a hard-edged comedy of manners, where characters and audience recover their happy ending only by means of the play's sudden turn toward sentimentality at the end. Still, Wycherley's ending, Elizabeth Story Donno argues, is symptomatic of a fundamental problem shared by Burnaby, Davenant, and other "improvers" of Shakespeare: a misunderstanding of the textured verbal tones and complex dramatic structures of Shakespeare's romantic comedies, in particular, those of Twelfth Night. For Donno, "Burnaby's failure may be accounted for less by the absence of a splendid finale than by his attempt to blend the fashionable comedy of manners with romantic comedy so that the sentimental denouement (like Wycherley's) jars badly with what has gone before" (25). Marivaux's French comedy, The False Servant (1724), stays the course. The play, a wickedly ironic inversion of Twelfth Night, features a Viola-like figure, caught in a swirl of misdirected sexual desires, who exploits the confusion with heartless and comic self-interest. The vast number of adaptations of Shakespeare's plays may have owed something to theater politics. Jean Marsden points out that when Charles II awarded the two royal patents for producing plays in London, including Shakespeare's plays, the most popular of Shakespeare's plays were given to Thomas Killegrew ("Improving" 21). Davenant, however, was given the larger number (O'Dell 1: 23). As a result, Davenant, whom O'Dell cites as the "greater offender" of the two (1: 24), may have been driven to refashioning new plays out of old, such as his The Law Against Lovers, made out of pieces of Much Ado About Nothing and Measure for Measure.

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Marsden argues that "[t]his unequal distribution may be one reason why many more of Shakespeare's plays were altered by the Duke's company than by the King's; handed unfamiliar or seemingly outmoded plays, the Duke's company sought ways to enliven and modernize its repertory of old plays" (22). In any event, the next production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, with, more or less, Shakespeare's language would not occur until the early 1740s. The mid-eighteenth century brought a return to popularity for Twelfth Night, as well as for other Shakespeare plays. According to Harry Levin, Shakespeare's "plays actually contributed one fourth of all productions at the two official London theatres in 1740—an all-time record" (217). Moreover, as Shakespeare had become increasingly a symbol of English national identity, there was, at least in theory, a desire on the part of actor-managers, most notably David Garrick, to restore Shakespeare's language to his plays, as well as to restore a wider range of Shakespeare's plays to performance repertory. Practice, though, was often a different matter. In one of his prologues, Garrick declared his intention to restore Shakespeare's own language to the national poet: "Tis my chief Wish, my Joy, my only Plan,/To lose no Drop of this immortal man" (qtd. in Marsden, "Improving Shakespeare" 31). Although Jean Marsden notes the irony that the prologue that makes this claim is for Garrick's version of The Winter's Tale, which omitted the last three acts of that play" (31), she also argues that in some sense Garrick's claim rings true. There was an attempt to restore some of the language lost in the Restoration adaptations. More to the point, a much wider variety of Shakespeare plays were performed, and performed more often, in the mid-eighteenth century, even if some of those plays were themselves adaptations. In 1741, at Drury Lane, 75 years after it was last produced in London by Davenant's company, then, Twelfth Night returned to the stage under the direction of David Garrick with Charles Macklin as Malvolio, a role he would play for several years. That Macklin would so often choose to play Malvolio suggests a change in the perceived structure of the play since the 1660s, when Davenant's star actor, Betterton, played Sir Toby, who, with more lines than anyone else, would seem the likely star vehicle. By contrast, Davenant assigned Malvolio's role to Thomas Lovel, "an unimportant actor" (Barnet, "Charles Lamb" 180). To an extent, Macklin's production returned to a much earlier sense of the play's comic structure, centering, once again, on Malvolio, as it had more than a hundred years earlier for playgoers such as John Manningham, Leonard Digges, and Charles I. But Macklin's Malvolio was somewhat different from Manningham's. Indeed, Macklin's casting of himself as Malvolio began a long tradition of actors

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and actor-managers choosing that role; one of them was Robert Bensley, who so much influenced Charles Lamb, John Philip Kemble, and William Ferren (Donno 26). Macklin's performance of Malvolio may have helped inaugurate yet another tradition, the association of Malvolio with another uncomfortable comic figure, Shylock, and an increasing tendency to treat both characters more sympathetically, even as quasi-tragic figures. J. M. Lothian and T. W. Craig note that "[i]t is of great historical importance that the first notable Malvolio, Charles Macklin in 1741, also played Shylock: the two parts (each of them the leading unromantic part in a romantic comedy) have often been in one actor's repertoire, and there is a long-standing critical tradition (more long-standing, perhaps, than wellgrounded) of treating them as comparable" (xc). In Macklin's hands, Malvolio was still a comic character. We are still a long way from more sympathetic personations of Malvolio, such as Bensley's or Irving's. But Macklin's interest in the psychological underpinnings of Malvolio's comic behavior may have helped point the way to more complex interpretations of Olivia's cross-gartered steward. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, from 1741 to 1819, Twelfth Night enjoyed greater popularity, especially after 1751 (see, for example, Hogan 2: 657-673, 718). As was the case in its early seventeenth-century performances, the play was several times performed on Twelfth Night itself, giving many of its productions an added dimension of holiday revelry. The theater critic Michael Billington observes that the play "was rarely out of the bill at either Drury Lane or Covent Garden which then enjoyed a monopoly on legitimate drama" (xi). The play not only recorded 113 performances between 1751 and 1800, but as Charles Beecher Hogan reports, Twelfth Night also enjoyed the distinction of being the Shakespeare play "least tampered with" (2: 716). There would, of course, be some tampering. Although as an actor John Philip Kemble had done very little with Twelfth Night throughout his career, filling in for Robert Bensley as Malvolio on two occasions, he did as manager undertake a revision of the play in 1811. His production enjoys the dubious distinction of being the first production to reverse the first two scenes of the play. That tactic has been imitated by many other eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century productions, nervous about an audience's ability to understand the Orsino-Viola plot without immediate exposition. Kemble also added dialogue and even characters to repair what seemed to him to be expositional gaps. But it was Garrick who was most responsible for reestablishing Shakespeare at the center of eighteenth-century English theater. One of Garrick's most important contributions to the staging of Shakespeare's

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plays, his redesigning of the theater itself, however, had a profound, if ambiguous, effect on an audience's relationship to Shakespeare's plays. As Russell Jackson points out, these changes in theater architecture sharpened what in Shakespeare's time had been an ambiguous boundary between stage and audience: "members of the audience were no longer suffered to sit on the stage, costume and scenic design were improved, and better stage lighting allowed the actor to perform effectively within the scenic picture—a move toward the eventual separation between stage and auditorium" (195). While Jackson is careful to note that the new theaters retained such Elizabethan features as universal lighting, nonetheless Garrick's new architecture eventually enforced a different kind of decorum on audiences, who soon found themselves on the other side of a fourth wall. Such a design accommodated itself to increasingly naturalistic acting styles and an increasingly elaborate and realistic pictorial splendor, culminating in the extravagantly detailed stage pictures of the late nineteenth century. Garrick's introduction of more sophisticated lighting techniques and a more judicious placement of lamps allowed the actors to perform deeper into the interior of the stage, "mov[ing] back from the front position which previously they had tended to occupy" (Nicoll 118). The effect was to distance the actors even more from the audience, setting them more securely within the picture frame of the proscenium arch. Subsequent actor-managers, such as John Philip Kemble, were as interested in reforming the theaters themselves, not just the plays those theaters contained. For Shakespeare to become the national poet, it was just as important to make the theaters, like the new 1809 Covent Garden theater, in which his plays were performed "great national institution^]" (O'Dell 2: 98). It is against this acting aesthetic, and this theater architecture, that William Poel and Harley Granville-Barker so strongly reacted in the early twentieth century, setting in motion a Shakespeare revolution that is still turning. Another development in the performance history of Twelfth Night, the psychological exploration of personality, would have its effect on the representation of character in Twelfth Night, especially that of Malvolio. During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, comic characterR were viewed largely from an emotionally and psychologically detached perspective. Like Puck, such an audience would step back, take in a larger pattern of social activity, and judge "what fools these mortals be." But eighteenth-century audiences, influenced in part by the readerly habits cultivated by the novel, began to look more into the interior life of characters. Those audience habits were reinforced by a more star-driven interest in major actors and in their ability to create life-like characters. Macklin, as we've seen, seized on this new appetite by seeking a more psychological

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basis for Malvolio's comic behavior. In the late eighteenth century this new interest was given a sharper edge by the hostility of many Romantic actors and commentators to the classical and aristocratic styles of John Philip Kemble. Edwin Kean in particular resented not only Kemble's enthusiasm for Shakespeare's more conservative and authoritarian "heroes" such as Coriolanus, who, for Kemble, became the spokesman for "a parable about the Tightness of patrician rule" (Moody 44), but also the cool-headed and restrained classical style Kemble used to represent such characters. Kemble had developed an approach that was somehow both formal and florid, "slow, dignified and statuesque" (Moody 44). Those who liked or disliked Kemble's acting were drawn to painterly comparisons. William Macready compared a Kemble performance as being "like a Rembrandt picture" (qtd. in Moody 43). Interestingly, Kemble's older sister, Sarah Siddons, who played opposite her brother in plays such as King John and Macbeth, as Constance and Lady Macbeth, seemed, more than her brother could, to acquire and beget a temperance to smooth her passion. Kean quickly developed a style as opposite from Kemble's as possible, fueled by political as well as artistic antagonisms. Kean's mannerisms were passionate and unrestrained, like those of a Byronic hero (Jackson 197). In Coleridge's famous phrase, "[t]o see him act, is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning" (qtd. in Jackson 197). Kean became especially interested in empathizing with characters such as Shylock who had been dismissed into caricature by earlier generations of actors and audiences. Part of the appeal of such roles was political, to take up the cause of Shakespeare's more neglected or unlikable characters. Malvolio might have offered Kean similar interpretive possibilities, but there is no evidence that Kean ever performed in Twelfth Night. As Russell Jackson puts it (quoting George Henry Lewes): "Kean did not show to advantage in comedy or in parts that gave no scope for 'tenderness, wrath, agony and sarcasm'" (198). Nevertheless, although Kean himself never played Malvolio, other actors who shared Kean's sympathetic instincts were drawn to the role. Perhaps the most interesting example is Robert Bensley, made famous by Charles Lamb's appreciation of Bensley's Malvolio in his essay, "On Some of the Old Actors." According to Lamb, Bensley's powerful psychological study of the steward forever changed the character. "I confess," Lamb wrote, "that I never saw the catastrophe of this character, while Bensley played it, without a kind of tragic interest" (qtd. in Barnet, "Charles Lamb" 183). Describing Bensley's performance, Lamb observes, "Bensley, accordingly, threw over the part an air of Spanish loftiness [a strategy Bensley might have borrowed from Macklin]. He looked, spake, and moved like

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an old Castillian," one whose qualities were "misplaced" in Illryia and one whose "fall inspires us to think of the weakness and yet the majesty of human nature" (183). In the twentieth century, however, Lamb's portrait of Bensley has been questioned. Sylvan Barnet notes that Lamb in his 1822 essay is drawing on memories at least 26 years old and that Lamb was not in regular attendance at the theater during much of Bensley's tenure, and quite young, "only 21 when Bensley retired from the stage on May 6, 1796" (183). Moreover, although others have written about Bensley's Malvolio, Lamb is alone in discovering a "tragic interest." Barnet cites two of Bensley's fellow actors, who seem to have seen a much more comic Malvolio than Lamb remembered, one praising Bensley's "excellent" portrayal of "the vain, fantastical Malvolio," another noting "Bensley's solemn deportment and ludicrous gullibility" (Barnet, "Charles Lamb" 184). Another contemporary remembers laughing at Bensley's skillful comedic gestures, including a cultivated manner of walking, which "reminded you of the 'one, two, three, hop' of the dancing-master" (qtd. in Barnet 186). Barnet concludes that "Lamb's discussion of Bensley, I think, is Lamb writing of his own Malvolio, rather than of Bensley's" (187). Yet despite these reservations, Lamb's sympathetic and quasi-tragic reading of Malvolio has had a profound effect on how that character has been realized, both on stage and in the study, for generations. If Sylvan Barnet is right, then there is an irresistible irony in the fact that one of the actors who was most influenced by Lamb's analysis, Henry Irving, had never seen a production of Twelfth Night but took on the role of Malvolio precisely because Lamb had so convincingly shaped the character for the actor (Donno 29). That "tragic instance" Lamb had observed showed itself most forcefully in the dark-house scene. Elizabeth Story Donno, citing William Archer's review of the production, notes that in that scene Malvolio "had collapsed on the straw in a 'nerveless state of prostrate dejection'" (29). Irving's final exit was equally marked by pathos, if not tragedy. Irving's 1884 performance was received with mixed, and often negative, opinion (Potter 41). For William Winter, "[t]he best of all performances of Malvolio, whether in England or America, was that given by Henry Irving" (32-33). But for many others the performance was a disappointment. Robert Speaight wrote that "Irving had taken over Bensley's Malvolio, as Charles Lamb had handed it down to him, with the result that his detractors applauded him and his admirers were bewildered" (65). For Ellen Terry, who played Viola, the production was "dull, lumpy and heavy" (qtd. in Salgado 210). Still, William Winter, acknowledging the wide and severe criticism of Irving's performance, argued that Irving's

