I am not what I

am
Twelfth Night and inverted
identities

Looking forward and

looking back: Janus and
January

Twelfth Night Merrymaking in

Farmer Shakeshafts Barn
(Phiz, c. 1840)

Carnival and Elizabethan

society

Elizabethan society was strictly

hierarchical:

Every degree of people in their

vocation, calling, and office hath
appointed to them, their duty and
order. Some are in high degree,
some in low, some kings and
princes, some inferiors and
subjects, priests, and laymen,
Masters and Servants, Fathers and
children, husbands and wives, rich
and poor, and everyone hath need
of other: so that in all things is to
be lauded and praised the goodly
order of god, without the which,
no house, no city, no
commonwealth can continue and
endure or last. (From Homily on
Obedience, 1559)

Carnival and Elizabethan

society

Built into the structure of Elizabethan society

were a series of safety valves: periods of
licence in which the strict social order would
be temporarily reversed:

Shrove Tuesday
Misrule (Christmas especially Twelfth Night)
May Day
summer games

These festivals often involved an invasion of

the local church or churchyard with music,
singing, dancing, joking, bawdy humour, roleplay and outrageous costume.

Carnival and Lent (Pieter

Bruegel, 1559)

Carnival

As Michael Bristol explains:

Central to the experience of Carnival is a

particular use of symbols, costumes and
masks, in which the ordinary relationship
between signifier and signified is disrupted
and conventional meaning is parodied.
Parody and travesty, the rude, foolish,
sometimes abusive mimicry of everyday
categories, create the topsy-turvy world of
carnivalesque misrule. (Bristol 1983: 641)

Carnival theory

A key theorist of the carnivalesque is the

Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975).
Bakhtins view of carnival is in many respects
the opposite to the safety valve theory.
For Bakhtin, carnival offers the chance to
have a new outlook on the world, to realize
the relative nature of all that exists, and to
enter a completely new order of things.
(1965: 34)
In the carnival of the Renaissance period,
says Bakhtin, the world is seen anew, no less
(and perhaps more) profoundly than when
seen from the serious standpoint (1965: 66).

Carnival theory

Carnival with all its images, indecencies, and

curses affirms the peoples immortal,
indestructible character. In the world of
carnival the awareness of the peoples
immortality is combined with the realization
that established authority and truth are
relative. (Bakhtin 1965: 256)
For Bakhtin, festive laughter is based upon
an idea of duality of the old, dying world
giving birth to the new one. Laughter in this
sense is fundamentally progressive.

Carnival and the

Elizabethan stage

Robert Weimann argues that although the

[carnivalesque] ceremonies were gradually
discontinued, their spirit survived in the gaiety,
the immoderate and disordinate Joye, of the
Elizabethan clown, jig dancer, and ieaster
(1987: 23-4):

his study is to coin bitter jests, or to show antique

motions, or to sing bawdy sonnets and ballads: give
him a little wine in his head, he is continually flearing
and making of mouths; he laughs intemperately at
every little occasion, and dances about the houses,
leaps over tables, outskips mens heads, trips up his
companions heels, burns sack with a candle, and
hath all the feats of a Lord of Misrule in the country.
(Thomas Lodge, Wits Miserie, 1596)

Carnival and the

Elizabethan stage

Theatres in the
Elizabethan period were
distinctly carnivalesque
spaces, as Bristol argues:

Theatre occupies a
marginal space as well as a
marginal time. This is
pragmatically true of the
earliest Elizabethan
playhouses, which were
situated outside the formal
jurisdiction of the city
authorities, although they
remained de facto an
integral part of the citys
economic activity. (Bristol
1983: 648)

Carnival and the

Elizabethan stage

Carnival and the

Elizabethan stage

The Puritans of the period, of course, took a dim

view of both carnival and theatre:

some spend the Sabbath day (for the most part) in

frequenting of bawdy stage-plays and interludes, in
maintaining Lords of Misrule (for so they call a
certain kind of play which they use), May games,
church-ales, feasts, and wakes: in piping, dancing,
dicing, carding, bowling, tennis-playing: in bearbaiting, cock-fighting, hawking, hunting, and such
like; whereby the Lord God is dishonoured, his
Sabbath violated, his word neglected, his sacraments
contemned, and his people marvellously corrupted
and carried away from true virtue and godliness.
(Philip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses, 1583)

What are the politics of carnival?

