‘I am not what I am’

Carnival and Lent in Twelfth Night

Looking forward and looking
back: Janus and January
‘Twelfth Night Merrymaking in Farmer
Shakeshaft’s Barn’ (Phiz, c. 1840)
 Misrule
Christmas – especially Twelfth Night

From Philip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (1583):

‘First, all the wildheads of the parish, conventing together, choose them a
grand captain (of all mischief) whom they ennoble with the title of “my Lord
of Misrule”, and him they crown with great solemnity, and adopt for their
king. This king anointed chooseth forth twenty, forty, threescore or a hundred
lusty guts, like to himself, to wait upon his lordly majesty… Then march these
heathen company towards the church and churchyard, their pipers piping, their
drummers thundering, their stumps dancing, their bells jingling, their
handkerchiefs swinging about their heads like madmen, their hobbyhorses and
other monsters skirmishing amongst the rout. And in this sort they go to the
church (I say) and into the church (though the minister be at prayer or
preaching) dancing and swinging their handkerchiefs over their heads in the
church, like devils incarnate, with such a confused noise, that no man can hear
his own voice.’
 Carnival
As Michael Bristol explains:
‘Central to the experience of Carnival is a particular use of
symbols, costumes and masks, in which the ordinary relationship
between signifier and signified is disrupted and conventional
meaning is parodied. Parody and travesty, the rude, foolish,
sometimes abusive mimicry of everyday categories, create the
topsy-turvy world of carnivalesque misrule.’ (Bristol 1983: 641)

For Mikhail Bakhtin, carnival ‘offers the chance to have a new

outlook on the world, to realize the relative nature of all that
exists, and to enter a completely new order of things’ (1965:
34).
 Carnival
As we saw last term, the Puritans of the period took a dim
view of both carnival and theatre:
‘… some spend the Sabbath day (for the most part) in frequenting
of bawdy stage-plays and interludes, in maintaining Lords of
Misrule (for so they call a certain kind of play which they use),
May games, church-ales, feasts, and wakes: in piping, dancing,
dicing, carding, bowling, tennis-playing: in bear-baiting, cock-
fighting, hawking, hunting, and such like; … whereby the Lord
God is dishonoured, his Sabbath violated, his word neglected, his
sacraments contemned, and his people marvellously corrupted and
carried away from true virtue and godliness.’ (Philip Stubbes, The
Anatomie of Abuses, 1583)
Carnival and the Elizabethan stage
Robert Weimann argues that ‘although the [carnivalesque]
ceremonies were gradually discontinued, their spirit survived
in the gaiety, the “immoderate and disordinate Joye,” of the
Elizabethan clown, jig dancer, and “ieaster”’ (1987: 23-4):
‘…his study is to coin bitter jests, or to show antique motions, or
to sing bawdy sonnets and ballads: give him a little wine in his
head, he is continually flearing and making of mouths; he laughs
intemperately at every little occasion, and dances about the houses,
leaps over tables, outskips men’s heads, trips up his companions’
heels, burns sack with a candle, and hath all the feats of a Lord of
Misrule in the country.’ (Thomas Lodge, Wits Miserie, 1596)
Twelfth Night and carnival
Bakhtin describes ‘the essential carnival element in
the organization of Shakespeare’s drama’:
‘This does not merely concern the secondary, clownish
motives of his plays. The logic of crownings and
uncrownings, in direct or indirect form, organizes the
serious elements also.’ (1965: 275)

Twelfth Night’s title, of course, has festive and

carnivalesque associations.
Sebastian, towards the end of the play, asks, ‘Are all
the people mad?’ (4.1.26)
Twelfth Night and carnival
In Bakhtinian fashion, Twelfth Night might be
characterised as a play which explodes traditional
categorisations and hierarchies.