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critics had missed the point. Winter insisted that "Irving was critically censured for doing precisely what it is right to do,—that is, for enlisting sympathy with Malvolio; right, because while the self-deluded being, because of his intrinsic, inordinate, preposterous vanity deserves the ridicule to which he is subjected, he is, in the sequel, so cruelly ill-used as, rightly understood, to deserve compassion" (34). In fact, although Irving's and Lamb's insistence on a tragic Malvolio certainly is open to criticism, if only for simplifying the complex balance of both play and character, nevertheless it raises issues of Malvolio's place in Twelfth Night that still resonate and disturb. The argument about Malvolio's position and gravity in the comic world of Twelfth Night continues to this day, an argument to which we will return. In the twentieth century some directors and actors have been so determined to preserve the festive spirit that they have erased certain troublesome moments in the play, tipping the play off its balance no less than Irving did. Beerbohm Tree's Malvolio dissolved discomfort into farce, as the "peacock-like" steward was always followed by "four smaller Malvolios in the production who aped the large one in dress and deportment" (Donno 31). In his 1893 and perhaps his 1894 London productions of Twelfth Night, Augustin Daly simply eliminated the dark-house scene as well as Malvolio's final "expostulation" (Winter 68). Even William Poel, a strong and eloquent proponent of returning to Shakespeare's language and staging practices, cut the dark-house scene from his production. Perhaps the boldest attempt to censor the more troubling aspects of Malvolio's role was that of the actor-manager Sir Donald Wolfit, who, like Daly and Poel, also eliminated the dark-house scene, contending that "I cannot learn it, and if I cannot learn it, Shakespeare did not write it!" (qtd. in Berry, Shakespeare Anecdotes 160). As the twentieth century progressed, through two world wars, a Great Depression, and a Cold War, productions accommodated a darker vision of Malvolio, indeed of Twelfth Night and much of Shakespeare. Early in the century, Harley Granville-Barker's Savoy production of 1912, featuring an older Fabian and Feste, caught the chill of "what's to come is still unsure." According to Robert Smallwood, "[t]he importance of Barker's Savoy Theatre production[] ... can scarcely be exaggerated" ("TwentiethCentury Performance" 99). For Granville-Barker, the humor itself was rooted in resignation. "Feste," Granville-Barker wrote, "is not a young man There runs through all he says and does that vein of irony through which we may so often mark one of life's self-acknowledged failures" (30). The feel of Twelfth Night's midsummer madness grew more autumnal, as in Peter Hall's and John Barton's productions of the mid- and

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late-twentieth century, even winterish, as with Kenneth Branagh's Renaissance Theatre production, set in a "snow flaked Victorian Christmas" (Billington xxx), especially so in its video version, where winter coats and traces of snow were seen through a bluish camera lens. During those same years the growing somberness of the play's tone often centered on Malvolio. Donald Sinden, who played Malvolio in John Barton's 1969 production, left the stage in the play's final scene more in despair than in rage. "It's a totally empty threat," Sinden said of his promise of revenge. "The House, Illyria, the world will shortly be laughing at his predicament. I believe there is but one thing for Malvolio—suicide" (66). Other Malvolios, like Nigel Hawthorne in Trevor Nunn's film of Twelfth Night, could be seen in his cell and in the final scene bearing evidence of mistreatment: disheveled hair, smudged face, and tattered clothes. And one notable example, Anthony Sher's Malvolio in Bill Alexander's 1987 Royal Shakespeare Company production, could be seen in his dark house chained to a stake. The connection between the "sport royal" of the revelers and the blood sport of bear-baiting was unmistakable. Yet if the overall tone of Twelfth Night performances has darkened somewhat in the twentieth century, and even if these anxieties are, in part, attributable to the Malvolio gulling scenes, that does not mean a return to Lamb's or Irving's conception of the play as the tragedy of Malvolio. Malvolio remains as supercilious, as self-infatuated, as sick of self-love and ill-will as ever—and as open to an audience's laughter. He remains proud to be "not of your element," dreaming, not of love, but of the power invested in becoming Count Malvolio. When Donald Sinden's Malvolio approached Olivia's garden, moments before he discovered Maria's forged letter, he encountered a sundial. Pulling out his watch, he noted a discrepancy between the sun's clock and his own. Not for a moment did this Malvolio consider that Time must untangle this. With a deft and authoritative movement, Malvolio slightly adjusted the sundial. It was an apt moment of comic truth so effective on stage that a generation later, in 1996, Trevor Nunn appreciatively borrowed the business for his Malvolio (Nigel Hawthorne) in his film of the play. The growing discomfort in these productions arises from a different source than it did for Lamb or Irving. It is not that our sympathies unite us with Malvolio but that our laughter, what Fabian calls our "sportful malice," somewhat estranges us from ourselves even as it releases us from the distempered powers of the Malvolios of this world. It is, as so often the case with this play, a question of balance. John Barton, when asked if his Twelfth Night production was a "light" or a "dark" play, replied, "my main wish was to keep what I thought might be a right balance, because it's not as simple as just seeing the play at one

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or other of those polarities. It's so full of contradictions and different elements that it's hard to bring them all out" (Billington 1). In the twentieth century Twelfth Night has thrived on the stage, as it had at no other time before. That is partly because directors and audiences were more willing to explore, rather than to erase, what Barton calls the play's many "contradictions and different elements." But Twelfth Night has also benefited from a number of breakthroughs in stage design, restored language, and speed of performance that represent something of a return to Shakespeare's own conditions of performance. Further, the decline of the actor-manager and the rise of "director's Shakespeare" mean that a play such as Twelfth Night is more likely to be viewed from a holistic, multifocused perspective than from the point of view of a single "star" actor. In fact, in some of these notable twentieth-century productions, as the play discovered more of a balance between pleasure and pain, Malvolio became somewhat displaced from its center. Increasingly, Feste and even Viola were seen as the chief spokespersons for this play. For John Barton, Feste was the "key" to the play. Not only did Feste embody the play's comic strategy of being a "corrupter of words," but, as Barton himself pointed out, Feste is "a classic example of the mixture" of irresolvable dark and light tonalities within Twelfth Night (Billington 67). It is no accident that as Feste assumed more prominence in the twentieth century's understanding of Twelfth Night, Feste's songs, largely suppressed since the Restoration, have been restored. Those songs are essential not only to the tonal ambivalence they rediscover in the play but also to Feste's ironic interrogations, also largely cut in the past, of the various forms of selflove and self-absorption that possess most of the population of Illyria. In a production by Actors' Express in Atlanta, Feste was indeed the enigma at the heart of Twelfth Night's mystery. A physically imposing male actor dressed in women's weeds, Feste was the embodiment of sexual indeterminacy. Moreover, he used a cane as a conductor's instrument, cueing the musicians as well as the lighting. Such a conception of Feste as the play's impresario and chief choreographer has become something of a tradition in mid- and late-twentieth century performances. Lois Potter points to several earlier productions that highlighted Feste's directorial role, most notably by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 1974 and by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1979. "At Ashland, Oregon, in 1974, he controlled the lighting with magic gestures; at the RST in 1979, he was onstage throughout, pottering about with bits of scenery and cueing the

characters' entrances" (Twelfth Night 63). Penny Gay also remembersTHT 1979 Feste, especially the effect of his early return to the stage during thE interval in Terry Hands's 1979 production of Twelfth Night. John Napier's

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set during the first half of the play had been decidedly winterish, snowcovered, and dark, scenes mainly occurring at night. During the interval Feste could be seen planting daffodils and snowdrops. "Indeed," Gay continues, "those who returned early enough saw that the ragged, ill-looking Feste, who seemed to have the role of tutelary god in this production , was present on stage throughout the whole play—when not taking part in a scene, he was at the edge, watching" (39). Similarly, Viola has also moved toward the center of the play, though a Viola much different from the sentimentalized image of Patience that so dominated eighteenth- and nineteenth-century characterizations. By adding a tincture of irony to Viola's passionate "willow cabin" speech, Judi Dench, according to Billington, gave to her character in John Barton's production something of the ironic presence that Feste has always enjoyed, "yet with all [her] contradictions intact" (xxii). Lois Potter describes a 1981-1982 Berkeley production that also presented a more complex Viola: "She was a human being, not an embodiment of a dream of perfect, self-sacrificing love" (Twelfth Night 62). When this Viola ruminated on the frailty of "women's waxen hearts" (2.2.27), not only did she use the First Folio's more ambiguous "For such as we are made, //"such we be" (2.2.29, emphasis added), but also, as Potter notes, "the actress, forgetting her doublet and hose, dropped a mock-curtsey which was also a mockacknowledgement of the sexual stereotyping in the lines" (62). Viola's prominence and revisionist personation, however, has been less certain than Feste's. Irene Dash, for example, has argued that many twentieth-century productions of Twelfth Night have worked against Shakespeare's careful and symmetrical development of both Viola and Olivia as equally complex women who, through their behavior and language, allow the play to raise "questions about women, wealth, power, and conformity" (Dash 211). Instead, as Dash establishes through careful analysis of several productions, directors have through a variety of tactics—including cutting Viola's lines (mainly those that suggest a social parity between Viola and Olivia), rearranging other scenes, casting, and costuming—re-created a Viola more to their liking, the patient, sentimental servant, and the more transgressive and socially independent Olivia suffers by comparison. Still, many of the radical transformations that Twelfth Night has enjoyed in the twentieth century—in its text, its tonal balance, the conception of its characters and themes, the shifting emphasis of its several plots and central characters, as well as the theatrical conditions that shaped its performances—all owe something to what J. L. Styan calls a "Shakespeare revolution" that has swept through twentieth-century productions and

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criticism. At the heart of that revolution were two guiding principles. First of all, practitioners of Shakespeare's theater and literary critics needed to initiate a richer, more synthetic discourse. Styan cites Harley GranvilleBarker's complaint that "an overwhelming proportion of dramatic criticism 'is written by people, who, you might suppose, could never have been inside a theatre in their lives'" (Shakespeare Revolution 2). Second, directors needed to remember that "Shakespeare knew his business as a playwright"; and, consequently, "the finest directors [and scholars] of the twentieth century sought to interpret Shakespeare's meaning by looking increasingly to his own stage practice. The secret of what he intended," Styan concludes, "lies in how he worked" (3, 4). To understand the seeds of that revolution, we must return to the very beginnings of the twentieth century, to William Poel's landmark 1895 production that returned to Elizabethan stage conventions. Even more important was Harley Granville-Barker's 1912 production, one that, by eliminating a detailed "pictorial" set and allowing much more of Shakespeare's language into the play, moved the play from a star-centered definition to something more balanced, more multi-vocal. Shakespeare's plays were quite popular by the turn of the century, so much so that George Bernard Shaw complained of the difficulty of enticing great actresses such as Ellen Terry away from the Shakespearean repertory to perform in his own plays (Potter, Shakespeare 194). And yet, the end of the nineteenth century also witnessed the culmination of a number of theatrical innovations, slowly growing since the Restoration, which would profoundly alter the way Shakespeare's plays were performed and understood. These were significant changes in the treatment of Shakespeare's text, in conventions of gesture and speech, and in realistic and detailed stage design. As we have seen, there were also changes in the size and design of the theater itself, and those changes in theater architecture radically affected the relationship between actors and audience. Some of these, of course, such as the appeal of the proscenium arch, establishing the activity on stage as a "moving picture" viewed by a detached audience, had begun as early as the Restoration. The lighting advances of Garrick and the large, "spectacular" theaters designed by Garrick and Kemble had further enforced a separation between actors and audience (see, for example, Nicoll). Such large theaters required more declamation and grander, more expansive gestures, the kind of painterly effect for which Kemble, no less than his harsh critic Edmund Kean, was famous. Others followed, literally, in their footsteps. As the demand for more detailed, illusionistic scenery grew, scenery not only specific to a particular play but to a specific scene within that play, productions needed to add considerable time

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for scene changes, resulting in longer productions and severely cut texts. Oddly enough, many of these changes, seen in our time as a regrettable distortion of Shakespeare, were perceived by proponents as the fulfillment of Shakespeare's desires. The celebrated choruses of Henry V, for exampl were read, not as a declaration of the efficacy of Shakespeare's minimalist stagecraft, but as a plea to later generations to "correct" the embarrassing limitations of those conventions. Hence, as Richard W. Schoch has argued, "[t]he elaborate pictorial accessories of the nineteenth-century stage ... were the means not of betraying Shakespeare but of realizing what the Victorians took to be his true, yet previously unattainable goal: the detailed depiction of historical events, cultures and geographies" (74). The most spectacular example of such pictorial innovation occurred in the productions of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. His most notorious production may have been his A Midsummer Night's Dream, where live rabbits hopped with abandon around a densely shrubbed on-stage wood. Tree's crowded physical detail realized what Robert Speaight has described as "the heavy materialism of the time" (125). But Tree's—and his designer, Hawes Craven's—detailed set design for his 1901 Twelfth Night was no less astonishingly picturesque. O'Dell wrote approvingly of what he termed "the most extraordinary single setting I have ever beheld. It was the garden of Olivia, extending terrace by terrace to the extreme back of the stage with very real grass, real fountains, paths and descending steps. I never saw anything approaching it for beauty and vraisemblance" (2: 455) Because the elaborate scenery of Tree's production required so much time to strike and rebuild, as one illusionistic scene gave way to another, such scenery had a larger effect on the production than one might imagine. It would be impossible, for example, to follow Shakespeare's scenic route from Orsino's household to the Illyrian seacoast, then to Olivia's household, then back to Orsino's house in 1.4, and finally returning to Olivia's house. The five scenic changes required by those scenes would have provided huge obstacles. Instead, Shakespeare's scenes were regrouped for convenience. The first two scenes were reversed, as were the third and fourth scenes. Thus the action could stay within Orsino's court for two consecutive scenes. Then, in Tree's production, 1.3 could move easily into 1.5 without another major scene change, as both scenes took place in Olivia's house. One effect of such scenic rearrangement was to make the opening sequence of scenes much less volatile, the characters less opalescent in their (our) constantly shifting expectations of Olivia. In Shakespeare's design we are continually forced to shift and reevaluate our perspective as we see Olivia first from Orsino's sentimental perspective, then from

