1. In making this claim, my argument directly opposes that of Leslie Hotson, whose close reading of the play's contexts is based on archival records of Don Virginio Orsino's visit to Queen Elizabeth's court in 1601, where the duke was entertained with dances, masques, and music. Hotson's work is invaluable for its wealth of contemporary excavations and its imaginative textual forays; I have been especially influenced by his treatment of the Olivia-Elizabeth parallel. However, his reading as a whole is based on what seem to me several untenable premises, chief among them this: that Orsino in Twelfth Night is meant as a compliment to the visiting dignitary. See Leslie Hotson, The First Night of "Twelfth Night" (London: Rupert Hart-Davies, 1954), esp. 113-32, for the inscription of Elizabeth in the play.

2. The most thorough treatment of Malvolio's social position is John Draper, The "Twelfth Night" of Shakespeare's Audience (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1950), 86-113.

3. Archbishop John Whitgift, An Answere to a certen libel intituled An Admonition to the parliament 1572 (London, 1572), 18.

4. Nashe, Pasquil's Return , in The Works of Thomas Nashe , ed. Ronald Brunlees McKerrow, 5 vols. (London: A. H. Bullen, 1904), 1:94.

5. Nashe, Pierce Penniless , in Works , 2:100.

6. G. K. Hunter, ed., All's Well That Ends Well (rpt. London: Methuen, 1977), and note to 1.3.91-92. Robert Greene complains that even his genuine remorse about past turpitude was mocked as a hypocritical act: "When I had discouered that I sorrowed for my wickednesse. . . they fell vpon me in ieasting manner, calling me Puritane and Presizian." Greene, Repentance , in The Life and Complete Works in Prose and Verse of Robert Greene , ed. Alexander B. Grosart, 12 vols. (London: Aylesbury, printed for private circulation, 1881-86), 12:176.

For more on the vestiarian controversy, see Marshall Mason Knappen's seminal work, Tudor Puritanism: A Chapter in the History of Idealism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1939), 187-216.

7. On this point, see any of the following superb studies: Knappen, Tudor Puritanism ; Patrick Collinson, The Elizabeth Puritan Movement (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967); Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: Studies in the Origins of Radical Politics (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1966); William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism (New York: Harper and Row, 1957); J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments, 1584-1601 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1957); and for the literary response, William P. Holden, Anti-Puritan Satire 1572-1642 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1954).

8. So Meredith Hanmer, writing in 1577 a history of the early church, asserts that "Novatus . . . became himself the author and ringleader of his own hereticall sect, to wit, of such as through their swelling pride do call themselves Puritans." In The auncient ecclesiasticall histories of the first six hundred years after Christ . . . (London, 1577), VI.43.116.

9. Paul Siegel, "Malvolio: Comic Puritan Automaton," in Maurice Charney, ed., Shakespearean Comedy (New York Literary Forum, 1980), 217-30; hereafter cited in text and notes as Siegel, "Malvolio."

10. J. L. Simmons, "A Source for Shakespeare's Malvolio: The Elizabethan Controversy with the Puritans," Huntington Library Quarterly 36 (May 1973): 181. Simmons makes the most complete case for Malvolio as a Puritan inscription; Siegel and all subsequent commentators on the issue are much indebted to this article.

11. All citations and quotations from Twelfth Night are from the Arden edition, ed. J. M. Lothian and T. W. Craik (London: Methuen, 1975).

12. Paul Siegel, Shakespeare in His Time and Ours (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1968), 246.

13. "For a static and deterministic Humour, Shakespeare substituted a kinetic, governing Appetite in the action . . . of his major characters." John Hollander, " Twelfth Night and the Morality of Indulgence," in James L. Calderwood and Harold E. Toliver, eds., Essays in Shakespearean Criticism (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 292. See also Kenneth Burke's marvelous description of Orsino's ''larval feeding," from "Trial Translation

(From Twelfth Night )," in his The Philosophy of Literary Form , 3d ed. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1973), 344-49. I thank Frank Whigham for this reference.

