<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Re-reading\u00a0Twelfth Night<\/em>\u00a0in preparation for seeing Pig Iron\u2019s interpretation of it in Philly\u2019s Live Arts Fest, I re-lived my delight in this great comedy, which I first discovered when I was twenty.\u00a0 But somewhat to my embarrassment I found that lots of things I thought I understood when I was in my twenties now are more mysterious and paradoxical to me in late middle age.\u00a0 For instance, the meaning of the Duke Orsino\u2019s famous opening speech:<\/p>\n\n\n\n If music be the food of love, play on;<\/p>\n\n\n\n Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,<\/p>\n\n\n\n The appetite may sicken, and so die.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That strain again! it had a dying fall:<\/p>\n\n\n\n O, it came o\u2019er my ear like the sweet sound,<\/p>\n\n\n\n That breathes upon a bank of violets,<\/p>\n\n\n\n Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018Tis not so sweet now as it was before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou,<\/p>\n\n\n\n That, notwithstanding thy capacity<\/p>\n\n\n\n Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of what validity and pitch soe\u2019er,<\/p>\n\n\n\n But falls into abatement and low price,<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even in a minute: so full of shapes is fancy<\/p>\n\n\n\n That it alone is high fantastical. (I.i.1-15)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thwarted in love, or what he thinks is his love for the Countess Olivia, Orsino opens the play with a sweet but cynical speech about the inconstancy of love. He basically says it\u2019s just like appetite\u2014what tastes good for a while then begins to be \u201cnot so sweet now as it was before.\u201d He doesn\u2019t compare love to any higher emotion or even hint that it has a spiritual dimension or the possibility of constancy. Indeed, the Duke even suggests that a person in love can become a connoisseur of his or her emotions as they sour, not just when they are fresh and new: he loves the \u201cdying fall\u201d in the music and the \u201cexcess\u201d that causes all emotion to \u201csicken, and so die.\u201d This sweet pessimism about love\u2019s sour transience reaches its culmination in the extended sea metaphor, where he says that individual passions are like rivers flowing into a capacious sea, where \u201cnought enters there \u2026 but falls into abatement and low price.\u201d What was once valued is now devalued. A sentence that appears to begin full of optimism and an apostrophe to love as \u201cquick and fresh\u201d ends in a crude economic metaphor for something now judged to be worthless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The \u201cpitch\u201d reference in this paean to love\u2019s ups and downs is particularly lovely, yet it ultimately proves disturbing in this context. Taken from falconry, pitch<\/em> describes the highest point of a falcon\u2019s flight. Which means that even such a soaring vision of love\u2019s heights is dunked in saltwater here. The speech nicely enacts what it describes too, since the Duke first calls for more music and then gets tired of it and grumps about it. The only constant here is that the Duke expects that all his commands will immediately be obeyed. Orsino, revealingly, also takes his own shifting feelings as an example of a universal principle of all passion, not merely his own inconstancy and errancy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So what\u2019s the problem? What\u2019s not to understand? Well, how do we explain the conclusion to the speech? Doesn\u2019t it claim that fancy remains \u201chigh fantastical,\u201d constantly renewing itself? Or is this ending a weak tautology, basically just saying in a sonorous way that fancy is fantastical? (If so, perhaps this moment is meant to hint of the Duke\u2019s pomposity and narcissism, just as earlier the speech revealed him to be a creature of whim.) An even greater puzzle is how any of this follows logically from what\u2019s been said before. The final sentence about fancy is preceded by a colon, like it really does sum everything up. But to my ear now it actually seems completely to ignore or contradict everything that\u2019s just been said, unless we take the conclusion merely to mean that each and every one of fancy\u2019s infinite shapes will soon no longer seem very fantastical at all. If that\u2019s the case, then what first appears like a triumphant summing up actually lands like a dying fall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The opening speech\u2019s comic mixture of narcissism and cynicism of course nicely sketch not just the Duke\u2019s up-and-down moods at that moment but also his character as the play gradually reveals it. He\u2019s inconstant in just about everything except repeatedly sending a proxy, Viola, to annoy Octavia. Yet by the end of the play are we really supposed to believe his marriage to Viola will be a happy and a constant one? What, except for whim, explains the Duke\u2019s sudden decision to throw off his claims to love Octavia for love of Viola instead? Is he just rebounding from Octavia\u2019s sarcasm and rejection? Or has Orsino actually grown up a little and become confident he can love Viola\u2019s inner character<\/em>, regardless of her outward appearance? (After all, he says he\u2019ll marry her while she\u2019s still dressed in the guise of a man! That for sure was a comic detail I don\u2019t remember noticing when I was younger, I wonder why.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Concluding that the Duke\u2019s love has become less narcissistic is obviously a more optimistic reading of the Duke\u2019s character and the comedy\u2019s ending, but it requires a leap of faith. Despite recently accusing Viola of betrayal, the Duke may realize after the play\u2019s climactic revelations about who\u2019s who that his new \u201cmale\u201d servant has repeatedly shown him constancy, compassion, and inventive intelligence. Perhaps the Duke decides he must love with those qualities in another, outward appearances be damned. Such a view of Duke Orsino\u2019s growth would certainly be consistent with the genial optimism of his last speech in the play, so different from his first:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhen \u2026 golden time convents<\/p>\n\n\n\n A solemn combination shall be made<\/p>\n\n\n\n of our dear souls.