Read Online Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare - Free Book Online Page B

animal. At the end of the scene, he presses Olivia’s crumpled letter against his cheek, with a tormented, hallucinated look on his face. This is an extremely powerful scene, which suggests, in a pathetic way, that the borderline between the light abuses of festive misrule and real madness has now become an extremely thin one.
    When Malvolio reappears on stage at the end, he is totally bedraggled and, red-eyed, tries to shield his sight from the recovered daylight. But after Feste has once more taunted him with the whirligig of time speech, Malvolio says the expected “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you” in a curiously slow way that ends in a singsong. When he goes away, with a strange smile on his face, one understands that the joke has really been pushed too far and that he has become truly mad. 70
    Both this production and Michael Boyd’s 2005 production made use of light inspired by the scenic device used in the play
Black Comedy
by Peter Shaffer, which takes place in the darkness:
    instead of playing it in darkness, you actually put light on the stage. So what the audience sees are people behaving as though it were completely dark … Instead of dimming the whole stage, we would flood a certain area of it with dazzlingly bright light to delineate the dark room. Both Feste and Malvolio would have their eyes open. But it would be clear to the audience from the very first moment—by the way that they moved around the stage—that neither of them was able to see a thing. 71 [Michael Boyd] plays the dungeon scene in a blaze of light. Thus we don’t strain to catch the sound of Malvolio’s
de profundis
, but hear it and see it full-on as the rope-tethered Richard Cordery angrily prowls the stage like a captive wild animal. 72

    2. Bill Alexander production, 1987: Antony Sher as Malvolio, “tied to a stake like a bear … presses Olivia’s crumpled letter against his cheek with a tormented, hallucinated look on his face.”
    This being comedy rather than tragedy, the accusations of madness are usually uncovered before the characters are seriously injured, although we wonder just how far Maria and Sir Toby would have been willing to go in pursuing their “sport” to the upshot, without the self-serving interests that hold them back. Donald Sinden, who played Malvolio in 1969, believed that his degradation left him no option but suicide: “All his dignity has gone, everything he stood for has disintegrated, what is there left for him to do? Nothing … I saw it as a very tragic ending … Malvolio’s a man without any sense of humor, and therefore, a tragic man.” 73
    In Shakespeare’s canon, the handling of Malvolio’s torture is undoubtedly one of the most difficult scenes for a director to stage. The absurdity of the situation may have its own inherent humor, but it is a bitter and dark one, especially when we think of the usual Elizabethan treatment of the insane: in Romeo’s words, “Shut up in prison, kept without food, whipped and tormented”; Rosalind, on the madness of love, mentions “a dark house and whip” as a cure. In Elizabethan times it was the general belief that mad people were mad because they were “possessed” by the devil or some evil spirit. An attempt was made by a priest or “conjuror” to exorcize the devil. If this failed, as it usually did, the poor unfortunate would be manacled and chained to the wall of a bare, dark cell, beaten or whipped to their senses. The cruelty of the prank on Malvolio can often elicit an uncomfortable response, and modern productions rarely let the audience off the hook. Do we laugh at it? That is a factor entirely dependent on the choices that the director makes.
“Nor Wit nor Reason Can My Passion Hide”
    Gender confusion stands at the very heart of the amorous adventures and comic love-plots in the drama of the age of Shakespeare. The confusion starts from the fact that on theJacobean stage all the marriageable young women’s