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.