PART THREE—
SHAKESPEARE'S TWELFTH NIGHT

Twelfth Night is one of the most universally admired works in the Shakespeare canon, but its admirers have never much cared to say why. What is it in the experience Twelfth Night gives its audiences that causes them to value it so highly? In the three essays that follow I speculate in detail about that experience. In particular, and among other things, I suggest that, like the Gettysburg Address and "On My First Daughter," Twelfth Night creates a music of ideas—a music of ideas that is inconsequential in all that word's senses, a music that makes us superior to the limitations of syntax and logic (and thus effectively though temporarily superior to the human limitations of which syntax and logic are such telling evidence), and a music that is an unobserved source of the value the play has for us.

1—
Twelfth Night 1.1:
The Audience As Malvolio

In his account of Twelfth Night in Shakespeare's Festive Comedy, C. L. Barber suggests—though in passing—"that we enjoy the play so much simply because it is a wish-fulfillment presented so skillfully that we do not notice that our hearts are duping our heads."^[1] My concerns in approaching Shakespeare's festively

[1] Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (New York, 1965), 244. A flood of influential, valuable, culturally focused essays on Twelfth Night appeared in the 1980s—notably Catherine Belsey's "Disrupting Sexual Difference: Meaning and Gender" (in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis [London, 1985], 166–90), Phyllis Racklin's "Androgyny, Mimesis, and the Marriage of the Boy Heroine on the English Renaissance Stages" (PMLA 102 [1987]: 29–47), Stephen Greenblatt's "Fiction and Faction" (in his Shakespearean Negotiations [Berkeley, Calif., 1988]), and Jean E. Howard's "Crossdressing, the Theater, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England" (Shakespeare Quarterly 39 [1988]: 418–40). Readers surprised that the following pages take no notice of those essays or of several other good ones that have followed their leads must understand that I ignore them here only because my concerns in thinking about Twelfth Night are essentially foreign to the concerns of those essays.

named festive comedy are—at least superficially—very different from Barber's. And yet, in groping toward an understanding of what it is we so love about Twelfth Night, I have arrived at a hypothesis that is essentially only a variation on the one Barber momentarily considered. The following discussion sets out to demonstrate that the first scene of Twelfth Night is nonsense—demonstrable nonsense, but (since it has made, and presumably always will make, perfectly good sense to its audiences) nonsense that is merely demonstrable. My concern will be similar to those of the essays that precede this one—here, the miraculous discrepancy between what the variously bizarre clauses of the forty-two-line first scene of Twelfth Night should reasonably be expected to convey and what they do in fact convey. And again my purpose is to suggest that nonsense is often not only a valuable ingredient but the vital ingredient in the greatest literary works, to suggest that nonsense can be the physical means by which our minds approach metaphysical experience—the experience of phenomena like the metaphysical phenomena we know exist but cannot ordinarily know except by arbitrary and diminishing metaphor. Although the particulars I talk about are small and thus clearly different from the large ones that C. L. Barber talked about when he wrote about Twelfth Night, what I say here is also concerned with a holiday aspect of Twelfth Night —or, more particularly, with a holiday aspect of its first scene. I suggest that to experience that scene is to be given a

small but metaphysically glorious holiday from the limitations of the ordinary logic by which sentences determine what they will be understood to say, and that that holiday is a brief and trivial but effectively real holiday from the inherent limitation of the human mind.

Twelfth Night is in manifold ways an ideal object for an investigation of the preciousness of nonsense. Nonsense—ordinary gibberish-like nonsense—is a topic in Twelfth Night . Sir Andrew, for instance, recommends that kind of nonsense as the highest form of comedy (2.3.28); and rational-sounding, but only formally sustained, excursions into blatant nonsense are the stock in trade of the play's chief comedian, Feste. Moreover and more obviously, the story line of Twelfth Night depends on a series of invalid and valid conclusions to which the characters jump from variously inadequate evidence. Analogous activity by the audience has a special and potentially philosophic pertinence to a play about discrepancies between signals and what they are understood to convey, discrepancies between what is there to see and hear and what contextual probabilities say is there. I suggest, indeed, that Twelfth Night and its first scene, which I present as an emblem of the whole, are wonderful, and that our sense that the play and the scene are wonderful (in the metaphoric sense of the word) is directly related to the fact that both play and scene are literally wonderful—are amazing, specifically so in being capable of comprehension, in seeming coherent.

I will now look in minute detail at the first scene of Twelfth Night, a scene that does not invite such inspection. I do so because it does not need analysis to be understood.

The business of demonstrating that a scene that has always made sense cannot be demonstrated to contain the sense it so obviously conveys is difficult. In the case of this first scene of Twelfth Night, the task is made a bit easier by the fact that a few commentators, mostly editors faced with the need to gloss and paraphrase, have had some trouble with the first three lines: If music be the food of love, play on, / Give me excess of it, that, surfeit -

ing / The appetite may sicken, and so die .^[2] In his 1747 edition of Twelfth Night, the indefatigably rational William Warburton said "There is an impropriety of expression in the present reading of this fine passage.... I am persuaded, a word is accidentally dropt; and that we should read, and point, the passage thus: 'that, surfeiting The app'tite, Love may sicken, and so die.'" Twentieth-century scholarship, of course, will not hear of such wanton emendation, and few listeners in any age would hear Warburton's ugly new line with pleasure. More important, the emendation may be rejected as unnecessary—obviously so because the unemended line was clear to Warburton before he set about making its syntax reflect the sense he apprehended from it. Warburton's emendation is a brutal variation on the justifying process common in explanatory footnotes on verse, a process by which reason is used to squeeze the obvious content of a sentence into the container. For instance, one could explain that love, wanting its food because it has lost its appetite for music, will starve to death—or that love (an appetite), will die of a surfeit. However, such explanations come after the fact of effective understanding; they do not gloss lines that need glossing; they explain—or pretend to explain—why one understands the sentence.

Almost two hundred years after Warburton—in the New Cambridge edition of Twelfth Night in 1930—Dover Wilson responded differently but just as rationally to the occupational hazard of insisting that a sentence delivers the meaning signaled by its syntax; Wilson simply capitulated to syntactical probability. "'Appetite,'" he said, "means not 'love' as is generally assumed, but 'love's appetite for music.'" Wilson was absolutely right. The syntax does say that. He was just as absolutely wrong. The sentence does not say that; Wilson's parenthetical "as is generally assumed" admits as much (just as Warburton's incidental

[2] Except where I specifically say otherwise, all Shakespearean citations are to the Revised Pelican Text, ed. Alfred Harbage et al. (Baltimore, 1969). The editor for Twelfth Night in the Pelican edition was Charles T. Prouty.

"this fine passage" advertised the impropriety of his critique of the passage).

Before I leave this first sentence, I want to analyze it, despite the fact that—or, rather, because of the fact that—analysis and explication are perfectly unnecessary as aids to comprehending it.

As we read or hear Orsino's first three lines, we understand a sentence that cannot be demonstrated to mean anything—any particular thing—at all. If music be the food of love, play on is as clear as it sounds. So are its implications. Orsino is intent upon nourishing love, and, since the line has no context but its speaker and the loverlike extravagance of his conjunction of topics, the love in question is the love he himself feels. Give me excess of it feels clear too. The preceding line, I think, makes us understand excess of as a hyperbole for "lots of"; the literal meaning of excess does not come into play—the word is not its usual self—until we reach surfeiting . In Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting ..., the word that is obviously so that, but on analysis surfeiting turns out to have been a problem. I say "turns out" because—since surfeiting occurs in a still-unfinished, and therefore promissory, syntax—a listener is not invited to care that the surfeiter is momentarily specified as the speaker (the "I" implicit in the me of Give me ), and is immediately specified otherwise in the next line; surfeiting, it turns out, pertains not to what preceded it but to what follows it: the appetite is the surfeiter. That makes perfect sense, but what sense does it make of the sentence? I think one never knows—or cares. One understands, but does not know what one has understood. The lines, however, assure one generically. Metaphors are by definition clarifying devices, and the action of the food metaphor here remains a clarifying action, even though it also and simultaneously generates a confusion.

Music is to love as food is to the body. Love is the eater, music the food . If love is the eater, then only love can be the surfeiter. But we all just sat still for the assertion that the appetite is the surfeiter. Is the appetite, then, love ? Love is indeed an appetite . An appetite for what? For the beloved, obviously. But in this conceit its

food is music . A physical truism underlies these lines: gorging on a delicacy leads to a revulsion against that delicacy, death of desire for it. An excess of music will cure lust for music. The lines obviously say that Orsino wishes to free himself of an addiction to music. Oddly enough, that is in fact what he immediately achieves: lines 7 and 8—Enough, no more. / 'Tis not so sweet now as it was before —report just such a cure. However, only a fanatic Puritan would want to cure an addiction to music. The overt topic here is music (the it of line 2), but music is of interest to the speaker as the food of love . Music nourishes love and causes it to grow. The speaker wants love to grow. The dubiety of lovers toward their condition—as toward their beloveds—was and is a psychological truism and a mainspring of love literature. It is remarkable, but usual, that a lover should record both the will to foster his passion and the will to starve it. The act of glutting one's passion is a conflation of the two ambitions, a violent compromise that feeds both urges and starves both. Here, though no probable listener will so much as pause to accept the inference that Orsino is worrying about a pathological dependence on music, the sentence sounds both true and simple because the physics implied here is, as Shakespeare says in Sonnet 129, natural to sexual desire and sexual possession. What one has in these lines, then, is a straightforward sentence demonstrably about appetite for music that is obviously understood as a sentence about sexual appetite. This synesis—this construction that asks to be understood to say what context makes probable rather than what is actually said—works because love is an appetite.

The next line, line 4, is an exclamatory interruption of the previous line of thought: That strain again. It had a dying fall . Even though the word strain appears here in context of excess and surfeiting, the reference is obviously and exclusively to a strain of music; and the line is as straightforward as it seems. The line does, however, act in a manner that in another—and ideationally insignificant—dimension has a kind of likeness to the preceding three lines. In that first sentence the significances of

individual words, phrases, and clauses shift—first they signal one thing, then another. Moreover, the ideational substance of the three lines is, as I said, one thing and two things—the two being what the syntax says and what we understand. Line 4 overtly acknowledges what could be usefully called the first pair of twins in the play: That strain again . The repeated musical strain is and is not the one it echoes. And, in an altogether other dimension, the phrase dying fall in the second half of line 4 presents a casual twin for and so die in line 3. Similarly, and of course beyond the consciousness of the mind that apprehends the sense of the lines, the word That, the first word of line 4, is and is not a repetition of the that of that surfeiting: the sounds are identical; the senses (a conjunction meaning "so that" in line 2 and a demonstrative adjective in line 4), are not. (That no-way-unusual phenomenon continues through the eight further thats in the scene—notably in the blurred, conflicted anaphora of line 6 [where That is a pronoun and thus repeats and fails to repeat the adjective that began line 4], line 10 [where That is doubtful—a pronoun colored by the adverb indicating extent], line 15 [the adverb], and line 21 [a pronoun meaning "in which"]. The pronoun that also appears in lines 18, 33 [where a second that, this one an adverb, also occurs], and 38.)

The next sentence, lines 5–7, begins with O —another disjunctive exclamation—although, since Orsino continues to comment on the same musical particular he pounced on when he last interrupted himself, this one is disjunctive only in manner.

I could comment in detail on the ostentatious disjunction and the equally ostentatious coherence of this scene (as, for instance, in its conjunction of restrictiveness and expansiveness or in the action of the three exclamatory O s in lines 9, 20, and 33); and on the ostentatious disjunction and equally ostentatious coherence of Orsino's thinking here and later; and on the ostentatious disjunction and equally ostentatious coherence of the whole play. It would take a lot of time and space to do so. Fortunately, doing so is probably unnecessary.

Let it suffice to say that there is a common denominator among the various kinds of disjunction in this scene (change of tone, topic, semantic significance, logical direction, and Orsino's whim) and larger disjunctions in the play at large. For instance, the standard shifts between one scene, group of characters, and sets of concerns and the next scene, group, and set of concerns; or the less commonplace but strikingly plentiful incidental self-contradictions characters perform in Twelfth Night; or the sudden, incidental, and unexplained discrepancies between what we expect will occur and what does.

As examples in that last category, consider the following. In 1.2 Viola plans to get employment as a singer. In the opening lines of 2.4 Orsino apparently asks her to sing. She makes no reply, and Orsino seems to expect none. Curio breaks in to say that Feste (whom we do not expect to be on call at Orsino's house), is not in the room but is about the house somewhere. Orsino sends for him. Feste comes and sings the song. In the following scene (2.5), we expect Feste to "make a third" (2.3.160) with Andrew and Toby as audience to Malvolio's reception of the Olivia-Maria letter; instead we get the completely unexpected Fabian (who, by the way, steps in to replace Feste again in the last scene when he reads another letter—the letter from Malvolio to Olivia). At the end of the last scene most of the loose ends of the plot are tied off, some more firmly than an audience demands, but Antonio—still under arrest—is ignored; however, the other sea captain, the absent one who saved Viola and is now also under arrest, is suddenly treated as necessary to the completion of the happy ending.

Sudden shifts in character also belong in this list—things like Toby's sudden viciousness toward Andrew at their final exit (where Andrew says I'll help you, Sir Toby, because we'll be dressed together, and Toby says Will you help? An ass-head and a coxcomb and a knave, a thin-faced knave, a gull? [5.1-197-99]); and Feste's mean-spirited I do not care for you, spoken in not-quite-obvious jest to Viola (3.1.28); and Orsino's surprising but momentary emergence as Othello in 5.1 (Why should I not, had I the heart to

do it, / Like to th' Egyptian thief at point of death, / Kill what I love? (A savage jealousy / That sometime savors nobly)  . . .[111–14]). All these large disjunctions are, in their various kinds, countered by equally various conjunctive factors, and, as I will suggest shortly, so are the various kinds of disjunctions within the first speech and the first scene.

Moreover, since I have now strayed so far from the text of scene 1, I may as well point out that all the phenomena I have mentioned—simultaneous conjunction and disjunction, simultaneous coherence (in its literal sense) and incoherence (in the metaphoric sense by which "coherent" and "incoherent" refer to the logicality or illogicality of discourse), repetitions, the double identity of the first sentence—all share the same physics, and all share that physics with the operation of simple literary constructions (a sentence is one thing and a union of disparate parts whose disparity the mere existence of the sentence advertises) and complex ones (rhymes—in which two words are insistently the same and just as insistently different—puns, rhythm—where a pattern both repeats and does not repeat—and so on). The most obvious—and traditionally the most fascinating—embodiments of the common underlying principle shared by the phenomena I have talked about are, of course, twins.

I want now to return from that extravagant, tentative gesture of aesthetic generalization to the more solid ground of Orsino's first speech. These are lines 4–8:

That strain again. It had a dying fall;
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odor. Enough, no more.
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.

In those lines Orsino's overt and noticeably abrupt change of whim follows upon a complementary semantic metamorphosis in stealing and giving, a change as complete in its dimension as the ostentatious one announced by enough, no more, but, if commentators' silence is any measure, a metamorphosis that goes—

and therefore should go—unnoticed. In its chronologically linear doubleness of effect, the sentence on the sweet sound and the bank of violets is comparable to the first sentence, whose principal double identity (in what is heard and what is understood) is more static, but which is also linearly double in that it sets out to recommend the nourishment of love and ends up recommending that love be starved to death. When stealing is heard in line 7, it participates in the process by which the musical phrase that came o'er the ear ("crept up on it" and "moved across it"), is likened to a sweet sound stealing (moving with unperceived motion). Stealing, however, is thereupon paired with giving, which, in a previously alien sense of "to steal," is a logical opposite of stealing . The incidental logic in which stealing and giving relate to one another is both irrelevant to the overt assertion (stealing says "moving unperceived") and relevant (a breeze both delivers odors and carries odors away).

Before going on, I want to pause for another venture into more general comment.

I am obviously suggesting that the various unnoticed vagaries and anomalies of this first scene are, though undeniably unnoticed, nonetheless efficient factors in our experience of the lines—that the enrichment provided by the manifold kinds of incoherence in this coherent whole is felt. That assertion cannot be proved, of course, but two facts of lines 5–8 and their critical history strike me as evidence for my case. First, unlike several much more questionable elements of the speech, the word sound has been a crux. People have wanted to change it to "south" (meaning "south wind") or "sough" (meaning "sigh"). Reasoning the obvious needlessness and injustice of emending sound is easy: sound is a simple metonomy, substituting effect (sound of a breeze) for cause (breeze); moreover, this passage is elaborately echoed in 2.3.50–53 (the "contagious breath" passage, where music, disease, and odor are reassociated in context of Toby's minidisquisition on synesthesia ["To hear by the nose, it is dulcet in contagion"]). I do, however, take the perseverance of editorial doubts about sound that breathes as significant. One of

the curious things about opaque but efficiently clear passages in Shakespeare and elsewhere is that while they themselves often go unremarked, small rashes of unwarranted scholarly illumination break out in their vicinities.

The other fact of critical history that I want to point to here pertains to Orsino's Enough, no more. / 'Tis not so sweet now as it was before . That line and a half, made an identifiable unit both by logic and the rhyme in more / before, presents the first narratively pertinent event since Orsino's first imperatives: it is an event on a larger scale than the linguistic gymnastics I have been discussing; it presents graspable evidence for one of the two elements most often pointed to by commentators: that Orsino's mind is a very opal. I have not made a statistical count, but I think scornful characterizations of Orsino tie with adjectives praising the beauty of the verse as the commonest comments the scene has evoked. The critics seem almost to compete with one another to find contemptuous labels for Orsino and to outdo each other in scorning him (for instance, in his introduction to the 1965 Signet edition of Twelfth Night, Herschel Baker calls Orsino "a narcissistic fool"). I do not mean to imply that such attacks are unjust—just suspiciously shrill and urgent. I suggest that attacks on Orsino are what a psychologist might call acts of transference; vague uneasiness generated by the skittishness of the syntax becomes exaggerated discomfort with the character who speaks it. We note something wrong with Orsino, but not the "wrongness" of the sentence.

The wrongness of Orsino's next lines (lines 9–14) is extravagant, but, again, is only seen to be so in the unlikely event that it is closely examined. These lines too are effortlessly assimilable by a listener—are so, I think, both in the Folio punctuation and in the only slightly less bizarre texts that result when—as most editors do—editors substitute for the Folio's full stop after sea in line 11.

A very few editions have retained the Folio punctuation for line 11—among them the Signet (New York, 1965), and, awkwardly for my purposes, the text I have been following here, the

Pelican text. If line 11 is punctuated as the Folio punctuates it, lines 9–14 read as two independent assertions—roughly like this (the following mockup also retains the Folio's comma after capacity in line 10):

O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou,
That notwithstanding thy capacity,
Receiveth as the sea. Nought enters there,
Of what validity and pitch soe'er,
But falls into abatement and low price
Even in a minute.

The Folio punctuation could make Receiveth an error for "Receivest"; it suggests that the first of the Folio's two sentences be understood as "O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou that—notwithstanding thy capacity—receivest as the sea." Or—by retaining the full stop after sea in line 11, but ignoring the logic implied by the comma after capacity at the end of the previous line—one could isolate the word notwithstanding and leave capacity the receiver: "O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou that—notwithstanding [that is, even though thou art quick and fresh]—thy capacity receiveth as the sea." Cases could be made for the Folio punctuation and the inflectional revision it demands and for the modification by which notwithstanding stands logically alone as an elliptic reference to the preceding exclamation. But they are irrelevant to my concerns here. It is the effectively standard editorially punctuated reading I care about: that is the one that has satisfied—seemed right to—generations of scholars, critics, and audiences ever since Nicholas Rowe emended the punctuation in 1714.These are the lines as punctuated by Rowe and the majority of editors since:

O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou,
That, notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,
Of what validity and pitch soe'er,
But falls into abatement and low price,
Even in a minute.

