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.