Shakespeare, 2014

Vol. 10, No. 3, 293–308, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2013.845595

PERFORMANCE
Seeing Double: Dramaturgy and the Experience of Twelfth Night
J.P.C. Brown*

Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK

“Seeing double” draws together perspectives on Twelfth Night to explore ways in

which its dramaturgy exploits and expands upon forms of doubleness implicit not just
in Shakespearean theatre but in theatre as such. In the process, it seeks to clarify the
kind of experience it offers by comparison with today’s dominant cinematic–
psychological realism. The play does not possess the kind of internal coherence we
commonly look for. Instead, it presents a double vision. It offers simultaneously
present, if seemingly incompatible, possibilities. Thus Viola both is and is not a
woman; the play’s implied locale is both Italian and English. In the way the play
conjures its setting the factual and the figurative overlap (e.g. in allusions to the sea).
Its principal genres of romance and satire are not only juxtaposed, but almost
superimposed on each other. The play’s interest in text and performance informs
actions that both are and are not actions, such as Sir Andrew’s challenge to Viola. As
characters self-consciously try out lines and phrases (as Viola does when she delivers
her speech to Olivia), a double awareness results not just of these being characters
performed by actors, but of the characters themselves assuming and enacting roles.
Many of these doubles collide in the final scene when the twins finally meet and
Jonsonian satire is confronted by Shakespearean romance.
Keywords: doubleness; dramatic conventions; genre; Jonson.

I
It is possible either to be baffled by Twelfth Night or to see in it only what one is disposed
to see. In the eighteenth century (and, to judge from passing references, in the
seventeenth) the tendency was to emphasise Malvolio and to see the most successful
part of the play as satirical. When John Manningham saw the play in 1602 he praised the
scenes featuring Malvolio as a “good practice” (Warren and Wells 1) and it was
performed at court in 1623 under the title of Malvolio (Barnet 166). In the following
century, Dr Johnson distinguished between the play’s mockery of Sir Andrew
Aguecheek’s innate folly and its mockery of Malvolio. In his view the latter was “truly
comic”, but not the former because “natural fatuity … is … not the proper prey of a
satirist”. Later critics have not been so exercised by Johnson’s neo-classical concern for
satirical correctness, but have shared his doubts about the play’s probability. He notes that
the intrigue surrounding Olivia’s marriage “wants credibility” (The Plays of William
Shakespeare 131). Hazlitt’s reaction to the play is typical of a Romantic turning away
from satire: he found that the play boasts “little satire, and no spleen”, and praised it for
its “pastoral and poetical cast” (133–34). Charles Lamb went so far as to claim that
Malvolio was almost more a tragic than a satirical character (37–42). Irving played

*Email: jpc.brown@bbk.ac.uk
© 2013 James Brown
294 J.P.C. Brown

Malvolio in 1884 according to Lamb’s prescription (Warren and Wells 58–9).

Nineteenth-century critics often saw the play as a romantic comedy in which one’s
response to the characters was determined by sympathy more than by moral judgement.
The play became a regular part of the repertory from about the middle of the century
(Gay 37), and historical scenery and costumes were routinely researched and designed
especially for the play. This was one of the prerequisites for the modern concept of
performances as instances of a “production”: i.e. an interpretation supported by
coordinated decisions about text, design, casting, sound and light. Victorian pictorialism
culminated in Beerbohm Tree’s elaborately visual production of 1901 (on the stage
history of the play in the nineteenth century see Warren and Wells [2–4] and Barnet
[167–71]).
However, shoehorning the play into later stage conventions does nothing to remove
the objection that can rise up in a modern mind that it is all terribly implausible. The way
the romantic intrigue turns upon coincidence and the sense of the characters dancing their
way through an appointed pattern rather than living lives in which their characters are
revealed as they act upon felt motives within given circumstances can seem alien.
The characters of the play seem to occupy different worlds. This occasioned difficulty
to nineteenth-century interpreters, given the essential realism of the proscenium arch
stage, and gave rise to much historical investigation to find moments in history when all
the elements of the play might have coexisted. Charles Knight remarked in his Pictorial
Shakespere [sic] of 1838–41 that the play is “among the most perplexing of
Shakespeare’s plays to the stickler for accuracy of costume” (qtd in New Variorum
Twelfe Night 408). Admittedly, William Poel experimented by staging the play without
scenery after the Elizabethan manner in 1897 and 1903, and Harley Granville-Barker’s
ground-breaking production of 1912 at the Savoy Theatre reacted against Beerbohm
Tree’s literal pictorialism by providing a visual setting that was suggestive and
conventional rather than realistically representational, thus seeking to combine Poel’s
fluid staging with the use of a proscenium theatre (Barnet 170–71). Even so, as Penny
Gay notes, for much of the twentieth century in the English-speaking world there was a
“fairly standardised” approach to the play involving a pictorial setting in the period
1600–1630 (39; cf. Bassnett’s view that Twelfth Night and As You Like It have lacked a
radically revisionist production in the English-speaking world [130]). As late as 1966, as
he tried to envisage a way of performing the play that would render its complexity and
variety, John Russell Brown accepted that “the proscenium arches and lighting devices of
modern theatres have made the visual embodiment of a play, in setting, costumes and
effects, a dominating – often the dominating – element of a production” and his proposal
accordingly accommodated a broadly realist and representational logic, insisting on the
primacy of the play’s Englishness, taking his cue from the play’s range of reference (196,
197–200). Yet it is not clear that the problem of the play’s setting can be resolved in such
a way. No matter how English the play’s frame of reference, the characters’ names come
from different worlds. Sir Toby and Sir Andrew are conspicuously English. Orsino and
Antonio and Cesario seem Italian. Olivia, Maria and Viola are perhaps ambiguous. Feste
seems to belong nowhere. At the end he is not even held securely within the play itself.
The realist impulse to create characters contained within a recognisable coherent and
consistent fictional world, which makes no concessions to the fantastic, and which in
some sense shapes characters that react and develop in psychologically plausible and
motivated ways, does not hold.
 Shakespeare 295

