Lightspeed Magazine Issue 37

by L. Timmel Duchamp

  As the King, Queen, Prince and crowd of courtiers stood about waiting while accommodation was made for the King’s party in the Performance Hall, the question “What doth the King here this evening?” was bruited about in low murmurs with lifted eyebrows. The Fool, at a distance from the royal persons, used the special power of her “amber orb” to scrutinize them and their favorites. The Queen showed not the least sign of irritation or curiosity as to the King’s change of plan. The King looked as he always did when drunk. But the Fool was suspicious. Not a soul at that Court failed to read political and ideological subtexts in even the most incidental piece of ritual, much less in the performance of an entire play. And knowing what she knew of the Queen’s and Countess’s preferences, she had no doubt that the Countess had arranged something the King had not been meant to see.

  The clever, silvery laugh of the Countess slipped and slithered through the raucous, bawdy racket made by the King’s Gentlemen, its timbre too thin and fine to be mired in the coarse Scots’ brawl.6Though responsible for the evening’s entertainment, she betrayed not the slightest sign of dismay at the King’s presence. The Fool watched the royal fingers busy themselves clumsily at the Favorite’s codpiece and wondered whether the Countess assumed that the King would be too preoccupied with lust or befuddled by drink to notice whatever delicious thing she had planned. And the thought struck her that perhaps Master Jonson, lately at odds with certain of the Queen’s ladies, had somehow maneuvered the Favorite (perhaps through the latter’s handler, Sir Thomas Overbury), into insisting on attending, in order to stir up the King’s resentment against them. The Fool thought it unlikely, but not impossible. Master Jonson had not liked the subtext the Queen and Countess had required of the Masque of Queens; he had quite other ideas about women than to glorify their bold, martial prowess. Since the King, having easily recognized it as a score for his wife in their continual game of one-upmanship, had expressed only perfunctory praise of the masque, perhaps Master Jonson thought the time was ripe for exposing the Queen’s circle’s tendency to lèse-majesté.7

  As the crowd of waiting courtiers milled and gossiped, everyone with a clear view of James watched his slightest gesture and twitch (a continual stream of twitches, frankly, since James habitually jerked his neck and rolled his eyes, behavior some of his courtiers variously attributed to his having been wet-nursed by a woman who was always drunk, or to his having been taught at a tender age to be fearful of assassination and witchcraft). Privileged with her far-seeing amber orb, the Fool watched a flea dive from the King’s beard onto a point of his high silver-threaded white lace ruff, dance briefly with the grand style of the Queen herself, then make a splendid gavotte, springing its body gracefully and elegantly high onto the jeweled royal earlobe. The Fool caught the Venetian ambassador staring at this royal ballet. Looking again at the King, she saw the royal tongue thrust into the Favorite’s ear. On seeing the King spit phlegm onto the marble palace floor only inches from Sir Robert Sidney’s jeweled and gold-thread embroidered velvet shoe, she thought, “’Tis our honor and place to behold all that Majesty is and does.” The king’s very vermin were royal, and the King’s stuttering Scots contortion of the English Tongue, too. Almost since childhood the King had proclaimed to anyone who would listen—in Latin, French, and Italian besides his own peculiar rendering of English—that he, by God’s grace, was a “Little God on Earth.” In his paternal masterpiece, Basilicon Doron, he bade his son Henry to be thankful to God “for that he made you a little God to sitte on the throne, and rule ouer other men.” James also said, “What God hath conioined then, let no man separate. I am the Husband, and all the whole Isle is my lawfull Wife; I am the head, and it is my Body.” Kings, James went so far to claim, are “euen by GOD himselfe … called Gods.”8“My new rib,” the Fool recalled hearing that the King had designated Anne when they were first married. So how many ribs did the King now have? she wondered.