As Karin S. Coddon argues:

‘In Twelfth Night demarcations between male and
female, master and servant, libertine and moralist come
into festive – and not so festive – collision.’ (Coddon
1993: 309)
Carnival and Lent (Pieter Bruegel, 1559)
 Sir Toby Belch
MARIA. …you must confine yourself
within the modest limits of order.
SIR TOBY. Confine? I’ll confine myself
no finer than I am. These clothes are
good enough to drink in, and so be
these boots too; an they be not, let them
hang themselves in their own straps.
(1.3.7-12)

Compare Falstaff: ‘out of all order,

out of all compass’ (1 Henry IV,
3.3.19)

Twelfth Night, Filter, 2008 (2010

revival)
 Sir Toby Belch
Lord of Misrule?
‘I am sure care’s an enemy to life’
(1.3.2)
Ambiguous identity
Terry Eagleton argues that Sir Toby
‘is a rampant hedonist, complacently
anchored in his body, falling at once
“beyond” the symbolic order of
society in his verbal anarchy, and
“below” it in his carnivalesque refusal
to submit his body to social control’
(1986: 32).
Twelfth Night, Filter, 2008 (2010
revival)
 Sir Toby Belch
In carnivalesque imagery, according to Bakhtin, the
human body ‘is presented not in a private, egotistic
form, severed from the other spheres of life, but as
something universal, representing all the people’:
‘The people’s laughter which characterized all the
forms of grotesque realism from immemorial
times was linked with the bodily lower stratum.
Laughter degrades and materializes. […] To
degrade also means to concern oneself with the
lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and
the reproductive organs; it therefore relates to acts
of defecation and copulation, conception,
pregnancy, and birth. Degradation digs a bodily
grave for a new birth; it has not only a destructive,
negative aspect, but also a regenerating one.’
(1965: 19-21)
Twelfth Night, Filter, 2008 (2010
revival)
 A twist on the morality play?
Remember the Vices from Mankind:

NOW-A-DAYS. Leap about lively! Thou art a valiant man;

Let us be merry while we be here!
NOUGHT. Shall I break my neck to show you sport?
NOW-A-DAYS. Therefore, ever beware of thy report!
NOUGHT. I beshrew ye all! Here is a shrewd sort;
Have thereat then, with a merry cheer!
Here they dance
MERCY. Do way! do way this revel, sirs! Do way!
NOW-A-DAYS. Do way, good Adam? Do way?
This is no part of thy play. (75-83)
 A twist on the morality play?
SIR ANDREW. Shall we set about some revels?
SIR TOBY. What shall we do else – were we not born under Taurus?
SIR ANDREW. Taurus? That’s sides and heart.
SIR TOBY. No, sir, it is legs and thighs: let me see thee caper. Ha,
higher! Ha, ha, excellent! (1.3.130-7)

MALVOLIO. My masters, are you mad? Or what are you? Have you
no wit, manners, nor honesty, but to gabble like tinkers at this
time of night? Do ye make an alehouse of my lady’s house, that
ye squeak out your coziers’ catches without any mitigation or
remorse of voice? Is there no respect of place, persons, nor time in
you?
SIR TOBY. We did keep time, sir, in our catches. Sneck up! (2.3.83-
90)
 Malvolio
MARIA. Marry, sir, sometimes
he is a kind of Puritan.
SIR ANDREW. O, if I thought
that I’d beat him like a dog.
SIR TOBY BELCH. What, for
being a Puritan? Thy
exquisite reason, dear knight.
SIR ANDREW. I have no
exquisite reason for’t, but I
have reason good enough.
(2.3.135-40)

I, Malvolio, Tim Crouch, 2011

 Malvolio
Malvolio as anti-theatrical Puritan:

MALVOLIO. I marvel your ladyship takes delight in such a barren

rascal… I protest, I take these wise men, that crow so at these set
kind of fools, no better than the fools’ zanies. (1.5.79-85)

SIR TOBY. Dost thou think because thou art virtuous, there shall be no
more cakes and ale? (2.3.110-11)

Of course, the festive world of the play turns the Puritan

Malvolio into his very opposite…

OLIVIA Why, this is very midsummer madness. (3.4.54)

Twelfth Night, National Theatre, 2017
 The Malvolio paradox
FABIAN. If this were played upon a stage, now, I could condemn it as
an improbable fiction. (3.4.125-6)

Director Tim Carroll describes Malvolio’s gulling scene as a

‘game’: it asks its audience ‘to be complicit in accepting
something which is literally unbelievable’ (2008: 38).

