Director Charles McMahon on TWELFTH NIGHT
On grief, love, and healing in Shakespeare’s comedy
Lantern Theater Company’s production of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night — onstage May 18 through June 18, 2023 — is directed by Lantern Artistic Director Charles McMahon. In this essay, McMahon considers how “in Twelfth Night, a ‘plague’ of love replaces grief with new life.”
FESTE
Good madonna, give me leave to prove you a fool.
OLIVIA
Can you do it?
FESTE
I must catechise you for it, madonna: good my mouse of virtue, answer me.
OLIVIA
Well, sir, for want of other idleness, I’ll bide your proof.
FESTE
Good madonna, why mournest thou?
OLIVIA
Good fool, for my brother’s death.
FESTE
I think his soul is in hell, madonna.
OLIVIA
I know his soul is in heaven, fool.
FESTE
The more fool, madonna, to mourn for your brother’s soul being in heaven. Take away the fool, gentlemen.
Every good play is a struggle. In great plays that struggle is clear, compelling, and relevant, serving as the driver of both the humor in comedy and the catharsis in tragedy.
In Shakespeare’s plays there is conflict in every scene. His plays always involve a world that is somehow out of joint, and the events of the play are the process of that world putting itself right. For the most part Shakespeare’s tragedies treat on the world of authority. Some illegitimate agent has seized control of the state, bringing chaos into the world. A king makes a catastrophic error in judgment. A military general trusts the wrong advisor. In all these cases, social, political, or martial power ends up in irresponsible hands, so the world must be set right by restoring the true ruling principal.
In the comedies, the world is out of joint in the affairs of the heart. Lovers are kept apart sometimes by external forces like disapproving parents, or by their own foolishness and lack of self-awareness. Twelfth Night gives us a wonderfully varied series of misprized loves and mistaken infatuations, where seemingly everybody is in love with someone they cannot have, and nobody is happy. This would seem at first blush to be the stuff of farcical comedy, but Shakespeare actually offers us something much deeper and more textured than a farce.
The clue comes early when in the first two scenes we learn that two major characters are mourning the loss of their recently dead brothers. The two characters, Viola and Olivia, react in very different ways leading to the increasingly desperate complications of the plot and finally to the restoration of harmony and balance in the imaginary land of Illyria. Olivia plunges herself into mourning and shuts herself off from the world. At first sight she seems even to have consciously banished joy from her court, with the line “Take the fool away.” She is referring to Feste, the jester whom we are told the Lady Olivia’s father took much delight in; but Olivia first words put us on notice that there is no room for anything delightful in Olivia’s house or her heart. Feste must work with all his might to pry loose a smile from Olivia, and he risks angering her in the process. Luckily, he succeeds in reaching her for a moment, but she is quick to reassume her icy mien and her first major action in the play is to reject an offer of love from Duke Orsino. During this scene, Feste is not only dealing with Olivia’s dark mood but he is engaged in a struggle with Malvolio to exert influence on her psyche. In a moment after Feste has coaxed from her the first smile she has cracked in weeks, Malvolio offers a scathing put-down of Feste, to which Olivia responds, “Oh you are sick of self-love Malvolio, and taste with a distempered appetite.” In this brief moment of clarity, she has summed up the problem in Illyria: everybody has an appetite for the things that hurt them and deprive them of happiness, and everyone disdains the things that might bring them joy.
Into this sick world comes Viola, driven to these shores by the shipwreck that she believes has killed her brother. Her condition is thus parallel to that of Olivia, but she reacts to her circumstances quite differently. She chooses to hold out hope that perhaps he is alive, however unlikely this may be, and establishes a plan to keep herself provided for, including adopting a disguise that will keep her safe. Assuming the part of a boy, she quickly makes herself an indispensable part of Duke Orsino’s household.
The two women thus have polar opposite reactions to loss and grief. Olivia, feeling that her happy world has been thrown into chaos, has to assume the role of Countess, and be responsible for the welfare of many people who are dependent on her. Her iciness is a result of the extreme self-discipline she has had to exercise to play a difficult role that she had never been prepared for. Losing her closest family members (her father also died only recently) and suddenly being charged with onerous worldly responsibilities has caused her to overvalue control. Thus Malvolio, who is a great affecter of gravity and severity, comes to have undue influence in her house, and the delightful Feste falls into disrepute. She has come to taste with a distempered appetite. Voila, meanwhile, has a different challenge: having kept herself afloat on stormy seas, she has gained the shore by abandoning the notion that we can control our fates. She has learned to swim with the currents, to analyze her situation and adapt to it. She has learned to cling to hope as one would a piece of flotsam in angry waters.