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Viola's empathetic one, then from the point of view of Sir Toby's uneasy confidence in his "consanguinity," then back to Orsino's moonish longings, now modulated somewhat by Viola-Cesario's questioning, and finally, at last, to Olivia herself. But Tree's more scenically ordered sequence lost something of the restlessness of Illyrian consciousness. In fact, somewhat ironically, as J. L. Styan observes, the enormous scale of Tree's and Craven's set design undermined its claims for verisimilitude. "Beerbohm Tree's garden set for Twelfth Night in 1901 was so sumptuous that it coul not be struck, and O'Dell reports that it was used for several episodes for which it was absurdly inappropriate" (Shakespeare Revolution 19). If Herbert Beerbohm Tree represented one radical theory of performance, William Poel represented another. Poel had experimented with Shakespearean staging in the late nineteenth century, presenting, for example, a performance of Hamlet based on the "bad" quarto. His aim was to test the hypothesis that the first quarto might have been an acting edition. In 1897, Poel staged an equally interesting experiment, producing Twelfth Night at Middle Temple Hall, the site of the play's first recorded performance. Staging the play on something like a bare stage—only a table and chair for furniture—and using Elizabethan costumes, Poel's aim was to test the theatrical resources of the Middle Temple space (Styan, Shakespeare Revolution 59-60). He used a platform stage, musical instruments from the mid-sixteenth century, and few cuts. Still, by speeding up the delivery of the language, the play took only two hours, an unheard of pace for that period (Styan 60). Poel came under considerable attack by such critics as Max Beerbohm and William Archer for his backwardlooking, museum-piece Shakespeare. Yet, despite such historically precise insistence on Elizabethan costumes, Poel's motives were more dramaturgical than historical. Indeed, the charges against Poel and his passionate defense anticipated a similar experiment and a similar controversy almost 100 years later. Poel, like the proponents of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre at the close of the twentieth century, was drawn to Shakespearean stage practices not entirely because they were historically correct but simply because they seemed to work, especially for the kind of plays Shakespeare was writing. Poel's objections to the late-nineteenth-century approaches to Shakespeare were threefold: He resisted "the excessive emphasis placed upon the star actor; the arbitrary cutting of the text; and the use of settings that localized, pictorially, the action of the play" (Sprague, Shakespearean Players 152). For Poel, such "realistic" practices disrupted the natural eloquence of an empty stage and an actor's voice. Indeed, the material "realism" of historically accurate sets occurred at the expense of a different kind of "realism," that "of an actual event, at which the audience

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assisted" (qtd. in Sprague 143). Poel believed that nothing should distract from the actors' spoken language. "In fact, the atmosphere, so to speak, of Elizabethan drama is created through the voice, that of modern drama through the sight" (qtd. in Sprague 142). The lack of illusionistic scenery, then, was not an impediment to Shakespeare's art but a necessary condition. Using a bare, thrust stage, with all attention focused on the player, the audience was not diverted by "outward decorations and subordinate details" (qtd. in Sprague 142). Many of William Poel's controversial ideas, particularly regarding staging and scenery, what Peter Brook would later characterize as the power of an empty space, have now become generally accepted tenets among Shakespearean practitioners and scholars, yet they failed to have an immediate impact on the staging of Shakespeare's plays. That was due partly, of course, to the intransigence of established custom but partly, also, to Poel himself. His staging ideas might have been more successful if he had a theater with which to work or more professional actors than the Elizabethan Stage Society, founded by Poel in 1895, could afford. There were also some inconsistencies in Poel's own performance principles. There was an element of nostalgia in the desire for historically accurate Elizabethan costumes, as one kind of pictorial realism was inadvertently replaced by another. And despite his insistence that Shakespeare's language and scenic integrity be preserved, Poel's own production, as we have noted, eliminated the dark-house scene where Malvolio is imprisoned and "catechized," a disturbing moment to be sure but one essential to Poel's insistence on preserving the full range of the "contrasts in the voices of [the play's] speakers" (qtd. in Sprague, Shakespearean Players 152). Perhaps the director and scholar most responsible for realizing at least the spirit of Poel's ideas was Harley Granville-Barker. Granville-Barker did not share Poel's passion for returning to Shakespeare's theatrical conventions in their entirety. His passion, instead, was for something more revolutionary: to exploit certain Elizabethan conventions in such a way as to revitalize early twentieth-century theater. As he stated in a letter to Play Pictorial, "We shall not save our souls by being Elizabethan. It is an easy way out and, strictly followed, an honourable one. But there's the difference. To be Elizabethan, one must be strictly, logically, or quite ineffectively so. And even then it is asking much of an audience to come to the theatre so historically sensed as that" (qtd. in Styan, Shakespeare Revolution 82). Instead, what Granville-Barker drew from Poel was the suggestiveness of a freer, open stage and the enfranchisement of Shakespeare's language. He built an apron that created the effect of a thrust stage. By adjusting the lighting, he was able to allow actors to act as far into the

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thrust area as possible without fear of being caught up in the shadows of the footlights. Speeding up the language allowed for a style of delivery that fused the formal requirements of verse speech with the open cadences of naturalistic speech. Finally, the setting was sparer than illusionistic sets and more abstract than representative. As the designer Norman Wilkinson put it, their setting offered "something that will reflect light and suggest space" (qtd. in Styan, Shakespeare Revolution 95). Unlike Poel's earlier productions or even Granville-Barker's own slightly earlier production of The Winter's Tale, Granville-Barker's 1912 production of Twelfth Night was widely praised by scholars, theater practitioners, and audiences alike. Granville-Barker succeeded in recovering the theatrical energies Poel saw in Elizabethan conditions of performance without falling into a strictly historical literalism. John Masefield was particularly moved by the ability of such simple conventions to communicate "a sense of Shakespeare's power and art, of his mind at work shaping and directing, and of his dramatic intention." Even more significantly, Masefield praised Granville-Barker's production for achieving what William Poel had insistently championed: the fusion of performance and criticism. "The performance," he argued, "seemed to me to be a riper and juster piece of Shakespearian criticism, a clearer perception and grasping of the Shakespearian idea, than I have seen hitherto in print" (qtd. in Styan, Shakespeare Revolution 90). Granville-Barker also achieved more of a balance between festivity and pathos, not by making Malvolio more "tragic," but simply by making the revelers, especially Fabian and Feste, older, and thus more suited to that "vein of irony" (30) that infused itself into an intelligent mind as it adjusts to age and disappointment. Harley Granville-Barker had a profound effect throughout the twentieth century, particularly in his insistence on a relatively uncluttered thrust stage, scenery more atmospheric or thematic than illusionary, brisk reading rhythms that would allow fewer cuts, and a much closer relationship between the actor and the audience. Granville-Barker's set consisted of "a brightly coloured garden with cut out trees that resembled a child's painting" (Beauman 58). Indeed, for Sally Beauman's history of the Royal Shakespeare company, Granville-Barker's Winter's Tale and Twelfth Nigh. both at the Savoy in 1912, were crucial: "productions which changed the course of English theatrical history, and haunted the memories of a generation of actors, directors, and critics" (57). Harley Granville-Barker's ideas of staging and nonrepresentational set design were taken up more than a half century later by Peter Brook in his gymnasium setting for A Midsummer Night's Dream, a set that realized not so much the woods near Athens as the imaginative athleticism of desire

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and Dream. Granville-Barker's staging of Twelfth Night, as well as his reconception of several of its characters, had an even greater effect, influencing major productions by Peter Hall and John Barton, and even extending into the next century to productions at the newly built Globe Theatre and Sam Mendes's production in 2002 at London's Donmar Warehouse. Peter Hall's 1958 Royal Shakespeare Company production, revised in 1960, adopted several of Granville-Barker's ideas, most notably his suggestive scenery, casting, and tone. Hall's sets, "by Lila de Nobili, included glowing gauze prospects of clouded and towered landscape" (Donno 34). Hall also tempered the play's tones by adjusting the ages of two major characters. Olivia, played by Geraldine McEwan, was far from matronly. Stanley Wells, who saw the production "a dozen or more times," described McEwan's Olivia "as a rather silly, giggly, flirtatious, and very pretty young girl" (Royal Shakespeare 44), thereby widening the range and styles of the play's romantic voices. By contrast, Feste was much older, "distinctly melancholy, an elderly fool in great danger of losing his job" (44). Thus by sharply adjusting these two voices, Hall achieved the Chekhovian balance for which his production, and Barton's 11 years later, would received much praise. That balance was further adjusted, as Lois Potter notes, by making Orsino more a satirical than a romantic portrait (Twelfth Night 53). There were some critics, however, who were concerned with the effects such changes had on the overall balance of voices in the play. Lois Potter pointed out that "[t]o encourage the audience to laugh at a man who says 'If music be the food of love, play on' can look like a tacit agreement between director and audience that poetry is really pretty silly stuff. To emphasize Orsino's egotism or silliness is also to shift the emphasis of Viola's role" (54). What preserves the balance of satire and sympathy for Potter was the youthfulness of both Orsino and Olivia. Stanley Wells went so far as to describe Hall's production "as a classic, especially in its realization of the play's more romantic qualities" (Royal Shakespeare 44). John Barton's 1969 (revised 1971) Twelfth Night, justly celebrated as one of the twentieth century's most distinguished and influential interpretations, was itself in part an homage to Hall's production close to a decade earlier. In fact, when Barton saw Hall's version, which Barton called "a definitive production," he was determined, until convinced otherwise by Trevor Nunn, that "I will never go near the play. I don't want to do it" (Billington 61). Moreover, Barton's production, like Hall's, owed much to Harley Granville-Baker's radical experiments with staging, scenery, and the pace of reading. Like Hall, Barton's casting experimented with the ages of certain characters, allowing for a more textured blending of moods. Barton was especially attentive to creating as inclusive an

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interpretation as possible. As he stated in an interview, "I wanted to sound all the notes that are there" in Shakespeare's text (qtd. in Wells, Royal Shakespeare 45). To that end, his Olivia, like Hall's, was younger and more passionate than earlier Olivias, but with a difference. As Michael L. Greenwald relates, "Barton cast Lisa Harrow, then one of the RSC's youngest actresses, and maintained Olivia's girlishness that Hall discovered, yet toned down some of the silliness of the earlier characterization" (91). John Barton also employed an elegantly designed set, which, according to Christopher Morley, the Sunday Times critic, consisted in "a long, receding wattle tunnel decorated by four stately, flickering candlesticks but lit from the outside, sometimes a somber twilit umbre, sometimes soaring into sunburst brilliance" (qtd. in Billington xxi). There may have been suggestions of Orsino's "sad cypress," or Viola's "willow cabin," perhaps even of Malvolio's dark house. For Michael Billington the long, tunnel-like structure receding all the way upstage until it ended at one of the exits, provided the entire production with a "depth of perspective" that seemed an appropriate entrance to an Illyrian altered consciousness (xxi). J. C. Trewin also appreciated the power of the simple set to suggest the mood of the play, especially in its definition of Viola's first entrance. The doors at the upstage end of the tunnel suddenly opened as Viola (Judy Dench) emerged through smoke looking like "a figure entering a world of fantasy" (qtd. in Billington xxi). Similarly for Sheila Bannock, in her review for the Stratford-upon-Avon Herald, "the setting reminded me of the tunnel of a dream, a journeying place of the mind" (qtd. in Potter, Twelfth Night 48). Yet despite these moving visual effects, Barton's Twelfth Night, like Shakespeare's, was created by sound. On stage, Barton kept the focus on the text, keeping as much of it as possible and encouraging his actors to speak the lines in a way as to discover their full poetic and psychological power. "The words," Barton tells his actors, "must be found or coined or fresh-minted at the moment you utter them. They are not to be thought of as something that pre-exists in a printed text. In the theatre they must seem to find their life for the first time at the moment the actor speaks them" (50). For Stanley Wells, the production illustrated "one of John Barton's greatest skills as a director; that is, the capacity to train his actors to deliver verse with a sensitivity to its full potential range of meaning, both intellectual and emotional" (Royal Shakespeare 46). Feste's music provided another on-stage sound that was central, not only to the taffeta moods of this play, but also in defining Feste himself, whom Barton described as central to the "balance" of his production (67), as a multi-voiced corrupter of words. Even before the opening moments of the play, the stage and

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auditorium were immersed in music. Lois Potter remembers that "Orsino was onstage listening to a lutenist for a good fifteen minutes before the play began" (Twelfth Night 48). And throughout the play, as one reviewer noted, "[e]veryone in the cast seemed to be humming Feste's songs at odd moments" (qtd. in Potter 48). There were also off-stage sounds as well. Throughout the production one could hear the sounds of the sea, perhaps evoking, as it did for Lois Potter, Mathew Arnold's "'eternal note of sadness'... beating against the enclosed world of human affections" (Twelfth Night 48). Or the same sound might establish the rhythms of a mysterious motion, with its dual hints of providence and appetite. Sometimes human voices were used quite effectively, as when Malvolio's off-stage sobs punctuated Sebastian's wrangling with his reason in a scene discussed in Chapter 3. Another sign of the balance of the production was the shared preeminence of four characters: Viola, Feste, Malvolio, and Olivia. Critics and audiences alike were moved by Judi Dench's Viola, especially the complex harmonies she discovered in the character—all the notes, as John Barton might have said. She was at once vulnerable and resourceful, deeply sympathetic and deftly ironic, romantic and practical. Stanley Wells remembered Viola's poised response to Olivia's emerging passion in 1.5: "great comic tact, suggesting rueful sympathy with the unfortunate Olivia along with a humorous embarrassment at her own plight" (Royal Shakespeare 50). For Michael L. Greenwald, Dench's Viola perfectly caught the tonal balance of the play, poised between mirth and sadness (92). Feste in this production was also seen as a kind of microcosm of the play's contradictions. For John Barton, Feste (Emrys James), like the play itself, resisted any definition, "either dark or light, either funny or sad. He's a classic example of the mixture" (Billington 67). But in addition to Viola and Feste, two other characters, Malvolio and Olivia, were also at the heart of this production, as if, collectively, these characters defined the multiplied center of a natural perspective. Donald Sinden's Malvolio was hilariously comical in his overwrought self-love and self-importance, the source of comic business, such as the scene with the sundial, that has been appreciatively stolen in subsequent productions. And yet Malvolio's melancholy, which Donald Sinden described as "suicidal," was allowed its full voice. That voice contributed to, but by no means dominated, the feeling of sadness that washed though this production. Equally contributing to that tone were Viola, Feste, Maria, and, especially given their autumnal ages in this production, Sir Toby and Sir Andrew. This chapter has given much attention to three productions of Twelfth Night in the twentieth century: Harley Granville-Barker's 1912 production,

