Twelfth Night: A Guide to the Play (Greenwood Guides to Shakespeare)

216 Pages·2005·11.8 MB·English

by  John R. Ford

Twelfth Night
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TWELFTH NIQHT
A Guide to the Play
JOHN R. FORD
Qreenwood Quides to Shakespeare
GREENWOOD PRESS
Westport, Connecticut • London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ford, John R.
Twelfth night: a guide to the play/John R. Ford,
p. cm. — (Greenwood guides to Shakespeare)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-313-31700-3 (alk. paper)
1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. Twelfth night—Handbooks, manuals, etc.
I. Title. II. Series.
PR2837.F67 2006
82.3'3—dc2 205026167
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.
Copyright © 2006 by John R. Ford
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be
reproduced, by any process or technique, without the
express written consent of the publisher.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2005026167
ISBN: 0-313-31700-3
First published in 2006
Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881
An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
www.greenwood.com
Printed in the United States of America
The paper used in this book complies with the
Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National
Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984).
10 987654321
CONTENTS
Preface vi
Acknowledgments xi
1. Textual History 1
2. Contexts and Sources 17
3. Dramatic Structure 47
4. Themes 71
5. Critical Aproaches 97
6. Twelfth Night in Performance 127
Sugested Readings 165
Productions Cited 17
Works Cited 179
Index 193
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PREFACE
This book presents itself quite modestly, and at the same time somewhat
presumptuously, as a guide to the richness and uncertainties, the music
and dissonance, the hilarity and discomforts of Twelfth Night. For Twelfth
Night, or What You Will is at once one of the most accessible and one of th
most elusive of all of Shakespeare's plays. It has enjoyed enormous popu-
larity in performance, yet it is often neglected by textbook anthologies,
certainly by those designed for secondary schools but also by many intro-
ductory college anthologies. Its tonal mix of mirth and melancholy is often
beyond the reach of performance, even though Twelfth Night, according
to R. L. Smallwood, has "long been, and continues to be, among the most
frequently revived of Shakespeare's plays" ("Middle Comedies" 127).
Despite, or perhaps because of, the play's many successes on stage,
there have been fewer movie and video productions of this play than of
others by Shakespeare. Only one of those, the 1996 Trevor Nunn film,
has reached a wide audience or critical applause. Twelfth Nighfs textual
provenance is also something of a riddle. Because the first printing of the
play is the 1623 folio, its text is often described as "superior" or "clean"
and free from those problems of multiple variants that the existence of
multiple quarto editions sometimes presents. And yet the text is haunted
by internal inconsistencies. Is Orsino a count or a duke? Can Viola sing "in
many sorts of music"? What happens to Feste in 2.3? Who is Fabian? How
much time has elapsed from the beginning of the play to its end? Three
hours? Three days?
In a sense, of course, none of these questions matters. Clearly, this
is a play that will confine itself no finer than it is. But that's the point.
There's something about this play that willfully contradicts, even undoes,
Vlll Preface
itself, until it becomes what Orsino describes as a natural perspective,
that is and is not. We might start with the play's riddling title, either of
them. Does Twelfth Night refer to the season of its fictional setting or to
its first performance? Does such a title point to the divinity of its epiph-
anic glimpses or to the profanation of its festival derisions? Is the subtitle
merely a nod to audiences' wavering tastes? Or does it refer to a play
about the habits of our collective wills, at once stubbornly fixed and as
unstable as the sea? Charles I famously rewrote the title page of his copy to
call it what he willed. For him the play was simply Malvolio. The dramatic
structure of the play is also both delightful and perplexing. The opening
sequence of scenes in the play, whatever name we give it, has puzzled
enough directors to make the switching of the first two scenes something
of a performance convention. The end of Twelfth Night is just as beguiling,,
"unbuild[ing]," as Anne Barton argues, "its own comic form at its point of
greatest vulnerability: the ending" (171). Not surprisingly, critical inter-
pretations of the play have been wildly diverse. Twelfth Night, or What
