"Twelfth Night": Critics, Players, and a ScriptAuthor(s): Homer SwanderSource: Educational Theatre Journal, Vol. 16, No. 2 (May, 1964), pp. 114-121Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3204506Accessed: 04/06/2009 23:03

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TWELFTH NIGHT: CRITICS, PLAYERS, AND A SCRIPT

HOMER SWANDER

"Saw Twelfth Night acted well, though it be but a silly play," Samuel Pepys wrote in 1663.1 Nearly three hun- dred years later-in 1940-Helen Hayes and Maurice Evans, under the direction of Margaret Webster, were offering Broadway its first Twelfth Night in ten years, and Wolcott Gibbs of the New Yorker was (possibly without knowing it) expanding upon Pepys; while praising the acting, he had this to say of the play:

[It] strikes me as an outrageous old bore, full of tiresome and gritty complications, incom-

prehensible Elizabethan jokes, and a troop of

low-comedy characters of really paralyzing in-

anity. . . . While the story . . . is as irritating as a raspberry seed in a back tooth, it is the dialogue that really makes [the] evening . . . a torment to all but the exceptionally devout.2

Pepys spoke that year in many voices: of the ten most influential critics then reviewing Broadway, only two expressed real doubts about the quality of the pro- duction, yet all but three had serious reservations about the play, most of them seeing it as a careless, "silly" mix- ture of good moments and bad

Nine years later, when Twelfth Night -this time with Arnold Moss and Fran- cis Reid-appeared again in New York,

Mr. Swander teaches in the Department of English, University of California, Santa Bar- bara.

1 The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Henry B. Wheatley (London, 1928), III, p. 6.

2 Nov. 30, 1940, pp. 34-35.

the anonymous critic of Theatre Arts magazine spoke for all his colleagues of that year when he lamented the the- atrical problem Shakespeare had created:

Twelfth Night is so poorly constructed, even by Elizabethan standards, that remarkably clever direction is required to make sense of it. The script contains three virtually irreconcilable elements. There is one play involving three of the most anaesthetic bores ever conceived- Feste, Toby Belch and Andrew Aguecheek. There is a second about Malvolio-doubtless tremendously comical in an era when bearbait-

ing was accounted genteel sport, but cruel in our own. And there is the third, a pleasant charade of love and confusion on the seacoast of Illyria. The problem is to make the first of these plays bearable (almost impossible), the second human, the third delightful.3

About half of his colleagues nevertheless found it possible (as he did not) to praise the production. John Mason Brown, in the Saturday Review of Lit- erature, for example, found the direc- tion "charming," the scenes "fine," the actors and actresses "ingratiating," "truly beautiful," and "intelligent."4 But not a single one of the twelve most impor- tant New York critics spoke up whole- heartedly for the play; and even when they found the production routine or worse, they knew where the original trouble lay. Here is a fair sampling of their comments:

3 Dec., 1949, P- o10 4 Oct. 29, 1949, pp. 30-31-

TWELFTH NIGHT: CRITICS, PLAYERS AND A SCRIPT

Time Magazine: . . . time, public taste and a certain original insouciance on Shakespeare's part have conspired against Twelfth Night. Particularly in the theater, the strands of its complicated plot can come to seem like chains. With its dead characters who are actually alive, its young gentlemen who are really young ladies, its love-making that is really leg- pulling, the play swarms with rather impracti- cal jokes. Then there are Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, those relentless cut-ups whom a later age would have relegated to the funny papers.5

NY Times, Brooks Atkinson: Not realizing that he was writing for the ages, [Shakespeare] took less pains with Twelfth Night than . . . he should have done. It is an improvised enter- tainment. . . .6

NY Herald Tribune, Howard Barnes: A spirited revival. .... If the comedy itself re- mains forced and fortuitous, that is the fault of the Bard, who wrote it in an off moment . . . there is too little fun in Shakespeare's random excursions into tippling and cruel jesting to make their efforts more than occasionally enter- taining.

N.Y. Journal American, Robert Garland: Twelfth Night is better read than heard. I've been sitting through it for many a year and, even as a youngster, I found it on the dull side. Then, of course, I didn't say so. Now I do. Frankly, I don't care if I never see it again . . .