14. Siegel makes the leap between Maria's designation "time-pleaser" and one who professes religion simply for his own profit by means of Thomas Wilson's A Discourse upon Usury (1572; rpt. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925), which may have appeared when it did partly as a counter to An Admonition to Parliament (1572). Siegel cites Wilson's argument that "touching this sinne of usury, none doe more openly offende in thys behalfe than do these counterfaite professours of thys pure religion" (178); Siegel, "Malvolio," 218.

15. Siegel cites Holden's Anti-Puritan Satire 1572-1642 , 42, 114-15, for evidence that Puritans were regarded as misers and business cheats. Siegel, "Malvolio," 219.

16. This custom might sound barbaric and improbable, but in agricultural areas it is (or was) frequent. In one recent American case, "A former agricultural sciences high school teacher who was fired after one of his students castrated a pig with his teeth is asking the Texas Education Agency for his job back." The man, named (this is true) Dick Pirkey, defended his pedagogical method by explaining that "when he was in college, his professor showed him how to orally castrate lambs. . . . Indeed, a textbook used by the Harmony [Texas] school district recommends oral castration of lambs. . . . A lawyer representing Pirkey presented three textbooks that discuss oral lamb castration, including one with pictures." David Elliot, "Pig Castration Teacher Wants Job Back," Austin American-Statesman , January 28, 1993, B1.

17. For Toby's own inclination to assume and command such postures, see his orders to Andrew concerning Cesario: "Go, Sir Andrew: scout me for him at the corner of the orchard, like a bum-baily" (3.4.177-78). Lothian and Craik define the term: "a bailiff (sheriff's officer) who comes up behind his quarry" ( Twelfth Night , 102). This positioning is reminiscent of the observation of Malvolio and his discovery of the letter, as I discuss below.

18. For a full-length consideration of the ways in which the Lucrece story functions in the larger context of Western humanism, see Stephanie H. Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Univ. of Indiana Press, 1989).

19. See Barbara Freedman, Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), 192-235, and Elizabeth Freund, " Twelfth Night and the Tyranny of Interpretation," ELH 53 (1986): 471-89.

20. For some other examples of the I/ay and O puns, see Eric Partridge, Shakespeare's Bawdy (New York: Dutton, 1960), 109 and 159, s.v. "eye" and "O." The "A" may stand for "ass" or "arse,'' a possibility I am less confident about; still, the reading is tempting, in that the "A" and the "O" are said to be in the wrong places in the anagram, and so this scene can stand as a low-comic, parodic version of the Viola plot.

21. See James F. Forrest, "Malvolio and Puritan 'Singularity,'" English Language Notes 11 (1973), 260; cited in Siegel, "Malvolio," 221.

22. See Holden, Anti-Puritan Satire , for a balanced reading of Malvolio's

Puritan and non-Puritan elements: "Indeed, Malvolio shows no sign of religious eccentricity in the course of the play; it is, rather, in other respects that he gives the impression of being Puritanical. . . . He is too solemn and sad: he talks un-necessarily of decay and death. . . . However, in his speeches in later scenes, Malvolio has no trace of the traditional idiom or phrase of the precisian: he talks as a well-trained servant in a household should" (124-25). See also the note by Rolfe in the Variorum edition of Twelfth Night , ed. Horace Howard Furness (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1904), 130.

Malvolio's interest in decay and death, by the way, invites a comparison between the steward and the fool, who is always singing about the end of festivity. This comparison becomes explicit at the end of the play when Olivia, with measured sympathy, says to her steward: "Alas, poor fool, how have they baffled thee." It should also be noted that Malvolio's description of Viola as Cesario could play as a species of "excellent fooling," although this would not occur to him:

