I first read Twelfth Night in my AP English Language and Composition class after having taken the AP test; we had to pick a novel or other work of fiction to read as a class (but my class split into about five separate groups reading different books because we couldn't settle on just one), and my friend Kayla and I decided to read something of Shakespeare's (this was to help prepare us for AP Literature & Composition next year; being a senior, I'd taken Lit in my junior year and therefore didn't really need to do this, but that's beside the point). We chose Twelfth Night entirely by accident, but I can honestly say that it was the best accident to ever happen to me, as the play very quickly grew to be one of my favorites among the Bard's work; only my love for Othello could match my love for this complex comedy.
Much of said comedy is rooted in the various mishaps and 'misdemeanors' that are wrought of severe cases of mistaken identity; in this case, the assumption of a masculine identity (called Cesario) by Viola, which then becomes confused with her masculine twin brother Sebastian. Being a twin myself, I found myself singularly appreciative of this particular device (especially considering the fact that Viola slotted herself firmly into the upper echelons of Shakespeare's strong and striking female characters: more on this later), as much as I loved the bawdier, more base comedy inherent in the plotlines championed by Sir Toby and his ilk. In light of this, the darker aspects of the plot, such as the cruel progression of the gulling of Malvolio from simple trickery to what seems akin to psychological torture (yes, Feste, I'm talking about you), the abandonment of Antonio to the mercy of a confused and uncertain fate, and the constant lingering shadows of Death and Time that never ventured far from the lively action, only served to 'spice up' the plot more, creating an astonishingly complex and intricate emotional masterpiece that could astonish and frighten and infuriate and amuse all at once. Truly, a most underrated and over-excellent piece.
One of the best things about Twelfth Night for me was its characters. In true Shakespearean fashion, I found myself enamored of nearly every single one of them; none were flat, none were extraneous, and none were not incredibly powerful and likable when taken in the context of the respective roles they played in engendering this comedy.
Let's begin with our heroine, shall we? Viola, as I mentioned before, placed herself right up with the best of Shakespeare's strong females in my eyes, alongside such bold, witty, strong-willed, and independent-minded characters as Much Ado About Nothing's Beatrice, Macbeth's Lady Macbeth, Othello's Emilia, The Taming of the Shrew's Katherine, and A Midsummer Night's Dream's Hermia. In the face of profound personal tragedy (the alleged loss of her beloved twin to a violent tempest), she did not grow hysterical, passive, or withdrawn, but rather faced boldly up to both paltry hope (offered her by the captain's suggestion that Sebastian, who had bound himself to a mast, might yet live) and hidden reserves of strength to assume a new identity and forge a relatively prosperous path for herself in the court of Orsino. Her compassion and calm sensibility enabled her to deal with the volatile fancies of both Orsino and Olivia, and her wit was more keen, perceptive, and sharp than that of any character in the play save Feste the Fool, giving her generally affable and warm persona a refreshing rougher edge that helped to bolster her 'masculine' image. In every possible, Viola embodied the male role she assumed with her strength of spirit, will, and wit, and therefore presented herself as one of Shakespeare's greatest heroines.
If Viola, then, was the epitome of masculinity in androgyny, Sebastian was her opposite. His general innocence (for he was nearly always seen in the company of the worldlier, gruffer, more jaded and world-weary Antonio), gentleness, enthusiasm, and sensitivity cultivated in him an almost feminine facade that his fits of temper and brutality warred jarringly with; thus an interesting dichotomy was created in one twin that was mirrored in the other, with the juxtaposition of masculine and feminine traits in both. Sebastian, however, lacked that essential something which set Viola apart from the rest of the major cast- that something, of course, being her trenchant wit. Sebastian was much more of a plain-speaker, with little time for nor understanding and appreciation of verbal folly, which helped to ally him with Antonio and his bluff, soldierly manner. He did share Viola's impulsivity, though, and seemed to have taken the majority of that trait as his own in the womb (how many people do you know that would agree to marry someone almost immediately after meeting them?), which certainly doesn't seem to bode well for Olivia.
Ah, Olivia. Olivia and Orsino were, upon my first reading of the play, the only characters I really disliked at first glance, because the both of them stake their initial character claims firmly into the ground of the melodramatic. In Olivia's case, she has endeavored to lock herself in mourning for her dead brother for seven years' time, and as such has "abjured the company and sight of men" to "season (her) brother's dead love." Pretty weird, right? Olivia, however, doesn't exactly seem to be particularly upset over the death of her brother (she only mentions him once, in Act 1, Scene 5, while humoring Feste's request to prove her a fool); rather, she seems to have taken this vow more as a means of avoiding the suit of Orsino. For all that she disparages his advances and tokens of love, the way she subtly prompts 'Cesario' to divulge the lovesick Duke's precise words of praise while feigning annoyance seems to reveal that she rather enjoys playing hard-to-get...and she forgets her vow quickly enough when she falls in love with Cesario after their first meeting. So...yeah, Olivia is rather fickle, but she redeems herself through her own brand of quick wit (and a fond tolerance of said wit in others...well, apart from Toby Belch, anyway) and fervent, girlish charm and grace. At the very least, she's up-front about her feelings. That's more than can be said for a lot of fictional women.
