by Emma Smith
When Antonio and Sebastian enter in Act 2, they are already on the verge of parting from each other. Antonio is the first to speak: ‘Will you stay no longer, nor will you not that I go with you?’ (2.1.1–2). Sebastian’s answer is negative: he needs to bear his evils alone. He reveals to Antonio that he is not who Antonio has thought, but is actually Sebastian, son of the Sebastian of Messaline who was the father of twins, the girl now drowned. Antonio’s responses as this story unfolds suggest that their past relationship has been one of equals, but what has now been revealed is that Sebastian’s social status is in fact much higher than his: ‘Pardon me, sir, your bad entertainment’; ‘let me be your servant’ (29–32). Sebastian rebuffs him and leaves: alone on stage, Antonio gives a short blank-verse soliloquy. This form contrasts with the workaday prose of the rest of the scene to suggest passionate emotion, and so does the content:
The gentleness of all the gods go with thee!
I have many enemies in Orsino’s court,
Else would I very shortly see thee there.
But come what may, I do adore thee so
That danger shall seem sport, and I will go.
(2.1.39–43)
This short scene echoes the associations between household service and romantic love that have already been established by the play in the complicated interactions between Orsino and his page Cesario, and between Olivia and her messenger Cesario – and which will be replayed again, more bitterly, when the steward Malvolio is tricked into believing his mistress is in love with him. The intersection of the erotic and the servile in this scene is a striking one. One way to read what’s happening is as a lovers’ break-up. Listen to Sebastian: don’t come with me, it’s not you it’s me, I still haven’t got over my father and sister’s death, I’m not the person you think I am. And now the plaintive Antonio: don’t you want me anymore? Tell me where you’re going, I’ll do anything for you, I’m so sorry that I didn’t understand how things were for you. No wonder that Lindsay Posner, directing the play for the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon in 2001, had the two men talking as they got dressed across a rumpled double bed.
Scholars have tended to be more cautious than theatre directors, and two related historical trajectories should make us wary of reading the intensity of this scene between Antonio and Sebastian as a gay relationship in the modern sense. The first is the history of sexuality, which suggests that before the eighteenth century, sexual practices did not constitute the identity of hetero- or homosexual (perhaps the twenty-first century is returning to this scepticism). You might do things, but you don’t become them: a man having sex with another man is a verb, not a noun. Historians of sexuality tell us that binary models of sexuality, and of identity defined by sexual practice, postdate the Renaissance period. In this way, then, the identity of ‘gay’ is simply not available in Shakespeare’s time. The second important historical context is the high value placed on male–male friendship in the early modern period. Humanist theories of male friendship drew on a long tradition dating back to Cicero, which idealized it in the very terms we would now allocate to heterosexual marriage. For the essayist Michel de Montaigne, the perfect emotional equivalence between male friends far exceeded the pragmatic alliance with a wife. Montaigne described marriage as typically ‘forced and constrained, depending elsewhere than from our will, and a match ordinarily concluded to other ends’, whereas friendship is a true ‘sacred bond’, ‘a knot so hard, so fast, and durable’. Elsewhere, a short pamphlet on friendship designed to spread this concept beyond the elite designated the true friend as ‘an Alter ego, that is another himself’. Shakespeare engages with this prevalent cultural tradition across his comedies (see also the chapter on The Merchant of Venice) and in particular in two plays whose titles indicate that their primary concern is with male friendship rather than romantic courtship: The Two Gentlemen of Verona and the collaborative work with John Fletcher, The Two Noble Kinsmen.
So, Antonio and Sebastian are just good friends. Well, perhaps. It’s also true that Antonio’s line ‘I do adore thee so’ is unexpectedly fervent. The word ‘adore’ turns up again in the play in the supposed letter of Olivia to Malvolio where it is clearly in a context of erotic love: ‘I may command where I adore’ (2.5.103). Sir Andrew Aguecheek’s poignant recollection ‘I was adored once, too’ (2.3.175) (Shakespeare is brilliant at these glimpses of backstory that make even minor or two-dimensional characters resonate with emotional possibilities) follows Sir Toby’s acknowledgement that Maria is ‘one that adores me’ (173–4), again implicating the word with romantic or erotic love. A glance at Shakespeare’s use of this word across his works – via an online text search or a print concordance – makes clear that it has two possible connotations: religious devotion or idealized romantic love. So Antonio’s language has connotations of eros rather than philia – useful Greek terms distinguishing erotic love from deep friendship. For some critics it has been self-evident that Sebastian does not, could not, requite these feelings, perhaps based on the rather unimaginative assumption that a man who willingly marries a woman could not possibly also desire another man. But the play itself is not so sure.
