Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, or As You Will.

A Masquerade of Fools, Fooling and Con(wo)men.

 Burton Weltman

“The silliest woman can manage a clever man;

But it needs a clever woman to manage a fool.”

Rudyard Kipling

Prologue: First Impressions.

What to make of the Duke Orsino?  The Duke opens the first scene of Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night with the beautiful lines “If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it, that surfeiting, the appetite may sicken and so die.”  He continues for a short time thereafter to wax poetically about wanting to listen to music until he sickens of love, but then suddenly tells the musicians to stop playing because he is sick of the music, not sick of love?  Would we say he is (a) a romantic soul; (b) a melancholy lover; or, (c) a narcissistic fool?  Most interpreters of the play say something like (a) or (b).  I would suggest (c).

What to make of Viola?  Having been shipwrecked on the shores of Orsino’s dukedom at the beginning of the second scene of the play, she asks whether the Duke is still unmarried and then, having heard that he is still a bachelor, proposes to make her fortune in Illyria by insinuating herself in disguise in the Duke’s household?  Would we say she is (a) a naively pure soul; (b) a goddess of good; or, (c) an adventuress on the make?  Virtually all interpreters of the play say something like (a) or (b).  I would suggest (c).

What to make of a play that is so full of high jinks and tomfoolery, that is set in a country so comfortable as Illyria, and that has happy endings in marriage all around?  Interpreters invariably see it as a mere entertainment, a brilliant distraction, full of sound and festivity, but signifying nothing.  I do not agree.  I think that Shakespeare intended the play as a dire warning to his countrymen about the future of their country, and it contains a message that may be relevant to us today.

These are my first impressions of Twelfth Night.  They run counter to most conventional interpretations of the play.  The purpose of this essay is to elaborate on these first impressions, and offer an alternative perspective on the work that sees it as both more serious and more fun.

A.  The Title: A Double Name and a Triple-Entendre.

What’s in a play’s title?  With Shakespeare, it is often more than seems at first glance.  The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is named after the young man who carries on and acts up throughout the play, but his ghostly father who initiates and encourages the young man’s antics is also named Hamlet.  Is that important?  Or take Henry IV, which is really about the future Henry V.  What’s with that?  Or the play Twelfth Night, or As You Will, which seems an odd coupling of phrases.

The title of Twelfth Night is a reference to the last day of the Christmas holidays as they were celebrated in Shakespeare’s day.  The Twelfth Night of Christmas was a time of revelry and masks.  Since the play involves multiple masquerades, connecting it with the Twelfth Night of the Christmas holidays seems appropriate.  In turn, the subtitle “As You Will” complements the reference to the Twelfth Night festivities if you take the phrase as meaning “anything goes.”  The phrase indicates that all sorts of unconventional things are going to happen in this play.

But “As You Will” is a triple-entendre.  It can also mean “getting your own way,” that is, getting what you want and getting it any way you can.  In this sense, the subtitle seems to be saying that this is a play about people using masks and tomfoolery to get what they want.  That is, it is a play about cons and con(wo)men, and about fools and fooling.  Finally, it can mean “a bequest,” that is, what you leave to your descendants.  In this sense, the subtitle seems to be saying that this is a play about the sorts of inheritance that people leave for the future.  These are meanings that conventional directors and other interpreters don’t get.  And that is the main theme of this essay.

B.  The Plot: What a Tangled Web.

Twelfth Night is a comedy that follows two main plotlines that overlap at key points, and that have an upstairs/downstairs quality to them.  Each plotline is filled with coincidences and surprises.  The upstairs or upper nobility plotline involves the efforts of a duke named Orsino to woo a countess named Olivia, using as his go-between a young woman named Viola who has disguised herself as a man named Cesario.  The outcome of this plot is that Orsino ends up marrying Viola, and Olivia marries Viola’s twin brother Sebastian.

The downstairs or lower nobility plotline involves the efforts of Olivia’s kinsman Sir Toby Belch to con money out of his gull Sir Andrew Aguecheek by promising to help Sir Andrew court Olivia, and using Olivia’s waiting woman Maria as his go-between.  The result of this plot is that Toby ends up marrying Maria, and Andrew sustains a beating at the hands of Sebastian.