Other characters in the play — Orsino, Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, Maria, Malvolio, and Antonio — are all suffering some degree of disfunction in the world of the heart. Orsino has developed an obsession with Olivia, but he cannot really see her for who she is; being trapped in his own shifting emotions and ego projections, he is blind to the true identities of others and even himself. Sir Andrew seeks Olivia’s favor too, but she will not even give him the time of day, so he ends up spending all his time with Sir Toby in drunken idleness. Sir Toby clearly feels for Maria but won’t let himself pursue anything deeper with her than pranks and tomfoolery. Maria feels the same for him but can’t make the first move, and the perpetually drunk Sir Toby is incapable. Malvolio wants to marry Olivia too, mostly so he can pursue his own titanic ego gratification and lord it over everyone else. Finally, there is Antonio, who selflessly aids Viola’s very much alive brother Sebastian, time and again exposing himself to risk for a young man he clearly adores.
How is this little world to be saved from its own endemic folly? With the arrival of Viola, a new agent is thrown into the suffering body of Illyria like a dose of medicine. She has gained from hard experience what the Illyrians cannot seem to grasp. Namely, that we are not in control of the events in our lives, nor even of ourselves. After meeting Voila — disguised as Cesario — for the first time, we see a sudden and dramatic transformation in Olivia. In a few short minutes she has gone from feeling utterly in control to acknowledging that she has fallen hopelessly in love with a young man who has expressed himself honestly to her. Ironically, Cesario can only do so because he is lying about his true identity as a woman. In this regard Viola herself is a metaphor for theater itself — i.e., the fictional story that reveals the deeper truths about what it means to be human. As Olivia experiences the sudden reawakening of life, she says, “Even so quickly may one catch the plague? Methinks I feel this youth’s perfections with an invisible and subtle stealth to creep in at mine eyes. Well, let it be.” And later, “Fate show thy force, ourselves we do not owe. What is decreed must be, and be this so.” Shakespeare casts falling in love with the metaphor of infection and disease, but in this case the disease is the cure. Olivia has realized in a moment that her self-control was an illusion and that the only path to her real life is to surrender to the truth of how she feels. To accept love into her life, embracing both the joy and the pain that it will bring.
Weaving in and out of the antics of this strange ensemble is Feste. Described by the others as a fool, an ass, a jester, a sot, and a rogue, he is really more of a stoic philosopher who acts as a private, on-staff comedian. His role in the Shakespearean world is to tell people the truth, but in a way that makes them laugh — otherwise, they might kill him. He is unattached romantically, but there is a sense that he has some terrible heartbreak in his memory and there is a sadness always present in him just below the veneer of easy wit. He sings several songs that Shakespeare wrote for him, always on the theme of love and the impermanence of human happiness. He always seems to be saying to the other characters, “Embrace the truth of who you are and take what joy you can in this moment, for everything you love could disappear in an instant. What’s real and present is the only thing you should concern yourself with, or you will waste your life in dreams and useless hesitation.”
The Greeks in classical Athens believe in a vital connection between theater and medicine. That the catharsis of tragedy was a necessary component of healing the human psyche. In a broad sense, Viola is the medicine that heals Illyria. In my own mind, I cannot help imagining Shakespeare the man, reflecting events in his own life: the father of twins, a boy and a girl, born some fourteen years before the play was written. At the age of seven the boy, Hamnet, is killed by a sudden illness, probably the plague, striking him down like a bolt from the blue and leaving the girl, Judith, without the person closest to her from literally before her birth.
What healing is Shakespeare looking to effect for himself and his daughter, now on the cusp of adulthood? Olivia has vowed that she will hide her face in grief for seven years to “season a brother’s dead love, which she would keep fresh and lasting in her sad remembrance.” In real life, an infection took away his daughter’s twin brother. In Twelfth Night, a “plague” of love replaces grief with new life. Of the two dead brothers at the start of the play Shakespeare says, one is in heaven, so do not mourn for him; the other brother, Sebastian, Shakespeare resurrects. It is, after all, a comedy.
Lantern Theater Company’s production of Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare is onstage May 18 through June 18, 2023, at St. Stephen’s Theater. Visit our website for tickets and information.
