MARCH 4TH TWELFTH NIGHT

Olivia, Sebastian, Viola and Orsino

in Trevor Nunn's 1996 film of Twelfth Night

The following article -- one of the best things ever written about the play -- is quite long, so you need not read it for Wednesday.  In fact, reading it is optional, though I would certainly recommend it to anyone who is writing on the play.

From "Fiction and Friction," in Shakespearean Negotiations by Stephen Greenblatt.

 In September 1580, as he passed through a small French town on his way to Switzerland and Italy, Montaigne was told an unusual story that he duly recorded in his travel journal. It seems that seven or eight girls from a place called Chaumont-en-Bassigni plotted together "to dress up as males and thus continue their life in the world."' One of them set up as a weaver, "a well-disposed young man who made friends with everybody," and moved to a village called Montier-en-Der. There the weaver fell in love with a woman, courted her, and married. The couple lived together for four or five months, to the wife's satisfaction, "so they say." But then, Montaigne reports, the transvestite was recognized by someone from Chaumont; "the matter was brought to justice, and she was condemned to be hanged, which she said she would rather undergo than return to a girl's status; and she was hanged for using illicit devices to supply her defect in sex." The execution, Montaigne was told, had taken place only a few days before.

I begin with this story because in Twelfth Night Shakespeare almost, but not quite, retells it. It is one of those shadow stories that haunt the plays, rising to view whenever the plot edges toward a potential dilemma or resolution that it in fact eschews. If we dwell on these shadow stories, we shall be accused of daydreaming (a serious charge, for some reason, against literary critics); the plays insist only that we register them in passing as we take in (or are taken in by) the events that "actually" happen. What if Olivia had succeeded in marrying Orsino's page Cesario? And what if the scandal of a marriage contracted so far beneath a countess's station were topped by a still greater scandal: the revelation that the young groom was in fact a disguised girl? Such a marriage—if we could still call it one—would make some sense in a play that had continually tantalized its audience with the spectacle of homoerotic desire: Cesario in love with "his" master Orsino, Orsino evidently drawn toward Cesario, Antonio passionately in love with Sebastian, Olivia aroused by a page whose effeminacy everyone remarks. But how could the play account for such desire, or rather, since an account is neither called for nor tendered, how could the play extricate itself from the objectification of illicit desire in a legal marriage?

The case recorded by Montaigne, let us recall, did not set off a psychological examination—the "scientia sexualis" that Foucault finds at the heart of the modern history of sexuality—but a legal proceeding, a trial issuing in a condemnation not, it seems, for deception but for the use of prohibited sexual devices, devices that enable a woman to take the part of a man. So too at the critical moment of misunderstanding in Twelfth Night, when Olivia urges the apparently timorous Cesario to take up his new status as her husband, the issue is defined not in psychological but in legal terms. A priest is brought in to testify to the procedural impeccability of the ceremony he has performed:

A contract of eternal bond of love,

Confirm'd by mutual joinder of your hands,

Attested by the holy close of lips,

Strength'ned by interchangement of your rings,

And all the ceremony of this compact

Seal'd in my function, by my testimony.

(5.1. 156-61 )

This legal validity would clash violently with the gross impropriety of a homosexual coupling; presumably, there would have to be a ceremony of undoing to resolve the scandal. But then, of course, Olivia does not succeed; she actually marries Viola's twin who is, as it happens, a male. At the moment that Cesario discloses what lies beneath the "masculine usurp'd attire"—"I am Viola"—her twin Sebastian frees Olivia from the scandalous shadow story:

So comes it, lady, you have been mistook;

But Nature to her bias drew in that.

(5.1.259-60)

What happened in Montier-en-Der was against nature; in Twelfth Night events pursue their natural curve, the curve that assures the proper mating of man and woman. To be matched with someone of one's own sex is to follow an unnaturally straight line; heterosexuality, as the image of nature drawing to her bias implies, is bent. Shakespeare's metaphor is from the game of bowls; the "bias" refers not only to the curve described by the bowl as it rolls along the pitch but also to the weight implanted in the bowl to cause it to swerve. Something off-center, then, is implanted in nature—in Olivia's nature, in the nature that more generally governs the plot of the comedy—that deflects men and women from their ostensible desires and toward the pairings for which they are destined.