NY Daily News, John Chapman: As I sat in my comfortable chair at the Empire last eve- ning, I had the blasphemous notion that Mr. Shakespeare had written his little play as a script for a Milton Berle television show .... Twelfth Night is a sloppy harlequinade . . . It would take an immense amount of style in

production and an inordinately gifted cast to

elevate it above the frequency of TV Channel

4. NY Daily Mirror, Robert Coleman: Twelfth

Night is one of Master Will's minor efforts. It lacks the familiar quotations of the Bard's titans . . .

The next professional production of the play in this country was a 1957 tel-

5 Oct. 17, 1949, pp. 88-89. 6 For the reviews from which this and the

four immediately following quotations were taken see NY Theatre Critics' Reviews X (1949), pp. 267-270. The reviews originally appeared in the Oct. 4, 1949, issues of their respective newspapers.

ecast starring Maurice Evans again. John Crosby, then our most influential re- viewer of television, thought the pro- duction was "absolutely beautiful" but had this to say of the play:

Piper Laurie, I'm told, withdrew from the lead role of Twelfth Night, muttering that the script wasn't right. Well, she's on sound ground there. That confounded script hasn't been right since the 17th century when Shake- speare wrote it. You can't put the blame on Lehman Engel, who adapted it for television, because there isn't a great deal an adapter can do with that one. It's the sort of script Moss Hart would have been called in on in Philadelphia if Moss had been around in the 17th century, but I doubt that Moss could have pulled it off, either.

"When Sir Toby got a little too much" for Mr. Crosby, he turned to Jack Ben- ney's program for that week and found it to be "far truer and more human

comedy" than anything Shakespeare had been able to provide.7

What kind of play do we have here, then? Four professional productions, if we count the one Pepys saw, and the conclusion of apparently discriminating men always the same: Twelfth Night is

silly, disorganized, boring, and occa- sionally barbaric.

But let me carry the story a step fur- ther. By 1958 only a courageous or fool-

hardy company would have dared to offer Twelfth Night again in New York; but the Old Vic did so, and the results were interesting. Suddenly the critics, presumably to their own surprise, were

enjoying themselves; and suddenly the

script wasn't so bad. The reviews tell the

story:

Daily Mirror, Robert Coleman: . . . a lively and buoyant production of Twelfth Night. It was a happy choice . . . for in this larkish

comedy, the Bard has mingled some of his favorite elements: romance, intrigue and mis-

7 NY Herald Tribune, Inc., Syndicated Column, Dec. 20, 1957.

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taken identity. He has also sketched some of his most unforgettable clowns.8

Journal-American, John McClain: This mel- low comedy [is] in my meagre opinion Shake-

speare's best. . .. . This is one of Shakespeare's most delightful jobs, and it'll be a long time before you are apt to see it so well done.9

Time Magazine: Twelfth Night . . . opened . . . delightfully . . . could hardly be brighter . . . the poetry dances in and out of the

prankishness, the air is brushed with light, the

carousing invokes no shudders and provides some laughs. . . . Malvolio is grandly absurd . . . really funny. . . . There is for once in the theater the sense of letting something deathless prove its mettle and not of belaboring something lifeless to move its limbs.10

Theatre Arts: . . . reasonably close to per- fection . . . Twelfth Night came through satis-

factorily on both its levels of lyric beauty and low comedy. The transvestite situations that make up the romance are always hard to bring off with any conviction, and the antics of Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Feste can be trying, too. But when the mood is as mellow as that induced by director Michael Benthall and his players, and when the per- formance is of such high polish, it would take a misanthrope, indeed, to be insensitive to the play.ll

The phrases are revealing: "letting something deathless prove its mettle" and "Twelfth Night came through." Is it possible that Pepys and his modern echoes were wrong, that when Twelfth Night fails to come through in the the-

atre, they should claim not that it was still-born from Shakespeare's pen or that it has been smothered by time but that it has been unwittingly strangled by an

acting company that (quite literally) doesn't know what else to do with its hands?

Judith Crist of the Herald Tribune remembers in her review everything that had in the past bothered her (as well as most of her colleagues)-Viola's dis-

s NY Theatre Critics' Reviews XIX (1958), p. 173 (from Daily Mirror, Dec. 31, 1958).

