Twelfth Night - Make Of It What You Will

Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare

I continue to be leery of reviewing Shakespeare. After all, great scholars devote lifetimes to studying, researching, and examining the Bard's work and have done so for centuries. I haven't nearly enough letters after my name to even reach for the scorching name of scholar. So I continue to ignore Shakespeare's work despite the amount of time the Bard seems to be spending in my living room, bathroom, and computer room. Indeed, you can't throw a cat in this house without hitting something associated with Shakespeare. Our son has tried.

Since I lack the scholarship, I must avoid any attempt to review one of William Shakespeare's more traditional comedies, Twelfth Night. After all, I would be able to share with you only the rumors of such things as the origin of the title. I could tell you that the play doesn't take place at Twelfth Night and that there is only one reference in the play to it. I could share with you the conjectures that the title refers to the overall jollity of the play's participants or the hypothesis that the play was first performed at a Twelfth Night command performance.

But what good would that do? After all, a true intellectual would be able to sweep such trivialities away with a run of ibids in a heavily footnoted dissertation that would prove my words shallow. And heaven forfend that I should seem shallow when talking about such revered works. True scholars would delve into long discussions about whether the subtitle "What You Will" is more apt.

If I were to review Twelfth Night, I would end up slipping into a certain amount of academic heresy. I might let something slip to the effect that I don't think Shakespeare belongs only to the scholars and academics. Certainly he didn't in his time. Look at the people who populate the pages of Twelfth Night:

A duke who is doubling as a love-sick puppy
A countess who is swept away with emotional extremes
A young lady who disguises herself as a man so she won't have to worry about the glass ceiling and then falls in love with her boss
A drunken uncle who has pranks to pull on everyone
A foppish knight who can't decide whether to court, drink, fight, or engage in all three at once
A rigid Puritan whose arrogance gives everyone the giggles
A sailor who loves the boy he rescued and risks life and limb to see him happy
A singing, tripping fool who makes motley of them all

And that's not even a complete cast list. The cast list is long and every one of the characters finds a way to make the reader laugh before the play is done. I have a soft spot for Sir Toby Belch, the drunken uncle who schemes to play pranks on anyone who shows the slightest inclination toward gullibility. (Granted, that favoritism must be accounted to the fact that when I first saw the play performed, this role was expertly played by my husband.) My overt favoritism has no patience for such ivory-towered gurus as Howard Bloom who categorizes Belch among the least sympathetic player, saying that his gulling of Malvolio (the rigid Puritan) borders on sadism. He claims Belch is a "fifth-rate rascal." Bloom then gushes on about the perfect creation of Malvolio and how he is truly the comic hero in this play. Bah!

Bloom forgets what he had stated several pages earlier-that Twelfth Night is a fast-paced pure comedy. Belch, Andrew Aguecheek (the foppish knight), and Maria are the trio that help keep the spirits of this play high. Just when the play threatens to drag with overlong speeches of self-indulgent passions, on come the clowns to dance, prattle, and keep you awake.

But perhaps you haven't yet had the delightful experience of either reading or seeing this play. Then let's push aside the academics for a moment and whisper a quick summary that would make the Cliff Notes authors blush.

Twelfth Night is a farce of love triangles. Everyone in the play loves someone and it is a madcap race to see who will end up with whom. The play opens with that famous line, If music be the food of love, play on, give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die. It is the love-sick puppy, Duke Orsinio, pining away for the love of Olivia, a countess too busy mourning the death of her brother to be responsive to missives of love. Sympathetic to her mourning is young Viola, a maid washed ashore after a shipwreck that, she believes, claimed her twin brother's life. She disguises herself as a boy and takes employment in Duke Orsinio's court and promptly falls in love with him. Orsinio sends her to woo Olivia for him, and Olivia falls in love with Viola (whom she meets as the boy Cesario). Meanwhile, Olivia's steward, the Puritan Malvolio, is falling madly in love with Olivia. He is pushed to go beyond his station through the machinations of Maria, Toby, Andrew, Fabian, and Feste. Sir Andrew Aguecheek, by the way, is staying in Olivia's household as the guest of Sir Toby. His visit is solely to woo and win Olivia for his bride.

Meanwhile, we readers get to discover that Viola's twin, Sebastian, is not dead. He was rescued by the sailor Antonio who is completely smitten with Sebastian. They enter Illyria where the rest of the madcap crowd is playing out their frantic stories, and a series of mistaken identities adds even more paprika to this stew.

In the end, couples are sorted out, some are matched, some are sent away alone, one is swearing revenge, and another's fate is left ambivalent.

Now those who frequent the ivied halls would demand that a proper review of Twelfth Night explore the genius of Feste-the fool generally proclaimed as Shakespeare's most charming clown. If I were to write the review, I'd have to confess that it took me several readings and several viewings of the play before I saw anything even remotely interesting in Feste. It is only once I delved into the double meanings of his speeches, the puns, and the gentle melancholy of the clown that I was able to develop an appreciation for this much-ballyhooed character.

There is plenty of material in Twelfth Night to provide fodder for a thousand dissertations and forty thousand theses. There is satire, political references, jibes at contemporary rivals, poetry, and a variety of themes. For the rest of us, we can enjoy Twelfth Night the way its original viewers did-as one of Shakespeare's funniest comedies, a play where all are mad except the fool and everyone's madness increases the fun. Even my three-year-old got a kick out of the play, albeit his favorite scenes were the sword fights and the singing.

So, I won't review Twelfth Night. I'd hate to leave the impression that we mere mortals can guffaw our way through a delightful little play even if we haven't a whit of scholarship or research to support our laughter. Instead, I'll just share with you the final words of Feste as he bows off the stage:

A great while ago the world begun,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
But that's all one, our play is done
And we'll strive to please you every day.

--B. Redman