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7/25/09 9:26 AMHeretic’s Foundation VIII: Seeing Beneath Twelfth Night « Clyde Fitch ReportPage 1 of 7http://www.clydefitchreport.com/?p=3294
 
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Heretic’s Foundation VIII: SeeingBeneath Twelfth Night
Friday, July 24, 2009Heretic’s Foundation
  By John Hudsondarkladyplayers@aol.comSpecial to the Clyde Fitch Report 
When I got to Central Park on my second attempt to see the Public Theater’s production of 
Twelfth Night 
, Iwas told I was too late: the line had begun to snake around the reservoir by 7 a.m. Evidently,CharlesIsherwood’s review in the New York Timeshad brought out the crowds even more than usual. It was along, flattering review claiming that this was the best production in a decade. But what did the reviewactually say? That Anne Hathaway was attractive, the costumes colorful, the music fine, the characters
 
7/25/09 9:26 AMHeretic’s Foundation VIII: Seeing Beneath Twelfth Night « Clyde Fitch ReportPage 2 of 7http://www.clydefitchreport.com/?p=3294
funny? This tells us absolutely nothing about what really matters to me, especially if one has waited in linefor six hours: Did this production help people understand the meaning of the play? That is what theElizabethan theater was for — not simply to produce a sparkling, witty surface, but to help audiences seebeneath it.No audience nowadays will see beneath the confusing surface of 
Twelfth Night 
without considerable helpfrom the dramaturgy. To begin with, a production could highlight the existence of the strangely namedcharacters Fabian and Sebastian. We should immediately be reminded, perhaps with a calendar, of the twosaints by those names who share the same feast-day, January 19. This is also the day the Elizabethan churchbegan reading St Paul’sEpistles to the Corinthians.
Twelfth Night 
is also set in Illyria, a location where StPaul claimed to have preached, and from which those same letters to the Corinthians were conceivablywritten. Indeed, at the beginning of the play, Sebastian is compared to the Corinthian poet Arion. At the endof the play,the first paragraph of Feste’s song about what he regarded as foolish when young, echoes1 Corinthians. So do Feste’s reflections on wisdom and foolishness. For example, his comment “Those witsthat think they have thee, do very oft prove fools; and I that am sure I lack thee, may pass for a wise man”(V.1.31-3) echoes “if you think that you are wise in this age, you should become fools so you may becomewise” (1 Corinthians 3;18).So the play seems primarily set in first-century Illyria, where, as Steve Sohmer has shown in his book
Shakespeare’s Mystery Play
, the events resemble the problems among the early Christians in Corinth. Thereason why
Twelfth Night 
is a play about foolishness of various kinds is that foolishness was the definingcharacteristic of the Corinthians — St. Paul’s letters to them use the word six times.Paul argued that to become a Christian, one had to embrace the foolishness of God, which to Jews was astumbling block and to Greeks was not wisdom (1 Corinthians 1:23). So, if a production wanted to makeclear where the playwright had set the play, it could present these various households on stage. To wit, wefind a Greek Feste — called a “foolish Greek” (IV.i.18); a household, presumably of Jews, run by Oliviawho is repeatedly called “Madonna” (I.v.55-68), whose name echoes the olive tree, the symbol of thespiritual heritage of the Jewish people; and a collection of foolish Christian clowns.Shakespeare scholarship shows that Sir Tony Belch is a parody of Sir Toby Matthew, a Catholicsympathizer who later became a priest. The “tall” Sir Andrew Aguecheek, who has no more wit than aChristian and speaks three or four languages but cannot understand basic Latin or French, is a parody of avery tall, able linguist,an Anglican clergyman named Sir Lancelot Andrewes, dean of Westminster. He wasalso known for obsessive nocturnal studying, which would have given him his sickly complexion andperhaps an “ague cheek.” The noise-hating Malvolio is, among other things,a parody of a puritan, T. Posthumous Hoby, who with his mother led a protest against the Blackfriars theater for causing too muchrowdiness, and carried out a lawsuit against visitors to their country house forcausing too much noise. So,
Twelfth Night 
mocks the foolishness of Christianity by presenting a member of various denominations —Catholicism, Anglicanism, Puritanism — as foolish.One subplot however, which appears nowhere in the Twelfth Night’s main sources,
Gl’Ingannti
andBarnabe Riche’s
 Apolonius and Silla,
involves Maria playing a trick on Malvolio through a letter — anepistle — that causes him to give up his Christian faith and become a heathen “Yond gull Malvolio is turnedheathen, a very renegado” (III.iii.66-7),
renegado
meaning a deserter of Christianity. Malvolio, whose namein Italian means bad-will, or “I wish to do evil,” is also referred to as being possessed by Legion, and all thedevils in hell (III.iv.86-7). A fiend speaks from inside of him; he is bewitched; he is tricked into believing“impossible passages of grossness” in a letter. He is confined under the stage, where he is exorcised by the
 