This deflection can be revealed only in movement. As befits a play intended for performance, the metaphor for nature invokes not simply internal structure but a structure whose realization depends upon temporal unfolding, or rolling. An enacted imbalance or deviation is providential, for a perfect sphere would roll straight to social, theological, legal disaster: success lies in a strategic, happy swerving. The swerving is not totally predictable because the bowl will encounter obstacles, or "rubs," that will make its course erratic; if sometimes frustrating, these rubs are also part of the pleasure and excitement of the game. Licit sexuality in Twelfth Night—the only craving that the play can represent as capable of finding satisfaction—depends upon a movement that deviates from the desired object straight in one's path toward a marginal object, a body one scarcely knows. Nature is an unbalancing act.

Swerving is not a random image in the play; it is one of the central structural principles of Twelfth Night, a principle that links individual characters endowed with their own private motivations to the larger social order glimpsed in the ducal court and the aristocratic household.3 The play's initiatory design invites the audience to envisage the unification of court and household through the marriage of their symbolic heads, Orsino and Olivia. This uniting, at once a social and psychological consummation, is blocked only by a vow that must be broken in the interest of both the political and the natural order of things. To intensify the narrative pressure behind this design, the play insists upon the perfect eligibility of Olivia: she is not only a great heiress but, in the wake of the deaths of her father and only brother, the sole ruler of her fortunes. Courtship need not be represented, as for example in The Taming of the Shrew and Much Ado About Nothing, as (at least in part) a negotiation with the father or male guardian; the countess Olivia is a prize encumbered only by her devotion to her brother's memory. (Her uncle, who could have filled the role of her guardian, is a hopeless sot whose own candidate for his niece's hand is suitable only to be bilked and mocked.) The lady richly left was a major male wish-fulfillment fantasy in a culture where the pursuit of wealth through marriage was an avowed and reputable preoccupation. Here the fantasy is at its most dreamlike because it focuses not on a widow—the only group whose members actually corresponded on infrequent occasion to this daydream— but on "a virtuous maid" (l.2.36).⁴

The maid, however, is strong-willed and refuses perversely to submit to the erotic dance that would lead to the legitimate male appropriation of her person and her "dirty lands" (2.4.82). Indeed she appears to enjoy ruling her household—controlling access to her person, taking pleasure in her jester, managing her manager Malvolio, dispensing rewards and punishments. One extraordinary woman in the period provided, of course, a model for such a career, lived out to its fullest—the virgin queen, aging and heirless and very dangerous. The queen had at once mobilized, manipulated, and successfully resisted decades of anxious male attempts to see her married; but this was a career that Elizabeth herself, let alone her male subjects, could not tolerate in any woman of lesser station.

There is then a powerful logic—social, political, economic, erotic—to the eligible, perfectly independent male ruler of the land taking possession of this eligible, perfectly independent maiden prize. The linked elements of this logic are suggested by Orsino's anticipation of the time

          when liver, brain, and heart,

These sovereign thrones, are all supplied, and fill'd

Her sweet perfections with one self king!

(1 1.36-38)

All that stands in the way, the play makes clear in its opening moments, is the extravagant irrationality of her vow:

The element itself, till seven years' heat,

Shall not behold her face at ample view;

But like a cloistress she will veiled walk,

And water once a day her chamber round

With eye-offending brine; all this to season

A brother's dead love, which she would keep fresh

And lasting in her sad remembrance.

(1.1.25-31)

Olivia's swerving from this vow—absurdly ambitious in its projected duration, comically ritualized, perversely wedded to misery—is entirely predictable.5 Indeed, in lines that play on the standard theological term for marital intercourse—"to pay the debt"— Orsino takes her mourning less as an impediment to his love than as an erotic promissory note:

O, she that hath a heart of that fine frame

To pay this debt of love but to a brother,

How will she love when the rich golden shaft

Hath kill'd the flock of all affections else

That live in her.

(1.1.32-36)6

The surprise for Orsino is that the swerving, when it comes, is not in his direction. That it is not depends upon a series of events that the play also represents as swervings: a shipwreck that keeps Viola and Sebastian from reaching their destination, the blocking of Viola's initial intention to serve Olivia, Viola's relatively unmotivated decision to disguise herself in men's clothing, the mistaking of Sebastian for the disguised Viola, and so forth. These apparently random accidents are at once zany deflections of direction, intention, and identity and comically predictable drives toward a resolution no less conventional than the one for which Orsino had longed. The plot initially invoked by Shakespeare's play is displaced by another, equally familiar, plot—the plot of cross-dressing and cross-coupling that had become a heavily overworked convention of Italian and Spanish comedy.7

Swerving in Twelfth Night, then, is at once a source of festive surprise and a time-honored theatrical method of achieving a conventional, reassuring resolution. No one but Viola gets quite what she or he consciously sets out to get in the play, and Viola gets what she wants only because she is willing to submit herself to the very principle of deflection: "I am not that I play" (1.5.184). She embraces a strategy that the play suggests is not simply an accident of circumstance but an essential life-truth: you reach a desired or at least desirable destination not by pursuing a straight line but by following a curved path. This principle underlies Sebastian's explanation of Olivia's mistake: "Nature to her bias drew in that."