If one breaks from the nineteenth-century concern for a realistic and historical setting
(as we have done), it is still difficult to jettison realism entirely. One indication of this is
an interpretative move evident in some productions to relocate plays to a recognisable
place and time and thus to unify them by imposing on them on a single, coherent setting.
In 1977, reviewing a production of Much Ado, which he spoke of as a “notoriously
broken-backed play”, Michael Billington spoke of this interpretative ploy as the “old
Shakespearean rule: a closely imagined society gives the characters roots and purpose”.
In fact, as he has acknowledged in other reviews, the ploy of relocating a play to a
specific time and place is apt to serve some characters well, while leaving others stranded.
It also tends to require a special kind of collusion from the audience, who need to see
some implications of the setting while ignoring others. This ploy is not an “old
Shakespearean rule” so much as it is a compromise between the coherence of the
imagined world at which nineteenth-century historical realism aimed and a later impulse
to interpretative freedom.
Several recent productions of Twelfth Night have sought to concoct a single world for
the play. David Farr’s 2012 RSC production took place in a broken down beachfront
hotel or wrecked ship. There was a water tank downstage out of which Viola emerged.
Plainly this was not illusionistic realism. However, that did not mean it was entirely free
from some of the underlying structures of realism, not least in the way a persistent and
partly enclosing set is apt to function as a determining environment, containing and (at
times) overpowering the actors. Gregory Doran’s 2009 production more clearly adopted a
specific time and place: Greece (or possibly the near east) in the era of Byron. Although
in Stratford it played in the Courtyard theatre, in London it played in the Duke of York’s,
and, as Peter Kirwan noted, the design betrayed “a preference for the proscenium stage of
the Duke of York’s over the thrust of the Courtyard” (247). While proscenium theatres
continue to be widely used, their structure will tend to keep in play some of the elements
of realist staging. It is one of the ways in which we remain haunted by the norms of
realism, even though much of the history of modern western stage drama can be
presented in terms of a struggle to break from realism punctuated by attempts to reassert
it in newly valid and urgent ways.
Disdainfully reviewing William Poel’s attempt to reconstruct an early modern staging
of Twelfth Night in 1903, Max Beerbohm could speak confidently of “the science of
scenic production” and he explained that “We have developed that science, and it is only
when Shakespeare’s plays are produced with due regard to this development, that they
seem to us works of living art” (qtd in Barnet 164; on the disagreement between Poel and
Beerbohm, see Falocco 17–18). In retrospect, it is possible to regard Beerbohm as more
old-fashioned than Poel, some of whose experiments contributed to the formal and
interpretative freedom of Shakespeare production in the twentieth century. Yet Beerbohm
speaks with a confidence that we have largely lost, at least so far as Shakespearean theatre
is concerned.
However, his “science of scenic production” so far from being dead thrives in
cinematography, especially in what David Bordwell dubbed Hollywood’s classical
cinema and variants and developments of it. One of the goals of classical editing and
shooting is to conjure a convincing illusion of coherent three-dimensional space and
mostly linear narrative tied to the principal characters. In some respects it was an unlikely
mode of realism, as it entailed the suppression of several features intrinsic to film, such as
the two-dimensional character of the images and the possibility of shooting and
assembling them in any order. Yet this convention with all its careful and technical
296 J.P.C. Brown

artifice has become so inevitable as to be well-nigh transparent. In drama it is our most

unambiguously living art and is stitched into the fabric of many if not most people’s lives.
It is a form of drama that draws upon what Durkheim called “collective
representations” (Conclusion, section IV; Gellner). Collective representations are less a
matter of debatable propositions than they are performative. They inform perceptions so
deeply shared that, whatever one’s personal opinion, it is almost impossible not to act
as if one believed in them. Although in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
Durkheim is mainly concerned with ethnographic discussion of aboriginal religion, and
he grounds collective representations in the performance of tribal ritual, it is
conceivable within the terms of his sociology for collective representations to exist in
modern market societies as well. Indeed, given Durkheim’s insistence on the need for
social solidarity, it is essential. Money might be an instance of a collective
representation in a market society. One can regard it as an illusion, but to function in
society one has to behave as if one believed in it. Something similar is true of cinematic
realism, which, given its dependency on narrative and motive, is usually also a mode of
psychological realism. Well-produced works within this convention have such an air of
self-evidence and transparency that it can be difficult to register that they are shaped by
conventions at all. In teaching film one’s first challenge is often to help one’s students
become aware of the constructedness of such films to enable them to discuss them as
films rather than just as stories. Yet almost all of them will have acquired a
sophisticated if largely unconscious capacity for reading such films. This, like the
ability to handle money, is virtually a prerequisite for participation in our kind of
society. This circumstance gives this kind of realism a status unlike that of any other
kind of drama available at present.
If one is seeking to address the problem of responding to a play whose conventions
risk seeming pejoratively conventional, so that attention is arrested by the conventions as
such rather than by the experience they enable (the problem I was presented with by a
friend which sowed the seed for this article), then this dominant form of cinematic–
psychological realism is an unavoidable point of comparison. This is not because it
defines the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays are currently performed (in the wake of
what Styan called the “Shakespeare Revolution” it is doubtful whether any one
convention does that), but because it is the crucial example of a dramatic convention
that enables one to feel as if it opens the way to an immediate experience. Locally, in
particular productions on stage and in other media or just at particular moments other
conventions are devised and acted on and may come gloriously to life. However, only
cinematic–psychological realism has this peculiarly unavoidable and pervasive character,
and it largely defines our norms of plausibility.

