Twelfth Night: Language and Writing

Frances E. Dolan

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781408171745
• eBook ISBN: 9781472518316
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

Frances E. Dolan examines the puzzling pronouns and puns, the love poetry, mischief, and disguises of Twelfth Night, exploring its themes of grief, obsessive love, social climbing and gender identity, and helping you towards your own close-readings.

CHAPTER ONE

Language in print: ’tis poetical

I’ve suggested a variety of strategies for getting a handle on a play, including narrowing your focus to a key character, word, scene or object. The moment in the text that triggers your own interpretation can come at any time. It is as likely to appear in the middle of the play or at the end as at the beginning. Still, it is always useful to consider how a play begins and what the effects of that beginning are. Students sometimes forget how a Shakespeare play begins because Shakespeare often begins in a place very different from where the central action will be: with Iago discussing Othello and Desdemona, rather than with the couple themselves eloping; with Gloucester and his son, rather than King Lear and his daughters; with Orlando and Adam at the court rather than in the forest of Arden. Many films of the plays alter their beginnings in order to provide backstory, making it harder to remember where the playtexts start. While Shakespeare is certainly comfortable providing us with exposition – when characters hold forth about what has already happened that we need to know to understand the story that will unfold before us – he also constructs his plays carefully so that the viewer has to piece together key information as the story develops. In all of his plays, he is interested in what Hamlet calls ‘indirection’ – seeing things from a skewed perspective, hearing what people thought happened rather than seeing an important event ourselves, feeling aftershocks rather than experiencing the original impact. After you’ve completed reading a play, it’s useful to think about where, in your understanding, the story begins and how you would compare where the story begins with where the play does. Sometimes it’s useful to think about how you’d ‘pitch’ the story if you were trying to convince someone to make it into a movie. ‘So there was a shipwreck …’; ‘So this guy is in love with this woman …’

Shakespeare tends not to depict the beginning of the story but rather to plunge us in when the story is already underway and when one of the most exciting things to watch is how the past – what has already happened – shapes the present. That’s traditionally considered the province of tragedy, in which it is impossible to shake off the constraints and consequences of what has come before. But it is true in comedy as well. Among the events that shape the characters’ personalities and possibilities in Twelfth Night are the deaths of Olivia’s father and brother and of Sebastian and Viola’s father, the shipwreck, the three-month cohabitation of Antonio and Sebastian and earlier encounters between Orsino and Olivia. What else? It’s also useful to think about what is part of the staged action but that Shakespeare chooses not to show: when Orsino hires Cesario, for instance. Instead of showing us that scene, Shakespeare fastforwards so that when we see Orsino and Cesario together they are already deeply attached.

The first scene

We begin with Orsino – and with music, which must be playing when the play begins, since Orsino comments on it. The play thus begins and ends with music, since it concludes with Feste’s final song. The play also opens with Orsino evaluating a performance and there will be other equally self-conscious performance reviews in the course of the play (Booth 152). Lovers in Shakespearean comedy meet their matches and fall in love in the course of the plays. A character who is already in love at the start of a play is more likely to be in a tragedy than a comedy. He or she is likely to switch from one supposed love to another, or conflict or death will divide the lovers. Make of that what you will. When we meet Orsino, he is already in love, he insists, with Olivia. This suggests that Olivia is not the one he will end up with. How would you evaluate what Orsino has to say?

If music be the food of love, play on,

Give me excess of it, that surfeiting

The appetite may sicken and so die.

That strain again, it had a dying fall.

O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet south

That breathes upon a bank of violets,

Stealing and giving odour. Enough, no more,

’Tis not so sweet now as it was before.

O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou,

That, notwithstanding thy capacity

Receiveth as the sea, naught enters there

Of what validity and pitch soe’er

But falls into abatement and low price

Even in a minute. So full of shapes is fancy

That it alone is high fantastical. (1.1.1–15)

First, try to sum up what Orsino says here. What or who is he talking about? Then break the speech down, trying to paraphrase each sentence. That should help you capture what Orsino is saying (although be advised that this is a difficult speech. If you are not always sure, that’s OK). A line of verse can be considered as a unit of thought. But that is less true in Shakespeare’s plays than it is in, say, a sonnet. Here, a thought often runs across several lines of verse. Lines and sentences are not the same. When you arrive at the end of each line in this passage, has a thought been completed (usually signified by ending punctuation) or has the thought been left hanging to run over into the next line (called enjambment)? What’s the effect of spillover in this passage?