Notwithstanding the ease with which it is assimilated, the repunctuated sentence is a chimera. Its head is an exclamation: O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou . As the words are heard, quick has to mean "lively"—"sprightly," in fact—and fresh has to mean practically the same thing: "vigorous," "youthful." The trunk of the sentence starts out to be its tail: the word that obviously means "who" or "which" and introduces a justification of the exclamation. However, the forward progress of the sentence is delayed by an ostentatiously logical reservation: notwithstanding thy capacity receiveth as the sea. Notwithstanding is a logical gesture, but its action is ultimately illogical. Up to this point, the modification meshes with the logic of the clause it interrupts: "how quick and fresh art thou, who, though you are sealike in one respect ..." The modification has, however, altered the senses of quick and fresh: the notion of capacity recurs to the food metaphor and activates the senses "keen" and "hungry" for quick and fresh . The change in the senses of quick and fresh thus asserts an extralogical pertinence of this sentence to the preceding lines. A second later, the word sea invokes the senses quick and fresh have as "water" words, words indicating the quality of water—specifically, water that is not saline, is not seawater; and—since the essential equation is between the spirit of love and the sea —the simile suddenly but perfectly contradicts the now relevant aqueous sense of how quick and fresh art thou . The semantic meanderings of quick and fresh thus at once give a sound of rightness to the sentence and render it nonsensical.

During the complex ideational process by which quick and fresh transmogrify, the idea of capacity, which is the focus of the phrase notwithstanding thy capacity receiveth as the sea, temporarily becomes the focal idea of the sentence at large; and the lines continue as if the word That, the first word of line 10, had never been heard, as if there were no syntactical-logical link between line 9 and line 10, and as if nought in line 11 were—as in fact it is in the Folio punctuation—the subject of an independent clause, as if line 9 had ended with a full logical stop ("O spirit of love,

how quick and fresh art thou!")—and line 10 had begun with "Notwithstanding."

Note that I am not suggesting that we fail to hear the word that or fail to acknowledge the syntactical unity between line 9 and the lines the word that tacks to it. I am suggesting something more complex: that the length and ideational bulk of notwithstanding thy capacity receiveth as the sea —a modifying gesture under cover of which, by the way, we easily adapt to the idea of a spirit, the sealike spirit of love, as a place—invite us to forget the clearly marked logical nature of the sentence's beginning and to hear its conclusion as an independent entity: "Nought enters there but falls into abatement and low price."

The improbable annotator who noticed that the lines as we are used to hearing them can be demonstrated to be incomprehensible might plausibly, but foolishly, pacify that paradox momentarily by decreeing the word That in line 10 to mean not "which" but "to such an extent that": "so quick and fresh that...." Such an explanation would solve the undeniable, undeniably invisible syntactical problem, but would do nothing for the logic. The explanation is a benevolent lie and an inefficient one: "How quick and fresh art thou—so quick and fresh that, notwithstanding thy capacity receiveth as the sea, nought enters there . . .that does not fall in value." Why should the power of the sealike spirit of love to convert its contents to flotsam and jetsam testify to its own quickness and freshness?

No matter how one may—after the fact—contrive to include the word That in the logic of the sentence, I suggest that what actually happens is that listeners altogether forget the syntactic signal of the word That —just as they forget the quickness and freshness for which the spirit of love was initially celebrated. The logical force of the next word, the word notwithstanding, comes finally to pertain only to one of the significances that the phrase quick and fresh takes on as the lines progress: "keen and hungry"; and thus the logical force of notwithstanding vanishes almost as completely as the logical force of the word That .

Unless one insists that quick and fresh have meant only "keen" and "hungry," the phrase notwithstanding thy capacity receiveth as the sea —a standard concessio, a gesture of simultaneous acknowledgement and dismissal—does not ultimately dismiss the facts it admits. The two-and-a-half-line assertion beginning nought enters there is altogether consonant with the idea of infinite capacity, the idea the word notwithstanding presents to us as contrary (though negligible) evidence—evidence for doubting the validity of the assertion that nought enters there . . .but falls into abatement and low price . Nonetheless—although (a) abatement and low price present a contrasting complement to quick and fresh, and although (b) the fact that the spirit of love has become a geographically imagined place (into which anything one falls in love with may fall, thereupon falling in price as well) is worth exclamation, and although (c) the fact that nought enters there of what validity (weight) and pitch (height) soe'er that does not shrink in size and value is itself exclamatory in substance—lines 11–14 have no logical relation to line 9, O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou, the exclamation that ostensibly occasioned them.

If the act of comprehending these lines ultimately results in the understanding I describe, why do we tolerate them in passage and tolerate them so casually that even editors let them pass—justly let them pass—unquestioned and unjustified? I think at least part of the answer lies in this: the logic signaled by the word notwithstanding does indeed reach satisfactory, though momentary, completion. Nought enters there is potentially—and, for the instant before the syntactic metamorphoses engendered by the syntactically unnecessary modification set in motion by of what validity and pitch soe'er, is in fact—complete. In the course of lines 9–14 a logically meaningful assertion is briefly audible (this again is the now virtually standard Rowe punctuation):

O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou,
That, notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there.

That temporarily extant proposition makes exactly the use of its materials that the notwithstanding construction calls for: "even though x is true, something contrary to the attendant probabilities of that fact is also true"—"even though your capacity is infinite, nothing fills it." That proposition also has shadowy and paradoxical pertinence to the traditional courtly love situation in which the frustrated lover pleads with his beloved who, although made for love, will admit no male into her vagina (her "nought").

The proposition, though proper to two distinct genres—the syntactic and the substantive—is only generically satisfactory. Whatever Orsino may be telling us about the spirit of love, and however he may imagine that spirit physically, he cannot here be telling us that the spirit of love is isolated. However, before a question can form in a listener's or reader's mind, the potentially complete sentence continues—thus promising to reveal a logic we will recognize as appropriate to the facts it treats. The sentence continues in a construction that, by its kind, acknowledges that an audience to the proposition it augments may feel that that proposition needs justification: of what validity and pitch soe're .

The addition also starts a transformation in the proposition for which it seems to be supporting bluster: the of what . . .soe're construction does not idiomatically present hyperbolic testimony to the speaker's conviction of the total truth of the unlikely assertion his sentence has so far made; what is called for for that purpose is some Renaissance equivalent of such a phrase as "of any kind at all." The of what . . .soe're construction is, however, a logical neutral zone, a buffer between phrases that assert rather than modify; the construction provides a moment in which our minds can coast upon generic assumptions and gears can shift silently. Here our minds shift into place for the nought . . .but construction—the "nothing that does not" construction.

If what I say is true is true indeed, then the momentarily full stop after nought enters there satisfies the expectations generated by the notwithstanding construction; and of what validity and pitch

soe're neutralizes our probable response to the questionable proposition conveyed in the momentarily perfect, but only momentarily extant, notwithstanding construction. Now, at the beginning of line 13, the word But fulfills the new syntax generically promised by line 12, and does so at the same time that—also by generic means—it assures us that the sentence was just as aware as we were that there was something factually dubious about the propositions that nothing at all enters the sealike spirit of love .

What I am suggesting is that listeners or readers deal satisfactorily with so many logics on the way to what is substantively the most important verb of the sentence, the word falls, that the process overwhelms the large illogic of the whole—an illogic that would impinge on their consciousnesses if the sentence were not layered with so many other logics.

The verb falls, by the way, has strong idiomatic credentials for its rightness in a sentence about falling in love—even though its particular function in the particular sentence is to assist in a proposition to which we do not accede.

The last line and a half of Orsino's first speech is a summary emblem of most of what I have been saying about the whole: So full of shapes is fancy / That it alone is high fantastical . Those words can be paraphrased, as Coleridge paraphrased them, as a play on two senses of fancy: "So full of shapes is love [fancy], that it alone is preeminently capable of making images [of fancying]." The paraphrase, however, is necessary only to explain what it is one has understood from the sentence, a sentence urgently and self-evidently true the moment it is heard—even though one does not know precisely what in particular it asserts. The certain but ungrasped core assertion is variously supported—supported by the confirming gesture of the pregnant polyptoton in fancy . . .fantastical; supported by the significant feel of full of shapes paired with alone; supported by echoes of preceding locutions (the word that, the ideational relevance of full to the capacity of the sea, and the phonetic relevance of full to fall [line 4], falls [13] and perhaps to the pertinent, heard, but unsaid word "false" [com-

pare Sonnet 124.6]); and supported by the pertinence of the commonest meaning of fantastical, a term of abuse for "a fantastic," "un fantastico, " an affected, capricious, show-off.

That line and a half is also emblematic of the whole in that the phrase so full of shapes is fancy, the second half of line 14, modifies the lines that precede it ("... falls into abatement and low price / Even in a minute—so full of shapes is fancy") and is also the opening element of a new assertion.

Anyone familiar with the contexts and expectations the act of academic criticism brings with it might see a direction for my line of argument, a kind of conclusion that has often been—and here could be—a justification and a satisfying product for stylistic analysis. As I have described them, the sentence structures of Orsino's first speech are indeed opal-like. Their syntactic sea changes can, in short, be justly called imitative of, and correlative to, the skittish mentality of Orsino, their variously fantastic speaker. Although it may well be that the quality of our experience of lines that operate in multiple logics and drift from one logic to another in passage is indeed a source of the disproportionately vehement and nearly universal critical contempt for Orsino and of our strong sense of his instability, I am, as I suspect we all are, suspicious of such neat critical revelations.

Moreover, I have my eye on larger, more nebulous, less immediately satisfying, but more essential conclusions. I am concerned here not so much with these lines as clues to Orsino as I am with the process of experiencing them. To return, for instance, to the word surfeiting in line 2, successive signals specify three identities for the surfeiter: the speaker (the "I" implied in Give me ), his appetite for music, and his infatuation. The three fuse in the sentence, which is thus a quasi-physical working embodiment of the traditional hyperbolic conceits in which a lover is "all love"—is his appetite, is his desires. One could call the syntactic fusion of the surfeiter's identities a metaphor for a lover's confused state of mind, but it is a metaphor that, unlike the food metaphor in line I, does not feel like a metaphor, does not

feel like a needed, modifying, remedial act of explanatory clarification. Since the sentence sounds like simple, single-minded exposition, it effectively makes an unsimplified and unsimplifiable confusion into a simple coherent fact.

A similarly insistent but similarly uneasy union of disjointed elements occurs a few lines later, when Orsino's heart, his dear beloved, a hart (a male deer), hounds pursuing it, and Orsino's desires chase themselves in a circle (lines 16–24). The exchange on the topic of hunting, however, does not lend itself to traditional, speciously comfortable critical ceremonies in which style is declared to be imitative and informative. That exchange is also a purer instance of clear nonsense:

CURIO:   Will you go hunt, my lord?

DUKE:    What, Curio?

CURIO:   The hart.

DUKE:    Why, so I do, the noblest that I have.
               O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first,
               Methought she purged the air of pestilence.
               That instant was I turned into a haft,
               And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds,
               E'er since pursue me.
               (16–24)

The potential crisis comes in line 19, specifically at the word have . Why should Orsino hunt what he has? More important, why do we not worry? If we did worry, a little strictly legitimate crushing would make the lines bow to us. One could quiet oneself by suggesting that Orsino's "I do [hunt]" means "I do hunt with, " explaining "hunt" in the always rare—and here unprovoked—sense "to exercise" (as in "I hunt my hounds regularly from the age of six months"). Or one could convince oneself that Orsino's response works from the conceit by which "his true love hath his heart, and he has hers."

But no parachute to rationality will effectively make this exchange logical or—and this is vital—make it feel il logical as it is

heard or make it feel in need of explication. As far as I know, only one commentator has commented at all on the real but ordinarily impalpable illogic of the lines. In 1901, in his New Variorum edition, Horace Howard Furness said this: "For the sake of the threadbare pun on hart and heart, the Duke gets his metaphor confused. In [line 19], he hunts his heart, the noblest part of him; in [line 21], he is himself the hart and his desires hunt him." Most editors, however, blandly annotate the exchange on hunting in one or another variations of this confidently concise note by the New Arden editors (1975): "For the hart/heart quibble (common in Shakespeare), cf. 4.1.58. Similar allusions to the story of Actaeon's transformation by Diana (Ovid, Metamorphoses, III.138 ff.) as typifying hopeless passion, were common: cf. Daniel, Delia, Sonnet 5." In context of the present microscopic exercise, the New Arden note may seem insufficient, but in practice it is altogether sufficient. For a modern student reading the note, for a modern scholar able to write it, and for Shakespeare's contemporaries, the well-known tracks of a traditional conceit and the appropriate and appropriately commonplace mythological filigree work make a listener superior to expository logic. The action of the lines is assumed to be what our generic expectations call for, what the habitual activities of the hart/heart pun and the mythological analogy make them. We do not notice what Orsino says; we hear what he must be saying. We listen to nonsense as if it were sense.

The last two speeches of scene I continue to exercise our capacities for ignoring evidence and responding instead to the dictates of contextual probability. Our capacity for hearing what is silly as solemn, what is solemn as silly, what is base as noble is akin to our capacity to hear sense as nonsense, and Valentine's speech (lines 25–33) provides an example. In answer to Orsino's "How now? What news from her?", Valentine says:

So please my lord, I might not be admitted,
But from her handmaid do return this answer:

The element itself, till seven years' heat,
Shall not behold her face at ample view;
But like a cloistress she will veiled[veilèd] 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.

Valentine's description of Olivia's lifestyle is demonstrably, but only demonstrably, comic—is demonstrably, but not efficiently, comic. Consider the image of Olivia dutifully walking her appointed daily rounds like a nun circling a cloister or following the stations of the cross and, like a gardener with a watering can, systematically dampening her parlor every day. Also potentially comic is the grotesque suggestion of curing meat, salting down dead flesh to preserve it from decay, that inheres in all this to season a dead brother's love, which she would keep fresh and lasting . But the speech has never evoked laughter: we respond to its manner rather than incidentals of its matter.

Scene I ends with what is probably its extreme exhibition of our ability to override linguistic signals on our way to easy comprehension. This is the last speech, Orsino's response to Valentine's report on Olivia:

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 killed the flock of all affections else
That live in her; when liver, brain, and heart,
These sovereign thrones, are all supplied, and filled
Her sweet perfections with one self king.
Away before me to sweet beds of flowers;
Love-thoughts lie rich when canopied with bow'rs.
(34–42)

In the third-from-last line of the scene, the phrase Her sweet perfections is syntactically free-floating. Is the phrase appositive to

the three "sovereign thrones"? Does it modify a noun phrase extrapolated from the verb and thus say that the acts of supplying and filling will perfect her and, thus, are her . . .perfections ? The word perfections does relate to the idea of completeness and to the idea that Olivia is exquisite, but no gloss or punctuation can worry the phrase into the grammatical logic of the sentence. Rather, her sweet perfections so obviously relates to the general context that it is hard to believe that some gloss or punctuation cannot be found to demonstrate that the sentence is as clear in grammatical fact as in effect.

I have so far dwelt principally on the syntactic illogic of scene and with the way syntactic gestures (like the one made by the word notwithstanding in line 10) make the speech sound logically coherent when its coherence actually derives from substantively incidental patterning factors. I have mentioned a few of those factors in passing (for instance, the echo of and so die in dying fall ).

The variety and number of others is astounding—not least astounding because they do not call attention to themselves. Some are simple—like die/dying —and local. Some are simple and reach out further—like the ideas of music and food in the first sentence, their echo in sweet as an atrophied taste metaphor applied to sound in line 5, the mere repetition of sweet in line 8, the ideational reprise of sweetness and loss of sweetness in the idea of seasoning something to keep it fresh in lines 31 and 32, and finally in the sweet beds of flowers in the last two lines of the scene. Those last lines also echo the bank of violets breathed upon by the sweet sound back in line 5. One could go on with the list indefinitely by, for example, pointing to the link the topic of disease makes between the first speech (where sicken occurs in line 3) and the exchange about hunting (where purged and pestilence occur in line 21)—or to the vague echo of the hunting passage in Orsino's lines about Olivia's heart and Cupid's rich golden shaft (36–38).

Valentine's speech (25–33), the one substantial speech in the scene that is not spoken by Orsino, is directly related to the gov-

erning topic of the whole but contrasts with the rest of the scene merely because Valentine speaks it. The news Valentine brings Orsino and the expository service he performs for us come clothed in phonetic and ideational echoes of Orsino's speeches. In line 25, I might not be admitted is an ideational echo of nought enters there in line 11. Return (26) echoes turned into a hart (22). Behold her face at ample view (28) echoes when mine eyes did see Olivia first (20). The first syllable of cloistress (29) echoes the essential idea of lines 1–3 (the word cloyment actually appears in 2.4.98, during a reprise of this scene and its language: "their love may be called appetite, / No motion of the liver but the palate, / That suffers surfeit, cloymerit, and revolt; / But mine is all as hungry as the sea / And can digest as much"). Water, brine, and the sound of the first syllable of season (30–31) variously echo the sea simile in line 11. The word season, as a sound that in another context could indicate time of year, echoes seven years' heat earlier in Valentine's speech. And the sense of to season actually operative in context of line 31 (namely "to preserve, as one preserves meat by salting") echoes the food metaphor of lines 1–3 and the idea of decay in lines 9–14. A brother's dead love (which, because the word dead effectively acts twice [modifying both brother and love ], is comparable in its physics to the more complex double action of stealing in line 7) echoes the metaphoric uses of die in lines 3 and 4 and the idea of falling into abatement and low price in line 13. The word dead and the word fresh, the two adjectives in line 32, relate complexly to the word quick and the word fresh in line 9, and the phrase fresh / And lasting, which runs across lines 32 and 33, relates in other complex ways to the variously similar unit quick and fresh in line 9 (as validity and pitch [in line 12] and abatement and low price [in line 13] did earlier).

A network of phonetic, ideational, and potential-but-unexercised ideational rhymelike links spreads out from the word fall, its sound, sounds that resemble it, its sense, its potential senses, their homonyms, their cognates, their synonyms, and their antonyms. The noun fall (which itself reaches back toward the topic

abruptly discontinued after sicken and so die ) occurs in line 4 as a musical term meaning "cadence." In line 13 the verb falls occurs in a standard metaphoric extension of its essential, physical sense (but in a construction where enters there and the syllabic flow from the preposition into to the not-quite-colloquially used word abatement momentarily activates the literal sense of falls into: "falls into a" points toward a noun indicating some thing—a ditch, a hole, a mire—that can be fallen into); falls is bracketed on one side by pitch in line 12 (where, though used metaphorically, it indicates height, but where its locally dormant musical sense is a semantic mute witness to a oneness of this part of speech with the first eight lines)—and on the other side by low (used metaphorically) later in line 13. In line 14, full in so full of shapes is fancy echoes the sound of fall (and, in a semantically irrelevant way, also echoes the idea of satiety and gluttony in lines 1–3). In line 15 high relates to the idea of falling, much as pitch and low did. In line 23, the hounds are fell and cruel, but the sound and a locally irrelevant potential sense of fell relate to fall . Phonetically the pattern made by the noun fall (4), the verb falls (13), full (14), and fell (23) culminates in filled in the last speech of the scene, where Orsino imagines the time

  when the rich golden shaft
Hath killed the flock of all affections else
That live in her; when liver, brain, and heart,
These sovereign thrones, are all supplied, and filled....

The casual rhyme in killed and filled presents a capsule summary of the first three lines of the play and is a rough common denominator for a scene that has worked with ideas of filling and killing from the very beginning.

The incidental topics of this scene recur as incidental or primary to all the scenes that follow it: music, gluttony, disease, hunting (in a recurring concern for finding people and in a complex alliteration of various ideas of following), dogs, payment (of

debts and for services), sibling relationships (of course), the word alone (and its significances and its etymological roots and their significances), achieved or frustrated entrance, the sea, seeing, and onstage judgements of onstage performances. Those incidental topics are to the play as some of them—and some of the sounds that allude to them, and the sounds of some of the words incidental to discussing them—are to scene 1: like the syntactic gestures, repetitions, rhythms, and phonetic and ideational puns and rhymes that can give a speech a formal coherence that effortlessly substitutes for a logical one, the recurring topics of the play make it feel pregnant with profound significance that critics acknowledge by their respect for Twelfth Night but never do—and, I think, never could—deliver to us.