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Peter Hall's 1958/1960 production, and John Barton's 1969/1971 production. These three productions have collectively shaped and sustained a revolutionary shift from the dramaturgical assumptions that had guided realizations of Shakespeare's plays—and certainly Twelfth Night—since the Restoration. This shift was not so much a fulfillment of William Poel's dream to return to historically authentic re-creations of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century material performances. Rather, it was a determination to reinvent the spirit if not the letter of Shakespearean staging— open, thrust stages, minimalist and suggestive scenery, fuller texts and acting styles that were both more presentational and more direct. There would, of course, be highly visual, illusionistic conceptions of Twelfth Night presented on late twentieth-century stages, but the new emphasis would be on simplicity, open spaces, and aural, rather than visual, stimulation. These principles would influence countless directors such as Tim Supple, whose 1998 production of Twelfth Night at the Young Vic was both visually simple, its costumes vaguely suggesting an Eastern exoticism, and aurally rich, the alien beauty of its Eastern melodies and instruments creating an Illyria of otherness and wonder. In an interview about that production, Tim Supple explained that he decided against establishing an unambiguous setting—and set—for his Twelfth Night to suggest the play's mysterious contradictions: "I can see the benefits of deciding to find a concrete context for the play—you can then quite easily make the play very accessible and vivid. But for me, this limits the ultimate experience an audience can have. Exactly what this is, is hard to put into words. It is related to each individual in the audience responding emotionally, instinctively and cerebrally to the more mysterious aspects to life. I think Shakespeare consciously makes his settings mysterious in order to allow for this" (Interview n.p.). Sam Mendes's 2002-2003 production was also a production that found the multiple dimensions of Twelfth Night with highly suggestive staging and music and a minimum of detail. For much of the play the stage consisted of a single chair facing a large, open frame that sometimes suggested an idealized painting, other times a mirror—narcissistic or magical. When Orsino or Olivia would sit dreaming of their imagined loves, the sheer power of their high fanastical wills drew the image of their passion into the frame. These images sometimes underwent a haunting metamorphosis, such as occured at the end of 1.5, when, as Olivia sat in her chair dreaming of Cesario, Viola stepped through the frame and exited at the same time Sebastian entered the frame, wearing the same clothes and assuming the same attitude Viola had exhibited. Antonio entered and 2.1 began as Olivia continued dreaming. That single device created a world of wonder

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and self-love, idealized dreaming and hints of the untangling providence of Time. Moreover, the presence of Olivia, Sebastian, Antonio, and Viola on stage together created a suggestive image of intermingling desires and wills, as well as the magical realization of those desires. Such minimalist yet subliminally suggestive sets illuminate not just the fictional world of Illyria but its double: those vaguer outlines of another world behind the fictional Illyria, rather like a dream than an assurance. So for Anne Barton "[b]ehind Twelfth Night, Shakespeare's London hovers like a ghost: an outline scarcely visible until you look for it" ("The London Scene" 115). The play offers glimpses of a familiar London life in the deep recesses of dreamy Illyria: the Elephant Inn in Southwark; a historic and up-to-date mercantile center "renowned for its 'memorials and the things of fame'"; the great houses of Somerset or Leicester; Middle Temple's Great Hall, or even Whitehall itself, where Twelfth Night may have been performed (115). In the 1995 Royal Shakespeare production of Twelfth Night, Ian Judge created a similar double vision. Behind the simple set that depicted the high-fantastical world of Illyria was a gauzy backdrop with painted images of the Stratford townscape. Taking their cue from Harley Granville-Barker's practices, many late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century productions of Twelfth Night were staged on limited sets. Where there was a set design, it was more often suggestive, atmospheric rather than illusionist. Thus Shakespeare and Company's 2000 production was set against fragments of a deteriorating seaside carnival. Feste observed the foolery from his detached perspective, sitting on a ruined roller-coaster track. The Theater at Monmouth's Twelfth Night, also produced in 2000, was set in a 1920s seaside resort. It was a world of glamour, music, and sand. Although in many ways an upbeat production that evoked much festivity out of the play's music, there was, nonetheless, an edge to the merriment. Moments before the play began, we could hear the sea and the thunder. The spirit of this Illyria was defined by Feste, a source of much of the humor and song yet played as a vaudeville comedian getting on in years. The program for this production announced that "[o]ur setting the play in the 1920s recalls a period in the more recent past marked by an almost frantic merrymaking. This time was a celebration of youth and life dancing on the edge of an economic and political precipice" (Program n.p.). The Alabama Shakespeare Festival's 2000 production also used an atmospheric setting, this time a 1930s cabaret mood. The setting, then, suggested not only the play's sexual indeterminacy—"[t]he slightly feminine sound of male crooners or the smoky masculinity of Connie Boswell" (Gash, "Director's Notes")—but also a festival spirit marked by the pressure of borrowed time. In fact, there was a consciousness of time,

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and time's limits, one of the play's central images, that presided over all three productions. In delay there was no plenty in these Illyrias. Other companies, such as the touring five-person troupe Actors From the London Stage, thrive on early modern practices such as open spaces and doubling, tripling, and quadrupling roles. In the 1994 performance of Twelfth Night at the Clemson Shakespeare Festival, Geoffrey Church played Orsino, Feste, and Fabian. In the scenes between Feste and Orsino, especially the performance of "Come Away, Death" in 2.4 and Feste's mockery of Orsino in 5.1, Church sharpened the metamorphosis from character to character to such a degree as to suggest a kind of comic psychomachia. Similarly, the work of the American producers/directors Ralph Alan Cohen and Jim Warren, founders of Shenandoah Shakespeare, has also been profoundly influenced and inspired by the effects that returning to the principles of Shakespearean staging practices might have: not so much in discovering the ruins of a sixteenth-century theater as in rediscovering and releasing the living energies that reside in contemporary theaters. Getting at the spirit rather than the letter of Shakespearean stage practices, Shenandoah Shakespeare generally perform in modern dress with contemporary music, just, as the company keeps insisting, as Shakespeare himself did. They employ universal lighting, which encourages a variety of opportunities for audience interaction. "Above all," Peter Holland observes, "their style of performance is epitomised by their commitment to a brisk speed, trying to keep the 'promise' of the Chorus in Romeo and Juliet in 'the two-hour's traffic of our stage'" (198). Two of Shenandoah Shakespeare's productions of Twelfth Night exploited every opportunity for audience intervention, thereby implicating the audience in the caterwauling. That was quite literally so in their 1995 production, directed by Murray Ross, where, in the disruptive midnight roistering scene, the revelers chose their dancing partners from the audience. Shenandoah Shakespeare often experiments in thematic doubling, as they did in their 2000-2001 Twelfth Night, where the actor playing Maria (David McCallum) doubled as Sebastian, thus creating a gendered ambivalence in both brother and sister. Cohen's work represents another kind of response to Harley Granville-Barker's vision—a call for a critical language that could be shaped by both scholarly and theatrical practice. After constructing his Blackfriars Playhouse, a re-creation of Shakespeare's company's own indoor theater, Cohen inaugurated a series of conferences where scholars and theater practicioners would collaborate in testing out the resources of this new space, both in deepening the scholarship of Shakespeare's theater and realizing the potential of our own. As Ralph Alan Cohen has stated on numerous occasions, "the farmer and the cowman should be friends."

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The twentieth century began and ended with a search for Shakespeare's theater and dramaturgy. The last years of the twentieth and the first years of the twenty-first centuries have seen a number of attempts to recover early modern theatrical spaces: the reconstructed Globe Theatre in London begun and inspired by Sam Wanamaker; the ongoing reconstruction of the Rose Theatre by Tina Packer's Shakespeare & Company in Massachusetts; and Ralph Alan Cohen's completed Blackfriars Playhouse and his planned reconstruction in Virginia of the Second Globe Theatre of 1614, itself a restoration of the first Globe, destroyed by the fiery consequences of special effects. Shakespeare's new building, then, was Janus-like, looking backward and forward in history simultaneously. Almost 400 years later, these restorative projects are also partly driven by nostalgia, the creation of tourism, and an impulse to a museum-like preservation of the past. The recent uneven history of Shakespeare's Globe is a case in point, sometimes choreographing groundling responses, sometimes indifferent to, or even working against, the power of an open, thrust stage. But these experiments potentially represent something more than theatrical archeology or commercial nostalgia. At their best, they can, as Ralph Alan Cohen puts it, help us recover lost joys. The Globe Theatre's 2002 all-male production of Twelfth Night wonderfully made an audience feel the transgressive dangers of crossed-dressed casting. A half hour or so before the play began, the tiring house was opened to the audience, allowing us to see the characters putting on their variously usurped attires and practicing behavior to their own shadows, as they mastered the voices, gestures, and body language that would transform them into a new character, a new gender, a new status. That we were allowed to witness these rehearsals implicated us in the formation of those codes and their power. We discovered, to quote Henry V only slightly out of context, that "we [were] the makers of manners" (Henry V 5.2.245). But we were also vulnerable. Because the production deliberately mixed sixteenth-century conventions of theatrical, social, and gender performance with twentieth-century conventions, we often felt an Illyrian-like bewilderment in interpreting these mixed codes, particularly regarding Viola's personation (see Ford, "Estimable Wonders," esp. 53-58). The actor's performance of Viola's femininity was somewhat more naturalistic than his more presentational performance of Cesario's masculinity. As a result, Viola seemed to grow more "feminine" as the play progressed. One moment toward the end of the play was especially effective, providing a baffling epiphany. After the recognition scene between Viola and Sebastian had uncovered layers of gender and erotic disguises, Orsino at last moved confidently toward his "fancy's queen," and chose the wrong

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actor. It is a piece of stage business often performed in twentieth-century mixed gender casting and one that usually provokes a confident and indulgent laughter from an audience so much more knowledgeable about such things than Orsino. But this time our laughter turned on ourselves. Why were we so confident that Orsino, faced with two nearly identical male actors distinguished only by their different gestures and movements, had chosen incorrectly? It was we who were fooled by the indeterminate conventions we helped create. Which way runs the stream? By the end of the twentieth century, the interest in examining early modern stage practices, not as an impediment to the richness and engagement of Shakespeare's plays but as the artistry that bodies forth his drama, had become the standard. The elaborate visual settings, sumptuous illusionist detail, and massive cuts of Tree or Daly seemed indeed quaint now, practices left behind by the Shakespeare revolution. And yet the whirligig of time would bring in its revenges, for the visual spectacles and illusionist realism of the past would find a medium after all, not in theatrical performance but in film—Shakespeare's plays presented through moving pictures, which, "even in their earliest forms, promised to recreate scenes and scenery on a scale unimaginable in a playhouse" (Schock 72). Although comedies do not always fare as well as tragedies on film or video, lacking the relentless, forward-driven narratives and the star roles tragedy invites; and although one might think that Twelfth Night, with its meanderin action, sexual disguises, not to mention its recognition scene with "identical" twins, might fare even more poorly, nonetheless, Twelfth Night has under gone a number of film adaptations, beginning with the 1910 Vitagraph silent film and ending, for the moment, with Trevor Nunn's highly praised 1996 film and Tim Supple's 2003 televised adaptation of his 1998 stage production of the play. The most interesting of these filmic productions will be those that "escape" what H. R. Coursen calls, quoting Max Reinhardt, "the condition of 'the photographed word'" (37). Such films are sensitive to their theatrical source while at the same time remaining uncompromisingly cinematic, in effect creating a new synthetic form. Directed by Charles Kent, the film of Twelfth Night, one of 11 silent versions of Shakespeare's plays produced by Vitagraph, is only 12 minutes long. The film immediately immerses us in the visual—actual sea footage of a storm and the rescue of Sebastian. We quickly move to Orsino's household, where Viola is employed, to Olivia's house. With only glimpses of Feste, Toby, or Andrew, the movie's subplot focuses on Malvolio wielding his staff. A series of title cards yields the invented love letter "complete" with Olivia's signature. We move through the letter-reading scene, where Malvolio is hit in the eye by a stone bolt, and then to Olivia's house for

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the cross-gartered scene. Kenneth S. Rothwell writes of the film's sophisticated photography that it employs "[s]omething close to a deep-focus shot": "in Olivia's mansion, courtiers retreat and exit in the background even as in the foreground Viola woos Olivia: 'Make me a willow cabin at your gate,/And call upon my soul within the house'" (History 11). It is interesting that such an overtly cinematic stratagem would for a moment suggest a theatrical convention, the simultaneous presence of two thematically related events on one stage. There wouldn't be another film of Twelfth Night for more than 40 years, with the appearance of Yakov Fried's 1955 Russian-language film in black and white. Like the Charles Kent silent film, Fried both celebrates and vexes the film's cinematic authority for reasons both artistic and ideological. Composed just after the death of Stalin, in the fresh air of political renewal, Fried's movie opens up Shakespeare's play into a world of expansive great houses and the rich, open landscape of far-away mountains, open fields, and the promise of unlimited vistas or reverberate hills. Such rich cinematography, along with some crucial editorial judgments with Malvolio and Antonio, makes for a decidedly cheery vision of the play. Often the effects of such "painterly" landscapes were to resist the dominant realism that ideology had imposed on artistic vision. Instead, Fried "quotes" the play's world within a frame that announces its own artifice. Michael Hattaway notes that "Fried's Russian version of Twelfth Night used a large number of shots that recalled the themes, patterns, and lighting of Renaissance paintings, and then offered a first view by Viola of 'the coast of Illryia' that looked like a Symbolist painting" (87). Jack Jorgens saw a more complex self-consciousness, a fusion of realistic and expressionistic features that had the effect of questioning, challenging one another (25). Another interesting feature to this production is a more vigorous Viola, who, for once, gets to "sing both high and low" (2.3.35), serenading both Orsino and Olivia with her lute and her voice. Trevor Nunn's film also succeeds in acknowledging the theatrical conventions of its source while unabashedly "translating" those theatrical elements into cinema. Nunn begins the film with cinematic shots of a passenger ship at sea, inventing a kind of mock prologue that depicts the sinking of the ship and the rescue of Viola, as the script of Nunn's own verse, echoing snatches of Shakespeare's language, rolls on the screen. A distinguished Shakespearean stage director and for 18 years either the director or co-director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Nunn had never directed Twelfth Night on the stage. Perhaps for that reason his movie of Twelfth Night is a confluence of theater and film. Nunn uses filmic techniques, such as cross-cutting in the "O Mistress Mine" scene previously