Once you get a handle on what Orsino is saying, the question should become what seems noteworthy about how Orsino says it? Many students approach the challenge of ‘close’ or ‘slow’ reading of a passage by hoping and waiting for some divine inspiration. Surely if you look long enough the text will reach out and grab you, handing you the key to its mysteries. Sometimes, that happens. But more often, we have to go to the text, rather than waiting for it to come to us. The best strategy for doing so is to begin to assemble a list of questions you can ask of a passage that will help you start to break down how it works and what it means. At the end of Chapter 3 in this book, there is a summary checklist of the kinds of questions you might want to get in the habit of asking about literature.

Parts of speech

The first step to literary analysis is also an early step in language acquisition: being able to identify parts of speech and ‘diagram’ sentences by identifying the work each word is doing. Unfortunately, native speakers of a language often lack this ability. Attention to grammar has dropped out of the curriculum for many. But the result is an impoverished understanding of how the language we speak and read works. It may seem pointless to learn the rules with regard to Shakespeare, since he so often breaks them. Still, one needs a basic understanding of grammar to analyse a Shakespearean passage, or, indeed, any text.

A basic sentence consists of a noun – the person or thing that engages in the action, the agent or subject of the verb – and a verb, the word that conveys the action. A sentence fragment is thus a sentence that does not have those basic components and so cannot stand alone. When Sebastian agrees to be ruled by Olivia, he says ‘Madam, I will’ (4.1.64). While short, this is a complete sentence. I is the subject and will is the verb here. I is a pronoun, meaning that it stands in for a named noun, which is its ‘antecedent’. We will focus on pronouns in the next chapter. In Orsino’s first speech, we can see that attending to pronouns and their antecedents helps us pinpoint some of Orsino’s vagueness. What is the ‘it’ in line 5? What ‘falls into abatement and low price’ and what do you think Orsino means by this?

There are often two nouns in a sentence, the agent or subject of the action – the doer – and the object of the action. When Viola proposes ‘I’ll serve this duke’ (1.2.52) in her simple sentence ‘I’ is the subject, ‘will serve’ is the future tense verb, and ‘this duke’ is the object. But this first speech in Twelfth Night immediately alerts you that few sentences keep it this simple. They elaborate on the noun-verb-noun structure. But you can get a handle on more complex sentences by looking for the noun-verb-noun structure at their core. Shakespeare often inverts the word order we might expect, placing the verb at the start or the end rather than the middle, for example. When you identify complicated sentences stretching across multiple lines, pay attention to whether or how the structure emphasizes some words over others. Where are the most important words placed?

Shakespeare also complicates sentences by adding multiple clauses or subunits of meaning. Consider, for example, the long sentence in which Orsino imagines Olivia’s capacity for love, given how passionately she mourns her brother.

How will she love when the rich golden shaft

Hath killed the flock of all affections else

That live in her – when liver, brain and heart,

These sovereign thrones, are all supplied, and filled

Her sweet perfections with one self king! (1.1.34–8)

The structure of Orsino’s sentence builds toward himself, the one and only king who will occupy the throne of Olivia’s affections. He presents Olivia as active – she will love – but also as the victim of a violent attack from Cupid’s arrow, which will kill all her other affections, and as a place or a piece of furniture, ‘supplied and filled’ by a new king. Two subordinate clauses (when … when) explain the conditions that must occur before Orsino’s fantasy can come true. Playing with other ways to order this complicated sentence will give you ideas about how to think about Shakespeare’s choices regarding word order. One of the conventions of literary criticism is that we act as if everything is intentional, everything has a meaning, even if we can’t capture an author’s intention. Shakespeare hasn’t left us rough drafts or a writer’s notebook explaining why he did what he did. Instead, just as it is illuminating to ask how else a play might begin and why it begins as it does, so it is also useful to look at a long complicated sentence and consider how else it could be laid out and what the effects are of presenting it as Shakespeare does. What can you make of the fact that Orsino saves himself to the end? What do we learn about him and his love from this sentence and the conditions it sets for him to win Olivia?

