Yes. OK. So this week's lecture is on Twelfth Night. The play, which comes from the end of the Elizabethan period, we think he's written about 60. You know, one. We know it's first recorded performances in 16 or two. And that puts it at the end of Shakespeare's comic period. So as you probably are getting a sense of during the 15 nineties, Shakespeare mostly writes histories and comedies. There's a couple of tragedies at the beginning. Around 60, No.
One, the dates of Hamlet ish just after Julius Caesar were sort of moving towards the tragedies which dominate the early part of the Jacobean period. It's first printed in the First Folio in 16 23. And it's a play which has got as near Thematic Neighbours Hamlet. Surprisingly, perhaps, it shares the death of fathers and the threat of madness. King Lear, with which it shares a melancholic fool.
And in fact, Feste, a song at the end of Twelfth Night, is echoed by The Fool in King Lear, the comedy of errors with which it obviously shows twins. The Tempest with which it shares the storm. And of course, it also fits with previous comedies of cross-dressing, including two gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice. And as you like it chronologically, its most closely related to Hamlet, I think, and probably to Troilus and Cressida.
And I might give you some sense of the kind of mood you might want to think more about in the play. But I'm going to try and do this morning is to turn the lecture around one marginal character. And I'm stressing that he is marginal, kind of as an experiment to see what we might do with that. And this is the character of Antonio.
And I think Antonio's role may help us think about some important questions for the play about desire and sexuality, but also about the way comedy works, the way Shakespeare and comedy works. And I hope that that will be something which might be useful for you to transfer to the study of other plays. So we first meet Antonio in Act two, scene one of Twelfth Night, and already a lot has happened.
He and his companion Sebastian are the final pieces in the jigsaw. The last characters to be introduced in the play. And they're a sign of how the play's complications are going to be resolved. So the fact the first act in a way sets up the complications and the second act begins by saying this is how they're going to be resolved. What's happened then so far and I apologise for this, if you if you know this play already like the back of your hand.
But as I said at the start of last week's lecture, I am going to assume that not everybody particularly does do that and that we need to give as much necessary information as possible. So let's think what's happened so far in the play. We've met the lovesick Orsino languorously in love. Perhaps like the speaker in a sonnet in love with being in love. He's in love with Olivia, a woman who disdains him because she's an extended, potentially excessive mourning for her dead father and her brother.
We found a shipwrecked woman, let's call her Viler, although if we were watching the play, we wouldn't know that that was her name at this point. Going to talk more about that in a moment. A woman whose brother has been drowned, who wishes she could attend. Olivia as a servant, recognising their shared status as morning brothers. And we like to hear fathers, but instead vows to enter the service of all Orsino in male disguise.
Her male persona, says Aria, is such a hit with all see, you know that he sends his new servant to woo Olivia on his behalf, but says Aria reveals to us that he she is in a difficult position because he she is in love with Orsino himself, herself and problem. Not going to keep that pronoun thing all the time. Is it slightly irritating? But we do need to stress that there is a lot of gender ambiguity in this play, which is something I'm going to be spending a good deal of time on.
So the encounter between DeSario and Olivia goes much too well. Olivia is clearly attracted to the messengers, assured confidence, and the pair have a charged, somewhat coded conversation in which Orsino supposed love. Olivia becomes erotically animated by violence, secret passion for Orsino and attracts Olivia to Caesarea. So, as well as this love triangle, we've been introduced to tensions within Olivia's household.
Her strict steward, Malvolio, possibly intended to signal a Puritan or an extreme Protestant. A strict steward, Malvolio has clashed with her for first day. It is clear that the bon vivant Sir Toby Belch uncle to Olivia and his friend and her would be suitors. Andrew Ague, Cheek and Olivia's waiting woman Maria are a riotous comic problem waiting to happen. So into this way, they establish relationships between the two households of Orsino and Olivia come Sabbat.
Martin. Violence twin. The one supposedly drowned in the shipwreck. So it's easy to see why Sebastian would be introduced at this point. We've had one act of introduction or exposition. The second act begins the long movement towards a new monk in this comedy, at least Shakespeare doesn't leave the that the way the comedy is going to be resolved too long.
Yes, it is. It's in that way. It's quite a comfortable comedy because no sooner, if you've got the difficulties established than the source of their resolution is introduced, that's quite comfortable. Sebastian is, of course, the fourth character who will enable the triangle, which is Orsino scenario. Olivia will enable that triangle to reconcile into two pairs.