We can spy a further convergence between Malvolio and Feste not only in their bitter rivalry but in the fool's own moral pronouncements; he has already made to Orsino the most Puritanical commentary in the drama: "Truly, sir, and pleasure will be paid, one time or another" (2.4.70). Malvolio is far from isolated in his constructed convictions. Indeed, Puritanism, verbal precision, and accounting (or attention to money) are all of a piece in Illyria. Shown to be, in the letter-deciphering scene, a "corrupter of words" like Feste (and, more to the point, of nonwords such as "M.O.A.I.''), Malvolio does not make wanton with language, as Feste and Maria do, but attempts to make words too accurate, too representational. Summing up the evidence of Toby's behavior that, he thinks, points to his favor, Malvolio asserts that "no dram of a scruple, no scruple of a scruple, no obstacle, no incredulous or unsafe circumstance—what can be said?—nothing that can be can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes" (3.4.79-83). His verbal involutions, shorn of the spirit of foolery, seem like foolishness. But the attempts either to straitjacket language or to disengage it from sense (Feste: "my lady has a white hand, and the Myrmidons are no bottle-ale houses" [2.3.28-29]) have the same degree of moral rectitude, and both serve their corrupters a single purpose: to profit materially ("Come on, there is sixpence for you"). The clown and the steward, the fool and the madman, fight over the same precise ground.

23. The obstruction in the blood registers the bodily effect of interpretive blockage; earlier, sifting through the letter's clues, Malvolio commented: "Why, this is evident to any formal capacity. There is no obstruction in this" (2.5.117-19). The culmination of these references comes in act 4, where Feste/Sir Topas paradoxically asserts that Malvolio's prison is and is not dark: "Why, it hath bay-windows transparent as barricadoes, and the clerestories toward the south-

north are as lustrous as ebony: and yet complainest thou of obstruction?" (4.2.37-40). The symbolic subtext of these lines is the claim that Malvolio sees only "through a glass darkly"—that is, not at all: "now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known" (1 Cor. 13:12). But even though revelation and recognition do come to him, they are scarcely spiritual uncoverings. The claim that Malvolio's designed torment has anything to do with his spiritual deficit is itself a morally occluded one, particularly coming from the revenging Fool and his admirers.

24. A perceptive account of this dynamic between servants is in Elliot Krieger, A Marxist Study of Shakespeare's Comedies (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979), 97-130; hereafter cited in text.

25. Hotson, First Night , 113.

26. Generally speaking, Puritans (whose Calvinist theology was integrally related to and not far afield from the dominant Anglicans') were not treated in such fashion. For a brief account of Jesuit persecution, see Patrick McGrath, Papists and Puritans under Elizabeth I (London: Blandford Press, 1967), 255-58.

27. Lothian and Craik note that the folio spelling, "Renegatho," "reflects the word's Spanish origin and Elizabethan pronunciation" ( Twelfth Night , 88).

28. Bancroft, Survay of the Pretended Holy Discipline (London, 1593), 415-16; quoted in Simmons, "Source for Shakespeare's Malvolio," 184.

29. Quoted in Harry Culverwell Porter, ed., Puritanism in Tudor England (London: Macmillan, 1970), 198-99; hereafter cited in text.

30. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion , trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1986), 34. But Malvolio should have read on: "never will we have enough confidence in God unless we become deeply distrustful of ourselves. Never will we lift up our hearts enough in him unless they be previously cast down in us" (34).

31. Oliver Ormerod, Puritano-Papismus: or A discouerie of Puritanpapisme , 24, sig. P2; hereafter cited in text. This work is appended to The Picture of a Puritan; or, A Relation of the opinions, qualities, and practises of the Anabaptists in Germanie, and of the Puritanes in England (London, 1605; rpt. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1975 [STC 18851]).

32. John S. Coolidge, The Pauline Renaissance in England: Puritanism and the Bible (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), esp. 1-22.

33. J.E. Neale, "The Via Media in Politics: A Historical Parallel," in his Essays in Elizabethan History (London: Jonathan Cape, 1958), 120-21.

34. John Field, the stalwart Puritan author and organizer, inveighed against the custom:

As for matrimony, that also has corruptions too many. It was wont to be counted a sacrament; and therefore they use yet a sacramental sign, to which they attribute the virtue of wedlock. I mean the wedding ring, which they foully abuse and dally withal, in taking it up and laying it down.

Field, "A View of popish Abuses yet remaining in the English Church, for which the godly Ministers have refused to subscribe," quoted in Porter, Puritanism in Tudor England , 128-29. For more on Field, see Patrick Collinson, "John Field

and Elizabethan Puritanism," in S. T. Bindoff, J. Hurstfield, and C. H. Williams eds., Elizabethan Government and Society: Essays Presented to Sir John Neale (London: Athlone Press, 1961), 127-62.

