In 1987 I was asked to play Portia in The Merchant of Venice at the Royal Exchange in Manchester and to follow that up with a season at the RSC in Stratford and London playing Viola in Twelfth Night and Imogen in Cymbeline. So I decided to write about playing the girls who play boys, as all three of them do. I hadn’t done any Shakespeare since the 1981–3 RSC season in which I had played Helena in Trevor Nunn’s production of All’s Well That Ends Well, and after a decent spell of television and contemporary theatre I felt ready for another season of classics.
From the start I was intent on finding the differences between all three characters as I did not want to repeat myself. My worry was that perhaps there was only one boy in me, but I came to see that Shakespeare had given each girl a very distinct nature and a very different reason for their disguise. Initially the piece covered all three girls, but for this book, I have cut the section on Imogen because I was subsequently commissioned to write about her separately (see the following chapter).
This was my first piece of writing on playing Shakespeare. It came from an invitation to write for a publication that never materialised, but, not having written anything since my schooldays, I decided to take up the challenge. I have reshaped it for this book but have preserved my original thoughts.
Funny to think Shakespeare never expected that a woman would ever play Juliet, or Cleopatra, or Portia.
We are working in a live art-form, as was Shakespeare. We try to ‘talk’ to Shakespeare, to dig back through the centuries to reach the original germ that motivated Shakespeare to write and which still moves us to perform his works. So we ask, ‘What did Shakespeare mean?’ and in asking this question a woman meets an obstacle: ‘He never meant you to play the part.’
Shakespeare wrote to the strengths of his company, so a modern actress’s expectations in the Shakespearean repertoire could be said to be proscribed by the limitations or excellences of two or three generations of Elizabethan boy players. Although many young male actors specialised in female roles and never played men, it is likely that others played the female roles during their apprenticeship before graduating to the male roles. I am grateful for that because, although they were junior in status within the company (and probably kept that way by the older actors), I don’t see much evidence that less acting ability was demanded of them by William Shakespeare. The verse is as dense and as beautiful, the emotional depth as great, the wit as brilliant (frequently more so), the psychology as complex in Shakespeare’s female characters as in the male.
It may be that since today’s Ophelia might be tomorrow’s Hamlet and a possible manager of the company, there was a vested interest in stretching his capabilities to the utmost. Judging by attitudes towards female players when they did come along a century or so later, it is quite possible that if he had been writing for women, Shakespeare would have tailored the female roles to fit the accepted limits of female decorum and would have produced a much narrower range of characters for us to tackle; so again I am thankful.
In some ways these quirks of social history that helped shape Shakespeare’s plays have given me a rare gift, but they have also limited the quantity of those gifts. I imagine that boy players quickly passed their prime of prettiness and graduated to playing men. So another consequence of social history is that modern actresses lack the continuum of female roles on up through the range of ages which would sustain us in an ever enriching and demanding career such as some of my male counterparts enjoy.
But enough of this. I am currently enjoying my prime while it is with me, and I rarely forget how exceptionally lucky I am. I have been offered three ‘trouser roles’ in one year, so 1987 is the Year of the Boy for me. I need to differentiate between them. I ask these questions: Why did they disguise as boys? How does their disguise change other characters around them? Do they enjoy their own disguise? What do they learn from it? Each character answers differently, and I want to make use of these differences so that each play might teach me something new and explore something unknown in myself.
The year began with Portia. The Merchant of Venice is often labelled an anti-Semitic play and, as its heroine, the same accusation has been levelled at Portia. I am puzzled by this. There is a big difference between a play that depicts an anti-Semitic society and an inherently racist play. Ben Jonson famously described Shakespeare as a man ‘for all time’, but he was also a man of his own historical time, so he sometimes comes up with attitudes which we now find hard to accept. I don’t want to get too hooked up on this argument, but I would say, firstly, that Shakespeare’s audience are unlikely to have known what anti-Semitism was as there were only a negligible number of Jews living in England at the time, and, secondly, that Shakespeare’s portrait of Shylock is largely sympathetic and famously emphasises our common humanity:
Hath not a Jew eyes?
fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is?