And of course, he is the literal embodiment of the fictive scenario, the male version of Viler who will enable Viler to return to herself. It is only when Sebastian recognises her in five long scene, which in reading can look rather ridiculous when the twins don't seem able to recognise that they are twins and instead go through this long account of their father and their upbringing to reassure each other.
But one which in performance is often extremely moving. It's only in that dialogue that Violet's name is spoken in the play. So anybody who is watching the play rather than reading it, would have had no name for this person other than her disguised identity of Sario. So the audience watching is in the same position as the people in Illyria. They don't know who this mysterious person is. The introduction of Sebastian, therefore, is the means to secure violence, own separate identity.
Now, violence assumption of male dress in this play is rather under motivated in plot terms. It is, after all, an odd decision for a young, noble woman shipwrecked on a shore, whereas she admits she knows fire. Her father, one of the prominent local citizens or. Not to send the message saying bring blankets and hot soup to the beach and instead to wonder which of the local dignity she should become a servant to.
Violet decides to dress herself in male clothes. At this point, she says, she's going to be a eunuch. Something happens seems to happen in the play where we forget that she's supposed to be a unicorn. That may be something actually to do with the practicalities of putting the state put in the play. On the beginning of the play, it looks as if Bilour is played by somebody who's going to do singing. And a unique is a way of introducing the fact that you'll have a high voice.
But we never get that singing Viler. So Viler is shipwrecked on the beach and takes the extraordinary decision that the best thing to do is to dress herself in male clothes and become a servant. Now, in some ways, the same common sense exception to Markus's behaviour towards Lavinia that I discussed last week when we were talking about Titus Andronicus and the same counterarguments apply here.
Shakespeare's plays are not always or only realistic. Characters sometimes serve their plots rather than the other way round. It is important for the consequences of violence. Dressing as a man are the most important thing, not necessarily the motivations for it. And it's quite interesting to think about that as a way that Shakespeare. I think sometimes divides us.
His plotting, sometimes motivation and what leads up to an action is the most important thing we might think about, say, Julius Caesar as an example of that sometimes, or even Hamlet. Sometimes what what comes afterwards, what the consequences are. I would think of Macbeth as a play in that kind of structural category. So Shakespeare's plays are not always our only realistic characters sometimes serve their plots rather than the other way round.
But there's also a more compelling psychological explanation for violent behaviour in becoming her dead brother. She keeps him alive. So she does a comic thing by resisting death rather than a tragic thing by going along with it. She tells us later at the end of Act three, I, my brother, know, yet living in my glass, even such and so in favour was my brother and he well, and he went still in this fashion colour ornament for him. I imitate so for him I imitate it.
It's only then that it becomes clear that that's her motivation. She's imitating her brother. So Sebastian is a necessary introduction. Who has a role in the plot? Perhaps not so much a character as a device. His main purpose is to be substituted effectively for someone he looks like. It's a kind of opposite or a perverse version of the bad trick that Shakespeare uses in plays like that.
All's well that ends well in measure for measure. The Bedrick is based on not seeing the person and so them looking the same. Catsuit grey in the dark. We here, we've got Sebastian is in a kind of bedrick in the plot in that he is his only role is to substitute for someone else who the love object thinks that they're talking to.
So since his only purpose is to be substitutive effectively for someone he looks like we might think it's important for Sebastian to be as individually underdeveloped as possible. OK. So if he's going to slot in to be the male Vilo, we don't want him to be a unique individual established yet on his own in the play. So Antonio, his companion here, is therefore not only unnecessary. We don't really need him in plot terms, but he might also be thought to be positively undermining.
He undermines the attempt to retain Sebastian's character as a blank sheet. Now, when Antonio and Sebastian enter, they're already on the verge of parting from each other. Antonio is the first to speak. Will you stay? No longer, nor will you. Not that I go with you. Sebastian's answer is no. He needs to bear his ill's alone. He reveals to Antonio in a kind of strange, unnecessary bit of exposition.
I guess he reveals to Antonio that he is not who Antonio has thought he has hitherto been pretending to be someone called Rodrigo. We don't know why he now tells Antonio his real name. Sebastian, son of the Sebastian of Mescaline, who is the father of twins. We might remember their hamlet son of Hamlet, says Sebastian of Misselling, was the father of twins.