  John Wheeler blasted out a trumpet fanfare, supported after the first five notes by an ensemble of two shawms (one of them played by James Morley) and three trombones. Under the direction of the Queen’s Lord Chamberlain, the Court perfectly arranged itself according to rank and began its entrance into the Performance Hall. Though the musicians played a march-like processional, the King and Queen paced their steps as though to a basse-dance, which the Fool believed must be the Queen’s doing, for the King, shambling and lurching with the clumsiness and crookedness that afflicted him when he was drunk, plainly depended on the Queen’s guidance to walk straight. And the Queen’s fondness for dance in all its forms made her wont to transform every ceremonial movement into dance whenever the King and Lord Chamberlain would allow her. After the King and Queen followed Prince Henry, paired with the Countess of Bedford because Lady Arbella, next the prince in rank, was confined to bed with small pox. After them came the several ambassadors and their ladies, including the French Ambassador (who was able to attend solely because the Spanish Ambassador had departed for Spain), followed by “the bevy of Barons and Countessess highest in their majesties’ favor,” then the “Knights and Ladies and so on,” down through the Great Chain of Being, with no one for once arguing with Sir Robert over his placement, with no gentleman jostling, punching, collaring, or threatening another, only the raucous talk and laughter of the drunken Scots spoiling the celestial harmony of the general social order. The Fool, scampering on her short legs to keep up even at such a stately pace, was assigned a place almost at the end of the processional, not much behind John Donne and immediately following the interesting Aemelia Lanyer who, like the Fool, was both a foreigner’s and musician’s daughter.9“Who,” asks the Fool, “cannot take comfort at the neatness of our order? God is in his heaven, the King’s Majesty is on his throne, and we, so privileged to shelter beneath such a paternal roof, are safe indeed.”

  And so the Queen was seated in the first row in a throne-like chair on the left, the King in his throne-like chair in the center, and Prince Henry in his throne-like chair on the right. To the left of the Queen were stools placed for each of the ambassadors present, and one also, between the King and the Prince for the Favorite. Velvet-covered chairs were placed to the right of the Prince for the Lord Chancellor and the ambassadors’ Ladies, and to the left of the ambassadors for the wife of the Lord Chancellor. Benches were placed in rows behind, where on the most prominent and comfortably upholstered of these sat the Barons and Countesses, and behind those everyone else in their order. The Fool’s place was on a plain oak bench. Sitting on the special cushion she had brought to augment her height, though, she had a clear view of the Queen and Countess, and with her special powers had no trouble eavesdropping when the Countess’s ash-blond head leaned forward to whisper in the Queen’s ear. Their exchange, of course, was safe from the King’s notice, for his own head was bent far forward, with his face up against the Favorite’s, nuzzling his neck, cheek, chin, and … nose.

  When Shakespeare appeared on the stage, the Fool recognized his costume as having recently belonged to Sir William Cornwallis.10The playwright bowed low, first to the King, next to the Queen, then to the Prince, and finally to the entire audience. Seeing the relative bareness of the stage, the Fool was reminded of the fabulous machinery and flashing colored lights of the Masque of Queens. Imagination and wit, not material wealth and physical invention, would that night be paramount. Said Shakespeare, “grandly and proudly”: “Your Majesties, your Highness, your Lordships and Ladyships, gentlemen and gentlewomen.” The King giggled at something the Favorite said; Shakespeare, of course, pretended not to notice. “’Tis my company’s immensely great honor and pleasure to present to you my comedy, which I call Twelfth Night Or What You Will, for your amusement and entertainment. We bestow our exceeding gratitude and thanks upon the Countess of Bedford, who, having seen it performed time past in the Middle Temple, duly recommended it to the Queen’s Majesty’s attention, and do verily hope to meet the faith in our play evinced by her shining grace.” Then Shakespeare
bowed again and backed quickly behind one of the screens set to the side of the stage.

  Almost at once the Duke of Orsino entered, richly dressed and bejewelled, followed by a retinue of courtiers and musicians. His voice was bitter and melancholy. “If music be the food of love, play on. Give me excess of it, that surfeiting, the appetite may sicken and so die.” Obediently, the musicians played—softly, though, softly, certainly not loudly enough to drown the King’s hiccup and giggle and grating growl of words too Scots-tainted for most of the English ears present to grasp. “Will you go hunt, my lord?” said one of the duke’s courtiers. “Tomorrow!” the King’s Favorite shouted, drowning out the actor’s response. At which the King collapsed into a fresh outburst of laughter as raucous as that of any drunkard in a tavern.

