William Shakespeare: Twelfth Night or What You Will.
Produced by Daedalus Production Company, Gateway National Recreation Area, Sandy Hook, New Jersey, June 1991. Joseph Giani, Director.
Produced by the Michigan Shakespeare Festival, Jackson, Michigan, July 2005. John Seibert, Director.
Like The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night was first performed for judges, lawyers, and law students at the Inns of Court—this time at the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple, formerly the home of the Knights Templar. And again the performance occurred during Christmastide; Twelfth Night is the final night of the Christmas season, Epiphany Eve. Following the star never before seen, three Wise Men visited Jesus in the manger at Bethlehem, knelt and prayed, bearing witness for the first time to the manifestation of God incarnate to the Gentiles.
Subtitled “What You Will,” the play recalls the title, As You Like It. Its heroine describes the Feste the Clown as a man who aims to please his audience. Aiming to please, as Shakespeare too must, requires a certain kind of prudence, a knowledge of one’s audience and of ‘how far to go’ with all the elements of a performance, not the least of which will be what you intend to tell them. More directly, a principal character in the play is called “Malvolio,” which means ‘bad will.’ This raises the question of whether “what you will” is good or bad. That goes for audience, playwright, and the playwright’s characters alike.
Shakespeare sets his comedy in Illyria and the seacoast “near it.” As almost always in the comedies, he infuses his place and the people in it with certain English and Christian characteristics. His comedies are not ‘history plays.’ Fact and fancy mix in them.
Orsino, Duke of Illyria commands his musicians, “If music is the food of love, play on, / Give me the excess of it, that, surfeiting, / The appetite may sicken and so die.” (I.i.1-3). Twelfth Night, to be followed by Lent, similarly invites over-feasting as a physical and psychic preparation for the starvation to come. The Duke claims to want a cure for love. But, then, love cures itself, he says, like a river flowing into the sea, its velocity moderated in the bigger body of water. He loves Olivia, a wealthy countess, who considers his suit coldly; better, then, to stop loving her. This play for lawyers initially has little directly to do with the law, but it begins with a suit—not a lawsuit but a love-suit. Trials and tests or temptations will follow because, unlike a lawsuit a love-suit between adults (indeed, rulers) has no third-party judge. Unlike court musicians and attendants, and unlike parties in front of a judge, the one who is beloved may not obey her lover’s command. His attendant, named Curio, asks “Will you go hunt, my lord?”—specifically, “the hart” (I.i.16,18). Yes, the Duke replies, picking up on the pun. He hunts “the noblest” heart he knows, the heart of the Countess Olivia (I.i.19). But the deer-hunt is coercive, ending in the death of the deer, whereas the successful love-hunt must preserve the life—more, win the consent—of the beloved. “What you will” for a lover wooing his beloved, and for a playwright wooing his audience, is more difficult than “what you will” for a ruler in firm command of his regime or a hunter in search of his prey.
What is Olivia’s will? Speaking of the heart, a second courtier named Valentine enters. He reports that Olivia mourns her dead brother and will not leave her house for seven years. This only makes the Duke the more in love with her, admiring such loyalty to, such love of, her brother. How much more intensely, then, will she love “when the rich golden shaft / Hath kill’d the flock of all affections else / That live in her” (I.i.35-37). The Duke wants no Lent in his loving, after all. And he does (mis)conceive of his quest as a hunt, hoping to kill at least part of his beloved’s love. In this, he verges on tyranny, without intending to.
Curio and Valentine: curiosity, the leading characteristic of the mind, and love, the leading characteristic of the heart. These are indeed Duke Orsini’s ‘attendants.’ Will his passion for inquiry and his passion for Olivia coordinate? If so, how? And will they, and how will they, coordinate with his, and her, status as rulers? In rejecting the harmonies of music for the discords of the hunt, does he put his own rule into danger?
The next scene shifts to the Illyrian seacoast, where a woman, a sea captain, and some sailors have survived a shipwreck. Viola’s brother Sebastian was on board, now unaccounted for. A man of “courage and hope,” in his sister’s estimation (I.ii.13), like Arion on the dolphin’s back he bound himself to a mast, and so may have survived. The bard Arion jumped off a ship to escape sailors who wanted to murder him, then so enchanted a school of dolphins with his music that they carried him to safety. Does Sebastian too have enemies? And whom will he enchant?
Viola exhibits an aristocrat’s political awareness, wanting to know not only what country this is but “who governs here” (I.ii.23). “A noble duke, in nature as in name,” the Captain tells her (I.ii.24); an Illyrian by birth, the captain knows the story of Olivia, too—how her father and brother both died in the past year, and how the “virtuous maid” is beloved of Duke Orsini. (“What great ones do the less will prattle of” (I.ii.33), he rightly remarks.) Unlike Viola, who doesn’t know what the status of her own “estate” is, given the question of her brother’s survival, Olivia already knows of her brother’s death. Ostensibly on account of it, she has “abjur’d the company / And sight of men” (I.ii.40-41). Both women are still ‘at sea’ respecting their future estates, albeit in different ways. observing that “nature with a beauteous wall / Doth oft close in pollution, yet of thee,” Captain, “I will believe thou has a mind that suit / With this thy fair and outward character” (I.ii.48-51). Viola will confide in him and request his assistance. She would like to become Olivia’s servant until her own circumstances “mellow” (I.ii.43)—that is, come to fruition, ripen. In the meantime, she will present herself to the Duke. She will disguise herself as a eunuch, neither a threat nor (as she expects) a temptation to anyone. She can sing, she says, “speak to him in many sorts of music,” in keeping with her musical name (I.ii.58). Unknowingly, then, she will be able to feed his appetite for love.
At Olivia’s house, her uncle, Sir Toby Belch, and Maria, her waiting woman, quarrel over his conduct, and Olivia’s. Sir Toby criticizes the Countess’s extended period of mourning, being “sure care’s an enemy of life” (I.iii.2). Maria says that she and Olivia disapprove of the late hours he keeps: “You must confine yourself within the modest limits of order” (I.iii.7-8). What is more, Sir Toby’s choice for Olivia’s suitor, one Sir Andrew Aguecheek, is a fool and a prodigal, to which charge the knight replies that he has “all the good gifts of nature” (I.iii.25).
Two conceptions of nature: the good nature Viola sees in the Captain, which the Captain sees in the Duke and the Countess; the ‘capable’ nature of Sir Andrew, whom Sir Toby praises for knowing languages and playing musical instruments, for being tall, and for his future wealth. Maria is unimpressed with Sir Andrew’s prospects; being a fool, quarrelsome, but also a coward (which “alloy[s] the gust he hath in quarrelling”) (I.iii.29), he will soon be parted from the money he inherits. When the controversial Sir Andrew arrives, he estimates his chances of winning Olivia to be poor, despite (or perhaps because) “I have no more wit than a Christian or an ordinary man has” (I.iii.79-80). More, since she refuses the Duke’s suit, why would she notice me at all? Because, Sir Toby explains, she’s told me “she’ll not match above her degree, neither in estate, years, nor wit” (I.iii.103). You, Sir Andrew, are suitably beneath her. And you know how to dance; show that off, and you might win her. There is considerable truth in this absurdity. ‘What I like about you is, you really know how to dance’ was an entirely plausible pop-song lyric in the United States, decades ago. Olivia may well attend to a more refined music than that; if so, she’s unlikely to be impressed by Sir Andrew’s tallness, linguistic fluency, musical talent, and ability to gyrate. But there are those who would be. As it happens, however, Sir Toby only encourages Sir Andrew’s suit because he’s amused by the man’s folly, and because in his prodigality Sir Andrew supplies Sir Toby with a ready flow of money.
