Sentences from Shakespeare

 

Viola’s abrupt address to “Disguise” in this sentence, as if Disguise were a person, is called an “apostrophe” (not to be confused with the punctuation mark. How they came to have the same name is a matter for you and your dictionary, but it has something to do with turning aside). For the space of half a sentence, Viola makes Disguise into a character. And in Shakespeare’s day, if you conjured up a person named “Disguise,” it wasn’t going to be a nice person. Sure enough, she tells Disguise it’s wicked. (No doubt she knew it was, even before she decided to dress as a man. The Old Testament edict against cross-dressing played a part in early modern politics, as it sometimes does even now.) Disguise is a garment “wherein the pregnant enemy does much.” Viola’s change of costume has awakened Disguise, alias Satan, alias “the pregnant enemy” (pregnant in the older sense of resourceful and sharp-witted).

 

Theater is all about disguise. That’s one reason Renaissance critics argued theater was evil. In Shakespeare’s England there could be serious consequences for wearing the “wrong” clothes, not only for different genders, but also for different social ranks. Some fabrics—purple silk, for instance--were reserved for nobility. But Shakespeare was no enemy of disguise, and neither is Viola. She may perceive the “wickedness” in dressing as Caesario, but she goes right on doing it. In fact, we never again get to see her in her “woman’s weeds.”

 

 

Olivia names the plague, but her metaphorical sentence is really about love. Partly she’s asking if there’s a way for her to slow it down: “Not too fast! Soft, soft!” But by comparing love to the plague, she’s also asking to be relieved of responsibility. Is love a disease? If so, she can hardly be held accountable for how fast it’s happening to her. As questions do, this one contains the reply the speaker wants. Asked and answered. Love is like the plague, and so there’s nothing Olivia can do except “let it be.”

 

Olivia is alone on stage when she speaks this line, but in real life, “Olivia” is an actor in a play. This is the situation of all Shakespeare’s soliloquies, and opinion differs about whether these characters are talking to themselves or to the audience. Olivia might be looking into her soul as she says this sentence, or she might be looking into the front row of seats. Actors and directors will make their own choices. But even if you’re just sitting home reading Olivia’s words, she is asking something of you: don’t hold me responsible. Let me off the hook.

 

Surprisingly, you might think, young students of Shakespeare are inclined to deny Olivia’s wish. Whether because they’ve learned that love at first sight is irrational or because they haven’t experienced it themselves, audiences in their teens and twenties tend to reject the Shakespearean convention that true love can be caught like the plague. They oppose the notion that good relationships can be built on impulses; the bonds will be flimsy, and it won’t last. Older readers or playgoers—in their thirties and beyond—are more likely to give Olivia a break.

 

 

Is is it still funny today when friends take advantage of a not-very-bright person, even if that person is also something of a braggart and has weird hair? The English Renaissance was a crueler age than ours, at least officially. Shakespeare walks a fine line with his buffoons, sometimes mocking them and sometimes eliciting sympathy for them. One of the most cruelly used, Falstaff, is also one of the most beloved.

 

What to say about fools—not wise fools, professional fools, like Feste in this play, but genuine simpletons? Today, as in the Renaissance, one possible impulse is to make fun of them, play tricks on them. That’s what happens to Sir Andrew. But it happens to almost all the other characters, too. By design or by accident, everybody plays the fool.

 

Sir Andrew’s temporary insight into his ordinariness can be very touching. Just for a moment, he understands that although he’s a rich knight, he’s also a person of very average ability. But the moment passes, and Andrew’s humility fades. The most attractive characters in Twelfth Night—Viola, Sebastian, and Olivia, for example—know how to admit when they’re flummoxed. The least attractive—Malvolio and Sir Toby—get angry rather than acknowledge their mistakes. Sir Andrew falls somewhere in the middle.

 

 

Or possibly titles didn’t matter much to Shakespeare. Most of his tragedies and histories simply take their names from the main characters. The titles of the comedies, whene they aren’t throwaways like “what you will,” usually name the plots, like The Taming of the Shrew. Such titles are basically labels that identify the subject of the play without trying to add any new meaning. (Compare this to titles like A Long Day’s Journey Into Night or A Streetcar Named Desire, for example.) For Twelfth Night, though, I think the subtitle was more than just a throwaway, even if it looks like one at first.

 

Tradition says Twelfth Night was named for the occasion of a performance of the play before Queen Elizabeth, on the last night of the Christmas season. If so, that was a good enough reason to use it as the title of the play thereafter, to advertise the work’s prestigious history. But why did it get a subtitle? The main title, Twelfth Night doesn’t explain the piece, since it isn’t about Christmas. But As You Like It doesn’t explain anything about that play, either, and yet nobody seemed to think it needed a subtitle. I suspect the difference was “will,” which may have been Shakespeare’s favorite word. To begin with, “Will” was his name. And it turned out his name could mean many other things. He wrote a famous sonnet about all those meanings of the word “will,” number 135.

 

No matter how he got the idea to use the phrase “what you will” in connection with Twelfth Night, it must have seemed an inspired choice once he thought of it. The play may not concern Christmas, but it certainly concerns “will” and “willfulness.” It’s about privileged people who insist on having their own ways, often driven by “will” in the sense of self-assertion, but also “will” in the sense of carnal desire (a meaning still current today, and one Shakespeare used often.) The antagonist of Twelfth Night is even named “Malvolio,” which literally means “Ill Will.”

 

In spite of ill will and plot twists, things usually come out all right at the end of a Shakespearean comedy. That’s the future toward which comedies tend. In Twelfth Night, as inSentences from Shakespeare English today, the most common sense of the word “will” is simple futurity. The characters use “will” the same way we use it, to refer to what is (probably) going to happen. “Will” means the future, and a lot of us in the audience at the start of a comedy expect that in the near future we will experience a (more or less) happy ending. In Twelfth Night, if not in every Shakespearean comedy, we will have our will.