***

It is the principal claim of this essay that in several related ways Twelfth Night offers us a
double vision: not alternatives, but simultaneously present possibilities. These are both a
question of what is represented and of how. Doubleness is a fundamental and persistent
feature of drama as such, though it has a particular significance in Twelfth Night. In
suggesting how the phenomenon of doubleness can thread together aspects of the play to
make possible an experience of it (rather than, say, the interpretation of a theme within it),
this essay offers a synthesis of various ways of looking at the play, and that entails the
brief restatement of some material with which most readers are likely to be familiar
 Shakespeare 297

already in order to work it into the pattern. It briefly rehearses some well-known features
not just of Shakespeare but of theatre as such, before locating kinds of doubleness
specific to Twelfth Night within the context of these broader kinds of doubleness.

II
One kind of doubleness is pervasive on Shakespeare’s stage and many others: we are both
watching a fictional world, and we are watching actors who are creating it for us. As
Peter Handke once observed, a chair onstage is always pretending to be another chair
(qtd in States 20): everything onstage is both itself and other than itself. One needs to
beware of seeing straight through what has been dubbed the “phenomenology” of the
theatre (States). The dominant realism of film and television is apt to favour
representation over phenomenology. Whether or not a film starts by giving us a
conventional establishing shot to enable us to locate the characters within fictional space
and time before we see them, the given circumstances of setting and context have a
conceptual priority in classical film style, many of whose rules seek to sustain for the
audience a sense of three-dimensional space and linear time. Plenty of films violate these
rules, but even now, nearly a century after they began to be formulated, they remain
normative. In principle, as Sartre observed, in classical film at least setting has a logical
priority over the actor (59–63). The simplest expression of this is the convention by
which an establishing shot is required before cutting to close-ups of the characters. Within
classical cinema stars are a significant exception to this norm, as the star is usually
located not only within the constraining fictional world of the film, but also in the context
of her or his status in the industry and our prior knowledge of their films. However, even
the star is located within a setting that is usually presented as having an independent and
objective existence.
By contrast, on Shakespeare’s stage much of what we understand of setting and
context emerges only as actors speak and act. As a result, what counts as “real” is
constructed, and, even when character is clearly affected by place, place is summoned
into existence by the actor, so the composite figure of the actor-character is both cause
and effect of place. Things that are not supposed to be objectively real are as easily
rendered imaginatively vivid and present as things that are. For instance, there is
supposedly a real gate to Olivia’s house, at which Maria and Sir Toby report that Cesario
is waiting; but the image one is most likely to carry away of the gate includes the
imaginary willow cabin that Cesario says he would make there, if he loved Olivia “in my
master’s flame” (1.5.253). What is imaginatively compelling is neither the literally real
nor the subjectively imagined, but an accommodation of the two.
The most intriguing and disorientating side-effect of this for a modern spectator is that
our normal division of experience into the subjective and the objective does not hold. It is
a division that is deeply internalized, and it is implicit in the dominant forms of film
language. Film is good at photographic realism, but it is also excellent at the presentation
of a subjectively distorted point of view, in which the camera becomes an I/eye. Within
the range of possibilities thus mapped out one finds many of the finest works of
Hollywood cinema: the screwball comedies beloved of Stanley Cavell, the great Westerns
of John Ford, Howard Hawks’ genre-bending films, Hitchcock’s thrillers, etc. While
accomplishing different artistic goals, these films unfold in a film language defined by the
dualism of subjectivity vs objectivity. Given that it can accommodate such diverse and
298 J.P.C. Brown

excellent films, this dualism might not seem to be much of a constraint. But it doesn’t sit
well with Twelfth Night.
Although no image-system dominates the play, sea and madness are important (on the
play’s use of the sea, which he finds curiously modern, see Mentz ch. 4). Both have an
ambivalent relation to the real. The sea is often used metaphorically, as, for example in
Orsino’s comparison of the “spirit of love” to the sea (1.1.9–14). However, with Viola’s
arrival in the next scene, the sea flows into this world metonymically as well. Notwithstand-
ing Viola and Sebastian’s deliverance to dry land, as John Barton communicated by sounds in
his RSC production, the play never leaves the sea (Warren and Wells 13).
The sea exemplifies Shakespeare’s use of a convention that confounds the opposition
of objective to subjective. Taken in isolation, many of the play’s sea-images can be
classified as metaphors. Sir Toby urges Sir Andrew to “board” Maria (1.3.53). Maria
invites Viola to “hoist sail” (1.5.194). Feste tells Orsino that “I would have men of such
constancy put to sea, that their business might be everything, and their intent everywhere,
for that’s it that always makes a good voyage of nothing” (2.4.74–77). It is an image that
recalls Sebastian’s “my determinate voyage is mere extravagancy” (2.1.9–10), and thus
relates this figurative invocation of the sea to literal ones. Within seconds of his first
appearance, Orsino uses a sea metaphor to expatiate on love:

O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou,

That 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!
(1.1.9–14)

In the next scene the idea thus planted in one’s mind of things of value falling into the sea
becomes literal when we learn of the sinking of the ship bearing Viola and Sebastian.
This combination of the supposedly literal use of sea images with figurative ones will
continue to the end of the play, with Antonio and stories about him (especially in the sea
battle against Orsino’s forces) being especially important in keeping the literal reality of
the sea in play.

