Read Online Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare - Free Book Online

the most wounded member of all—broken double under the weight of his humiliation, [stumbled] off stage after handing Olivia his chain of office. It is not a happy household. 53
    In John Caird’s 1983 production inherent melancholy resulted from the pain of love. The program, instead of the usual notes, was littered with Shakespeare’s sonnets on unrequited and barren love: “Set in the Jacobean period, the production accentuated a sense of decay and confinement by employing a ruined garden, rusting gates, and a mortuary chapel as components of the set design.” 54 Thunder rumbled in the background, only achieving downpour at the end of the play, cued by Feste’s song. The impact of frustrated love and thoughts of mortality on Viola’s psyche was demonstrated by an inspired bit of acting from Zoë Wanamaker:
    the decisive moment in [her] performance as Viola came when reunited with Sebastian, she showed her deep fear that her drowned brother had returned as a ghost to frighten her. She had suffered enough already, and now, on top of everything, the spirit world was playing an unforgivable trick, trifling inexcusably with her deepest feelings of loss and grief. 55
    In recent years there has been a definite reaction against the “twentieth-century preoccupation with the play’s melancholy.” 56 Ian Judge’s 1994 production played “the broad comedy to the hilt.” 57 When discussing the play he observed that:
    The beginning of
Twelfth Night
deals with bereavement: we see a girl hopelessly distressed, having lost her brother but then,because of hope and friendship she is able to re-invent herself: a disguise allows her to create a new life. That’s comedy, not because it’s funny, but because hope and joy can be seen to spring from happiness.
Twelfth Night
also shows the comedy of falling in love, which occurs when people turn themselves inside out and almost reach the edge of madness. There are a thousand different ways of laughing and I think that
Twelfth Night
touches them all. 58
    Taking a more extreme approach to the comic aspects, Adrian Noble’s 1997 production had an exaggerated and comic nonrealist feel to the characters, setting, and costumes: “When there are gags to be gone for, Noble goes for them, adopting the anarchic visual humour of pantomime.” 59 The set, with brash, bold primary colors, was reminiscent of a child’s play-box:
    a pop-art playground complete with jokey lurid green carpet for the garden box-hedge. It’s overhung by a day-glo blue arc, on top of which sits an orb that travels a day’s length from west to east and sun to moon during the play’s course. 60
    The design … often seemed to take the 1950s (perhaps as perceived through
Carry On
films) as its historical cue … the production was, in short, bold, brash and cartoon-like. 61
    Michael Billington referred to it as “a kind of pop-art Alice in Illyria with little emotional reality or erotic tension.” 62 Although entertaining, it annoyed critics with its gimmickries. Also, by playing up the comic aspects, Noble lost the poetry of the play. Dimension and depth were lost in the interpretation of the characters. The program notes reduced them to types found in an enneagram report, * and illustrated them with exaggerated and grotesque caricatures:
    Twelfth Night
is the darkest and most haunting of Shakespeare’s great comedies, its humour constantly shadowed by cruelty and a keen awareness of mortality. Here, however thepoetry is almost entirely missing and you are left with little more than crude, one-dimensional farce. 63
    Noble’s production was a reaction against the type of
Twelfth Night
that had emerged since the 1960s, a conscious lampooning of the Chekhovian take on the play which began with John Barton’s production in 1969. The effect of treating the characters as purely comic creations, however, was revealing in the failure of these productions to make you
feel
. It appears that the comedy, inherent in