The girl has now drowned. Antonio's responses to this story as it unfolds suggests that whereas in the past they've had a relationship of equals. This new revelation about who's Sebastian really is means that his Sebastian social status is much higher than Antonio's. These are Antonio's next remarks. Pardon me, sir. Your bad entertainment. And then let me be your servant. Sebastian rebuffs him.
But as he leaves, he does tell Antonio where he is going. I am bound to the council cenotes court left on stage alone. Antonio gives a short verse soliloquy, the form of his words here, unlike the prose of the scene before, suggests heightened emotion as it does elsewhere in the play. And the content expresses love for Sebastian. The gentleness of all the gods go with the. I have many enemies in all cenotes court. Else I would very shortly see the there.
But come what may. I do adore these so that danger may seem sport and I will go. I hope you can see already that something in this short scene replays the associations of household service. Let me be your servant and romantic love. I'll do anything for you. Which has already been part of the complicated interactions between Orsino and his page, DeSario and Olivia and her messenger DeSario.
These are gonna be replayed again by Malvolio is tricked into thinking his mistress is in love with her Malvolio servant, thinking that his relationship with his mistress is not one of of households a service but romantic service. These confusion's play on the overlap of servitude and eroticism and on the overlaps between the language of devotion and courtship and those of service. And they do something to parallel relationships of those of different social status with those of different sexes.
And just as viler as servant or Seno enters into a relationship of passionate devotion, which Orsino can barely understand because of not recognising who Viler is. So, too does Antonio with Sebastian. But the overlap of the erotic and the romantic with the devotion of the servant in this scene with Antonio and Sebastian is a striking one. One way to understand this scene is as a lover's Break-Up. One party is saying, Don't come with me.
Don't come with me. It's not you. It's me. I haven't got over my father's death. I'm not the person I think that I am, not the person you think I am. Probably I'm not even the person I think I am. I'm not the person you think I am. And the other partner is saying, Don't you want me? Tell me where you're going. I'll do anything for you. I'm sorry. I didn't understand how things were for you. It ends with the wonderfully conflicted remark from Sebastian. Don't follow me.
I'm going to Orsino was caught. No wonder that Lindsey positive directing the play for the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford in 2001 had the two men getting dressed on an unmade double bed as they talked. Now we've learnt in scholarship to be more cautious than this kind of staging might suggest. Two historical trajectories have made us mindful of reading the intensity of this scene.
As a gay relationship in the modern sense, the first is the history of sexuality outlined by fuko and elaborated and modified by numerous other cultural historians. The consensus from this work is that before somewhere around the 18th century, sexual practises did not constitute an identity. So the labels, hetero or homosexual, we're not we're not we're not really available. You did things that didn't make you things. You might do things, but you are not defined by them.
You might have read The Guardian columnist Suzanne Moine in the weekend papers suggesting we've actually gone backwards in this respect, she wrote. Now it seems homosexuality is as fixed as heterosexuality. It's not about what you do, but who you are. Now, historians of sexuality tell us that binary modes sorry, binary models of sexuality and binary identities formed by sexual practises post date.
The Renaissance period is that they come after this period and therefore the identity homosexual, which is very available to us as a label for intense same sex desire, is not really a very appropriate one to read on to early modern culture. The second and related important historical context is the high value placed in this period on male male friendship. Humanist theories of mailed friendship idealised it as the perfect union of souls, the Aristotelian idea of a soul in two bodies.
These are terms which we would often now allocate to heterosexual marriage. And in fact, the marriage service in the Book of Common Prayer, a book derived from humanist learning, really uses that Aristotelian idea of the union, its souls carried over from male friendship discourse into the discourse of marriage. For Montand, the emotional bond between male friends far exceeded any pragmatic alliance with a wife.
And for Francis Bacon, also writing an essay on friendship, a man without a friend may quit the stage, may quit the stage. He has no role. It's quite interesting to literals this in plays. Men without friends in plays are in tragedies. Hence the problem of Horatio in Hamlet, who is a threat to Hamlet's tragic isolation. Tragic characters don't have best friends. That's the that's the trope, isn't it? Of that YouTube phenomenon, the gay best friend coming in at the end of Shakespeare's tragedies.