III
The doubleness of conventions regarding setting frames other kinds of doubleness. One
of these juxtaposes performance or action with something other. Letters and messages
play an important role here. Sometimes they constitute a kind of performance and even a
kind of mimicry (as in Maria’s letter for Malvolio), but they may also, from another point
of view, be non-actions, or, like a play-script, be a blueprint for a performance but not the
performance itself.
The situation of the two households, with messages going back and forth between
them, is partly responsible for the salience of messages. This is one of the reasons for
Viola’s structural centrality to the play as the only person apart from Feste capable of
 Shakespeare 299

making contact with both Orsino and Olivia. But it is not only the need to mediate
between the households that gives rise to letters and messages. The story of Malvolio
turns on a letter that proves to be a kind of disguise, because Maria contrives it so that it
appears to be a declaration of love from Olivia. Sir Toby’s next ruse, getting Sir Andrew
and Cesario to fight, also starts with discussion of a letter: Sir Andrew’s challenge
(3.2.40–48). It proves so “excellently ignorant” (3.4.185) that Toby and Fabian carry
messages back and forth between Sir Andrew and Cesario, misrepresenting each to the
other, until they have whipped up the semblance of a duel which threatens to become
more real than they had bargained for when Antonio appears.
Messages tend to miscarry in Illyria. Orsino sends Cesario to woo Olivia on his
behalf, and the plan backfires when Olivia falls for the servant instead of the master. Once
Viola has gained admittance, she is disconcerted by Olivia’s refusal to reveal herself. The
comparison between text and performance, between the learnt or artificial and the
spontaneous, comes to the fore as Viola seeks clarification:

Viola. Most radiant, exquisite, and unmatchable beauty – I pray you tell me if this be the lady
of the house, for I never saw her. I would be loath to cast away my speech: for besides that it
is excellently well penned, I have taken great pains to con it. Good beauties, let me sustain no
scorn; I am very comptible, even to the least sinister usage.
Olivia. Whence came you, sir?
Viola. 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.
Olivia. Are you a comedian?
(1.5.163–75)

The moment recalls the confrontation between Malvolio and Feste earlier in the scene, in
which Malvolio recalls,

I saw him put down the other day with an ordinary fool, that has no more brain than a stone.
Look you now, he’s out of his guard already: unless you laugh and minister occasion to him,
he is gagged.
(1.5.80–83)

It is apt, then, that Viola later recognises Feste’s skill, not in waiting to have occasion
ministered to him, but in finding it out by observing “their mood on whom he jests”
(3.1.61). She should know. It is in the nature of Feste’s style of fooling that it should
weave literary reference into the performance. Such allusiveness has been traced to the
style of foolery favoured by Robert Armin (Bradbrook 222–28, 231).
Ironically, if Maria is to be believed, Malvolio is more dependent on learnt texts in
order to sustain his social persona than the improvisatory Feste. She tells her co-
conspirators:

The dev’l a puritan that he is, or anything constantly but a time-pleaser, an affectioned ass
that cons state without book and utters it by great swathes...
(2.3.141–43)
300 J.P.C. Brown

This insistence on deliberately learning phrases for use with as much spontaneity as one
can affect is also a trait of Sir Andrew, who catches some of Viola’s winning phrases and
hopes to appropriate them:

“Odours,” “pregnant,” and “vouchsafed” – I’ll get ’em all three all ready.
(3.1.89–90)

It is perhaps not surprising that Feste, as an accomplished user of language, should have
grown distrustful of it:

Clown. Why, sir, her name’s a word, and to dally with that word might make my sister
wanton. But indeed, words are very rascals since bonds disgraced them.
Viola. Thy reason, man?
Clown. Troth, sir, I can yield you none without words, and words are grown so false I am
loath to prove reason with them.
(3.1.18–24)

This sense of being unable to get away from the treacherous medium of language is
reflected in the play’s organisation of real and imagined space. Unlike in some other
comedies (such as As You Like It or A Midsummer Night’s Dream), there is no world
outside the world of Illyria to which to withdraw: no wild, green place in which to rework
relationships, before returning to the regulated everyday world. There is only Illyria. But
Illyria is haunted by its other. Anne Barton sees the twin places of some other
Shakespearean comedies being replaced by two kinds of time, so that the “heightened
world” of Illyria exists in a “time of holiday and of fiction” which has to give way to
another kind of time that “is remorseless and strictly counted” (171, 177). Yet there is
also a sense in which the sea stands in for the place of pastoral renewal that one finds in
some other plays. However, it is not a place to which one can withdraw. It washes
figuratively over Illyria and is coterminous with it.
Equally, there is no choice to be made between performance and writing. It is not that
one is authentic and the other false, or one real and the other mere seeming. Malvolio
may be misled by the letter Maria frames as if from Olivia, but it is by writing that
Malvolio is able to persuade Olivia that he is not mad, even though Feste reads
Malvolio’s letter like a madman (5.1.288–97). The moment the letter can speak for itself,
it is obvious that “This savours not much of distraction” (311). If that is so, there is also a
sense in which the earlier letter that dupes Malvolio reveals a truth. As becomes clear just
before Malvolio picks it up, he is already absorbed in a fantasy life. The letter does not
create it. To the extent that Maria’s invention leaves Malvolio much interpretative work to
do, he is self-deceived. Malvolio only gets “M.O.A.I.” to stand for himself by starting
from the desire to “make that resemble something in me” (2.5.117–18) and by deciding
“to crush this a little” and so make it “bow to me” (2.5.136). When he appears before
Olivia in act 3 scene 4 cross-gartered, smiling and in yellow stockings, the ideas of
writing and performance become intertwined. Malvolio gives an extraordinary perform-
ance as instructed by writing, throwing at Olivia phrases from the letter of which she can
make no sense.
 Shakespeare 301