9 Ibid. (from Journal-American, Dec. 1o, 1958).

10 Dec. 22, 1958, p. 54. l"Feb. 1959, p. 24.

guise, the business of the twins, the scenes with Sir Toby and Sir Andrew, the "cruelty" to Malvolio-and, aston- ished but honest, she says, "these are the very things that the Old Vic has made into the more captivating elements of its presentation." And when she remembers what had always appeared to be a play with "six intertwining plots," she is forced to remark, "The Old Vic's secret is ... Michael Benthall's conception of this comedy as a 'team play,' and his direction results not only in exact tim- ing. .. but also in a unifying effect that makes the most minor masquerade and sub-plot a part of the whole."12 That is, what were once thought to be weak- nesses are suddenly revealed as strengths, and the revelation is not so much a re- sult of simple good acting as of a con- trolling "conception" that keeps a good play good, that prevents it from appear- ing to fall apart. One assumes that Direc- tor Benthall understood the play.

But a performance, however unified, is com-

posed of details: Malvolio accidentally cross- garters his knees together so that he must exit with bounds as in a sack race. He plops his hat on his long walking stick to woo it as if it were his lady. When his feet hurt he removes his shoes. He practices a lover's smile in his

pocket mirror. .... Sir Andrew extends a long. stemmed bloom which collapses rubberishly. At one crucial point he cannot move because a foot has caught in a grating. In the duel he leaps, terrified, into Sir Toby's unwilling arms. Sir Toby and a crony pantomime the bliss of becoming elaborately soused. A night cap tas- sel gets stuffed in the wearer's babbling mouth, and a night shirt is lifted to expose lace drawers on a gentleman. A singing clown . . . beats out time on a kind of Elizabethan bongo drum.

Such farcical stage business can of course be dreadful. Only the skill, timing, and good taste of an excellent director and splendid actors can make it funny; and reviewer Frank Aston of the World-

12 NY Theatre Critics' Reviews XIX (1958), p. 174 (from Herald Tribune, Dec. lo, 1958).

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TWELFTH NIGHT: CRITICS. PLAYERS AND A SCRIPT

Telegram (who joyfully composed the above list) goes on:

These uncommonly apt players . . . rush toward burlesque without a blush, but never- theless maintain a definitely elevated tone. Trheir researches and experiments have wrought from the classic comedy a long stream of joys ranging from delicate to rugged. . . . You'll laugh, not like the obedient schoolboy, but lest vou burst.13

The comic characters, with their peril- ous antics, are perhaps more skillfully (lescribe(d by Kenneth Tynan in the New Yorker (whose WVolcott Gibbs, remember, had been paralyzed by the

';"inanity" of precisely these scenes as

i)erformed by the two previous Broad- way companies, and who had typically blamed Shakespeare instead of the play-

ers): l hroughout the evening, the comic scenes

come off best, and Mr. Benthall has embel- lished them with some intricate flourishes of

business. It must have taken a lot of hard

thlinking to arrange for Richard Wlordsworth- a spindly, brilliant Malvolio-to undo his

cross-gartering and then, a minute later, fasten il up again in such haste that he rises to his feet with his knees tied together, but Mr. Benthall has timed the trick co carefully that it looks plausible as well as funnly. Joss Ack- land is a juicy Sir Toby, whose knighthood, if not precisely in flower, has not yet gone sl0molly to seed, and John Neville, peering in alarm throutgh a yellow, moplike iwig, gives a

performance of Aguecheek that is good

enough, in the sharpness of its responses and in its fundamental seriousness, to qualify him for enrollment in the Comedie Francaise. His

bony face, as earnest in outrage as in simple ccrebration, is that of a fool of God who is

just clever enough to impel him to a frenzy of stiff-arm jabs illustrative of what he would do to the man if he had him there. He is

easily soothed, of course, but you feel that at

any moment the fit may take him again. In a

peaceful hour, at the end of a carousal, Mr. Neville remarks, with the air of one tentatively justifying his existence, "I was adored once . .'. There is a silence, in which Sir Toby,