Have you seen any of those so incomes of wonderfully camp figure who says, come on, you know, let's get your hair done and you're too good for him or something? So there's a maybe that friendship is friendship, even in that even in that sort parodic version, friendship is against tragedy. If you've got a best friend, you're not in a tragedy. And Hamlet knows that.
I think that's why he can't really deal with Horatio and Shakespeare knows that, which is why he doesn't know what to do with that character. So Shakespeare engages with this important tradition of male friendship in two plays whose indicate who titles indicate that their primary concern is with male friendship, not romantic courtship. The two gentlemen of Verona and the collaborative work with John Fletcher, the two noble kinsmen.
So we know that this is a this is a field of interest for Shakespeare. The unfortunately named Walter Dork in a short pamphlet on friendship, which you published in fifteen eighty nine, and a pamphlet which seems to have been designed to filter down to the slightly lower classes, these this more aristocratic and noble idea of male friendship describes. He looked upon his faithful friend, doth behold, a perfect pattern of his own person being, as it were, an alter ego.
That is another himself, an alter ego. That is another himself. So Antonia and Sebastian then are just good friends. Well, perhaps it's also true that that phrase in Sebas in Antonios soliloquy, I do adore thee. So I do adore this. So is unexpectedly fervent. The word adore turns up again in the play in the supposed letter of Olivia to Malvolio, where it is clearly in a context of erotic love. I may command where I adore Sir Andrew Ague cheek's poignant.
I was adored once to follows Sir Tobey's acknowledgement that Maria is one that adores me again, linking the word with romantic or erotic love, using a concordance either a printed one or more. Usually now a searchable text of Shakespeare online would enable us to broaden out the connotation of the word. Just glancing at that this morning made me think that almost all the occurrences in Shakespeare imply either heterosexual idealisation or some kind of relationship with the gods.
So this research would suggest that perhaps Antonios language, the use of the word adore, has connotations of Eros rather than Filia as the Greek terms for erotic love and deep friendship allow us to separate out. So while theatre directors like Lindsay Posner, who I started a moment ago, have no particular obligation to the historical meaning of their texts, so perform texts are not historical reconstructions.
Thank goodness. It may be that there is some semantic support for the idea of a strong, possibly sexual bond between Antonio and Sebastian. Those critics who attempt to suggest that Antonios love for Sebastian is unrequited.
Yes, that's the one to acknowledge that that's how you kind of retreat from the difficult potential difficulties of this, maybe, and ignoring the importance of Sebastian's greeting to him in Act five, entering the stage to clear up the misapprehension that Olivia has married DeSario and that Caesarea has beaten up. So, Toby. Both these things involve Sebastian, not Azaria. Sebastian addresses his new bride formally and courteously. I am sorry, madam, I have hurt your kinsman.
But he turns to greet Antonio in altogether more enthusiastic terms. Antonio. Oh, my dear Antonio. How have the hours wracked and tormented me since I have lost the emotional focus which might be all the more remarkable given that as well as his new wife, his supposed drowned twin sister is also present on stage. So why would this be important? Well, it's important structurally precisely because Antonio is so unnecessary to the plot. He has just four percent of its lines, the same as Fabian.
He appears in just four scenes in two of these, which comprise about three quarters of his lines in the play. He is with Sebastian expressing his love in Act three. Scene three, the pair meet again. Sebastian opens the scene, admitting he is glad to see Antonio. And Antonio says in reply, My desire, more sharp than Filer's Steel did spur me forth. My desire did spur me forth. Antonio gives him his purse for no reason other than for Sebastian to buy himself something nice haply.
Or I shall light upon some toy you have desire to purchase there to meet the elephant in the two other scenes in which he occurs. Antonio begins to unravel the plot of the two identical twins. His intervention when Violet is fighting Andrew in the mistaken belief it is Sebastian and his subsequent arrest when he asks Sario for his purse back.
These are the means by which the play world catches up with the fact of the two twins and comes slowly to unpick the confusions in this role, Antonio resembles Tromeo of Syracuse in the comedy of Errors. But that doesn't that doesn't get can get away from the fact that his passion for Sebastian is quite unnecessary in terms of that role. I've already mentioned that plots require characters rather than the other way round. But Antonio is a slight counter to this.
He's a character. The plot doesn't really need it. So I think Antonio Israel must be a thematic one. His desire for Sebastian resonates with all seniors for Sario and with Olivia's for Viler, which is to say, however hard we might want to try, it is hard fully to straighten out this play. It's hard to reconcile it to the conventional drive towards marriage in this light. The play's teasing subtitle or What Will or What You Will has a decidedly saucy ring to it.