Speaking of being up-front about feelings, there's such a thing as being TOO forward and revealing regarding them, and evidently, Orsino never got that memo. He is the ultimate Petrarchan lover, suffering under the burden of unrequited love/lust and loving love more for its own sake than for that of the object of his so-called love. He's melodramatic, whiny, whimsical, slightly misogynistic, passionate...and firmly in the closet. He disparages the capacity of women to love, claiming it to be inferior to that of men (and since he says that in the hearing of Cesario/Viola, I can only imagine how irked she was by that slight; I know I was)...but a part of me wonders if he subconsciously longed for the love of a man, and therefore set about denigrating his lack of appetite for women in a more socially acceptable manner (for misogyny was commonplace at the time). On the other hand...Orsino is fickle, just as much as Olivia is; his affections and tastes can change at the drop of a hat, as Feste so acerbically pointed out to him in Act 2, Scene 4 ("now the melancholy god protect thee, and the tailor make thy doublet of changeable taffeta, for thy mind is a very opal"). Who knows how long he would've sustained his passion for Olivia (really a passion for the feeling of being the forlorn and longing lover, and for the idea of love, particularly love unattained, that Olivia represented), even if Cesario hadn't shown up to insidiously steal away his affections?
On an unrelated note, I've mentioned the fool several times now, so I think it prudent to analyze him in like kind before I run out of characters. Now, this motley fellow was an enigma right from the start; in the Dramatis Personae of the copy I read originally, there were two named servants of Olivia': Feste and Fabian. Having a tiny bit of background knowledge of this play, I knew that Feste was supposed to be a clown of some sort, but when we got to Act 1, Scene 5, the stage directions said simply
"Clown-" not Feste, but Clown. Kayla and I were so confused, wondering if there was another clown, and scoured the script for mention of this 'Feste' fellow...but he never turned up, so we assumed that they had to be one and the same. For the record, his name is mentioned only once: by Orsino's servant Curio, in Act 2, Scene 4. Everyone else refers to him as either 'fool,' 'sir,' 'ass,' 'friend,' 'foolish Greek,' etc...basically, everything but his real name. Rather fitting, that, though, seeing as no one ever becomes acquainted with the 'real' Feste. He is a strange and solitary figure in the mad and lovesick world of Illyria, roaming freely between the two great houses (Olivia's and Orsino's) and never fully belonging to either; one gets the sense, too, that he doesn't particularly care to be a part of either world. He is a spectator, a commentator, watching the drama play out on its very fringes through the jaded, weary, wry eyes of one who has seen and done so much more than his title would suggest. At one point, he tells Olivia, "cucullus non facit monachum," and continually proves throughout that he's more than just a fool, good for nothing but cracking jokes and singing songs. This fool is an insightful one, criticizing and sardonically reproving everyone's nature freely with the license that his job gives him, and seeing through all manner of disguises (Olivia's 'mourning' as a facade behind which to hide, Orsino's 'lovesickness' as a love of love, Viola's assumed masculinity, etc) while permitting none to see behind his. Only Viola comes close when she observes that "this fellow is wise enough to play the fool, and to do that well craves a kind of wit;" Feste is easily the wisest, most clear-sighted character in the play, and is content (if in a rather bitter and melancholic way; I remember being quite surprised by how much of what came out of his mouth proved incredibly dark, even morbid) to leave others ignorant of that fact.
Among those who remain ignorant are Sirs Toby Belch and Andrew Aguecheek. These two may well be the greatest comedic duo ever conceived in fiction, and with good reason. From a psychical standpoint, they stand like Abbott and Costello at an all-night bar: one tall and thin, the other short and stout, and both happily and brazenly drunk. Between the two of them, they are both 'fools' in the sense that they provide the brunt of the play's comedy, both physical and verbal; as Andrew says, "he (Toby) does it with better grace, but I do it more natural." Now, the 'natural' fool in Shakespeare's time was, essentially, someone who was funny through natural causes: deformity, disability, mental handicap, or any combination of the three. An artificial fool, on the other hand, was someone who affected those qualities deliberately to garner laughs from an audience; in light of this, Andrew would certainly be considered the natural fool, with Toby (alongside Feste) as the artificial one.