Let us return to Orsino’s first speech in Twelfth Night. In it, he introduces several nouns that will prove important in the play. These include music, appetite, love and the sea. But I want to draw your attention to another that is less familiar: fancy. The word fancy was closely connected to the word fantasy. Early modern people understood it to mean ‘a creative capacity that was engaged every single time they saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and/or touched anything – or anyone, for that matter’ (Bruce Smith, ‘His fancy’s queen’ 65). It thus emphasizes the role of sense perception in stoking desire and daydreams. In addition to imagination or fantasy, it can mean variously ‘delusion, whim, affectation, love-longing’ (Bruce Smith 67). The word will appear often in the play. Sebastian uses it to convey his delighted surrender to Olivia’s invitation: ‘Let fancy still my sense in Lethe steep: / If it be thus to dream, still let me sleep’ (4.1.61–2). For Sebastian, ‘fancy’ means an illusion, a dream he wants to keep on dreaming. He wants that illusion to ‘still’ or silence his sense that this is not real. Orsino uses the word ‘fancy’ again to compare men and women, saying that men’s ‘fancies are more giddy and unfirm’ than are women’s (2.4.33). Here he seems to mean desires or whims. Malvolio uses the word as a verb, meaning feeling erotic desire, when he claims that Olivia told him ‘that should she fancy it should be one of my complexion’ (2.5.23–4). Finally, Orsino imagines a future when Cesario has changed into maiden’s weeds or women’s clothes and so can be seen as Viola and installed as ‘Orsino’s mistress and his fancy’s queen’ (5.1.381). As his fancy’s queen, Viola will reign over his desire, capture his imagination, and occupy all of his senses. We will see other examples of words in the play that bear a range of meanings, many of which have since become obsolete, in Chapter 3.

With regard to the verbs, the first step is to identify the action words in a passage. In this passage, the verbs include be, play, give, surfeiting, sicken, die, had, came, breathes, stealing and giving, is, was, art, receiveth, enters, falls, is and is. Orsino relies heavily on versions of the verb to be (be, is, was). Among all of these verbs, which one would you select as the most important? Do you see connections among them? Note how the noun form of fall early in the passage (‘dying fall’) alerts us to its verb form later (‘falls into abatement’). When we are thinking about action, it’s also useful to think about the arc or movement in a passage. What has changed or been learned or accomplished in the course of the speech?

We will talk more about tenses later, but it is interesting here to see that while Orsino uses verbs in the present tense for the most part – describing actions that are underway – he also moves into the past tense to describe how the tune becomes less sweet than it ‘was before’ and he anticipates the future, a future in which his appetite sickens and dies. You might also attend to the ‘voice’ of verbs, that is, whether they are active or passive. Many teachers will encourage you to use active verbs in your own writing because this leads to more concise and forceful prose. You can take a first step toward more self-conscious use of active verbs in your own writing by starting to distinguish between active and passive verbs in Shakespeare’s text. When Olivia concludes about Malvolio: ‘He hath been most notoriously abused’ (5.1.372) she uses a verb in the passive voice to explain what has been done to Malvolio rather than what he has done.

Whereas nouns, pronouns, and verbs are the basic building blocks of a sentence, sentences also often include gracenotes, the adjectives that describe a thing or person (a noun) and the adverbs that describe how an action is done (a verb). In this passage, ‘sweet’, ‘quick’, and ‘fresh’ are all adjectives. The extended simile describing the tune as like the south breeze on violets acts as a kind of adverb, describing how the tune ‘came o’er’ Orsino’s ear. Adverbs conventionally end in ‘-ly’. A more familiar adverb appears in the next scene, in which Viola promises the Captain: ‘I’ll pay thee bounteously’ (1.2.49). Bounteously is the adverb. At one level, adjectives and adverbs are unnecessary – we could grasp the sense, at the simplest level, without them. At another level, Shakespeare wouldn’t be Shakespeare without these words. What do they add?

The text I’ve provided here is from the Arden edition of the play (as are all of the quotations in this book). You might find it useful to compare this version to others, which are readily available in books and online. But you need to know the source of those other editions. Some other volumes in this series focus on comparisons between the earliest texts of the plays. But there is only one early text of Twelfth Night. There are no quartos of Twelfth Night, that is single-play editions, because it was one of the 18 Shakespeare plays that were not published before 1623, when what has come to be called the ‘First Folio’ presented Shakespeare’s collected works to readers. This collection appeared years after Shakespeare’s death in 1616. Two actors from his company oversaw its publication. Without it, we probably would not have a record of those 18 plays that it first brought into print. Since the authoritative text of Twelfth Night is the First Folio, start by looking at that. You can access an online facsimile through the Internet Shakespeare Editions website (http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/facsimile/). Note that to reach Twelfth Night you must first go to First Folio (1623). You might then contrast that to a readily available version such as The Complete Works of Shakespeare (http://shakespeare.mit.edu/). What differences do you see? Some versions, for instance, use numerous exclamation points, making Orsino a more emphatic and lively speaker than he appears to be here. The Folio also places a period after ‘sea’ in line 11. How does that shape your understanding of Orsino’s complicated sentence? Beginning in the eighteenth century, many editors have replaced ‘sound...

Table of contents

• FC
• Half title
• Arden Student Skills: Language and Writing
• Title
• Contents
• Series editor’s preface
• Preface
• Introduction – ways in
• 1  Language in print: ’tis poetical
• 2  Language, character and plot
• 3  Language through time
• 4  From reading to writing
• Bibliography
• Copyright