35. Marshall Mason Knappen, ed., Two Elizabethan Puritan Diaries by Richard Rogers and Samuel Ward (Chicago: American Society for Church History, 1933), 65.

36. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism , rev. ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1937), esp. 226-43. For a vigorous rejection of Tawney's hypothesis on the grounds that "such ideas are utterly unrepresentative of classical Puritanism and even of Puritan economic theory," see A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation (New York: Schocken, 1964), 316-17. Dickens argues, with important resonances for those who would see Malvolio in solely Puritanical garb, that the Puritan movement was "an essentially other-worldly religion, dominated not only by an almost morbid moral sensitivity but by a real distrust of 'modern' capitalist tendencies" (317). But David Zaret suggests that the "rhetorical use of contractual themes by Puritan clerics makes sense only in view of their assumption that godly parishioners were familiar with the principles and practices dictated by the rational pursuit of self-interest in markets. Indeed, textual evidence indicates how this assumption explicitly animated Puritan rhetoric." See The Heavenly Contract: Ideology and Organization in Pre-Revolutionary Puritanism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985), 203. The "corrosive individualism that undermined the corporate solidarity and structure of communal life and thus paved the way for capitalist society" ( Heavenly Contract , 201) that some historians have described Puritanism as fostering well describes Malvolio's solitary (if not "singular'') stance and concern with his own status in the play. But I cannot help thinking that the so-called festive community of Illyria, especially the other members of Olivia's house, comprises an aggregate of corrosive individuals whose sincere dedication to producing nothing itself undermines the capitalist enterprise. The structure of communal life in Twelfth Night is among the play's most difficult social elements to pin down.

37. See The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible , s.v. "steward, stewardship." I have also benefited from the citations in The Encyclopedia of the Lutheran Church , ed. Julius Bodensieck, 3 vols. (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1965), 3:2264-65; hereafter cited in the text as Encyclopedia .

38. Quoted in Porter, Puritanism in Tudor England , 143.

39. It might be argued that these characteristics became distinctly "Puritan" only in the mid to later seventeenth century, and thus that Krieger's claim is ahistorical. But he makes a useful point about the symbolic and philosophical similarity of tormentor and victim, and about their actual divergence in terms of class affiliations.

40. John Field (?), An Admonition to the Parliament (London, 1572), in W. H. Frere and C. E. Douglas, eds., Puritan Manifestoes: A Study of the Origin of the Puritan Revolt (London: Church Historical Society, 1907), 22; hereafter cited in text.

41. For more on the specific objections of Puritans to theater, see Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981), 80-131.

42. For a stunning early Elizabethan example of a direct critique, see Edward Dering, A Sermon Preached Before the Queenes Majestie (1570), in his Workes (London, 1597).

43. Neale, "Via Media in Politics": "To Queen Elizabeth, Puritanism was an abomination. She hated and scorned its doctrinaire character, disliked its radicalism, and detested its inquisitorial discipline" (121).

44. Letter to Archbishop Parker, quoted in Porter, Puritanism in Tudor England , 141.

45. For a fine summary of the position and status of the Brownists in Elizabethan England, see Samuel Hopkins, The Puritans and Queen Elizabeth; or, the Church, Court, and Parliament of England , 3 vols. (New York, 1875), 1:218-33.

46. "The thrust of Puritan doctrine, for all the evasiveness of the ministers, was clear enough: it pointed toward the overthrow of the traditional order." Walzer, Revolution of the Saints , 118.

47. Anglican authorities worried openly about and fought vigorously against burgeoning Puritan parliamentary influence primarily in the 1570s to the early 1590s. In Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments , Neale asserts that "'the godly brotherhood'—as they termed themselves—were in process of creating a revolutionary situation" (145) in the parliaments of the mid-1580s.

48. Patrick McGrath confirms that "the Puritans, like the Papists, were not again to enjoy the successes which had been so marked a feature of their history in the 1580s." McGrath, Papists and Puritans , 252.

49. This point is emphasized by Stephen Orgel, "'Nobody's Perfect'; or, Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for Women?" South Atlantic Quarterly 88, no. 1 (winter 1989): 27.