Andrew may well be Shakespeare's stupidest character; in terms of lack of intelligence and buffoonery, he trumps even the gull Roderigo. He is naive, gullible, sweetly oblivious, hopelessly bumbling, posturing, and high-strung, and Toby quite gleefully takes full advantage of all of that (and his considerable wealth) to fund his partying lifestyle. Toby himself is a bot more of a cultured gentleman...well, if a cultured gentleman took a vacation to Brazil and became a crass, boozing, salacious, expansive, gregarious party animal. He does have some wit to him, though, sodden with drink though it is, and his flamboyant panache and larger-than-life personality more than make up for some of the more unsavory (or cruel) aspects of his character.
Certainly Maria is one who sees past his drunkenness to find some measure of merit and intelligence in him. Maria, Olivia's lady-in-waiting, is another one of those sassy, strong, brash women whom I can't help but love, no matter how wide her sadistic and mischievous streak is. She's outspoken, plain, passionate, and extraordinary clever...but bugger all if she can't hold a grudge. It takes a peculiar sort of wit to concoct such an elaborate scheme of revenge as that which was enacted on Malvolio, but Maria- gleefully conniving Maria- assumes that particular yoke of responsibility with ease, and crafts a plot for the ages that works so well, Toby immediately decides to marry her. What o' that, eh?
For Monsieur Malvolio...well, I've got mixed feelings about the chap. Upon my first reading of the play, I actually sympathized with him a great deal. I didn't feel that he deserved all of the abuse that Maria, Toby, and their ilk heaped upon him. All right, so he's that Type-A sort, all uptight and morally rigid and superciliously upstanding and a bit of a killjoy, but that's really no reason to make a complete and utter arse of him, is it? As Olivia's steward, he has a job to do, and he does it well, despite his profound social ambitions (which ultimately are used against him); besides the which, a lot of what is perceived by others to be irksome meddling and joy-killing is practical advice (who wants to hear drunken caterwauling after midnight after a trying day of conflicting emotions? Not Olivia!). That being said...the wild-spirited and hot-blooded youth in me does find the fellow a bit dry and annoying, though that has more to do with his blatant desire to better himself socially (by marrying Olivia, how else?) and his willingness to act out this fantasy in a rather embarrassing manner than his puritanical manner. In any case, he really didn't deserve to be abused and toyed with as he was, and Toby was well within his rights to say that he wished to be "well rid of this knavery" following the whole Sir Topas charade...but of course, Feste had his own bone to pick with poor Malvolio ("'By the Lord, fool, I am not mad-!' but do you remember? 'Madam, why laugh you at such a barren rascal? An you smile not, he's gagged!'"), and took the joke WAY too far. "Alas, poor fool, how they have baffled thee," as Olivia said to the poor steward.
Have I forgotten anyone...? AH, yes, I have, but I did that deliberately, see. I purposely 'forgot' Antonio, because he's one of those characters that every other character simply...forgot. At the end of the play, the couples have all headed offstage, and only three characters remain alone: Feste, Andrew, and Antonio. Antonio was the sea captain that rescued SEBASTIAN from the wreck, and took him under his wing while helping him deal with the grief of his sister's supposed passing. Antonio, as I've mentioned before, has a soldier's bluff openness and gruff honesty to him, making him the perfect companion for the gentler and less experienced Sebastian. I firmly believe that Antonio loved Sebastian (like a brother, at the very least), and the whole Cesario/Viola/Sebastian mixup seemed to affect him most deeply, as he felt himself to be sorely betrayed by the one he'd deemed closest friend. His loyalty to Sebastian was unwavering, and to have that seemingly thrown back in his face upon his arrest must have dealt him a gut-wrenching blow; no wonder he had cracked up a bit by the end (being left alone onstage while his beloved Sebastian pranced off with Olivia, a complete stranger to him, without so much as a backward glance, couldn't have helped matters). Poor sod.
Now, because I am, at heart, a massive fangirl, I have to close out what has been an otherwise legitimate review with a declaration of my top 'ship' from this play. In this case, the prize goes to Viola/Feste! These two are so very similar in so many ways: both free to pass between both worlds of the play, both known truth-tellers (though Viola is a bit less sharp and blunt about it), both skillful and quick wits, both accomplished and passionate musicians (though we never see Viola either sing or play), both situating themselves firmly behind masks for the majority of the show. Their respective wits are unmatched by any other character save the other, and their short interaction in Act 3, Scene 1, is charged with tension in more ways than one (there are definite sexual undertones to the 'they that dally nicely with words may quickly make them wanton' and 'Cressida was a beggar' bits, while the 'now, Jove, in his next commodity of hair, send thee a beard' introduces the tension inherent in the removal of a carefully assumed disguise; on the other hand, 'Not so, sir; I do care for something... But in my conscience, sir, I do not care for you; if that be to care for nothing, sir, I would it would make you invisible' represents the tension of irritation inherent in being boxed into a stereotype without grounds for the labelling). In short, these two are much better matched than Viola and Orsino are, in my opinion.
Well, there you have it. I think the length of this review makes it safe to assume that I love this play entirely too much...but it's all one, isn't it?