What is more to the point here, the action of perceiving a sentence as two things at once—what is there and what the listener perceives to be there—recurs throughout the play. Take, for example, the subscription of the Maria-Olivia letter: She that would alter services with thee (2.5. 145). That subscription has, as far as I know, never been glossed. It needs no gloss. Why it needs no gloss, however, is fascinating. Considering our everyday, working assumptions about the relationship of language and understanding, it is amazing that this obviously simple assertion is obviously simple. Try to make another sentence in which "to alter" and "to exchange" are synonyms. Just try. She that would alter services with thee is made meaningful by its context, informed by a context relevant to "an altar"—an altar in a church—sustained by the relevance of both the liturgical and sexual senses of "service," and smoothed over by an implied logic that says that—since "to exchange" and "to change" are synonyms, and "to alter" and "to change" are synonyms—"to exchange" and "to alter" must also be synonyms. (For a similar but cruder example of semantic double-dealing, see Feste's use of the word welkin ["sky"] to mean "proper sphere of action": Who you are and what you would are out of my welkin. I might say 'element,' but the word is overworn [3.1.55–57]; element can mean "air" and can

therefore replace welkin, but that does not make welkin a universally available substitute for all senses of element .)^[3]

After scene 1, disjunctions between what is signified and what is understood from the signal become common on the stage. The audience is often conscious that a character ignores obvious signals in the words he hears. Consider, for instance, Viola's riddling I am all the daughters of my father's house, / And all the brothers too, which Orsino lets pass—apparently because Viola diverts his attention by suddenly swerving back to Orsino's obsession: Sir, shall I to this lady? (2.4.119–21). In some cases the contextual signals are so strong that members of an audience can easily join an onstage listener in taking the generically evident import of a sentence for its actual substance; the best example is save I alone in Viola's answer to Olivia when, as the boy bachelor Cesario, she swears she will never love any woman: 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 (3.1.155–57).

The relation of what I have said about an audience's—about our—superiority to the "hard" evidence of the language of

[3] In the following passage (2.3.50–52), "contagious" in "contagious breath" may be like "alter" in 2.5.145 and "welkin" in 3.1.58; Feste has just sung "o mistress mine":

ANDREW: A mellifluous voice, as I am true knight.

     TOBY: A contagious breath.

ANDREW: Very sweet and contagious, i' faith.

"Contagious"—which means rather the opposite of what context suggests Toby wants it to mean and which is not known elsewhere as a synonym for "attractive"—is a synonym for "catching," and "catching" was presumably already capable of saying "attractive" (OED 's first example of the adjective in that sense is from 1654, but "to catch" meaning "to charm," "to attract," "to captivate" goes back at least to Chaucer. OED [s.v. "to catch," IX: 37] cites Henry VIII 2.3.76–77: "Beauty and honor in her are so mingled / That they have caught the King"). Note that as soon as Feste enters the scene, Toby proposes singing a catch and that, in the next speech after Andrew's "Very sweet and contagious, i'faith," Toby repeats his suggestion and that the ensuing catch occupies everyone's attention for most of the balance of the scene.

Twelfth Night relates so obviously to the behavior of the characters in the story that there is little need to illustrate the parallel. The equation in my title probably does the job by itself. I suspect that the intended implications of "The Audience as Malvolio" are now clear. Those implications are both variously just and variously unjust. My title singles out Malvolio as the preeminent example of a character who mistakes evidence.

What is most interesting in this context is that many audiences, some students, and even some scholarly critics see Malvolio's self-delusion as a contributing factor in his acceptance of the forged letter and its contents. The credentials of and in that letter are awfully convincing. The letter gives Malvolio plentiful and persuasive evidence that Olivia loves him—much stronger evidence than Viola has when she says "She loves me sure . . .I am the man" (2.2.21–24). Viola just happens to be correct. Sherlock Holmes himself would accept Maria's letter as a love letter from Olivia to Malvolio. Malvolio's self-delusion is a factor in our initial acceptance of the justice of the deception, but, when he later makes a fool of himself, he does so because he has been made a fool of, tricked, not because he is a fool. Malvolio, however, is a self-deluded fool, and that fact colors and confuses our understanding of cause and effect in the letter scene. Similarly, we are inclined to think it ridiculous that Malvolio should even imagine that Olivia might love a self-important servant. On the other hand, although we may find Olivia ridiculous in loving a woman dressed as a boy, we accept the idea that she could be infatuated with a genuine Cesario—with a self-important servant. (The parallel between Malvolio and Cesario is, in fact, carefully spelled out in 3.1.92–114; in particular, note the interaction of line 111—Myself, my servant, and, I fear me, you —with the preceding lines about Cesario's and Orsino's identities as servants. Note too that Cesario is notably and persistently "surly with servants"; see the exchange with Valentine that opens 1.4 and Cesario's manner with Maria in 1.5 and with Malvolio in the opening lines of 2.1—where Cesario is as gratuitously haughty as Malvolio is.)

If one wanted to draw a lesson from Twelfth Night, the one to draw would be the one Viola and Sebastian—and only Viola and Sebastian—seem to learn in the course of the play: do not let overpowering evidence overpower you—the lesson they could be said to respond to when they perform their minuet of supportive evidence in 5.1.233–40 (My father had a mole upon his brow / And so had mine )—supporting evidence for a truth self-evident to us, a truth we are impatient to hear them acknowledge. If one drew that moral, then the relationship between the characters in Twelfth Night and their audience, which so often listens to context rather than content, would be like that between "the picture of we three" (a picture of two donkeys or—sometimes—a picture of two fools) and its beholder.

But I do not want to draw that moral (or, for that matter, any moral). I do not want to draw that moral because that moral does not yield itself up; it must be drawn. To draw that moral one would have to be a jackass.

Audiences to Twelfth Night do not, and therefore should not, feel like fools looking at fools, or jackasses looking at jackasses. In fact audiences feel good. Audiences do not just laugh a lot (as they do watching Comedy of Errors or Merry Wives ); all theatrical and critical evidence suggests that audiences feel actively good. I submit that, although common sense says that the reason Twelfth Night is a joyous and liberating play is that so many of its characters and events are joyous and free, common sense is wrong. I submit that much of our joy in Twelfth Night derives from triumphant mental experiences like our modest but godlike achievement in comprehending scene 1. The processes the language of scene 1 sets free are not unusual to ordinary verbal experience. Consider again an example I cited when I talked about the Jonson poems: the current American idiom "I could care less," meaning "I could not care less." The triumph of understanding that idiom is of the same sort as those evoked by the various comparable but more complex constructions I have talked about here. What is special about the mental triumphs

that the language and the action of Twelfth Night enable us to perform is their number, their concentration, and their variety. If the act of comprehending "I could care less" is comparable to doing a mental somersault from the high trapeze, then our easy, graceful, matter-of-fact acceptance of the two-and-a-half-hour experience of Twelfth Night is comparable to doing the triple over all three rings of a three-ring circus at once and being one's own catcher.

2—
Getting into the Spirit of Twelfth Night:
The Audience as Malvolio again

In subtitling my discussion of 1.1 "The Audience as Malvolio," I relied on context to define "like Malvolio" as "prone to take signs for substance." There is, however, a chronologically primary other implication in the idea of being like Malvolio. Audiences to Twelfth Night are not, I think, ever really "like Malvolio" in the sense in which that label says "petty, punctilious, formal, mean-spirited, and generally out of step with the festive freedom the play celebrates, demonstrates, and generates." I do suggest, however, that as audience to Twelfth Night, we are regularly—if momentarily—discomfited by a recurrent need to fight back fleeting urges toward being like Malvolio—being like the character in the play whose presence makes getting into the festive spirit an issue for the characters. I think we often catch ourselves feeling distaste for festival frolic, and I for one catch myself fussing pettily about details I neither want to bother with nor want to admit to being small-minded enough even to notice.

In talking about Twelfth Night I have been, as I was when I talked about the Gettysburg Address and "On My First Daughter," principally concerned with manifestations of a phenomenon whereby listeners and readers casually and effortlessly perceive sense in texts that—that therefore —"contain" the sense they deliver but that can be demonstrated to be nonsense. Now,

however, I want to consider the effects and aesthetic value of comparable phenomena in Twelfth Night: ones whereby for various reasons listeners and readers feel obliged to dismiss or deny inconvenient responses that the play evokes—phenomena whereby one's mind says "Nonsense" to its own responses.

This new topic, which presents a variation on simultaneous rightness in one dimension and wrongness in another, is peculiarly difficult to discuss responsibly. I will back and fill elaborately on the way to making clear what I am and what I am not saying. For instance, the rejections I referred to respond to a sense of discrepancy between our responses and those that we feel are expected of us. To speak of responses expected of us—to speak of responses that are appropriate (or, to use a term generally crucial to Twelfth Night, suitable)—to talk about what we are "supposed" to think—is to implicate this discussion in the issue of authorial intention, and—since the whole idea of "getting into the spirit" of a play is meaningless except in reference to an audience's sense of audience obligation—I may reasonably rehearse some truisms about literary intentionality.

To begin with, although the New Critics of the 1940s and 1950s properly taught us the folly of importing theses about "the author's intent" into texts that do not of themselves betray—or show a capacity ever to have betrayed—that intent, it would also be folly to deny that a sense of authorial intent—or, better, a sense of a work's intent—is a constant of our experience of manmade objects. We infer intent from generic and contextual signals (in fact, we are surprised when we come on a mechanism that does not show its purpose or when we find ancient earthworks and cannot guess their purposes). We are particularly quick to assume intent for objects made of words, and we are at our quickest, most confident, and most casual when we do so for the closed, deliberate verbal objects we call literary.

Among the least remarked and most remarkable things about communication in language is our capacity to fill lacunae and

correct errors in what we read and hear.^[4] We routinely finish one another's sentences, furnish words for which a speaker is groping, recognize malapropisms, see that a child who says "tomorrow" when he means "yesterday" does in fact mean "yesterday," see that a "not" has been omitted before a verb in a newspaper, and perform any number of similar, almost always appropriate adjustments to things we hear and read. Our experience of the first scene of Twelfth Night is a series of less demanding, more complicated variations on the emendation process we go through when we assume a misprint or take the word for the deed in a malapropism. We can only do such things because we assume that what we hear and read makes sense. And sense is defined in relation to realities superior to the realities of the actual sentences we emend. We know those Platonic realities from contextual probabilities.

As I said, my concern in this second discussion of Twelfth Night is not with the circumstances and processes of the sorts of casual, confident adjustments we perform on a malapropism or an ellipsis. What concern me here are mirror images of such mental circumstances and processes. The circumstances that concern me here are ones that lead us to emend (or try to emend, or try to make ourselves feel that we have emended) our responses. And the processes now are ones wrought upon our responses, not upon the stimuli that evoke the responses. I mean to discuss only two examples of such circumstances. One example is brief and local: the mental circumstances generated in us by Fabian's and Feste's speeches just before Malvolio's I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you at the end of the play. The other is the mental circumstances repeatedly generated over the whole length of the play by demands for laughter that we as audience cannot easily meet.

[4] E. H. Gombrich discusses the phenomenon as it occurs in our perceptions of the visual arts (Art and Illusion, rev. ed. [New York, 1961], 211–22). Later he briefly extends his comments to speech (232).

I will begin with—and spend most of the discussion on—the larger example, a relatively simple one, but one that is nonetheless very ticklish: audience response to Toby Belch's almost perfect incapacity to delight us with his constant, always strenuous efforts to be comical.

Before I get to my thesis about Toby, I want to say that, whereas audiences to comedies customarily give some conscious attention to measuring their satisfaction or want of satisfaction with the comic activity presented them, audiences to Twelfth Night have onstage company in doing so. From the play's sixth line—in which Orsino says that the music he has so praised is not so sweet now as it was before —evaluation of performance is a recurring theme of Twelfth Night . And specifically comic performances are more often evaluated than any other.

Such evaluation pops up casually—as, for instance, it does repeatedly in 2.3, the scene in which, within fewer than sixty lines of dialogue, Andrew volunteers his opinion that Feste was in very gracious fooling the previous night (when he spoke of Pigrogromitus, of the Vapians passing the equinoctial of Queubus ), offers the general aesthetic proposition that nonsense is the best fooling, when all is done, and responds to Feste's favorable comments on Toby's comic form with Ay, he does well enough if he be disposed, and so do I too. He does it with a better grace, but I do it more natural (21–23, 28–29, 75–77).

A bit less casual, but also incidental, is Viola's soliloquy on Feste's trade (This fellow is wise enough to play the fool.... This is a practice / As full of labor as a wise man's art [3.1.58–64]). And, from one end of the play to the other, characters evaluate Feste's jokes and decide that the jokes are worth the tips he begs in exchange for them.

Up until Olivia's entrance at line 28, 1.5 is entirely taken up with a sort of audition by Maria: she tries out her skills as a jester, and Feste—the established professional—judges her efforts (Apt, in good faith, very apt ). Then, as Olivia enters, Feste discusses good and bad wits: Wit, an't be thy will, put me into good fooling. Those wits that think they have thee do very oft prove fools, and

I that am sure I lack thee may pass for a wise man. For what says Quinapalus? 'Better a witty fool than a foolish wit' (29–33).

The instance of critical evaluation of comedy that is most vital to the events of Twelfth Night occurs about forty lines later and in reference to a particularly successful comic effort, Feste's proof that Olivia is a fool. She says, What think you of this fool, Malvolio? Doth he not mend? Malvolio thereupon speaks his first lines in the play: Yes, and shall do till the pangs of death shake him. Infirmity, that decays the wise, doth ever make the better fool and, after responses by Feste and Olivia, I marvel your ladyship takes delight in such a barren rascal. I saw him put down the other day with an ordinary fool that has no more brain than a stone. Look you now, he's out of his guard already. Unless you laugh and minister occasion to him, he is gagged. I protest I take these wise men that crow so at these set kind of fools no better than the fools' zanies (68–72, 78–84).

The reason for that lengthy preamble to my discussion of Toby's comedy is my desire to suggest that our difficulties with Toby are particularly pertinent to this play and more insistent than they would be in a play that did not itself so persistently dwell on the natures of satisfying and unsatisfying comedy. Twelfth Night is a play that puts a special kind of moral pressure on us to sympathize with Toby's brand of heavy, hearty jocularity and also presses us to measure the comic quotients of a succession of comic turns.

In essence, my thesis about Toby is as follows: (1) Toby is delightful by kind; that is to say that everything about him tells us (and presumably told the first audiences who met him) that he is a comic character (as many, many years of commentary have said, Toby is like Falstaff—a lovable swaggerer, a ne'er-do-well, a bluff, hearty eccentric, who, though we might elsewhere share his fellow characters' low opinion of him, commands our affection as long as he stays up there on the stage where he does not challenge the day-to-day moral economics of our practical experience); (2) although Toby is likeable by kind—is a theatrical commodity of a kind attractive to consumers—what he does and says fails to live up to the generic expectations he evokes: he

is a funny character who is not funny; (3) we feel—and sometimes succumb to—an urge to pretend to ourselves that we take appropriate pleasure from Toby's antics. (If my experience of the two is reliable, to be entertained by Toby is comparable to attending a New Year's Eve party: no one is having a good time; some people are pretending to enjoy themselves; everybody feels that he or she is somehow wanting in geniality and that it is at least vaguely shameful to be so.)

There are a lot of troubles with that thesis, and—because the thesis is more complicated than it sounds—there are several apparent difficulties that are only apparent. One of the real ones is that I might be wrong about Toby. There might be—or might once have been—someone somewhere who is or was amused by Sir Toby's strenuously comic lines and antics. Whereas the rest of us merely offer a dutiful cooperative chuckle now and again in observance of the generic obligations Toby brings with him, the chuckles of a genuinely delighted audience member would be simple, fresh, and involuntary.

I may indeed be wrong, but—although I surely exaggerate when I imply that nobody ever found Toby funny—I have reason to think not only that my response to Toby is not idiosyncratic but that it is usual. I base that belief on my experience of audiences to Twelfth Night . I have spent an unlikely percentage of my professional life watching audiences at performances of Shakespeare plays and listening to them. Such study, of course, is far from scientific (for instance, I suspect that when I observe audiences I am likely to read their responses in the only available light, the light of my own). Still, for what it is worth, let me offer what I hope will be more a reminder for people who have seen Twelfth Night repeatedly than a report of controlled field research. Audiences confronted with Sir Toby Belch sound as if they are trying to demonstrate to one another that they are having a very good time. Whole audiences—or, rather, working majorities of the whole—have the sound and feel of the small but vocal minority in all modern audiences to Shakespearean

comedy that is composed of people who have recent or particularly scarring experience of a Shakespeare course and who laugh, as if on cue, at any reference at all to cuckolds' horns.

If one grants, however, that twentieth-century audiences are not amused by Toby, can one not assume that the audiences for whom Shakespeare wrote would have found him as delightful as he seems intended to be? In saying that Toby is not funny, am I not simply providing evidence for what everybody remembers being told in high school, namely that Shakespearean comedy is no longer funny, but once was? No. Moreover, both parts of that commonplace are dubious.

As for the first part, the percentage of Shakespearean comedy that is now inefficient is much smaller than the commonplace would suggest. Consider what a lot of genuine laughter one hears from Shakespearean audiences; consider audience responses to Rosalind's interviews with Phoebe, or to the wooing scenes in The Taming of the Shrew and Henry V, or to Lavatch's marriage plans in All's Well That Ends Well, or—in Twelfth Night itself—to Feste's proof that Olivia is a fool and to the letter scene and to plenty of other scenes, exchanges, and routines as well. The behavior of modern audiences suggests that most comic material in Shakespeare is still comic in its effect as well as in its kind and probably is not very different for us from what it was for its first audiences.

As to the second—and here more pertinent—part of the popular commonplace about Shakespearean comedy, in most situations where we are likely to make the assumption, it is probably valid to assume that those scenes and jokes that now lack power to amuse us once had that power. But that assumption is not, I think, universally valid and, in particular, is invalid with respect to most of the comedy of Sir Toby Belch. There is a difference between most of Toby's comedy and the sort of failed comedy that to us seems only unavailable and only unavailable because of the passage of time. I propose to discuss that difference at some length.

Leaving aside Toby's own particular brand of failed comedy, unfunny comedy in Shakespeare is of several sorts. Some of it just doesn't suit our tastes. For instance, much of the verbal comedy of Love's Labor's Lost is not to the taste of twentieth-century audiences (and may not have been to the taste of many sixteenth-century audiences), but, I think, we recognize it as good of its kind. With some help from editorial glosses on unfamiliar usages, we can see what the jokes are—even if we ourselves take no pleasure beyond the little that comes from having "solved" them.

Some Shakespearean comedy appears unimpaired by time but does not seem ever to have been much good. And yet we do get its jokes. Consider the "knock me here soundly" routine performed by Petruchio and Grumio (The Taming of the Shrew, 1.2.5–41). The exchange seems contrived and is prolonged beyond its power to please, but one does not feel that—given one's own personal tastes—one's response is deficient or other than it would have been had one been born in sixteenth-century London. The same seems true of the verbal wit of things like the "sheep"/"ship," "lost mutton"/"laced mutton" sequence in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1.1.72–100).

