Perspectives

Perspectives on Shakespeare’s
Twelfth Night
Dr David McInnis
Gerry Higgins Senior Lecturer in Shakespeare Studies
University of Melbourne

If I had to nominate key topics explored
within Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night
it would be hard to avoid using terms
such as ‘power’, ‘society’ and ‘identity’,
paving the way for Marxist and Feminist
perspectives on class and gender.
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aristocracy, for example, are precisely
that: representations, not presentations,
since none of Shakespeare’s actors were
aristocrats themselves.
The VCE Literature Text List for 2018
explains that the Twelfth Night of the
valve for discontent’ is overstated, and
the playful behaviours exhibited in
Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night might in
fact lead to genuine change. 2
Coddin’s own response is to suggest
that the play ‘pointedly reinforces

A Marxist critic might try to see Twelfth
Night as the product of the dominant
economic and ideological contexts of
its era. In the case of Shakespeare, this
would not amount to attempting to
ascertain the playwright’s own attitudes
to the class system; whereas lesser
writers are criticised for producing work
that consciously or subconsciously
perpetuates the dominant ideologies of
their era, the fictional world Shakespeare
creates is so rich and complex that it
might be taken as a reflection of the
economic and social conditions of the
real world, as Marxists perceive it. The
interactions of the upper and lower
class characters in Twelfth Night might
thus be taken as a reliable index of an
external reality.
Shakespeare’s theatre, of course, was
already always engaged with the
construction and representation of
classes, because common players –
people of low estate, sometimes even
described as vagabonds – impersonated
princes and aristocrats when they
performed. Representations of the
Christmas festivities, ‘drawing on pagan
rituals of carnival and Saturnalia, was
an occasion for revelry and misrule’
and that in Shakespeare’s play of that
name, ‘[d]isguises, twinning, dualities
and mistaken identity all contribute to
a general sense of madness’ in which
the ‘construction of gender’ in particular
is explored.1 Readings of the play have
often focused on how the Twelfth
Night topsy-turveydom and the general
comedy of misrule allows a safe and
temporary exploration of alternative
models of society, of alternative social
roles; but that this comic inversion of
roles ultimately reaffirms the dominant
aristocratic values, and the transgressive
behaviours are contained by the acts of
identity disclosure and marriage at the
play’s end. On the level of genre, the
play formally contains the subversions
by having Orsino marry Viola and
Olivia marry Sebastian, even though
the latter is a particularly problematic
and superficial solution. But as critics
such as Karin Coddon and Natalie
Zemon Davis have argued, this concept
of carnivalesque misrule as ‘safety-
neither aristocratic nor anticourt values’
but ‘subversively confounds holiday
and history, festive “license” and
contestation’.3 She cites the resistance
of Feste the clown to narrative
recuperation (think of his dirge-like
epilogue of a song, after the marriage
plans have been concluded) as evidence
of ‘theatrical evasion of order’ and of
‘limited autonomy from the institutional
structures seemingly acknowledged
in the reversions of the young nobles
and the overreaching Malvolio to their
proper places and degrees’.4 Feste’s
first entrance is marked by his long,
unauthorised absence from Olivia’s
house and his disdain for Maria’s
subsequent warning that he could be
hanged or unemployed for his continued
insolence. He is not really a licensed
fool of the feudal sort; he does what
he pleases and demands payment for
his services. His is a sort of ‘fooling as
professional, intellectual labor’; Viola
notes that Feste ‘plays the fool’ much
as she’s playing a role.5 The old class
system is changing.

1
http://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/Documents/vce/literature/VCE_LiteratureTextList2018.pdf
2
Karin S. Coddon, ‘“Slander in an Allow’d Fool”: Twelfth Night’s Crisis of the Aristocracy’, SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 33.2 (1993): 311.
3
Coddon, 311-12.
4
Coddon, 312.
5
Coddon, 321.