Anything goes. Whatever you like. Every which way. Or perhaps even as the ambiguous ending of Billy Wilder's analogous cross dress film comedy. Some like it. Hot has it. Nobody's perfect. Critics have tried hard to suggest that the attraction of scenario for Orsino is that he is feminine. Thy small pipe is as the maiden's organ, shrill and sound and all is Sembler TIV a woman's part. That's all seen as description of Caesarea.
So the idea there seems to be that all Seno is actually falling for a woman at some level or sener responds. This is area's femininity. In this interpretation, when the page is revealed as Vialet the play's conclusion. There is a kind of recognition and retrospective understanding. This is the take in Trevor None's highly enjoyable film of the play, which I recommend. The whole thing is available in segments on YouTube, which I'm not allowed to recommend.
Toby Stephens as Orsino and Imogene Stubbs as DeSario find themselves repeatedly drawn together, almost kissing during one of FSD songs before Orsino pulls back, horrified. Is he gay? His demeanour when Viler is revealed in the film is one of relief. Ah, that's what was going on, of course, in a film in which Vialet is played by Imogene Stubbs or any other female actor. There is at heart a certain gender stability. We all know that DeSario is really female because he's played by a woman.
The character of violence is always somewhere in evidence. Not so, of course, on the Elizabethan stage, where there is no reassuring physical femininity to sort out the play's queer moments underneath the characters. Azaria's pretence of maleness was, oh, maleness. But even if Orsino does fall for a fictional woman in the play, that can't really help us with Olivia. She also does or Mark, rather, it moves the plays.
It's sort of tantalising frisson of same sex desire across from Olivia Insys area to from sorry, from Orsino in Syria to Olivia DeSario. And just as we've looked at the word a door across Shakespeare's works to try and pin down its meanings so we might look at the name Antonio used in the Merchant of Venice five years previously to name another man tied emotionally to a man to whom he gets money and whose marriage he witnesses.
In conclusion, something of Antonio in Twelfth Night echoes with this more developed picture of a male friendship structurally and effectively opposed to marital coupling, yet enabling it. So Antonio in The Merchant of Venice is both the threat to Pisania and Portia's marriage, but also the enabler, the kind of sugar daddy. We might also look at another Antonio and Sebastian remembered in The Tempest.
There's something about this name and something about this pairing which keeps turning around in Shakespeare's head. I'm going to talk more about these adjacent characters and these echoes in a moment when we talk about Antonio's role in the ending of Twelfth Night. So a sexual transgression then, I think is a crucial part of the play's comedy. And Antonio's role enables us to see that more clearly.
Critical attitudes to this and the visibility of this relationship have changed along with social attitudes. Writing in the late 1950s in a book which is still otherwise very influential. His Shakespeares festive comedy s.L. Barber describes Twelfth Night in these terms. It's quite a long quotation, so read out twice. The most fundamental distinction Twelfth Night brings home to us is the difference between men and women.
To say this may seem to labour the obvious for what love story does not emphasise this difference. But the disguising of a girl as a boy in Twelfth Night is so exploited as to renew in a special way our sense of the difference, just as a Saturnalia and reversal of social role, roles need not threaten the social structure, but can serve instead to consolidate it.
So a temporary, playful reversal of sexual roles can renew the meaning of the normal relation one can add with sexual, as with other relations. It is when the normal is secure. That playful operation is benign. OK, so the normal is secure. It's a great idea, but I think it's a completely wrong one that we would have to find, would have to look quite hard to find a normal or a secure normal in in Twelfth Night. And in fact, the whole point of the play seems to be to challenge that on every front.
Barbic ends that section I've just been quoting this basic security of the normal explains why there is so little that is queasy in all Shakespeare's handling of boy actors playing women and playing women, pretending to be men queasy must be a sort of euphemism for kind of homo erotic muscatel homosexual in that in that sentence. That's what Bob. But that's what's important for bother to try and assert in the late 1950s.