Some of Shakespeare's inefficient comedy, however, does indeed seem to rest absolutely on shared knowledge to which modern audiences are not party and to which scholarship cannot make them party. One good example—one that occurs in the role of Toby Belch and is atypical of it—is his reference to Mistress Mall's picture . It occurs in Toby's speech of inordinate admiration for Andrew's dancing skills: Wherefore are these things hid? Wherefore have these gifts a curtain before 'em? Are they like to take dust, like Mistress Mall's picture? " (1.3.112–14). Toby seems to allude to some sort of lost anecdote—something that was for Shakespeare's contemporaries as "the curate's egg," and "I say it's spinach and I say the Hell with it," and "Ready when you are, C.B." are for us.^[5]Mistress Mall's picture sounds like a reference to

[5] The phrase "for us" is cavalier. The "us" in question is people my age and of my background. In fact, lots of educated English speakers—particularly Americans—will not know that "the curate's egg" refers to a Punch cartoon that showed a particularly meek-looking young curate breakfasting with a particularly imposing bishop; the bishop, noticing that the curate is not eating, inquires whether his egg is rotten; the abjectly courteous curate replies, "Only in parts." The second reference is to another cartoon about unwillingness to eat—a cartoon from the early days of The New Yorker: a woman is shown trying to get a small boy to eat his vegetable; the caption reads: "It's broccoli, darling." / "I say it's spinach, and I say the Hell with it." The last of the three references is to a joke about an especially elaborate and expensive shot for a movie extravaganza being made by Cecil B. De Mille—a shot that must be got perfectly in one take because the action involves blowing up the whole set. De Mille takes special care not to miss the shot. He arranges that the scene be photographed by three separate cameras. When the scene is over and the set is rubble, De Mille calls to the first cameraman and asks how the shot went. The answer is that everything went perfectly but that the film broke. The second cameraman reports that he forgot to take the cap off his lens. Then De Mille calls to his third cameraman, who cheerily shouts back, "Ready when you are, C. B."

a lost anecdote of the limp sort collected in A Hundred Merry Tales and similar jest books (something on this order: an unlovely lady gives a merry young man her portrait; he puts a curtain over it so he won't have to look at it; she finds out; he nimbly excuses himself by saying that he feared it might get dusty). The allusion is probably irretrievable—and, since whatever energy it once had must have depended on casual familiarity, even if the reference were someday pinned down in Notes and Queries, the line could probably never be brought back to life either for readers or in the theater.

Some lost Shakespearean comedy can be revived in performance—brought to life, not footnoted by actors pointing to parts of one another's bodies and leering insistently. For instance, immediately after his reference to Mistress Mall's picture, Toby returns specifically to Andrew's abilities as a dancer: Why dost thou not go to church in a galliard and come home in a coranto? My very walk should be a jig. I would not so much as make water but in a sink-a-pace (1.3.114–17). The line about making water in a sink -a-pace is still funny and can be made twice as funny if the actor playing Toby pronounces sink-a-pace as, on insufficient evidence, I suspect an Elizabethan Englishman would have pronounced it:

"sink^[*] uh piss."^[6] But, as far as I can see, the sink joke is the only one in Toby's role that is at all susceptible to scholarly enlivenment. In fact, the sink joke is just about the only effectively funny line Toby has. The speech I quoted contains both the exceptions to the rule for Toby's comic efforts: it has the one line that seems diminished by the passage of time, and it has the one funny line too.

The rest of Toby's part is a trial for an actor (actors can demonstrate talent playing Toby, but I have never known one to score a triumph in the role—never heard an audience get really excited about welcoming Toby back for the curtain call)—and a trial for audiences as well—a trial in which the play contrives to make them feel obliged to prove that they are not like Malvolio but are instead jovial and carefree like Toby. The big difference between our responses to nonamusing comedy in Twelfth Night and nonamusing comedy elsewhere in the Shakespeare canon is that in Twelfth Night our experience occurs in a context where to admit, even to oneself, that one is not reveling in the revelry of Toby Belch is tacitly to imply that one is spiritually wanting in the way that Malvolio is.

Like most Shakespearean comics, Toby has a few jokes that are simply weak. For instance, just before the "Mistress Mall"/ "sink-a-pace" speech, Andrew boasts that he can cut a caper, and Toby responds with And I can cut the mutton to't (1.3.108–9). The

[6] My guess is that the a in the last syllable of sink-a-pace was pronounced on the model of such modern pronunciations as those of a in the final syllables of "furnace," "boniface," "preface," "palace," "solace," "Horace," "Christmas," "pirate" and "determinate." As to my insufficient evidence that "sinka-pace" was pronounced in a way confusable with "sink-'o-piss"—I have only a scathing comment on Barnabe Barnes's infamous "urine" sonnet (a sonnet in which he grossly and comically overexploits the standard conceit by which a lover wishes he were his beloved's glove [as Romeo does in Romeo and Juliet ], or lapdog, or whatever): Barnes's sonnet (63 in his sequence Parthenophil and Parthenope [1593]) proclaims his wish to be a glass of wine and to journey through his beloved's digestive system and emerge as urine. In 1596, in Have with You to Saffron Walden, Thomas Nashe, commenting on Barnes, says "or if you would have anie rymes to the tune of stink-a-pisse, he is for you" (Q2 verso).

wit of that response is wan, but it is genuine. The plays between the metaphoric and literal meanings of "to cut" and between "a capriole" and "a pickle" cannot provoke much mirth, but the natures and capacities of their limited physics are evident and comfortable. (The caper cutting joke is of the same kind as the better-meshed multiple pun in in a sink-a-pace . Just as the dance terms cut and caper also pertain in the culinary context introduced by mutton, so the word in [which, in relation to the context of dance, means "after the pattern of"—as it does in the phrases "go to church in a galliard" and "come home in a coranto"—and means "into" in relation to make water ] and the three syllables of sink-a-pace generate a small but measurable thrill of mastery in the mind that perceives the neatness of the purely accidental coincidence of two related assertions within one phrase. The wit of the "sink-a-pace" joke is superior to that of the caper-cutting joke not in kind but because the introduction of mutton feels forced—does not feel like a lucky accident—and because the in-a-sink-a-pace joke is three layers deep.)^[7]

Toby's typical foolery, however, is very different and falls as dead as the caper-cutting joke for very different reasons. Typically, Toby is as he is when two new characters, Sir Toby Belch and Maria, enter to begin the play's third scene and Toby says his first speech: What a plague means my niece to take the death of her brother thus? I am sure care's an enemy to life (1.3.1–2). That speech is a bully. By that I do not mean to say that Toby is a bully (although he is one), but that the speech is. It tells any audience familiar with stage morality that we are to recognize Toby as lovable and admirable (comparable bullying occurs at the first entrances of Little John and Friar Tuck in dramatizations of the Robin Hood stories and at the first entrances of heroes' comical sidekicks in B-grade western movies).

[7] The three layers of sense in the joke are "urinate while hopping up and down in a frantic dance," "urinate into a sink," and "urinate into a sink of urine." (The gentle play between the two senses of in —"while performing" / "into"—comes close to making it reasonable to call the sink-a-pace line three-and-a-half jokes deep.)

When Maria responds by scolding him (You must come in earlier o' nights. Your cousin, my lady, takes great exception to your ill hours ), Toby's second speech not only advertises him as comic but advertises itself as comic too: Why, let her except before excepted (6). What matters about that line is not that it is not funny but that it sounds as if one ought to find it so. Because except before excepted echoes a legal phrase, exceptis excipiendis —a legal phrase unfamiliar to modern audiences—readers of modern student editions can get not only the impression that the phrase was once as familiar as, say, "habeas corpus" but the impression that the reference was once amusing. I see no reason to suspect that Toby's allusion to the never-familiar Latin for "with the aforementioned exceptions" would ever have seemed apt—which is to say, would ever have seemed witty. It has no reference. It is funny only to the extent that pure nonsequitur is funny. This nonsequitur is not in fact pure (Toby does echo, and thus allude to, Maria's phrase takes exception ), but it might as well be. Wit requires that its impertinence be balanced by equal, but previously unobserved, pertinence, and there is no such delightfully surprising pertinence here.

And there is none in Toby's next sally. Maria continues to scold:

MARIA: Ay, but you must confine yourself within the modest limits of order.

TOBY:  Confine? I'll confine myself no finer than I am. These
             clothes are good enough to drink in, and so be these
             boots too. An they be not, let them hang themselves
             in their own straps.
             (7–12)

Toby's answer is comic in manner. The responses of editors testify to that. Editors treat the speech as it asks to be treated. For instance, in her notes for the Riverside Shakespeare (1974), Anne Barton reports that in his use of confine Toby is "quibbling on the sense 'dress.'" And the editors of the New Arden edition of Twelfth Night (1975) give this valiantly cooperative note on Confine? I'll confine myself no finer than I am: "another rejection of

Maria's advice, turning to a tipsy quibble whereby 'confine' is made to mean 'dress myself up.'" Less traditionally, but just as valiantly, C. T. Prouty tried this in the Pelican Shakespeare: "finer: both 'tighter' and 'better'" (rev. ed., 1969).

Lest I seem to mock those glosses or imply that I might do better or other than those editors, let me insist that I presented the foregoing sampler of editorial glosses on Toby's use of confine only to illustrate the proposition that the "confine" speech, like many others from Toby, successfully demands that one try to find more wit in it than it delivers. In my experience, audiences in the theater make their own variation on the same sort of dutiful effort that editors make in annotations like the ones I quoted. Audiences do so for the "confine" speech, and they do so for a succession of similarly pallid, similarly demanding lines—lines like A plague o' these pickle-herring (1.5.115)—all the way through Toby's long, verbose tenure on the stage.

The role of Sir Toby Belch is the longest in Twelfth Night: by the count Marvin Spevack gives in volume I of his Complete and Systematic Concordance [Hildesheim, 1968], Toby has 364 lines (16.5 percent of the play) to 339 (13 percent) for Viola, 318 (12 percent) for Feste, 313 (12 percent) for Olivia, and 286 (11 percent) for Malvolio. I mention those figures because the relative length of Toby's part is usually a surprise to people (it certainly was to me). That sense of surprise suggests that Toby does not have the impact that the size of his role would lead one to expect.

A second reason for mentioning those figures is that the size of the role provides a probably unnecessary excuse for not prolonging my efforts to demonstrate that Toby's comedy misfires and misfires in the way I say it does. Since literary analyses designed to illustrate failure are even more tedious and even more dubious than other literary analyses, I will probably be forgiven if I simply declare that what is true of Toby's first two speeches is generally true of his others.

Before I move on from my thesis about Toby—and as a first step to introduce the larger thesis to which my comments on

Toby are auxiliary—I should dispel an assumption that has probably been invited by what I have so far said. It would be reasonable but wrong to assume that, having spent so long insisting that an audience's experience of Toby is of frustration—is an experience in which one feels that one should be delighted and is unable to be so—I must be demonstrating a flaw in Twelfth Night . That assumption is partially valid. I do indeed dislike the experience of Toby's sweaty efforts to be amusing—an experience that, as I watch the play, I would prefer to be spared. But that assumption is also vitally invalid. I think that Twelfth Night —a play that, in my opinion, is one of the most beautiful man-made things in the world—is better, is a more delightful experience, for the mildly, casually, but undeniably dis pleasing experiences it includes within an audience's experience of the whole.

That last proposition probably sounds bizarre—more bizarre, sillier, and more wantonly ingenious than I think it is in fact. The idea that a work of art can be better for elements in it that its audiences dislike is an idea that all but begs for dismissal by caricature ("Well, Byron's Manfred must be a very great work indeed: there's nothing anywhere in it that I don't find acutely unpleasant"), but consider a Shakespearean paradox remarked, I guess, by most people who have met Shakespeare plays in schoolrooms—and remarked out loud by the brashest among them. First one is told by teachers and by authoritative introductions to student texts that this or that Shakespeare play is a masterwork. Then the same teachers and introductions spend a good percentage of their time and energy on elements that seem "wrong" and on neutralizing them (by, for instance, explaining that oddities in Macbeth result from probable accidents in the transmission of the text or that now-troublesome elements in the histories—notably the rejection of Falstaff in the last scene of 2 Henry IV —are misunderstood by modern audiences whose values differ sharply from some convenient, scholar-isolated values—values that can plausibly be said to make sense of corresponding troublesome elements in a given Shakespeare play but that do not seem in fact

to have been any more active in the consciousnesses of Shakespeare's contemporaries than they are in our own).^[8]

The expert assistants to the plays furnish one of two kinds of help. Either they offer the opportunity to think that our responses to plays we love are invalid and are not "really" part of our experiences or, even more ridiculously, that the plays we love—which is to say the plays we have, the plays printed and played all these years—are not in "fact" what we love but only variously mangled remnants of long-lost originals that had the perfection we feel in Shakespeare's best plays but cannot rationally demon-

[8] When I refer to "wrong" elements in the most admired of Shakespeare's plays, I refer to things like the following. The wounded captain's narrative in the second scene of Macbeth is incoherent (and was once routinely declared to have resulted from some kind of distortion in Shakespeare's lost original). The events of Othello are not credible: its plot rests on an unlikely series of lucky lapses in probability. Much Ado about Nothing is similarly reliant on the improbable reticence of Margaret. As a plot device to insure that Friar Laurence's message does not reach Romeo, the quarantining of Friar John creaks horribly. Hamlet's behavior to Ophelia in the "nunnery" scene does not make sense: Hamlet does not know that Polonius and the King are eavesdropping. Edgar has no reason to withhold knowledge of his identity from his desperate father, and Rosalind has no reason to retain her disguise after she reaches safety in Arden. As audience to "Pyramis and Thisbe," the gentlefolk in A Midsummer Night's Dream are gratuitously harsh and disquietingly insensitive of the feelings of Peter Quince's troupe of amateur actors. Prospero is a hero of charity and is also a petty, petulant, irresponsible tyrant. In 4.3 of Julius Caesar Brutus tells Cassius about Portia's death and, moments later, hears the same news himself and hears it as if for the first time.

Shakespeare's plays are not the only acknowledged masterworks that are also acknowledged to be crucially faulty. Consider the standard and, I think, just complaints about the end of Huckleberry Finn . The people who care most about that book complain loudest that it degenerates into puerile farce at the end. The last part of the book is undeniably a letdown, but what could better fill its place? If Huck were not engulfed at last in the limitations of boyhood (and/or the limitations of human beings in society, no matter what their ages), the spiritual grandeur available to Huck and Jim on the river would insist on being recognized as an accidental fulfillment of a dream of freedom and potential for responsible moral action and choice—a temporary condition attainable only on a raft. A spiritually satisfying conclusion to the journey—one that retained the philosophic size of the trip itself—would be and would show itself to be wishful thinking, philosophic fantasy. The farcical ending is undeniably bad, and it lets the book as a whole be better than I can believe it could otherwise be.

strate them to possess. (The logic is akin in its unspoken premises to that of a girl named Maureen, who was my sister's best friend when they were both about eight years old. After she had eaten and enjoyed a paper cup full of what we all supposed to have been chocolate ice cream, Maureen read the label on the paper cup, discovered the contents to have been frozen malted milk, and said, "I wish I hadn't eaten it. I don't like malted milk.")

Be that as it may, I should get back to my purpose—my purpose in introducing the paradoxical conjunction of belief that the most admired of Shakespeare's plays are at once beautiful beyond expressing and are, if not deeply, at least casually flawed. It seems to me reasonable to suppose that, if the highest-held of all literary creations are all in some way or other marred, that fact justifies considering the possibility that aesthetically displeasing elements in aesthetically pleasing wholes may be of the essence of the pleasure we take in them.

That possibility is certainly consistent with what I have said so far in this book. After all, as my repeated disclaimers have already acknowledged, the generally unnoticeable syntactic and logical oddities I have noticed and admired in the Gettysburg Address, the Jonson epitaphs, and the first scene of Twelfth Night are all things that, at least in terms of the norms of syntax and the limits set by the particular premises of logical propositions, are "faults." All evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, my purpose has always been to wonder admiringly at and to marvel over the improbable logical and syntactical events I have discussed, but—because of the kinds of conclusions to which the kinds of evidence I have used usually point—the evidence has indeed been to the contrary. The phrase "the preciousness of nonsense"—a transformation of the old, mild expletive of dismissal that is this book's title—encapsulates the paradox.

I do not, of course, mean to suggest that I think my present thesis will be more palatable because it is in harmony with my

earlier ones about the aesthetic value of unobserved nonsense in the Gettysburg Address, the Jonson epitaphs, and Twelfth Night 1.1—theses that even their sponsor cannot pretend are now self-evident truths. Nonetheless—since any reader who has come this far probably sees some sense in my case for nonsense—I do think it is worth emphasizing the kinship between, on the one hand, my present contention that "bad" parts of masterpieces may contribute to the special essence we recognize when we distinguish between good things and great ones and, on the other, the contention that the syntactic and logical gaps and lapses that have concerned me in the discussions that precede this one are sources of the joy we get from the works that house them. The common denominator is real but inefficient stress.

Like the logical and syntactic crises to which I have said Lincoln, Jonson, and Shakespeare make us superior—to which, in fact, they make us oblivious—the gentle but insistent pull between the responses we want to give Toby and those he evokes and comparable, comparably gentle pulls I will talk about later are real difficulties for perceiving minds, but are difficulties that those minds handle with casual, godlike ease. Like the phenomena I have considered previously, active but casual failures—if they are so gentle as not to become the focus of our attention—put minds that perceive them under stress—but under stresses with which those minds can cope without strenuous effort, stresses that are real but ultimately inefficient. They are irritants, irritants as insistent as, but no more demanding than, gnats or cobwebs. The difference between the stresses I talked about earlier and the stresses I am talking about here is that the slight but persistent irritation Toby's failure to provide the delight the play implies he is successfully providing impinges on our consciousnesses and is felt as a fault in the play—not, I think, thought to be a fault, but felt .

The distinction I make between thought and felt is between a considered judgment—a verdict—and a sense of unease—a feeling of uneasiness, an incidental annoyance. The difference is like the one between saying why people do not like a play or

movie or poem that people do not like and discussing something that makes us uneasy within a work we delight in. The last parts of Tartuffe and Huckleberry Finn are examples in the latter category. And (however interesting those two notoriously unpopular plays may be to Shakespeare specialists) the last parts of Love's Labor's Lost and Measure for Measure are examples in the former. The self-consciously violent lapse from genre at the end of Love's Labor's Lost and the blind determination with which Measure for Measure pursues its generically appropriate but locally inappropriate happy ending generate an uneasiness that overwhelms everything else. In each of those two instances, the play's sudden odd behavior becomes an issue; rather than a passing mental inconvenience, the oddity demands that it be thought about and either puzzled away or moralized and said to he Shakespeare's illustration of a philosophic point or argued to be a reason to dismiss the play as an aberration.

That brings me to consideration of a further minor complication inherent in thinking about Toby's comedy—a complication that precludes the relatively comfortable conclusion that what I am arguing is that Toby's ineptitude as a comic creation spoils the parts of the play he dominates. That would be easy to understand—and to recognize as the logical but wrongheaded conclusion of a literary critic more intent on his thesis than on Twelfth Night as audiences experience it. In fact, Toby's scenes are, on the whole, funny. He is not funny, but they are. And it is exactly that that keeps Toby's leadenness as a theatrical commodity from dominating our experience of his scenes and thus making our disquiet more urgent than our contentment.

Do what he may to dampen them, Toby's scenes are funny. They are funny because Andrew Aguecheek is in them, and because Andrew—the one among his company in the outskirts of Olivia's household who puts least energy into showing off comic talent for the approbation of his fellow characters—is consistently funny. What Andrew works at is to seem sufficiently debonair to pass for a worldly, fashion-wise man about town,

and a lot of his humor derives from his efforts to ape behavior that he supposes to be sophisticated and clever. Andrew thus tries his hand too at wit, but with only one exception that I can see, his ineptitude always seems clearly to be his —the amusing ineptitude of the character and not the ineptitude of his creator—not, that is, the slightly embarrassing product of an artist's failed effort to make a comic character efficiently amusing.^[9]

When Andrew is present—which he is most of the time in Toby's scenes—Shakespeare works Toby even harder to amuse us than he does when Andrew is absent—and with even less success. Meanwhile, Andrew gets laughs without effort of his own and without apparent effort by the playwright (as Andrew says, he does it more natural). The result is an improbably peaceful neighborhood of responses in which mild but persistent irritation with Toby as a comic character coexists with delight in comedy upon which he is felt to be a burden.

The best example of double identity as comic failure and comic success is 2.3—the nocturnal revels scene, a scene that, because it becomes as irritating to us in terms of our experience (our experience as theatrical consumers) as it is to Malvolio in his, is also a severe test of our much-prized identities as jolly good fellows—identities that the scene makes more urgently desirable than any other in the play. Act 2, scene 3 is thus also the ideal place to examine the interactions of uncomfortably contrary responses evoked in differently pertinent dimensions of our experience.