1 Ibid., p. 172 (from World-Telegram, Dec. 10, 1958).

slumped beside him on a bench, belatedly re- acts with a slow, incredulous take, and then, relentingly, pats his abstracted companion twice, commiseratingly, on the flaxen head. The pathos is unforced but potent. A little later, the two bachelors depart, each wearing, by some confusion, one of the other's boots. It is Mr. Benthall's strength as a Shakespearean director that he can make prose scenes like this poetic.14

But we need not let the case rest with Mr. Benthall and his Old Vic produc- tion. It is at least conceivable that what we have there is an inspired acting com- pany making a silly play seem better than it really is, though we must notice that not a single reviewer suggests any- thing of the kind. It will help if we turn to a quite different kind of production -a studio performance by a group of

young actors on a nearly bare stage; with no elaborate sets, no famous director or actors, nothing but players and a play- and to some remarks about that produc- tion by Stark Young, America's finest critic of the drama. Much of what he says about the performance, the play, and the relationship between the two helps to explain how less perceptive critics can, when bored or irritated, blame the play instead of the players.

It was interesting to watch [the actors] thrown back to suLch an extent on make-up, technical

pains and high spirits, never minding the logic of any prose in life, trusting their own poetry and the play's together, every player expected to press for his share in the free folly, radiant or crude, and for the glamor and romance.

This conception of the play . . . is the only conception and approach that can set free such a piece of art as Twelfthi Niglht, it seems to me. Otherwise the play will as often as not be turned against itself, and likely to call for as much apology as admiration.

In Orsino's case everything swas gained by showing him in a veritable sickness of ro- mantic sadness and melodic egotism, jealous lest anyone else should be said to rival him in his state of love. Olivia on her part feeds an

equal egotism, sorrowing for the loss of her

14 Dec. 27, 1958, pp. 52-54.

I7

brother. On this basis what the two of them do, those high-flown, elaborate actions of theirs, becomes all the more poetic for being seen with wit; for then our common sense

puts nothing in their way. Into this glowing air come Viola and Sebastian, rained down from heaven, to settle everything. There was a great gain too in making Sebastian a young fire-eater, charging straight for Sir Toby, which turns the tables on the tormentors of the scared page, Viola, in a duel a moment before. It also makes more plausible Sebastian's ready acceptance of Olivia's love and hand, having him thus so amazed, impulsive and intrepid.

Mr. Elie Faure once said of Renoirs portraits that the silks are like flesh and retain their lightness, the flesh is like silk and retains its weight. That applies subtly enough to t7welfth Night, so lovely, varied and accessible. It should be played straight and lustily, in all the rough bravura of its Elizabethan form, heedless, abundant, musical, all the rash ele- ments; and played as taking the body of the play not as the prison but as the mere shadow, perhaps, of its poetry.15

Twelfth Night is, as the critics have monotonously agreed, a difficult play to produce (though no more so than many other great comedies), and the difficulty, to be sure, lies in the script; but Stark Young is almost alone among the New York critics of the past twenty or so years in seeing that the difficulty exists not because the script is a badly con- structed and outdated patchwork that the players must struggle to overcome but because its subtle and lovely unity is lustily inclusive, various, abundant, a subtle union of silks and flesh (to re- tain the metaphor), of radiance and crudeness, of delicacy and rashness, of high-flown actions and low comedy, of Orsino (on the one hand), whose ser- vants are named Curio and Valentine, and Sir Toby (on the other), whose name is Belch; a complicated unity, that is, in which the players must trust and with which they must cooperate.

We must ask a question, however,

15 The New Republic, Dec. 2, 1940, pp. 755- 756.

EDUCATIONAL THEATRE JOURNAL

that takes us beyond what even Mr. Young has given us. Is the play shaped by an idea? Has Shakespeare ordered his actions, formed his characters, se- lected his words so as to make some in- telligible comment on human affairs? The answer of course lies only in the script, and I do not have space to exam- ine much of it here. But I should like to make a few very brief remarks against which it may be possible to measure the opinion that Twelfth Night is, even at its joyous best, only a romantic romp, a sloppy harlequinade, an entertain- ment.