And Shakespeare seems very modern in his understanding that abuse leads to abuse when he has Shylock say:
If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me, I will execute.
To me it seems that if Shakespeare is on anyone’s side it is Shylock’s, but he also wants us to love Portia. The only thing that can possibly be construed as racist in Portia is that, in the trial scene, she upholds the law of Venice, which was a Christian, and therefore an inherently anti-Jewish, law. I tried hard to play this as a troubling rather than a triumphant moment for Portia, not because I wanted to whitewash her but because Shakespeare’s play can only work in its entirety if we approve of Portia. Therefore I made some little adjustments of emphasis where I could, so as to avoid alienating a twentieth-century audience. I worked on the premise that Shakespeare intended Portia to be a generous spirit, containing the hope for the future. To work against that is to undermine the final act and the spirit of the play.
In the production I did in Manchester, the director Braham Murray, himself a Jew, realised that by putting a lot of focus on to the triangular love story of Antonio, Bassanio and Portia, he could unlock some of the impasse in which the play has left our post-Holocaust sensitivities. He posited very plausibly that the title, The Merchant of Venice, suggests that it was not Shylock but Antonio who was intended as the central character. Shylock only came into the plot because the economy of sixteenth-century Venice depended on moneylenders, and these were invariably Jews. Shylock was/is part of a subplot that connected the idea of bonds of love to that of financial bonds, but as Shakespeare developed him, he became the richly human character that is considered one of the greatest roles in the canon, attracting all the great actors through history to play him and thereby tipping Shylock into the central role.
In our production he was played by a great old Norwegian actor, Espen Skjønberg who, although he in no way softened the danger in the man, could not avoid giving off a humanity and warmth that had the audience eating out of his hand. The actors playing the Christians in Venice did not avoid the vanity and anti-Semitism they found in the text, and the trial scene was cruel and terrifying. These factors all militated against any perceived anti-Semitism that might obstruct the audience’s way to the heart of the play. Indeed in Manchester, which has a large Jewish population, Espen reported that several people, including two rabbis, had approached him in the street and thanked him for his sympathetic portrayal.
For my own part, as Portia, I tried to show a woman of great spirit and intelligence trapped by her father into a waiting game. Her father’s will forces her to wait for a husband until a suitor chooses the right casket out of three. As she watches these men going through their hoops, we see Portia as volatile and impatient, and no suitor escapes her barbed tongue. One by one, the suitors choose wrongly and reveal their vanity and shallowness, and Portia grows in her understanding of men. She begins to accept her father’s wisdom. Maybe he was right, as her sidekick Nerissa suggests: ‘Holy men at their death have good inspirations…’ Maybe her father knew that the right casket ‘will, no doubt, never be chosen by any rightly but one who shall rightly love’.
In Portia’s eyes, when Bassanio chooses the right casket, these words are vindicated. Papa was right, and all is right with the world. Here you have to surrender to the benign paternalism of Shakespeare’s vision. A woman alone must have a God or a dead father to guide her, but I think I can say with the particular ‘authority’ I have acquired by playing Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well, that this is not the end of Shakespeare’s message on the subject. It is the application of this guidance that matters.
Helena also receives a legacy from her dead father in the form of a precious medical remedy with which she manages to cure the King of France of a terminal disease. Her father has given her the wherewithal, but it takes her own particular force of character to recognise and grab the right moment to apply it. She cannot know what will come of it but she intuits that:
There’s something in’t,
More than my father’s skill…
that his good receipt
Shall for my legacy be sanctified
By the luckiest stars in heaven.
But she also realises that we have to help the stars along:
Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,
Which we ascribe to heaven: the fated sky
Gives us free scope, only doth backward pull
Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull.
Her hunch proves well founded. In both All’s Well and The Merchant of Venice, the match is made fairly early in the story and the heroine needs the journey of the play to teach her some hard truths about the man of her choice.