We are put in an intriguing position as spectators. We have a privileged point of view.

We can see, as Olivia cannot, what makes Malvolio’s actions explicable, if absurd.
Elsewhere we know exactly who is disguised as whom. From the beginning of act 2
onwards we even have the advantage of Viola in that we know, as she does not, that
Sebastian is alive (although she starts to suspect he may yet live at 3.4.371–76, when
Antonio addresses her as Sebastian). If this meant that there were propositions that
described the objective reality about what is going on in Illyria, and that the resolution of
the play consisted simply in bringing these to light and banishing the misapprehensions
under which the characters labour for the sake of the intrigue, then the play would be
implausible. But the important thing about the play’s form, or, rather, about the way in
which we interact with it and work through it, is that it offers no such certainties.
In Shakespearean drama any understanding we achieve is not to be separated from the
affective and imaginative processes by which we work our way towards a recognition of
it. One of the unsettling things about watching Malvolio become imaginatively engrossed
in the false letter is that this process of meeting a text half way with one’s own assistant
imagination is akin to watching the play itself. An important instance of this is the way in
which we are persuaded to see a boy in boy’s clothes as a woman. Viola’s gender is not
so much enacted as imagined. As Orsino notices what is supposed to be really the case
about Cesario/Viola’s female body, we imagine her into being:

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
(1.4.30–34)

We see Viola/Cesario’s gender only if we see double. Careful inspection of factual reality
will not help. As Barton observes, it seems likely that Shakespeare knew his Sebastian
and Viola would not look identical, but that kind of literal resemblance was beside the
point for his kind of comedy (176). What then happens when Olivia sees the boy playing
Viola as male? Modern romantic expectations are readily offended when she marries
Sebastian under the misapprehension that he is Cesario. This seems to fly in the face of
the individual reality we ascribe to each person.1 However, Cesario was never literally
real in the first place, even though, given the convention of boy actors playing women
and the way Viola’s name is withheld, he seems as real as anyone in the play.
Nevertheless, Olivia’s love was true. In a land over which the sea figuratively washes, but
with a force just as real as anything else that is represented as part of Illyria, who or what
is real? The play invokes the notion of performance and plays it off against something
other than performance, but declines to assert that one term of this dualism is true and the
other false.

IV
If Twelfth Night generates a double consciousness to do with performance itself, it also
exhibits doubleness in its genre. As noted above, Hazlitt commented on the play’s
302 J.P.C. Brown

“pastoral and poetical cast” and in doing so he stands at a turning point between seeing
the play as satirical, with the Malvolio plot accordingly dominant, and seeing it as a
romantic comedy. Without ceasing to see Twelfth Night as a romantic comedy, it is worth
exploring its relationship with a different kind of comedy. Ben Jonson’s satirical comedy
proceeds on neo-classical principles to display flaws of temperament. The butts of
Jonson’s satire are often isolated figures, self-enclosed in a world of their own unbalanced
imaginations. They act frenetically on their desires but are typically incapable of change
and in this respect may be considered to be static characters. The dupes in The Alchemist,
with their fantastic dreams which Face, the conman, plays upon, exemplify this perfectly.
It is of a piece with this concern to anatomise temperaments (i.e. “Humours”) and to
explore self-isolated figures that Jonson often presents a character virtually alone. They
display their traits, perhaps with other characters standing to one side, commenting upon
the character on display. This device, as several critics have noted, can be found in
Twelfth Night: in Malvolio’s reading and interpretation of the letter by which he is duped
into supposing Olivia to be in love with him.2
Jonsonian satire has some curious features. Ostensibly it seeks to anatomise people as
they are. Since its professed purpose is criticism with a view to reform there is no point in
castigating imaginary faults and vices. There were two critical debates in the period
which could impinge on the connexion between satire and reality, depending on how one
interpreted them. One dealt with a longstanding contrast between satire proper and mere
character assassination. Satire was to attack general faults, not particular individuals. In
theory it therefore proceeded by an act of generalising abstraction from specifics, which
might seem to put it at one remove from reality. At the same time the “war on poetry”, as
Russell Fraser termed it, disparaged claims to a distinctively poetic truth, and satire could
therefore find itself sent in one of two directions: either to closer engagement with the
actual, which risked scurrilous particularity, or to abstract ethical truths validated by
philosophy or religion, which risked bland generality.
In practice, in Jonson’s best plays two things come through in a way that threatens to
run counter to the plays’ self-proclaimed purpose: violence and theatricality. The
imagination that is disparaged in the poet takes refuge in the characters. They fall into
two main categories: outrageous and immoral performers, whose imagination is deployed
to enable them to prey on the others and exploit their imaginative susceptibilities; and
rapacious victims, who succumb to their own greedy imaginations as much as to the
ploys practised on them. The air of violence develops because of the intensity of the
desires being explored. In lieu of the expected division between vice and virtue one tends
to get instead an amoral division between the theatrically knowing and effective
(Volpone, Mosca, Face, Doll) and those who are doomed to be their victims if only
because they are trapped in a single role (Corvino, Voltore and Corbaccio in Volpone;
Surly, Epicure Mammon, Kastril et al. in The Alchemist). Being a bad actor proves to be
the real ‘sin’ in Jonson’s world. A metatheatrical dimension to his drama threatens to
subvert its ostensible moral import.
To return to Twelfth Night with Jonson in mind is not only to see certain obviously
satirised characters who get their comeuppance, such as Malvolio, while a pastoral,
romantic comedy proceeds separately, but also to see that many of the figures in the
romantic plot are also presented by partially Jonsonian techniques. Excess and
monomania are the hallmarks of Jonsonian characterisation. But they are also features
of Orsino and Olivia: “both the ruler of Illyria and his reluctant mistress have manoeuvred
themselves into unbalanced states of mind” (Barton 172). If at her first appearance Olivia
 Shakespeare 303