In the first plotline, Viola and her twin brother Sebastian have been sailing from their homes in some unnamed someplace for some unspecified reason to some unnamed someplace else, and they have been shipwrecked off the coast of Illyria in the Adriatic Sea.  Each thinks the other has been drowned.  In fact, Viola has been saved by a sea captain and comes ashore in Illyria.  Uncertain about her reception there, she decides to dress up in men’s clothing, pretend to be a eunuch named Cesario, and find employment in the household of Duke Orsino.  The Duke, who is seemingly taken with the good looks and manners of Cesario, employs Cesario as a go-between to help Orsino woo the reluctant Countess Olivia.

Olivia, her mother apparently long dead, has recently lost her father and brother, and insists that she will not entertain any marriage proposals for seven years.  No sooner, however, does Cesario/Viola speak words of love to Olivia on behalf of Orsino, than Olivia falls madly in love with what she thinks is a beautiful young man, and wants to marry him.   Cesario/Viola has meanwhile fallen for Orsino, and wants to marry him.

Although it is clear from their first meeting that Olivia has no interest in what Cesario/Viola has to say on behalf of Orsino, and that Olivia wants Cesario/Viola to make return visits only so that she can woo the ostensible go-between, Cesario/Viola keeps going back, which only increases Olivia’s desire for Cesario/Viola.  Many humorous exchanges ensue between Cesario/Viola and Olivia, and between Cesario/Viola and Orsino, as Cesario/Viola tries to negotiate the three-way relationship, while maintaining her masquerade as a man.

As the play winds down, it turns out that Viola’s twin brother Sebastian has also been saved by a sea captain from drowning.  He shows up in Illyria, where Olivia mistakes him for Cesario and rushes him off to the alter to be married.  Thanking his lucky stars for the chance to be wedded to a good-looking and very wealthy woman, Sebastian blithely goes off to be married to Olivia, a woman he has never met or even seen before.  This leaves the door open for Viola to come out of the closet as a heterosexual woman and be married to Orsino, who is immediately cured of his passion for Olivia and sees that he is really in love with Cesario, that is, Viola.

In the second plotline, Toby Belch is a sluggard and a drunkard, who is living high off the hog at the expense of his niece Olivia.  Toby is also using the money he is conning out of Andrew to drink Andrew under table.  Olivia tries using her Puritanical steward Malvolio to keep Toby in line, but Maria devises a scheme to humiliate Malvolio, and get him off Toby’s back.  The scheme works, and Malvolio eventually runs off as a consequence of his mistreatment.  Toby marries Maria in seeming gratitude for ridding him of Malvolio.

There are several humorous interactions in which Cesario/Viola and Sebastian are mistaken for each other by various characters.  One results in a fight between Andrew and the virile Sebastian, whom Andrew has mistaken for the weak Cesario/Viola, and during which Andrew gets a beating.  Another such mistake results in a violent outburst by Orsino against Cesario/Viola which leads to the unmasking of Cesario/Viola and the various reconciliations that conclude the play.

In the ostensibly happy ending, the dimwitted Orsino marries a conniving woman who he thought was a man, the volatile Olivia marries an opportunistic man whom she has never met, and the sluggard Toby weds a shrewish woman who is his intellectual superior.  Whether and how these relationships will work out after the play has ended seems to me very much in doubt.  Significantly, the action of the play closes with Olivia and Orsino sending couriers after Malvolio to make peace with him and have him return to service.  Olivia’s clown Feste then recites a poem about the ways in which foolish self-indulgence and complacency can get one in trouble.  The audience is left with these words of warning from a clown.

C.  The Setting: Feudalism, Capitalism, and a Once Upon a Time Kingdom.

The historical setting of Twelfth Night is significant for both the location of the story and the social conflicts portrayed in the play.  Once upon a time, there actually was an Illyria.  It was for many centuries a prosperous center of shipbuilding and trade on the shores of the Adriatic Sea.  As a part of the Roman Empire in Ancient times, it was the birthplace of several of the greatest Roman emperors, including Diocletian, Constantine, and Justinian.