Portia has another paternal mentor in her cousin Doctor Bellario, who instructs her in the law which she applies in the courtroom, and it is her (sometimes questionable) interpretation of that law that launches her as a rounded individual.
Portia’s beautiful speech in Act III, Scene 2, where she offers everything she has up to Bassanio, ‘her lord, her governor, her king’, is not nearly so hard for an actress to get behind as the comparable speech of Kate to Petruchio at the end of The Taming of the Shrew. After all, Kate’s is her final word on the matter, spoken in the final scene, so the speech appears to be the message Shakespeare intended the audience to go out with.
Portia’s similar speech comes far earlier in the play, and it is the expression of a woman brimming with love of life and generosity who for years has had nowhere to put it. She has had everything money can buy, and none of that has brought her happiness. She has been mistress of her world, and now, riding on a wave of sexual longing and love, she surrenders to the novel and refreshing idea of being owned and ruled by her husband.
But how long does this last? Learning from Bassanio that he has a friend in danger of his life, the plot instantly thickens. Portia sees a chance to help, to save Antonio and thereby earn even more of Bassanio’s love.
Within minutes she is taking charge of Bassanio’s life, organising the wedding, packing him off to Venice with money enough to get Antonio off the hook, and she will then order her servant to go to Doctor Bellario, entrust the running of her house to Lorenzo and Jessica (to whom, incidentally, she shows no racist hostility, contrary to what has sometimes been suggested), and recruit Nerissa into the ‘adventure’ of disguising as lawyers. Finally she will win a court case and save Antonio’s life. Hardly the achievements of a submissive wife!
For Shakespeare’s audience there was an inherent rationale when a woman disguised herself as a man: she may need a job in an exclusively male court (Viola in Twelfth Night), or she may need to survive in a wild forest (Rosalind in As You Like It), or she may need an entrée into a world from which women were normally barred. In Portia’s case this is the legal profession. It is worth noting here that it was more acceptable for the lowly Helena to take on the role of a female doctor precisely because of her class. Portia, being an heiress, was more socially prized and therefore more strictly confined.
Logically Portia could have sent for Doctor Bellario himself and paid him a tidy sum to fight Antonio’s case, but then Shakespeare’s audience would have been deprived of the comic irony of a boy playing a woman playing a boy. There is also a deeper psychologically rooted reason for her disguise which Shakespeare may or may not have intended, since it is only with the advent of women players that it could truly be revealed. This reason goes to the heart of the love triangle.
Almost immediately after winning the man of her dreams, Portia learns that Antonio loves Bassanio so much that he is willing to give his life for him. Without necessarily suspecting that any homosexual love exists between the two men, Portia is troubled and indeed at first feels competitive with Antonio to demonstrate the extent of her love: ‘Since you are dear bought I will love you dear.’ (Note that Shakespeare gives a mercantile ring to the measure of her love, and this runs throughout the play.)
Suddenly Portia is reminded that her husband is a stranger, a man with a past, with an allegiance to an older man that she doesn’t fully understand. It is this anxiety, I think, that prompts the idea of a disguise. As the lawyer Balthasar, she will enter the male world. She will get closer to Antonio and thereby tame her fears, or at least understand them, and she has a chance to save Antonio’s life, thereby proving her ‘superior’ love to Bassanio. What she hadn’t bargained for was meeting Shylock, and the lessons she would learn about herself, her husband, and the sullied, ‘real’ (i.e. male) world.
Portia has a sharp mind that has been wasted in her sheltered life in Belmont. In the courtroom she will exercise her innate abilities that we often think of as ‘masculine’, those of decisiveness, logic and authority. Her disguise will make these qualities acceptable for themselves, rather than as ‘exceptional’ in a woman. She has been thoroughly briefed by Doctor Bellario in the laws of Venice, and she can’t wait to put all this to the test. She is used to commanding the world of Belmont, but this is an altogether different world.
