The Masks of Twelfth Night

The Masks of Twelfth Night I have loved Twelfth Night ever since I first read it in a Shakespeare survey course in 1938-39. Thefirstproduction Isaw ofit struck me as most unsatisfactory — one with Helen Hayes as Viola (which sheplayed as ifwritten by Barrie), and Maurice Evans as a pompous and rather boring Malvolio. The director was Margaret Webster, and almost everything struck me as wrong right up to the end, when the entire cast came on stage, put thdr arms around each other's shoulders, did the grapevine step, and sang the song, "When that I was but a little tiny boy," which Feste is supposed to sing alone: it made no sense. I think that production made me want to write what I thought the play was about, but it took me a long time to get around to it. A stimulus was a production of the play during my years at Bard College, 1948-50, when the drama teacher asked me to talk to his cast about the play just as they were beginning to work on it. The students responded to my notions, andfor many years I thought their production of the play the best I had ever seen. (It still may be, despite my enjoyment ofa production in Boston [with Siobhan McKenna as Viola, Jason Robards as Orsino, Tammy Grimes as Maria, and three actors dividing the complex role of Feste: one for the dialogue, a marvelous dancerfor the acrobatics, and Alfred Délierfor the songs] and several other interesting productions on stage and screen.) I got around to writing a more or less finished version of an essay in my early days at the University of Connecticut, but had no luck when I began to submit it to various journals: it had nofootnotes and was not "scholarly" enoughfor the learned journals and it wasn't really "popular" enoughfor the others. I let Leonard Dean, the chairman ofmy department, read it, and he liked it. He had had some difficulty in placing some ofhis The Masks of Twelfth Night essays on Shakespeare's histories and Coriolanus and finally had them accepted by The University of Kansas City Review, and he suggested Ishould send my essay there. I did so, and was wonderfully relieved when, after the twelve earlier rejections, they accepted it — on condition that I cut itfairly drastically. Cfcourse one never wants to cut anything; butafter the surgery I had to admit it was a good idea. I can't even remember what was left out. It has been reprinted more often than any other essay I have written. Love and its fulfillment are primary in Shakespeare's comedies. Its conflicts are often presented in terms of the battle of the generations. At the beginning of the plays the bliss of the young lover is usually barred by an older generation of parents and rulers, a group which has supposedly experienced its own fulfillment in the past and which is now concerned with preserving old forms or fulfilling new ambitions. The comedies usually end with the triumph of young love, a triumph in which the lovers make peace with their elders and themselves assume adulthood and often power. The revolutionary force of love becomes an added element of vitality in a re-established society. Twelfth Night does not follow the customary pattern. In this play the responsible older generation has been abolished, and there are no parents at all. In the first act we are rapidly introduced into a world in which the ruler is a love-sick Duke — in which young ladies, fatherless and motherless, embark on disguised actions, or rule, after a fashion, their own households, and in which the only individuals possibly over thirty are drunkards, jokesters, and gulls, totally without authority. All the external barriers to fulfillment have been eliminated in what becomes almost a parody of the state desired by the ordinary young lovers, the Hermias and Lysanders — or even the Rosalinds and Orlandos. According to the strictly romantic formula, the happy ending should be already achieved at the beginning of the play: we should abandon the theater for the rites of love. But the slightly stunned inhabitants of...