That it was intended to entertain is of course not in question. The Eliza- bethan Twelfth Night after Christmas was the gayest, perhaps because the last, festivity of the season, and Shakespeare may actually have written the play for such a celebration. In any case, the title suggests a play in harmony with such a time, and Shakespeare quickly estab- lishes love, gaiety, wit, and the proper evaluation of one's self as the great vir- tues. Yet there at the center is Malvolio, a heavy-witted, pompous, self-loving man who dislikes music, laughter, cakes and ale, all that Twelfth Night would sig- nify, who wants the clown Feste dis- missed, gets Fabian in trouble about a bear-baiting, and jails the friendly cap- tain who brought Viola ashore. It is Malvolio, however, who attracts the sympathy of the New York reviewers, for they think Shakespeare's treatment of him barbarously cruel (the remark in the first quotation above from Theatre Arts is typical). To suggest that Mal- volio deserves what he gets takes us into the meaning of the play.

Olivia, whom we can clearly trust on the matter, says, "0, you are sick of self- love, Malvolio, and taste with a dis- tempered appetite" (I.v.97); and Maria later adds, "it is his grounds of faith that all that look on him love him"

n18

TWELFTH NIGHT: CRITICS, PLAYERS AND A SCRIPT

(II.iii.i63). More important, however, is the way he reveals himself in the famous scene (II.v) that amounts to a long soliloquy (though Fabian, Andrew and Toby overhear and comment). Shake- speare here shows the steward imagining and acting out for his own pleasure what it would be like to be Count Mal- 'volio, married to Olivia. His evil desires

(which is the meaning of his name) stand wholly exposed: his longing for Olivia is purely sensual (54-55), there is no hint of tenderness or love; and his wish to marry is purely a desire for

power, which it is clear he will misuse. The trick played on him could find no success were he not what he is, for the tricksters do not mislead him by address- ing the letter to him; he believes it to be a letter from the countess, sees that it is meant for her "unknown beloved," and yet, in a typical violation of civilized behavior, opens it. The wacky antics of the eavesdroppers cannot obscure Shake-

speare's point: the Malvolios of the world mean death to the spirit of Twelfth Night. They do in fact think that because they are "virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale" (II.iii. 124).

The point is clear, too, in Malvolio's opposition to Feste, whose name allies him directly with the festive spirit. The opposition begins with Malvolio's attack upon the clown when the latter is in danger of losing his position in Olivia's house (I.v.). For an Elizabethan court jester to be "turned away" was "as good as a hanging" because it could mean for him the cold, hunger, and hard death of a street beggar: a far more serious n-atter, that is, than if Red Skelton, say, were to lose his sponsor, though the analogy is otherwise precise. And sum- mer will "beat it out" only because the streets are less (lisastrous in warm weather. Malvolio's attack at the source of Feste's livelihood contrasts sharply,

in an important aspect of Shakespeare's design, with the action of the other ma-

jor characters, all of whom give Feste

money-help, that is, to support him. It is Malvolio's action in this their

first confrontation that we are to re- member when they meet again. At the climax of the gulling (IV.ii)-at, if you wish, its "cruelest" moment-Malvolio and Feste are together again, this time alone, and the steward (now imprisoned in a "clark room" for the mad) is brought to begging of the fool. The poetic justice at work is surely clear, but Shakespeare later spells it out. In Feste's last speech of the play (except for the final song) we get by way of three quota- tions from Malvolio-which it is essen- tial to identify-a capsule history of this important relationship, reminding us that things are now about even:

Why, "some are born great, some achieve great- ness, and some have greatness thrown upon them." I was one, sir, in this interlude; one Sir Topas, sir. But that's all one. "By the Lord, fool. I am not mad." But do you re- member? "Madam, why laugll you at such a barren rascal? An vou smile not, he's gagged." And thus the whirligig of time brings in his i evengcs.

Although Olivia can accurately say that Malvolio "hath been most notoriously abused," she says not one harsh word to those responsible; for in fact Fabian is right: How with a sportful malice it iwas followed May rather pluck on laughter than revenge, If that the injuries be justly weighed That have on both sides passed. (V.i.373-76)

But Malvolio is still sick of self-love, the only citizen of Illyria who cannot laugh at himself. Maria's "physic" (II.iii.i87), intended to purge him of his "distem- per," has not worked; and he rages off, promising revenge. Not even the comic community-in which, by definition, all ends happily-can successfully "en- treat him to a peace." Shakespeare leaves

119

120

him out there just offstage, an unyield- ing threat to the spirit of anyone's next Twelfth Night celebration.