Illyria was still prosperous during the Middle Ages, largely because of its strategic location. It had become, however, socially and politically passive, and it was conquered by the Ottoman Turks during the fifteenth century.  The Ottomans were at that time an economically and intellectually more productive society, and one of the world’s major empires.  At that point, Illyria disappeared as a corporate entity.  Illyria emerged again as a political entity during the seventeenth century, but not until after Shakespeare had written Twelfth Night.  For Shakespeare and his audience, Illyria was history.

Twelfth Night is set in medieval Illyria, when peace and prosperity would have seemed to the ruling Christian nobility in the play to be assured in perpetuity.  Shakespeare and his audience would have known better.  They knew that the Turks were coming, and that the Illyrian characters in the play were essentially luxuriating in a fool’s paradise.  This historical fact, that the Illyria of the play had been destroyed soon after the setting of the play, was, I think, intended by Shakespeare as part of the background for the play.  Why else would he have chosen such an odd and out-of-the-way location for his play, a place so different from the sorts of locations he chose for his other plays?  It adds an eerie air to the Marx Brothers atmosphere of the play and the frivolous behavior of the main characters.

The play portrays significant social conflicts among social classes, and between traditionalists and modernists in Illyria, social conflicts that concerned Shakespeare about his own time and place.  When I was a graduate student in history at Rutgers University during the late 1960’s, Professor Warren Susman told those of us in his graduate seminar that if we were ever called upon to give a lecture on any time and any place, especially one about which we knew nothing, all we had to do was say “It was a time of trouble.  It was a time of turmoil.  The old order was failing.  A new order was struggling into existence.  And the middle class was rising.”  One could, he said, go on about any time and place for at least an hour with that as one’s theme.

Notwithstanding the irony of Professor Susman’s advice, I think that one can apply his theme to Twelfth Night and to most of Shakespeare’s plays.  In turn, I think Shakespeare himself used that theme in Twelfth Night and in most of his plays.  Shakespeare was writing at a time when the feudal system of Medieval England was almost gone.  Remnants of the feudal nobility and feudal customs remained, but the English peasants were free, and both free enterprise and freer thought were steadily encroaching on traditional practices.  Capitalism and a middle class were rising.

Shakespeare was aware of these facts, and they concerned him.  Political collisions between a declining old ruling class and a rising new upstart class, social conflicts between the privileges of an inherited elite and the rights of ordinary people, religious battles among Anglicans, Puritans, and Catholics, and moral tensions between the pull of personal loyalties and the push of cutthroat competition, underlie most of Shakespeare’s plays, including Twelfth Night.  These were the same contests that divided England in his day.  Shakespeare generally portrays the contending parties and contending ideas in his plays with a relatively even hand, sometimes tilting in favor of traditional practices and civilities, other times toward new ways, means and moralities.

In Twelfth Night, Illyrian society represents an old aristocratic order, one that seems to be wallowing in wealth and indolence.  Duke Orsino and Countess Olivia seem to be overcivilized idlers of the upper nobility, with nothing but time on their hands.  Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek are under-civilized members of the lower nobility, with nothing but decadence on their minds.  These people do not seem to do anything productive, or know how to.

Malvolio, who is described as a Puritan, seems, on the other hand, to represent a new order of people, one that is sober, stern and efficient.  These are qualities that are missing in the aristocrats.  Olivia apparently has the wit to recognize this, and that is one reason she is upset about possibly losing Malvolio at the end of the play.  She realizes that people like her need people like Malvolio, no matter how much her sort may find Malvolio’s ilk distasteful.  The aristocrats’ sense of their own incompetence, and the degrading fact of their reliance on people such as Malvolio, may account for much of the melancholy that pervades the nobility in the play.  It also may explain their enthusiastic welcome of Viola and Sebastian as potentially new genteel blood that might invigorate their society.