Back at the palace, the Duke’s gentleman-attendant Valentine converses with Viola in the guise of Cesario, an assumed name that makes us wonder if, having come and seen, ‘he’ will conquer. Valentine assures Cesario that the Duke is not “inconstant in his favors” (I.iv.6). The Duke comes in and commands Cesario to go to Olivia’s house and insist upon an audience. “Be clamorous and leap all civil bounds” (I.iv.20), even as Sir Toby does, in his drunken carousing. When admitted, “unfold the passion of my love” (I.iv.23); if you convince her to reverse her intention, “thou shalt live as freely as the lord” (I.iv.38). The Duke’s command, and his promise (which Cesario now hears he is likely to keep) appeals to the Belchian aspect of human nature, the desire for freedom defined as living as you want, free of civil bounds. Although the Duke assumes that this appeal will motivate his new attendant, the opposite is true. Viola has fallen in love with him; that is her motive for obeying the ruler’s will. “Myself would be his wife”; in her self-chosen role of Cesario, she will be “wooing” a potential rival (I.iv.40-41).
At Olivia’s house Maria is scolding the Clown, who has been absent from the household without leave, and therefore deserves hanging, she judges. The Clown proves more sober, and more witty, than Sir Toby, the other butt of her ire. “Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage,” he aphorizes in return (I.v.18). Olivia enters, with her steward, Malvolio. She orders the fool’s removal, to which he heartily concurs, saying, go away, Countess. A woman of equanimity, she engages: Prove me a fool, fool. You are a fool, Countess, because if your brother is in Heaven, why mourn? Malvolio is not amused. “I marvel your ladyship takes delight in such a barren rascal” (I.v.79). But Olivia is quite amused, rebuking her steward. “O, you are sick of self-love, Malvolio and taste with a distemper’d appetite. To be generous, guiltless, and of free disposition, is to take these things for bird-bolts that you deem cannon bullets.” (I.v.85-87). She defines freedom quite differently than Sir Toby or even the Duke define it. Olivia’s freedom is both non-egocentric and thoughtful, not impassioned either for someone else (as is the Duke’s love) or for herself (like Malvolio’s self-love). Her freedom never magnifies the small, refrains from quarreling over a straw because she sees her honor isn’t really at stake. After all, isn’t the Clown right? How foolish is he, in Christian terms? But is her mourning the result of melancholy passion, now moderated by his jibe, or a device of prudence, a delaying tactic, a wise use of time?
And if she doesn’t love the Duke, possibly because she won’t marry ‘above herself,’ whom will she love? We don’t wait any longer for the answer. The Countess admits Cesario when Malvolio tells her that ‘he’ is only an adolescent—no danger to a woman. When Cesario prefaces her speech by calling it “poetical,” Olivia immediately stands on the authority of her wit: “It is the more likely to be feigned,” in that case; “I pray you keep it in.” (I.v.183). What is more, “I heard that you were saucy at my gates, and allowed you approach rather to wonder at you than to hear you” (I.v.184-85); she not only esteems the Clown’s wit but likes to wonder. “If you be not mad, be gone; if you have reason, be brief; ’tis not that time of moon with me to make one in so skipping a dialogue” (I.v.186-89). She can distinguish between madness and the sane inanity of youth; rejecting both, she admits rational discourse, if her interlocutor is capable of it, while stipulating that stem-winding rhetoric will not be countenanced. Only Socratic brevity of speech will do. But she commits an error, suspecting the truth of Cesario’s speech without suspecting the truth of ‘his’ identity.
Cesario requests a private audience, a secret speech by one whose identity is secret. Olivia grants permits this esotericism. There is good reason for Cesario to want no onlookers. ‘He’ praises Olivia’s natural beauty, her physical excellence. But like the Clown, ‘he’ is unimpressed with her soul. “I see you what you are: you are too proud; / But, if you were the devil, you are fair, / My lord and master loves you.” (I.v.234-36). Olivia replies, that it isn’t her body, her looks, that the Duke should be considering. “Your lord does not know my mind; I cannot love him,” although “I suppose him virtuous, know him noble, / Of great estate, of fresh and stainless youth; / Invoices well divulg’d, free, learn’d, and valiant, / And in dimension and the shape of nature / A gracious person.” (I.v.241-46). This only increases Viola’s love for him, and she wonders why Olivia cannot love such a man. If I were his suitor, ‘he’ tells her, I would camp out at your gate in a cabin made of willow, symbol of unrequited love. I would write you love poems to sing at night, make your name echo in the hills, give you no rest until you pitied me. In their privacy, Olivia drops her hint: You “might do much,” young Cesario (I.v.260). She invites ‘him’ back, and Cesario departs, saying, “Farewell, fair cruelty” (I.v.272).
Love has begun to humble Olivia by teaching her fear. For the first time, she is dependent upon the approval of another, unfree. “I do not know what, and fear to find / Mine eye too great a flatterer for my mind,” she confides to Malvolio (I.v.292-93). She can only appeal to Fate to “show thy force” in the matter (I.v.294). Knowing herself in love, she no longer believes that she rules the course of events.
Act One presents the theme of the play: rulers in love. The Duke and the Countess are both good rulers. They are honorable, prudent, just, even magnanimous—rulers by nature. But human nature also loves, and in loving challenges even good rule and good rulers. It makes good rulers dependent upon the good graces of another person. Insofar as it does, it denatures rulers as rulers, compromises their self-command, puts in question their habitual authority over others. The Duke responds by redoubling his efforts to win his beloved; the Countess responds by appealing to a higher power and resigning herself to its verdict, while hoping to arrange circumstances in such a way as to give a favorable outcome a chance to occur.
Viola’s brother Sebastian has survived the shipwreck, rescued by a sea-captain, as she was. Like Olivia, he feels buffeted by Fate, believing his sister drowned. She was called beautiful, he tells the captain; being her twin, he modestly abstains from affirming it. But “she bore a mind that envy could not but call fair” (II.i.26-27). Although he asks Antonio to leave him—it “were a bad recompense for your love to lay any of [my evils] on you” (II.i.7)—his new friend demurs. And when Sebastian tells him he intends to head for Duke Orsini’s court, he insists on accompanying him, despite the fact that “I have many enemies in Orsini’s court” (II,i.40). Twinship is one natural pairing; love aims at another; friendship is a third. Rescuer Antonio may not have been enchanted by Sebastian, who exhibits no Arionic musicianship, but love and friendship can prove as powerful as enchantment, and more lasting.
