MALVOLIO
It’s all too easy, isn’t it? To laugh at people. To let yourselves go. To exploit a weakness. To destroy the thing you’re too lazy to take time to understand. To take pleasure in someone else’s downfall.
The practical joke. Is that how it goes with you, is it? Is that what you do?
The bully?
With my lady grieving, with the madness taking hold. Toby Belch targets me. In effect, you target me. With your slouched shoulders and your stinking breath. You trick me. You bully me. Because you don’t approve of the way I live my life. You don’t approve of the way I look, the way I think.
Toby Belch gets his drunken friends together and they work up a plot that will bring me down. It’s the easy option. The lazy option. A practical joke. Oh ha ha! Won’t that be funny? One of many fruitless pranks this ruffian hath botched up.
Toby Belch encourages my lady’s maiden to write a letter.
That letter.
He points to the letter on the floor.
A letter that looks like it’s been written by my lady Olivia – in her very Cs and Us and her Ts. And her great Ps. A letter that is left for me to find. A letter declaring my lady’s LOVE for me. For me! Her love for me her love for me her love for me (I were better love a dream).
He picks up the letter and reads from it.
‘She thus advises thee that sighs for thee. Remember who commended thy yellow stockings and wished to see thee ever cross-gartered: I say, remember. Go to, thou are made, if thou desir’st to be so.’
‘If thou entertain’st my love’, it says, ‘let it appear in thy smiling, thy smiles become thee well.’
A letter declaring my lady’s desire to see me smile. A thing that I am not naturally inclined to do. To see me in yellow stockings with crossed garters. To see me ‘surly with servants’. All of which things I do. Because for the first time, for the first time in my life, I think, I think, I think that somebody loves me and that I AM IN LOVE.
Not mad, but in love.
I AM IN LOVE. For the first time in my life. I am happy.
I AM HAPPY.
To be Count Malvolio!
What weakness. What glorious weakness. Love and happiness. Have you ever felt that? How ridiculous. For the first time I let my happiness in. AND I SMILE. (He smiles.) And I breathe and I FEEL! Sensuous. Physical. As a gentleman does towards a lady. Alive for the first time. Complete for the first time! Possible for the first time. I smile and I smile and I smile because that is what I think my lady wants. My body becomes alive to my lady. The thought of her touch!
Oh!
A paroxysm of smiles.
And look what happens. Look where it leads me.
The behaviour I believe is so desired by my lady becomes my downfall. My smiles are taken for lunacy. My yellow stockings are ridiculed for madness. I am accused of insanity and thrown in a cell where I am tormented and despised.