Imagine her exhilaration as ‘Balthasar’ struts into the court with the arrogance of ignorance. She quickly sizes up the room, her opponent Shylock, and her ‘rival’ Antonio. She spots Bassanio and hopes he doesn’t recognise her. Her eloquence soon starts to flow as she argues for the highest ideals in human nature in her famous speech about the quality of mercy. I used to think of this speech as the equivalent of my somehow bursting in on Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office and saying, ‘Lay off Nicaragua. You’d feel so much better for it in yourself.’ What she says in the Mercy speech is beautiful and true but, as it turns out, naive in the circumstances. She is humbled to learn that her idealistic silvery tongue has worked no magic on Shylock. She has no conception of his agenda.
I have read Ellen Terry and other actresses on Portia, and I talked to Peggy Ashcroft about her interpretation. This is not to copy them (if only!) or steal their ideas, but it was enlightening to discover that each actor had made slightly different choices for Portia in the trial scene. I was also reassured to find that I was at least addressing myself to familiar questions: To what extent has Portia prepared her argument? When does she go ‘off book’? Does she enter the court knowing that she has an ace up her sleeve should all pleas for mercy fail, or does she invent it on the spot?
There is no right answer, only what can be sustained within the production you are in. No one else need know your decisions, and it is by holding on to your own private secret that the part becomes truly your own. You start thinking as and for Portia.
This was my plan (and for the above reasons, other actors will choose otherwise): Portia must prove beyond doubt that Shylock will carry out his bond to its logical end, i.e. Antonio’s death. In seeking this proof she exceeds her brief. She is thinking on her feet. She impresses on him at the end of the famous Mercy speech that if he proceeds in his case,
This strict court of Venice
Must needs give sentence ’gainst the merchant there.
In other words, ‘You do realise exactly what you are doing, don’t you?’ She tries two or three times to inspire him to be merciful. She offers him ‘thrice thy money’. Still he refuses. She has an attitude to this: a mixture of disgust, sorrow and humiliation. Now she is improvising. Why doesn’t she stop then and say ‘Got you!’? No. She wants further proof. (That Antonio is her rival and she wants to see him suffer is a red herring that I have heard suggested. Isn’t that using a sledgehammer to crack a nut? And where is this idea of Portia’s sadism borne out in any other part of the play?)
Shylock believes in the rule of law. Portia must demonstrate justice by using only the rule of law and thereby teach Shylock about mercy by playing the rules of his game. She of the quick wits seizes on a clue about Shylock’s character: his insistence on the absolute letter of the law. At one point, when ‘Balthasar’ tells Antonio to ‘Bear your bosom’, Shylock jumps in:
Ay, his breast!
So says the bond, doth it not?…
Nearest his heart, those are the very words.
And again later when Portia/Balthasar asks Shylock to have a surgeon standing by to stop Antonio’s wound, Shylock asks,
Is it so nominated in the bond?
Portia (slightly shocked) replies,
Shylock protests,
I cannot find it: ’tis not in the bond.
Suddenly Portia switches the focus on to Antonio and asks him to speak. This buys her time to scrutinise the bond. She has suddenly had a brainwave, unlooked-for and unplanned. ‘Okay, Shylock, if you’re going to nitpick about the letter of the law, I’ll play that game too.’ She builds Shylock up to expect his moment of triumph. He is almost whetting his knife… Then, with the most perfect theatrical timing, Portia suddenly stops him with:
Tarry a little; there is something else.
Unison intake of breath from the courtroom. Portia is chancing her luck:
Prepare thee to cut off the flesh.
Shed thou no blood, nor cut thou less nor more
But just a pound of flesh: if thou cut’st more
Or less than a just pound, be it but so much
As makes it light or heavy in the substance,
Or the division of the twentieth part
Of one poor scruple, nay, if the scale do turn
But in the estimation of a hair,
Thou diest and all thy goods are confiscate.
The letter of the law made no mention of blood and everyone knows it will be impossible for Shylock to cut just one pound of flesh from Antonio’s body without spilling a drop of his blood. For Portia and the actresss playing her, it is a thrilling but disturbing moment.
