Shakespeare After All

by Marjorie Garber

Being thus benetted round with villainies— Ere I could make a prologue to my brains, They had begun the play… 5.2.30–32

But by the fifth act, after the voyage to England, there are no more soliloquies. Hamlet now talks to others

rather than to himself or to the audience, and his language is suddenly full of active verbs, verbs of “doing”:

Of all the changes in Hamlet as a dramatic character, though, the most striking is the change in his conception of his own role.

Hamlet's education in the mutability of roles began with the

players, and the First Player's tears, but it ends in the graveyard, with the lesson that all human lives are roles, briefly played.

If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, Absent thee from felicity a while, And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain To tell my story.

Twelfth Night

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HAKESPEARE'S PLAYTwelfth Night, or What You Will takes the first half of its title from the English holiday celebrated on the evening before January 6—the Twelfth Day of Christmas, otherwise known as the Feast of the Epiphany.

In England, Twelfth Night was a feast of misrule, a festival of eating and drinking, during which masques and revels were presented.

What You Will, the second half of the play's title, speaks both to this customary season of topsy-turvy revelry and to the space of fantasy and wish fulfillment

Twelfth Night was first presented as a private entertainment at the Middle Temple, a law

school in London, in 1602, and the play as we have it shows a number of evidences of its Christian festival origins.

Olivia Good fool, for my brother's death. Feste I think his soul is in hell, madonna. Olivia I know his soul is in heaven, fool.

Feste The more fool, madonna, to mourn for your brother's soul, being in heaven. Take away the fool, gentlemen. Twelfth Night 1.5.57–62

in Twelfth Night the “outsiders” not only bring the comic elements of energy, desire, and fruitfully mistaken identities; they also bring key elements from

another literary genre: romance. The world of romance invades the world of comedy.

From the first, though, it is Viola, of all the shipwreck survivors, who has the strongest claim upon the audience's attention.

and as is so often the case with Shakespeare, the sheer beauty of the passage can sometimes overshadow its sense.

Orsino is passive rather than active, passive in the extreme. He does not even go himself to Olivia to tell her of his love, but instead sends a go-between. His is the

apotheosis of aristocratic indolence and moodiness, the opposite of Viola's energy and activity—just as his constant rhetorical insistence upon expressing his thwarted love is the contrary to

For what is Olivia's situation? Her waiting-gentlewoman Maria will say that she is “addicted to a melancholy” (2.5.176).

Olivia puts herself in a nunnery of her own devising. She is her own repressive parent,

Olivia's mourning, “addicted to a melancholy,” is thus in complete

contrast to the way Viola mourns for the loss of her brother, Sebastian. Viola's response to what she believes to be her brother's death is life-affirming rather than life-denying, and is manifested outdoors rather than indoors.

underscores the degree to which these characters mi...

Critics have noted the predominance of water imagery in this play, from tears to seawater to urine, from dry hands to dry jests to dry fools.

Self-love, an aspect

of pride, is this play's besetting sin, a sin that provokes the language of sickness that envelops much of the play.

The rebellious backstairs world, too, is in a sense a result of Olivia's self-absorption. Preoccupied by her own grief, she has

given the rule of the household over to Malvolio, her steward.

Puritans in this period were vociferous in their criticism of the theater

Both Malvolio's social climbing and his repressiveness are all too apposite for Olivia's mood as the play opens.

Orsino's court world speaks in lofty, often high-sounding poetry. Olivia's household largely speaks in prose.

There is danger on both sides—too little rule, or too much.

I am sure care's an enemy to life” (1.3.1–2).

The two extremes here, Toby's misrule and Olivia's and Mal-volio's excessive rule, are really two sides of the same coin. Both are aimless, fruitless, and preoccupied with sterile formalities,

Appetite for appetite's sake is not only a problem for Toby and company—it is Orsino's problem as well. His appetite is for music, and for the melancholy of love, while theirs is for cakes and ale, but it is all mere appetite,

Viola's own nature is clearly one that combines the virtues of other resourceful women in Shakespearean comedy, virtues like generosity and risk-taking.

[“]I am a gentleman.” I'll be sworn thou art. Thy tongue, thy face, thy limbs, actions, and spirit Do give thee five-fold blazon…. 1.5.261–263

The double nature of all human beings, the fact that men and women all have something “masculine” and something “feminine” about them, is an issue that

Shakespeare takes up in several of his sonnets, as well as in scenes like this one in the plays.

Anxieties about men “turning into” women were amply to be found in Puritan antitheatrical diatribes, where they were often linked, as we have seen, to the watching of stage plays and the seductiveness of gender impersonation. In staging a play that involved a set of male and female twins, identical except for gender, Shakespeare revisits ideas as old as Plato's Symposium,

In the early years of its performance the most crowd-pleasing characters in Twelfth Night were Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, and Malvolio.

The self-love of Malvolio, like its twin manifestations, that of Olivia and of Orsino, plunges the entire household, if not the entire world of Illyria, into something its inhabitants will constantly identify as “madness.”

The scene is perhaps the most glorious comic scene in the play, as Malvolio, bowing and prancing and paying homage to his shadow, comes upon a letter on the ground. The onstage audience, Toby, Andrew, and Fabian, concealing themselves inadequately behind an ornamental shrub (“Get ye all three into the box-tree,” commands Maria), provide a noisy commentary, as Malvolio embarks upon his short-lived career as a literary critic, and a would-be aristocrat. (Malvolio unquestionably runs away with the play, in almost any production, in part because of the sheer brilliance of this scene.)

Shakespeare's plays never produce these familiar maxims without some irony, at least of the dramatic variety.

The real or geographical Illyria, a district of the Balkan peninsula which had earlier been under the jurisdiction of the popes and then of the Slavic Dalmatians and Croatians, was conquered in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by

the Turks, and did not reappear on European maps until the very end of the seventeenth century. In Shakespeare's time, “Illyria” would have been a place-name without a place.)

We might better see Shakespeare not as resorting to gimmicks, but rather as creating a theatrical counterpart for a psychological state. Malvolio thinks these things, and suddenly a letter falls at his feet