Twelfth Night and

carnival

Bakhtin describes the essential carnival

element in the organization of Shakespeares
drama:

This does not merely concern the secondary,

clownish motives of his plays. The logic of crownings
and uncrownings, in direct or indirect form,
organizes the serious elements also. (1965: 275)

Twelfth Nights title, of course, has festive and

carnivalesque associations.
Sebastian, towards the end of the play, asks,
Are all the people mad? (4.1.26)

Twelfth Night and

carnival

In Bakhtinian fashion, Twelfth Night

might be characterised as a play which
explodes traditional categorisations and
hierarchies.
As Karin S. Cuddon argues:

In Twelfth Night demarcations between

male and female, master and servant,
libertine and moralist come into festive
and not so festive collision. (Coddon 1993:
309)

Sir Toby Belch

Lord of Misrule?
I am sure cares an enemy to
life (1.3.2)
Ambiguous identity
Terry Eagleton argues that Sir
Toby is a rampant hedonist,
complacently anchored in his
body, falling at once beyond
the symbolic order of society
in his verbal anarchy, and
below it in his carnivalesque
refusal to submit his body to
social control (1986: 32).

Sir Toby Belch

The grotesque body

Laughter degrades and
materializes To degrade
also means to concern
oneself with the lower
stratum of the body, the
life of the belly and the
reproductive organs
(Bakhtin 1965: 20-1).
Compare Falstaff?

Malvolio
MARIA. Marry, sir,
sometimes he is a kind of
Puritan.
SIR ANDREW. O, if I
thought that Id beat him
like a dog.
SIR TOBY BELCH. What,
for being a Puritan? Thy
exquisite reason, dear
knight.
SIR ANDREW. I have no
exquisite reason fort, but I
have reason good enough.
(2.3.135-40)

Malvolio
MALVOLIO. My masters,
are you mad? Or what
are you? Have ye no wit,
manners, nor honesty,
but to gabble like tinkers
at this time of night? Do
ye make an alehouse of
my ladys house, that ye
squeak out your coziers
catches without any
mitigation or remorse of
voice? Is there no respect
of place, persons, nor
time in you? (2.3.83-9)

Malvolio

Malvolio as anti-theatrical Puritan:

MALVOLIO. I marvel your ladyship takes delight in such
a barren rascal I protest, I take these wise men, that
crow so at these set kind of fools, no better than the
fools zanies. (1.5.79-85)
SIR TOBY. Dost thou think because thou art virtuous,
there shall be no more cakes and ale? (2.3.110-11)

Of course, the festive world of the play turns the

Puritan Malvolio into his very opposite
OLIVIA Why, this is very midsummer madness. (3.4.54)

Carnival and Lent in

Twelfth Night
What is love? tis not
hereafter;
Present mirth hath present
laughter;
Whats to come is still
unsure:
In delay there lies no plenty;
Then come kiss me, sweet
and twenty,
Youths a stuff will not
endure.
(2.3.46-51)

Carnival and Lent in

Twelfth Night

The play stages a conflict between the force of

self-denial and the more joyful spirit of liberation.
VIOLA. She pined in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief. (2.4.112-15)
OLIVIA. Why then, methinks tis time to smile again. []
The clock upbraids me with the waste of time. (3.1.1259)

Feste

Ambiguous social status of fools (and indeed of players)

as at once both high and low (2.3.40).
A wandering figure, Feste belongs both to the locus of
the play world and the platea of the Elizabethan
audience.
VIOLA. Art not thou the Lady Olivias fool?
FESTE. No indeed, sir, the Lady Olivia has no folly I am indeed
not her fool, but her corrupter of words. (3.1.30-5)

Festes entrance is coloured not only by the

unauthorized absence from Olivias household, but also
by his defiant resistance (Let her hang me) to Marias
interrogations about his whereabouts, even under the
threat of hanging or unemployment. (Coddon 1993:
315)

Wise fools and foolish

wits

This fellow is wise enough to play the fool (3.1.59)

Better a witty fool, than a foolish wit (1.5.32-3)
Feste and Olivias Take the fool away exchange
(1.5.35-68) disrupts categories of folly and wisdom in
a carnivalesque manner.
This same disruption is later brought to bear on
Malvolio:
MALVOLIO. Fool, there was never a man so notoriously abused.
I am as well in my wits, fool, as thou art.
FESTE. But as well? Then you are mad indeed, if you be no
better in your wits than a fool. (4.2.89-92)
OLIVIA. Alas, poor fool, how have they baffled thee! (5.1.366)

Clowns and Fools

Clowns

Rustic and idiotic

Bottom, Dogberry, smaller clown roles like
Lancelot Gobbo and Peter
Many were written especially for Will Kempe

Fools

Professional court jesters, often wise fools

Feste, Lears Fool, Touchstone
These roles emerged after Kempes departure
from Shakespeare company (around 1600) and
were written for his replacement, Robert
Armin