Let’s look at Antonio and Sebastian again, this time in Act 5. A lot has happened between their initial leave-taking scene and this reunion. Entering the stage to clear up the misapprehension that Olivia has married Cesario and that Cesario has beaten Sir Toby (in both cases it is not Viola but Sebastian who is responsible), Sebastian addresses his new bride formally and courteously: ‘I am sorry, madam, I have hurt your kinsman’ (5.1.206). He then ignores Viola, and turns to greet Antonio in altogether more enthusiastic terms: ‘Antonio! O my dear Antonio, / How have the hours racked and tortured me / Since I have lost thee!’ (215–17). So why would this be important? Well, it’s important because it is unnecessary. Antonio has a very small number of lines in the play and appears in just four scenes. In two of these, comprising about three-quarters of his lines, he is with Sebastian expressing his love for him and giving him money. In his other two scenes, Antonio serves to unravel the plot of the two twins. His intervention when Viola is reluctantly duelling with Sir Andrew in the mistaken belief that she is Sebastian, and his subsequent arrest when he asks Viola for his purse back, are the means by which the play world comes slowly to unpick the confusion caused by the presence of the two twins. It is Antonio addressing her angrily as Sebastian that gives Viola the first wonderful intimation that perhaps her brother is not dead after all. So Antonio does have a role in the plot, but his passion for Sebastian is quite unnecessary and in excess of that role. If Shakespeare often puts plot before character, here we have something different. Antonio is a character not really needed by the plot.
Except, that is, thematically. Antonio’s desire for Sebastian resonates with Orsino’s for Cesario and with Olivia’s for Viola, which is to say that however hard we might want to try, it is hard fully to straighten out this play and reconcile it to the conventional drive towards heterosexual marriage. In this light, the play’s tongue-in-cheek subtitle, ‘or, What You Will’, has a decidedly saucy ring to it: anything goes, whatever you like, every which way – or, as the beautifully ambiguous ending of Billy Wilder’s analogous cross-dressing film Some Like it Hot (1959) has it, ‘nobody’s perfect’. Critics have tried hard to suggest that Orsino is attracted to Cesario’s obscured femininity: ‘thy small pipe / Is as the maiden’s organ, shrill and sound, / And all is semblative a woman’s part’ (1.4.32–4). In this interpretation, when Viola is revealed at the play’s conclusion, there is a kind of relieved recognition. This is the take we get in Trevor Nunn’s highly enjoyable film of the play (1996) where Toby Stephens as Orsino and Imogen Stubbs as Viola/Cesario find themselves ineluctably drawn together, almost kissing during one of Feste’s songs, before Orsino pulls back, bewildered at his own homoerotic desire. Finding out Viola is a woman reconciles his feeling of erotic dissonance: so that’s why he fancied her – or him.
Of cou
rse, in a modern film in which Viola is played by Imogen Stubbs there is a reassuring gender stability throughout: we all know that Cesario is really ultimately female because ‘he’ is played by a woman, and thus the character of Viola is always in evidence. Not so on the Elizabethan stage where there was no underlying physical femininity to sort out the play’s queer moments. All parts were played by men, so underneath Cesario’s pretence of maleness is – uh-oh – real maleness: the body of the young male actor underwrites not Viola’s femininity but the authentic masculinity of Cesario. Within the fiction of the play, it’s the male Cesario that is the pretence, but on the all-male stage, the female character of Viola seems the unreal one. We get only a few minutes of the shipwrecked Viola in 1.2, and for the rest of the play we see ‘her’ entirely in male disguise. No one, until her reunion with Sebastian at the end of the play, knows her name, and so watching the play we would have no female identity to attach to her. Even at the denouement she does not reappear as a woman, and her lover Orsino seems happy to continue to address her as ‘his fancy’s queen’ Cesario (5.1.384).