And if you look at more recent criticism, you'll see there's been an entire shift away from that and away from those kind of assumptions so that the normal is secure. Seems to me to underestimate the play's charms or to put that another way, we could see that Antonios role is in part a challenge to the idea of normative city in these terms. But he may also, as I want to try and explore, be a kind of scapegoat for the play's movement away from sexual transgression towards marriage,
a scapegoat for the movement from queer to straight. He's arrested on a charge which even the play itself seems to acknowledge is trumped up. It's related to some mysterious past sea battle. It's a kind of odd moments in the play, which doesn't really seem motivated. This arrest might be read as the necessary precondition for Sebastian to undertake his heterosexual plot work to resolve the plots.
Erotic triangulation. In the second half of this lecture, I want to try and use Antonio to talk about the play's ending and thereby to discuss some of the conventions of Shakespearean comedy and how these might be extended or modified in a useful contemporary summary of the differences between comedy and tragedy. The playwright and theatrical apologist Thomas Heyward described them. In these terms, tragedies and comedies differ us in comedies.
Turbulent Uprima Tranquila, Ultimate in Tragedies Tranquila, Premer, turbulent. Ultimate comedies begin in trouble and end in peace. Tragedies Beginning CALM's and end in Tempest. Comedies begin in trouble and end in peace. Tragedies beginning CALM's and end in Tempest. It's it's a it's an enjoyable kind of structural sense of the difference in tragedy and comedy being largely a sense of why you choose to start and stop.
Perhaps the lowest common denominator of that peaceful comic ending in Shakespeare is marriage. Now, that's not always true, actually, in Shakespeare's plays. Comedy of Errors, for instance, is very clearly a comedy which doesn't end in marriage and ends with a different kind of family reconciliation.
But it still felt to be such a conventional trope. Concluding trope that Love's Labour's lost to highly aloof and self-conscious play about plays and about comedy and about language can mockett in its conclusion. You may know that that play ends with the marriages deferred, having set up a very obvious sense of how this is going to work out.
King and his three noblemen in the opening scene of Love's Labour's Lost say that they're going to devote themselves to study and not have anything to do with women. And immediately somebody gallops up and says, the princess and her three ladies are here at the gate. You know, it's kind of obvious setup. This is what's going to happen. There are these four marriages at the end. But the play ends with the marriages deferred by the women for a year.
So the king says at the end of Love's Labour's Lost are wooing does not end like an old play. Jack, have not Jill. These ladies courtesy might have made our sport accommodate. So comedy is seen there as an old form in which Jack hath Jill at the end. Now Twelfth Night is clearly heading towards marriage, towards multiple marriages. Olivia and Sebastian have already married, albeit under slightly false pretences. Orsino accepts Azaria as all seen as mistress and his Fancy's queen.
Even Maria and Toby have married in recompense for her work in writing the letter to Malvolio. But Twelfth Night is still a play more than usually concerned with bringing into its long, final scene characters for whom the comedy has failed, characters who do not have a comic resolution. And this is in part the sense in which it's been identified variously as dark or post festive. Heading towards the problem plays where the question of how comic the ending is is is very, very pressing.
Plays like measure for measure and all's well that ends well. Most prominent, I think, of these anti comic figures is Malvolio. Malvolio is rolling the network of desire and transgression that make up Twelfth Night is an interesting one. His aspiration to marry Olivia Mursalin, exploited by Maria's penmanship, is depicted in great detail.
He has a long fantasy in which possession of his mistress is figured in terms of the possession of a range of high status consumer goods indicative of luxury and breeding a day bed, a branch red velvet gown. Elizabethan sumptuary laws prevented all but the most the highest echelons of society from wearing velvet. So even that adjective velvet is very significant. He even wants the latest miniaturise technological gizmo a watch.
The letter, supposedly from Olivia, explicitly encourages these dreams of social mobility. Some are born great. Some achieve greatness. Some have greatness thrust upon them where great means. I think, according to OBD of persons eminent by reason of birth, rank, wealth, power or position of high social or official position, case of great is a social term. And Olivia is encouraging Malvolio to rise socially, to think of himself ambitiously and aspiration early.
Amid all the play with sexual identity in Twelfth Night, which I've been talking about already. Malvolio transgression is a different one. He wants social elevation and for this, of course, he is roundly punished. The play moves from the often highly comic scene of his humiliation in Cross Carter's face contorted into an unfamiliar smile. There's a great joke.
One of the best jokes, I think, in Shakespeare when he replies to Olivia's concerned that he is ill, Olivia says, will go to bed at Malvolio. He says brilliantly and appropriately to bed, I sweetheart and I'll come to thee. So we move from a scene which is often very funny in the theatre. Funnier than you obviously found it then. But perhaps I am. Perhaps I spoilt it. I won't try again. It is actually really funny.
