Twelfth Night

"If you’ve got Measure for Measure in your mind, Twelfth Night looks a bit darker. What I really like about this play is its sexual playfulness. It seems very modern in that way. There’s no way to play it straight. You’ve either got Orsino in love with Cesario, or you’ve got Olivia in love with Viola, and you’ve always got Antonio in love with Sebastian. It feels to me as if its subtitle What You Will , is a cheeky way of saying ‘whatever, anything goes’. I like the fact that quite often you see productions where at the end Olivia and Orsino are still mixing up the twin they are with and there’s still playfulness. Why do you like it? Yes, because if you believe in the Orsino/Cesario relationship, which says that someone’s externals don’t matter, and what matters is how you get to know them, then the Olivia/Sebastian relationship seems to give exactly the opposite message. It’s really hard to reconcile them. There’s a very dark view of the play, which is that Olivia is being punished like Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew , even like Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing , or Isabella, for opting out of the marriage world and for running her own household. She’s bought out of that in a very extreme way. I wonder, yes. We tend to think a woman dressing as a man must have been a great transgression of social order, but that doesn’t seem the case in Twelfth Night . Viola is the only person who’s really rewarded in the play. She knows who she wants and she gets him, and everybody else’s ending is a little more compromised. Think about how Viola is treated for pretending to be a man against how Malvolio is treated for pretending to be rich, or for wanting to marry advantageously. I think comedy is quite a conservative form. Shakespeare is much more sexually liberated than he is in terms of social class. He seems to feel it’s impossible for people to change where they’re born. Yes, gender inversion is ok. Though the idea of the master waiting on the servants, the social inversions which were part of Twelfth Night, are not ok. I remember reading an interview with Zoe Wanamaker, when she played her, saying Viola is a catalyst, she comes into this very static world where people are fixed in their roles, and she breaks things up. But I think scientifically a catalyst is itself quite inert. It acts on other people and other things but isn’t itself active. That would fit with that idea."

"Twelfth Night is a lovely mellow play. A play which has more comedy in it, in the scenes involving Malvolio. Donald Sinden was a wonderful Malvolio and he has a marvellous essay about it, which I talk about in my book about great Shakespeare actors. He’s very good at describing the self-consciousness of the actor in manipulating his audience as Malvolio. “Shakespeare was quite happy about altering historical fact in order to achieve dramatic effects” At the same time, it’s a maturely romantic play. Take the lover Orsino, his opening scene, “If music be the food of love, play on” is one of the best known lines in Shakespeare. It’s a play that rises to a great climax of reunion. Again, it looks forward to the late plays like The Winter’s Tale in the almost miraculous sense you get in the final scene when Viola is reunited with her brother she believed to be dead. It’s a very beautiful and very moving scene. It covers a wide range of comedy and romance. It’s very entertaining in the scenes with Sir Toby Belch. Again, I saw a great production by John Barton with the Royal Shakespeare Company which was the one in which Donald Sinden played Malvolio and Judi Dench was a great Viola. It’s a very musical play too. The clown has a number of songs which give us a framework for the action. Hardly any of the music originally written for Shakespeare’s plays has survived. But people have been able to use the lyrics of Shakespeare to create their own songs through the ages, all the way up to modern composers. There are some great compositions for the Royal Shakespeare productions. With all the sittings there would have been a great range of people, including some Puritans. Some refused to go to the theatre but no doubt some of them did, even if it didn’t square easily with their principles. So, some people, no doubt, were shocked by the play. The play is one which toys, as does Shakespeare in other plays, with homoerotic themes: for example the relationship between Orsino and Viola disguised as a boy. The relationship between Sebastian and Antonio is particularly capable of homoerotic interpretation: when Antonio talks about his desire for the boy Sebastian being “more sharp than filed steel”; I can’t help but regard that as a suggestion of homoerotic desire. Shakespeare invites the possibility of same sex desire in a number of places. I doubt that members of the audience were particularly worried about it. I don’t think they cared all that much. I think it’s we, in modern times, who have been more inclined to worry about the homoerotic aspects behind some of the plays. Again, it’s something I write about in my book Shakespeare, Sex, and Love . I write at some length about this topic. I write about the attitudes towards same-sex desire in Shakespeare’s plays and in Shakespeare’s time. My feeling is that one of the reasons why we don’t see it spoken about very explicitly in the plays or in other writings in the period is because they didn’t think it was all that important. They were pre-Freud and didn’t have great complexes about what people did with each other’s bodies. I think they accepted these things more easily and in a more relaxed fashion than later ages have tended to do. Indeed, it would. I have taught Shakespeare, I’ve lectured about Shakespeare, I’ve been chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, I’ve been director of the Shakespeare Institute, I’ve been professor of Shakespeare Studies, I’m general editor of the Oxford Shakespeare, I’m general editor of the Penguin Shakespeare, I’ve lectured about Shakespeare all over the northern hemisphere. And still, at the age of eighty-five, I’m doing that. I’m going to Romania and Italy and taking part in conferences and I’m writing another book about Shakespeare’s Tragedies. So I am a fairly comprehensive Shakespearian, I think it’s fair to say. It’s difficult to put anything like that in a nutshell but I suppose, ultimately, it has to be his great humanity. It’s his concern with what it is to be a human being, in the sense of the fun that human beings can have out of life but also the sense of the mysteries of human life. It’s his consciousness of the heights to which human beings can rise in heroism—for example with characters like Henry V and Coriolanus—but also the sense of suffering that people can undergo. And also his great sense of fun. He’s a comprehensive writer. I would come back to the fact that ‘Shakespeare’ is not just one play, but that ‘Shakespeare’ is a great body of evolving work. We get a sense of a man who was himself evolving over that period and whose response to life is always alert and always deepening and becoming more and more aware of the complexities of what it is to be a human being."