Missing Fathers: Twelfth Night and the Reformation of Mourning

Twelfth Night (ca. 1602) begins and ends with references to dead fathers whose link to the action of the play is clearly significant and significantly unclear. A lady richly left by one father is erotically paralyzed. Another of slightly lower status, also fatherless, leaves the family home. The fathers reveal themselves merely in traces: Olivia’s is mentioned in an aside telling us that he was “a count / That died some twelvemonth since,” and Viola notes hers just in passing until act 5, when she and Sebastian verify each other’s identities.¹ One might assume that this paternal absence would free the plot from being the sort that Jonson crafted, with the older generation hovering over the libidos of the young. After all, the casual approximation of “some twelvemonth since” suggests the count’s insignificance, and the quantitative play on “count” and “account” underscores the imprecision of the dating and the wealth of the estate left Olivia by her father. But rather than celebrating post-adolescent freedom, the play reverberates with the sense of familial loss that accompanies entry into the sexual adult world. That loss is a social lacuna, literalized as paternal death.

Less subtle than the appearances of the fathers whose mentions bookend Twelfth Night in acts 1 and 5 is Twelfth Night’s twinning and doubling. The shipwrecked dyad of Viola-Sebastian replicates Viola’s dual identity as herself and her transvestite alter ego Cesario; it also copies the similarity of Viola’s and Olivia’s names and circumstances, with the two quasi-anagrammatic women mourning for brothers. Even the doubled recounting of Olivia’s circumstances, the mistaking of Feste for Sir Topas, and Maria’s handwriting for Olivia’s repeat the trope. The twinning in Twelfth Night functions as a response to death.² A double is most obviously a form of spatial repetition, with one person or image duplicated in another place. However, it can also be chronological repetition: someone from the past is copied into the present, as is the case in the play. This essay will discuss doubling in Twelfth Night, its connections to the ambivalently longed for figure of the early modern father, and the multiple implications of that longing. A response to a specifically post-Reformation hunger, I will argue, the double takes its force from changes in mourning rituals that accompanied the decline of English Catholicism. It serves as a testament to the power of the father-child tie and ultimately as a fantasy of its replacement.

Death and the Double

That Twelfth Night concerns itself with death is a familiar observation; mortality makes its entrance in the first scene even with the evidently healthy young Orsino, who wishes for music so that “his appetite may sicken and so die” (1.1.3).³ “That strain again,” he requests, “it had a dying fall” (4).⁴ As with Hamlet, first performed around the same time, dying is the alpha and omega of the play. But unlike Hamlet, Twelfth Night concludes with the promise of marriage. It also ends not with the more typically comedic references to pregnancy but with a song that for many readers describes a mortal trajectory, especially in the fourth stanza:⁵

But when I came unto my beds, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, With tosspots still ’had drunken heads, For the rain it raineth every day.

(5.1.378–81)

The chronological progression of the first three stanzas moves from childhood to both marriage and maturity, so “beds” implies decline as much as sexuality or ordinary drunkenness. What the play does with that projection of decline is to oscillate between mournfulness for the past—and the parent—and a desire to avoid patrilineal strictures. The preoccupation with death is not least visible in Sebastian, who usually plays second fiddle to Viola in critical treatments of the play. When Sebastian describes his father to his friend Antonio, the lines, “He left behind him myself and a sister, both / born in an hour” (2.1.13–14), juxtapose the children’s birth and the father’s...