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discussed, as easily and as expertly as he uses Shakespeare's language. At the same time his vision of the play is in the tradition of GranvilleBarker, Hall, and Barton, even borrowing John Barton's famous "sundial" scene with Malvolio. Samuel Crowl notes the way Nunn's camera takes in the omnipresent sea, one of the play's most insistent verbal images (8384). Moreover, Nunn's emphasis on song and music, including material Nunn himself introduces, allow his film to capture some of the aural energies of the play without compromising the film. For we are most certainly watching a film. In one wonderful moment early in the film, Nunn uses the camera to capture the complex energies swirling within Viola. We see her in disguise, walking along the sea, determined to master her manly walk in a state of mind both resourceful and ironic. As the camera moves out to sea, we see Saint Michael's Mount against the waves, with its sad hint of Lycidas and Sebastian. Yet, as Rothwell writes, "Nunn does not allow any of the potentially serious subtext to spoil the fun of a good movie, which is about 'what you w i l l ' . . . " (History 227). Other films enjoy a more mixed success. Despite excellent acting from Sir Ralph Richardson (Sir Toby), Sir Alec Guinness (Malvolio), and Joan Plowright (Viola/Sebastian), the 1970 Dexter-Sichel film was too much the photographed word to discover itself as a film. It was shot against a painted backdrop of Illyria on what seemed a studio set. Moreover, the decision to have Joan Plowright play both Viola and Sebastian turned the recognition scene into more trickery than wonder. For Coursen the decision was a "ludicrous" one (Shakespeare: The Two Traditions 201). The 1980 BBC-TV version, directed by Cedric Messina and John Gorrie, although more successful than earlier work in the series, such as A Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It, and graced with spirited performances by Felicity Kendall as Viola and Sinead Cusack as Olivia, still suffered to some extent under the weight of canonical seriousness. There was a strange echo of the detailed, illusionistic settings of Beerbohm Tree. Susan Willis notes that both of John Gorrie's televised BBC Shakespeare plays, "Twelfth Night and The Tempest, are based on the belief that the places shown need to have a real geography, that spaces need a definite physical relationship visible on camera. Hence, in The Tempest we see the trees on one side of the island's cliff face and the shore on the other, and in Twelfth Night, we could draw a blueprint of Olivia's house" (191). Furthermore, the rich detail of that "geography" depicts not so much Illyria as BBC England. As Laurie Osborne observes, the production's "intimacy with the country house ties Twelfth Night to other popular BBC productions like Upstairs, Downstairs and places the play firmly within the BBC's larger commitment to English culture and

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manners" (Trick 119). Still, this Twelfth Night remains one of the better BBC Shakespeare productions. The 1988 Kenneth Branagh/Paul Kafko Renaissance Theatre production is another interesting case of a film rich in fine performances and offering an interesting interpretation of Twelfth Night, darker, more wintry, yet a version not quite sure if it wants to be television or theater. This version uses a number of accomplished Shakespearean stage actors such as Anton Lesser (Feste), Frances Barber (Viola), and Richard Briers (Malvolio), all of whom are strong. Lesser's Feste is a bitter fool, even more drawn to the bottle than is Sir Toby. There are moments when his unease with the gull catching grows especially sharp, as when, preparing for his Sir Topas scene, he suddenly explodes, "NAY, I am for all waters" (4.2.50, emphasis added). In fact, several characters in this play seem to embody a violence that can erupt at any time. This is a world, not of wind and rain, but quite literally of wind and snow. Much of the play is set outside in a snowy cem etery, decorated by a wispy Christmas tree: a kind of theatrical set, made even chillier by the use of a camera filter that washes everything into an icy blue. Two other television versions warrant some note. The first is the Animated Twelfth Night (1993), part of the series of animated Shakespeare "produced jointly by Soyuzmultfilm animation studios in Russia and a Welsh television production company" (Osborne, Trick 114). It is a brief version, only about 30 minutes long, with necessarily massive cuts and rearrangements of scenes. Malvolio's story is severely cut, eliminating entirely his treatment in the dark house as well as his cry of revenge in 5.1, effectively erasing the darker tones of the play. Still, its use of puppetry, rather than conventional animation, as well as its photography, creates some interesting effects, finding a way for this new medium to reinvent a powerful theatrical moment. Laurie E. Osborne defines a kind of "layering" of scenes that the puppetry allows, an effect not unlike the "deep focus" experiments of Fried or the capacity of an unlocalized stage to accommodate two separated fictional moments at the same time. In the animated Twelfth Night,AS Osborne points out, "Viola's meditation on the ring (2.2) and a combined scene between Antonio and Sebastian (2.1 and 3.3) occur simultaneously in the background and foreground" (114). Another intriguing televised version is Ron Wertheim's Playboy production of Twelfth Night (1972). As one might expect, the language of the play is ruthlessly cut to accommodate numerous and oddly innocent examples of Illyrian erotic revelry, rich in nudity, pastoral landscapes, soft-focus camerawork, and slow motion. The verbal cuts are indeed exhaustive, as if authenticating the professed work ethic of one of Clarence's murderers in Richard III—"Talkers are no good

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doers" (1.4.351). Yet at the same time the film is so replete with "quoted" idioms and other small details from the play, details hardly necessary to Playboy's agenda, that their effect is to suggest Wertheim's genuine and playful affection for his source, an affection that is contagious. This is the Joe Macbeth of erotic videos. All of these films and videos, although of varying quality and textual closeness to Shakespeare's text, nonetheless raise interesting issues about the relationship between theatrical and cinematic Shakespeare. Indeed, some of these versions participate in the same dialogue of reinventing Twelfth Night that we have been following in stage adaptations. Several of these films and videos rearrange some of the same scenes that earlier theatrical productions had rearranged, especially 1.1 and 1.2, as well as 2.1 and 2.2, and for the same reasons: either to clarify the exposition or to shift the emphasis from one character to another. These versions are centered on different characters and relationships and reveal different readings of both, in particular the shifting centrality of Viola, Malvolio, and Feste, as well as differing conceptions of the homoerotic possibilities in the relationships between Sebastian and Antonio, "Cesario" and Orsino, and Viola and Olivia. Most interesting is a struggle for artistic integrity as these films and videos attempt to appropriate Shakespeare's aural theatrical energies without losing their visual and cinematic energies. John Wilders, the literary consultant for the BBC Shakespeare series complained that one of the chief frustrations of that series was its failure to compensate for the loss of an audience and its shaping powers. How can film discover within its own resources conventions that will appropriate the power of an audience without slavishly imitating theatrical conventions? Suddenly we are back to the dilemmas faced by William Poel.

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SUQQESTED READINQ We should begin with bibliographies. In fact, there are a number of helpful bibliographies of studies of Twelfth Night, although some of them are in need of revision. Bruce Smith's Twelfth Night: Texts and Contexts has an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources on Twelfth Night and its cultural contexts. James L. Harner's World Shakespeare Bibliography Online is also helpful, with thoughtful and judicious annotations that quickly get to the heart of an argument. Another valuable general bibliography is Shakespeare: A Bibliographical Guide (1990), edited by Stanley Wells, a "thorough revision" of his 1973 work. Wells's Guide is a collection of helpful bibliographical essays, with succinct descriptions that clarify not only the thesis of a particular work but also its place in a continuum of Shakespeare studies. The discussion of Twelfth Night criticism occurs in the chapter "The Middle Comedies," written by R. L. Smallwood. These two bibliographies are excellent places to begin, even if Wells's publication date limits its coverage of more contemporary critical discussions. The same might be said for two other bibliographies, David M. Bergeron and Geraldo U. de Sousa's Shakespeare: A Study and Research Guide (3rd edition, rev. 1994) and David Bevington's Shakespeare (part of the Goldentree series of bibliographies). Bevington's bibliography, comprehensive for its time but limited by its 1978 publication date, arranges its entries according to play and then according to more defined features of that play. So the entries on Twelfth Night are arranged according to such subtopics as "sources," "general studies," and "character studies." In addition, many entries are cross-listed, appearing under the category of "Twelfth Nighf but also, mixed with other plays, under other rubrics: contextual, thematic, style and language, psychological, political, etc.

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Bevington, although not annotating his listing, does place an asterisk next to those works he considers "most nearly indispensable" (Shakespeare xvi). Bergeron and de Sousa's book, a series of bibliographical essays, is both a bibliography and a guide to writing about Shakespeare's plays using sources. Another annotated bibliography, Larry Champion's 1986 The Essential Shakespeare, also has a number of brief descriptive references to studies of Twelfth Night. Annotated references to Twelfth Night can alO be found in the bibliographies of Sajdak (1992) and Rosenblum (1992). There is also Philip Kolin's extensive Shakespeare and Feminist Criticism: An Annotated Bibliography and Commentary (1991), "lavishly informative but non evaluative" (Kolin 47), with several often richly detailed references to studies of Twelfth Night. Finally, the Arden, New Cambridge,AN Oxford texts of Twelfth Night all offer suggested readings (Lothian and Craik; Donno; Warren and Wells). In recent years there have been several valuable bibliographies of studies of Shakespeare in performance, whether stage- or film-centered. They include Hugh Macrae Richmond's Shakespeare and the Renaissance Stage to 1616 and Shakespearean Stage History 1616 to 1998: An Annotated Bibliography of Shakespeare Studies 1576-1998. Other performance-related bibliographies focus on Shakespeare on film, such as "The Reel Shakespeare: A Selected Bibliography of Criticism" (2002) by Jose Ramon Diaz-Fernandez, in Lisa Starks and Courtney Lehmann's The Reel Shakespeare: Alternative Cinema and Theory. Equally important are number of bibliographies and bibliographic essays by Kenneth S. Rothwell, including "Filmed Shakespeare: Scholarship and Criticism at the Millennium" (2000), "More Studies of Shakespeare on Film: A Review Essay" (2002), and "Recent Books on Shakespeare and the Movies" (2002), all published in Shakespeare Bulletin. There are many perceptive and engaging general studies of Twelfth Night. Among them, Bruce Smith's Twelfth Night: Texts and Contexts, already mentioned, is especially valuable. Part of Bedford's series examining the relationship between the texts and contexts of individual Shakespeare plays, Smith's book distinguishes itself by its close readings of both the texts and contexts of Twelfth Night. Although the focus of Russ McDonald's excellent The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare: An Introduction with Documents is more general than Smith's work, it nonetheless offers perceptive insights into Twelfth Night that emphasize the aesthetic features of the play as well as its cultural setting. There are also a number of book-length anthologies of criticism on Twelfth Night. The Methuen Casebook series, edited by D. J. Palmer, and the Twentieth Century Interpretations series, edited by Walter King, are both dated,

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Palmer's collection published in 1972 and King's in 1968. Still, despite this limitation, both anthologies offer valuable access to some of the major critics of the middle third of the twentieth century. Stanley Wells's Twelfth Night: Critical Essays (1986) and R. S. White's Twelfth Night: Contemporary Critical Essays (1996) are somewhat more up to date, including a more representative offering of essays written, and critical methodologies used, in the last 25 years. As White's introduction asserts, the essays collected in his book not only reflect critical thinking about Twelfth Night but are also very much about the trends of contemporary critical discussion of this play. Hence, White's collection is also a helpful introduction to recent critical approaches to Twelfth Night. Because of its unusually "clean" text, there are not as many textual studies of Twelfth Night as there are of other, more problematical, ShakespeareE texts. There are, however, helpful short discussions of the nature and evolution of various editorial choices made throughout the published life of Twelfth Night located in the introductions of several current editions of the play, including the Arden, New Cambridge, Oxford, and Signet editions, as well as in all of the complete works of Shakespeare volumes described in the chapter on Textual History. An interesting and unique study by Laurie Osborne, "Editing Frailty in Twelfth Night: 'Where lies your Text?'" demonstrates how apparently "neutral" editorial practices can be fueled by unacknowledged ideological and patriarchal assumptions. Perhaps the two most useful studies of the sources of Twelfth Night are still Geoffrey Bullough's comprehensive eight volume Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare and Kenneth Muir's briefer but invaluable The Sources of Shakespeare's Plays. Bullough, who discusses the various sources of Twelfth Night in volume 2 of his series, also includes whole texts of two of Twelfth Nighfs most likely sources: the 1531 GVInganatti and Barnabe Rich's "Apolonius and Silla," published in 1581. Robert S. Miola's Shakespeare's Reading, although focusing on the genealogy of all of Shakespeare's plays, looks particularly at some of the ways Shakespeare transformed Twelfth Nighfs Italian sources, focusing not merely on what sources Shakespeare most likely read but how he read those sources. William C. Carroll is also interested in Shakespeare's transformation of his source material. While acknowledging the importance of Shakespeare's Plautine sources, Carroll argues convincingly that scholars might look more carefully at Ovid's and Lyly's accounts of gender metamorphosis as a possible source of the sexual and gendered transformations of Twelfth Night (50-60). One of the most insightful studies of the complex dramatic structure of Twelfth Night remains C. L. Barber's chapter on the play in his

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groundbreaking Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom. Written in 1959 but still vital, Barber's study locates the metamorphic shapes of the play's several plots, not in dramatic but in social structures, in the transformative ludic energies, both comic and corrective, inherent in the festive license of such holiday topsy-turvy celebrations as the Twelfth Night revels, often called the Feast of Fools. Barber's examination of such deeply rooted social archetypes develops from the work of another great critic of Shakespeare's comedies, Northrop Frye, whose "The Argument of Comedy," traces out a similar route, from a restrictive court world to a freer, more experimental "green world," then back to the court. And yet, for Frye, a return to the court at the end of the play does not imply a submission to its oppressive ideology, for both the lovers and the audience have been transformed by a growth of consciousness and perspective offered by their experiences in the green world. Indeed, that new critical consciousness, both pastoral and parodic in nature, subjects the closed environment of the court world to new, inclusive pressures. Adjustments to Barber's theory can be seen in much later works, such as Frangois Laroque's Shakespeare's Festive World: Elizabethan Seasonal Entertainment and the Professional Stage and Michael Bristol's Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England. Some critics also see a kinship, although different and darker than the patterns Barber explored, between the structure of Twelfth Night and that of other forms of holiday "sportfulL malice" such as bear baiting (Stephen Dickey, John R. Ford "Changeable Taffeta," Jason Scott-Warren) or cony-catching (Angela Hurworth). Other critics interested in the play's dramatic design have looked more closely at the structural relationship between plot and subplots or the structural principle within or between scenes. Jean Howard looks at both in her book, Shakespeare's Art of Orchestration with a particularly perceptive and lucid analysis of the complex, even contrapuntal, musical "orchestration" of the play's final scene. Alexander Leggatt, in his invaluable Shakespeare's Comedy of Love, sees at the heart of Twelfth Night's comic structure an absurd collision between two radically opposed modes of consciousness and engagement. Joan Hartwig, in Shakespeare's Analogical Scene: Parody as Structural Syntax, sees an interwoven relationship between major and minor plot threads, establishing the subplot as a parodic commentary on the main action. In an essay that synthesizes strategies of performance history and cultural criticism, Karen Greif argues that Feste's emergence in the late twentieth century as the central voice of the play reflects a desire within both audiences and critics for a new kind of structural design, even a new genre—darker, more satiric, than the comic