In a street in the city, Malvolio catches up to Cesario, saying he returns a ring ‘he’ gave to the Countess. When ‘he’ refuses it, he throws it on the ground and walks away, not caring if ‘he’ picks it up. Viola is bewildered, having left no ring, but she understands that “my outside” has “charm’d” the lady (II.ii.16). “She loves me, sure” (II.ii.20): “I am the man,” she avers, with the double irony of saying so while posing as a woman and echoing the acknowledgment of Jesus by His disciples. She now sees that “disguise,” what she had supposed a clever ruse, “art a wickedness / Wherein the pregnant enemy”—Satan, always ‘big’ with mischief—”does much” (II.ii.25-26). “Fortune” has caught her in a love triangle drawn by her own wit. “O Time, thou must untangle this, not I; / It is too hard a knot for me t’untie!” (II.ii.38-39). She has run out of plots, out of schemes to outmatch fortune. Like her rival/beloved, Olivia, she can only appeal to a higher power—not Fate or Fortune, which has conned her, but Time, which many ignore but no one can think himself clever enough to rule.
That night, at Olivia’s house, Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, and the Clown are in a celebratory mood, as usual. They agree that life consists of eating and drinking, and fools though they may be, they too know Time has no master. As the Clown sings, “What is love? ‘Tis not hereafter, / Present mirth hath present laughter / What’s to come is still unsure. / In delay there lies no plenty, / Then come and kiss me, sweet and twenty; / Youth’s a stuff will not endure.” (II.iii.46-51). They are celebrating Twelfth Night. Maria warns them that Malvolio will throw them out and sure enough—demanding, rhetorically, “Is there no regard of place, personage, or time in you?”—he steps in, telling them to shape up or ship out (II.iii.89). To which Sir Toby replies, “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” (II.iii.108-09). To Malvolio’s austere conventionalism (including his conventional notion of time), Sir Toby opposes nature, low nature though it is. If Malvolio ruled, there would be no Christmastides, and all of life would be Lenten.
Giving him up, Malvolio turns to Maria, complaining of “this uncivil rule” (II.iii.115) and promising to report it to the Countess. Although she herself has reprimanded Sir Toby for his unbounded misbehavior, Maria can’t stand Malvolio at all. She conceives of her own plot, her own scheme to manipulate Fortune, in order to “make him a common recreation” (II.iii.127). “Sometimes he is a kind of Puritan,” but not a real one (II.iii.131); in reality he is nothing “constantly but a time-pleaser,” so intensely self-loving that he imagines all others share in his love (II.iii.137-38). Viola hopes that time may somehow bring a solution for her dilemma, while knowing it will go as it goes. Malvolio is time’s sycophant, vainly hoping to please it; his self-love and lack of self-knowledge make him a sort of unintentional hypocrite, a Puritan without purity who preens himself in his self-conceit. “On that vice in him will my revenge find notable cause to work” (II.iii.142-43). She will forge a letter from the Countess confessing her love for him, dropping it where he will find it. This will be “sport royal” (II.iii.161), a prank hatched by a servant but fit for a queen. The trickster-servant will rule the scheming steward.
At the palace, the Duke once more calls for music. The previous evening he’d heard an “old and antique song” (II.iv.3). “Methought it did relieve my passion much, / More than light airs and recollected [studied] terms / Of these most brisk and giddy-faced times.” (II.iv.4-6). The simplicity and sobriety of old music calms the passions, whereas modern, Renaissance music anticipates the clever over-sophisticated tunes Cole Porter would invent, centuries later. In his second appearance in the play, Curio goes to find the Clown, who can sing the song again. The Duke tells Cesario that a woman should marry men older than herself in order to be “level in her husband’s heart” (II.iv.30). His purpose is identical to Olivia’s: equality in marriage. But he recommends the opposite means to that end. That is because men’s “fancies are more giddy and infirm” than those of women—”more giddy and infirm, / More longing, wavering, sooner lost and won, / Than women’s are” (II.iv.31-33). Men’s love attaches to women’s beauty; women’s beauty fades like roses; ergo, men’s love evanesces quickly. This opinion recalls the carpe diem sentiments expressed in the Clown’s song to Sir Toby and Sir Andrew. But the old and antique song he esteems strikes an entirely different tone. It gives voice to one who dies of unrequited love: “I am slain by a fair cruel maid” (II.iv.53). No one mourns the lover. Does the Duke’s liking of the song bespeak the moderation and sobriety of antiquity or merely his own self-pity? Has he learned that the hunter-lover may end up as the slain prey?
As in the opening scene of the play, the Duke changes his mind almost immediately, now telling Cesario what is obvious, that his love for Olivia is constant, that he loves her for her nature, and that ‘he’ must now return to her house to tell that to her “sovereign cruelty” (II.iv.79). He cares nothing for her lands, for “the parts that Fortune hath bestow’d upon her” (II.iv.82); like all things Fortune bestows, they are as easily taken away. It is the “gem” of nature’s gifts in her that “attracts my soul” (II.iv.85). And if she “cannot love you, sir?” Cesario asks (II.iv.86). Impossible, in the end, for “there is no woman’s sides / Can bide the beating of so strong a passion / As love doth give my heart.” (II.iv.92-94). A woman’s love is delicate but superficial, a matter of “the palate,” whereas a man’s love is deep, a “motion of the liver” (II.iv.97-98). His love is “all as hungry as the sea, / And can digest as much” (II.iv.99-100).
Cesario, who knows the power of the sea to devour ships, also knows that a woman’s love can equal a man’s in its depth and power. “In faith, they are as true of heart as we” (II.iv.106). ‘His’ own father had a daughter who loved so, who “pin’d in thought” for her undisclosed beloved, sitting “like Patience on a monument, smiling at grief” (II.iv.113-14). And, diagnosing the Duke’s love for Olivia, “We men may say more, swear more, but indeed / Our shows are more than will; for still we prove / Much in our vows, and little in our love” (II.iv.115-17). As if to confirm her suggestion, the Duke sends her off again to Olivia with a jewel symbolizing his lover’s natural gifts, saying “My love can give no place, bide no delay” (II.ii.123-24). He would besiege the countess, as if she were a fortress to be conquered. It is hard to separate his desire for the fortress from his love of the challenge. In this, the central scene of the play, Cesario/Viola tries to teach the Duke the nature of women, which is not so far from the nature of men, not so unequal to them as he imagines.
As we’ve seen, the rulers aren’t the only plotters in Illyria. In Olivia’s garden, away from the ears of authority, Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, Maria, and Fabian, a servant of Olivia’s, further Maria’s plan against Malvolio, whom Fabian detests because he reported Fabian’s bear-baiting to disapproving Olivia—another of the steward’s attempts to restrict the recreations of the people, and not only the people. King Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth I were also fans. Puritans attempted to ban bear-baiting, especially when held on the Sabbath, so Malvolio acted true to his type.
