‘Twelfth Night’: A Critical Reader ed. by Alison Findlay and Liz Oakley-Brown (review)

Whatever a teacher’s enthusiasm for sharing with students the multi-faceted appeal of Twelfth Night, he or she may well hesitate over points of entry into the ever-growing mass of performances, contextual studies, and criticism. Such a teacher will find this little book, which brings together old and new thinking about Shakespeare’s ‘most perfect comedy’ (p. 52), a godsend.

Enticements to deeper investigation in the Introduction and four of the contributed essays mean that the collection fulfils some of the functions of an annotated bibliography, but with the added inducement of sequential intellectual themes. For example, Peter Kirwan’s chapter is a diligent, wide-ranging, yet tightly-written evaluation of recent pedagogical approaches to Twelfth Night that deals with linked Shakespearean plays, characterisation, genre, carnival, gender, text, language, and visual resources. Kirwan’s interleaved insights into related internal issues such as Sebastian’s and Viola’s teachability sustain the reader’s engagement. R. S. White’s chapter, ‘The Critical Backstory’, and William C. Carroll’s discussion of Keir Elam’s 2008 edition and post-2000 commentaries are reliable and readable accounts of a rich tradition.

A Critical Reader also offers succinct guidance on the performance history and recent productions of Twelfth Night. In summarising a wide selection of stage and film versions, Linda Anderson objects, rightly in my view, to the anachronistic nineteenth- and twentieth-century ‘trend toward tragic Malvolios’ (p. 67), but astutely analyses the dilemma of directors staging the comedy for modern audiences, to whom Malvolio’s treatment ‘can only appear as cruelty and his adversaries as sadists’ (p. 68). Disagreements between Kirwan and Anderson, for example with reference to the 2006 Hollywood film, She’s the Man (pp. 59, 207–08), leave space for teachers and students to make up their own minds.

Four further essays in A Critical Reader are aptly titled ‘New Directions’. Elam argues that an emphasis on optics in the Viola plot and on graphics in the Malvolio plot ‘is central to the comedy’s dramatic economy’ (p. 109). Randall Martin applies stimulating social and psychological insights about shipwreck to Viola’s, Sebastian’s, and Feste’s progress through the play, while also making connections with Pauline eschatological teachings. Tiffany Stern’s essay demands reading as an essential preliminary to debating Twelfth Night’s festive and/or melancholic moods. Stern detects in the Folio text traces of ‘an earlier version … perhaps closer to the play’s probable Twelfth Night performance’ (p. 168), and warns that the relevance of Feste’s songs to Shakespeare’s work ‘may arise simply from the fact that they are (now) there’ (p. 171).

Andrew Stott bases his interpretation of Feste as a professional comedian on an analysis of Robert Armin’s literary promotion of clowning as expert paid work. In seeking to undo C. L. Barber’s ‘gassily optimistic assessment’ of Twelfth Night (p. 144), Stott finds in Illyria’s ‘cut-throat world’ ‘a dark core that is never far from tipping into cruelty and violence’ (p. 159). He posits convincingly, on the basis of their interchanges (iv. 2. 31–60), that Feste’s verbal tormenting brings the imprisoned Malvolio to a ‘space of dissociative disembodiment’ (p. 165) that threatens a loss of identity. The further claim, however, that Twelfth Night ends ‘in summary imprisonment, promises of revenge and a song that takes as its subject the world’s stubborn refusal to improve’ (p. 145), is surely overstated, given the centrality to the last scene (v. 1) of clarifications, resurrections, and release. Malvolio, Viola’s sea captain, and presumably Antonio as Sebastian’s restored friend are freed; Malvolio’s is the only promise of revenge; and ‘When that I was a little tiny boy’ encourages a freeing of the audience too, both from life’s inherent sadness, and from engagement with Feste’s and the other characters’ troubles – ‘But that’s all...