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structures designed around the boisterous Malvolio subplot or the romantic structures designed around a sentimentalized Viola. Finally, critics such as Irene Dash and Laurie E. Osborne (The Trick of Singularity), drawing on both feminist and performance critical strategies, show how rearrangements in Twelfth Night's scenic design or cuts to its script, whether the consequence of film editing or theatrical choice, have resulted in a diminishment and simplification of the play's three female characters. A number of critics have written astutely and quite helpfully on Twelfth Night's several themes. Joseph Summer's "The Masks of Twelfth Night" is one of the best: an eloquent study of the play's use of masks and disguises either to illuminate or obscure issues of identity, depending on the degree of consciousness with which each disguise is assumed. Among these amateur maskers, Summers notes, Feste distinguishes himself as the one professional. Summers's essay both echoes and anticipates the arguments of a number of critics who see revelry, masking, disguise, even appetite as, paradoxically, a measure of both self-estrangement and the comic means of self-awareness. Harold Jenkins's "Shakespeare's Twelfth Night" and John Hollander's "Twelfth Night and the Morality of Indulgence" are particularly interesting examples of this thematic approach. And for Harry Levin ("The Underplot of Twelfth Night") and Maurice Charney ("Comic Premises of Twelfth Night"), the characters we most admire, whose knowledge of themselves is the soundest, are those who open themselves most generously to comic absurdity, who plunge most unwaveringly into ludic folly. Levin describes such characters not so much as ridiculous but as ludicrous, in the semantic spirit of Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens. As Levin suggests, "we end by laughing with them at ourselves" ("Underplot" 161). The wise man, Shakespeare's fools never tire of telling us, knows himself to be a fool. Issues of identity in Twelfth Night are complicated by the conditions and conditionings of gender and sexuality. Recently, feminist and "queer" approaches to Twelfth Night have challenged the optimism implicit in such critical arguments as Barber's that see, either in the use of disguise— especially sexual disguise—or in the use of festive excess, strategies that allow characters and audience a measure of independence and autonomy. Jean Howard's "Crossdressing, the Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England" and Dympna Callaghan's '"And all is semblative a woman's part': Body Politics and Twelfth Night," as well as Callaghan's Shakespeare Without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage, are all particularly helpful examples of feminist interrogations of conventional approaches to disguise and identity, exposing the limits of such strategies. Joseph Pequiney's "The Two Antonios

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and Same-Sex Love in Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice" is a good example of an approach that critiques the unexamined heterosexist assumptions that sometimes shape criticism of this play. Linda Bamber, examining the difference in the appraisals of comic versus tragic female characters, looks to shifting definitions of constancy, or, as she puts it, "unregeneracy" of the "feminine other": "The feminine is unregenerate in comedy just as she is in tragedy; but in comedy it is unregeneracy we aspire to" (133). Coppelia Kahn looks at the possibilities in Shakespeare's plays, especially in comedies such as Twelfth Night, of discovering a "fluid" space between personal and sexual identity, an erotic indeterminacy often experienced in adolescence. Finally, any discussion of works that historicize early modern attitudes toward gender and sexuality would have to include Stephen Greenblatt's New Historicist discussion of Twelfth Night in his Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England as well as Bruce R. Smith's work, especially his Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England: A Cultural Poetics and his later Twelfth Night: Text and Contexts. Other thematic approaches, such as Twelfth Night's complex attitude toward religion, at once mocking and deferential, are skillfully explored in the work of Maurice Hunt, particularly in his essays "The Religion of Twelfth Night" and "Malvolio, Viola, and the Question of Instrumentality: Defining Providence in Twelfth Night," as well as in his 2005 book, Shakespeare's Religious Allusiveness: Its Play and Tolerance. William C Carroll's "The Ending of Twelfth Night and the Tradition of Metamorphosis," recommended earlier for its contribution to source study, is also valuable for its insights into the play's religious themes, especially as they manifest themselves in the many epiphanies of the last scene. Yu Jin Ko also explores the religious implications of Twelfth Night's ending in his astutely argued and evocatively written "The Comic Close of Twelfth Night and Viola's Noli me tangere." Beginning with a single moment in the play's concluding scene, when Viola-Cesario implores her brother not to embrace her, Ko is reminded of those moments in biblical narrative or mystery cycle plays that enact similar experiences of religious recognition, as when the resurrected Jesus warns Mary Magdalene to "touch me not." For Ko, Viola's reenactment of that religious moment, when her brother seems to come back from the dead, catches the finely balanced equipoise of pain and joy in religious miracle. That sense of religious wonder in Twelfth Night is often explored in the language and rhythms of music. John Hollander's invaluable essay, "The Role of Music in Twelfth Night," is necessary reading, as Hollander lucidly and eloquently explores this play's immersion into music in both

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its philosophical and sensual dimensions. Indeed, Hunt's exploration of providential time and Hollander's of celestial music together get at one of Twelfth Night's most elusive mysteries: that the search for religious epiphany is radically involved with the profane, sometimes mean-spirited, processes of comic revenges and comic disorder. Although starting from opposite assumptions, both Stephen Booth and Ralph Berry are fascinated by the radical contradictions, shared by both characters and audiences, about the unruly mirth and appetitive pleasures that reside at the heart of Twelfth Night. Booth's Precious Nonsense, especially the chapter, "The Audience as Malvolio," and Berry's Shakespeare and the Awareness of the Audience explore the uncomfortable ambivalence at the heart of festival mirth. Both Booth and Berry are attentive to Malvolio's role in causing this ambivalence towards merrymaking. A good background for both arguments would be Charles Lamb's famous essay, discussed earlier, on Malvolio, as well as Sylvan Barnet's equally important critique of Lamb's argument. There has been a wealth of books and articles, especially in the last 20 years, offering performance criticisms of Twelfth Night, either on stage, film, or video. A good place to start is with Harley Granville-Barker's "Preface" to Twelfth Night. Granville-Barker's central idea, that there must be an interdependent relationship between text and performance, as well as between performance and criticism, has illuminated some of the best performance studies—and some of the best performances since. Alan Dessen has much of value to say about the processes of "reading" performances, whether in his earlier works such as Elizabethan Conventions and the Viewer's Eye (1977) and Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters (1984), or in more recent studies such as Recovering Shakespeare's Theatrical Vocabulary (1995) and (with Leslie Thompso) A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama: 1580-1642 (1995). Laurie E. Osborne's The Trick of Singularity: Twelfth Night and the Per formance Editions explores how the history of Twelfth Night productions "proves an expansive history of textual multiplicity, from the eighteenthcentury performance editions to our recent video texts" (xv). Also useful is Penny Gay's As She Likes It, which surveys a number of stage productions of Twelfth Night during the second half of the twentieth century in terms of their various constructions of gender and sexuality, particularly in terms of the Violas and the Olivias created by those productions. Nancy Taylor's Women Direct Shakespeare in America: Productions From the 1990s is an interesting feminist survey of recent Shakespearean productions by women directors that often challenge comfortable habits of performance and interpretation. Her chapter on Twelfth Night, "Whose Gender Is It

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Anyway?" analyzes the work of two women directors, Abigail Adams and Melia Bensussen, whose productions of Twelfth Night resist traditional approaches to that play and especially to its female characters. Lois Potter's Twelfth Night: Text and Performance (1985) provides an excellent survey of productions of Twelfth Night and of the performance choices that define those different interpretations. Potter is gifted with a long memory and a keen eye for the details of performance choices, whether in films or stagings of the play. The same might be said of H. R. Coursen, whose performance studies of Twelfth Night and many books and articles on Shakespeare in performance include Shakespeare: The Two Traditions. In addition to his sharpl observed details that economically catch the coherence of a performance interpretation, Coursen's performance criticism is based on two firm principles: What Coursen first looks for in a production is a new recognition of an old archetype. A performance must do more than offer a "neutral" reading of a text; rather, its choices collectively must define its own interpretation, even though that interpretation, that performance text, must itself be informed by the language of Shakespeare's text. Thus, a good performance must be both "faithful" and resistant to the Shakespeare text it inherits, a version of T. S. Eliot's interdependent relationship between tradition and the individual talent. Coursen's second principle informs his criticism of film, television, and video treatments of Shakespeare's plays. Coursen insists that critics—and producers too!—keep in mind that film is generically different, not only from theater, but from television and video as well. Each medium of performance brings its own conventions. A film of Twelfth Night, then, cannot merely "photograph" a stage performance; nor can a televised Twelfth Night photograph a film version of the play. Each form of performance—stage, film, television, video—must draw on its own resources. Coursen praises Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night for its willingness to replace theatrical conventions with cinematic ones, such as Nunn's cross-cutting of parallel moments in plot and subplot. Coursen catches the cinematic moment when a decision in the editing room allows a film audience to fuse two kinds of madness: Malvolio's and Sebastian's Coursen also discusses productions of Twelfth Night in his other works, including Teaching Shakespeare with Film and Television: A Guide. If a effective performance needs to frame an argument, an effective interpretation needs to be tested, and framed, by performance. Peter Thompson, in his Shakespeare's Theatre, particularly in the chapter "Twelfth Night and Playhouse Practice," catches the symbiotic rela tionship between criticism and performance, as he imagines the material conditions—the props, the music, the acting and casting choices, the staging

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and blocking of particular scenes—of an early modern performance of Twelfth Night and the interpretative roots of those aggregate performance choices. John Russell Brown's Shakespeare's Plays in Performance (1966) has a chapter on Twelfth Night that maps out pragmatic directorial choices for producing the play that also suggest a coherent critical framework for Twelfth Night. One of the best, and certainly most eloquent, writers about Shakespeare on film (and occasionally in theatrical performance) is Samuel Crowl. Like Coursen, Crowl is fascinated by the way great film versions of Shakespearean plays can rediscover and challenge a kinship to a Shakespearean text by subverting theatrical conventions with cinematic ones, as when Nunn's Twelfth Night, by adding some scenes and rearrangin others, allows a cinematic audience to feel the visual presence of the sea all around them. And yet Crowl is as interested in the conversations between Shakespeare films and other movies as he is in those conversations among different film versions of Twelfth Night. For Crowl, Shakespeare movies work best when they are crossbred with popular, not classical, art. They form surpising hybrids. Branagh's Hamlet, for example, is best understood as "film noir with the lights on" (141), and his Much Ado "can be seen as his effort to make a Shakespearean screwball comedy for teenagers" (90). Nunn's Twelfth Night, Crowl argues, is different, "find[ing] its inspiration more in Chekhov and Mozart than in film" (79), something that may have accounted for its more limited popularity. Crowl's comparisons—Mozart, Chekhov—are the very comparisons used to describe the stage productions of Barton and Hall. And yet, as Crowl observes, there is something in Nunn's film, perhaps its synaesthetic songs and seas, that beckons us. This is a film that will confine itself as finer than it is. Crowl notes that Nunn's Twelfth Night "is one of the films in the Branagh era that most rewards repeated viewings" (90). Equally significant is Laurie Osborne's brilliant analysis of Trevor Nunn's use of cinematic conventions, such as cross-cutting and scenic redistribution, not only to reinvent theatrical conventions often lost in cinematic translation but also to manipulate the film audience's sense of duration and its consequent acceptance of a plausible narrative of the evolution of the Viola-Orsino relationship ("Cutting up Characters"). The work of other performance critics—both in film and theatrical studies—are also worth noting. There is, for example, Stephen Buhler's political analysis of the 1955 Soviet production of Twelfth Night in his Shakespeare in the Cinema: Ocular Proof Finally, anyone interested in Shakespeare on film owes a great debt to Kenneth S. Roth well, whose Shakespeare on Screen (published in 1990),

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co-written with Annabelle Henkin Melzer, includes a painstaking gathering of filmographic information about 23 Twelfth Night films, information on the year and location of first showing, medium (color, b/w, length), credits, distribution and availability, as well as a description of its history, contents, and a brief evaluation. Another of Rothwell's books, A History of Shakespeare on Screen: A Century of Film and Television, written in 1999 with a second edition in 2004, provides invaluable bibliographical and historical understanding of the century-long development of Shakespeare on screen. Rothwell does more than merely analyze how these different films and videos reflect different conceptions of Shakespeare's plays. He is also interested in how these films use Shakespeare to reflect their own historical and cultural moments. Sometimes, Rothwell discovers, a postmodern cultural moment brushes against an early modern one. Writing about the present-day tensions between worshipers of Shakespeare's high-cultural texts and enthusiasts of pop-cultural incursions into "Shakespeare," Rothwell hears echoes of earlier squabbles: "Actually there is nothing new about any of this tug of war between text and performance. The grudge in Jacobean times between Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones over whether in the court masque the text (Lexis) or the scenery (Opsis) should be given priority has been displaced forward into the struggle between author and auteur. This 'dismemberment' of Shakespeare ... has not destroyed the powerful force of Shakespeare's work as a theogony, a kind of creation epic for western civilization. It has instead infused the parts like a sacramental wafer into the body and blood of the masses who partake of the feast. The old fashioned textual scholar remains on the high altar guarding the holy relics of folio and quarto. Never mind that only a faithful few still attend Mass" (History xi-xii). There are a number of valuable performance studies of Twelfth Night of a different sort: discussions by producers and performers involved in particular productions of Twelfth Night. The most valuable of these is Approaches to Twelfth Night, edited by Michael Billington, a long, spirited conversation between Billington and four directors of important mid-twentieth century Royal Shakespeare Company productions of Twelfth Night: Bill Alexander, John Barton, John Caird, and Terry Hands. This is a fascinating discussion of four of the most important Twelfth Night productions of the century by the directors who shaped those productions. These directors discuss their various interpretations of some of the central, and most contested, features of the play: its seasonal setting, its conception of Illyria, its "pressure points," its constructions of the various characters in the play, its tone, its attitude toward music and revelry, its balance of comedy and melancholy, etc. Also valuable is the Players of Shakespeare series, now in its sixth volume, where actors discuss the process of inhabiting the characters

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they personate. There are a number of essays about Twelfth Night in the serie. The first volume features an article by Donald Sinden on his conception of Malvolio for John Barton's 1969 production; the second includes an article by Zoe Wanamaker, who played Viola in John Caird's 1983 production. An essay jointly written for the fifth volume by Zoe Waites and Matilda Ziegler, who played Viola and Olivia, respectively, in Lindsay Posner's 2001 produc tion, explores the intersecting lines of interest and compassion between the two women in a production that foregrounded the Viola-Olivia-Orsino love triangle. A chapter in John Barton's Playing Shakespeare, a transcript of a television series of the same name, shows Barton, with the help of his 1969 cast, including Judi Dench (Viola), Richard Pasco (Orsino), and Norman Rodway (Feste), re-creating 2.4 and commenting on their directorial and acting choices and the interpretations formed by those decisions. Finally, there are two books written by actors about their performances and productions of Twelfth Night: Emma Fielding's Twelfth Night and Michael Pennington's Twelfth Night: A User's Guide. Clearly, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have been fertile ground for discussions of Shakespeare on film and video—and for discussions of Shakespeare. That fertility has caught us by surprise. Gary Taylor, in a lecture at a meeting of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association and later in his afterword to Shakespeare and Appropriation, formally announced th demise of "the incredible shrinking Bard," a once powerful cultural idol now all but ignored by postmodern tastes. After all, our postmodern aesthetic, with its primary emphasis on the visual, could not be more different from the aural world of early-modern playgoers, who, after all, went to hear a play, not to see it. They were an audience, not spectators. Why should our taste for movies—moving pictures—draw us to Shakespeare's words? And yet the recent wave of Shakespeare movies and movie adaptations, coinciding with Taylor's funereal tribute to the Bard—he "c[a]me to measure Shakespeare, not to bury him" (205)—says otherwise. Ours is, after all, a culture that needs to tell its stories through fused pictorial and aural media, the synaesthesia of music videos. Our taste for such synaesthetic pleasures, our willingness to "dismember" Shakespearean holy text in order to create our own adaptations, "beautified" by the feathers we dismember, hints at the mixed sensual pleasures of an earlier aesthetic, quite different from ours. Shakespeare may not be our contemporary, as Jan Kott once argued. Yet the willingness and the capacity of a twenty-first-century audience to pick up a seventeenth-century cue, to "Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them," hints at a brief intersection of early-modern and postmodern sensibilities. If this were played upon a stage, should we condemn it as an improbable fiction?