Maria has kept the letter just mysterious enough to engage Malvolio’s curiosity, engage him in thought; it “will make a contemplative idiot of him” (II.v.17-18), lure him like a trout to the fly-concealed hook. And it has exactly that effect. Reading the letter, which encourages him to “cast thy humble slough and appear fresh,” he muses to himself that it can only be from Olivia. If he marries her he will become a count. (“How imagination blows him,” Fabian whispers—blows him like the wind that wrecks ships). (II.v.39-41). Malvolio soliloquizes on how he will command his future subordinate, Fabian. “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them” (II.v.132-34). His “Fates have opened their hands”; he needs only to embrace them (V.v.134-35). As count, “I will be proud. I will read politic authors. I will battle Sir Toby.” (V.v.143). This is no power-fantasy whipped up by ambition and self-love, he tells himself, “for every reason excites to this, that my lady loves me” (II.v.146). He walks off, entranced. In this garden, it is the serpent who is tempted, not to eat an apple (no food for snakes) but to shed his skin, his humbleness, which on Malvolio is indeed but skin-deep, an implausible disguise.
Maria comes by, a comic Eve triumphantly taking vengeance on her enemy, to the delighted applause of her confederates. “I could marry this wench for this device,” Sir Toby exults (II.v.162). She is not done. She will advise Malvolio to approach the Countess wearing yellow, cross-gartered stockings, which she loathes, and to smile at her constantly, crossing “her disposition” as well as his stockings. (II.v.181). She is sure to regard him with “a notable contempt” (II.v.182). If Maria will not exactly bruise the serpent’s heel, she’ll make a laughing-stock of his calves.
Twinship, love, and friendship are natural and noble; eating, drinking, and laughing are natural and low, but not to be despised. Death puts a limit to natural life, even as it is part of nature. Death makes human ‘timing’ more urgent, human beings more in need of wit. Fortune or the Fates can serve to derange these natural bonds and pleasures. A certain kind of religiosity and a certain narrow or conventional civility can also derange them. The ineluctable fact of ruling in human societies complicates love, bringing to it questions of equality and dependence, as well as the danger of mixing love with ambition—as seen in a serious way in the Duke’s willful wooing, comically in Malvolio’s illusive desire for superiority.
Prudent plotting can sometimes cure Fortune’s derangements, but this can go wrong (as with Viola’s disguise) or right (as with Maria’s letter). Time is a more reliable remedy, as Fortune balances out her gifts over time, allowing nature to emerge in the long voyage.
Act III begins and ends in Olivia’s garden, and persons will continue to be led into temptation there. The ‘low’ characters have now departed, Cesario and the Clown have come in. Unlike the Duke in his palace, Cesario wants to hear no music, seeks no love-cure. ‘He’ exchanges not tunes but words with the witty Clown, who offers a lesson on the ambiguity of words. Telling ‘him’ he lives by a church, he draws the question, “Art thou a churchman?” (III.i.4). No, his house is by the church, ergo, he lives by the church. “A sentence is but a chev’ril glove to a good wit. How quickly the wrong side may be turned outward.” (III.i.10-12). If a word is a kid glove, it may do more than cover more than a wolf in sheep’s clothing, be more than a humble skin covering an ambitious snake; a word might itself be turned inside-out, revealing not the nature of the thing it covers but its own duplicity, its own opposite or self-contradicting nature. This, the Clown continues, puts into question the use of reason itself, which depends upon the principle of non-contradiction. I am not “the Lady Olivia’s fool,” as Cesario supposes, “but her corrupter of words,” the serpent in the garden of her thought (III.i.34).
This Eve isn’t fooled. After the Clown leaves to tell Olivia’s household that Cesario has arrived, Viola considers him carefully. “This fellow is wise enough to play the fool; / And to do that well craves a kind of wit.” (III.i.57-58). A costumed play-actor herself, Viola/Cesario sees that to bring off a performance she will need both an underlying wisdom (to conceive of the role in the first place) and then the tactical wisdom of wit. That is, “He must observe their mood on whom he jests, / The quality of persons, and the time; / And like the haggard, check at every feather / That comes before his eye.” (III.i.59-62). Earlier, perplexed by the complications multiplying around her, she surrendered to the test of time; she now sees that a jester-fool, with his wit, can also at least to a degree, use time, quickly perceive the immediate and passing emotions of his audience, the social standing of the persons present and even, like a young hawk being trained for hunting, forego the lesser birds for the game-birds. “This is a practice / As full of labor was a wise man’s art; / For folly that he wisely shows is fit; / But wise men, folly-fall’n, quite taint their wit.” (III.i.61-65). Viola has learned that sophia, the wisdom of the truth of nature, needs the protection of phronēsis, practical wisdom or wit, if only to notice the audience to whom one speaks of the higher wisdom. The Clown has taught her that with practical wisdom she doesn’t need to be the victim of fate, of shipwreck by sea or in love, if she pays attention to persons (without necessarily ‘respecting’ them, as neither fools nor gods ever do), and if she exercises good timing in her wit’s exercise.
Her newly calibrated wit immediately faces a test, as Olivia enters the garden. Dismissing her retinue, the Countess engages Cesario in another private conversation. Olivia describes another bear-baiting, but this time her honor is the bear, Cesario’s thoughts the unmuzzled dogs that torment it at the command of ‘his’ “tyrannous heart” (III.i.117). When Cesario expresses pity, Olivia calls that a step toward love, which Cesario denies, as “we oft pity enemies” (III.i.122). What do you think of me? Olivia asks. “You do think you are not what you are” (III.i.136); you are my enemy, without knowing it. What is more, Cesario tells her with equal honesty, “I am not what I am” (III.i.138). She has mastered the Clown’s mastery of words. She can tell the truth while keeping it concealed.
Placed in the Duke’s position of loving unrequitedly, his female counterpart-ruler seeks to overbear her beloved as he had attempted to do, by strength of will and of passion. Whatever ambiguity the words related to ‘being’ may have, “I would you were as I would have you be” (III.i.139). Swearing by “the roses of the spring,” which must be gathered timely, and by “maidhood, honor, truth, and everything,” she confesses her love which, despite “all my pride” neither wit nor reason can hide (III.i.146-47). Unlike Maria, who would restrict Sir Toby’s drunkenness within civil limits, unlike Malvolio, who would limit merriment within civil limits austerely tightened, Olivia asks Cesario to fetter her reason with reason itself, as “love sought is good, but given unsought is better” (III.i.152-53)—an argument Duke Orsino might well have used, had he wooed directly, not through an intermediary who unwittingly precluded the success of his suit.
Cesario answers the suit by protesting his innocence. “By innocence I swear, and by my youth, / I have one heart, one bosom, and one truth, / And that no woman has; nor never none / Shall mistress be of it, save I alone.” (III.i.154-57). ‘His’ reason practices self-government, not submitting to the rule of another’s passion, however good that passion may be—relative to another passion. Cesario/Viola’s reason follows nature, not the appearance she has contrived. Her use of ambiguous words never loses sight of the nature words may reveal or conceal.