A word or two now about Feste, the most important character, and Viola, the heroine. Feste touches everyone, all except Malvolio tenderly, yet in the love that leads to marriage he can, as he says, never thrive. He provides for all the other characters what they would have: affectionate fooling for Olivia, ancient romance for Orsino, nonsense for Sir Andrew, songs of love and drinking for Sir Toby, wit for Viola. Yet he, as surely as Malvolio, is alone at the end. As the communal harmony of the traditional comic ending is opposed by Malvolio, the traditional celebration of marriage is controlled and set off by Feste's auto- biographical song. The last moment of truth in this romantic comedy is a sad and realistic song from this gay and lovable-but lonely-man. Comedy's un- complicated happy ending clearly em- braces too few human possibilities to satisfy Shakespeare even on Twelfth Night.

Viola is another case from Feste en- tirely: from the moment in scene two when she remembers Orsino as a bach- elor, we know that he is headed for a marriage quite different from the one he yearns for; and he had better like the change. Shakespeare works rapidly here. In the first scene he gives us, briefly but sharply, a society of fine, sensitive but luxury-loving and "high fantastical" people (Orsino and Oliva, the latter only by accurate report) who need a small shock treatment to bring them down to earth. In the second scene a young lady arrives, by way of shipwreck, out of nowhere (literally: Shakespeare deprives her of the past she had in his source); she decides, for no apparent reason, to disguise herself as a man and serve a bachelor duke. In spite of these romantic trappings, there is no nonsense

EDUCATIONAL THEATRE JOURNAL

about her, no lushness, no long "po- etical" (her own word in a later scene) speeches. She is plainspoken and busi- nesslike. She gets the facts about her brother, gets briefed on the country, and decides to act ("lead me on"). The impression is of a capable and coura- geous lady who is bringing something new to Illyria; and when later-after her directness of spirit has brought Olivia out of that silly mourning-she be- comes "Orsino's mistress and his fancy's Queen" (V.i.397), Illyria has been purged of a delicate but destructive sentimentality.

Though I have here touched only the surface, I think it clear even on the sur- face that Twelfth Night is more than a

harlequinade, that Shakespeare means not only to entertain but to instruct, that one of his purposes is to celebrate certain virtues and to ridicule certain follies, to nourish the good life and de- feat the bad, that his ridicule attacks the disease of self-love-and thus (in varying degrees) Orsino and Olivia, who are in love with their own emotions; Sir Toby, who is in love with his own fun (Sebastian sets him right with a real fight and a real wound); and Malvolio, in whom the folly goes so deep as to be incurable. And it is hardly extreme to believe that a production in which this purpose of Shakespeare's does not come through to a reasonably perceptive au- dience is to that degree simply not a production of the play that he wrote.

My anthology of remarks from the New York critics emphasizes, at the very least, the extremely precarious life of a play in the theatre and the intricate relationship between the script and the production. It instructs us in the elemen- tary fact that there is no substitute for a genuine understanding of the meaning -and thus of the unity and theatrical potential-of the playwright's words.

TWELFTH NIGHT: CRITICS, PLAYERS AND A SCRIPT

Without this understanding otherwise intelligent playgoers will dismiss from their lives good or even great plays only because they have seen them poorly pro- duced. We have thus a responsibility to ourselves arising out of the irresponsibil- ity or superficiality of many critics, ac- tors, and directors: we must (the sim- plicity of the demand is really embar-

rassing) understand the play. One fan- tastic fact of the modern theatre is that an acting company can adapt, cut, re-

arrange, and misinterpret the life right out of a Shakespearean play, and the bored critics will pan Shakespeare while praising everyone else in sight. Another fact is that, other things being equal, the best twentieth-century Shakespearean production will come from the company remaining most faithful to that seven- teenth-century script. Again the demand is simple: let "something deathless prove its mettle," let "Twelfth Nighit come

through."

Pepys' Show

. .. and saw "Macbeth," which, though I saw it lately, yet appears a most excellent play in all respects, but especially in divertisement, though it be a deep tragedy; which is a strange perfection in a tragedy, it being most proper here, and suitable.

The Diary of Samuel Pepys

1 1