The removal of a scene which many theatregoers and readers or at least myself have enjoyed to one that many people have felt uncomfortable with. When first day visits the imprisoned Malvolio to persuade him that he is mad that what he is seeing, that he sees perceptions are twisted and he is not seeing the world as it really is.
The joke perhaps seems to have gone too far. Malvolio is returned to the stage in the last scene, swearing revenge on the whole pack of you acknowledges the way the community is really interesting would pack because it makes us the people on stage. The people in the audience into a kind of a lot of hands and lots of imagery in this play of hunting bloke, but both classer sized in the myth of act.
Him and Diana right at the beginning, but also bear baiting and bloodsport and those kinds of hunting with dogs. A malvolio language that implicates us all in that, I think, in really interesting way. So Malvolio swearing revenge on the whole pack of you acknowledges the way the community has turned on him and on his ambition. It's really important to notice that no such punishment is handed down for sexual transgression.
It doesn't seem to matter in this play that women dressed as men, even though we think that must be very challenging and dangerous. The cross dress viler is the only person at the end of the play who really gets what she wants. He is rewarded for that deception. It's a good reminder that perhaps playing with gender identity is less fraught. On the early modern stage than playing with with class or rank, we might just say in a kind of parenthesis there.
Critics have have, I think, come to feel that the spectre of Viler dressed as a man being the play's challenge to normative ideas of femininity is a bit of a decoy, and that the most challenging figure in this play to conventional ideas of femininity is actually Olivia. Olivia is a highborn female character who says she will not get married. She runs her own household. She doesn't need a man to enable her to do that.
She's an efficient, effective woman who is withdrawing herself from the emotional and kind of social forms of marriage. She's like women in Shakespeare. Any woman in Shakespeare's comedies who says she isn't going to get married, we know there's going to be some plot convulsion which makes sure she does get married. And that happens to Olivia, too. It's one argument says that Olivia has been humiliated by her treatment in the play.
She's being cheeky, like Malvolio, who's being punished for not fulfilling her proper role. So back to my early mother is a prominent outsider in the play's conclusion, but so too are others. First day is also outside the unions, which structure the ending of the play free to deliver, then his melancholy epilogue in the form of a song. But to some extent. Foster has been an outsider throughout an observer of events rather than a participant.
But next to them, and perhaps even more alienated from the comic denouement, because he has so few lines to speak. Is Antonio. Antonio has his longest speech in Act five when he expresses the pain of his betrayal by Sebastian, are most in grateful boy who has repaid him for saving his life with false cunning and deny denial. And the idea that Sebastian is a most in grateful boy to Antonio really anticipates the speech where we'll see no thinking that says Mario has married.
Olivia also turns on that page and feels a great weight of betrayal. Now in the scene, as is Aria situation, it's recoupable because his aria has not married in Libya and in fact, is there to marry or. Would get the same speech. Essentially, I think twice, once from Antonio talking about Sebastian and once from Orsino talking about his aria. But the Antonia Sebastian one. Nothing can be done about that. But have a look at them. I think they're the same. They are the same speech, really.
Antonio then looks on as the plots unravel in 300 lines, which, as we know from last week, would take about 20 to 25 minutes on stage. Antonio has four lines of speech yet he's on stage throughout. Since he's so little used, this seems rather extravagant. An analysis of the casting of Twelfth Night suggests that 14 actors could play it. It's not particularly demanding in terms of casting, but one of those 14 actors is someone to deliver just one hundred and six lines by Antonio Spread.
As I said, across four of the play's 18 scenes, it's not much of a part. But the possibilities that the actor playing Antonio could double could play other small roles as a common structural structuring principle of Shakespeare's plays. These possibilities are severely hampered by having Antonio onstage in Act five, scene one, which requires 12 characters. So if Antonio weren't on stage in this scene, he could double up with all kinds of other characters.
The fact that he is onstage in this scene means really another person in the play, another person on the payroll and getting all this information from care. Elam's album three edition of Twelfth Night, which has got a grid about who appears in what scenes. It's actually really easy to do a casting grid yourself. Obviously, you just do the characters on one side and the scenes across the top. Quite useful, actually, to see who who is it, who's where.