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PRODUCTIONS CITED Actors from the London Stage (ACTER). Twelfth Night. Perf. Geoffrey Church. Brooks Theater, Clemson, SC, and USA tour. 1994. Alexander, Bill, dir. Twelfth Night. Perf. Antony Sher. Royal Shakespeare Company. Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. 1987. Barton, John, dir. Twelfth Night. Perf. Judi Dench, Donald Sinden. Royal Shakespeare Company. Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. 1969, 1971. Aldwych Theatre, London. 1970. Booth, Stephen, and Ralph Alan Cohen, dirs. Twelfth Night. Shenandoah Shakespeare Express. USA tour. 2000-2001. Bosch, Barbara, dir. Twelfth Night. Perf. Doug Shapiro. The Theater at Monmouth. Cumston Hall, Monmouth, ME. 2000. Carroll, Tim, dir. Twelfth Night. Perf. Mark Rylance, Michael Brown. Shakespeare' Globe Theatre, London. 2002. Coleman, Chris, dir. Twelfth Night. Actors Express. Atlanta, GA. 1995. Dexter, John, and John Sichel, dirs. Twelfth Night. Perf. Joan Plowright, Alec Guin ness, Ralph Richardson, Tommy Steele. London: ATV, 1970. Donnellan, Declan, dir. Twelfth Night. Cheek by Jowl. Donmar Warehouse, London. 1986. Fried, Yakov, dir. Twelfth Night (Dvenadtsataia noch'). Perf. Katya Luchko (Viola/Sebastian). Leningrad: Lenfilm Productions, 1955. Gash, Kent, dir. Twelfth Night or What You Will. Alabama Shakespeare Festival Festival Stage, Montgomery, AL. 2000. Granville-Barker, Harley, dir. Twelfth Night. Savoy, London. 1912-1914. Hall, Peter, dir. Twelfth Night. Perf. Geraldine McEwan, Dorothy Tutin, Cyril Luckham. Royal Shakespeare Company. Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, and Aldwych Theatre, London. 1958-1960. Hands, Terry, dir. Twelfth Night. Perf. Geoffrey Hutchings. Royal Shakespeare Company. Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, and Aldwych Theatre, London. 1979-1980.

178

Productions Cited

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Smith, Bruce R. Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England: A Cultural Poetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. , ed. Twelfth Night: Text and Contexts. New York: Bedford, 2001. Speaight, Robert. Shakespeare on the Stage: An Illustrated History of Shakespearean Performance. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973. Sprague, Arthur C. "Shakespeare's Plays on the English Stage." A New Companion to Shakespeare Studies. Ed. Kenneth Muir and S. Shoenbaum. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971. 199-210. . Shakespearean Players and Performances. Cambridge: Harvard Universit Press, 1953. Spurgeon, Caroline F. E. Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us. New York Macmillan, 1936. Starks, Lisa S., and Courtney Lehmann, eds. The Reel Shakespeare: Alternative Cinema and Theory. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002. Styan, J.L. The English Stage: A History of Drama and Performance. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. . The Shakespeare Revolution: Criticism and Performance in the Twentieth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Summers, Joseph H. "The Masks of Twelfth Night." The University of Kansas City Review 22.1 (1955): 25-32. Rpt. in Collected Essays on Renaissance Literature. Fairfield, CT: George Herbert Journal, 1993. 1-11. Supple, Tim. Interview. Resource Pack for Twelfth Night. Ed. Sue Emmas. London, Young Vic, 1998. Taylor, Gary. "Afterword: The Incredible Shrinking Bard." Shakespeare and Appropriation. Ed. Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer. London: Routledge, 1999. 197-205. . "Shakespeare Plays on Renaissance Stages." The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage. Ed. Stanley Wells and Sarah Stanton. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 1-20. Taylor, Nancy. Women Direct Shakespeare in America: Productions from the 1990s. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2005. Theater at Monmouth. Program. Monmouth, ME, 2000. Thompson, Ann. Which Shakespeare? A User's Guide to Editions. Milton Keynes Open University Press, 1992. Thompson, Peter. Shakespeare's Theatre. 2nd ed. Theatre Production Studies. New York: Routledge, 1992. Traub, Valerie. Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama. Gender, Culture, Difference. New York: Routledge, 1992. Turner, Robert K., Jr. "The Text of Twelfth Night. Shakespeare Quarterly 26 (1975): 128-138. Vendler, Helen. "Reading, Stage by Stage: Shakespeare's Sonnets." Shakespeare Reread: The Texts in New Contexts. Ed. Russ McDonald. New York: Cor University Press, 1994. 23-41.

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Vickers, Brian, ed. Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage. 6 vols. London: Routledge, 1974-1981. Waites, Zoe, and Matilda Ziegler. "Viola and Olivia in Twelfth Night." Players of Shakespeare 5. Ed. Robert Smallwood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 60-73. Wanamaker, Zoe. "Viola in Twelfth Night." Players of Shakespeare 2: Further Essays in Shakespearean Performance by Players with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Ed. Russell Jackson and Robert Smallwood. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. 81-91. Warren, Roger, and Stanley Wells, eds. Twelfth Night, or What You Will. By William Shakespeare. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Wells, Stanley. Royal Shakespeare: Four Major Productions at Stratford-uponAvon. Furman Studies. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976. , ed. Shakespeare: A Bibliographical Guide. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. . Shakespeare: A Life in Drama. New York: Norton, 1995. . "Shakespeare Criticism Since Bradley." A New Companion to Shakespeare Studies. Ed. Kenneth Muir and S. Schoenbaum. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971. 249-261. . Shakespeare: For All Time. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. , ed. Twelfth Night: Critical Essays. New York: Garland, 1986. Wells, Stanley, and Gary Taylor, eds. William Shakespeare: The Complete Works. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. White, R. S. Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. . "Shakespeare Criticism in the Twentieth Century." The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare. Ed. Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 279-295. , ed. Twelfth Night: Contemporary Critical Essays. New Casebooks. New York: St. Martins, 1996. Wickham, Glynne. Early English Stages 1300 to 1600. Vol. 2. New York: Columbia University Press, 1972. Williams, George Walton. The Craft of Printing and the Publication of Shakespeare's Works. Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library; London: Associated University Press, 1985. Williams, Porter, Jr. "Mistakes in Twelfth Night and Their Resolution: A Study in Some Relationships of Plot and Theme." PMLA 76 (1961): 193-199. Willis, Susan. The BBC Shakespeare Plays: Making the Televised Canon. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Winter, William. Shakespeare on the Stage. Second Series. 1915. Rpt. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1969.

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INDEX Abrams,M.H., 105 Actors' Express. See Twelfth Night theatrical productions Akrigg, G.P.V, 131 Alabama Shakespeare Festival. See Twelfth Night theatrical productions Archer, William, 142, 149 Armin, Robert, 44, 46 Authorship, collaborative nature of, 6 Baker, Herschel, 7, 14, 26 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 114 Bandello, Matteo, 27. See also Twelfth Night sources Bannock, Sheila, 153 Barber, C.L., 109; dramatic structure and festivity, 49, 113-14; festival disorder as renewal of social order, 88; holiday surfeit and drunkenness, 29; Twelfth Night vs. other Shakespeare comedies, 56-57 Barber, Frances, as Viola, 162 Barnet, Sylvan, on Charles Lamb's tragic Malvolio, 138, 141 Barton, Anne, 101, 114 Barton, John: balance in Barton's RSC production, 83, 143-45,

152-55; Feste, 111; importance of the sea, 95; Malvolio and the sundial, 144, 161; Twelfth Night's, interlinked scenic structure, 59; Twelfth Night's mixed tones, 52. See also Twelfth Night theatrical productions Beauman, Sally, 151 Beerbohm, Max, 149 Belleforest, Pierre de, 26. See also Twelfth Night sources Bensley, Robert, 139, 141 Berger, Thomas L., 2, 6 Berry, Ralph, 52, 88 Bertram, Paul, 4 Betterton, Thomas, 135, 138 Billington, Michael, 144-45, 152-53 Blount, Edward, 2 Bohr, Neils, and Norman Rabkin's complementarity, 115 Boose, Lynda E., 123 Booth, Stephen, 122-23; co-director, Shenandoah Shakespeare production of Twelfth Night, 157. See also Twelfth Night theatrical productions Bradbrook, M.C., 44 Bradley, A. C , 109-10

194

Index

Branagh, Kenneth, co-director, Renaissance Theatre's televised production of Twelfth Night, 144. See also Twelfth Night films and videos Briers, Richard, as Malvolio, 162 Bristol, Michael, 114 Brook, Peter, 150-52 Bullough, Geoffrey, 18-20, 23, 26 Burbage, Richard, 91 Burnaby, William, Love Betray 'd, 136-37 Byrd, William, 36, 38. See also Twelfth Night, music in Charles I, and Malvolio, 138 Charles II: establishment of royal patents, 137; introduction of female actors, 133 Charney, Maurice, 49, 76 Church, Geoffrey, as Orsino/Feste/ Fabian in Actors From the London Stage (ACTER) production of Twelfth Night, 157 Clarke, Mary Cowden, 107-8 Clemen, Wolfgang, 113 Cohen, Ralph Alan, 157-58; codirector, Shenandoah Shakespeare production of Twelfth Night. See also Twelfth Night theatrical productions Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, on Edmund Kean, 141 Collins, Fletcher, 36. See also Twelfth Night, music in Condell, Henry, 2 Coursen, H.R., 159, 161 Crowl, Samuel, 161 Covent Garden Theatre, 139, 140 Craig, T.W., 129, 139 Crossdressing: and gender, 39-41, 84-87; and Malvolio, 39; Puritan attacks on, 42-43; and social status, 41; and Viola, 40-41

Cusack, Sinead, as Olivia, 161 Daly, Augustin, production of Twelfth Night, 143 Dash, Irene, 85, 87, 117-18, 146 Davenant, William, and Duke's Company, 133,135-37 Day, Barry, 42 Dench, Judi, 83, 153. See also Barton, John; Twelfth Night theatrical productions Digges, Leonard, 98, 132, 138 Dobson, Michael, 135 Donnellan, Declan, 88. See also Twelfth Night theatrical productions Donno, Elizabeth Story, 83 n.48, 130, 137, 139, 142-43, 152 Downes, John, 136 Drolls, as interregnum interludes, 133 Dryden, John, 99, 102, 134 Duffin, Ross W., on songs in Twelfth Night, 36, 39, 52. See also Twelfth Night, music in Duke's Company, 138 Eastman, Arthur M., 100, 108 Ellington, Duke, 18 Ellington, Mercedes, Play On!, 18 Empson, William, 114-15 Estienne, Charles, 19 Evans, G. Blakemore, 42-43 Everett, Barbara, 111, 123, 125 Ferren, William, 139 Feste: Bradley's assessment of, 110; central to twentieth-century performances, 127,145; as comic center, 45, 110-11; as corruptor of words, 81-82, 111; disinterestedness, 82; as embodiment of theater, 43^44; Feste's epilogue-like song, 55, 67-68, 95, 124; Feste's songs as ironic tactics, 53-54; Feste's songs restored in

Index twentieth century, 36, 153-54; and Malvolio, 111; and mood of Twelfth Night, 110, 145; as older character in John Barton's RSC production; and Olivia, 51, 65, 75-76; on our patched natures, 109; as play's chief choreographer, 110; and Robert Armin, 44; as "self-acknowledged failure" in Granville-Barker's production, 143; in Terry Hands's RSC production, 111; unaccounted for in sources, 45; and Viola, 58, 67, 79, 82-84; vs. fool in King Lear, 114 Ford, John R., 158 Frye, Northrop, 109, 113-14 Gardner, Helen, 56, 111 Garrick, David, 102, 138, 140, 147 Gash, Kent, director, Alabama Shakespeare Company's Twelfth Night, 156 Gay, Penny, 145-46 Gentleman, Francis, 105 GT Ingannati (The Deceived), 20-26, 130. See also Twelfth Night sources GVInganni, 17, 19, 25-26, 130. See also Twelfth Night sources Globe Theatre (reconstructed), 125, 158-59 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 105 Gosson, Stephen, 42, 85 Grady, Hugh, 102, 108 Granville-Barker, Harley, 140; production of Twelfth Night, 110, 127, 143, 147, 150-52. See also Twelfth Night theatrical productions Greenblatt, Stephen, 50, 91, 118-19 Greene, Robert, 17-18,97 Greenwald, Michael L., 153-54 Greif, Karen, 69 Guinness, Alec, as Malvolio, 161 Hall, Peter, 52, 59, 143, 152-53; Hall's Twelfth Night compared