7/25/09 9:26 AMHeretic’s Foundation VIII: Seeing Beneath Twelfth Night « Clyde Fitch ReportPage 3 of 7http://www.clydefitchreport.com/?p=3294
fictitious figure of Sir Topas, a curate named for a jewel, topaz, that cures madness. So Malvolio, in hissteward’s chain, parodies the story in the gospels of Jesus meeting a demoniac in broken chains calledLegion, and exorcising him to expel the demons from him. But whereas in the Gospel the demoniac is curedand wants to become a follower of Jesus, Malvolio in the play ceases to be a Christian.Into this first century Illyria also arrive the twins. There’s Sebastian (the revered one), from the nonexistenttown of Messaline (an allusion perhaps to the messiah); he has been in Elysium (heaven) and in a “waterytomb” (V.i.232) from which he emerges symbolically on the third day. He is imitated (III.iv.393) by Cesario(as in “belonging to Caesar”). By pretending to be the messiah, and holding an olive branch in his hand(I.5.212), Cesario gets the love of Orsino, of Olivia and of Antonio, who does devotion to his image as avile idol (III.iv.374).However, at the end of the play when the twins are finally together in the same room, the play’s languagebecomes full of theological imagery. Orsino is astonished: “One face, one voice, one habit, and twopersons,” he says (V.i.214). Similarly, Antonio asks, “How have you made division of yourself?” (V.i.220).These comments allude to theBlack Rubricin the 1552 prayer bookstating it was against truthfor Christ’s body to be “in more places than in one at one time.” This was mocked in Nicholas Udall’s play
 Jack  Juggler
(1562): “Why thou naughty villain, darest thou affirm to me…That one man may have two bodiesand two faces.”I believe this reference unambiguously identifies Cesario and Sebastian as different bodies of Christ, yet asSebastian notes, there cannot be “that deity in my nature of here and everywhere” (V.1.225-6). A productionof 
Twelfth Night 
could thus lead the audience to a radical question: What would it mean if Caesar had thesame identity as the messiah? Exploring this radical question is the focus of some of the latest, mostinteresting New Testament research. It would appear that this question also underlies
Twelfth Night 
, and thatone challenge is to make it obvious onstage. I am beginning to do the early dramaturgical work for auniversity production in Massachusetts next year, and it is already clear that the scholarship on the play canbe used to create an entirely unique production. It is well known that the mystery plays and miracle playswere highly didactic: they existed to teach people about Catholic theology. But it is becoming graduallyclear that Shakespeare’s plays are also allegorical exercises in teaching theology of a very different kind,with enormous implications for performance.
Twelfth Night 
is not a play about foolishness or falling in love and certainly not the mindless comedy that Iused to believe it was. My hope is to use stagecraft to show the play for what it now seems to be: a cleverlycrafted account that suggests the true identity of Jesus as a literary allegory for Caesar. Perhaps, after all,that is why it is called
Twelfth Night 
– the night on which the 12 days of Christmas fantasies are over, whenstark reality begins to set in. That should make a production worth seeing.
 John Hudson is a strategic consultant who specializes in new industry models and has helped createseveral telecoms and Internet companies. He has recently been consulting to a leading think tank on the future of the theater industry and is pioneering an innovative Shakespeare theory, as dramaturge to the Dark Lady Players. This Fall he will be Artist in Residence at Eastern Connecticut State University. Hehas degrees in Theater and Shakespeare, in Management, and in Social Science.
This entry was posted on Friday, July 24th, 2009 at 3:21 pm and is filed underHeretic’s Foundation. You can follow any responses tothis entry through theRSS 2.0feed. You canleave a response, ortrackbackfrom your own site.
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