The opening and closing of the scene are emblematic of the valuative stalemate the scene generates in other more disturbing

[9] The exception is 2.3.155, Andrew's contribution to an exchange between Toby and Maria. Toby summarizes the probable results of Maria's letter plot against Malvolio, and Maria says, "My purpose is indeed a horse of that color." When Andrew interjects, "And your horse now would make him an ass," an audience cannot be sure whether the weakness of the wit is the character's or the play's. Note the labored play on "ass" and "as" in the "capper" with which Maria responds: "Ass I doubt not."

ways. The scene begins and ends with Toby and Andrew alone together. Toby's first speech is typically promissory of more wit than it shows and typically demanding of more merriment than it evokes: Approach, Sir Andrew. Not to be abed after midnight is to be up betimes; and 'diluculo surgere, ' thou know'st . And, also typically, Andrew's literalistic response—apparently innocent of comic intent on the character's part—is more successful in amusing us than Toby was: Nay, by my troth, I know not, but I know to be up late is to be up late . Toby thereupon does some insistently comical blustering and then explains painfully how it is that to be up after midnight is to be up early and how it is that to go to bed after midnight is to go to bed early (6–8) and then (with the phrase consist of in Does not our lives consist of the four elements? [9]) sets up Andrew for another innocently literal demurrer (Faith, so they say, but I think it rather consists of eating and drinking [10–11]). The last moments of the scene recur to the topic of bedtime. They too demand tediously that we cherish Toby for being a lovable roisterer, and they complicate our difficulties because, in order to force ourselves into compliance with the spirit we are pressed to admire and reflect, we have to overlook our uneasiness at Toby's probable motives in urging Andrew to send for money:

TOBY :       Let's to bed, knight. Thou hadst need send for more
                 money.

ANDREW : If I cannot recover your niece, I am a foul way out.

TOBY :       Send for money, knight. If thou hast her not i'
                 th'end, call me Cut.

ANDREW : If I do not, never trust me, take it how you will.

TOBY :       Come, come; I'll go burn some sack. 'Tis too late to
                 go to bed now. Come, knight; come knight. Exeunt .
                 (2.3.168–76)

On the other hand, just by recurring to the topic of bedtime, those last lines of the scene put an aesthetically comforting frame to it and thus are mildly pleasing in one of the sets of terms in which our experience occurs—just as they are mildly discomfiting in the others. (There is also, I suspect, some aesthetic en-

ergy—in the opening exchange, in the closing one, and in their interaction as framers—in the urgently available, unexploited raw materials for easy wordplay on knight and nighttime—energy of a kind that I will discuss at length in the discussion that follows this one).^[10]

[10] Although the matter is not altogether pertinent here, I want to point out a likeness between the physics of the particular phenomena I am discussing here (for instance, successful and unsuccessful comedy coexisting and balancing each other in 3.2 and the phenomenon whereby the same elements are at once aesthetically displeasing in one system of perception and pleasing in another), and the phenomenon whereby what is substantively nonsense can be something like sensible in a system of articulation based on connections irrelevant to substantive content.
Consider, for example, the response Andrew gets when he asks whether Feste received a sixpence that Andrew sent him on the previous evening. Feste's reply—in effect, a token gift in recompense of the one he has received from Andrew—is pure nonsense; this is Andrew's question and Feste's response (the physics I am talking about is present in emblem in the antistasis in for [as a gift to] thy leman and for [because] Malvolio's nose is no whipstock ):

ANDREW: I sent thee sixpence for thy leman. Hads't it?

CLOWN:    I did impeticos thy gratility, for Malvolio's nose is no whip-
                  stock. My lady has a white hand, and the Myrmidons are no
                  bottle-ale houses.
                  (2.3.23–27)

All the evident energy of Feste's speech goes into establishing its incoherence—or, rather, its substantive incoherence.

The key word in establishing that incoherence is the word for —"because"; it announces that what follows it will explain something about what went before it. What follows is ostentatiously irrelevant to "I did impeticos thy gratility." And what follows the irrelevant assertion about Malvolio's nose is equally irrelevant to that assertion.

Phonetically, however, the M of My Lady's hand relates very clearly to Malvolio, and, in the next clause, the M of Myrmidons relates that clause to both of the other two. Moreover, as nose echoes the last syllable of Malvolio's and is echoed in the no of no whipstock, so the no of no bottle-ale houses echoes all three. And the wh sound of whipstock separates into the opening sounds of white and hand, the corresponding element—object of the verb—in the grammar of the substantively unrelated following clause; by beginning with an h sound, houses, the object of the verb in the third of the three nonexplanatory explanatory clauses, continues the pattern.

And whipstock, which, aside from their phonetic link, is so ostentatiously irrelevant to white hand, does, after all, refer to a hand le. Similarly, the second of the three simultaneously related and unrelated explanatory clauses relates to I did impeticos thy gratility, the clause to which it and its companions are so pointedly irrelevant: the context of a coin received suggests the sense "pocket up" for the nonsense word impeticos, but the context also includes thy leman, and invites listeners to include the likeness of impeticos to "in petticoat" in their experience of the clause; the dim but real relevance of my lady to thy leman and of hands to the business of "impocketing" (and to groping in petticoats) all pull the assertively foreign clause about my lady's white hand into relationship with the topics from which it so sharply divides.

The same kind of simultaneous pertinence and impertinence occurs on a larger scale when, later in the same scene, topics touched upon here only because they are irrelevant to the matter about which the speaker purports to be speaking recur as meaningful incidentals of later discussion. When Malvolio arrives he compounds several separate elements of Feste's reply to Andrew in "Do ye make an alehouse of my lady's house...?" (82–83), and "my lady's hand" recurs crucially—but in another sense—when Maria says, "I can write very like my lady your niece; on a forgotten matter we can hardly make distinction of our hands" (146–48).

When the scene gets under way in earnest, it presents a good deal of mildly amusing stuff (notably Andrew's reminiscences of the previous evening's performance by Feste [18–23], the sample of nonsense fooling Feste gives Andrew in thanks for his tip [25–27; see note 10], and the truly dazzling song "O mistress mine")—surely enough to build a considerable head of unforced good will in us, the audience.

Moreover, during the ensuing caterwauling—during the howling that brings Malvolio down upon the revellers (50–79)—the audience is treated to, and is presumably soothed by (and presumably takes no conscious notice of), a particularly subtle harmony of cats. The harmony gets its start in a line of Andrew's that plays on "dog" and "cat": Toby invites Feste and Andrew to join him in singing a catch, and Andrew says, An you love me, let's do it. I am a dog at a catch (57). The play on "dog" and "cat" echoes and thus makes a harmony with the similar and similarly recessive wordplay that preceded Feste's attempt to prove Olivia a fool back in 1.5; Olivia gave permission to make his proof, and Feste said, I must catechize you for it, madonna. Good my mouse of virtue, answer me (1.5.57–58). And, merely by referring to dogs,

the play on "dog" and "cat" in Andrew's line participates in a play-long alliteration-like succession of casual references to dogs—a succession that starts early in scene 1 when Orsino says, and my desires like fell and cruel hounds, / Ere since pursue me (1.1.23–24). Within the twenty-line passage in 2.3 between "O mistress mine" and Malvolio's entrance, the "cat" in I am a dog at a catch is echoed in caterwauling (in Maria's entrance line, What a caterwauling do you keep here? [66]), and Cataian (in Toby's otherwise irrelevant response, My lady's a Cataian [69]).

By even mentioning the cat-based harmonies of 2.3.50–79, I automatically exaggerate their effect on an audience. As I said, however, I do not in fact suppose that audiences pay any conscious attention at all to the cat patterns. Even the wordplay of dog at a catch goes past most audiences and most actors—just as it does past Feste, whose response is the limply jocular By'r Lady, sir, and some dogs will catch well (58).^[11] I do suggest, however, that

[11] It is possible that "Catch" was a common name for dogs (as "Blanch," "Sweetheart," and "True" appear to have been). If so, the complex play on "catch," "cat," and dogs in 2.3 becomes even more complex. A dog of that name figures in the eclogue beginning "And are you there, old Pas " in Sidney's Arcadia (51–56 in William Ringler's edition [Oxford, 1962]): "A prettie curre it is; his name iwis is Catch" (40).
Given the play on "catch," "cat," and dogs in 2.3, and given the scene's focus on singing, one can suspect that Sidney's poem lies somewhere in the background of Shakespeare's scene.

The eclogue, a parody of Virgil's third, is a singing contest between louts. One contestant puts up his cat against a dog wagered by his opponent.

NICO.:... I will lay a wager hereunto,
          That profit may ensue to him that best can do.
          I have (and long shall have) a white great nimble cat,
          A king upon a mouse, a strong foe to a rat....

PAS.:... I have a fitter match;
          A prettie curre it is; his name iwis is Catch....
          This is my pawne; the price let  Dicus ' judgment show:
          Such oddes I willing lay; for him and you I know.
          (29–32, 39–40, 47–48)

Like the catch of Toby, Andrew, and Feste in 2.3, the singing of Sidney's shepherds displeases its audience. In the poem's last lines, the judge refuses to declare either singer the winner:

Enough, enough: so ill hath done the best,
That since the having them to neither's due,
Let cat and dog fight which shall have both you.

the cats give the passage a felt undercurrent of artistic coherence and that they help keep us back from considering the always available, regularly shunned possibility that, if we fail to delight in Toby's noisy revels, the fault might be with them and not where I think we usually place it—with humorless, spiritually wizened us.

The scene begins to get hard on the theatrical consumer when Toby, who has not spoken at length since he and Andrew were joined by Feste, speaks a speech that, in its eagerness to warm things up, cools us with reiteration of an invitation to calculated merriment that becomes decreasingly inviting by virtue of the implied need to stimulate it: But shall we make the welkin dance indeed? Shall we rouse the night owl in a catch that will draw three souls out of one weaver? Shall we do that? (54–56).^[12]

What follows is two or three minutes of loud, determined jollity, namely the action that is described—in much less time than it takes to perform—in the innocent-seeming stage direction "Catch sung ." I have never seen any production of Twelfth Night —and I have seen seventy-some Twelfth Nights —in which actors and director contrived to make the catch other than a trial for the audience, an audience that is required to approve and that

[12] Compare the first speech of the outraged Malvolio a few lines later; formally—and, of course, only formally—it is the twin of the passage beginning "But shall we make the welkin dance": "My masters, are you mad? Or what are you? Have you no wit, manners, nor honesty, but to gabble like tinkers at this time of night? Do ye make an alehouse of my lady's house, that ye squeak out your coziers' catches without any mitigation or remorse of voice? Is there no respect of place, persons, nor time in you?" (2.3.80–85). Like Toby, Malvolio overdoes his gestures of emphatic apposition. Toby and Malvolio speak to very different purpose, but, in demanding unearned repetitions of their listeners' responses, they speak to the same effect.

wants to approve generically amusing high jinks that amount theatrically to so much sweat and raw noise.

As is by now presumably obvious, the point toward which I am moving here is that, when Malvolio the spoilsport enters to end the revelry, we the audience—firmly and forever allied with the forces of free-spirited good fellowship—feel something different from, but uncomfortably akin to, sympathy with Malvolio's point of view. The moral context of the play will not allow us even fleetingly to consider the possibility that Malvolio's attitude toward roisterers has anything to be said for it, but, however dedicated we may temporarily be to "good life" and songs of good life, I suspect that, as audience to this particular example of musical roistering, we are—in our terms—as annoyed with all the pointless racket as Malvolio is. I suggest that, in their—in our—incapacity fully to enter into the comic spirit of genuinely funny scenes (scenes that cannot be dismissed the way the efforts of inept tummlers and jolly masters of ceremonies at ships concerts can, but scenes that also sweat under a weight of elaborate, inefficient effort to amuse), audiences to Twelfth Night come dangerously close to seeing a likeness between themselves and the harshest of the many onstage critics of comedy in this play, Malvolio—Malvolio, self -exiled from the carefree festival spirit Toby advertises and the object of our scorn because he refuses to do what we want to do but cannot.

In an essay called "Twelfth Night: The Experience of the Audience" (Shakespeare Survey 34 [1981],111–19), Ralph Berry treats matters closely related to the ones I treat here and anticipates me to my profit at several points. One of the most profitable of those is in his notice of a nearly universal critical eagerness to be disassociated from Malvolio. I will quote him on that subject later. For the moment I want to quote only his comments on 2.3:

The revels of act 2, scene 3 will secure the sympathy of the audience, and the great confrontation between Sir Toby and Malvolio does at the same time seem like the lifeforce challenging the powers of repression and sterility: 'dost thou think, be-

cause thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?' As presented, there is no chance of an audience denying this affirmation. (Or critic, one might add. There is an all but universal convention for commentators to stand up and be counted as in favour of cakes and ale.) (111)

I agree that there is no chance that any audience will ever refuse a call to affirm the life force, but I do not think our endorsements are quite instinctive in the particular circumstances Shakespeare provides, and I do not think our yea-saying is ever quite as wholehearted as we would like it to be.

Berry's point about the critics is particularly apt. I have been bullied by the line about cakes and ale and by its morally threatening, perhaps morally threatened, clack all my professional life (and during the last parts of my childhood when teachers trotted out their gusto for me and insisted that mine was also in play). Moreover, unlike Ralph Berry (who locates the onset of audience queasiness in act 3 or later), I feel bullied during the whole confrontation between Malvolio the spoilsport and the night revelers. And the suspiciously eager endorsements of the commentators Berry mentions suggest that I am not alone.

There is probably no need for detailed illustration that after Malvolio's entrance the wit of the merrymakers becomes even flatter than it was before. For a quick example, take Toby's narrow, contrived, overtly effortful response to Malvolio's Is there no respect of place, persons, nor time in you?: We did keep time, sir, in our catches (84–86). Unless—as actors never do—the actor puts pointed stress on the word time (thus establishing that Toby is pretending seriously to challenge the justice of one particular charge among the three), the cleverness of Toby's puerile effort at riposte falls as dead as similar sallies by cheeky children do in real life. A few moments later, when Toby and Feste taunt Malvolio by conversing in fragments of improvised song (But I will never die. Sir Toby there you lie . [98–99]), the puerility of the wit and of the tactic itself is, I suspect, hard on audiences. We cannot do other than cheer Toby and Feste on, but they are unworthy of us—both in being insufficiently amusing and, in

Toby's case, in being contemptible enough to register snobbish contempt by saying Art any more than a steward? (104–5). We cheer Feste and Toby on, but it isn't easy.

I want now to turn briefly to our difficulties in coping with regrettable and regretted flashes of Malvolio-like punctiliousness about matters so petty as to be beneath the notice of anyone but a twit.

In 1.1 we are empowered to comprehend effortlessly what is demonstrably incomprehensible. In the body of the play, moments of comparably godlike ease cohabit with contrasting moments when our minds suddenly, unexpectedly scramble to get bearings they do not need—or, rather, to get bearings the spirit of the play says our minds do not need. A mind skating comfortably across a performance of Twelfth Night repeatedly hits pebbles. But they are not big enough to cause a spill—or to cause us to pull up short and brush them from our path. And the play skims along past them and implies by its example that such free spirits as Twelfth Night assures us we are must be skimming along too—superior to, oblivious of, every kind of petty inconvenience to smooth comprehension. Nonetheless, as they are in all of Shakespeare, the pebbles are there and are inconvenient. Again, the difference is that this play will not let us respect anyone who takes notice of petty detail.

Take, for a relatively large example of pebblelike bother, the sudden arrival of Fabian. Not only does he arrive from nowhere at the beginning of 2.5, he arrives to occupy a place already assigned to Feste: Maria has promised us that Toby and Andrew will be witnesses to Malvolio's entrapment in the letter plot and that the fool will make a third (2.3.160–61). But, since no one on the stage is at all surprised to see Fabian or surprised at Feste's absence, we, like the several editions I have checked out on the matter, let the matter pass—or pretend to. It is not worth worrying about. (And besides, if we are willing to admit to wondering about Fabian's presence in the play, there is more than a century of creative scholarship behind us providing models for speculation and teaching us how to explain away discrepancies

in detail and structure as understandable in the work of an inspired hack hurrying his plays out to meet deadlines. There are also plentiful models for a guess that Shakespeare worked the play out two different ways, one without Fabian and one in which he and Toby do in fact set the device against Malvolio. One such theory might very well be entirely valid, but it would only explain why the play is as it is; the explanation would not change the play's behavior or our experience of it. The need for explanation is a permanent fact of the play.)

Twelfth Night presents us with a number of other minor inconveniences to our theatrical comfort. And, as I said earlier, I think we notice them—things like the gratuitously mean I do care for something; but in my conscience, sir, I do not care for you. If that be to care for nothing, sir, I would it would make you invisible (spoken by Feste to Viola-Cesario [3.1.27–29]), and Will you help? An asshead and a coxcomb and a knave, a thin-faced knave, a gull? (spoken by Toby in response to Andrew's offer to help Toby as the two of them limp out of the play [5.1.198–99]). But the behavior of critics and commentators suggests that, having noticed them, we quickly and conscientiously respond to their presence in our consciousnesses in much the way the cockney in King Lear is said to have responded to the live eels in her pie: She knapped 'em o' th' coxcombs with a stick and cried, 'Down, wantons, down!' (2.4.118–19).

The greatest concentration of pebblelike obstacles to comfortable comprehension and easygoing conviviality occurs in the speeches Fabian and Feste speak immediately before Malvolio storms out of the play vowing revenge (I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you [5.1.367]) and immediately after Olivia has unraveled Maria's letter plot (Alas, Malvolio, this is not my writing  . . .[5.1.335 – 45]). Those speeches too generate circumstances that lure us toward likeness to Malvolio.

The first of them, Fabian's, is the play's best statement of its prevailing spirit. The speech follows immediately upon Olivia's acknowledgement that the letter plot hath most shrewdly passed upon Malvolio and her promise to him that, when the grounds and

authors of the plot are known, Malvolio will be both plaintiff and judge of his own cause. Fabian says:

  Good madam, hear me speak,
And let no quarrel, nor no brawl to come,
Taint the condition of this present hour,
Which I have wond'red at. In hope it shall not,
Most freely I confess myself and Toby
Set this device against Malvolio here,
Upon some stubborn and uncourteous parts
We had conceived against him. Maria writ
The letter, at Sir Toby's great importance,
In recompense whereof he hath married her.
How with a sportful malice it was followed
May rather pluck on laughter than revenge,
If that the injuries be justly weighed
That have on both sides passed
(5.1.345–58)

The speech is generous-spirited in manner, superficially generous-spirited in substance, and, if one thinks about it, gives persuasive, but not-quite-conclusive evidence that it is generousspirited in essence too. Its spirit is exactly the one that best accords with our wishes for the end of this play. But the speech is also acrawl with gratuitous incidental inaccuracies.

Fabian says that he—who was not present (or even known to us) when the letter plot was hatched back in 2.3—and Toby set this device against Malvolio . And he says not only that Maria writ the letter, but that she wrote it at Sir Toby's great importance . We saw no such importunity or any need for any. The discrepancies are trivial, but they are of a piece and threaten to complicate our experience of the lines by presenting themselves as evidence for generous motives behind Fabian's speech—a speech that, as I said, seems generous for other reasons, generic and situational reasons, anyway. We don't want to be thinking about Fabian. At this point in a play that, at the point when Olivia's memory of Malvolio was accidentally jogged, had already reached its destined happy ending, we do not want to worry about the inner qualities of a minor character.

And yet Fabian does take more of the blame on himself than our experience can witness, and he protects Maria by implying that the idea of the letter came from Toby, who—since his rights in Olivia's continued patronage are reinforced by consanguinity—is best able to take and survive the guilt.