\u201d (V.i.384-6)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Convents<\/em>\u2014cool verb that means \u201ccome together\u201d or convene.\u00a0 Current in the 16th century but obsolete now.\u00a0 The Duke certainly suggests here that he now sees love as the sacred coming-together of two souls, not something bedeviled by price fluctuations!\u00a0 Yet the Duke\u2019s opening speech and his actions throughout the play shadow this \u201cgolden\u201d ending, and we\u2019re left to wonder which is the true Duke and what kind of husband Viola will actually get.\u00a0 With Viola we have few such doubts.\u00a0 To borrow a line from\u00a0A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream<\/em>, she exhibits \u201csomething of great constancy\u201d despite her rapidly changing situations and fortunes in the play. \u00a0 Perhaps the best evidence for the Duke\u2019s new constancy is that Viola vouches for it.\u00a0 But who the Duke really is, or what either he or Olivia really desire or deserve, remains a conundrum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The theme of this comedy reminds me of the title to the old Sammy Kahn and Jule Styne tune, \u201cI Fall in Love Too Easily\u201d (from the Broadway musical\u00a0Anchors Aweigh<\/em>, 1945). \u00a0 Kahn\u2019s lyric, sung by Frank Sinatra, reflects, \u201cI fall in love too easily\/ I fall in love too fast\/ I fall in love too terribly hard\/ For love to ever last.\u201d\u00a0 Everybody in\u00a0Twelfth Night<\/em>, including even Viola\u2019s and Sebastian\u2019s rescuers, fall in love impetuously and completely. \u00a0 The play is sweetly cynical about this, but in the end it gently works to give these characters what they desire:\u00a0 it all works out.\u00a0 (Malvolio and Sir Andrew being the well-deserved exceptions, of course.)\u00a0 Yet of course this comedy\u00a0doesn\u2019t<\/em>\u00a0really just give the main characters what they fell in love with at the start; it changes their desires and gets them to reflect a little on what it is they really want or deserve. Perhaps it\u2019s only Viola and the Fool, though, who can now and then fully step outside of their own emotions a bit and ponder what\u2019s happening and how strange, comic, and unknowable it all is.\u00a0 I love that verb Viola uses in II.ii.33, \u201cHow will this fadge?\u201d she says, meaning \u201cwork itself out\u201d:\u00a0 \u201cO time! thou must untangle this, not I\u201d (II.ii.40).\u00a0 Viola must have a lot of inner confidence to trust Time like this\u2014and after a shipwreck too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Feste the Clown\u2019s concluding song holds many sweet-sad conundrums too, and it is composed in an even more melancholic \u201cstrain\u201d than the tune that opened the play. Certainly Feste\u2019s ditty shadows any sense that Time\u2019s action on our lives is as \u201cgolden\u201d as the Duke decrees it will be, or Viola hopes it is, or the genre of comedy scripts things to be. In a marvelous colloquy with Viola in III.i, Feste\u2019s only extended time with her in the play, this professional \u201ccorruptor of words\u201d cynically says that any word can be twisted inside-out like a glove to mean just about anything, including it antonym (III.i.9-10). Even \u201cpurity\u201d can be made to mean \u201cwanton.\u201d Feste\u2019s made us and his employers laugh and he\u2019s earned a few coins, but he\u2019s also throughout the play teaching us skepticism toward everything we think we know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What does<\/em> his song at the play\u2019s end say? It\u2019s hardly as \u201cfestive\u201d as its singer\u2019s name might imply. It says we go through the stages of our lives predictably captured by the illusion that we\u2019re acting uniquely on our own and know what we\u2019re doing. (Remember the subtitle that the play slyly offers us and then hilariously refutes, which says that comedy is about \u201cWhat You Will\u201d coming to pass.) In Feste\u2019s song, though, our actions in this world are revealed to be entirely conventional and blind. Boys all have the same illusion about their toys. All men of \u201cestate\u201d act the same too. Not to mention aristocrats who may eventually get what they think they want without perhaps really learning very much. For what we think we possess and know slips from our control like rainwater running away:<\/p>\n\n\n\n But when I came to man\u2019s estate,<\/p>\n\n\n\n With a hey, ho, the wind and the rain,<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate,<\/p>\n\n\n\n For the rain it raineth every day\u2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ****<\/p>\n\n\n\n I now realize that in my younger days I thought\u00a0Twelfth Night<\/em>\u00a0was about \u201cgolden time\u201d eventually giving us more or less what we want.\u00a0 I was not insensitive to the melancholy, minor-key music in the play; those notes were what made this\u2014perhaps\u2014my favorite Shakespeare comedy, along with the reversals and pratfalls.\u00a0 It\u2019s in the spirit of festival time, when the normal order of things is reversed and, in the case of traditional \u201cTwelfth Night\u201d festivities in England, the night-long party celebrates days growing longer again after the midwinter solstice.\u00a0 But having lived a little more I realize I\u2019m now more skeptical about the Duke and Olivia as characters and more ironical about how truly golden Time\u2019s actions are towards \u201cwhat we will,\u201d in comedy or in life. \u00a0How will this fadge?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Re-reading\u00a0Twelfth Night\u00a0in preparation for seeing Pig Iron\u2019s interpretation of it in Philly\u2019s Live Arts Fest, I re-lived my delight in this great comedy, which I first discovered when I was twenty.\u00a0 But somewhat to my embarrassment I found that lots … Continue reading