A Pelican Book: This Is Shakespeare by Emma Smith

Author:Emma Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241361641
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2019-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

Twelfth Night

‘If music be the food of love, play on’ (1.1.1). The opening line of Twelfth Night, or, What You Will makes clear that this is a play all about desire. The central protagonists all yearn, deliciously, for the unattainable. Orsino desires Olivia, Olivia desires Cesario; Malvolio desires Olivia, Olivia desires Sebastian; Orsino desires Cesario; Viola desires Orsino. This chapter on the play approaches these networks of desire via an apparently minor character, Antonio, to help reveal how Twelfth Night works and what we might understand by its teasing subtitle ‘What You Will’. As with the blurred skull in Hans Holbein’s anamorphic sixteenth-century painting The Ambassadors, a sidelong look at Twelfth Night brings the play’s themes into three-dimensional focus. Viewing the play from an angle helps us to see how Shakespeare crafts his plays for the theatre, how he engages with conventions about comedy, and how potential meanings of Twelfth Night shift over time.

We first meet Antonio at the beginning of the play’s second act, where he and his companion Sebastian look like the convenient final jigsaw pieces needed for its comic resolution. What’s happened so far is that we have met the lovesick Count Orsino, who is languorously in love with being in love, rather like the passionate speaker in an Elizabethan sonnet, whom we suspect would actually run a mile if the idealized object of his affections stepped off her pedestal and gave him the eye. Olivia disdains him, ostensibly because she is in extended mourning for her dead father and brother. We have also encountered a shipwrecked woman – let’s call her Viola, although if we were watching the play we wouldn’t know what to call her (of which more later) – whose brother has been drowned, and who has decided to enter Orsino’s service in male disguise. Her male persona, Cesario, has been such a hit with Orsino that he has sent this new servant to woo Olivia on his behalf, but as Cesario reveals to us, he/she is in a difficult position since he/she is actually in love with Orsino himself/herself. The encounter with Olivia complicates things further, as she is clearly attracted to the messenger’s assured confidence. In addition to this love triangle, the play has established the tensions within Olivia’s household: her strict steward Malvolio has clashed with her fool Feste, and it is clear that her drunken uncle Sir Toby Belch, his friend and her would-be suitor Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and her sassy waiting woman Maria, are a riotous comedic problem waiting to happen.

So into this play world – part yearning, part mourning, part wassailing – comes Sebastian, Viola’s twin brother, supposed drowned in the shipwreck. It’s easy to see why Shakespeare would introduce Sebastian at this point. He is the reassurance of a comic conclusion, a fourth eligibly single character who will enable the triangle of Orsino–Cesario–Olivia to reconcile into two romantic pairs. He is also the embodiment of the fictional Cesario who will enable Viola to return to herself.

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