On the other hand, is Fabian altogether generous? The speech, remember, responds to Olivia's promise that Malvolio will be judge in his own cause. His recommendations are calculated to save Fabian's skin as well as those of his colleagues, and the speech is openly calculating in its insinuating efforts at once to justify Malvolio's suffering and dismiss it as incidental overflow from a prank (sportful malice [365] is an oxymoron slippery enough to have done credit to Claudius's first speech in Hamlet ). And so on.^[13]

What concerns me most about Fabian's speech is what—faced with my prolonged commentary on it—probably at the moment most concerns you: the obvious fact that, however just they may be, my comments on Fabian's speech are entirely alien

[13] Note too, by the way, that Upon some stubborn and uncourteous parts / We had conceived against him (5.1.351–52) is nonsense of the sort that I talked about when I talked about 1.1. The phrase only seems to provide meaningful modification to the assertion to which it is appended. How can one hope to take any precise sense from the idea of conceiving parts—much less imagine how parts could be conceived against someone else?

And, as for imprecise sense, which side is it to which we finally understand the lines to be charging stubbornness and discourtesy? The phrase is an idiomatic crazy quilt that magically enacts the blending and blurring of blame that Fabian goes on to ask for in the last lines of the speech. Upon implies—accurately implies—that it introduces a reason for setting the device against Malvolio—a reason for doing what Fabian says he and Toby did. The stubborn (that is, "inflexible") and uncourteous parts ("qualities") first seem to be Malvolio's—traits that we know to be his and ones here being said to have made Fabian and Toby want to discomfit him. The sentence thus starts out as a gesture of self-justification. We had conceived changes the phrase's apparent motive; the phrase seems now to have slipped again into the confessional mode in which the sentence started and to be explaining the offense against Malvolio as the product of unmotivated ill will in Toby and the now selflessly self-accusing Fabian.

to the spirit generically appropriate to an audience listening while a playwright brings his comic machine to rest. These lines—like the last lines of similar Shakespearean comedies and, indeed, of most of the rest of Shakespeare's plays—ask to be taken as performers of perfunctory final housekeeping chores. This is only a play, and, as I will suggest in section 3, at this point it is urgently so.

And yet, here am I carrying on like a sophomore in a high wind—picking at nits in a speech that in its substance asks largemindedness from its onstage audience and in its kind asks the same from us. At this point in Twelfth Night, it makes no difference—or, in the play's pet idiom, it's all one—whether the details of Fabian's account do or do not square with those of the events as we have seen them unfold. And surely it is silly to go motive hunting in the lines of a character whose very existence was unknown to us until the tenth of the play's eighteen scenes and who, when we heard him carefully reminding Toby of an incident involving himself, Malvolio, and a bear-baiting (2.5.6–7), sounded from the first like a hastily adopted—or adapted—child of some dramaturgical necessity equally unknown to us. Both Fabian and his peacemaking speech ask us to take them as furniture of the play as play—as stuff in a comedy.

It is foolish to treat Fabian's speech as one would a trial transcript, but every time I hear Fabian's speech my mind both follows the route I have mapped out here and feels foolish for doing so. In short, I am mentally uncomfortable about being mentally uncomfortable with Fabian's peacemaking speech. I feel myself pulling back from its admirable spirit and perilously close to its subject, the play's chief nitpicker, Malvolio—who (being more foolish than I), is braver about admitting his disinclination to go along and taints the condition of the hour by storming ineffectually off the stage.

I am similarly troubled by similar details in the lines that come next—details effectively similar, but troublesome in another and even more petty dimension, pedantry. Feste says, Why, 'some

are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrown upon them.' I was one, sir, in this interlude, one Sir Topas, sir; but that's all one. 'By the Lord, fool, I am not mad!' But do you remember, 'Madam, why laugh you at such a barren rascal? An you smile not, he's gagged'? And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges (5.1.360–66).

What troubles me in Feste's speech is that I always have checked involuntarily when Feste says thrown where the two previous versions of the formula have taught us to expect thrust and that I am tempted to go on foolishly from there to fret over Feste's absence from the stage on both occasions when the "born great" / "achieve greatness" / "greatness thrust upon them" formula is spoken.^[14] Similarly, I am self-disgusted when my mind detours into worry about Feste's substitution of smile in But do you remember, 'Madam, why laugh you at such a barren rascal? An you smile not, he's gagged'? for laugh in its "original," 1.5.78–82: I

[14] Thrown upon them is effectively synonymous with thrust upon them, the phrase it "replaces," the phrase from 3.4–41 that quoted thrust upon 'em (2.5.134) in the fraudulent Maria/Olivia letter to Malvolio. The phrases are also nearly identical phonetically. But thrown upon them is not identical with thrust upon them, and the imperfection of Feste's quotation of a phrase we have heard twice before calls momentary attention to itself—attention that one presumably does not want to give. There is no reason to expect Shakespeare to quote himself faithfully; characters misquote all the way through the canon. More important, it does not matter whether Feste's phrasing is identical to the phrasing it echoes. It is all one.

It is all one, too, that the line we hear as a misquotation is quoted by a character who was present on neither of the occasions when we heard it (2.5—in the letter scene—and 3.4—in the scene where Maria demonstrates Malvolio's madness to Olivia). Why does that not matter? First, because Feste could have read Malvolio's letter offstage or heard accounts of Malvolio's behavior. Second, and more important, because this is only a play—and a farce at that; to speculate on the source of a clown's knowledge (or, for that matter, on his use of his offstage time) is silly—particularly silly since, although an audience can be expected to notice and shrug off the substitution of thrown for thrust, no member of an audience can be imagined to remember that Feste is offstage in the scenes where Malvolio says the words Feste echoes to him here. And yet my mind has—obviously has—in fact gone down the several paths to folly that I now label as such.

marvel your ladyship takes delight in such a barren rascal.... Unless you laugh and minister occasion to him, he is gagged .

Perhaps my experience is unusual. Perhaps not. One way or the other, it is certain that each of the troublesome details that I want to brush aside and cannot quite brush aside has a lot of company here. The concentration of incidental discrepancies in the two speeches that precede Malvolio's enraged promise to be revenged is greater than any I can remember in any passage of comparable size anywhere in the Shakespearean canon. And it is certain too that my trivial discontent with my reactions to the trivial discrepancies I have just been discussing occurs in the coinpany of a lot of larger invitations to police one's responses.

The largest of those occurs when our desire to join in the fun of the happy ending requires that we try to brush aside nagging, always minor inclinations to agree that Malvolio has indeed been most notoriously abused .

I said earlier that I would quote Ralph Berry on the topic of critical eagerness to be disassociated from Malvolio. Berry takes the eagerness of critics to assure us and perhaps themselves of their allegiance to festival views as a symptom of an unspoken truth about the play. So do I. (Note that critics never bother to register the difference between Iago's behavior and behavior they themselves would recommend, that we never feel the need to label the behavior of Don John, lachimo, and Richard III as wicked, and that Twelfth Night does not impel commentators on it to put themselves on public record as being of the opinion that Andrew is silly.)

This is Berry on the shrillness of critics insisting that they are comfortable with Malvolio's punishment (Berry has just said that Malvolio's "final speech, leading to the appalling 'I'll be reveng'd on the whole pack of you', is the climax of everything that happens in Twelfth Night "):

The experience must be confronted, and neither denied nor indulged. 'Malvolio: a tragedy' is a sentimentalization of this play. But equally, one is struck by the large number of critics who, on

this issue, seem bent on represssing instincts which, outside the theatre of Twelfth Night, they would surely admit. I cite a few instances, though my point could easily be illustrated at far greater length. To Joseph Summers, 'Malvolio is, of course, justly punished.' Barbara K. Lewalski concurs in the natural justice of the affair: 'Since he so richly deserves his exposure, and so actively cooperates in bringing it upon himself, there seems little warrant for the critical tears sometimes shed over his harsh treatment and none at all for a semi-tragic rendering of his plight in the "dark house".' For C. L. Barber, Malvolio is 'a kind of foreign body to be expelled by laughter, in Shakespeare's last free-and-easy festive comedy'. Most certainly he is to be expelled, if Twelfth Night is a 'free and easy festive comedy'; but supposing the intruder belongs in the play, what then?

How can one explain this critical imperviousness to the ending? One comes to view the critics here as a representative sampling of the human mind. They want, as we all do, a comedy; they do not want a disturbance to the agreeable mood created in Twelfth Night; it is easiest to find a response based on 'Serve Malvolio right: he asked for it....' [The critics] seek a formula that helps to suppress the disquiet one inevitably feels. In this they faithfully embody certain tendencies within the mind, and thus—as Shakespeare well knew—of his audience.^[15]

Like this one, Berry's essay suggests that Shakespeare built "into his design a threat to its own mood" (118). He concludes by saying that "the ultimate effect of Twelfth Night is to make the audience ashamed of itself" (119). I agree. But, unless I misunderstand him, Berry thinks the audience is ashamed to have associated itself with Malvolio's tormentors and thus to have been accomplices in petty but real brutality. I suggest, rather, what the critical testimonials to cakes and ale and to the justice of Malvolio's punishment suggest: that, though we may have crowed persuasively, we are ashamed to have secretly been insufficiently fes-

[15] Pp. 117–18. Berry gives the sources of the passages he quotes as follows: Joseph Summers, "The Masks of Twelfth Night, " University of Kansas City Review, 22 (1955): 25–32; Barbara K. Lewalski, "Thematic Patterns in Twelfth Night," Shakespeare Studies, 1 (1965), 171; C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton, N.J., 1959), 257.

tive—ashamed that we have been unable to play zany to Sir Toby as well as we would like and as well as we would like to be thought to have done—ashamed of having been insufficient to the play's demands on us—ashamed of having failed to fit in.

Throughout his career, Shakespeare experiments with—and gets energy from—setting audiences to watch—or, rather, try to watch—a play other than the one he shows them. For example, he does that in varying ways and to varying effects in Love's Labor's Lost, Romeo and Juliet, 2 Henry IV, Henry V, All's Well That Ends Well, Troilus and Cressida, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. Twelfth Night, I think, is not only Shakespeare's supreme achievement but his most complex experiment with the interaction of the play we see and the one we try to see.

Some of the plays in my list of examples make us—which is to say let us—face up to our plights. Those plays relieve much of the uneasiness they evoke by commenting more or less selfconsciously on their deviations from a behavior pattern they have invited us to rely upon. Love's Labor's Lost and Troilus and Cressida certainly do that. And, less crudely, 2 Henry IV and Henry V do too. Some of the listed plays do not—notably Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, The Tempest, and—and above all—Twelfth Night .

Some of the plays in my list—All's Well, Henry V, and Antony and Cleopatra, for instance—leave us in doubt about where they want us to stand. Twelfth Night, on the other hand, does not leave us in any doubt about what responses it expects of us; we know where Twelfth Night wants us to stand. What Twelfth Night does is leave us in doubt as to whether or not we have succeeded well enough in standing there.

I have been insisting on the likenesses between us the audience and Malvolio. We are also like Andrew Aguecheek. Andrew—the most persistent participant in the play's themelike series of variations on the idea of following—is constantly a step or two behind his companions—often physically, always mentally. He puts most of his energy into attempting to demonstrate that he is, and has the qualifications to be, one of what he takes

to be a sophisticated company. Andrew never quite succeeds in fitting in, but he never quite fails either. He seems to have doubts about his success, but, until Toby speaks his last line, no one directly tells him.

Andrew keeps insisting on his concurrence in his companions' thinking. A good percentage of Andrew's role consists of variations on "me too." Andrew's most famous "me too" line is I was adored once too (2.3.166). Like Andrew, audiences to Twelfth Night try to fit in. And, like him, they are not told outright whether their efforts are or are not fooling anybody. We want the play to find us adorable in its terms, but the play will not tell us whether we pass its muster.

3—
The Last Few Minutes of Twelfth Night

At the end of Twelfth Night everything comes together with the neat, easy convenience available to neat, easy fictions. And nothing does. That paradox is played out in every dimension of the last few minutes of Twelfth Night, and I will spend the bulk of this last section describing the paradox's multiple manifestations.

Before I begin listing and describing, however, I want to do two preliminary things.

The first is to say that the paradox I focus on here manifests the physics that is the common denominator in every literary phenomenon in which the human mind takes pleasure. What our minds most like is to be in situations where they simultaneously perceive is as is not and is not as is . The paradoxically coexistent contrary actions I will talk about here all share the same physics, and all share those physics with the operation of simple literary constructions (a sentence is one thing and a union of disparate parts whose disparity the mere existence of the sentence advertises) and complex ones (rhymes—in which two words are insistently the same and just as insistently different—puns, rhythm—where a pattern both repeats and does not repeat—and so on). The most obvious—and traditionally the most fas-

cinating—embodiments of the common underlying principle shared by the phenomena I will talk about are, of course, twins—which, as Orsino says, present a natural perspective that is and is not (5.1.209).

As a second preliminary, I want to remind you that what interests me about Twelfth Night is the question of what is so good about it and to say that this essay is groping toward an answer to that question.

Now I will come back to enlarge on my opening assertion that everything comes together in the last few minutes of Twelfth Night and that nothing does. I will begin by looking at conclusiveness and inconclusiveness in their most obvious manifestations.

The happy marriages that make the play come out as nature and the nature of fiction demand are fairy-tale easy. Toby marries Maria in a subordinate clause (5.1.354). Olivia has loved Cesario, has contracted a marriage with Sebastian, is content, and blandly welcomes Viola as an in-law: A sister, you are she (5.1–317). Orsino—previously governed by his love for the now truly unavailable Olivia—cheers up immediately, claims his share in this most happy wrack and proposes marriage to Viola: Boy, thou hast said to me a thousand times / Thou never shouldst love woman like to me.... Give me thy hand, / And, let me see thee in thy woman's weeds (258–60, 263–64). Everything is coming out exactly as it should.^[16] As Twelfth Night draws comfortably toward its close,

[16] The two Shakespeare plays most obviously similar to this one are blessed with similar good fortune. In Much Ado about Nothing, Claudio mourns for the girl he thinks he has killed but he willingly settles for her mysteriously—and temporarily—extant cousin. And, in As You Like It, Phoebe responds ruefully to the revelation of Rosalind's sex—"If sight and shape be true, / Why then, my love adieu" (5.4.114–15)—but is quickly and gracefully resigned to marry Silvius (143–44); moreover, that play introduces a new character in its last fifty lines: "the second son of old Sir Rowland" who ties off further loose ends by unexpectedly arriving with the unexpected news that, on his way into the Forest of Arden to murder his brother, the usurping duke, "meeting with an old religious man, / After some question with him, was converted / Both from his enterprise and from the world, / His crown bequeathing to his banished brother" (5.4.146, 154–57).

only a critic with the naïveté of a verisimilitude-crazed high school student or a theater reviewer for The New Yorker could fault the play for its good fortune in drawing so conveniently to its bias. Everything is coming out exactly as it should. And I for one am delighted.

On the other hand, Malvolio—appropriately enough—refuses to do what is appropriate to the spirit of the scene; he refuses to be included and storms out of the happy ending, promising future discord: I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you (5.1.367).^[17] What matters from the point of view of the play as play—what matters to the play's self-interested efforts to reach the comfortable conclusion it seems so doggedly determined to achieve—is that the reintroduction of narratively necessary concern for the outcome of the Malvolio story occurs after all the other major necessities of the plot line have been scrupulously attended to. In Albany's words at the end of King Lear (where Shakespeare experiments again—more daringly and more dangerously—with premature signals of dramatic conclusion and lets his play behave as if it had forgotten all about its central character), the plight of Malvolio is reintroduced as a great thing of us forgot (King Lear 5.3.237). In fact, Olivia has simply forgotten all about Malvolio: A most extracting frenzy of mine own, she says, From my remembrance clearly banished his (5.1.273–74).

The issue of Malvolio recurs at exactly the point where it feels most inappropriate and where the fact that it does not fit in—

[17] Compare As You Like It . In 5.4.172–73, Duke Senior's couplet could conclude the play: "Play, music, and you brides and bridegrooms all, / With measure heaped in joy, to th'measures fall." Instead, Jaques holds up the festivities with a prolonged refusal to participate in them. When Jaques does at last make his exit, the duke has to provide a new couplet to do again the job his previous couplet had been thwarted in: "Proceed, proceed. We'll begin these rites, / As we do trust they'll end, in true delights." Something comparable happens in the last three speeches of Much Ado, where a messenger with news of Don John's capture requires Benedick to conclude the play a second time—now with a cheerful reminder of the day-to-day life that goes on after wedding dances are over: "Think not on him till to-morrow. I'll devise thee brave punishments for him. Strike up, pipers!"

the fact of its unsuitability—is most urgent in an audience's experience. Earlier I quoted Orsino's lines to Viola, Give me thy hand, / And let me see thee in thy woman's weeds (5.1.264–65). If it were not for the Malvolio plot—or if the Malvolio plot had been disposed of earlier (this long last scene did, after all, begin as another "letter scene" [Now as thou lov'st me, let me see his letter ]; and its first topic was the letter Feste is carrying from Malvolio to Olivia)—what Orsino says in lines 264–65 could have led directly into a slightly modified version of the couplet with which, in lines 376–77, he concludes the action:

                        0Give me thy hand,
And let me see thee in thy woman's weeds,
And when in other habits you are seen,
Then be my mistress, and my fancy's queen.

Instead, Viola's response to Orsino fixes on the incidental practicalities of recostuming herself and, as an improbable result, causes the play to meander back to Malvolio by an altogether improbable route. Viola cannot put on her woman's weeds because she left them with the captain who brought her on shore in scene 2; he is in jail; Malvolio put him there.

Let me back up for a minute.

In pointing out the ease with which Shakespeare pairs his characters off at the end of Twelfth Night, my purpose was not to say that those pairings have the comic-opera symmetry by which W. S. Gilbert suddenly mates Sir Joseph Porter with Hebe at the end of Pinafore and marries Captain Corcoran to the plump and pleasing person who was his nurse when he was a baby. After all, given the farcical situation in Twelfth Night, the marriages of Olivia and Sebastian and of Viola and Orsino are dramatically inevitable and have, as Sebastian points out, nonfarcical, natural justice; moreover, the possible marriage of Toby and Maria was mentioned way back in scene 5 (If Sir Toby would leave drinking, thou wert as witty a piece of Eve's flesh as any in Illyria [1.5.24–26]), and Toby himself has introduced the idea—albeit in his hyperbolic I could marry this wench for this device (2.5.168). What mat-

tered to me was that Shakespeare went to such apparent lengths to make Orsino's instant recognition of his generic obligation to love Viola seem like an authorial convenience and to announce the marriage of Toby and Maria in such a way as to make it sound like a casual act of authorial housekeeping (Maria writ / The letter, at Sir Toby's great importance, / In recompense whereof he hath married her [1.5.352–54]). In the last minutes of Twelfth Night, Shakespeare tempts his audience to condemn the play as an improbable fiction and demands that his audience consciously remember what no audience to a farce is likely to forget: that this is just a play.

He goes to the same trouble to present the in conveniences of the plot in a way that invites similar awareness of crude authorial stitching. The transition from the happy realignment of the four participants in the Orsino/Olivia/twins plot to the allbut-forgotten Malvolio plot is pointedly artificial—is wantonly and openly arbitrary about announcing an otherwise unsuspected, otherwise irrelevant fact by which the otherwise trivial topic of Viola's clothes leads into a reminder of Malvolio. This is 5.1.264–70:

DUKE:                           Give me thy hand
                And let me see thee in thy woman's weeds.

VIOLA:    The captain that did bring me first on shore
                 Hath my maid's garments. He upon some action
                 Is now in durance, at Malvolio's suit,
                 A gentleman, and follower of my lady's.

OLIVIA:   He shall enlarge him. Fetch Malvolio hither.

As a reminder of the lost loose end that Malvolio has become, Viola's account of the whereabouts of her wardrobe unravels the play just at the moment when it had begun to feel complete. But that sense of completeness was illusory: we need to see Malvolio's letter delivered and to see Malvolio himself delivered from prison. Thus, the undeniably disruptive wardrobe speech undeniably furthers the scene's efforts to tie off all the play's plot strands.

There is a similar contrariety in the fact that the plot device by which concern for Malvolio is gracefully reintroduced is so ruthlessly convenient that its very grace is awkward.