50. Barish, Antitheatrical Prejudice , 89.

The Puritan critique of ambisexual garb was not the only source for invective against sartorial boundary-crossing. In The Description of Britaine (1577), William Harrison writes with ill temper of the growing favor for men's accoutrements in women's clothing:

In women also, it is most to be lamented, that they do now far exceed the lightness of our men (who nevertheless are transformed from the cap even to the very shoe). . . . What should I say of their doublets with pendant codpieces on the breast full of jags and cuts, and sleeves of sundry colours? Their galligascons to bear out their bums and make their attire to fit plum round (as they term it) about them. Their fardingals, and diversely coloured nether stocks of silk, jerdsey, and such like, whereby their bodies are rather deformed than commended? I have met with some of these trulls in London so disguised that it hath passed my skill to discern whether they were men or women.

Thus it is now come to pass, that women are become men, and men transformed into monsters.

In Elizabethan England , ed. Lothrop Withington (London: Walter Scott, n.d.), 110. This account of the colorful, shape-changing garments recalls at once Malvolio, whose constricting garters pain him pleasingly, and Orsino, who, according to Feste, should have a doublet made of changeable taffeta.

51. J. B. Black, The Reign of Elizabeth, 1558-1603 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), 300-301. The best-detailed study in English of the political ener-

gies and maneuvers around the affair is by Conyers Read, Mr. Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth , 3 vols. (Oxford: Archon Books, 1967), 2:1-117.

52. As Burleigh and other lords speculated, the crucial benefit of the match would have been its creation of a potent anti-Spanish alliance, for King Henri III would likely have joined his brother Anjou and Elizabeth in aiding Dutch rebels against the encroachments of Spanish forces. The Netherlands revolt, under Anjou's auspices, was a major selling point for the French match. See Mack P. Holt, The Duke of Anjou and the Politique Struggle During the Wars of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), 118-20.

53. Her suspicions may have been fed by a diet of reports about Anjou's appearance. His visage was rumored to have been badly marred by smallpox, and the queen discouragingly instructed his ambassadors that "she could not marry any prince without seeing him, and if Alençon was going to take offence in case, after seeing him, she did not accept him, he had better not come." Cited in Martin Andrew Sharp Hume, The Courtships of Queen Elizabeth (New York: Macmillan, 1898), 195.

54. Quoted in Harris Nicolas, Memoirs of the Life and Times of Sir Christopher Hatton (London: Richard Bentley, 1847), 106.

55. Black, Reign of Elizabeth , 301.

56. The epithet is cited in Neale, Queen Elizabeth I. A Biography (New York: Doubleday, Anchor, 1957), 245, but unfortunately he does not give a source for it.

57. See Nicolas, Life of Hatton , 106.

58. Quoted in Nicolas, Life of Hatton , 108. The letter can also be found in G. B. Harrison, ed., The Letters of Queen Elizabeth (London: Cassell, 1935), 130-35. The missive ends with another chafed reference to rumors that may have arisen against the queen and Simier: "Having thus at large laid before you the whole course of our late proceeding with de Simier. . . we nothing doubt but that you will report the same both to the King and to the Duke in that good sort as both they may be induced to see their error, and we discharged of such calumniations as perhaps by such as are maliciously affected towards us in that Court may be given out against us."

59. Lloyd E. Berry, ed., John Stubbs's "Gaping Gulf" with Letters and Other Relevant Documents (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia for the Folger Shakespeare Library, 1968), 156. Subsequent references to Stubbs and Northampton will be to this edition, cited in text and notes as Berry, Stubbs's "Gaping Gulf."

60. Calendar of State Papers, Foreign Series, 1578-1579 , ed. Arthur John Butler (London, 1903), 310. Hereafter cited as CSPF 1578-79 .

61. Berry, Stubbs's "Gaping Gulf," 149-50. This document is also excerpted in John Strype, Annals of the Reformation and Establishment of Religion , 8 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1824), 4:232-38. For further praise of Simier, see CSPF 1578-79 , 463.

62. The letter, from Simier to Roch des Sorbiers, seigneur des Pruneaux (Anjou's commissioner to the Netherlands), continues with sincere praise of the queen: "I swear to you that she is the most virtuous and honourable princess in

the world; her wit is admirable, and there are so many other parts to remark in her that I should need much ink and paper to catalogue them." CSPF 1578-79 , 487.