The extraordinary and wonderful thing about the trial scene in particular is that it teaches you how to play it. I laid my plans, thought it through logically step by step, but when I came to play it I experienced it. I learnt things about myself, and I am sure Portia learnt similar things, and this added a whole other dimension that Shakespeare never envisaged since he never expected a woman to bring her experience of life to bear in the playing of it. Portia triumphs, and Shakespeare’s audience would have delighted in the cleverness of the boy. My own woman’s sensibilities in going through the trial scene picked up the horror Portia must have felt on first entering this hate-filled arena, the pain she must have felt on hearing Bassanio say to Antonio that
Life itself, my wife, and all the world,
Are not with me esteem’d above thy life,
and, more strange than all of these, I felt the disconcerting thrill of power.
Few acting roles for women let loose this opportunity to command, to match the great weight of Shylock and control the rhythm, timing, thoughts and feelings of audience and courtroom alike. I learnt that I could do it. I enjoyed it, felt ashamed of it, felt jealous of my male counterparts that they so often get a go at it. Like Portia I had a moment’s insight into what it was to be a man. At the end of this scene, I played her troubled by her own victory, unhappy at her part in upholding the law made by Venetian men against an alien, and disturbed by the suffering of Shylock when she hears him say,
You take my life
When you do take the means whereby I live.
This lack of complacency pays dividends when entering the final act, where Portia and Nerissa put Bassanio and Gratiano through a mock trial for having given away their betrothal rings. Portia now sees that: ‘So shines a good deed in a naughty world ’, and we feel her to be authorised now to judge Bassanio.
In the little interlude just after the trial (Act IV, Scene 1), we highlighted the moment at which Portia intuits that there is a possible sexual relationship between Antonio and Bassanio. As a boy, I openly flirted with Bassanio in order to get him to part with his ring. Protesting that he promised his wife never to part with it, Bassanio resisted ‘Balthasar’ but was obviously turned on by him/her, much to his confusion. Then, minutes later, Gratiano comes running up to Portia/Balthasar and gives her the ring that Bassanio has now surrendered. Portia can only guess that Antonio has persuaded him to change his mind.
It is a bitter pill for her to swallow. Knowing all this, it is essential that Portia take Bassanio through the consequences of his act to finally realise that the boy and the woman are one and the same. She does this in Act V, in a delightfully funny and ultimately merciful way, though not without an underlying seriousness, nor without the sad acknowledgement that it is finally Antonio’s word that releases Bassanio into heterosexual love.
Portia is by no means perfect, but she has a loving spirit and a capacity to learn and understand life that earns her the right to carry the moral torch at the end of the play. If she never moved from Belmont why would we listen to her, to a woman who hasn’t glimpsed the real world nor ever dirtied her hands? We need to respect Portia even when we don’t yet particularly like her.
The fun of the part is to show her transition not only from girl to boy and back, but from spoilt little rich girl to a somewhat sobered, wise and generous wife. It is the lessons she learns that make her tolerable, and by Act V we feel for the hurt love she has experienced and we want a bit of payback for Bassanio, before the forgiveness and the moving on to what we hope will be a fairly balanced marriage. All this is achieved in a lighthearted bitter-sweet manner which, for me, more than justifies the existence of the final act—which Henry Irving cut because Shylock’s part was over!
Twelfth Night also deals with the transition of love from the homosexual to the heterosexual via an androgynous catalyst; this time Viola/Cesario. For me, Twelfth Night is the play in which Shakespeare perfects his gender-mixing theme and puts it at the very heart of the plot. Twelfth Night plays with pain and dresses it as comedy. We laugh, cry and wince at the madness of love and feel the aching pleasure of it.
The disguise
In my ongoing quest to vary the ‘boys’, I make notes about the differences between Portia and Viola. Portia is in charge, knows how to act, has a legal brain, knew she had these all along and was ‘aweary of this great world’ that wouldn’t let her use them. She is also a convincing actor. Viola, on the other hand, is catapulted unwillingly into her disguise by her extreme circumstances, and that disguise is so see-through that all at Orsino’s court take a jibe at it. Feste the clown has a few ambiguous comments about ‘him’ and even Malvolio has noticed that
He is very well-favoured and he speaks very shrewishly.