D. Conventional Interpretations: An Idyll.

“Twelfth Night is widely regarded as one of Shakespeare’s greatest creations.  Michael Billington, the dean of Britain’s theater critics, calls it “the most perfect comedy ever written.”[1]  Harold Goddard has said it is “one of the most effective theater pieces Shakespeare ever wrote.”[2]  Michael Wood enthuses that “Twelfth Night represents the peak of Shakespeare’s festive comedy.”[3]  I think, nonetheless, that these critics and most other interpreters miss much of the fun in the play because they overlook much of the complexity in the central character of Viola.

Viola is a woman pretending to be a man, which is wonderfully and comedically complex.  And in Shakespeare’s day, Viola would have been played by a boy, who was playing a woman pretending to be a man.  O, what a tangled gender web.  But I think most interpreters miss the point that Viola and Sebastian seemingly begin the play as adventurers wandering around Mediterranean societies, looking for opportunities to make their fortunes.  And they find those opportunities in Illyria.  Viola is, in this view, essentially a hustler who sees her opportunity with Orsino, and makes the most of it.  Sebastian is a smoothie who seizes his opportunity when it comes knocking with Olivia.  Their opportunism is an angle that is missed in conventional interpretations of the play.

Conventional interpretations of the play tend to follow one of two main lines, depending on whether the interpreters sympathize most with the aristocratic representatives of Merry Olde England or with the criticism of that regime represented by the Puritan Malvolio.  Interpretations also differ in whether they emphasize the melancholy atmosphere of Illyrian society represented by Orsino and Olivia or its antic and anarchic tendencies represented by Toby and Maria.  But all describe Viola as a maiden of virtuous intention, even as they leave unexplained Sebastian’s willingness to wed a wealthy woman he has never met.

Harold Goddard takes a melancholy view of the play, as Shakespeare’s “farewell to comedy,” that allegorically portrays “the end of Merry England” and “an intimation of the Puritan revolution” that was to come not long after Shakespeare’s death.  Goddard claims that Shakespeare was not wholly on the side of the old ways, as they could be cruel and feeble, and Orsino and Olivia are idle, sentimental and self-centered.  Shakespeare, in turn, portrays the Puritan Malvolio as “a man of principle.”  But Viola is the star of the show.  She is, Goddard exclaims, “sincere, modest, sweet, gentle, generous, tender, true,” and deeply devoted to Orsino.  He says that he cannot understand how Viola “should have fallen in love with such a spineless creature as the Duke,” but he thinks we are supposed to believe that she will purify Illyrian society “toward a more spiritual level.”[4]

Mark Van Doren sees Illyria as an ideal “world [built] out of music and melancholy,” but the idyll is “threatened by an alien voice,” the voice of the Puritanical Malvolio.  Melancholy in Illyria, according to Van Doren, is not a function of the idleness and vapidity of the ruling classes, as Goddard sees it, but is result of the threat represented by Malvolio, who is “ambitious, self-contained, cold and intelligent.”  Van Doren enthuses that “The household of Olivia is old-world, it is Merry England.”  Malvolio, he laments, is the new world, and not a very pretty one.  Most tellingly, Van Doren says, “Malvolio hates music.”  As a result, Van Doren claims, “The drama in the play is between his [Malvolio’s] mind and the music of old manners.”  Van Doren concludes that despite the “greatness” of Viola, Shakespeare intends to warn his audience that the Malvolios of the world will likely triumph.[5]

In a performance of the play that I recently saw at the Stratford Theater Festival, the downstairs plot involving Toby, Andrew and Maria was played for a maximum of laughs, including lots of slapstick and pratfalls.  But the upstairs plot involving Orsino, Olivia and Viola was played with a restrained, almost dignified humor, perhaps befitting the higher social status of the characters.  Melancholy was the dominant mood in Illyria in this production.  The production also treated the actions and transactions of the transgender Viola as seriously and sincerely romantic.  She is pure and purely good.  And we are seemingly supposed to admire the society into which she and her brother are marrying.[6]

Professor Humphry Tonkin echoes Van Doren’s idyllic view of Illyria as a “magical region.”  Like Van Doren, he sees Malvolio as “the enemy of love,” as opposed to Viola who is “the spirit of love.”  One of the questions that interpreters of the play should have to answer, but almost never do, is why Cesario/Viola keeps going back to see Olivia when their visits can only have the effect of confirming Olivia’s desire for Cesario/Viola and dissatisfaction with Orsino.  Tonkin attempts to answer this question by saying that Cesario/Viola has compassion for Olivia.[7]  But that answer does not make sense.  The only answer that makes sense is that Cesario/Viola wants to undermine any possible attachment between Olivia and Orsino, so the field will be open for Viola to gain Orsino for herself.  And that is the key to my interpretation of the play.