Cesario promises not to bring the Duke’s impassioned “tears” to you, again (III.i.159). Olivia can only invite ‘him’ to come again, “for thou mayst move / That heart which now abhors to like his love” —more specifically, his beloved (III.i.160-61). In truth, Viola would like his love very much, were it directed to herself, according to nature.
Meanwhile, indoors at Olivia’s, the comical men contrive their own plot to match Maria’s plot. Sir Toby and Fabian scheme to make gulls out of Sir Andrew and Cesario. They urge Sir Andrew, who still entertains the remote hope that he might win Olivia, to challenge his rival Cesario to a duel. This would set up another love triangle, substituting Sir Andrew for the Duke but retaining Olivia as the beloved and Cesario as the middle-‘man.’ A letter will advance this plot, too, although this time they will induce the gull to write the letter himself.
Out on a street in town, Sebastian is thanking “my kind Antonio”—’kind’ being another word with more than one meaning, namely, compassionate, natural, and species—for his loyalty and friendship. He is right. The sea-captain compassionately intends to guide the young man, inexperienced in travel and otherwise friendless in Illyria; he is a true friend, indeed a man of Sebastian’s kind or type, a man of virtue. When Sebastian says he wants to look around the town, to see “the memorials and things of fame / That do renown this city” (III.iii.23-24), the noble calls to the noble. This worries Antonio, however, who once fought a sea-battle against the Duke’s galleys in a piratical mission. Antonio will retire to an inn called The Elephant, named after the animal that never forgets—a sort of memorial to memorials, and a reminder that memories may be of base things as well as noble ones. Meanwhile, he tells the young man, by all means visit the sights of interest here, “feed your knowledge” on those tokens of Illyrian virtue (III.iii.41). To know what the citizens of a city esteem is to know something important about them and about those who rule them. More, take my purse with you, in case you see something you might wish to buy. With that gesture of liberality, another measure of friendship and trust, they agree to meet again at The Elephant.
In Olivia’s garden of temptation, of testing, Olivia and Maria must listen to deluded Malvolio’s love-prattle—a test of their patience, if nothing else. Quoting from the letter he believes she wrote, thanking Jove for his good fortune, he finally elicits Olivia’s verdict: “This is very midsummer madness” (III.iv.53). She leaves him to the tender care of Sir Toby, to that gentleman’s delight. As Fabian puts it, “If this were play’d upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction” (III.iv.121-22). He keeps his eye to the purpose, however: “Why, we shall make him mad indeed” (III.iv.127).
Things get even better for the plotters when Sir Andrew arrives, letter in hand. He reads it aloud, with Sir Toby remarking its one strength: in view of the illegal character of dueling, it contains no culpable evidence of a challenge. He promises to deliver the inanely-written document to Cesario, but because it is too foolish to intimidate that gentleman he elects to deliver the message orally, in his own words. Given Sir Andrew’s imbecility and cowardice and Cesario’s slightness and effeminacy, he predicts that no blood will come of their confrontation; they will likely only stare at one another like basilisks, except that their looks won’t kill.
Olivia and Cesario enter the garden, Olivia complaining of Cesario’s heart of stone. It is “my fault” to have “laid my honor too unchary out,” but “such a headstrong potent fault it is / That it but mocks reproof” (III.iv.191-95). Her garden-Eden features the temptation seen in the Biblical one, but stubborn, original sin has never been absent from it. “With the same haviour that your passion bears / Goes on my master’s griefs” (III.iv.196); Olivia had sought equality and she has achieved it, but hardly in the form she wanted. That is often the way with the desire for equality. Cesario continues to insist that the only way for Olivia to regain her honor, to be redeemed from her fault, is to feel “true love for my master” (III.iv.203)—remaining loyal to ‘his’ master’s command, although if Cesario succeeds Viola will lose him. When Olivia tries to trap ‘him’ with logic—”How with mine honor may I give him that / Which I have given to you?” (III.iv.203-04)—Cesario replies as one elevated to the position of a judge: “I will acquit you” (III.iv.205). Turning on her heel, Olivia calls ‘him’ a fiend, casting herself as Eve in her garden psychodrama. She very much prefers being the ruler, not the ruled, but her love has made that impossible.
Olivia’s departure frees Cesario for the role Sir Toby has assigned ‘him’ in his own play. First, Sir Toby says that there is a real devil in the garden, Sir Andrew, “a devil in a private brawl” (III.iv.225). He then confidentially warns that devil of Cesario’s prowess; “they say he has been fencer to the Sophy” (III.iv.266)—that is, to the Persian Shah, although she’s also been learning to be a verbal fencer in defense of the nature Sophia knows. Both principals are intimidated, Cesario confessing, “I am no fighter” (III.iv.231) but “one that would rather go with Sir Priest than Sir Knight” (III.iv.258-59), Sir Andrew proposing that he will bribe the fencer with a horse if ‘he’ will decline combat. This time, Cesario/Viola can appeal not to Time, which isn’t on her side in this case, but to God, who alone can defend her, she thinks, as “I lack as a man” (III.iv.283). Manhood is a natural thing, and Time may test and reveal it; salvation is an immediate thing, at this moment it seems that only God can deliver her.
But this is no divine comedy. Instead, a human savior, Antonio, arrives. Mistaking Cesario for Sebastian, he offers to defend him against the challenger. This offends Sir Toby, whose plot the intruder would ruin. But before any damage can be done, officers arrive to arrest the sea-captain. Antonio asks Cesario for the purse he’d given Sebastian, evidently so that he will be able to pay bail. When ‘he’ cannot produce it, Antonio assumes he’s been betrayed by his friend. The officers take him away, but not before he calls Cesario “Sebastian.” This tells Viola that her brother may have survived the shipwreck and is in Illyria. If so, “Tempests are king and salt waves fresh in love!” (III.iv.367-68). Viola can’t reveal her true nature quite yet, but time and nature have indeed come to her rescue, giving her far greater scope for her wisdom and wit.
Act III has seen the education of the two noblewomen. Viola has learned from the Clown how to understand the relation of wisdom, wit, and words in meeting the exigencies of Fortune in the course of time. Olivia has learned, or is beginning to learn, the limits of a ruler’s power when it comes to matters of love, nature’s heart.
The Clown enjoys a noteworthy form of freedom. Most of the time, he manifests himself when and with whom he chooses, saying whatever he wants to say, without punishment. Sebastian has arrived in front of Olivia’s house, and the Clown is there to greet him—this time, however, on orders from the Countess, who has sent him out to bid Cesario to speak with her. But just as the two rulers are ruled, now the fool is fooled. He mistakes Sebastian for Cesario, attempts to give him the message from Olivia. When nonplussed Sebastian dismisses him, the Clown indignantly appeals to the reality of names, forgetting his own teaching on the ambiguity of words: “Your name is not Cesario; nor this is not my nose neither” (IV.i.7-8). Indeed, “Nothing that is so is so” (IV.i.8). Even, and especially, the trickster relies on knowing what reality is, on what (as a U.S. president famously intoned) is is. How can this fellow Cesario so blatantly deny the reality of himself, which the Clown sees in front him?
