Twelfth Night

Introduction

“How Have You Made Division of Yourself?”

The Fountain of Self-Love

Master-Mistress

About the Text

Key Facts

Twelfth Night, or What You Will

List of Parts

Act 1

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Scene 5

Act 2

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Scene 5

Act 3

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Act 4

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Act 5

Scene 1

Textual Notes

Scene-by-Scene Analysis

Twelfth Night
in Performance: The RSC and Beyond

Four Centuries of
Twelfth Night:
An Overview

At the RSC

The Director’s Cut: Interviews with Sam Mendes, Declan Donnellan, and Neil Bartlett

Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater

Beginnings

Playhouses

The Ensemble at Work

The King’s Man

Shakespeare’s Works: A Chronology

Further Reading and Viewing

References

Acknowledgments and Picture Credits

“What is love?” asks Feste the clown in one of his songs. It is a very old question. One of the most influential answers to it comes from ancient Greece in the imaginary voice of the comic dramatist Aristophanes in Plato’s dialogue called the
Symposium
. Love, says Aristophanes, is a quest, a journey in search of our lost other half.

The idea is explained by way of a story about human origins. Originally there were not two sexes but three—male, female, and a mixture of the two called androgynous. Furthermore, the original humans were round, with four hands, four feet, and two faces. Humankind then began to have presumptuous ambitions. We rose up against the Olympian gods. Zeus therefore decided to weaken us by cutting us in two, “like an apple halved for pickling.” So now we have two legs, two arms, one face, and the sensation that we are only half ourselves. We yearn and wander, hoping that one day we will find the other half that is literally our soul mate. If the original whole of which you are a half was male, your desire will be for another male (as seems to be the case with Antonio in this play—and Orsino when he falls for “Cesario”?); if female, another female (Olivia desiring the disguised Viola?). These two orientations are what we now call homosexual.

Only if your original was androgynous will you be drawn to the opposite sex, as Viola is to Orsino—and Sir Toby, who has the play’s largest role, to Maria. When one of us meets his or her other half, “the actual half of himself,” then, the
Symposium
explains, “the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and one will not wish to be out of the other’s sight even for a moment: these are the people who pass their whole lives together, and yet they could not explain what they desire of one another.”

A myth of this kind is a piece of storytelling that answers to a profound and enduring human belief: that we are somehow incomplete without love, without a partner. And that in an ideal world we would all have exactly the right partner. We know viscerally that desire and reproduction are forever bound to conjunction and splitting: two people join as one in the act of love; we are made out of a mixture of X and Y chromosomes, of male seed and female egg, of two distinct genetic lines.

If love is a quest for an idealized version of our own selves, it is easy to understand our fascination with twins. They seem to be the living embodiment of the single self split in two; the extreme case of conjoined twins vividly conjures up the
Symposium
’s tale of the original human as an unhalved apple. At the same time, a certain anxiety has always been attached to the phenomenon of twins. In ancient Greece it was assumed that a woman who bore twins must have been impregnated by two different men. Some mythical twins represent idealized unity—as with Castor and Pollux, the “gemini” or heavenly twins who symbolize perfect friendship—but others represent opposition or splitting. A nymph in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
has twins fathered by Apollo, god of music and light, and Mercury, god of theft and shady dealings; a pair of girl twins in Edmund Spenser’s epic romance of Shakespeare’s time,
The Faerie Queene
, respectively embody chastity and eroticism; in another of Ovid’s poems, the
Fasti
, a girl called Lara is raped by Mercury and bears the Lares Compitales, who become guardians of the crossroads. These twins become symbolic of how the story of our lives is made of a perpetual sequence of choices, as alternative ways open before us.

Perhaps the most potent of all narratives about twins are those in which a brother and sister are separated soon after birth, meet when they are grown up and fall passionately and unashamedly in love with each other: Siegmund and Sieglinde, as portrayed in Richard Wagner’s
Die Walküre
, might be considered Western culture’s highest exemplar of the motif. Brother–sister incest was sometimes explored in the Renaissance theater—most notably in John Ford’s darkly brilliant
’Tis Pity She’s a Whore
—but Shakespeare steered away from this dangerous matter. His way of recreating the
Symposium
’s originary androgyne was by cross-dressing Viola as “Cesario,” the lovely boy actor with whom both man and woman, both Orsino and Olivia, fall in love. Puns on “woman’s part” and “small pipe” (meaning both voice and male sexual organ) leave no doubt that alluring androgyny is implied here:

William and Ann Shakespeare’s twins, Judith and Hamnet (alternatively spelled Hamlet), were born in February 1585. Their father’s fascination with the dramatic possibilities of double selves is apparent from his early
Comedy of Errors
, where he adapted a classical story about separated male twins and mistaken identity, but complicated it by giving the brothers servants who are also identical twins. Then in the summer of 1596, the eleven-year-old Hamnet died. Shakespeare had lost his only son and Judith would be forever bereft of her second self. Though we should always be wary of inferring authorial autobiography from the words of fictional characters in a play, there is an inescapable poignancy to the images of loss in
Twelfth Night:
when Feste sings of sad cypress (“Come away, death”) or Viola alludes to a funeral monument, it is tempting to think of Shakespeare’s own lost boy. Olivia mourns a brother, while Viola assumes that hers has been drowned. When she takes a male disguise and “becomes” Cesario, it is as if she impersonates her own opposite-sex twin: “I am all the daughters of my father’s house, / And all the brothers too.” She herself explains that the lost Sebastian is the model for her performance of male behavior (“For him I imitate”).

The principal source of
Twelfth Night
’s tale of siblings lost and found, and of a cross-dressed servant sent to woo on behalf of a master whom she loves herself, was a novella by Barnaby Riche called “Apollonius and Silla.” There the brother and sister who are the originals for Viola and Sebastian are not twins but “the one of them was so like the other in countenance and favour that there was no man able to discern the one from the other by their faces, saving by their apparel, the one being a man, the other a woman.” Critics sometimes express puzzlement that Shakespeare makes so much of the resemblance between Viola and Sebastian, given his presumed personal knowledge that boy-girl twins are not identical. In modern terminology, it is generally accepted that monozygotic fertilization is always same sex (in fact, recent research has shown that in certain rare cases of genetic abnormality it is possible to have boy-girl monozygotic twins). But Riche’s original premise reveals the absurdity of this criticism of the plot: siblings don’t even have to be twins to look remarkably alike.

One of the greatest challenges for a writer is to imagine what it would be like to be a member of the opposite sex. The particular demand faced by Shakespeare and the boy actors who played his women’s parts was to get beyond the age’s conventions of proper female behavior, which commended silence and submissiveness. “Cesario” is partly a device to give Viola an active voice, to enable her to break the shackles of passivity. But the lovely combination of quick-witted facility, wonder, and vulnerability with which she slots into her impersonation is something more than a reaction to social convention or codes of propriety. In terms of the play’s imaginary world, Viola plays Cesario so effectively because of her prior knowledge and love of Sebastian—this is what allows the otherwise implausible conceit of Olivia’s marrying Sebastian in the belief that he is Cesario. In terms of the play’s creative origin, it is tempting to speculate that the germ was sown by Shakespeare’s observation of the intuitive understanding between his twins as they learned to speak and to play together.