Sebastian glosses his own image with the comment, "You would have been contracted to a maid" (5.1.261); that is, he invites Olivia to contemplate what would have happened had nature not drawn to her bias.8 The line seems to call forth its complement -- "But now you are contracted to a man"— yet characteristically Twelfth Night does not give us such a sensible and perfectly predictable turn. Instead Sebastian concludes by renewing the paradox after it had seemed resolved:

Nor are you therein, by my life, deceiv'd,

You are betroth'd both to a maid and man.

(5.1. 262-63)

A man because Sebastian has beneath his apparel what Cesario lacks—"Pray God defend me!" cries Cesario before the duel with Sir Andrew, "A little thing would make me tell them how much I lack of a man" (3.4.30-3); a maid because the term, by a quibble whose several sixteenth-century examples the OED records, could be applied to a male virgin.9 Its use here refers wittily not only to Sebastian's virginity but to the homosexual coupling that Olivia has narrowly escaped. Only by not getting what she wants has Olivia been able to get what she wants and, more important, to want what she gets.

Nature has triumphed. The sexes are sorted out, correctly paired, and dismissed to bliss—or will be as soon as Viola changes her clothes. And nature's triumph is society's triumph, for the same clarification that keeps marriage from being scandalized by gender confusion keeps it from being scandalized by status confusion: no sooner has Sebastian explained to Olivia that he is both a maid and man than Orsino adds, as if he were in no way changing the subject, "Be not amaz'd, right noble is his blood." This is the first mention of the twins' nobility—previously we had only heard Cesario's declaration, "I am a gentleman"—and Orsino's knowledge must stem from the same source that settled the question of identity: the name of the father.  Throughout the play we have been allowed to think that Viola and Sebastian are beneath Olivia's station—hence the spectral doubling of Malvolio's dream of social climbing—and consequently that the play's festive inversions have been purchased at the cost of the more perfect social alliance between the duke and the countess. Now, through the magical power of the name of the father, we learn that the threat to the social order and the threat to the sexual order were equally illusory. All's well that ends well.

"The most fundamental distinction the play brings home to us," remarks C. L. Barber in his well-known essay on Twelfth Night, "is the difference between men and women.... Just as the saturnalian reversal of social roles need not threaten the social structure, but can serve instead to consolidate it, so a temporary, playful reversal of sexual roles can renew the meaning of the normal relation. One can add that with sexual as with other relations, it is when the normal is secure that playful aberration is benign. This basic security explains why there is so little that is queazy in all Shakespeare's handling of boy actors playing women, and playing women pretending to be men." Perhaps. Yet however acute these remarks may be as a humane vision of life, we must question them as a summary judgment of Shakespearean comedy in general and of Twelfth Night in particular. At that play's end, Viola is still Cesario—"For so you shall be," says Orsino, "while you are a man" (5.1.386)—and Olivia, strong-willed as ever, is betrothed to one who is, by his own account, both "a maid and man." At the risk of intensifying our sense of the "queazy" (a category that might reward some inquiry), I would suggest that Twelfth Night may not finally bring home to us the fundamental distinction between men and women; not only may the distinction be blurred, but the home to which it is supposed to be brought may seem less securely ours, less cozy and familiar, than we have come to expect.

But how can we unsettle the secure relation between the normal and the aberrant? How can we question the nature that like a weighted bowl so providentially draws to her bias and resolves the comic predicaments? I propose that we examine the bowl more carefully, search out the off-center weight implanted in it, analyze why it follows the curve of gender. To do so we must historicize Shakespearean sexual nature, restoring it to its relation of negotiation and exchange with other social discourses of the body. For this task it is essential to break away from the textual isolation that is the primary principle of formalism and to move outside the charmed circle of a particular story and its variants. How can we do this? How but by swerving?

. . .