But even if we are convinced, or prefer to believe, that Orsino falls for a woman underneath unconvincing male disguise, that can’t help us with Olivia, who also does. Or rather, it moves the frisson of same-sex desire across, mobilizing the relationship between the two women – or even the two male actors playing women – as a further instance of homoerotic attraction. And just as looking at the word ‘adore’ across Shakespeare’s works helped to pin down its meanings, so too we might look at his use of the name Antonio – used in The Merchant of Venice to name another man whose primary emotional attachment is to another man to whom he gives money and whose marriage he too witnesses in conclusion. Something of Antonio in Twelfth Night echoes with this earlier picture of male friendship, that ‘sacred bond’, in Montaigne’s terms, that is structurally and affectively opposed to heterosexual marital coupling, yet is co-opted to bring about that romantic conclusion.
Sexual transgression, then, is part of Twelfth Night’s queer comedy, and Antonio’s role enables us to see that more clearly, making it harder to dismiss or de-authenticate the play’s other expressions of same-sex desire. The name of the Southwark tavern Shakespeare has transplanted to Illyria is irresistible in this context: the relationship between Antonio and Sebastian is, for romantic comedy, the room in the Elephant, their lodging symbolizing an alternative homoerotic landscape.
Antonio’s role in Act 5 also helps identify the way endings function in Shakespearean comedy. In a useful summary of the differences between comedy and tragedy, Jacobean playwright and theatrical apologist Thomas Heywood described them in these terms: ‘Tragedies and comedies … differ thus: in comedies, turbulenta prima, tranquilla ultima; in tragedies, tranquilla prima, turbulenta ultima: comedies begin in trouble and end in peace; tragedies begin in calms and end in tempest.’ It’s all about how things end, Heywood diagnoses: in comedy, the so-called happy ending is constitutive. For Shakespeare (if not in life generally), that happy ending is in multiple marriages, a truism that he mocks in his arch, self-conscious comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost by ending with marriages deferred, by the women, for a year:
Our wooing doth not end like an old play.
Jack hath not Jill. These ladies’ courtesy
Might well have made our sport a comedy.
(5.2.860–62)
Twelfth Night is clearly heading towards ending in marriage, with Olivia and Sebastian, Orsino and Cesario, and even Maria and Toby paired off ‘in recompense’ (5.1.361) for her work in writing Malvolio’s trick letter. But alongside these couples, the play is more than usually concerned with bringing into its long final scene the characters for whom no such ending is possible. It is very noticeable in Twelfth Night that not everyone gets a happy ending, and the particular prominence of these outsiders has identified the play as markedly dark, post-festive, heading towards the so-called problem plays that Shakespeare was to write over the next two or three years (see the chapter on Measure for Measure for more on this subgenre).
Most prominent of these anti-comic figures is, of course, Malvolio. The steward’s worldly aspiration to marry Olivia, mercilessly exploited by Maria’s hoax penmanship, is depicted in unforgiving detail. Malvolio’s fantasy aligns possession of his mistress with possession of a range of high-status consumer goods indicative of luxury and breeding: a daybed, a branched velvet gown (Elizabethan sumptuary laws meant that the wearing of velvet was forbidden to all but the highest echelons of society), and that latest miniaturized technological Renaissance gizmo, a watch. The letter supposedly from Olivia explicitly incites these dreams of social mobility in its encouraging formula: ‘Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrown upon them’ (5.1.367–8): ‘great’ here means ‘of persons: eminent by reason of birth, rank, wealth, power, or position; of high social or official position’. Amid all the playfulness around sexual identity, therefore, Malvolio’s transgression is a different and more dangerous one. He is roundly punished for his dreams of social elevation. The play moves from the ritual hilarity of his humiliation in yellow stockings and cross-garters, face contorted into an unfamiliar rictus smile, to the terrifying prison, via one of my favourite jokes in all of Shakespeare. Concerned that he must be ill, Olivia asks solicitously: ‘Wilt thou go to bed, Malvolio?’, to which he replies with brilliantly inappropriate gusto: ‘To bed? Ay, sweetheart, and I’ll come to thee’ (3.4.27–9). But the laughter becomes crueller. When Feste visits the imprisoned Malvolio to try to persuade him he is mad, the joke seems, perhaps, to have gone too far. Malvolio’s return, swearing to be ‘revenged on the whole pack of you’ (374), acknowledges the way the community, including the theatre audience, have turned on him and his ambition. ‘What You Will’ takes on a more savage air of communal violence. No such punishment, of course, is handed down for sexual, rather than social, transgression. Viola is the only person at the end of the play who really gets what she wants, and is therefore rewarded for her male disguise. It’s a good reminder that, for all the outcry it caused among contemporary moralists, playing with gender is less fraught on the Shakespearean stage than playing with status or rank.