Call me pedantic, but I wanted to find a psychologically believable reason for Viola’s disguise over and above a pretext for comedy and confusion. I am sure this is a modern-day approach that the boy players of Shakespeare’s day eschewed. Shakespeare has done all the thinking work for you, so why not just get on with speaking the lines, mimicking the emotions and expertly serving up the gags, as I suspect the boy players did? Blame it on the cinema, or Method Acting, or simply on the natural evolution of taste, but modern audiences set up more barriers to the suspension of disbelief than was true in Shakespeare’s day.
It has been suggested to me that Viola has her eye on the main chance, noting Orsino’s bachelor status in the first scene, and entering his service with a view to trapping him into marriage. (Does anyone think that clearly when they’ve just escaped death and believe their brother has drowned?)
Theories can sound attractive, but when you come to play the part they often just don’t stand up from the inside. It has also been suggested that Viola uses her wiles to make Olivia fall in love with her so she can string out her job as messenger and not lose her place in Orsino’s court. It sounds a bit flimsy to me. My answer to all this is that Viola soliloquises, and there is no example in the canon of a character lying to the audience in a soliloquy. Viola’s soliloquies are full of confusion and ‘what the hell is going on?’ If she harboured any of the above schemes I think the audience would be let in on them.
So this is my thinking: ‘Here I am shipwrecked, a lone virgin, having lost my twin brother. What would Daddy have done?’ (Again the endorsement of the dead father.) ‘He’d have gone straight to the top man…’
—Who governs here?…
—Orsino? I have heard my father name him.
He was a bachelor then.
Even better, Daddy actually knew of this man. ‘Daddy’ died when I, Viola, was thirteen, and if Orsino was remarkable for being a bachelor then, it could argue for an older Orsino who is more acquainted with wars than women. Or, if Orsino is younger, it might suggest that Daddy had mentioned his name in front of Viola, thinking that, one day, when they were both older, they would make a good match. Both scenarios are plausible but we opted for the former.
‘If Orsino is a bachelor,’ thinks Viola, ‘I can’t seek asylum in his household as an unchaperoned virgin…
What’s that? He’s in love with Olivia? Who’s she?’
‘A virtuous maid, the daughter of a Count / That died some twelve-month since.’ He left her in the care of her brother ‘who shortly also died’.
‘What a coincidence! We two should get along famously! I’ll go and serve her till something shows up… But she might not let anyone enter her household?… She’s a recluse? Ah well then, there’s nothing for it. I’ll have to go to the Duke’s house, but for reasons of propriety I’ll dress as a boy and serve in his household.’
All perfectly logical, I thought, but somehow when I started rehearsing, it seemed too rational and too schematic for someone as traumatised as Viola is at that point, and I eventually found a more instinctive, more unconscious motive.
Here is my potted psychology: Sebastian is Viola’s twin. They were both orphaned at thirteen. Together they make a whole. They are yin and yang. If Sebastian (yin) is drowned, Viola (yang) needs to become that yin in order to fill the gap that the loss of her other half has made and to complete the male/female circuit within herself.
Viola ditches her old identity and invents Cesario (and in fact her real name is never mentioned in the play until Sebastian greets her in the last scene, and her identity is restored). There is also the thought that somehow by becoming her brother he is no longer dead. So her disguise is her hope. It is also the trigger for a whole set of new problems for her.
The go-between
Viola/Cesario is in more than one sense the go-between. Not only is she the messenger who can pass freely between the female-centred household of Olivia and the exclusively male court of Orsino, but she also crosses fluidly over the lines between girlhood, boyhood, youth and maturity. Malvolio describes him/her as:
Not yet old enough for a man, nor young enough for a boy; as a squash is before ’tis a peascod, or a codling when ’tis almost an apple.