63. Simier to Michael de Castelnau, seigneur de Mauvissiere, French ambassador in England, Nov. 3, 1578; in CSPF 1578-79 , 260.

64. "C'est que mon fils m'a faict dire par le Roy qu'il ne la veut jamais espouser, quand bien elle le voudroit, d'aultant qu'il a tousjours si real oui parler de son honneur , et en a veu des lettres escriptes de tousles ambassadeurs, qui y ont esté, qu'il penseroit estre déshonnoré et perdre toute la réputation qu'il pense avoir acquise ." Quoted in Nicolas, Life of Hatton , 16 note b; italics in original. No date is given for this letter, but I assume it was written circa 1581-82, when the negotiations were all but finished.

65. "Que vous aviez non seullement engasge vostre honneur auveques un estrangier Nomme Simier . . . ou vous le basiez et lisiez auvec luy de diverses privaultes deshonnestes." In William Murdin, A Collection of State Papers . . . relating to affairs in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, from the year 1571 to 1596 (London, 1759), 558-60. Concerning the queen's sexual voracity, Mary seems to suggest that Elizabeth's interests ran toward both men and women ("indubitably, you were not like other women"). The letter is partly quoted and translated (with these passages deleted) in Thomas Robertson, The History of Mary Queen of Scots (Edinburgh, 1793), 149.

66. Calendar of Letters and State Papers, Spanish, 1580-1586 , ed. Martin A. S. Hume (London, 1896), 266. Hereafter cited as CSPS .

67. Hume, Courtships of Queen Elizabeth , 231.

68. Ibid., 186. For more on Anjou's untrustworthiness, see CSPF 1578-79 , 451; Berry, Stubbs's "Gaping Gulf" ; and especially the well-known letter from Sir Philip Sidney to the queen. "As for monsieur," he says,

he is to be judged by his will and power: his will to be as full of light ambition as is possible. . .; his inconstant attempt against his brother, his thrusting himself into the Low-Country matters, his sometime seeking the king of Spain's daughter, sometimes your majesty, are evident testimonies of his being carried away with every wind of hope; taught to love greatness any way gotten.

Reprinted in John Strype, Annals of the Reformation and Establishment of Religion , 8 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1824), 2:644.

69. This fantasy depends on a limited disturbance of class structures: the twins are, after all, well-born. But much of the stage business devolves from the obvious favor that the servant Cesario garners from Olivia. Thus does Viola become the target of almost everyone's anger and jealousy. Competition for the great woman is played out in measured compartments of class hostility. Even Sir Toby plots against the mediator, insofar as the prank fight with Andrew targets the new favorite.

Olivia's position at the courtly center of nearly everyone's desires in the play is the surest sign of her participation in Elizabethan inscription. Many of the characters fantasize about possessing her. The motives have often to do with property rights, status, or money, but these do not diminish the sincerity of the passion. Malvolio's smug imaginings of potency, of leaving Olivia sleeping in her day bed, is a dream of power many Elizabethan courtiers indulged; and Sir Toby's overly angry response to the fantasy alludes to the profound personal and cultural investment in this dream. Sir Andrew's interest in Olivia, attenuated as it is (and virtually indistinguishable from his interest in Sir Toby), adds more than a filip to the plot; it rounds out the impression of her universal desirability. And when Feste comes at Viola with this jealous shrapnel, the impression is consolidated:

With this deft question, Viola uncovers what Feste does indeed care for. The possibility of his lady's marriage brings the clown no pleasure: "She will keep no fool, sir, till she be married, and fools are as like husbands as pilchards are to herrings, the husband's the bigger" (3.1.33–36).