Sebastian would get rid of him by paying him off, treating him as the court fool that he is. Sir Toby and Sir Andrew arrive before he can leave, and they too mistake Sebastian for Cesario. Sir Andrew and Sebastian scuffle, with Sir Andrew threatening his rival with a lawsuit, once Sir Toby has safely restrained the surprisingly fight-ready ‘Cesario.’ “I’ll have an action of battery against him, if there be any law in Illyria. Though I struck him first, yet it’s no matter for that.” (IV.i.31-33). Shakespeare’s audience of lawyers and judges have undoubtedly encountered such plaintiffs before.
Sebastian breaks free of Sir Toby’s grip, and they are about to fight when Olivia, alerted by the Clown, intervenes, pronouncing Sir Toby an “ungracious wretch, / Fit for the mountains and the barbarous caves” (IV.i.43-44). She orders everyone away, except her ‘Cesario.’ To him she pleads, “Let thy fair wisdom, not thy passion, sway / In this uncivil and unjust extent / Against thy peace.” (IV.i.51-52). She invites him into her house, so that he can hear accounts of “the many fruitless pranks / This ruffian hath botched up, that thou thereby / Mayst smile at this.” (IV.i.54-55). Let laughter replace your rage, comedy replace incipient tragedy. Curse his soul “for me,” because “He started one poor heart of mine, in thee” (IV.i.57-58).
Olivia intervenes first on the grounds of civility and good order, against outlaw dueling, however farcical; she doesn’t know it’s farcical, any more than Sebastian does. Sir Toby’s comic plot was about to spin out of his control because his anger was overbearing his sense of fun. He is, after all, a ‘Sir,’ a knight, a man of the warrior class, however self-abased he has become with eating and drinking and pranking. Olivia prevents the comedy from turning tragic by banishing the men she calls the “rudes,” the uncivil, those unworthy of a place in civil society (IV.i.47), those who act beneath their conventionally rightful places in that society because their nature prevents them from living up to such places.
She next appeals not to ‘Cesario’/Sebastian’s civility but to his reason, to his nature not his sense of civil propriety. She knows Cesario has the kind of nature that can draw itself back from anger to reason, a nature that can recall itself into civil society, and indeed (as she continues to hope) into her household. Like a deer, a hart, her heart leaped in fear when she saw him endangered by the sword in the hand guided by the damnation-worthy soul of her unregenerate uncle. She hopes Cesario will enter her household out of compassion for that fear, a sure token of her love.
If this ‘Cesario’ were Viola, the impasse would recur. ‘He’ would excuse himself, faithfully respecting the Duke’s authority. But Olivia has committed a right error. When it comes to reason, Sebastian has every reason to think that either all these people are mad or he is—and if not mad, then dreaming. But crucially, unlike Viola/Cesario, Sebastian/Cesario by nature looks at Olivia and very much likes what he sees. The man who loves memorials and would lodge at an inn named for the never-forgetting Elephant now tells himself, “Let fancy still my sense in Lethe steep / If it be thus to dream, still let me sleep!” (IV.i.58-59). “Would you be ruled by me?” Olivia asks (IV.i.60). “Madam, I will” (IV.i.61). To Olivia, suddenly her reluctant beloved has consented to her suit. The stern judge who had fiendishly acquitted her of responsibility for loving ‘him’ now acquits himself nobly in the role she wills for him. ‘Acquit’ is yet another word with more than one meaning. The play’s alternate title, What You Will also has a double meaning: the audience assumes it means ‘as you like it,’ ‘what you want.’ The rulers in the play, however, being rulers, have been habituated to obtaining what they will, and love has frustrated them in that. Her beloved having replied in accordance with her will, Olivia has every reason to believe her will has finally prevailed, her just rule restored, her regime well-ordered again.
Over at the prison, Malvolio has been thrown into a lightless cell, darkness being considered a cure and a punishment for madness, an imitation on earth of the evil soul in Hell. Maria, Sir Toby, and the Clown aren’t done with him yet. Another plot, another disguise: Maria dresses the Clown as a curate, “Sir Topas.” “Topas” might be a pun on topos, the word for a traditional theme or topic in rhetoric. The fake curate who pays Malvolio a visit does ‘treat’ him according to the conventions of the time, pretending to perform an exorcism to free the prisoner from the Satanic forces that the plotters pretend are controlling him. Since Malvolio can see nothing, the Clown only needs to change his voice to manifest himself as himself, as well—his wit making himself into twins. Malvolio associates darkness with ignorance and with Hell; he is indeed plunged into the one and may as well be in the other. He insists on his sanity, but neither of the Clown’s personae will credit him with it. Whereas ignorant Sebastian, being sane, had sanely doubted his own sanity, and is said rightly to be civil, ignorant Malvolio, equally sane, but only conventionally civil, never doubts but is lyingly said to be mad. Or is it a lie? His version of civility was humorless, too pure (and too Puritan) for this world. He has been sanely mad, ill-willed. ‘As you will,’ directed at him, would lead men and women into a sort of prison. In that way, his punishment is just.
Sir Toby, chastened by the Countess’ scolding and banishment from the household, decides that the pranking play has played itself out. He fears Olivia’s continued displeasure with his antics. The tormentors withdraw, but not before the Clown promises to bring him light, pen, and paper, so Malvolio can write to the Countess. The Clown sings a taunting farewell ditty about vice, madness, and the devil.
Out in “the glorious sun” and air, Sebastian soliloquizes in the garden (IV.iii.1). He is filled with “wonder” at a gift from the Countess, a pearl; unlike much else preying upon his mind, he can touch and feel the pearl; it is real. And it symbolizes other realities. The pearl is the only gem that isn’t a stone, but the product of a living thing. It is also the only gem that needs no polishing, no cutting, no human artisanship to make it more beautiful. It comes from the sea, where life on earth originated, and from which Sebastian has come to Illyria. In Greece, where Shakespeare’s Illyria is nominally set, it was associated with Aphrodite, the goddess of love; in Christian iconography it symbolized another form of love, chastity before marriage. And in the Book of Matthew the pearl of great price symbolizes the Kingdom of God, for which a wise merchant would sell everything else he has. The pearl, then, is a natural thing betokening the divine regime, and the Christian marriage Olivia hopes for is a sacrament, a human token of the divine regime.
Sebastian also wonders at the absence of Antonio, whose “counsel now might do me golden service” (IV.iii.3,8). All of these things, he sanely and reasonably thinks, may not be madness at all, in himself or in the others, but only the result of “some error” (IV.iii.10). He doubts that the Countess could be mad; if she were, “she could not sway her house, command her followers,” with “such a smooth, discreet, and stable gearing, / As I perceive she does” (IV.iii.17-20). When Olivia comes to him, priest in tow, she invites him into the nearby chantry, where, “before him, / And underneath that consecrated roof,” he may “plight me the full assurance of your faith, / That my most jealous and too doubtful soul, / May live at peace” (IV.iii.24-28). She has achieved a degree of self-knowledge, even in her final error of mistaken identity. For his part, Sebastian consents to the ceremony of betrothal and, “having sworn truth, ever will be true” (IV.iii.33). He has seen her beauty and her virtue as a ruler, and that knowledge of the nature of her body and soul is good enough for him.