And, for yet another manifestation of contrariety in yet another dimension, consider the fact that—when this play takes sudden urgent interest in the captain that did bring Viola first on shore, a captain who has long faded from our memories—it does so while another sea captain—Antonio, who, in the phrase of the second officer, was arrested at the suit / Of Count Orsino (3.4.307–8)—is on the stage and, in so far as the silence of the text is evidence, still under arrest. The play really does forget all about him. After the speech in which he responds to the fact that an apple cleft in twain is not more twin (215) than Cesario and Sebastian, he neither speaks again, nor is spoken to, nor is spoken about.

All this is pretty dull and obvious. I have subjected you to it because I want to talk about similar and similarly simple rhymelike contrarieties that differ principally from those I have so far dwelt upon in that they do not appear to invite conscious notice—even the conscious notice of professional noticers annotating texts.

It may give you some comfort if I tell you what I am driving at. I am driving toward the proposition that from moment to moment, second to second, this last scene of Twelfth Night and, for that matter, the whole play cause our minds perpetually to pull in contrary directions simultaneously—to perceive conclusion as inconclusive or to perceive like things as self-evidently unrelated to one another.

By way of transition from effects that call attention to themselves (at least to the degree that they cause ripples in our consciousnesses) to effects that seem to me to invite no attention whatever, consider the double effect that derives from twin facts of lines 360–66—Feste's raging speech of triumph over Malvolio. That speech unexpectedly informs us that Feste has held a particular grudge against Malvolio since scene 5 and implies that Feste has been purposefully exercising it during his subsequent

participation in the group effort to discomfit Malvolio. But the vehicle for that surprising revelation is a speech that is a medley of reprises of earlier scenes—notably 1.5, which this whole last scene repeatedly and variously echoes: Why, 'some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrown upon them.' I was one, sir, in this interlude, one Sir Topas, sir; but that's all one. 'By the Lord, fool, I am not mad!' But do you remember, 'Madam, why laugh you at such a barren rascal? An you smile not, he's gagged'? And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges (5.1.360–66).

The relation of Feste's speech to the speech that precedes it evokes a similar effect in another dimension—one to which I will soon give a lot of attention. Olivia, in pity of Malvolio, calls him poor fool —"pitiable innocent": Alas, poor fool, how have they baffled thee . Feste then breaks in with a speech that reprises speeches in which Malvolio had baffled Feste by calling him an ineffective professional clown—a poor fool.

Let me start with the smallest of all the small experiences of paradox I mean to discuss: the experience of understanding 5.1.274, the second of a pair of lines I have already quoted: A most extracting frenzy of mine own / From my remembrance clearly banished his . The relationship of one's understanding of the word remembrance in that line and one's understanding of the word his is remarkable—and not least so for inviting no remark at all. Remembrance in the phrase my remembrance refers to a faculty of the mind—here, the file of active accounts in Olivia's memory bank. When one follows the signal presented by his, one understands it to say "my memory of him," but one gets that clear understanding through the intercession of the implied phrase "his remembrance." The parallel between my remembrance and his is easy, ostentatious, and syntactically commonplace. But, in "his remembrance," the absent/present word "remembrance" refers not to remembering but to something remembered. Compare the unworkable hypothetical phrase "from my thoughts drove out his"—a phrase that, in isolation at least, can only be understood if one talks oneself into accepting "his" as a synonym for

"thoughts of him"—accepting "of" meaning "about" as a synonym for "of" indicating possession. But the my remembrance / his pair does not occur in isolation. It occurs after A most extracting frenzy of mine own , a phrase that, in my own , presented a more distant but more easily meaningful antecedent for his than my remembrance did: "his extracting frenzy," a reference for his that the my remembrance / his pair successfully screens us off from but that makes easy sense in reference to the raging lunatic Olivia supposes Malvolio to be.

The phenomenon I have just discussed is not unusual. Things like it go equally unnoticed every day in ordinary discourse (and are ahnost indispensable to the day-to-day operation of faulty logic). I would not fuss about the sleight-of-mind trick one probably performs as one hears Olivia's sentence or about the syntactically less inviting substantively straightforward reading one presumably ignores, if one did not hear Olivia's sentence in context of a veritable gymkhana of strikingly various but altogether comparable perceptions of relationship.

Consider the relationship of the phrase Malvolio's suit —the key phrase of the wardrobe speech—to the fact that the speech is a wardrobe speech—a speech about clothes. Note too that Viola goes on in her next line to identify Malvolio as a follower of my Lady's , and that everyone in Twelfth Night is some kind of follower, some kind of pursuer. Twelfth Night has been largely concerned with servants, with zanylike followers (like Andrew), and with suitors—lovers endeavoring to gain favor. Moreover, hunting—particularly hunting with dogs—has been a recurrent incidental of the play ever since its third speech, in which Orsino said that the sight of Olivia turned him into a hart whose desires pursue him like hounds (1.1.19–24). And all the way through the play clothing has been an incidental topic too (These clothes are good enough to drink in [1–3. 10] and I know your favor well, / Though now you have no sea-cap on your head [3–4.3 10–11]); and Olivia's veil and Malvolio's yellow stockings are momentarily central concerns. Of course, the generically inevitable comedy topic—the

topic of what is suitable, the topic of how things ought to be—is even more persistent in this comedy than it is in most others.

I want now to consider the effect on our experience of the play and the value to it of several puns on suit that the urgently pertinent, urgently impertinent speech about Viola's clothes and the captain now in durance at Malvolio's suit does not contain. What that speech does contain are the raw materials for one or another pun on suit . Most of the untapped potential for suit play is obvious when one thinks about it (as one must as one reads this essay and as one is not invited to do as one hears or reads the speech under normal conditions): garments, at Malvolio's suit , and follower occur in concert with one another and with Orsino's new identity as suitor for Viola's hand. Moreover, in the words in durance, at Malvolio's suit (5.1.268), the wardrobe speech also presents and resists exploiting one of Shakespeare's pet puns, one no longer readily available to us, that on durance: "forced confinement" (usually in prison) / "a kind of stout durable cloth" (OED , 3).^[18]

As some of the material I have already quoted demonstrates, Viola's wardrobe speech is not unusual in Twelfth Night . Almost from the beginning, the play has repeatedly presented and resisted opportunities to pun on suit .

Consider, for instance, the opening moments of 3.4. Olivia has been musing about her progress and prospects as a suitor for Cesario's love (I have sent after him. . . . youth is bought more oft than begged or borrowed ); then she speaks the following lines to Maria: Where is Malvolio? He is sad and civil, / And suits well for a servant with my fortunes? A moment later, Malvolio—newly a suitor and

[18] Shakespeare puns brazenly on "durance" in The Comedy of Errors 4.3. 23–24, where one of the Dromios describes the officer who arrested one of the Antipholuses as the man who "takes pity on decayed men and gives them suits of durance," and in 1 Henry IV 1.2.40, where Falstaff says that the buff jerkin traditionally worn by arresting officers is "a sweet robe of durance." Restraint similar to the restraint Shakespeare shows by not cashing in the "durance" pun occurs in another dimension of Twelfth Night: the play does nothing to call conscious attention to the parallel between the captain in durance at Malvolio's suit and Malvolio's own imprisonment "in a dark room and bound" (3.4–127).

newly suited in unsuitable clothes—enters and we get our first sight of him cross-gartered and in yellow stockings.

Later in the same scene, when Antonio mistakes the disguised Viola for Sebastian and rescues her, we hear this exchange between Antonio and the arresting officers (I have already quoted some of the phrases):

2. OFFICER:      Antonio, I arrest thee at the suit
                          Of Count Orsino.

ANTONIO:                           You do mistake me, sir.

I. OFFICER:       No, sir, no jot. I know your favor well,
                          Though now you have no sea-cap on your head.
                          (3.4.307–9)

The first time Shakespeare puts his audience's mind into a verbal situation pregnant with potential for puns on "suit" is in act I, scene 2 and involves the very captain who intrudes so abruptly into the wardrobe speech in 5.1. I will use italics in the following exchange to force the unobserved potential for overt wordplay into view—thus totally distorting the usual and otherwise inevitably sweat-free effect of the lines. Viola tells the captain that she wishes she could serve Olivia:

VIOLA:                                 O that I served that lady,
                      And might not be delivered to the world,
                      Till I had made mine own occasion mellow,
                      What my estate is.

CAPTAIN:                            That were hard to compass,
                      Because she will admit no kind of suit ,
                      No, not the Duke's.

VIOLA:          There is a fair behavior in thee, captain,
                      And though that nature with a beauteous wall
                      Doth oft close in pollution, yet of thee
                      I will believe thou hast a mind that suits
                      With this thy fair and outward character.

I prithee (and I'll pay thee bounteously)
Conceal me what I am, and be my aid
For such disguise as haply shall become
The form of my intent. I'll serve this duke.
(1.2.41–55)

When I talk about puns the play does not make, I am not just trying to be cute. Common sense says that to fuss about puns that don't occur is to waste time. I suggest, however, that such invisible constellations as the ones that form in words and ideas that relate to ideas expressible in the word suit may be the prime source of Twelfth Night 's greatness.

The play keeps establishing thrilling environments for the minds that perceive it.

As one sees and hears this play one's mind is surrounded by potential for perceiving connections among disparate elements and differences between things that are also "all one." That potential is surely there in the likenesses and differences among characters and among situations. A similar potential in interactions among words and the ideas they convey is manifest in so many different patterns of relationship that, at almost any given moment in Twelfth Night , one's mind stands a split second from a flush of mental triumph—a flush comparable to the ones one feels just before one solves a problem, or just before the shininess of a pebble in the American River near Sutter's Mill attracts one's attention, or just before one realizes that one's conversational circumstances are ones in which there is a pun to be made. The flush fades immediately because achievement brings with it awareness of its limitations. All one has done is square the circle or find a cure for cancer or find gold or make a pun. The aura of potential triumph is always brighter than the triumph can be.

For my purposes here, I have gone at least as far with that line of thinking as I need to. I would, however, suggest incidentally that, somewhere along that line of thought, lie one kind of justification for old-fashioned close readings and one kind of answer to the question why great works of literature are recognized to be so before they are analyzed and—usually—revealed

to say or do things they have not previously been heard to say or seen to do.

I should now get back to the value of unmade puns.

Several pages ago, I said, "We need to see Malvolio's letter delivered and to see Malvolio himself delivered from prison." There was a play on words there. That sentence is clever—not very clever—but clever, overtly clever. My sentence simultaneously denied the differences between two senses of "to deliver" and called attention to those differences. It also advertised the perfect triviality of its Polonian achievement. It demanded a murmur of mental applause for accomplishing something—not for the something accomplished. There is, down deep, good reason for the popular contempt in which punning is held.

By way of contrast to my simultaneously insipid and explosive exploitation of the potential inherent in the word deliver , consider the splendor of what Shakespeare makes of the same potential in the last scene of Twelfth Night .

Shakespeare makes nothing of it whatsoever.

When she hears that the captain is in durance at Malvolio's suit, Olivia says, He shall enlarge him (1.5.270). A few moments later, Feste reports on Malvolio's condition in the first of two speeches that play on the verb "to deliver"—play on it in senses different from one another as well as from the sense in which "deliver him" might have said what enlarge him did five lines before—but so casually that I doubt that any audience ever registers the fact. Feste says that Malvolio

               holds Belzebub at the stave's end as well as a man in
               his case may do. Has here writ a letter to you; I
               should have given't you to-day morning. But as a
               madman's epistles are no gospels, so it skills not much
               when they are delivered.

OLIVIA :   Open't and read it.

CLOWN :  Look then to be well edified, when the fool delivers the madman.
                                           [ Reads in a loud voice ] 'By the Lord, madam'—
                                                                                                          (5. 1.276–84)

The necessary last link in the chain—the return to the substance of Olivia's He shall enlarge him —occurs twenty lines later, in line 305, where as far as I can tell it goes unobserved to be so: See him delivered, Fabian; bring him hither .

In the interval between the phrase when the fool delivers the madman and the phrase See him delivered , the play presents two other, effectively silent circuses of verbal wit. The first gets its impetus from the coincidence of the words madman and madam in when the fool delivers the madman. By the Lord, madam —although the two words are already reaching for one another several lines earlier in the speech that begins Truly, madam and ends but as a madman's epistles are no gospels, so it skills not much when they are delivered (276–80). Note Truly in Truly, madam; its sense both is and is not echoed in the word that triggers the overt word play in the speech—the play on gospels meaning Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and "gospel" used figuratively to mean "undeniably true." Similarly, the surface wit of when the fool delivers the madman —the wit inherent in the simultaneously valid and invalid distinction between fools and madmen—is echoed in its physics by the available but unexploited phonetic wit in the indistinction the first syllables of "mad man" and "mad am" might—but do not—imply.

The following sequence follows upon By the Lord, madam:

OLIVIA:      How now? Art thou mad?

CROWN:     No, madam, I do but read madness. An your ladyship
                    will have it as it ought to be, you must allow vox.

OLIVIA:      Prithee read i' thy right wits.

CROWN:     So I do, madonna; but to read his right wits is to read
                    thus. Therefore perpend, my princess, and give ear.
                                                                                                 (285–90)

Almost thirty lines later, at Malvolio's entrance, we hear madman and madam again—and in an exchange where How now? Art thou mad? is echoed in How now, Malvolio?:

          DUKE:      Is this the madman?

     OLIVIA:                                      Ay, my lord, this same.
                           How now, Malvolio?

MALVOLIO:                              Madam, you have done me wrong,
                           Notorious wrong.
                           (317–19)

As the second of those two little exchanges reaches back toward the first, so both of them reach back to a much more complex, elaborately sustained, but equally unostentatious display of valuably wasted opportunities to make comic capital of the orthographically identical, phonetically different opening sounds of madman, madam , and madonna . The display occurs in three neighboring passages in 1.5. The first is Feste's famous and splendid proof that Olivia is a fool. Although the word "mad" does not occur until line 102 (in "madman" in the third round of play on sounds, words, and ideas that can refer to fools, madness, and Olivia), the interplay of variations on "mad" in Feste's proof so urgently echo Feste's thesis that the passage flirts with, but never succumbs to, an available temptation to pun macaronically on the first three letters of madonna and say that madonna is Italian for "madwoman."^[19] Note the ostentatiously twinlike relationship between Good madonna and Good fool in Good madonna, why mournst thou? / Good fool for my brother's death and the complexly easy symmetry and asymmetry of the nearly identical next two lines—lines that differ only in the simultaneously distinct and indistinct concepts expressed in think and know , the ideationally rhyming concepts hell and heaven , and the substitution of

[19] Geoffrey Hartman's wonderfully rich and suggestive "Shakespeare's Poetical Character in Twelfth Night " (Shakespeare and the Question of Theory , ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman [New York and London, 1985], 37–53) touches momentarily but deftly on the interplay of madam and madman; Hartman says that "'madam' ('mad-dame') and 'madman' collapse distinctions of character" (45–46). Hartman also insists throughout the essay by means of casual iterations of his own that his readers observe the iterations in Twelfih Night of various senses of all one and of various senses of hand .

fool in the second line for madonna in the first. These are lines 47–67 of 1.5:

CLOWN:      The lady bade take away the fool; therefore, I say
                    again, take her away.

OLIVIA:      Sir, I bade them take away you.

CLOWN:     Misprision in the highest degree. Lady, cucullus non
                    facit monachum. That's as much to say as, I wear not
                    motley in my brain. Good madonna, give me leave to
                    prove you a fool.

OLIVIA:      Can you do it?

CLOWN:     Dexteriously, good madonna.

OLIVIA:      Make your proof.

CLOWN:     I must catechize you for it, madonna. Good my
                    mouse of virtue, answer me.

OLIVIA:      Well, sir, for want of other idleness, I'll bide your
                    proof.

CLOWN:      Good madonna, why mourn'st thou?

OLIVIA:       Good fool, for my brother's death.

CLOWN:      I think his soul is in hell, madonna.

OLIVIA:       I know his soul is in heaven, fool.

CLOWN:      The more fool, madonna, to mourn for your brother's
                     soul, being in heaven. Take away the fool, gentlemen.

Forty lines later conceptual interplay among foolishness, madness, and appellations for Olivia begins again, this time in a single speech of Feste's—a speech that concerns kinship (and, in here he comes at Toby's entrance, generates gratuitous confusion about kinship) and abruptly brings the words madonna and fool into the company of the idea of weak-mindedness expressed in the phrase weak pia mater . In that phrase lies substantively dormant—absolutely dormant—substantively unavailable potential (1) for echoing the previously central idea of motherhood, (2) for repeating a sense as contextually foreign to madonna^[20] (which here

[20] This is John Florio's gloss for "madonna": Mistris mine. Madame. Also taken for our Lady (Queen Anna's New World of Words or Dictionarie of the Italian and English Tongues  . . .[London, 1611]).

means "mistress mine" and nothing else) as the surface Latin sense—"holy mother"—is to pia mater , when as it is here it is used as an anatomical term, and (3) for presenting—as, remember, it most distinctly does not—the shadowy approximation of the term "madwoman" (an approximation inherent in the conjunction of the word mater and the idea of mental disorder): Thou hast spoke for us, madonna, as if thy eldest son should be a fool; whose skull Jove cram with brains, for—here he comes—one of thy kin has a most weak pia mater (1.5.107–10).

A few minutes later Toby concludes his uninformative report on the gentleman at Olivia's gate; he says, Let him be the devil an he will, I care not. Give me faith, say I. Well it's all one (5.1. 122–23), and leaves the stage. Thereupon, Olivia and the fool perform the third of the scene's three variations on m, a , and d in combination:

OLIVIA:      What's a drunken man like, fool?

CLOWN:      Like a drowned man, a fool, and a madman. One
                    draught above heat makes him a fool, the second
                    mads him, and a third drowns him.

OLIVIA:      Go thou and seek the crowner, and let him sit o'
                    my coz; for he's in the third degree of drink—he's
                    drowned. Go look after him.

CROWN:      He is but mad yet, madonna, and the fool shall look
                    to the madman.               [Exit.]
                    (1.5.124—32)

Malvolio enters and speaks the scene's next word: Madam .

This is already a long discussion, and I want to get to the last of the last few minutes of Twelfth Night . I will content myself with noticing only three more examples of unrealized but elaborately sustained opportunities for punning in the last scene, and I will do little more than mention those.

I have already pointed to an instance of intercourse between poor fool meaning "pitiable innocent" and poor fool meaning "inept comic entertainer." Here it will suffice to say that the play's continuing, all-but-obsessive eagerness to offer onstage evaluations of Feste's skills (I had rather than forty shillings I had such a leg ,

and so sweet a breath to sing, as the fool has [2.3.18–20]; This fellow is wise enough to play the fool [3.1.58]; The knave counterfeits well; a good knave [4.2.19])—keeps company with Feste's repeated and regularly successful efforts to make himself richer.

Intervening between the twin flurries of mad-madam activity—and in part overlapping them as they themselves overlap the variations on deliver and suit —is a dizzyingly fruitful field for punning—one that Shakespeare fruitfully forbids his speakers to harvest. The exchanges about the two letters (lines 277–304, about the letter written to Olivia by Malvolio; lines 318–44, about the letter not written to Malvolio by Olivia)—have a unifying common denominator in the altogether unexploited opportunities they offer for an outlandish variety of plays on writing, reading, right, and wrong. The verbal festival begins in line 286 when Feste talks about reading madness and introduces the idea of rightness, how "it ought to be":

                    I do but read madness. An your ladyship will have it
                    as it ought to be, you must allow vox.

OLIVIA:      Prithee read i' thy right wits.

CLOWN:      So I do, madonna; but to read his right wits is to read
                    thus. Therefore perpend, my princess, and give ear.

OLIVIA:      [to Fabian ] Read it you, sirrah.

FABIAN:     (reads ) 'By the Lord, madam, you wrong me. . . .'
                    (5.1.286–92)

The exercise reaches its entirely unnoticeable perfection in lines 318–19 of the second sequence when Malvolio says Madam, you have done me wrong, / Notorious wrong . The first syllable of Notorious is of course—and of course does not ask to be observed to be—a synonym for "epistle."