has surrendered herself to just one insistently repeated, unchanging response to the world
(grieving), there is something similarly insistent and repetitive about Toby’s carousing.
How can one see in one play elements of Jonsonian satire and also elements of
romantic, pastoral comedy? One mode of comedy offers an image of the ideal, an echo, if
we have the ears to catch it, of Eden; the other deals in fallings from it. One is an
imaginatively perfected vision of human life as it might have been; the other is distrustful
of powers of imagination that have been tainted by our own selfishness and post-lapsarian
corruption. How can they coexist?
At one level one needs to remind oneself that they do not: Shakespeare is merely
adapting a feature of Jonson’s dramaturgy to his own ends.3 However, if all one sees in
Twelfth Night is an idyllic romantic comedy, one is not attending to the unsentimental
harshness with which Malvolio is treated, which is one of several instances of an impulse
to cruelty in the play. These include Orsino’s threat to “Kill what I love” (5.1.117), the
wounds that Sebastian inflicts on Toby and Andrew, and Toby’s abrupt abandonment of
any pretence of friendship for Andrew, as he rejects his offer of help with “Will you help –
an ass-head, and a coxcomb, and a knave; a thin-faced knave, a gull?” (5.1.203–04).
Illyria is no paradise. Its title notwithstanding, it is not even a world of temporary festival,
or not consistently so. The sense of the play coinciding with a time of special festivity is
countered by the revelation in the final scene that the action has taken three months
(5.1.91, 96). Notwithstanding moments of enchantment, that is quite long enough for the
everyday world occasionally to reassert itself. Twelfth Night can be bracingly
unsentimental.
However, while Illyria may not actually be a paradise, in an understated way it carries
the possibility of being subsumed in a mythic pattern of redemption. To put it baldly,
Illyria can be seen as a kind of waste land which can only be revived by the arrival of the
miraculously impossible twins. In this regard the pattern it enacts anticipates the late
plays: a seemingly miraculous resolution (wrought by Prospero’s magic in The Tempest,
and by the living statue in The Winter’s Tale) leads not only to the union of lovers
(Ferdinand and Miranda; Perdita and Florizel), but, almost more importantly, to the
reunion of families (Prospero and Miranda with Antonio; Leontes with Hermione and
Perdita).4 For this redemptive pattern to convince, it is important that Illyria should not
only be a world needing to be saved, but also one that is ready to be saved.
In what ways does Illyria need to be saved? The play is sometimes compared with
Chekhov’s, and there is something of Chekhov’s sense of the lines of communication
between places and people becoming impassable. Think of the leave-taking as the winter
closes in at the end of Vanya; or of the impossible distance to Moscow in Three Sisters; or
the aching pressure of the proposal that is never made in The Cherry Orchard. Initially,
Illyria is conjured for us principally out of two places: Orsino’s court and Olivia’s
household (we get a sense of the town only with the arrival of Sebastian and Antonio).
One is given over to hopeless love; the other to hopeless grief. No connexion can be
made between them, as Valentine reports to his master in the opening scene (1.1.23–31).
Admittedly, Olivia’s household includes Sir Toby and Sir Andrew; but Sir Andrew’s suit
to Olivia seems more hopeless than Orsino’s of which it is a comic counterpart.
Stasis dominates, and it has two effects. It makes it feasible for Shakespeare’s
dramaturgy to accommodate Jonsonian modes of character-presentation while declining
to accept Jonson’s conception of character. The contrast between such stasis and its
setting within Shakespeare’s transformative dramaturgy in itself implies something is
amiss in this world: stasis is not dramaturgically axiomatic, as it is for Jonson’s
304 J.P.C. Brown

unchanging (if frenetic) characters, but a problem. As Shakespeare arranges these stasis-
bound figures into patterns, their very stasis becomes poetically suggestive. We see
characters arranged, as if for a picture, in contrasting groups. In other words, there is
something emblematic about their juxtaposition. This at once relates to the moral
judgement that Jonsonian satire might encourage one to pass, and it obliges the impulse
to judgement to pass through a medium of poetic symbolism. The juxtaposition of
opposites has the further effect of continually reminding one of what each isolated figure
has repressed or excluded in order to fashion the unchanging image of themselves. Thus
one has a sense less of a world that is static by virtue of the dramatic method with which
it has been made than because it has ossified. But it retains the possibility of quickening
again into life, if only its opposites can connect. In the terms that E.M. Forster coined for
discussing character, it is not that one has characters who are axiomatically either round
or flat, but potentially round characters who are allowing themselves to dwindle into flat
ones by emphasising only one side of themselves (65–75).
The possibility of change, even in the midst of stasis, is evident in Orsino’s swiftly
reversed attitude to music in the first scene: now demanding, now rejecting it. Self-
consciously lyrical images are quickly succeeded by images of physical revulsion and
ugliness. But the possibility of redemptive change is only registered at Viola’s entrance. It
begins to stir in the sounds of two names, Illyria and Elysium:

And what should I do in Illyria?