Manningham, significantly, remembered Olivia as a widow: "FEBR. 1601. At our feast wee had a play called 'Twelve night, or what you will'; much like the commedy of errors . . . . A good practise in it to make the steward beleeve his Lady widowe was in Love with him, by counterfayting a letter, as from his Lady, in generall termes, telling him what shee liked best in him." Robert Parker Sorlien, ed., The Diary of John Manningham of the Middle Temple, 1602–03 (Hanover, N.H.: Univ. Press of New England for the Univ. of Rhode Island, 1976), 48. As an imagined widow, Olivia would be capable of granting the bourgeois wish for social ascent through profitable marriage. In this respect, Olivia may well prefer the lower-ranked suitor, as Sir Toby has suggested—"she'll not match above her degree, neither in estate, years, nor wit; I have heard her swear it" (1.3.106–7)—a reasonable precaution against relinquishing her high station.

70. Such a courtship recalls, as readers have noted, John Lyly's lasting image of two women in love in Gallathea (c. 1585). See Leah Marcus's commentary on the fashion for these representations, with potential historical correlates: Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), 97-104. Marcus's discussion of the wish for Elizabeth's metamorphosis into a man in order to meet and possibly woo Mary Queen of Scots is especially interesting.

71. See Leah Scragg, The Metamorphosis of Gallathea: A Study in Creative Adaptation (Washington, D.C.: Univ. Press of America, 1982), and Phyllis Rackin, "Androgyny, Mimesis, and the Marriage of the Boy Heroine on the English Renaissance Stage," PMLA 102, no. 1 (January 1987): 29-41. Ellen M. Caldwell argues, somewhat ahistorically, that Lyly's play aims at Elizabeth and suggests a "method for uniting the parts of a woman's divided nature, of her competing urges for separateness and union, or for chastity and love." Caldwell, "John Lyly's Gallathea : A New Rhetoric of Love for the Virgin Queen," ELR 17 (winter 1987): 23.

72. Freund, "Tyranny of Interpretation," says some pertinent things about

the "I" in Viola's and Olivia's discourse; she regards it as a signifier in crisis: "We expect the speech of self-presentation to situate or contextualize an identity, but if we seek modest assurance of the identity of the speaking "I" we are compelled to unravel a labyrinthine specularity, a tissue of subversive textuality. Who speaks?" (483). About the willow cabin speech she argues, even more sharply, ''The tonalities of the speech incorporate voices and echoes to the point where language overextends the confines of personal identity" (488).

73. See Freund, "Tyranny of Interpretation," and Catherine Belsey, "Disrupting Sexual Difference: Meaning and Gender in the Comedies," in John Drakakis, ed., Alternative Shakespeares (London: Methuen, 1985), 166-90.

74. The most plausible psychological reading of Viola's sincere courtship can be found in Alexander Leggatt's fine chapter on the play in Shakespeare's Comedy of Love (London: Methuen, 1974), 221-54. Freund cleverly summarizes Viola's possible motives, which she then takes pains to deconstruct, in "Tyranny of Interpretation," 485.

75. For more on the homoerotics of the play, see Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (London: Routledge, 1992), 137ff.

76. John Hollander, The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981), 22.

77. Arthur Golding, Shakespeare's Ovid: Being Arthur Golding's Translation of the Metamorphoses , ed. W. H. D. Rouse (London: De La More Press, 1904), 3:477-78; hereafter cited in text (by book and line numbers) as Golding, Metamorphoses .

78. Anthony Brian Taylor, "Shakespeare and Golding: Viola's Interview with Olivia and Echo and Narcissus," English Language Notes 15, no. 2 (December 1977): 103-6.

Samuel Daniel's speaker in Delia (c. 1592) addresses Echo in a familiar way:

Echo, daughter of the air,
Babbling guest of rocks and hills,
Knows the name of my fierce Fair,
And sounds the accents of my ills:
Each thing pities my despair,
Whilst that she her lover kills.

Elizabethan Lyrics , ed. Norman Ault (New York: Wm. Sloane, 1949), 158. The ambiguous pronouns in the last line suggest that the Echo and Narcissus paradigm commonly involves a slippage of identities between the lover and the beloved.

79. One other suggestive, complicating parallel emerges at the end of Twelfth Night , when Viola instructs her brother: "Do not embrace me, till each circumstance / Of place, time, fortune, do cohere and jump / That I am Viola" (5.1.249-51). Along with the odd Christian implications of Noir me tangere , the lines may harken back to the description of Narcissus's "passing pride": "That to be toucht of man or Mayde he wholy did disdaine" (3.441-42).