There are generally two games being played concurrently during

this sequence:
the onstage observers’ game is to remain hidden from Malvolio
whilst indulging in behaviours that jeopardise their cover;
at the same time, the object of Malvolio’s game is to persuade both
himself and the audience that the words of the letter refer to him.
 The Malvolio paradox
Donald Sinden documents his performance in John Barton’s 1969
production in his chapter of Players of Shakespeare 1, noting numerous
playful exchanges with the audience.

For example, when Malvolio reads the word ‘steward’ in the letter, he
shows it to the audience:
‘They obviously don’t believe him, so he shows them the very word and
mouths it a second time (laugh 3). Fools! He is patently wasting his time
on them – they only laugh.’ (1985: 58)

Jonathan Holmes points out that Sinden ‘predicates his characterisation

on the play-acting of those he is addressing, which as his account
makes clear includes the audience as much as, and perhaps more than,
his onstage addressees’ (2004: 29-30).
Twelfth Night,
Shakespeare’s
Globe, 2017
 Feste
FESTE. I am gone, sir,
And anon, sir,
I’ll be with you again,
In a trice,
Like to the old Vice,
Your need to sustain… (4.2.123-8)

The social status of fools (and

indeed of players) is at once ‘both
high and low’ (2.3.40).

A wandering figure, Feste belongs

both to the fictional play world and
the here-and-now of the Elizabethan
Twelfth Night, Royal Exchange Theatre,
audience.
2017
 Feste
VIOLA. Art not thou the Lady Olivia’s fool?
FESTE. No indeed, sir, the Lady Olivia has no
folly… I am indeed not her fool, but her
corrupter of words. (3.1.30-5)

‘Feste’s entrance … is coloured not only

by the unauthorized absence from
Olivia’s household, but also by his
defiant resistance (‘Let her hang me’) to
Maria’s interrogations about his
whereabouts, even under the threat of
hanging or unemployment.’ (Coddon
Twelfth Night, Royal Exchange Theatre,
1993: 315)
2017
Wise fools and foolish wits
‘Better a witty fool, than a foolish wit’ (1.5.32-3)

‘This fellow is wise enough to play the fool’ (3.1.59)

Feste and Olivia’s ‘Take the fool away’ exchange (1.5.35-68)

disrupts categories of folly and wisdom in a carnivalesque manner.

This same disruption is later brought to bear on Malvolio:

MALVOLIO. Fool, there was never a man so notoriously abused. I am as well

in my wits, fool, as thou art.
FESTE. But as well? Then you are mad indeed, if you be no better in your wits
than a fool. (4.2.89-92)

OLIVIA. Alas, poor fool, how have they baffled thee! (5.1.366)
Carnival and Lent in Twelfth Night

What is love? ’tis not hereafter;

Present mirth hath present
laughter;
What’s to come is still unsure:
In delay there lies no plenty;
Then come kiss me, sweet and
twenty,
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.
Twelfth Night, dir. Trevor Nunn, 1996
(2.3.46-51)
Carnival and Lent in Twelfth Night
The play stages a conflict between the force of self-
denial and the more joyful spirit of liberation.

VIOLA. …She pined in thought,

And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief. (2.4.112-15)

OLIVIA. Why then, methinks ’tis time to smile again. […]

The clock upbraids me with the waste of time. (3.1.125-9)
 Gender inversion
Three couples exhibit same-sex attraction in the play:
Olivia/Viola, Orsino/Cesario, and Antonio/Sebastian.

Casey Charles argues that

‘…this theme functions neither as an uncomplicated promotion of
a modern category of sexual orientation nor, from a more
traditional perspective, as an ultimately contained representation
of the licensed misrule of saturnalia. The representation of
homoerotic attraction in Twelfth Night functions rather as a means
of dramatizing the socially constructed basis of a sexuality that is
determined by gender identity.’ (Charles 1997: 122)
 Gender inversion
Complicating this, of course, is the fact that Viola-as-Cesario would have
been played by a boy actor.

Boy actors already challenged Elizabethan England’s sense of stable gender

identities: anti-theatricalists frequently complained that boys dressed as
women provoked illicit sexual desire.