MALVOLIO:           Madam, you have done me wrong.
                         Notorious wrong.

OLIVIA:                                                   Have I, Malvolio? No.

MALVOLIO:    Lady, you have. Pray you peruse that letter.

                         You must not now deny it is your hand.
                         Write from it if you can, in hand or phrase....
                                                                                    (5.1.318–22)

In the lines just quoted the pattern in writing and rightness overlapped with a concurrent pattern made in different meanings of the word hand .

Shakespeare appears to have been partial to play-long, alliteration-like repetitions of words capable of reference to body parts. The whole of Hamlet is studded with references to ears—including, for example, the mildewed ear of grain that, like Claudius, blasts its wholesome brother (3.4.65–66). In King Lear , feet—some French and secret. In Love's Labor's Lost , buttocks. In Troilus and Cressida , arms. In Twelfth Night , hands. I will resist laboring the topic of hands, handwriting, commands, and such in Twelfth Night except to say that—whereas in As You Like It Shakespeare wastes the inherent energy of hand in an openly chuckle-hungry pun on hand meaning "the extremity of the arm" and hand meaning "handwriting" (Rosalind denies that Phoebe could have written the letter Silvius delivers: I saw her hand. She has a leathern hand, / A freestone-colored hand. I verily did think / That her old gloves were on.... This is a man's invention and his hand [4.3.25–27, 30])—in Twelfth Night he does not.^[21]

A great while ago, I argued the rarely debated proposition that Shakespeare is a better writer than I am. Shakespeare is also sometimes a better writer than Shakespeare is in As You Like It . The various hands in Twelfth Night reach out to one another (as they do across the lines that separate Orsino's first blurry, amorphous marriage proposal to Viola [5.1.264–65] and his second [311–16]—and as the ensuing discussion of Olivia's and Maria's twin handwriting does to Give me thy hand and Here is my hand

[21] As You Like It also sports a heavyhanded pun on "suit." Jaques says, "O that I were a fool! / I am ambitious for a motley coat." The duke promises him one, and Jaques's response is "It is my only suit" (2.7.42–44).

in the marriage proposals)—but in Twelfth Night , unlike As You Like It , they never clasp.

As to Feste's final song, it is an emblem of the last scene and, like the scene, an emblem of Twelfth Night at large.

For instance, the whole song circles longingly around seductive potential for a pun on son (a boy child) and sun (which ever art when rain is not)—a pun that would complement 3.1.37–38: Foolery, sir, does walk about the orb like the sun; it shines every where .

Feste stands all alone on the stage at the end of a play that is complete—is all one—and is not, alone on the stage at the end of a play that over its whole length has played with the ingredients and potential of the word alone —notably with those ingredients in the phrase all one and that phrase's potential to say "does not matter" (that is, to say what What You Will , the play's subtitle, says) and/or to say "the same," and/or to say "whole," "complete."

This is the song's first stanza:

When that I was and a little tiny boy,
   With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
   For the rain it raineth every day.

When that I was and a little tiny boy: that is an ordinary "when" clause—except that its fifth syllable, and , does not perform, cannot perform, its usual conjunctive function in this sentence; in fact, in this syntax it is incapable of any substantive function whatever. That, however, doesn't bother us: this is a song; and we are used to nonsense syllables in songs—syllables present for merely rhythmic purpose.

With hey, ho, the wind and the rain: this line follows—but does not follow from—the line that precedes it. For an instant, With gestures toward the kind of connection that the preposition "with" makes for the Whittier-blessed "little man," the "bare-

foot boy with cheek of tan." But the wind and the rain are not personal attributes. That does not, of course, matter to us. This is a song. We are used to the substantively irrelevant "with" that introduces refrain lines. I would mention, however, that here, as in all similar songs, the substantively impertinent prepositional gesture of relationship is a gesture of relationship—connects, makes one thing of, two lines that have no more-than-local connection at all except the one asserted by With —which does function as an asserter of connection, albeit nonlogically. With finally asserts no connection between the substance of one line and the substance of the next. With comes ultimately to assert simple connection between the lines as lines—as, and only to the extent that, a rope makes a cow part of a barn and makes a barn part of a cow.

A foolish thing was but a toy , on the other hand, does connect logically with line I—the line from which it is dis connected by line 2, a line introduced by a gesture of substantively irrelevant connection. Line 3 presents the independent clause inherently promised by the "when" clause. The interrupted substantive unity of lines x and 3 corresponds to the interrupted formal unity they have by virtue of the a, b, a, b rhyme scheme.

Line 2 was a nonsense line. Line 3 is not. Its syntax meshes logically with that of line I, and its substantive particulars pertain to childhood. Moreover, the irrelevance of the nonsense line (like the irrelevance of the other refrain lines—the second and fourth lines of each of the first four quatrains) vouches for the substantive coherence of the substantively purposeful pair it interrupts.

But what does A foolish thing was but a toy mean? Not much. Foolish thing and toy are synonyms: twins. The line says "a foolish thing was only a foolish thing." If it were not for the word but —which suggests that we will subsequently hear that a foolish thing subsequently came to count for more than it once did and more than the logic of synonyms says it justly should—line 3 would be nonsense too—though nonsense of a different kind

than the nonsense of the refrain line (it would be nonsense of the sort exemplified in That that is is [4.2.14] or There's never a villain dwelling in all Denmark / But he's an arrant knave [Hamlet 1.5.123–24]).

For the rain it raineth every day is another substantively irrelevant nonsense line—obviously so and for reasons similar to the ones that evoked generic recognition in line 2. This second nonsense line also presents itself as a substantive continuation of the preceding line. This time the connection is urgently logical: the line begins with For —"because"—and momentarily promises to explain or justify the assertion made in line 3. When, as of its third syllable, line 4 turns out to be impertinent to line 3, it simultaneously shows itself pertinent to line 2, which was also about weather; the earlier, similarly irrelevant line now has a twin established in terms irrelevant to the pair it interrupted.

And, by the end of the line, the second "b " rhyme establishes the twinship of lines 2 and 4 in another dimension. The rhyme, however, is not perfect: the vowel sounds of rain and day are identical, but day lacks a final n . But the rhyme sounds of lines 2 and 4 are also more than perfect. Day does not rhyme perfectly with rain , but it does rhyme perfectly with hey , the first stressed syllable of line 2; and rain , though imperfectly matched by day, is perfectly matched by—is repeated by—the first stressed syllable of line 4: rain .

Although the legitimate union of the outlaw lines is indisputably established, For the rain it raineth every day still gestures toward explanation—and does not explain the second line—a syntactic fragment incapable of explanation in any event—any better than it did the third. Furthermore—at exactly the moment when the rhyme word, day , is in the act of imperfectly augmenting the otherwise-established independent identity that lines 2 and 4 (the weather lines) have from lines I and 3—the phrase every day suddenly but gently establishes kinship between the nonsense lines and lines 1 and 3, the pair of lines focused in the concepts of time and mutability.

This is the second stanza of the song:

But when I came to man's estate,
  With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
'Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate,
   For the rain it raineth every day.

By the time we have heard the second stanza—and heard the tune two times through—we understand the rules. We understand that, although the second and fourth lines of these quatrains have substantive and syntactic coherence, their action is effectively formal. They are of a commonplace but complex kind. Like similar lines in similar songs, the second and the fourth lines of these quatrains correspond in kind to the nonsignifying ideational interplay of mad and madam , or read, write, wrong, right , and notorious . The refrain lines are agents of nonsubstantive—that is, noncommnicating—coherence. They work to the same kind of effect to which a tune the song is sung to works—the effect to which any tune any verses are sung to works. The refrain lines work as rhythms, rhymes, and alliterations work. The refrain lines bind the stanzas to one another. At the same time, they are agents of incoherence. They are substantively and logically unrelated to the autobiography-like narrative that is beginning to emerge in the substantively efficient lines. The With is filler. And "because it rains every day" cannot be conceived of as witness to the truth of the assertions spread over the first and third lines.

Quatrain 3 is insistently one with quatrain 2—more so than quatrain 2 was with quatrain I. Both 2 and 3 begin with But when I came . Moreover, the pattern of chronological narrative is becoming more certain. Quatrain 3, however, while progressing through the steps of a predictable young manhood, colors the essence of what it echoes.

But when I came, alas, to wive,
  With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
By swaggering could I never thrive,
  For the rain it raineth every day.

In 1954, in his The First Night of "Twelfth Night" (p. 168), Leslie Hotson suggested that thing in A foolish thing in line 3 of quatrain I had—or played on—the bawdy sense that, like fool and toy, thing has as a slang term for "penis." Hotson was, quite properly, hooted down. There is nothing in the substantive context of quatrain I to activate any of the bawdy potential of thing (or fool or toy ). But when the first line of quatrain 3 comes to wive , its last syllable, it retroactively generates a sexual context for the diction of quatrain I—and for the modification quatrain 2 imposed on the state of original innocence presented there. The incidental sexual context persists in the rest of quatrain 3 and in quatrain 4. Quatrain 3 is overtly playful. But when I came, alas, to wive plays casually on "a lass"—a girl. And—to state the matter simply and obscenely—But when I came alas to wive . . .By swaggering could I never thrive says that, for the groom, marriage is a put-up-or-shut-up situation.

Quatrain 4 insists further on the likeness of the successive quatrains to their siblings. It too begins But when I came . This third "come to" construction, however, is subtly different from the two it echoes. Unlike to in came to man's estate and came . . .to wive , the to in came unto my beds actually introduces a physical destination—a place to move toward.

But when I came unto nay beds,
  With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
With tosspots still had drunken heads,
  For the rain it raineth every day.

The first line of this quatrain is not only subtly different from the first lines of quatrains 2 and 3; it is crudely different as well. Except as it comes vaguely to have imitated the double vision of a teetering drunk, But when I came unto my beds does not make sense: beds is plural; one can lie down in only one bed. Still, line 2 is reassuringly identical with the three previous second lines. Indeed, each time they recur, the pairs of second and fourth lines—pairs whose prime identifying quality is their imperti-

nence—become, in another organizational dimension, increasingly pertinent—pertinent to the song as song. At the same time—and at the same time that a sort of autobiography-like quatrain-to-quatrain continuity is developing—the substantively coherent pairs of lines in the middle three quatrains are ostentatiously discontinuous with, and impertinent to, one another. Each begins with a signal of logical discontinuity—the conjunction But —and quatrains 3 and 4 make sudden topical leaps. On the other hand, the context has become more and more supportive; the narrative has become more and more clearly coherent. Now, in quatrain 4, the syntax of lines I and 3—the syntax that successfully carries the continuation of the autobiography-like narrative—collapses. Now, in quatrain 4, where the first line has behaved like a nonsense line, the third line usurps the formulaic opening gesture of each of the previous second lines. And—though this use of with is not the substantively irrelevant one with has as a hook to hold refrain lines—the with of With tosspots still had drunken heads does introduce a nonsense line—a line where one head is plural and where the logical relationship with establishes between line I and line 3 is similarly drunken.

Paradoxically enough, however, the second nonsense line of quatrain 4 is regular and is thus reassuring: For the rain it raineth every day . But it is not so obviously isolated from the narrative lines as it has been in its previous appearances. Now both pairs of lines have a topical common denominator: liquids. And—in context of the issue of adequate and inadequate masculine sexual performance and of the idea of swaggering—the contrast between wind and rain has begun to feel pertinent to the content of the substantive lines—as has the daily reliability of rain.

The song started out talking about its singer's distant past. Quatrains 2, 3, and 4 presented a series of events from his less distant past. The song seems to be moving toward the present. Quatrain 4, however, while confirming that impression, seems to blur together many days or weeks or years. It also concerns

evening and night—and thus points toward a conclusion, toward an assertion of how things are now (or how they soon will be or how they must at last inevitably be for all mortals). Instead, the first line of the last quatrain of this song that started from the speaker's distant past and moved forward chronologically now leaps to the ultimate human past—to creation—and, in its last line, talks about the indefinite future .

A great while ago the world begun,
  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.^[22]

The present—now —is effectively missing. It gets lost.

The same sort of thing happened at the end of the play's dramatized action. Both in general (as, for instance, in Feste's mocking reminder of the past and Malvolio's threat for the future), and in the substance and grammatical structures of the speech with which Orsino concludes the fiction, the end of Twelfth Night behaves as if there were no present, only a past and a future—and lets our minds behave in something like the way they would if human minds were capable of the impossible task of imagining time without a present moment.^[23] This is that concluding speech (note, incidentally, the incidental clash of dimensions we casually weather when, four lines from his final exit [from the

[22] For the first four stanzas of the final song, I have quoted the Pelican text as usual. In this last stanza, however, I follow the folio's version of the second line of the last stanza (even though the variation between it and its counterparts in earlier stanzas is very probably accidental).

[23] As Geoffrey Hartman has observed, present time momentarily evaporated back in act 1. In the essay I mentioned earlier he comments acutely on what Olivia says when she accedes to the request that she remove her veil and let "Cesario" see her face: Look you, sir, such a one I was this present . Hartman says this: "I was, not I am; by pretending she is a painting, just unveiled, the original I is no longer there, or only as this picture which points to a present in the way names or texts point to a meaning.... There is no 'present'" (51).

stage], Orsino says We will not part from hence [will not part from Olivia's house]):

Pursue him and entreat him to a peace,
He hath not told us of the captain yet.
When that is known, and golden time convents,
A solemn combination shall be made
Of our dear souls. Meantime, sweet sister,
We will not part from hence. Cesario, come—
For so you shall be while you are a man,
But when in other habits you are seen,
Orsino's mistress and his fancy's queen.
                                                   (5.1.369–77)

All in all, the last quatrain of Feste's song multiplies the play's typical characteristics.

The line that follows the once ostentatiously predictable pattern of likeness—line 2—here loses its ceremonial initial With (at least With is absent in the First Folio text of the last quatrain; the Second Folio printer seems to have assumed that the initial With was lost by accident and to have replaced it; most subsequent editors have followed his lead; but, whatever the cause, the missing With in quatrain 5 is one more casual manifestation of simultaneous likeness and difference in Twelfth Night ).

Line 3 of the last quatrain suddenly dismisses all of history (But that's all one ), and just as suddenly announces that the play is done—is complete—is "all one." But, typically of the physics of Twelfth Night , the assertion of finality that is made in But that's all one, our play is done —that is made in a line made extrafinal by the word one , an extra, midline "a " rhyme that augments the end rhymes in begun and done (words that rhyme ideationally as well as phonetically)—is an assertion of finality that occurs before the quatrain can end. It has to have a fourth line. The fourth line begins with And , which here is at once songlike metrical filler and a real signal of continuation. The promise of future performances of future plays is as impertinent to the song as the song was to the apparently concluded play it continued. But the

last line does end with every day , does come to complete the otherwise lost likeness between this quatrain and its predecessors.

As of the moment we hear But that's all one, our play is done , the singer of this song is—as, of course, he also always has been—the actor who has been playing Feste and not Feste "himself" (Feste is only a character in a play).

But this character in a play is himself an actor. Feste played Sir Topas the curate and, already costumed as Sir Topas, prefaced that performance by offering Sir Toby—whose name is not Sir Topas—an absolutely perfect and perfectly unexceptional pair of pairs of twins: two identical, nonidentical thats and two identical, nonidentical is s: "That that is is ". One clause later, however, when one or the other in the second pair of thats (there is no way to tell which and no need to) and one or the other in the second pair of is s (there is no way to tell which and no need to) turned out to be references to the word that and the word is instead of instances of their use, the pairs of twins became so extraordinary as to discourage any further attempt at understanding what was by then obviously mere nonsense: "That that is is"; so, I, being Master Parson, am Master Parson; for what is "that" but that, and "is" but is (4.2.14–16). On the other hand, in one logic or another, each of these three clauses makes sense. And—granting its merely verbal equation of two senses of being —so did the logic of the whole.

In the fiction performed by the actors, the speaker of that fool-like parody of jackleg scholasticism was, by the way, either Feste pretending ontological discourse on his assumed identity as Sir Topas—the role he is about to play—or Feste pretending already to be playing that role and imitating Sir Topas engaged in ontological discourse. There is no way to tell which and no need to.

Now, in But that's all one, our play is done —the next-to-last line of the play—the actor who has played Feste echoes lines he spoke a few minutes earlier when Feste recalled his own theatrical performance as Sir Topas: I was one, sir, in this interlude, one Sir Topas, sir; but that's all one (5.1.361–63). At the moment when the words I was one, sir, in this interlude were heard, the theatrical

term interlude referred to the whole extended practical joke; one in , of course, meant "party to," "a participant in" (as variations on that locution do earlier in the play in Olivia's to make one in so skipping a dialogue [1.5. 190–91] and Andrew's I'll make one too [2.5.191]). The next phrase makes interlude refer specifically to the onstage masquerade in which Feste played the role of Sir Topas and makes the word less a metaphor: I was one in this interlude, one Sir Topas . But Feste was not one in that interlude. He, who carried on both sides in conversation between himself and himself playing Sir Topas, was two.

And the actor is two here too. He is what Feste is: a professional entertainer. And he is here performing for his audience as—as Feste—he has performed both for that audience and for onstage audiences. Moreover, in the traditional plaudite gesture of And we'll strive to please you every day , he asks by implication what various characters and Feste himself have asked all the way through the play—whether Feste's efforts to please are successful (Doth not this fool mend? ), and whether other kinds of performance are adequate (as I noted earlier, judgment of performances is an incidental of Orsino's first speech, the first speech of the play: Enough, no more, / Tis not so sweet now as it was before ). And the actor asks the question at the end of a song that has idly echoed other persistent details of the fiction from which But that's all one, our play is done does and does not break free—details like play on little thing (3.4-282–83: A little thing would make me tell them how much I lack of a man ); gates (1.4. 14–15 [my italics]: "Therefore, good youth, address thy gait unto her; / Be not denied access , stand at her doors "; 1.5.99–268, passim; 3.1.80: "I will answer you with gait and entrance "); swaggering, drunkenness, and Feste's efforts to thrive financially. Consider quatrain 2 in particular. That quatrain establishes the aesthetic ground rules of the song and thus augments the independence of its identity. But the quatrain echoes early parts of the story. In act 1, scene 2 Viola—wishing "not to be delivered to the world" till she had made her own occasion mellow what her estate was (42, 43)—suddenly came to man's estate by means of masculine usurped

attire; and—in 1.5—men shut Olivia's gates to her.

More urgently, this actor—who now seems to have ceased to play Feste once the action stopped—has stood all alone and sung a song in which the singer/autobiographer got married—and, like the well-sorted/oddly-sorted lovers in Twelfth Night , got married inconclusively.

I should not, however, myself be inconclusive. Although I have said as much as I have to say about the last song, the last scene, and Twelfth Night itself, I should say something summary. I go on record, therefore, as saying that Twelfth Night is about twins—deeply, totally, perfectly, about twins. I will, moreover, therefore risk further generalization on what it is that is so good about Twelfth Night: Twelfth Night is good because it is so witty.

Twelfth Night is a witty play.

It may well strike you as it does Horatio in Hamlet that there needs no ghost . . .come . . .to tell us this . However, the term "witty play" ordinarily means a "play with lots of witty lines in it"—a play that is a vehicle for wit, that contains wit. That is not what I mean. Twelfth Night surely contains wit, but it is also witty. The container, the play itself, is witty. When one calls a line or a phrase witty, what one is saying is that the line or phrase enables its auditor simultaneously to perceive simultaneous rightness and wrongness, that the elements conjoined in the witty assertion belong together and also—in some other pertinent set of terms—do not. In saying that Twelfth Night is a witty play, I am saying that in all its dimensions and in every scale—every scale from the relationship of its at once separable and inseparable plot lines to the catechism and mouse game in I must catechize you for it, madonna. Good my mouse of virtue, answer me or the complex phonics of Therefore perpend, my princess, and give ear—Twelfth Night consists of relationships that are at once just and unjust and of disjunctions among parts of entities that are and remain all one.