Twelfth Night
Twelfth Night, which marks the mid-point of Shakespeare’s career, is a ripe love-
comedy with a happy ending. Shipwrecked separately on the coast of Illyria are
twins, Viola and Sebastian, each thinking the other drowned; each ends up marry-
ing well.
As in most Shakespeare plays about love, the protagonist is a girl, Viola. She
disguises herself as a boy (Cesario), to evade detection rather than to pursue a young
man. Cesario (Viola) is employed by the young Duke Orsino to carry his love to the
young Olivia. Both Olivia and Viola mourn a brother. Viola falls in love with Orsino,
however, and Olivia falls for Cesario. Orsino’s opening words had announced the
theme of longing:
If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it that, surfeiting
The appetite may sicken and so die.
That strain again, it had a dying fall.
O,it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour. Enough, no more,
’Tis not so sweet now as it was before.This play is as much music as action: the players dance to a series of variations
upon love. Orsino and Olivia overdo the love-sickness. When Orsino says that
women’s hearts lack retention, Viola disagrees:
My father had a daughter loved a man
As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman
I should your lordship.
ORSINO: And what’s her history?
VIOLA: A blank, my lord. She never told her love ....Viola’s love is discreet, patient, unpossessive, undisclosed. Beneath the plangent
strings there is a scherzo of wind instruments led by Sir Toby Belch, who sits up late
guzzling the cakes and ale of his niece Olivia, and singing loud catches, to the disgust
of Malvolio. Olivia’s steward, as his name suggests, is ‘sick of self-love’. He is tricked
by a forged letter written by another servant, Maria, into thinking that his mistress
invites him to woo her. In a very funny scene, Malvolio’s declarations convince Olivia
he is mad. Olivia is herself tricked into marrying Viola’s lost twin Sebastian. Viola
reveals herself to her restored Sebastian. Maria marries the undeserving Toby, and
Viola her wonderful Orsino. Malvolio the spoil-sport is unmated. So is Feste, who
sings the songs, ‘O Mistress mine, where are you roaming?’, ‘Come away, come away
death’ and ‘When that I was and a little tiny boy’. Fools and clowns are always solo.
Feste is one of Shakespeare’s best fools. Henry VIII and James I kept licensed
fools; the Popes kept one until the 18th century. Shakespeare developed the jester
into a choric figure. His fools joke and sing, and make fun of their betters – as did
the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Feste’s songs are sad, and there is a balance in the play
between those things which make romance and fairy tale – discoveries, recognitions,
the promise of love fulfilled, the restoration of a lost twin – and a sense of a time-
governed world in which these wished-for things do not happen. Viola and
Sebastian are identical brother and sister; Shakespeare was the father of boy and girl
twins,of whom the boy (Hamnet) died, aged 11. He often has pairs closely coupled
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 125