And it just it just got a different visual sense of what's happening in a place that could be a good way of getting through or all of the talk. There in Shakespeare. I don't say you should try and get all the time. Talk is the point, but can be good to have a different vision or visual representation of the play. So Antonio doesn't say much in the scene that prevents him from doubling up roles.
And for Shakespeare, who is a playwright uniquely for this period, who writes for a fixed group of actors and knows how about how to use his personnel effectively. This is unusually inefficient. The only logical explanation, I think, must be that Antonio silent presence in the final scene is important.
It's worth devoting an actor to for that time. Elsewhere in Shakespeare, I think we have become critically very attentive to silences when a character is onstage and not saying anything is of course very easy to read over that one. We're working from print. But a character on the stage who isn't saying anything is always meaningful. An actor not speaking is full of meaning by their body language. They may be attentive. They may be distracted.
They may be dissatisfied or enthusiastic or any number of things from the way they stand in the way they relate to the characters who are speaking. There are some important silences in Shakespeare that have become critical cruxes. Silvius response to Valentine at the end of two gentlemen of Verona, Isabella's silence as the Duke proposes marriage to her at the end of measure for measure, the failure of another Antonia, this time in The Tempest, to reply when Prospero offers him forgiveness.
So these are all silences which have become critically very important for how we think about their plays and their moments in plays, which you might want to compare with this moment of Antônio silence, which we haven't really yet identified. How Antonio should behave in this final scene of Twelfth Night on stage is something worth thinking about. There are no clues, no direct clues in the scene, but as I've suggested, he must be there for a reason. You might have to look out for him.
If you watch the Trevor Nunn film or the films, of course, a slightly different in that they can turn away from characters who are not interesting. But that's different from the experience of watching a whole lot of people on stage. The Cheek by Jowl Production, directed by Declan Donnellan had an interesting take on this, but also Pixar, Antonio's sexuality. The problematically jilted Antonios has the review and the independent hooks up with first day on the wedding party dance floor.
I'm not sure I would want to hook up with best day, but I guess people always hook up with the wrong people at wedding parties. OK, so perhaps one answer. One final answer then to this, to the question of Antonio's role in this final scene. It's how we think about comedy itself. Northrop Frye, an important structuralists critic of Shakespeare's plays, whose broad brush observations have shared myths and patterns.
I really recommend to you what Fry does is to say that these are big patterns like the killing of the king. The movement from winter to spring, kind of big mythical soul types. But it doesn't do any detailed work. So it means it's quite useful thing to read, which doesn't stop you actually trying to explore it in relation to particular plays. Fry notes that the end of comedy is always tinged with something darker. This is a quote from him.
This quoting him, which I really like because it tries to link something about the mood at the end of comedy with the mood at the end of tragedy. The sense of alienation, Frei says, which in tragedy is terror is almost bound to be represented by somebody or some thing in the play. We sell them consciously, feel identified with him, for he himself wants no such identification. We may even hate or despise him, but he is there to.
The sense of alienation is almost bound to be represented by somebody or something in the play with seldom conscious. We feel identified with him, for he himself wants no such identification. We may even hate or despise him, but he is there. It seems to me a good description of the evasive Antônio in this scene present, not inviting conspiracy or identification.
There are no asides, for example, but he is monitoring something about that Shondra boundary, just as in saving Sebastian from the waves before the play begins. He enables the plot to resolve itself just as he maintains Sebastian's identity as a separate character. So here Antonio becomes the figure of alienation whose presence secures the comedy.
So I've tried to show in today's lecture how if we ask about a minor character in a play, if we say why the church would bother to write this small character, how that might open up some of its wider themes. It's something you can easily do with other plays. And you might want to use the RISC Shakespeare collected edition of Shakespeare, edited by Jonathan Bate and Rasmussen, not least because it has the useful facts at the beginning of each play of the proportion of lines for each character.
So it's quite an interesting way of just getting a different snapshot of who's important. And as I've said in the method for this lecture, who in terms of lines at least, is not important. So those themes in Twelfth Night are about desire and sexuality, and they're also about the genre of comedy and the nature of comic endings. And what I've tried to do today is to show some different ways of thinking about how Antonio's role gives us an angle on these different contexts.
Next week, I'm going to be talking about the history play, Richard. The second I think the question I'm asking is whether it was a good thing for Bowling Brook to depose him.