Maluolio within": Performance Perspectives on the Dark House

In 4.2 of Twelfth Night, Malvolio, having been incarcerated in a "dark house" (5.1.341) by Sir Toby and Maria, is tormented by the Clown Feste, initially in disguise as Sir Topas the curate. ¹ John Astington has described this scene as "not altogether easy to transfer to the stage" because the Folio stage direction "Maluoliowithin" (TLN 2005) implies that Malvolio is "entirely out of sight and speaking from the tiring house, possibly from behind one of the stage doors." ² Astington is in part concerned that Feste, having the entire platform stage to himself, "would naturally have broadened his antics." ³ But "the central physical problems of the scene," he suggests, "are those of audibility and visibility." ⁴

My intention here is to investigate first the performance history of "Maluolio within"; then whether "audibility and visibility" really would have been problems for Elizabethan stagecraft; and, finally, the dramaturgical dynamics of the scene and the play if Malvolio is kept entirely out of sight. "Maluolio within" is the only Folio stage direction to give us any guidance. This direction can be supported by Malvolio's explanation that he is "in hideous darkness" (l. 31); by Maria's comment to Feste regarding his disguise as Sir Topas that "Thou might'st have done this without thy beard and gown, he sees thee not" (ll. 66-67); and by the fact that Feste can subsequently change voices to hold a mock dialogue between himself and Sir Topas, heard but not seen by Malvolio. In addition--for what it is worth--no entry or exit directions for Malvolio are given in the Folio text of this scene.

I

What does the performance history of Twelfth Night tell us about whether the scene can work satisfactorily as it appears to have been written, with Malvolio unseen? Certainly there is significant evidence to suggest that it was staged thus well into the Restoration period and indeed until the nineteenth century. A promptbook adapted sometime in the seventeenth century from a copy of the Second Folio shows a deletion of several lines just prior to Malvolio's "Who cals there?" (Fig. 1). ⁵ The prompter evidently regarded the printed stage direction "Maluolio within" as important, so he wrote it into the margin, immediately following Sir Toby's entry mark, just in case it was missed at the end of the cut passage. In a copy of F3 used as a promptbook at the Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin in the 1670s, not only is "Maluolio within" retained unaltered, but a prompter's note at the start of the scene says "Court" (Fig. 2), ⁶ indicating the standard wing-and-shutter setting used for Olivia's palace throughout the play (i.e., there was no special dungeon scenery). Nor is there an entry call marked for Malvolio as there are for other characters who appear onstage.

Rowe's 1709 edition of Shakespeare prints a frontispiece of this scene (Fig. 3) which W. Moelwyn Merchant describes as "so intolerably clumsy as an illustration that it appears with certainty to be a stage set." ⁷ Flats divide the stage into halves, viewed end-on by the audience, with a curtain border concealing the tops of the flats. Malvolio's side of the stage is in darkness; the other side is in light. This would be a radical development in wing-and-shutter staging and in the presentation of 4.2. The principal difficulty about accepting this 1709 illustration as evidence of late-seventeenth- or early-eighteenth-century staging practice is the absence of any record of Twelfth Night being performed in London between 1669, the last time Pepys saw it, and Macklin's triumphant revival in 1741. Merchant refers to the 1703 performance at Lincoln's Inn Fields of "Burnaby's egregious adaptation as Love Betray'd";but since Love Betray'd does not include 4.2 of Twelfth Night, this seems to be a red...