Malvolio is one prominent outsider in the play’s conclusion, but there are others. Feste, the fool, is also outside the unions that structure the ending of the comedy. He provides a melancholy epilogue in the form of a song about ‘the rain it raineth every day’ (5.1.388), but then Feste has been an outsider throughout, an observer of events rather than a participant. But most interesting, and most alienated from the comic denouement because he has so few lines to speak, is Antonio. Antonio has his longest speech of the play in Act 5 when he expresses the pain of his betrayal by Sebastian – a ‘most ingrateful boy’ (73) who has repaid him for saving his life with rejection, ‘false cunning’ (82). He directs the speech mistakenly to Viola, but that doesn’t neutralize its wounded power. Then, spent, he looks on as the plots unravel. In three hundred lines, or about twenty minutes’ stage time, he has only four further lines.
Here it’s useful to think practically about logistics. Employing an actor to do so little could seem rather extravagant. Analyses of the casting of Shakespeare’s plays suggest fourteen actors could play Twelfth Night. Three of these men would double two or more smaller roles, but Antonio’s part cannot easily be doubled, because he is present in the final scene, which requires twelve actors on stage at once. So while he doesn’t say much, his presence has real dramaturgical costs. In other plays doubling is used efficiently to make full use of the company personnel, sometimes requiring some adjustment to the plot for practical purposes. The Fool in King Lear, for instance, disappears without comment in the play, most likely because he is needed for another role, probably Cordelia; at the end of As You Like It, Duke Frederick never arrives for the showdown in the forest, probably because the actor playing him is already present as another character, Duke Senior. For Shakespeare, a playwright who uniquely in th
is period wrote all his plays for a stable company of known actors, the drafting of Antonio’s role looks somewhat inefficient. The only logical explanation is that Antonio’s silent presence in this final scene is crucially important.
Silences in plays are easy to miss on the page. It is easy to forget who is present in the scene if they are not speaking. But on the stage, silences are impossible to ignore: the actor is still full of meaning. Actors act even when – especially when – not speaking. Elsewhere in Shakespeare’s plays there are some important silences that have become critical cruxes: Silvia’s response to Valentine at the end of The Two Gentlemen of Verona when he offers her up to the rapey Proteus; Isabella’s silence after the Duke proposes marriage to her at the end of Measure for Measure; the failure of another Antonio, this time in The Tempest, to reply to Prospero’s overture of forgiveness. How Antonio should behave in this scene is worth thinking about: is he attentive? jilted? well-wishing? angry? sad? Shakespeare leaves us no stage directions as clues, but he’s put the character there for a reason.
Northrop Frye, an important structuralist critic of Shakespeare’s plays who brings out their mythic contours and parallels, notes that the end of comedy is always tinged with something darker: ‘This sense of alienation, which in tragedy is terror, is almost bound to be represented by somebody or something in the play … We seldom consciously feel identified with him, for he himself wants no such identification: we may even hate or despise him, but he is there.’ It seems a good description of the indefinite Antonio in this scene: present, not inviting conspiracy or identification (no scripted asides, for example), again monitoring the genre boundary. Just as in saving Sebastian from the waves he enables the plot to resolve, so here he becomes the figure of alienation whose presence, according to Frye, secures the comedy.