195

with Barton's, 52, 152-53. See also Twelfth Night theatrical productions Hands, Terry, production of Twelfth Night, 145-46. See also Twelfth Night theatrical productions Harrow, Lisa, as Olivia in John Barton's production of Twelfth Night, 153. See also Barton, John; Twelfth Night theatrical productions Hartman, Geoffrey, 111 Hartwig, Joan, 66 Hattaway, Michael, 160 Hawthorne, Nigel, as Malvolio in Trevor Nunn's film, Twelfth Night, 144 Hazlitt, William, 106, 108 Heminges, John, 2 Hirsch, James E., 58 Hogan, Charles Beecher, 139 Holbein, Hans, 67 Holland, Peter, 157 Hotson, Leslie, 128-30 Howard, Jean, 66-67, 86, 116-17 Hunt, Maurice, 95 Hunter, G.K., 19-20 Ioppolo, Grace, 4 Irving, Henry, 69, 142-43. See also Lamb, Charles Jackson, Russell, and theater architecture, 140 Jaggard, Isaac, 2 James, Emrys, as Feste in John Barton's Twelfth Night, 111, 153-54. See also Barton, John Johnson, Samuel, 49, 99-105 Jonson, Ben, 19, 98-99, 101 Jorgens, Jack, 160 Judge, Ian, production of Twelfth Night, 156. See also Twelfth Night theatrical productions

196 Kahn, Coppelia, 117 Kaufman, Helen Andrews, 25-26 Kean, Edmund, 141, 147 Keats, John, "negative capability," 106 Kelly-Gadol, Joan, 116 Kemble, John Philip, 121, 139-40, 147 Kendall, Felicity, as Viola, 161 Kent, Charles, 159-60. See also Twelfth Night films and videos Killigrew, Thomas, and King's Company, 133, 137 Kimbrough, Robert, 89 Kliman, Bernice, 4 Knight, G. Wilson, 113 Knollys, William, 129. See also Twelfth Night sources Lamb, Charles, and Malvolio, 69, 107-8, 139, 141-42 Lander, Jesse M., 2, 6 Laroque, Frangois, 114 Leggatt, Alexander, 57, 67, 78, 109 Les Abuses, 19. See also Twelfth Night sources Lesser, Anton, as Feste, 162 Levin, Harry, 102 Levine, Laura, 85 Lewes, George Henry, 141 LTnteresse, 25. See also Twelfth Night sources Long, John H., and songs, 36, 38, 52. See also Twelfth Night, music in Lothian, J.M., 129, 139 Lovel, Thomas, 138 Lynch, Jack, 104 Macklin, Charles, 138-39, 141 Macready, William, 141 Maguire, Laurie, 5, 7 Malvolio: audiences' reluctant identification with, 122-23; and Bensley's performance, 142;

Index and Charles Lamb, 141-42; and crossdressing, 39; effect on play's ending, 55, 68; as enemy of festivity and theater, 42; and Irving's sympathetic performance, 142-43; letter-reading scene as parody of recognition scene, 28; links with Orsino, 54, 58; Macklin's psychological performance of, 138-39; and nineteenth-century emphasis on character, 140-41; parodied in Feste's song, 36-38; as play's comic center, 98, 101, 130, 132, 163; as play's tragic center, 107, 110, 142; and Puritanism, 92-93; and self-love, 51, 58; as title of play, 131; twentieth-century representations of, 143-45, 150, 154; unaccounted for in sources, 29-30, 45; vs. Hamlet, 128; vs. Maltevolte in // Sacrificio, 22; and William Knollys, 129 Manningham, John, 17, 100-101, 130, 138 Marivaux, Pierre, The False Servant (adaptation of Twelfth Night), 137 Markels, Julian, 114 Marsden, Jean, 133-34, 136-38 Masefield, John, on Granville-Barker's production of Twelfth Night, 151 Mason, Pamela, 132, 135 McDonald, Russ: on close reading, 111, 115, 122-23; on closing of theaters during plague outbreaks, 43; on Shakespeare and New Criticism, 112; on Shakespeare's knowledge of foreign languages, 20; on social fluidity and dress codes, 41; on textual issues, 1-2, 4; on Twelfth Night and sexual ambiguity, 88 McEwan, Geraldine, as Olivia in Peter Hall's production of Twelfth

Index Night, 152. See also Hall, Peter; Twelfth Night theatrical productions Melzi, Robert, 25 Mendes, Sam, production of Twelfth Night, 45, 155-56. See also Twelfth Night theatrical productions Milton, John, 99 Miola, Robert, 17,20,45 Moody, Jane, 141 Morgann, Maurice, 107 Morley, Christopher, 153 Morley, Robert, on songs, 36, 38. See also Twelfth Night, music in Muir, Kenneth, 18-20, 25-26 Naylor, Edward W., on songs, 36, 52 "New Bibliography," 5 New Criticism, 112-13 Nicoll, Allardyce, 140, 147 Nunn, Trevor, director of Twelfth Night film, 33-35, 54, 86. See also Twelfth Night films and videos O'Dell, George CD., 137, 140, 148-49 Olivia: capacity for self-mockery, 51; Geraldine McEwan's youthful Olivia in Hall's production, 152; her dark house vs. Malvolio's, 74; and homoerotic passion, 41; importance of Olivia in twentieth century, 154; and Isabella in GVIngannati, 21-22, 24; and Julina in Rich's "Apolonius and Silla," 27; Lisa Harrow's young, passionate Olivia in Barton's production, 153; play's multiple perspectives on, 52, 61-65; and Queen Elizabeth I, 129; and "swervings," 118; and Viola, 117, 146 Oregon Shakespeare Festival. See Twelfth Night theatrical productions

197

Orgel, Stephen, on early modern homosexuality, 90 Originality as imitation, 17 Orsino: in Burnaby's Love Betray 'd, 136; defined by music in Barton's RSC production, 154; Don Virginio Orsino as possible source for, 128-30; doubling of Orsino with Feste and Fabian in Actors From the London Stage's (ACTER) production, 157; few seventeenthcentury references to romantic plot, 130; and fluid social status, 78-79; male bonding with Cesario, 82, 89, 92; Olivia's disguise vs. Orsino's, 74-75; Olivia's parody of Orsino's religious eroticism, 76; Orsino's attraction to both Viola and Sebastian in Globe Theatre's 2002 production, 158-59; Orsino's few references to Olivia; 73; Orsino's mixed homoerotic and heteroerotic desire for "Cesario," 87-89, 92, 163; Orsino's resemblance to Malvolio, 54, 58; Orsino's sentimentality compared to Olivia's "seasoned" grief, 74-75; satiric portrayal of Orsino in Hall's RSC production, 152 Osborne, Laurie E., 117, 119-20, 161-62; and BBC Twelfth Night, 161; editorial intervention in Twelfth Night, 9-10; on "layering" technique in animated Twelfth Night, 162; and performance texts, 11 Painter, William, 26 Palmer, D.J., 35-36 Parsons, Keith, 132, 135 Paul, Saint, 33 Pequigney, Joseph, 88, 89 Play On!, musical version of Twelfth Night, 18

198

Index

Pepys, Samuel, 49, 135-36 Plowright, Joan, as Viola/Sebastian, 161. See also Twelfth Night theatrical productions Poel, William, 128, 140, 151; production of Middle Temple Hall Twelfth Night, 143, 147, 149-50, 163. See also Twelfth Night theatrical productions Pope, Alexander, 102-5 Potter, Lois, 67, 128-29, 131, 142, 146-47, 152, 154 Productions, film and video. See Twelfth Night films and videos Productions, stage. See Twelfth Night theatrical productions Prynne, William, 85 Puritanism, 71-72

Rabkin, Norman, 84, 114-16, 122, 124 Ransom, John Crowe, 112 Rich, Barnabe, "Apolonius and Silla," 26-31, 130. See also Twelfth Night sources Richardson, Ralph, as Sir Toby, 161 Rothwell, Kenneth S., 160-61 Rowe, Nicholas, 101-2

Shaw, George Bernard, 147 Sher, Anthony, as Malvolio in Bill Alexander's production of Twelfth Night, 144. See also Twelfth Night theatrical productions Shirley, James, 135 Siddons, Sarah, 141 Sidney, Philip, 98-100 Sinden, Donald, as Malvolio in John Barton's production of Twelfth Night, 144, 154. See also Twelfth Night theatrical productions Slights, Camille Wells, 79, 94 Smallwood, Robert, on Harley Granville-Barker's production of Twelfth Night, 143 Smith, Bruce, 40-41, 77, 90, 131 Speaight, Robert, 142 Sprague, A.C., 132, 137, 149-50 Spurgeon, Carolyn, 113 Stubbes, Philip, 85, 93 Styan, J.L., 132, 146-47, 149-51 Summers, Joseph, 55, 57 Supple, Tim: director, Comedy of Errors, 33; director, TV adaptation of his Twelfth Night stage performance, 159; director, Twelfth Night, 33, 155. See also Twelfth Night films and videos; Twelfth Night theatrical productions

Salgado, Gamini, 136, 142 Salinger, Leo, 25, 66 Schlegel, Augustus William, 102 Schoch, Richard W., 148, 159 Scragg, Leah, 31 Secchi, Nicole: author of GVInganni, 19, 25; author of LTnteresse, 25. See also Twelfth Night sources Seng, Peter J., on songs, 36, 38-39, 52. See also Twelfth Night, music in Shapiro, Michael, 35, 86, 90-91 Shakespeare & Company. See Twelfth Night theatrical productions

Taylor, Gary, 133 Terry, Ellen, 142, 147 Theater at Monmouth. See Twelfth Night theatrical productions Theater design: bare, thrust stage, 128, 147, 149-51; illusionistic scenery, 134, 138, 140, 148; proscenium arch, 134, 140; Traub, Valerie, 92 Tree, Beerbohm, production of Twelfth Night, 143, 148-49 Trewin, J.C., 153 Turner, Robert K., 8

Quartos vs. Folio, 2, 4

Index Twelfth Night: music in, 36-39, 51-55; nature's bias in, 50; religion in, 32, 35, 48, 71; time in, 52, 61, 71; title and subtitle, 48-51; tonal balance in, 55-57. See also Barton, John Twelfth Night films and videos: dir. Dexter-Sichel, 161; dir. Fried (Russian), 160; dir. Kafko-Branagh (Renaissance Theatre), 162; dir. Kent, Charles (silent), 159-60; dir. Messina-Gorrie (BBC), 161-63; dir. Muat (animated), 162; dir. Nunn, 33-35, 54, 86, 160-61; dir. Supple (televised), 159; dir. Wertheim (Playboy), 162-63; dir. West (Play On!), 18 Twelfth Night sources: Barnabe Rich's "Apolonius and Silla," 18, 20, 22, 26-32, 34, 38, 44; GVIngannati, 19-22, 24-28, 130; GVInganni, 17, 19, 25-26, 130; // Sacrificio, 22, 46; Latin and French translations, 19; Plautus, 17, 25-26, 31; Shakespeare's knowledge of Italian, 20, 25; Shakespeare's self-borrowings, 31-36; Viola vs. GVIngannati's Lelia; 21-26, 28; Viola vs. Rich's Silla, 27-32 Twelfth Night theatrical productions: dir. Actors From the London Stage (ACTER), 157; dir. Alexander (RSC), 144; dir. Barton (RSC), 52,59,83,95, 111, 143-45, 152-55, 161; dir. Booth and Cohen (Shenandoah Shakespeare Express), 157; dir. Bosch (The Theater at Monmouth), 156; dir. Carroll (Shakespeare's Globe Theatre), 125, 158-59; dir. Coleman (Actors' Express), 145; dir. Daly (London), 143; dir. Donnellan (Cheek by Jowl), 88; dir. Edmondson (Oregon Shakespeare

199 Festival), 145; dir. Gash (Alabama Shakespeare Festival), 156; dir. Granville-Barker (Savoy), 110, 127, 143, 147, 150-52; dir. Hall (RSC), 52, 59, 143, 152-53; dir. Hands (RSC), 145-46; dir. Holdridge (Shakespeare & Company), 156; dir. Irving (Lyceum), 69, 142-43; dir. Judge (RSC), 156; dir. Mendes (Donmar Warehouse, BAM), 45, 155-56; dir. Poel (Middle Temple Hall), 143, 147, 149-50, 163; dir. Ross (Shenandoah Shakespeare Express), 157; dir. Supple (Young Vic), 33, 155; dir. Tree (His Majesty's Theatre), 143, 148-49

Vendler, Helen, 123 Vickers, Brian, 99, 104 Viola: and "breeches roles," 134-35; de-emphasized in seventeenth century, 130; emotional balance, 61; engagement, 84; and gender indeterminacy, 33, 40, 41, 48, 50; Joan Plowright's doubling of Viola and Sebastian, 161; Judi Dench's performance of, 154; and Olivia, 69; as sentimental heroine, 69, 105, 1079, 117, 127, 130; in Shakespeare's Globe production, 158; sharing play's comic center with Feste, 45, 58, 81-84, 145-46, 163; as singer in Fried's film version, 160; Viola's engagement vs. Feste's detachment, 82-83; vs. GVIngannati's Lelia, 21-23, 25; vs. Julia in Two Gentlemen of Verona, 35; vs. Rich's Silla, 28. See also Twelfth Night films and videos; Twelfth Night theatrical productions Warren, Jim, 157. See also Twelfth Night theatrical productions

200

Index

Wells, Stanley, 98, 112, 135; on imagining Shakespeare's library, 18-19; on John Barton's RSC production of Twelfth Night, 83,95, 153-54; on Peter Hall's RSC production of Twelfth Night, 152 White, R.S., 106, 107-8, 112, 115, 120, 122 Wickham, Glynne, 93 Wilders, John, 163

Wilkinson, Norman, 151 Williams, George Walton, 4-7 Willis, Susan, 161 Winter, William, 20, 128, 131, 135, 142-43 Wolfit, Donald, eliminating dark house scene, 143 Wycherley, William, The Plain Dealer, 137

About the Author JOHN R. FORD is Assistant Professor of English at Delta State University. His work has appeared in such journals as The Upstart Crow, Shake speare Bulletin, and Shakespeare and the Classroom.