GCSE REVISION NOTES

 "Twelfth Night" - William Shakespeare

Sample Essay

Nothing that is so, is so

Illusion in Illyria

A myth most commonly associated with adolescence, but nonetheless a widely prevalent one, is that young people who claim to be 'in love' are more often than not under an illusion. They are in love with the idea of being in love rather than with another person. A recognisable aspect of behaviour connected with this state is a marked tendency towards self dramatisation. The `lover' wears his or her condition as a clearly visible badge for all to see. They tend to assume that their condition is of overriding interest to everyone, not just to themselves. But, like drunks, lovers are only really tolerable to other lovers. Sometimes this form of self delusion, involves acting out the role of spurned lover. All this dramatic activity is harmless enough; because most people grow out of it, and usually it affects no one other than themselves. Such behaviour is associated with adolescence (perhaps unfairly) because that is a time when people are thought to be between childhood and maturity and therefore not yet fully in control of powerful feelings of adult sexuality, nor fully in touch with the evolving sense of their adult selves. It is a time to play out roles such as that of the lover in order to test out and explore the new freedoms and opportunities presented by adult life. Such self-dramatising illusions become problematic when the players can no longer distinguish between illusion and reality.

Shakespeare's Twelfth Night contains many characters who experience difficulties in distinguishing between illusion and reality: Orsino is one of them. The play begins with a scene very similar to the archetypal one I have outlined. It may be a critical cliché, but it is nonetheless true, that Count Orsino, whom the audience sees commanding music and speaking aloud of his unrequited love, is in love with love. However, he is no adolescent. Yet he apparently spends his time carefully manufacturing a self indulgent narcissism, using music as a kind of sensual narcotic in order to induce feelings of what he labels `love' for Olivia. Paradoxically this love causes him pain rather than pleasure, and his first words speak not of life, but of sickness and death:

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.
(I.l.l-4)

Thus, the most powerful man in Illyria, is shown as essentially passive, emasculated by his fixation on the object of his desire. His almost morbid fixation with his own plight echoes the popular Elizabethan stereotype of the lover, 'such as I am, all true lovers are:/ Unstaid and skittish in all motions else,/ Save in the constant image of the creature/ That is beloved' (II.4.17- 20). It is also reminiscent of that other fashionable Elizabethan pose - that of the melancholy man. Orsino appears determined to play both parts to the full.

The traditional image of the melancholy man was familiar to Elizabethan theatre audiences through such characters as Jaques in As You Like It. He, you may remember, has no significant friendships with the other inhabitants of Arden, and, when Rosalind, Orlando and the other members of Duke Senior's court have left, remains in the forest, a determinedly solitary figure. Orsino too is cut off by his adopted condition from the society of others (`I myself am best/ When least in company' I.iv.37-38). But of course Orsino's is an adopted condition. He possesses free will and has decided, although claiming he wishes I to be 'cured' of his condition, deliberately to adopt this position in relation to the rest of the world. Of course by doing so he draws attention to himself as being 'special' and different from his peers, a classic sign of the kind of adolescent behaviour that is often the despair of parents!

In the opening scene of the play Orsino displays an unwillingness to respond to the prompting of his anxious courtiers to find a diversion in the traditional male pursuit of hunting. Hunting would mean joining with other men in a collective activity and Orsino has no wish to dissipate the effectiveness of his own self-dramatisation by sharing his stage with others. Traditionally the melancholy man prominently demonstrated his inner state by adopting the most conspicuous signs of outward display: a generally languorous air and a suit of black clothes. It may well have been the case in the first performances of Twelfth Night that, although there is no direct reference to it in the spoken text, the actor playing Orsino wore melancholy black. If this was so it makes an obvious but important link to the subsequent presentation of the object of his desire: Olivia.

Like Orsino, she too has cut herself off from society, and like him she also indulges in a degree of self-dramatisation. The audience have been told that, since the death of her brother, she has become like a nun: `The element itself, till seven years' heat,/ Shall not behold her face at ample view,/ But like a cloistress she will veiled walk' (I.1.27-29). To live as a nun was also to live a celibate life, and this is of course what causes Orsino most pain and what he finds impossible to understand. When the audience first see her, in Act I scene 5, they note that she has not as has been reported by the Captain 'abjured the sight/ And company of men' (I.2.40-41), but that she is highly selective about those men allowed in her company. She admits only those who pose no physical threat or temptation: Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Malvolio and Feste. In performance the colour of her veil, and perhaps even the colour of her dress, may have been black to signify her state of mourning for her dead brother and thus make an important visual link between her state and that of Orsino. Significantly, as Act I scene 5 rapidly makes clear, her position seems as contrived as that of the melancholy Duke. Within minutes of her first entrance her façade has been challenged by the Clown, who seeks leave to 'prove [her] a fool' (lines 52-53). He challenges the validity of Olivia's adopted role with a familiar but effective argument:

FESTE - Good madonna, why mourn'st thou?
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.
(I.5.61-66)

Olivia's immediate response is to appear to recognise its validity: 'What think you of this fool, Malvolio? Doth he not mend?' (lines 68-69). But the real evidence that she is not altogether as committed to her role as she seems comes a few minutes later, when first Maria and then Malvolio bring her news of the arrival at her gate of a 'young fellow' (line 134) and she asks pointed questions as to the kind of man he is. On learning that he is both young and attractive the woman who has supposedly 'abjured the sight/ And company of men' (I.2.40-41) admits one.

Before Viola-Cesario enters, Olivia attempts to create an illusion in order to confuse Orsino's embassy: she throws the veil over her face in order to disguise herself. However, in the course of the encounter with `him', Olivia rapidly shatters the illusion. She begins by discarding the outward sign of mourning; lifts her veil and displays her face to Viola-Cesario. She then confounds convention by demanding to be left alone with 'him', and, when they are alone, talks openly and flirtatiously with this new 'man'. By the end of the scene her old role has been dropped entirely in favour of a new one: Olivia is now in love not with the memory of her dead brother, but with Viola-Cesario: 'Even so quickly may one catch the plague' (line 284). The speed with which Olivia changes roles is characteristic of lovers in Shakespearean comedy, but Olivia's love, although perhaps deeply felt, is based not on truth but on a fiction: she is under the illusion that Cesario ('. . . I am not that I play', (line 77) ) is a man.

There is of course a further twist in the complex illusions surrounding Olivia. When Viola's brother Sebastian makes his appearance in Act IV scene 1, she mistakes him for Viola-Cesario, and subsequently marries him. Thus she is deceived on three levels: first that she is wedded to the idea of her dead brother, second that she has fallen in love with a man, and thirdly that she has married Viola-Cesario.

Twelfth Night is a play that contains not only self deception, but literal deception, especially in the extent of the cross-dressing of characters. Of course, Shakespeare's players were all male and in the original casting of Twelfth Night presumably the players would have attempted to cast Viola-Cesario and Sebastian with two actors who not only resembled each other, but, in the case of the actor playing Viola, could also convincingly, represent a woman. Olivia, in falling in love with Cesario and then later mistakenly thinking Sebastian to be 'him', seems to indicate that she finds a man who is so like a woman (his sister) to he immediately acceptable to her, whereas a more obviously 'manly' man, like Orsino, she has rejected. Perhaps it is male' sexuality that she is afraid of; she certainly surrounds herself with men who are not in the least sexually attractive - Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Malvolio. And when Malvolio does declare his desire it is treated, not least by Olivia, as a joke. Despite his overt expressions of unfulfilled desire, Orsino too only falls in love when sexuality is not an issue. For Viola's literal deception in representing herself as Cesario gives him time to be with her without the pressure of overt sexuality that would presumably be present if he knew of Cesario's gender. This deception presents him with an opportunity to get to know Viola, whereas he has had no opportunity to encounter Olivia. But, there is more than a mere suspicion in this play that, here and elsewhere, the shifting feelings of both Orsino and Olivia reveal two deeply insecure individuals, more at home with their own than the opposite sex, and who at times appear superficial and ultimately self centred.

A third character who bears many of the hallmarks of Orsino and Olivia and suffers under many illusions, not least " about himself, is Malvolio. He too has adopted black as a badge signifying his isolation and difference from others. Malvolio is a puritan (Maria: 'The devil a puritan that he is. . .', II.3.140), and the puritan's costume was largely black. Like Orsino and Olivia, Malvolio too keeps most people at arm's length. In Shakespeare's England, and especially in London, the puritan's were a group who deliberately kept themselves apart from ordinary society, believing as they did in the certainty of their own salvation and the equal certainty of the damnation of the rest. They were powerful figures in the City of London and opposed to the playhouses. Because of the strength of their opposition the players were forced to build their theatres on the south bank of the Thames outside the jurisdiction of the City. It was generally thought that puritans were set against anything but hard work, and play-going certainly did not constitute work; indeed, as performances took place during the day it probably necessitated absence from work! Sir Toby's famous cutting remark to Malvolio 'Dost thou think because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?' (II.3.111-112) probably sums up a good deal of popular anti-puritan sentiment. But it is not only the wearing of black and the fact that his puritanism separates him from the everyday cut and thrust of society that links Malvolio with Orsino and Olivia: like them he lacks self-knowledge and enjoys playing a role. Malvolio's generally ill-disguised contempt for Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, and the rest of his mistress's household is based on feelings of superiority which have no basis in reality. He is under the illusion that he is naturally their moral superior.