The Clown, Fabian, the Duke, Cesario, and Curio convene in front of Olivia’s house. At last the Duke has come to make his suit in person, without intermediary. The Clown pleases the Duke by saying that he, the Clown, profits more from enemies than friends because enemies help him gain self-knowledge, while friends only flatter. In this play of disguises, from costumed bodies to ambiguous words, self-knowledge opens the pathway to knowledge simply. The Duke calls this Socratic lesson “excellent” (V.i.21). He promises payment to the Clown if he will announce his presence to Olivia and bring her out to parley with him.
Some officers lead Antonio by. Cesario recognizes him as ‘his’ rescuer. The Duke also remembers him as the captain of the pirate ship, a man so brave in battle that the “very envy and the tongue of loss / Cried fame and honor on him” (V.i.52-53). Cesario would have the Duke pardon him, as the captain had offered to defend Cesario when endangered in the duel. The Duke wants to know why he dared to come to Illyria; Antonio explains that it was out of friendship for Sebastian, whom he takes Cesario to be. He endangered his own life for that friend, after rescuing him from “the rude sea’s enrag’d and foamy mouth” (V.i.72). But when he in turn had needed his friend to return his money, the man betrayed him, “not meaning to partake with me in danger” (V.i.81). Out of cowardice, Antonio charges, Sebastian failed to repay a double debt: life and purse.
Cesario does not know how this can be, but, as a wise judge of the case before him, the Duke asks the pertinent question, having to do with time: When did you come to Illyria? When Antonio says it was today, the Duke sees that his testimony is somehow false, as Cesario arrived prior to that. Before he can inquire further, Olivia and her attendants emerge from her house. “Now heaven walks on earth,” the Duke exclaims, unknowingly referring to the theme symbolized by the pearl Olivia has given to his unknown rival. No longer wishing to bother with Antonio, he dismisses Cesario by saying that Cesario has attended upon him for the past three months. As Viola had hoped, time has redeemed her, although not in a way she could have anticipated.
Seeing Cesario and wondering at ‘his’ continued allegiance to the Duke, the Countess accuses: “You do not keep promise with me” (V.i.97). As for the Duke, if music is the food of love, she will not dine with him: If you have come to sing “the old tune” to me, it will sound in my ears like “howling after music” (V.i.102-04). To this the Duke can only fulminate at “you uncivil lady,” ungrateful for his faithful love, deserving no less than death at his hands—”had I the heart to do it.” (V.i.106-11). But since he knows that she prefers Cesario to himself, he will kill Cesario himself, “sacrifice the lamb that I do love / To spite a raven’s heart within a dove” (V.i.124-25). Incomprehensibly to Olivia, Cesario consents. “I, most jocund, apt, and willingly, / To do you rest, a thousand deaths would die.” (V.i.126-27). “Have you forgot yourself?” (V.i.135). Calling Cesario her husband, she summons the priest as her witness, a claim Cesario finds equally incomprehensible. When she denies it, Olivia repeats the charge Antonio had leveled; Cesario is a base coward. “Fear not, Cesario, take thy fortunes up; / Be that thou know’st thou art, and then thou art / As great as that thou fear’st” (V.i.142-44). Like the Duke, the Countess esteems self-knowledge and, like him, has not yet fully achieved it. Both mistake the nature of Cesario, the object of their contention, and thus mistake themselves. The priest affirms the “contract of eternal bond of love” the couple (as he thinks) entered into, in his presence. In fewer than fifty lines, Shakespeare has brought together the themes of his play: fidelity, contract, civility, rage, love, self-knowledge, sacrifice, courage and cowardice, rule all of them symbolized by doubleness, shadowed by duplicity.
The play has veered straight toward tragedy, again. Cesario begins to protest, but when Sebastian arrives the perplexities begin to dissolve and comedy reclaims the plot. He begins by apologizing to Olivia for injuring her kinsman, Sir Toby, but he could have “done no less with wit and safety,” even had he been “the brother of my blood” (V.i.202-03). Looking back and forth between Sebastian and Cesario, the Duke exclaims, “One face, one voice, one habit, and two persons! / A natural perspective, that is and is not.” (V.i.208-09). A “perspective” is a mirror; in the mirror and the one mirrored we see the real, what is, and its reflection, what is not but is identical to what is. This perspective is natural, as the twins are both real, neither an image. The Duke again speaks Socraticly, inasmuch as it’s Socrates who remarks that 1 + 1 = 2—that is, two things become one thing, a pair. And they do so without violating the principle of non-contradiction. Olivia responds as Socrates might want his interlocutor to respond: “Most wonderful!” (V.i.217). Up to now, all had assumed that it could not possibly be the case that Cesario and Sebastian were distinct; such a thing seemed to defy logic. But not so. Knowledge is beginning to satisfy wonder, the desire to know.
The twins themselves find all of this hard to believe, because their thought of each has been based on the false premise that the other had died. When Cesario worries that ‘he’ is seeing a ghost, Sebastian responds as Plato’s Socrates would: “A spirit I am indeed, / But am in that dimension grossly clad / Which from the womb I did participate.” (V.i.228-30). That the ideas or forms “participate” in matter, giving them their physical shape, explains how he can be a spirit and a body at the same time, dual in one way, one in another.
There is only one remaining problem of self-contradictory duality to solve. Cesario isn’t a woman, as far as Sebastian and the others can see. “Were you a woman, as the rest goes even, / I should my tears let fall upon your cheek, / And say ‘Thrice welcome, drowned Viola!'” (V.i.231-33). “Thrice” because their identity as a pair is real, their survival is real, and their dualities as male and female, brother and sister, are also real. Cesario has the solution to this problem. “I am Viola” (V.i.244), as I can prove by admitting my disguise and by the testimony of one member of another pair: the Illyrian sea-captain who rescued her, as distinct from Antonio, the sea-captain who rescued Sebastian.
Sebastian can now turn to Olivia to say, “So comes it, lady, you have been mistook” (V.i.251). But not through any malicious plot. It was “nature in her bias” that “drew in that” (V.i.252). The innocent joke on her is that “You are betrothed both to a maid and a man” (V.i.255), both to Cesario/Viola, with whom you first fell in love, supposing her a man, and to me, the real thing. As for the Duke, he has seen Viola’s fidelity unto her prospective death, and now he only wants to see her in women’s clothing. “Since you called me master for so long, / Here is my hand; / You shall from this time be / Your master’s mistress.” (V.i.314-16). These two shall also become one.