80. Viola and Olivia are not the sole Ovidran descendants in Twelfth Night . In one of Orsino's first conceits in the play, he imagines himself as a love hunter, pursuing "the hart." Imagistically, he metamorphoses at once into Actaeon—

not seeking but sought, yet not sought by the beloved but rather his own urges: "my desires, like fell and cruel hounds, / E'er since pursue me" (1.1.22-23). Orsino's hunting image, drawn like the Echo and Narcissus story from Metamorphosis , book 3, provides an active, bodily complement to the passive incorporeality of narcissistic self-imperiling; Actaeon, Echo, and Narcissus all die radically defaced, without bodies. Actaeon's tragedy proleptically comprises the Echo and Narcissus tale, especially after his transformation into a stag:

But when he saw his face
And horned temples in the brooke, he would have cryde alas,
But as for then no kinde of speach out of his lippes could passe.
                                       (Golding, Metamorphoses , 3.236-38)

In anticipating both Narcissus (beholding his unrecognizable image) and Echo (in a state of verbal insufficiency and frustration), the Actaeon story prepares Ovid's reader for the vision of failed, bodiless self-love. Perhaps remembering Actaeon's fate and subconsciously seeking romantic dismemberment, Orsino tells Cesario on his first embassy to "be clamorous and leap all civil bounds" (1.4-21).

81. It might be argued that Olivia's abasement is deliberately not male-factored; it thus prevents that fantasy of courtier dominance common in the court of Queen Elizabeth.

82. Caren Greenberg, "Reading Reading: Echo's Abduction of Language," in Sally McConnell-Ginet, Ruth Borker, and Nelly Furman, eds., Women and Language in Literature and Society (New York: Praeger, 1980), 305. Greenberg further explains that "when Narcissus rejects Echo's love, she repeats his words in such a way as to express her own love for him. Echo's repetition is, therefore, a reading. Echo has abducted the first person pronoun, and the negation of passion simultaneously becomes an expression of passion" (307).

83. Holt, Duke of Anjou , 120.

84. Read, Mr. Secretary Walsingham , 2:21 n. 1.

85. Even though Olivia suggests she "would not have him miscarry for the half of my dowry," her comment betrays Malvolio's purely material worth to her. This is the same dehumanization that the steward movingly describes in his imprisonment: "They have here propertied me" (4.2.94). In his brutal comeuppance, he becomes mere material, "matter for a May morning": matter for cruel jest on the one hand, for Olivia's marriage activities on the other.

86. Salingar, "The Design of Twelfth Night ," Shakespeare Quarterly 9 (1957): 119.

87. Read, Mr. Secretary Walsingham , 2:25-26.

88. For "Sebastian" as a name with homosexual overtones in the Renaissance, and for a further meditation on the significance of his nominal relation with Antonio, see Cynthia Lewis, " 'Wise Men, Folly Fall'n': Characters Named 'Antonio' in English Renaissance Drama," Renaissance Drama 20 (1989): 197-236.

89. Neale, Queen Elizabeth I , 316.

90. More on Antonio's luckless career can be found in Read, Mr. Secretary Walsingham : "At the beginning of the year 1581 Don Antonio, with a price of twenty thousand ducats on his head, was practically a fugitive. His whereabouts were not even certainly known; his cause appeared to be absolutely desperate" (2:51). I have also consulted the entry on "Antonio, Prior of Crato" in the Encyclopedia Britannica , 11th ed. (New York, 1910). The names "Antonio" and "Sebastian" recur, with no apparent relevance to the Anjou match and no homoerotic (but plenty of political) implications, in The Tempest.

For further suggestions that the central referentiality of Twelfth Night hovers around the year 1580, see the pages on the play in Eva Lee Turner Clark, Hidden Allusions in Shakespeare's Plays , 3d ed. (Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1974), 364–92. Clark briefly mentions Sebastian and Antonio ("important names to [Elizabeth's] court circle in 1580" [380–81]) and reminds us that the Brownists, to whom Sir Andrew objects, were "by the end of 1580 . . . grown to sufficient numbers to be of official concern" (389, 390), but they had lost real power as an historical force by 1583. I owe this reference to Shannon Prosser.