Authors: William Shakespeare
Twelfth Night (23 page)
3.
Peter Gill production, 1974: John Price as Orsino (right) lolling on cushions as Jane Lapotaire as Viola is “small, white and utterly frozen … not just with horror but with tense, deliberately fraught repression.”
Zoë Waites and Matilda Ziegler decided that on the line “Love sought is good, but given unsought is better” (3.1.157):
Olivia should kiss Viola … Lindsay’s suggestion was that after Olivia initiated the kiss, Viola, rather than pulling away instantly, should respond for a brief moment. Lindsay’s intention was to highlight the sexual ambiguity that reverberates through the play … Although Viola’s instinct might initially be to pull away, the experience of such a loving kiss became fleetingly seductive for her too. Brimful as she is with love for Orsino, she is living with her own unexpressed erotic charge and readiness, and the joy, or comfort, of sensual human contact is not to be underestimated!
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The relationship between Antonio and Sebastian in recent times has often been played as a sexual one. Director John Caird believes that this is a vital misreading:
[Antonio] deserves gratitude, friendship, filial love—all the most pure things. In other words, he has built Sebastian into something of an idol, and that is one of the most powerful forms of love there is. But if you make it sexual … then you diminish the other much more important aspects of the play that surround it.
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4.
Lindsay Posner production, 2001: Ben Meyjes as Sebastian “getting himself together after a romp on a large bed with Antonio … the butch black sailor who’s plucked him from the waves” (with Joseph Mydell as Antonio).
Conversely, Terry Hands believes that “It’s a wonderful mirror to the Orsino–Cesario relationship … but also enables us to see doom very clearly in front of our eyes and to relate that to the other love stories in the play.”
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Antonio sees things as they are, deals in the every-day realities of a relationship, while the lovers discover perhaps more heady and ambiguous truths by dalliance and impulse. Antonio is as much an outsider in his way as Feste and Malvolio are in theirs … The lovers swirl and exit, perhaps still wrongly paired, it matters not; but they leave Antonio stranded in front of the painted Narcissus, a baffled figure.
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It seems that in the last fifty years all possible sexual permutations have been explored. But does the overt imposing of a sexual reading on every character connected with the love plot provide maybe one dynamic too many? John Caird, who directed
Twelfth Night
for the RSC in 1983, pointed to what he felt was key about Viola’s male/female persona:
Viola puts on men’s clothes and behaves like a boy, she finds out what life is like in both camps, and by the end of the play she is more sexually complete than she was before. The male and the female have been married in her. Sebastian is going through a similar sort of journey. He is having a relationship of one sort or another with a man in which his masculinity is made passive.
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It is only on breaking the social conventions of their sex that the characters can meet on a spiritual level outside the affectations of courtly love. We see Orsino reverting to type when he refers to Viola as his “fancy’s queen.” The formulaic modes of communication which had been broken down by Viola’s disguise appear to be reinstalled. Cesario, the catalyst of sexual turmoil, has gone, leaving behind him self-awareness—an understanding of both male and female aspects of the self, for all the lovers involved. As a Lord of Misrule he has been more successful than Feste.
The Fool knows that the only true madness is to recognize the world as rational.
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Between the worlds of festivity and reality, self-delusion and sanity, sits Feste. He has been played variously as the orchestrator of the play’s action, knowing commentator on the folly of the lovers, and even elevated “to an almost superhuman position.”
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This enigmatic character is “rarely played as genuinely funny.”
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The melancholic nature of his songs and his bitterly humorous remarks place him outside the “comic” plots, with the effect that in many productions the play is depicted from Feste’s viewpoint. Prefiguring Shakespeare’s Fool in
King Lear
, his witticisms attempt to awaken various characters to their “irrational” behavior, the affectations that keep them from reality: Olivia from her mourning, Orsino from his romantic delusions. Maria and Sir Toby use him to mock his true function when confronting Malvolio as “Sir Topas” with the converse aim of turning a sane but deluded man into a madman.
In an innovative reading of the part for Michael Boyd’s 2005 production, Forbes Masson played Feste as an integral part of the play’s action rather than the usual external observer. An extra dimension was given to the subplot by Feste’s obviously hopeless love for Maria. The theme of unrequited love was extended to engulf his world and infiltrate his songs, with the effect that he is commenting as much on himself as on the Orsino–Viola–Olivia love triangle. After the interval we intruded on Feste alone at the piano playing a beautifully pained and sonorous melancholy song, the same he played for Orsino at the start of the play. On Viola’s entry he started, as if caught betraying something of himself that he’d rather not show. Not the usual eager force in the plot to bring about the downfall of Malvolio, he walked off the stage in disgust at Maria’s device, instantly seeing through her prank as a means to Sir Toby’s bed. Painfully aware that he was losing her affection fast, Feste was kept dangling and manipulated by Maria with intimate touches and kisses. Reluctantly he plays the part of “Sir Topas,” hoping that the trick will win her favor. One had the sense that Feste knew the inevitable upshot of the plot but, a victim of fate and his own affections, had to play out the game.
