“Twelfth Night, or What You Will”

1. “Twelfth Night, or What You Will”

2. Title’s Significance • Final night in Twelve Days of Christmas: break from the rigid day-to-day life of the Elizabethan period that enforced deference, sobriety, and strict obedience to authority. • Everything was turned upside down: heavy drinking, revelry, feasting. e.g. young boys crowned for a day as bishops and carried through the streets in mock religious processions.

3. Title Cont’d • Clue to happenings in the play: gender confusion, swapping of lovers, potential shifts in (normally rigid) social position, drinking, joking, pranks. • Title also implies that audiences may construct their own meaning of the play: Shakespeare is inviting audiences to interpret the events of the play on their own terms.

4. PLOT • Viola shipwrecked off coast of Illyria and believes her identical twin brother dead. • Alone with no protection, decides to disguise herself as young man. Finds work with powerful nobleman, Duke Orsino. • Orsino in love with a noblewoman, Olivia. Orsino gets Viola – disguised as Cesario, the young man – to go to Olivia and convince Olivia to fall for the Duke. • Viola falls in love with Orsino (who thinks her the man, Cesario); Olivia falls in love with Cesario/Viola.

5. THEMES • Love as a cause of suffering • The folly of ambition • Uncertainty of Gender

6. LOVE Orsino refers to desire as “savage & cruel hounds” that hunt him (Act 1 Scene 1); talks about its “sweet pangs” (Act 2 Scene 4); Viola is sorry that Olivia has fallen for her and “desperate for her Master’s love” (Act 2 Scene 2); Olivia makes comparison with “the plague” (Act 1 Scene 5) Love is also described as something that happens to someone rather than something that happens between two people consciously. The person who has fallen in love is like an innocent bystander who is “bowled over” by love.

7. AMBITION • Works itself out largely through the character of Malvolio, a puritan and Olivia’s steward. • Conceited, self-centred, & has ambitions to rise above his social class: not something to be taken lightly. • His ambition exploited by other characters & ultimately leads to his downfall. Tricked into believing Lady Olivia loves him and so acts in such a way that others believe he’s gone mad and lock him up.

8. GENDER • Woman (Viola) disguises herself as man (Cesario) & falls in love with another man (Orsino); • Woman (Olivia) falls in love with Cesario (really Viola); • Keep in mind that women played by men/boys. Good demonstration of Shakespeare’s use of farce. • Farfetched to mistake a woman for a man because she changed her clothes?? To believe that twins of opposite sex virtually identical??

9. Gender Cont’d Keep in mind: • Use of farce: Characters ham it up, audience laughs at seeing a man/boy playing a woman[remember Shakespeare in Love?] • Audience can suspend disbelief if actors are good & they buy into it. (e.g. movie like “The Blair Witch Project”: see only how actors are reacting & we get scared)

10. GENDER CONT’D • Galen model: male/female biologically identical, females as “incomplete” males: • Challenged in Shakespeare’s time but still influential: Boys & girls dressed alike until 7. Gender based on clothing so masculinity & feminity achieved by dressing like man or woman & adopting appropriate mannerisms.

11. GENDER CONT’D • Shakespeare poking fun at this notion of gender – especially at the end of the play: Viola/Cesario revealed as woman & will marry Orsino. But wedding can’t happen while she’s dressed as a man – needs her own female clothing before it can happen. Also, Orsino refuses to call Viola by her real name, instead referring to her as Cesario (until she changes her clothes).