My brother he is in Elysium.
(1.2.2–3)

The way the sounds of the names chime against each other has often been remarked (e.g.
by Everett 195). But to catch the force of this moment, one needs to recall that this is a
place-making statement. It is easy to assume that the first scene, whose stage direction
announces Orsino as Duke of Illyria, sets the scene and establishes the place, like an
establishing shot in a film. It does not. It presents the nameless lord of a nameless land.
Only as Viola gets her bearings with the help of the sea captain do Orsino and Illyria
acquire their names (although Viola herself will not acquire hers until the final act). The
first things Illyria is associated with are death and paradise. One might even catch in the
name itself lyric answering illness, announcing the play’s themes of sickness (especially
madness) and artifice (especially of writing and music).

V
The key moment at which different kinds of doubleness come together is the reunion of
Sebastian and Viola, where the idea of seeing double is taken up explicitly. It is
associated with sexual difference and its overcoming, which one might register in
Sebastian’s remark to Olivia that she is “betrothed both to a maid and man” (5.1.261). It
is also an image of the soul’s relation to the body, thanks to Sebastian’s admission, “A
spirit I am indeed, / But am in that dimension grossly clad / Which from the womb I did
participate” (5.1.234–36). As Warren and Wells claim, it is “at once a moment of magical
simplicity and of great complexity” (63). When it happens, it almost seems for a beat as if
the whole play is reducible to this strangely actionless encounter. It is a moment of
exquisite and pregnant stasis, in which almost without anything needing to be said as
 Shakespeare 305

much as is ever going to be resolved in the play is resolved. The ominous forces of
violent mutability which have been mustering throughout the act to this point, and which,
thanks especially to Antonio, remain associated with the sea (5.1.47–59) are suddenly
stilled. Orsino’s threats of violence give way to literal violence when Sir Andrew and Sir
Toby appear, nursing the wounds Sebastian has inflicted upon them. It’s of a piece with
the mutability that’s threatening to undo all that Sir Toby should suddenly round upon
Aguecheek as they leave, supplying an example of something falling into “abatement and
low price” (1.1.13). It is an example that other relationships onstage are perilously close
to following.
Then Sebastian appears. Suddenly it becomes clear that the “blind waves and surges”
(5.1.227) of the sea need not destroy. Sebastian’s “watery tomb” has rendered him again,
and, given his sister’s decision to imitate him, has rendered him double. Hence the way
“tomb” is answered four lines later by “womb” (5.1.232, 236). However, while
everything else onstage seems to rearrange itself around the reunited twins (Antonio,
Orsino and Olivia being the only other named characters present), Shakespeare’s internal
stage directions keep the twins static. Sebastian says that if Cesario were a woman, “I
should my tears let fall upon your cheek / And say ‘Thrice welcome, drowned Viola’”
(5.1.238–39), but he does nothing, and he is checked a moment later by Viola’s
instruction, “Do not embrace me” (5.1.249). Yet at another level he has done something
profoundly significant by finally naming Viola (Warren and Wells 65). We have always
known she was not Cesario, but, unlike Sebastian who divulges his name and parentage
as soon as Antonio brings him ashore, we have not known who she is. Shakespeare
leaves the realisation of her female identity curiously poised between the real and the
imagined. We are left to anticipate Viola’s resumption of her “maiden weeds” (5.1.253),
while Orsino continues to address her as Cesario “For so you shall be while you are a
man” (5.1.382), even as he undertakes to marry her.
However, once the reunion of Viola and Sebastian has been accomplished the end of
the play is still some hundred lines away. The twins’ reunion is not the note on which the
play ends. The last hundred lines or so mostly concern Malvolio. This is one of the
features that encouraged eighteenth-century readers to see the play as being about him.
That may not be so, but the ending still has to be taken into account. One aspect of the
play’s doubleness is that, even when something extraordinary happens, such as the
reunion of the twins, there are those, like the occupants of the “expensive delicate ship”
in Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, who are indifferent to “Something amazing, a boy
falling out of the sky” – or, in this case, twins falling out of the sea. When Malvolio
reappears, even though Cesario/Viola and Sebastian are before him, he says nothing.
Fabian at least acknowledges “the condition of this present hour, / Which I have
wondered at” (5.1.354–55), but Malvolio is onstage for 50 lines at the climax of the play
and can speak only of his own concerns.
This is striking, if apt, in that in one way Malvolio is Sebastian’s counterpart (as in
another way he is is Orsino’s, sharing with him a doomed, self-absorbed passion for
Olivia). Malvolio imagined Olivia was offering herself to him and became so caught up
in the fantasy that he seemed to be going mad. At the beginning of act 4 Sebastian
succumbs to the same fantasy, only in his case it is about to come true: Olivia really is
offering herself to him. He wonders whether he is going mad (4.1.60; 4.3.1–21) or Olivia
is mad, but, like Malvolio, persuades himself that he is in his right wits. In between the
two scenes in which Sebastian meets Olivia for the first time and then marries her, as in a
dream, we see Malvolio cast into prison for succumbing to the same dream. There is a
306 J.P.C. Brown

