Appreciations: William Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night”

With this, the last night of the Christmas season, upon us, I thought it an appropriate occasion to comment on perhaps my favorite comedy by the Bard.

At my alma mater a quarter-century ago, the entire Shakespeare corpus was covered in two semesters. Though the course and its professor were legends on the campus, I was at least a mild dissenter from the prevailing opinion – "a boat against the current," if you will. I thought then – and feel even more strongly now – that it is insane to think that one can cover all the plays and all the poems and still do justice to any one of the works.

I only took one half of the full-year course, so I did not go the later plays (including this one). Much of my education on the playwright since then has come on my own, helter-scatter, aided largely by perhaps really best way to appreciate Shakespeare – in performance.

My good opinion of Twelfth Night was formed by two productions I saw: at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada, in 1994, starring a rising star of that repertory company, Lucy Peacock, as Viola; and, four years later, at Lincoln Center, with more of a marquee cast, including Helen Hunt as a more cautious Viola, the marvelous character New York stage actor Brian Murray, and, in a performance that first made me aware of how marvelous an actress she could be, Kyra Sedgwick.

Last summer, in upstate New Year, I vacationed at the Chautauqua Institution, an eight-week program devoted to public affairs, recreation, and the arts. One of their Special Studies of continuing-education courses was “Illustrating Shakespeare via Twelfth Night.” With easily worn learning and vast reserves of humor, the instructor, Ruth Gerrard Cole, focused on the play's central play in the evolution of Shakespeare.

The play constantly underscores the theme of appearance vs. reality, like a comic Hamlet, as can be seen in the following lines:

Orsino: "So full of shapes is fancy
That it alone is high fantastical." – (I, i, 14-15)

Viola: I am not what I am.
Olivia: I would you were as I would have you be.

In another forerunner of Hamlet, fate figures prominently (Olivia: "Fate, show thy face, ourselves we not owe,/What is decreed must be, and be this so.")

Shakespeare also plays with dissolving the line between spectator and stage, giving the audience a poke in the ribs, like an Elizabethan Bob Hope: (Fabian: "If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.")

While never neglecting the raw material craved by Elizabethan (or, for that matter, modern) audiences, such as complications doubled and redoubled and one-liners sure to produce chuckles (“Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage”), the playwright raised the play above the level of simple farce through his humanity, notably how he treats Malvolio, Olivia's censorious household steward.

To be sure, Shakespeare made sure his contemporary audiences knew that he shared their scorn for the Puritan (who, like many of his co-religionists, undoubtedly interfered with the theater and much-loved festivals such as – well, Twelfth Night). "Dost thou think because thou art virtuous that there shall be no more cakes and ale?" Malvolio is reproved by Olivia's uncle, Sir Toby Belch. (That final phrase gave an especially felicitous title to what might be Somerset Maugham's finest novel.)

But the trick played by Sir Toby, his boon companion Andrew Aguecheek, and Olivia's servant Maria is great comic fun. But the playwright shows that Malvolio's punishment – "imprisoned,/Kept in a dark house") is crueler than anything he ever perpetuated. Contrast this with the film M*A*S*H, in which Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan is humiliated in the shower while naked – a scene that should make anyone question the humanity of that much-loved (and at least somewhat overrated) auteur, Robert Altman. Malvolio's punishment as a madman makes us queasy, so his release comes almost as welcome as the laughs in this surprising, and surprisingly humane, comedy.