At the end of the play when Feste lamented that “the whirligig of time brings in his revenges,” he intimated that the revenge was also upon him. Maria had married and carried away the leglessly drunk Sir Toby, and he has incurred the displeasure of Olivia for his part in the deception of Malvolio. His final song was sung with anger and helpless frustration. Starting with a beautifully sung lament, the tone changed after the first verse and he angrily spat out the words “knaves and thieves” and “toss-pots still had drunken heads.” Seeing him used and cast aside by Maria for a particularly vile and drunken Sir Toby, the audience were made painfully aware till the end that the clown who strives to please us every day suffers while we laugh:
5.
Forbes Masson as Feste in Michael Boyd’s 2005 production: “After the interval we intruded on Feste alone at the piano playing a beautifully pained and sonorous melancholy song.”
In his chequered suit and with every weary mark of distress writ large upon his whited face, Forbes Masson gives as affecting a performance as I can remember. He sings exceptionally well, accompanies himself on a pub piano and gets the balance between pain and redemptive levity exactly right. He perfectly captures the pathos of his rejection by Meg Fraser’s cruelly teasing Maria before magnificently picking up his spirits with “I am gone, sir, and anon, sir.”
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Nigel Hess, the composer for the 1994 Ian Judge production, pointed out that the songs contained in the play are hugely emotional and important and that the actor playing Feste has to be a skilled singer. “Every time Feste sings everybody on stage says, ‘What a beautiful voice.’ It has to be like that.”
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The difficulty of finding an actor talented enough to take on the role of Feste
and
sing has made this phenomenon a rarity. In 1969, though, Ron Pember, in a highly praised performance, “sang his songs with the gritty voice of the modern, unaccompanied folk-singer.”
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Probably the most vicious Feste on the RSC’s stage, Pember brought in an element of class consciousness, which accounted for the bitter essence at the heart of the character:
He was a working man among the leisured classes, deeply critical of their behaviour and bitterly dissatisfied with his own … [He] spoke like a Londoner, dressed like a faded Harlequin now reduced to busking, and hinted always at a radical’s social distaste for the antics of privilege. He despised the
effeteness of Orsino’s court, and his angry assumption that Viola considered him a beggar … had all the spikiness of class-pride … He was discomforting, an outsider, almost malevolently saturnine, defying the sentimental response to Malvolio’s plight by pressing home his final accusations with heartless accuracy in Act V.
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The most effective, highly praised performances of Feste came from interpretations that focused on the more bitter, melancholic aspects of his character. Difficulties with the accessibility of his “jokes” have led to a conscious move away from Feste as “comic” fool to a focus on his more serious function within the play. At his most sublime, the pain he imparts to the audience derives from the fact that Feste sees the world too clearly. In every aspect of light he sees darkness, in every character of worth he sees a flaw. As a melancholy entertainer, a
corrupter of words
, aware of the follies of love and class, Feste can remind us of Shakespeare himself, who strives to please his audience regardless of the pain that they and he are subject to when the festivities are over, when the play has ended.
The critic Anne Barton believed that, from a modern perspective, this comedy with its great undertow of melancholy linked the two halves of Shakespeare’s working life:
The play crowns, almost summarizes, the nine Elizabethan comedies he had already produced. Children separated at sea, a heroine forced to disguise herself as a boy, the wise fool, a girl who reluctantly woos her own rival in love, ill considered vows, confusion between twins: these are only a few of the themes which
Twelfth Night
picks up and elaborates from its predecessors. At the same time, this comedy prefigures the final romances.
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Twelfth Night
was also written around the same time as
Hamlet
, with Shakespeare’s other major tragedies,
Othello, King Lear
, and
Macbeth
, still ahead of him and, in its mixture of comedy and tragedy, foreshadows the so-called problem plays,
All’s Well That Ends
Well
and
Measure for Measure
. As Janice Wardle points out,
Twelfth Night
is:
One face, one voice, one habit, and two persons!
A Natural Perspective, that is and is not.
Much of the play is light-hearted in character, with the comic potential of concealed and mistaken identities running rife. But the other “person” of the play is altogether less frivolous: many critics argue that the dominant mood of the play is sombre and dark, with its emphasis on self-deception and the transience of life and love.
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