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

216 Pages·2005·11.8 MB·English
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Twelfth Night Recent Titles in Greenwood Guides to Shakespeare Julius Caesar: A Guide to the Play Jo McMurtry Romeo and Juliet: A Guide to the Play Jay L. Halio Othello: A Guide to the Play Joan Lord Hall The Tempest: A Guide to the Play H. R. Coursen King Lear: A Guide to the Play Jay L. Halio Love's Labour's Lost: A Guide to the Play John S. Pendergast Antony and Cleopatra: A Guide to the Play Joan Lord Hall As You Like It: A Guide to the Play Steven J. Lynch The Merchant of Venice: A Guide to the Play Vicki K. Janik A Midsummer Night's Dream: A Guide to the Play Jay L. Halio Coriolanus: A Guide to the Play Mary Steible The Winter's Tale: A Guide to the Play Joan Lord Hall 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 This page intentionally left blank 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

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Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.