Stubbes again:
‘Our apparel was given us as a sign distinctive to discern betwixt sex and sex,
and therefore one to wear the apparel of another sex is to participate with the
same, and to adulterate the verity of his own kind.’

VIOLA. Disguise, I see, thou art a wickedness

Wherein the pregnant enemy does much. (2.2.27-8)
Twelfth Night as saturnalia?
C. L. Barber:
‘The most fundamental distinction the play brings
home to us is the difference between men and women.
To say this may seem to labour the obvious; for what
love story does not emphasize this difference? But the
disguising of a girl as a boy in Twelfth Night is
exploited so as to renew in a special way our sense of
the difference. Just as a saturnalian reversal of social
roles need not threaten the social structure, but can
serve instead to consolidate it, so a temporary, playful
reversal of sexual roles can renew the meaning of the
normal relation.’ (245)
 Viola as liminal figure
Viola makes it clear that she is ‘acting a part’:

VIOLA. I can say little more than I have studied, and that question’s
out of my part. (1.5.171-2)

OLIVIA. Are you a comedian?

VIOLA. No, my profound heart; and yet – by the very fangs of
malice I swear – I am not that I play. (1.5.175-7)

Later, however, this becomes a more profound identity crisis:

VIOLA. I am not what I am. (3.1.139)
 Viola as liminal figure
ORSINO. Your master quits you, and for your service done him
So much against the mettle of your sex,
So far beneath your soft and tender breeding,
And since you called me master for so long,
Here is my hand. You shall from this time be
Your master’s mistress. (5.1.318-23)

ORSINO. …Cesario, come –

For so you shall be while you are a man;
But when in other habits you are seen,
Orsino’s mistress and his fancy’s queen. (5.1.381-4)
 Viola as liminal figure
‘…in her hermaphroditic
capacity as man and woman…
[Viola] collapses the polarities
upon which heterosexuality is
based by becoming an object
of desire whose ambiguity
renders the distinction between
homo- and hetero-erotic
attraction difficult to decipher.’
(Charles 1997: 127-8)

Twelfth Night publicity image, Propeller, 2007

 Twelfth Night’s ending:
saturnalian or subversive?
‘If in Twelfth Night the aristocratic order is ostensibly reasserted in
the pairings of Orsino/Viola and Oliva/Sebastian, the refusal of the
play’s closing to recuperate two of its most disorderly subjects –
Malvolio and Feste – suggests rather less than a wholesale
endorsement of the privileges of rank and hierarchy.’ (Coddon
1993: 309)

‘The so-called “festive comedy” concludes rather ominously; if

indeed “the whirligig of time brings in his revenges,” it is difficult
to dismiss Malvolio’s parting threat as merely one sour note
troubling an otherwise stable social hierarchy.’ (Coddon 1993:
322)
 References
Bakhtin, Mikhail (1965) Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Barber, C. L. (1972) Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Form

and its Relation to Social Custom, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.

Bristol, Michael D. (1983) ‘Carnival and the Institutions of Theatre in

Elizabethan England’, ELH, 50: 4, 637-654.

Carroll, Tim (2008) ‘Practising behaviour to his own shadow’, in

Christie Carson & Farah Karim-Cooper [eds] Shakespeare’s Globe: A
Theatrical Experiment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 37-44.

Charles, Casey (1997) ‘Gender Trouble in Twelfth Night’, Theatre

Journal, 49: 2, 121-141.
 References
Coddon, Karin S. (1993) ‘“Slander in an Allow’d Fool”: Twelfth
Night’s Crisis of the Aristocracy’, Studies in English Literature,
1500-1900, 33: 2, 309-325.
Eagleton, Terry (1986) William Shakespeare, London: Basil
Blackwell.
Holmes, Jonathan (2004) Merely Players?: Actors’ Accounts of
Performing Shakespeare, London & New York: Routledge.
Sinden, Donald (1985) ‘Malvolio in Twelfth Night’, in Philip
Brockbank [ed.] Players of Shakespeare 1, 41-66.
Weimann, R. (1987) Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the
Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and
Function, Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press.