E.  An Unconventional Interpretation: A Sting.

The opening lines of a Shakespeare play often tell much of the tale, and the way they are interpreted and performed can set the tone for much that comes next.  The ghost scene that opens Hamlet,[8] Orlando’s opening speech in As You Like It,[9] and Antonio’s opening speech in The Merchant of Venice, [10]among others, can be played in different ways that predetermine much of the meaning of the rest of those plays.  It is the same with Twelfth Night.

The opening speech by Orsino, in which he waxes poetically about music as the food of love before sickening of the music but not love, is conventionally played seriously.  Orsino is invariably played by a dignified figure who is surrounded by other dignified figures who look up to him.  The scene sets up the play as some sort of romance in the upstairs plotline, following a burgeoning love between Orsino and Viola, contrasted with the downstairs plotline of Toby and Maria, which is treated as slapstick.  It also sets up Illyria as some sort of idyllic society, a model of an enlightened nobility.  In this context, Viola naturally emerges as an ideal person, finding her way to fit in with this society.

But all is changed if you play Orsino’s speech as the mellifluent, insincere blathering of an overdressed narcissistic fool, surrounded by a bunch of overdressed courtly sycophants, whose words of love are really all about himself.  Orsino’s self-absorption is evident throughout the play.  Who, but either a pompous ass or an insecure idiot, would send someone else to court a woman for himself, let alone send a comely young man to do the wooing?  Playing the opening scene in this way sets the play up as a comedy in both plotlines, and makes much better sense of their intersection.  Just as Toby is ripe to be plucked by Maria, so are Orsino and Olivia easy pickings for Viola and Sebastian.

In this interpretation, Illyria comes off not as an idyll, but as a complacent society ruled by an overindulgent and incompetent nobility.  It is a nobility that relies on the competence of servants (Malvolio, but also Maria) who are more intelligent and competent than their masters, and who are undermining their masters’ rule.  It is a society that ultimately cannot sustain and defend itself, and that is soon to be overrun and overturned by a more vigorous people.  This is the warning that Shakespeare is giving to his audience.

The play is a compendium of deceptions and con jobs.  Viola pretends to be a man, which is the essence of the upstairs plotline.  Feste, the clown, pretends to be a priest in Maria’s plot to torment Malvolio.  And Toby pretends to Andrew that he is working on Andrew’s behalf to induce Olivia to marry Andrew, which is a parallel of Cesario/Viola’s efforts on Orsino’s behalf. Toby is, in fact, just trying to get money from Andrew.  This farce is the substance of the downstairs plotline, and is conventionally well played for laughs.  But there are, I think, two other con jobs that are ignored by conventional interpretations of the play.  Playing up these con jobs would, I think, give greater depth and greater humor to the play.

First, in my view, Olivia is herself conning Orsino by pretending that she won’t marry him because she is in prolonged mourning for her brother.  Conventional interpretations of the play take this excuse at face value, and play her as a serious character.  It seems more plausible, however, that she just does not like the guy, and given his pomposity and self-centeredness that seems very reasonable, but that she does not want to offend such a powerful nobleman by just rejecting him.  That her mourning is a con job is also indicated by how quickly she is willing to forgo her weeds to wed Cesario/Viola/Sebastian.  And her willingness to marry Sebastian without first checking up on his bone fides indicates that she is a fool.  She has, in fact, been fooled by both Cesario/Viola and by Sebastian.  This could be very funny.

Second, and most important in my view, Viola is trying from the start to con Orsino into marrying her.  It is why she gives up on her initial intention to pretend to be a eunuch, and plays the courtier instead.  Her task is to make sure that Olivia does not change her mind about rejecting Orsino, and to get Orsino to eschew Olivia in her favor.  Toward this end, Viola makes herself attractive to Olivia, flirting with her even as Viola is pretending to present Orsino’s case.