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 Perspectives
A Marxist perspective might also attend
to the un-aristocratic behaviour of
Duke Orsino, languishing in the first
scene of the play, or of Sir Toby Belch
and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, revelling
incontinently at all hours of the night and
studiously avoiding all responsibilities.
Aristocratic excess in the consumption
of luxury goods, music, food and drink
paints an image of the upper class as
indulgent gluttons. Coddon suggests
that the ‘profligate expenditures and
conspicuous consumption’ of the
nobility ‘weaken[s] the aristocracy both
economically and in terms of popular
perception’, but notes that the play’s
most outspoken critic of the aristocracy,
Malvolio, is subjected to even greater
derision himself.6 This is in part because
he has aspirations of social mobility,
seeking the love of his lady and the
elevation in status that comes with it
(which the play mocks). It may be worth
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noting that even though Malvolio’s
desired union with his lady Olivia is
thwarted, the play allows Olivia’s uncle,
Sir Toby, to marry her serving-woman,
Maria, with barely a pause to consider
the class impropriety there. Festivity
alters the natural order, as Coddon
puts it.7
Feminist critics, perhaps a bit like
Marxists, implicitly reject the early
twentieth-century humanist belief that
literature can be interpreted through the
common experiences and values of the
human subject, because that subject
tended to be, well, white, male, and of
a particular class, whose views turned
out not to be universal, though they
were often presented as such (witness
the royal plural ‘we’ as the hallmark of
literary scholarship at that time, as if the
critic spoke for all readers, or at least a
homogeneous readership). As well as
attending, like postcolonial critics, to
those who are oppressed or otherwise
denied representational apparatus in
society, feminist critics attend to the
6
Coddon, 312, 314.
7
Coddon, 315.
8
Dympna Callaghan, ‘“And all is semblative a woman’s part”: Body politics and Twelfth Night’ in Shakespeare Without Women (London: Routledge, 2000), 46.
9
Callaghan, 30.
10
Callaghan, 33.
11
Callaghan, 36-37.
construction of gender and how traits
that are conceived as masculine or
feminine in identity or behaviour are
largely cultural constructs.
In the case of Twelfth Night it can
be tricky to distinguish feminist from
Marxist concerns in the play, since
Viola not only proves that a woman
can successfully impersonate a man
(and even woo a lady in the process),
but also that a gentleman can be
made rather than born. Of course all
women on the early modern stage are
artificial constructions of femininity; it
was a transvestite stage that excluded
women even though it represented
them. This paradox of absent presence
or material exclusion of women from
the stage has encouraged feminist
critics to examine the construction of
gender in Shakespeare’s plays. Dympna
Callaghan, for example, has provided
a bracing analysis of ‘the exclusion of
women from the Renaissance stage
without denying the complexity of the
representation of the female body’.8 Her
attention to the female body in Twelfth
Night is instructive in this regard, for
as she argues, ‘the female body, while
not literally present on the Renaissance
stage, was constantly and often
scabrously constructed in masculine
discourses in ways that reinforced larger
patriarchal institutions and practices’.9
The scene that brings together a number
of feminist insights or perspectives,
beyond the usual readings of a boy actor
playing a girl disguised as a boy wooing
a lady, is the scene late in the second
act when Malvolio discovers the letter
Maria has forged. Recalling the Marxist
framework again, we might remember
(as Callaghan does) that there are two
types of transvestism, one pertaining
to gender demarcation and the other
to class hierarchy: Malvolio’s yellow,
cross-gartered stockings. Callaghan
historicises the phenomenon, noting that
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Malvolio’s cross-gartering, his
‘transvestism’ [as Callagan
calls it] is, then, structurally and
symbolically related to gender
inversion, and it is no further
removed from anatomical
inscription than is Viola’s disguise.
Malvolio adopts attire that might
be suitable if worn by a young
gentleman suitor to Olivia but is
incongruous and ridiculous when
worn by a servant who sees
himself as fit to be her husband.10
Interestingly, the early audience
response we have for the play (that
of John Manningham, from a Middle
Temple performance in 1602), doesn’t
mention Viola’s cross-dressing at all
but does dwell on Malvolio’s. Class
transvestism would appear a worse
transgression than gender transvestism
in the world of the play.
As Callaghan notes, the gulling of
Malvolio also has monstrous female
genitalia at its centre:
Sir Andrew’s exclamation is in part
a rhetorical question emphasizing
the scandalous pun, which Malvolio
spells out in slow, excrutiating
detail: ‘CU[N]T.’ On another level
the query justifies this crude jest
because, of course, no C, U, or T
exists in the superscription of the
letter. ... At that literal, textual level
we never really do know why there
is a ‘CU[N]T’ in Twelfth Night.
Symbolically, however, Malvolio,
in taking seriously the possibility
of trading a steward’s servility for
sexual service with his mistress
– ‘She that would alter services
with thee’ (II.v.157-8) – has, as
Maria promised, been gulled into
a ‘nayword’ (II.iii.135-6). That
is, he has become, ‘liver and all,’
feminized, ridiculed, castrated;
his corporeal being in its entirety
has been reduced to the most
denigrated body part – a ‘cut’.11
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 Perspectives
As the play presents him, he
‘degenerates’ into femininity, following
the opposite trajectory to Viola, and his
‘social ambitions implicate him’ (says
Callaghan) ‘in a species of deviance far
more dangerous than Viola’s deliberate
transgression’.12
Olivia’s genitals are on display in this
scene, and are appropriated to denigrate
Malvolio; moreover, Olivia’s body is
transformed into a kind of carnivalesque
grotesque, incontinent in the description
of it making great P’s. Olivia also
loses authority and power through
the process of having her writing
impersonated by her servant Maria.
Maria is conspicuously absent in this
gulling scene; having set it up with the
device of the forged letter, she promptly
exits in anticipation of Malvolio’s
arrival, and the episode becomes a
scene of male bonding (she re-enters
immediately after Malvolio leaves). So
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we have a fantasy of social climbing,
the undercutting of female authority
specifically through denigration of her
absent body and the use of that body to
in turn denigrate the overreaching gull.
The rape of Lucrece imagery cannot be
accidental here: Malvolio describes the
letter’s wax seal as bearing Lucrece’s
12
Callaghan, 37
Callaghan, 43
13
likeness, presumably in the act of
stabbing herself ( just as the seal will
be cut open) rather than in the act
the stabbing repeats (the violation of
her body). Callaghan concludes: ‘For
the critic, Twelfth Night illustrates the
problem of recovering the female body
for feminism. We cannot make a female
body “materialise” from nowhere; we
can only register the complexity of its
exclusion’.13
The artifice of identity construction
in Twelfth Night – whether gendered
identity, class identity, or other forms
of identity altogether – offers a useful
opportunity for students to reflect
on different perspectives in the play.
Although in theory the play ends
conservatively in heteronormative
marriage, the superficiality of its various
resolutions (or, in the case of Malvolio,
its emphatic failure to offer resolution)
ought to be read as a prompt for
interrogation of such easy answers.
Like Viola’s apostrophe to Disguise as
a ‘wickedness’ that allows Satan, the
‘pregnant enemy’, to do much harm
(2.2.24-25), generic closure offers a
seductive, but ultimately deceptive
account of the play’s complexities.
‘The scene that brings together a number
of feminist insights or perspectives,
beyond the usual readings of a boy actor
playing a girl disguised as a boy wooing
a lady, is the scene late in the second act
when Malvolio discovers the letter Maria
has forged.’
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