sense in which Malvolio’s baffled appeal in the final act to the text of the letter and to his
supposed claims upon Olivia constitute an alternative to what we have just witnessed in
the almost instantaneous rearrangement of romantic relations occasioned by the reunion
of the twins.
Sebastian may have stumbled, instantaneously and dream-like, into marriage, whereas
his sister served Orsino in mute constancy for three months, but they both display a
serendipity of spirit. Johnson notes of Viola’s resolve to “serve this Duke” (1.2.51) that
“Viola is an excellent schemer, never at a loss; if she cannot serve the lady, she will serve
the Duke” (Johnson on Shakespeare 92). In speaking of her as a “schemer”, Johnson
implies that Viola is always consciously aware of her own objectives. That is of a piece
with Johnson’s preference for a Jonsonian version of the play in which satire and
Malvolio loom large. Regarding Viola, C.L. Barber was nearer the mark when he spoke
of her exhibiting “an undaunted, aristocratic mastery of adversity” as she decides how to
proceed when she comes ashore (113). However, there is also a willingness to go with the
flow of events, which is likewise expressed by Sebastian after his first meeting with
Olivia: “If it be thus to dream, still let me sleep!” (4.1.62). Compare the note on which
Viola sets off to turn herself into Cesario and serve the Duke: “What else may hap, to
time I will commit” (1.2.60). As Bertrand Evans argues, after her “initial disguise” her
policy consists largely of “waiting on time” (168).
This willingness to follow the flux of events is something Malvolio lacks. As befits
someone who spends a good part of Act 4 protesting his sanity, he lives in a limiting way
within his mind and thus he goes swiftly from entertaining a self-regarding fantasy about
Olivia, on which he might never have acted but for the letter, to following a scheme in
order to obtain her. The dottiness of the clothes and behaviour involved in pursuing the
scheme implicitly rebuffs Malvolio’s kind of instrumental rationality. In the final scene
the alternative that he represents has an implicit judgement passed upon it when Olivia
addresses him as “poor fool” (5.1.366), which gives Feste his cue to remind Malvolio of
how contemptuously he had dismissed Feste’s fooling. He storms off, promising
vengeance on everyone, without having told them about the sea captain, whom he has
had imprisoned. Yet there remains a sense in which Malvolio represents an alternative
vision which the miracle of the twins’ reunion and the consequent resolution of the play’s
romantic plots cannot eliminate. If Malvolio is unchanging almost in the manner of a
Jonsonian character (the way in which his name describes his character condemns him to
stasis), he is also representative of the way too much of the world works for the lovers to
eclipse him. They have a moment of stasis of a different kind when Malvolio arrives,
during which Sebastian and Viola are silent and Orsino nearly so. Malvolio is onstage for
50 lines, during which Orsino utters just 4 words: “Is this the madman?” (5.1.324). Only
Olivia can act in the matter. Still, at the end of the play they seem curiously reluctant to
act, as if trying to hold onto the moment. Orsino even implies that they remain dependent
on Malvolio to tell them about the sea captain:

When that is known, and golden time convents,

A solemn combination shall be made
Of our dear souls. Meantime, sweet sister,
We will not part from hence.
(5.1.378–81)
 Shakespeare 307

Ironically, having said that they “will not part from hence”, within seconds the stage
direction will insist that they “Exeunt”, leaving only Feste, whose briskly reductive
account of the cycle of a man’s life hurtles more rapidly than Jaques’ seven ages from
boyhood, through manhood, to decline, and so to the end of the play in five brief stanzas,
washed over by the “wind and the rain”. As the song proceeds, the precarious ideal
represented by the image of the providentially united lovers feels as if it is challenged by
the onrush of time, the kind of time Barton speaks of as “remorseless” in contrast the
“time of holiday and of fiction” (177).5 Yet in a final instance of the play’s doubleness,
even as that image fades, there is the possibility of its return, in that “we’ll strive to please
you every day” (5.1.404) (cf. Summers 96).

Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Dr Samantha Ashenden for raising objections to Twelfth Night that I set out to
answer, and to Dr Lawrence Normand for kind and constructive criticism.

Notes
1. See Linda Bamber’s argument that the tendency to understand drama in terms of the characters’
individual self-discovery and development gets one nowhere with Twelfth Night, because “The
discoveries take place at the level of the plot, not at the level of individual psychology”
(129–33).
2. Janet Clare, for example, explores intertextual relations between Twelfth Night and Every Man
out of His Humour (199–208). See also Bednarz, who argues that Shakespeare reacts to Jonson’s
challenge to his dramaturgy by provocatively using a formula for the romantic plot of “cross-
wooing-with-clown” that Jonson had castigated, and by appropriating and implicitly criticizing
Jonson’s own satirical formula involving dupes (or “gulls” in Elizabethan parlance) and
conmen (179).
3. To that extent, I have no quarrel with John Hollander’s judgement that Twelfth Night seeks to
refute Jonsonian comedy by presenting a drama that is moral in part by virtue of being
metaphorical (220–38).
4. This similarity to the late plays was brought out by the RSC season in which John Barton’s
production of Twelfth Night (1969–71) was first performed, in which the late romances loomed
large (Warren and Wells 13, 24, 66).
5. Porter Williams Jr notes that the song briefly reminds us “of time, mortality and the passing of
all things” (187).

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