This is the reason Viola keeps going back to see Olivia, even after it is clear that her visits are only hurting Orsino’s chances with Olivia.  In this context, Viola’s continually praising Orsino to Olivia only increases Olivia’s respect for what she foolishly sees as Viola/Cesario’s integrity.  At the same time, while Viola is playing the virile man to Olivia, she is playing the docile youth to Orsino, attracting him despite his seeming heterosexuality, confusing him in his affections, and setting him up for Viola’s eventual coming out as a woman.  This back and forth on the part of Viola, sometimes masculine, other times feminine, trying to keep things straight, would be very interesting and very funny. If it were played that way. And the fact that Viola falls for Orsino in the course of her masquerade – she soliloquizes words of intense passion towards him — only adds to irony and humor of the situation.  She has conned herself into falling for her dupe.

By the end of the play, the Illyrian nobility seem happy to welcome into their ranks two people, Viola and Sebastian, who are clearly, even to the dimwitted Illyrians, a couple of clever tricksters, Viola for putting across her imitation of a man, and Sebastian for grabbing at the chance to marry Olivia.  Did the Illyrians somehow see this as a way to invigorate their doldrum society?  In an Elizabethan era in which regular commerce, sharp practices, and piracy often overlapped, did Shakespeare see the addition of con men to the English ruling class as means of invigorating his society?  He portrayed Prince Hal, the future heroic King Henry V, very favorably in Henry IV, and Hal was a trickster.  Or, given the eventual fate of the real-life Illyria, was Shakespeare warning against falling for con-men and con-women.  I am writing this essay in the United States during the month of August in 2017, and we have just endured six months of having a con-man as our President.  It has not been a good experience, and I hope we do not go the way of Illyria.

In sum, I think that playing Orsino and Olivia as fools, Illyrian society as a fool’s paradise, and Viola as a clever con-woman makes better sense of the lines and the plotlines in the play, more sense out of Shakespeare’s intentions for the play, and makes for a more interesting production.  The moral of the story is posed in the opening lines of the poem sung by Feste the clown who closes the play: “When that I was and a little tiny boy, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, A foolish thing was but a toy, For the rain it raineth every day.”  But we in the audience are no longer little boys and girls and, as such, our foolishness can have more consequence than mere playthings.  What we will for ourselves and to our descendants makes a difference.

BW  8/23/17

[1] Michael Billington. “Twelfth Night Review.” the guardian. 2/23/17.

[2] Harold Goddard. The Meaning of Shakespeare, Vol. I. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1951. p.294.

[3] Michael Wood. Shakespeare. New York: Basis Books, 2003. p.231.

[4] Harold Goddard. The Meaning of Shakespeare, Vol. I. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1951. pp.295, 296, 299, 300, 304.  See Michael Wood. Shakespeare. New York: Basis Books, 2003. p.231. for a similarly somewhat sympathetic treatment of Malvolio.

[5] Mark Van Doren. Shakespeare. New York: New York Review Books, 2005. pp.136, 138, 140, 141, 143.  See also Dominick Cavendish. “Twelfth Night, National’s Oliver Theatre Review.” The Telegraph. 2/23/17. For a review of a performance of the play that emphasizes the malevolence of Malvolio.

[6] See J. Kelley Nestruck. “Review: Stratford Festival Kicks off with dreary take on Twelfth Night.” The Globe and Mail. 5/30/17 for a melancholy review of a melancholy interpretation of the play.

[7] Humphrey Tonkin. “Five Lectures on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.” University of Hartford. Nov./Dec. 1999.

[8] I have a blog post that deals with this point titled “Better Dead than Red: Hamlet and the Cold War against Catholicism in Elizabethan England”

[9] I have a blog post that deals with this point titled “The Taming of a Schlemozzle:  As You Like It as you like it.”

[10] I have a blog post that deals with this point titled “Shakespeare and Shylock: Protestants, Catholics and the Jewish Question in Elizabethan England”