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Authors: William Shakespeare
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Shakespeare’s text, comes from the characters themselves and is most effective when actors play the characters straight. Judi Dench, who played Viola in 1969, remarked: “John Barton was the one who said it’s such a bittersweet play, that if you do that [i.e. play it purely for comedy] it tips over. It’s not pure comedy.” 64 As academic and theater historian Ralph Berry explains,
a taste for dark comedy has long been prevalent … the entire network of assumptions sustaining the old
Twelfth Night
has collapsed. And that raises the whole question of what is called, for want of a better word, comedy … A modern production of
Twelfth Night
is obliged to redefine comedy, knowing always that its ultimate event is the destruction of a notably charmless bureaucrat. 65
But, he goes on to ask, “Do we laugh at it?”
“Are All the People Mad?”
There is a great deal in
Twelfth Night
about madness … for all its comedy and charm, [it is] very much darker than that. Like so many of Shakespeare’s plays, it’s about what happens to individuals when their idea of themselves prevents them from taking in the reality of the world around them. They act irrationally, lose their sense of proportion, become—in a way—unbalanced. 66
Orsino is a victim of a type of madness to which the most admirable characters are sometimes subject. Its usual causesare boredom, lack of physical love, and excessive imagination, and the victim is unaware that he is in love with love rather than with a person. 67
Orsino’s complete lack of reason with regard to Olivia’s refusal of him has been emphasized in more recent years. Michael Boyd’s 2005 production had him in various states of disarray and undress, in a half-waking, half-sleeping state, indulging his every “romantic” whim, at the expense of his personal musicians, who had to get up and play music whenever he dictated. At one point they appear in dressing gowns, obviously dragged out of bed to perpetuate his obsessive sickness. Clearly unbalanced at the start of the play, his fantasy became so overwhelming that, in the final scene, he threatened to murder both Olivia and Viola. The question of whether or not he had regained his sanity remained ambiguous.
This emphasis on the madness of Orsino’s wooing threw light on the fact that his behavior and romantic posturing is as forced as that of Malvolio. Faced with Viola/Cesario, who expresses her true feelings for Orsino through her entreaties, Olivia is awoken by a genuine note of true love. One of the play’s ironies is that the man who is most sure of himself and most grounded in reality, Malvolio, is the one who is treated as insane.
In 1987 Bill Alexander wanted to emphasize the “madness” of all the characters, and his set and lighting plots played an integral part in this:
I wanted to stress in my production some of the links between love and madness … to show people behaving in ways that are extreme, or deluded, or uncharacteristic—slightly “touched” perhaps … I wanted a sense of the intense Mediterranean heat that can go to people’s heads. So the stage set was rather like a Greek island—white-washed houses, bright blue skies … And the lighting was deliberately strong when people’s behaviour was at its most illogical. 68
The whitewashed walls of the set and the intense white lighting, specifically plotted for moments of “deranged” behavior, alsoencouraged a visual association with the white walls of a padded cell. This focus on madness was pursued to the end with a disturbing conclusion for Malvolio. Antony Sher, who played the part, “initially presented him as a figure of broad comedy, then showed the character degenerating through appalling suffering into real madness”: 69
[Malvolio] gives the impression of groping around in the darkness while his voice is amplified to suggest a hollow cellar … [he] is tied to a stake like a bear and he whirls round it like some mad
a taste for dark comedy has long been prevalent … the entire network of assumptions sustaining the old
Twelfth Night
has collapsed. And that raises the whole question of what is called, for want of a better word, comedy … A modern production of
Twelfth Night
is obliged to redefine comedy, knowing always that its ultimate event is the destruction of a notably charmless bureaucrat. 65
But, he goes on to ask, “Do we laugh at it?”
“Are All the People Mad?”
There is a great deal in
Twelfth Night
about madness … for all its comedy and charm, [it is] very much darker than that. Like so many of Shakespeare’s plays, it’s about what happens to individuals when their idea of themselves prevents them from taking in the reality of the world around them. They act irrationally, lose their sense of proportion, become—in a way—unbalanced. 66
Orsino is a victim of a type of madness to which the most admirable characters are sometimes subject. Its usual causesare boredom, lack of physical love, and excessive imagination, and the victim is unaware that he is in love with love rather than with a person. 67
Orsino’s complete lack of reason with regard to Olivia’s refusal of him has been emphasized in more recent years. Michael Boyd’s 2005 production had him in various states of disarray and undress, in a half-waking, half-sleeping state, indulging his every “romantic” whim, at the expense of his personal musicians, who had to get up and play music whenever he dictated. At one point they appear in dressing gowns, obviously dragged out of bed to perpetuate his obsessive sickness. Clearly unbalanced at the start of the play, his fantasy became so overwhelming that, in the final scene, he threatened to murder both Olivia and Viola. The question of whether or not he had regained his sanity remained ambiguous.
This emphasis on the madness of Orsino’s wooing threw light on the fact that his behavior and romantic posturing is as forced as that of Malvolio. Faced with Viola/Cesario, who expresses her true feelings for Orsino through her entreaties, Olivia is awoken by a genuine note of true love. One of the play’s ironies is that the man who is most sure of himself and most grounded in reality, Malvolio, is the one who is treated as insane.
In 1987 Bill Alexander wanted to emphasize the “madness” of all the characters, and his set and lighting plots played an integral part in this:
I wanted to stress in my production some of the links between love and madness … to show people behaving in ways that are extreme, or deluded, or uncharacteristic—slightly “touched” perhaps … I wanted a sense of the intense Mediterranean heat that can go to people’s heads. So the stage set was rather like a Greek island—white-washed houses, bright blue skies … And the lighting was deliberately strong when people’s behaviour was at its most illogical. 68
The whitewashed walls of the set and the intense white lighting, specifically plotted for moments of “deranged” behavior, alsoencouraged a visual association with the white walls of a padded cell. This focus on madness was pursued to the end with a disturbing conclusion for Malvolio. Antony Sher, who played the part, “initially presented him as a figure of broad comedy, then showed the character degenerating through appalling suffering into real madness”: 69
[Malvolio] gives the impression of groping around in the darkness while his voice is amplified to suggest a hollow cellar … [he] is tied to a stake like a bear and he whirls round it like some mad
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