  Since certain relationships in Twelfth Night are integral to the Fool’s tale, and since the Fool penned her tale for someone well-acquainted with the play (assumed by the scholars to be the Countess of Bedford), a plot summary at this point is in order. The play opens after a shipwreck in which a pair of teen twins, Viola and Sebastian of Messaline, are separated. These twins are supposedly identical in appearance, and each believes the other to have perished in the wreck, but Sebastian is rescued by a pirate named Antonio (to whom he is known as “Roderigo”), and the two became lovers. Eventually Sebastian announces he is leaving for Illyria. Antonio, desperately enamored, begs him not to go and says that the Duke of Orsino, who rules Illyria, bears him, Antonio, a grudge and will destroy him if he ever gets his hands on him. When Sebastian leaves anyway, Antonio follows, regardless of the danger.

  In the meantime Viola, with the help of the captain of the ship that wrecked, disguises herself as a boy (“as a eunuch,” as she calls it) and places herself in the service of the Duke of Orsino, under the name “Cesario.” Orsino, she finds, is languishing in a sea of narcissistic self-pity, apparently in love with his neighbor, Lady Olivia, who is in mourning for her brother and refuses to have anything to do with Orsino’s suit for marriage (or anyone else’s, for that matter). Orsino, struck by “Cesario’s” style, sends Viola to woo Lady Olivia in his stead. Olivia of course falls madly in love with “Cesario”—while Viola falls in love with Orsino, who himself comes to have rather tender feelings for the “boy.”

  Interlacing these love plots are scenes of disorder in Lady Olivia’s household (which is female-headed, after all). Her uncle, Sir Toby Belch (played by Shakespeare), throughout the play carouses with two buddies and makes trouble. He schemes to get one of the buddies, the foppish and foolish Sir Andrew Aguecheek, married to his niece and engineers an unwilling duel between the latter and “Cesario.” Lady Olivia’s fool, the merry, mischievous, but often wise Feste, and Maria, her waiting woman, join their revels and form a league against Olivia’s social-climbing, snobbish, and puritanical steward, Malvolio. It is Maria’s idea to expose Malvolio’s ambitions to Lady Olivia by writing an unsigned letter that obliquely encourages his pretensions to wed a lady above his status, a letter Maria allows him to find just lying about. Malvolio, believing the letter is for him, slyly presses his attentions on Olivia and is locked up as mad for his pains, thereby giving Feste, Maria, and Sir Toby real scope for tormenting him.

  The main plot comes to a head when Sebastian and Antonio arrive (separately) on the scene. Sebastian, taken for “Cesario,” fights the duel and agrees—with a bewildered sense of having stumbled on a windfall—to Olivia’s proposal of marriage; the Duke’s men arrest Antonio, and Antonio, taking “Cesario” for Sebastian, begs the return of the purse he had given Sebastian, which Viola, of course, does not have. Inevitably, the Duke, with Viola, Lady Olivia, and Antonio all encounter one another, with Antonio reviling Viola for having betrayed his friendship, and Olivia claiming Viola as her husband. Viola, mystified, protests these claims, but the Duke condemns her perfidy. At which Sebastian comes on the scene, and Olivia (with everyone else) is duly astonished, and unable (!) to tell who is the real “Cesario.” All is revealed. The Duke offers to marry Viola once she has dressed in women’s clothing; Viola agrees to do so when her old clothes are found. Since she had left her old clothes with the captain, and it is revealed that Malvolio had had him arrested, Malvolio is released and receives Olivia’s apologies, and the play ends with plans for a double-wedding.

  Eroticism, in the early modern period, is not gender-specific, is not grounded in the sex of the possibly ‘submissive’ partner, but is an expectation of that very submissiveness. As twentieth-century readers, we recognise the eroticism of gender confusion, and reintroduce that confusion as a feature of the dramatic narrative. Whereas, for the Elizabethan theatre audience, it may be the very clarity of the mistakenness—the very indifference to gendering—which is designed to elicit the pleasurable response from the audience.

  —Lisa Jardine, Reading Shakespeare Historically

  The fragments left by Queen Anne’s fool provide a blow-by-blow description not of the play per se, but of particular audience responses to the play—and of her own sudden insights into the performance’s subtexts. She writes, for instance, “soon it is the pretty little boy playing Viola’s turn to enter. ’Tis Robin, a known flirt at court, pert as a kitten, and when younger, a strong countertenor, though not so tuneful as would make him suitable for the trade. Now the King’s party quiets, pleased to hear his sweet piping voice—until, that is, they cannot help but snicker, as when Viola says: ‘I’ll serve this duke. Thou shalt present me as an eunuch to him.’”