Viola embodies the cusp between all these states. Both Olivia and Orsino have created a sort of ghetto around themselves and only Feste and ‘Cesario’ can move between the two. Viola becomes subjectively involved in both places, and both are transformed by her presence. She achieves all this by default. She does not feel her instrumentality in the transformation. Fate is playing with her as much as with anyone else. She has none of Portia’s proactive confidence.
On her first assignment to Olivia, Viola overplays the part and pushes the bravado a bit too far, out of nervousness. But the enmeshing of two sexual personae in the physical presence of Cesario works on Olivia, who has ‘abjured the company / And sight of men’ and will only admit a creature that is ‘in standing water between boy and man’.
It also works on the all-male household of Orsino, who finds ‘I have unclasp’d / To thee the book, even of my secret soul’, and who, when describing Cesario, says ‘all is semblative a woman’s part’.
When playing Viola I never forget I am a woman, just as she can’t because she is so in love with a man who thinks she’s a boy. This is a constant, painful reminder for her, and her femininity risks seeping out all over the place to betray her. There is also a sense in which she wants to be unmasked. She seems to be flying deliberately close to the wind when she tells Orsino that
My father had a daughter loved a man,
As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman,
I should your lordship.
—and then smilingly describes that daughter as sitting like
Patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief.
Even more nervy, she looks Orsino in the eye tempting him with the riddle,
I am all the daughters of my father’s house,
And all the brothers too,
then the ambiguous
and yet I know not.
which I played in various ways, but lately I have been playing it as ‘I know not whether I am the only brother, because I still hope that my real brother is alive.’ Then, having boldly offered the Duke a glimpse into my heart, I recover man-to-man, servant-to-master decorum with
Sir, shall I to this lady?
In Olivia’s presence, Viola transforms from the subservient adorer to unwitting adoree. The scenes with Olivia are like perfect musical duets between a flute and a clarinet (or perhaps a violin and a viola?). Hovering over the scenes is the thought of a girlie sisterhood that would unite the two orphans mourning their brothers’ deaths. (It is not for nothing that their names are almost anagrams.) With Olivia, Viola feels more at ease acting out her masculine side than when she is inhibited by the presence of Orsino. She quickly takes over the initiative of the scene from the haughty Olivia, who in her turn backs down to become a babbling, lovelorn fool. The turning point seems to be when Viola’s own passion for Orsino bursts out with:
If I did love you in my master’s flame,
With such a suffering, such a deadly life,
In your denial I would find no sense;
I would not understand it.
Something in that passion prompts Olivia to ask,
Why, what would you?
Her interest has switched from the message to the messenger.
Unaware of this, Viola relishes the question and acts out the wooing she would do if only she were free, in her famous ‘willow cabin’ speech. Viola is released into a transport of beautiful invention which surprises even herself, and Olivia is well and truly smitten.
Viola soon becomes aware of what has happened when Malvolio delivers Olivia’s message with the ring. Her immediate response is:
I left no ring with her: what means this lady?
but she hits on the truth in the very next line:
Fortune forbid my outside have not charm’d her!
—which is a pretty speedy conclusion and indicates that something odd in Olivia’s look or behaviour had already set up the thought in Viola’s unconscious mind. After all, she knows the signs of a woman in love.
Never in the play does Shakespeare give Viola a jealous thought or word about Olivia, and now, as it becomes clearer and clearer to her that Olivia is in love with the non-existent Cesario, she expresses nothing but sisterly pity. It is a wonderful soliloquy that brings her step by step into line with the audience’s understanding. But she is in the play, and they are not. They cannot help her.
O time! thou must untangle this, not I;
It is too hard a knot for me to untie!
From this point on, Viola is caught in the absurd situation of having to keep visiting Olivia for both Orsino’s and Olivia’s own reasons and all very much against her own will. She has now got personal proof that Olivia will never love Orsino, and she needs to tell Olivia not to waste her time on ‘Cesario’. She is becoming impatient with Orsino. ‘Leave off that hopeless case and see the love here under your very nose!’ She also has to be cruel to Olivia and reject her while understanding the pain of rejection. Does this make her understand better how Olivia can reject Orsino? Her speech wraps up her true identity in another riddling hint:
I have one heart, one bosom and one truth,
And that no woman has; nor never none
Shall mistress be of it, save I alone.