As it happens, Viola reports, she had entrusted her clothes to her savior-captain, who is now in prison because Malvolio had sued him. The Countess assures her that she will order Malvolio to free him; the difficulty is that Malvolio himself is not only in jail but reportedly “much distract” (V.i.272). This brings another potential legal dispute to the attention of the lawyerly audience. The Clown had withheld Malvolio’s letter to Olivia, now giving the excuse that “a madman’s epistles are no gospels” (V.i.278-79). The lie, an artificial and misleading mirror of the truth, is quickly ‘seen through’ when Olivia commands the Clown to give the letter to Fabian, who reads it; the Duke in his capacity as judge hears, and says, “This savors not much of distraction” but of sanity (V.i.304).
With both the Duke and the Countess in agreement regarding Malvolio and, more importantly, with the disentanglement of the love triangle in accordance with nature and reason, not Fortune, deception, or convention, they can reach a politic settlement, which Olivia now proposes. “My lord, to please you, these things further thought on, / To think me as well a sister as a wife, / One day shall crown the alliance on’t, so please you, / Here at my house and at my proper cost.” (V.i.306-09). “Madam,” the Duke replies, “I am most apt t’embrace your offer,” as he no longer feels any need to embrace the Countess herself (V.i.310). Twin brother and sister have each gained a spouse; each spouse has gained a ‘twin’ sibling. These natural pairings parallel the spiritual pairings according to the Christian doctrine of marriage, whereby husband and wife are spiritually and physically bound together as ‘one flesh’ in their covenant with one another, before God—as two in ‘one flesh.’ Moreover, a brother-in-law, a sister-in-law, Christianly considered, become spiritual brother and sister. This will form the foundation of their political alliance. They have already begun to rule, together, not as the Duke had originally willed but in accordance with both natural and Christian love, which cannot be willed, but with which one’s will ought to be aligned.
At the Countess’s command, Fabian brings Malvolio before them. Malvolio accuses her of wrongdoing, since she wrote a letter to him, courting him, and this was the efficient cause of the chain of events ending in his imprisonment in the dark as a madman. Examining the handwriting on the letter signed with her name, Olivia pronounces it a counterfeit—a false or unnatural twin—and identifies its real author, Maria, whose ‘hand’ she knows. She promises Malvolio that when a full investigation has been completed, “Thou shalt be both the plaintiff and the judge / In thine own cause” (V.i.344-45).
This prospect is more than enough to alarm Fabian into both confessing and turning state’s evidence. (He is, after all, named for the Roman general who defeated the mighty Hannibal by avoiding direct battles.) “Let no quarrel, nor no brawl to come, / Taint the condition of this present hour.” (V.346-47). “I most freely confess” his own and Sir Toby’s “device against Malvolio here” (V.i.349-50). He hastens to add that they did this in retaliation on account of “some stubborn and uncourteous parts / We had conceived against him” (V.i.351-52). Maria only forged the letter at the urging of Sir Toby, so she is at most an accessory to the crime, “in recompense whereof he hath married her” (V.i.354)— indeed a punishment that fits the crime. But, Fabian pleads in his and Sir Toby’s defense, their “sportful malice” should provoke laughter not revenge “if the injuries be justly weighed / That on both sides passed” (V.i.355-58). The Clown then defends himself, pointing to Malvolio’s conceit and ill-willed insults directed at himself, in front of Olivia. “Thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenger” (V.i.363).
The whirligig of time recalls Viola’s reflection, her reliance on time to reveal the nature Fortune disrupts. Self-righteous Malvolio will not offer a reciprocal confession, despite Olivia’s compassion (“Alas, poor fool, how have they baffled thee!”) (V.i.359). Unlike all the others, he cannot accept having been fooled by the duplicity of appearances; he cannot laugh at himself. “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you!” (V.i.367). He stalks off. The Puritans would indeed prove difficult to integrate into the English regime, and they would take their revenge, less than a half-century after Shakespeare put those words into Malvolio’s mouth. Malvolio may be, as Maria said, more an ambitieux than a Puritan, but in civil society and politics, it would sometimes be difficult to see the difference, insofar as Puritans’ souls lacked self-knowledge.
The Countess continues to pity her abused steward. The Duke orders that he be pursued and offered a peace settlement, since “he hath not told us of the captain yet”—the holder of the proper woman’s garments he wants his future wife to recover (V.i.370). Once that is settled, “and golden time convents”—that is, convenes—a “solemn combination shall be made / Of our dear souls” (V.i.368-70). Time, as revealer of nature, is indeed golden; what Viola had said resignedly about the goodness of time her future husband can now say with joy. And he, who had expected hunter Cupid’s golden arrow to strike Olivia’s heart, now sees that slow Time is still more golden than Cupid’s swift arrow, that the truer love may come in the longer time in which nature reveals itself. Gold is the color of royalty, of crowns, of ruling. The lawyers and judges in Shakespeare’s audience will recognize “convents” as a term in law, meaning the action of a legal authority who summons a person to present himself to court. The Duke has found the way to reconcile nature and law, as made known to him in time. In this final scene, Curio is present for the third time, but this time remains silent and has nothing to do. The Duke’s curiosity and his love, his mind and his heart, have been satisfied.
Once Cesario’s proper garments have been delivered, he shall address her no longer as Cesario but as “Orsino’s mistress, and his fancy’s queen” (V.i.374). There is justice in the whirligig of time because there is justice in nature, which at times decrees revenge, at other times reconciliation. The near-tyrant’s fancy needs a queen to rule it, or at least to share in self-rule; the cure of love isn’t music but a good beloved. Having come, seen, and conquered as Cesario—conquering first, unintentionally, a woman who mistakes her for a man, then conquering a man who finally sees ‘him’ as a woman after testing her loyalty while she still seemed a man—she can now reassume her real name, a word not for a piece of music but for an instrument that makes music—in her case, music made by nature. Her brother’s name, which he shares with their late father, means venerable, revered; with Olivia as his bride, he can now live up to that name despite, but also because of, the shipwreck Fortune meted out.
Shakespeare nevertheless gives music the last lyrics. All leave except the Clown, who sings for the first time to the audience. When a little boy, he tells them, “a foolish thing was but a toy”; when a man, I needed to attend to serious things, defending my household “‘gainst knaves and thieves” (V.i.377,381). “But when I came, alas! to wive…. By swaggering could I never thrive.” (V.i.383,385). The swagger, the pride, that intimidates evildoers, the strong, overbearing will that makes all the world a battlefield, and even the house of one’s beloved a castle to be besieged, must give way to reciprocity, to the humility of ruling and being ruled, to the politic relationship of husband and wife, one flesh ruling one household. “A great while ago the world begun” (V.i.391); the need to conform one’s will to nature exists, is a reality not an illusion, because nature is the setting, the stage, on which human beings, the last beings created, must live. To know themselves, they must know that. To rule themselves, in households and in cities, they must know that. “But that’s all one, our play is done; / And we’ll strive to please you every day” (V.393-94). Will you will that? Will those at the Inns of Court, who rule according to the rule of law, understand and walk along the natural paths the law serves to delineate for the instruction and restraint of impassioned men and women who often prefer to step away from those paths?
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