  The Fool describes Sir Toby Belch’s and Sir Andrew Aguecheek’s bawdy foolery as “quite to the King’s taste.” She notes that in most of the scenes between Viola (as “Cesario”) and the Duke, the audience is closely (and mostly quietly) attentive—though even these scenes are distinguished by remarks from the audience, as when the Duke says, “For they shall yet belie thy happy years that say thou art a man. Diana’s lip is not more smooth and rubious; thy small pipe is as the maiden’s organ, shrill and sound, and all is semblative a woman’s part.”

  The Fool says that “a good English voice, from a bench closer to me than to the King,” called out, “And just what size is thy pipe, boy?” The Fool expresses annoyance—and the opinion that if the King had not been present, the man would not have been “so impertinent with his own pipe.” A short while later, when Malvolio describes Cesario, “as a squash is before a peascod, or as a codling when ’tis almost an apple. ’Tis with him in standing water, between boy and man,” the same male voice burst out, “Aye, and full ripe enough to be tasty!” The Fool notes that she was not alone in her annoyance. The Countess of Bedford’s kinswoman and maid of honor, a certain Mistress Goodyere, went so far as to get up from her seat and go to speak to one of the Queen’s ushers, presumably to have the man silenced if he persisted.

  The Fool’s reactions to the play include professional interest whenever Feste plies his craft: “Next enters the Lady’s fool, and my interest quickens most proprietorial. I dearly love the clever fool who proves wise, giving a fillip to such humble work as mine, and yet find myself gnawed by jealousy to see one such of readier, nimbler wit on his feet than is ever possible in true life. These lines he speaks were written for him, of a quill’s invention. And does not clever ink flow more freely from a quill than twisted wit rolls off a nimble tongue? How can the Queen my mistress not wonder at the clumsiness of my own, after seeing this night’s work? How compare I to Feste? Not at all, alas, not at all!”

  Significantly, the Fool explicitly distinguishes what interests her from what interests the vocal male audience. The male audience is clearly most entertained by the drunken hilarity engineered by Sir Toby Belch and the fool, and most emotionally engaged by the Duke’s relations with “Cesario.” The Fool, contrarily, expresses boredom with the drunken hilarity and intense interest in Lady Olivia’s relations with “Cesario” and Maria’s cleverness and loyalty to her lady. Perhaps the greatest anxiety the play raises for her lies in the extent to which Olivia and Maria flout
gender restrictions, revealed by the Fool’s certainty that they will be punished. She quotes “Cesario” telling Olivia (after Olivia’s told “him” that she’d heard he’d been “saucy at my gates”) “I see what you are, you are too proud,” and notes that it’s clear that Olivia would rather have a lover she could pity from above, than one she must simply respect.

  The Fool’s first clue to the Countess’s subtext is Sir Toby’s naming Maria “Penthesilea,” which the Fool at first takes as “a cheekiness for certain, when that queen’s true image only lately graced our Court.” A few sentences later, she reports: “Lo, at this very moment of the Duke’s speech, do I suddenly lay my thoughts on that niggling familiarity that has been teasing my brain since I first put my eyes to this character. Ho, and so it is, that the Duke’s silver-threaded ruff, his royal purple velvet doublet slashed with rose silk, his worsted and silk hosen seamed with evenly matched seed pearls, and even his high, cork-heeled shoes lined with gold and studded at the toes with great garnets, are all the very items I recall seeing the King’s Majesty himself wearing not five winters past! And it is now, too, that I see that as the Duke lifts his goblet to his lips, why he holds it in that peculiar, clumsy way only the King doth, with his crooked elbow thrust awkwardly out at its own unnatural angle! And I notice, now, the odd restlessness of eyes that never stay still—though not rolling wildly, as the King’s are like to do, yet in discreet emulation thereof … Yea, all becomes obvious of an instant, to she that hath eyes to see, making the nagging puzzle breathtakingly plain! How now, can it be that the King doth not see it himself? ’Tis he so far gone in his cups, or may it be that, never having beheld himself in a true mirror of disinterested fashioning, his Majesty would not recognize himself were he to meet his own image in bright light and open face-to-face, and not as in this mirror so darkly?