He appears at his most ridiculous when, under the illusion that Olivia is in love with him, he plays the role of the lover - a part dictated by the script (letter) written for him not by Olivia, but by her maid, Maria. Malvolio lays himself open to such crude deception because, like Orsino and Olivia, he is self-deceived. Malvolio lacks self-knowledge and is 'sick', as Olivia says, of 'self-love' II.5.85). He falls eagerly into the trap set by Maria to the delight of those gathered to watch him fall.

But it is not only Malvolio, Orsino and Olivia who are deceived or self deceived in this play. Almost everyone in Twelfth. Night is at some point under an illusion: Orsino that he is in love with Olivia; Olivia that she is married to the memory of her late brother; Viola that her brother is dead; Sebastian that Viola has perished; Malvolio that Olivia is in love with him; Sir Andrew that Olivia is in love with him; Antonio that Viola-Cesario is Sebastian; Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, Maria and Feste that Sebastian is Viola-Cesario, and so on. These illusions succeed not because they are skilfully and convincingly maintained, but because the people who apprehend them are all too easily taken in by fictions. Not only are people deceived by outward appearances, but also, and much more significantly, they are often self deceived.

Twelfth Night as a whole seems to be a play about a decadent society where people's feelings are not to be trusted. Although it is supposedly a comedy, and certainly in the late twentieth century it is one of the most frequently performed of Shakespeare's plays, suggesting that it is well liked by actors and audiences, it is a play, I suggest, that presents an audience with a bleak picture of the human condition. The men and women portrayed within it are repeatedly revealed as shallow foolish, and capable of extreme cruelty. Even the names of some of the characters - Belch, Aguecheek, Feste - seem to conjure the smell of decay. Indeed, the behaviour of Sir Toby, too often played as a genial Falstaffian figure of fun, is in reality very far from possessing that knight's qualities of generosity and common humanity. Sir Toby Belch is only too keen to exploit the trusting friendship of the simple Sir Andrew, and quick to resort to violence when encountering Sebastian. The world he inhabits seems closer to the empty and ultimately meaningless landscape of Samuel Beckett's plays than it does to the sunlit uplands of Shakespeare's other comedies. But unlike Beckett, where characters can redeem the apparent hopelessness of their situation through their capacity to laugh at themselves, the humour in Twelfth Night seems always to arise at the expense of another human being. We are invited to laugh at the gullibility and human frailty of Sir Andrew, to laugh at the drunken loutishness of the bullying Sir Toby, and to find it amusing that the so-called Clown subjects the imprisoned Malvolio to a form of mental torture in trying to convince him that he is mad. In Twelfth Night we almost never laugh with the injured party, but are encouraged instead to laugh at them.

Although superficially Twelfth Night resembles the other romantic comedies of Shakespeare, in that, in common with them, it contains pairs of lovers who suffer temporarily from cases of mistaken identity, and any confusion that results is resolved in the closing scenes - men and women are united in marriage and fools get their come-uppance - the general atmosphere of self-delusion and self indulgence cannot entirely be erased by the concluding marriages. In the light of their behaviour as presented on the stage, the prospects for the forthcoming marriages of Orsino and Viola and Sebastian and Olivia do not look rose-tinted. Shakespeare seems disinclined to show that either Orsino or Olivia have learnt anything from their experiences, or from the fact that both have been grossly self-deceived. Unlike the lovers in As You Like It, who enter the Forest of Arden as adolescents and use the time to play out love-games in which they rehearse and test the behaviour required in adult married life, and consequently by the end of the play are recognised as mature, Orsino and Olivia seem locked into adolescent illusions.

The mood of the end of the play is therefore hardly celebratory. There are no dances, no collective celebration. Just as the action of the first scene began with one man listening to music, it ends with the audience themselves in the passive role of the consumers of Feste's lyrics. After everyone else has left the stage the Clown/Fool sings exactly the kind of melancholic song so beloved of Orsino. Far from travelling in the right direction towards enlightenment and personal happiness, the characters have gone nowhere. . . they and we have come full circle to the point where the action began. The ears of the audiences about to leave the theatre are filled not with a lyric in praise of love and marriage, but with one that echoes a bleak picture of the future, of going drunk to bed, walking together not into the sunset but into the rain because, in Illyria at least, 'the rain it raineth every day'.

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