You Will, a play so much about the riddle of reading and interpretation, h
generated not a map but an atlas of misreadings, with "more lines than is
in the new map with the augmentation of the Indies" (3.2.62-63). Or, as
Feste puts it, nothing that is so, is so.
It is not that criticism of this play has been especially wrongheaded. Just
the opposite is true. Twelfth Night has provoked some of the most brilliant
critical responses from some of the finest of critics, from C. L. Barber to
Northrop Frye to Alexander Leggatt to Anne Barton to Laurie Osborne to
Stephen Booth, to name only a few. It is more accurate to say that this play,
more than any other by Shakespeare, challenges and empowers critics to
participate in its field of play. If Hamlet can be said to be not merely mad in
itself but the cause that madness is in critics, then there is something in the
language and moods of Twelfth Night that licenses corruptors of words.
I would like to explore the many ways that this play maps out not only
the energies of pleasure and of "play," in every sense of that word, but also
the weariness of guilt and satiety that are the costs of such indulgence. As
Feste reminds Orsino, "pleasure will be paid, one time or another" (2.4.70).
Such a study should be alive, not only to verbal, structural, thematic, and
performance issues within the play, but also to the presence of those same
issues in critical writings about the play. The questions raised by these
issues particularly resonate in performance. Consequently, although this
book has a chapter dedicated to performance history, all the chapters are
sensitive to the ways that questions about text, sources, dramatic structure,
themes, and critical approaches are realized, challenged, or mirrored in
performance.
Preface IX
How do performances of Twelfth Night redefine an audience's sense of
itself and its decorum? How do performances implicate us in the burdens
of mirth? Critics and playgoers alike comment on how uneasy the audience
is made to feel. But is that uneasiness caused, as Ralph Berry suggests,
by audiences' culpable allegiance with the revelers? Or is it caused, as
Stephen Booth suggests, by audiences' secret sympathy with Malvolio's
desire to shut down the boisterous all-night party next door? How does our
conscious awareness of the complex heteroerotic and homoerotic dynam-
ics between Viola and Orsino, or between Viola and Olivia, relate to our
capacity to "misplace" or forget Antonio for so much of this play? Or how
does our capacity to remember Malvolio's threats—not just to the on-stage
revelers within the play but to our desire for comic fulfillment from the
play—shift our status from detached spectators to involved participants?
How do performances make that metamorphosis easier or more vexed?
When, for example, Andrew Aguecheek, in his sour epiphany, hears of
Sir Toby's actual feelings for him, a contempt that is defined and nurtured by
comic distance, where does that distance leave us? For that matter, at what
point do individual acts of laughter and mockery define an "us"? When do
"we" first laugh? Is it as early as 1.3, when a perplexed Aguecheek assures
Sir Toby that he would never undertake to accost Maria in this company,
a statement often accompanied in performance with a gesture identifying
"us" as "this company"? Are we laughing at Sir Andrew or at ourselves?
In a 1994 performance by ACTER at Clemson University, the actor play-
ing Feste entreated not just his fellow Illyrians but also members of the
audience for money. We responded by tossing coins onto the stage and
across the auditorium with such festival energy that we began to threaten
the decorum and even the safety of the performance. Feste had to calm us
down while at the same time stoking the fires of the on-stage revelry. Is
there recognition in our mirth? How articulate is our laughter? In a play
so full of fustian riddles, how can our critical responses be anything other
than audience responses provoked by and included in the festival rhetoric
of this play? How can we, either as audiences or critics, possibly resolve
the contradictions of this play except, like Malvolio, by "crushing" them a
little, until they bow to us?
I have tried to write the kind of book I would want to read. That involves
meeting two quite different goals. This should be a book that clearly and
usefully guides readers toward a comprehensive understanding of Twelfth
Nighfs rich and diverse elements. But I hope, just as passionately, that thi
book will introduce readers to the inscrutable, unknowable mysteries of
this play. Consequently, I am writing to a mixed community of students,
teachers, and scholars. The first two categories, however, would probably