Robert Armin (d. 1615)

Apprentice to the great Elizabethan

clown Richard Tarlton
Joined Shakespeares company after
Kempe left (around 1600)
Less physical, more intellectual than
Kempe
Very short!
Often played fool roles more
integrated with the main plot:

As a life-long solo performer, Kemp tended

to dominate the stage whenever he
appeared. Armins attributes were better
exploited in a different way. For a simple
physiological reason, he could not so easily
command the stage in a long monologue.
He was of much more use as a foil, or as a
distinctive individual who lent visual
interest to a group. (Wiles 2005: 161)

Gender inversion

Three couples exhibit same-sex attraction in the

play:

Olivia/Viola
Orsino/Cesario
Antonio/Sebastian

Casey Charles argues that

this theme functions neither as an uncomplicated

promotion of a modern category of sexual orientation
nor, from a more traditional perspective, as an
ultimately contained representation of the licensed
misrule of saturnalia. The representation of
homoerotic attraction in Twelfth Night functions
rather as a means of dramatizing the socially
constructed basis of a sexuality that is determined by
gender identity. (Charles 1997: 122)

Gender inversion

Complicating this, of course, is the fact

that Viola-as-Cesario would have been
played by a boy actor.
Boy actors already challenged any stable
sense of gender in Elizabethan England:
anti-theatricalists frequently complained
that boys dressed as women provoked
sexual desire.

Viola as liminal figure

Viola makes it clear that she is acting a

part:
VIOLA. I can say little more than I have studied,
and that questions out of my part. (1.5.171-2)
OLIVIA. Are you a comedian?
VIOLA. No, my profound heart; and yet by the
very fangs of malice I swear I am not that I play.
(1.5.175-7)

Later, however, this becomes a more

profound identity crisis:
VIOLA. I am not what I am. (3.1.139)

Viola as liminal figure

in her hermaphroditic
capacity as man and
woman [Viola] collapses
the polarities upon which
heterosexuality is based
by becoming an object of
desire whose ambiguity
renders the distinction
between homo- and
hetero-erotic attraction
difficult to decipher.
(Charles 1997: 127-8)

Viola as liminal figure

VIOLA. Ay, but I know
DUKE ORSINO. What
dost thou know?
VIOLA. Too well what
love women to men may
owe.
In faith, they are as true
of heart as we.
My father had a
daughter loved a man
As it might be, perhaps,
were I a woman
I should your lordship.
(2.4.103-9)

Viola as liminal figure

VIOLA. What will become of this? As I am man,
My state is desperate for my masters love.
As I am woman, now, alas the day,
What thriftless sighs shall poor Olivia breathe!
(2.2.36-9)
ORSINO. Your master quits you, and for your
service done him
So much against the mettle of your sex,
So far beneath your soft and tender breeding,
And since you called me master for so long,
Here is my hand. You shall from this time be
Your masters mistress. (5.1.318-23)

Twelfth Nights ending:

Saturnalian or subversive?

If in Twelfth Night the aristocratic order is

ostensibly reasserted in the pairings of
Orsino/Viola and Oliva/Sebastian, the refusal of
the plays closing to recuperate two of its most
disorderly subjects Malvolio and Feste
suggests rather less than a wholesale
endorsement of the privileges of rank and
hierarchy. (Coddon 1993: 309)
The so-called festive comedy concludes rather
ominously; if indeed the whirligig of time
brings in his revenges, it is difficult to dismiss
Malvolios parting threat as merely one sour
note troubling an otherwise stable social
hierarchy. (Coddon 1993: 322)

References

Bakhtin, Mikhail (1965) Rabelais and His World,

trans. H. Iswolsky, Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Bristol, Michael D. (1983) Carnival and the
Institutions of Theatre in Elizabethan England,
ELH, 50: 4, 637-654.
Charles, Casey (1997) Gender Trouble in
Twelfth Night, Theatre Journal, 49: 2, 121-141.
Coddon, Karin S. (1993) Slander in an Allowd
Fool: Twelfth Nights Crisis of the Aristocracy,
Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 , 33: 2,
309-325.

References

Eagleton, Terry (1986) William Shakespeare, London:

Basil Blackwell.
Halliwell, J. O. [ed.] (1844) Tarltons Jests, and News
Out of Purgatory, London: The Shakespeare Society.
Palmer, D. J [ed.] (1984) Comedy: Developments in
Criticism, London: Macmillan.
Weimann, R. (1987) Shakespeare and the Popular
Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social
Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function,
Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Wiles, David (2005) Shakespeares Clown: Actor and
Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.