She wants to be discovered and released from this farce.
What’s so funny?
To Elizabethans there was an almost inexhaustible joke built into the situation of a boy playing a girl playing a boy that we modern audiences have to go without. In its place we have an altogether new joke, unintended by Shakespeare; that of a girl playing a boy playing a girl dressed as a boy. Maybe it is not such a good ‘joke’. Some say that women are not as funny as men. I look around me in a time of burgeoning female comic talent and I doubt this. Maybe it has been a case of audiences finding it hard to laugh at women.
Portia and Viola are allowed to make lewd quips, protected as they are by their male disguise. The boy players of Shakespeare’s day were also protected by the fact of their masculinity, so that many female characters can be quite blue in their language with one another (Princess Katherine and her maid Alice, or Doll Tearsheet and Mistress Quickly, to name a couple of examples). It also rather depends on their social position as to whom they can share these jokes with. Portia makes them with Nerissa, never Bassanio. Viola’s sole confidantes are in the audience, and she tells only them that
A little thing would
Make me tell them how much I lack of a man.
I wonder whether Shakespeare would have written that joke if a woman had played the part.
I don’t think that Viola is a naturally comic role. In the reviews in Stratford someone commented that I played the first scene too like a tragedy, but consider her situation:
Viola is shipwrecked, an orphan in a foreign land where no one knows her, and she believes her twin brother and only relative has been drowned. She then falls in love with a man who thinks she’s a boy, and who is infatuated with another woman, and is sent to woo that rival on behalf of the man she loves. Olivia then falls in love with her boy disguise. The audience revels in these complications. Viola does not. Viola isn’t Rosalind, loved and in love, delighting in the freedom of her disguise and knowing she can drop it at any time (in the forest at least).
Viola triggers a lot of comedy but does not crack a lot of jokes. It seems to me that the comedy in Twelfth Night works along a spectrum of self-knowledge with the most self-deceived at one end (Malvolio, Aguecheek), whose idiocy we laugh at, and at the other, the most self-aware, Viola (the only character on stage aware of her real identity), whose wit we laugh with. We laugh at Orsino, who is blinded by love, and at Olivia, who is blind to her vanity in mourning, and at both of them, who are blind to the fact that Cesario is a girl. Sebastian, the ‘drowned’ brother, walks into a chaos he cannot make head or tail of, and we laugh at his confusion. We wryly laugh with Feste, the all-knowing fool, and with Maria, the traditional cunning maid, and we uncomfortably laugh with Belch, who thinks he knows it all and revels in exploiting other people’s weakness.
Although Viola is the most knowing in one way, she is on totally unfamiliar ground (physically and emotionally), and this is a source of comedy for the all-knowing audience.
So I do get into the comedy eventually, and I have changed the first scene a bit for the London run (and got better reviews!). There is so much fun in the scenes with Olivia, but any wit in the scenes with Orsino remains a wistful wit, laden with Viola’s desperate trapped love. The audience smiles rather than laughs at her.
Then there is the physical comedy of the sword fight between the terrified Cesario and the cowardly Aguecheek (which was enhanced for me by the instability of David Bradley/Aguecheek’s wig), at the end of which Viola detects a glint of hope that Sebastian may be alive. From this point on, Shakespeare seems to let go of Viola’s pain. The audience knows that Sebastian is en route to meeting up with her, that a happy ending is in sight, and all will be resolved. Or will it?
In the final scene there are some untied-up ends that leave a residue of unease. Malvolio’s humiliation seems unwarranted (and unfunny) to a modern audience, and I never can quite get what that is all about—something to do with puritans versus ‘cakes and ale’ guzzlers? The Roundhead-versus-Cavalier schism that was already building up to the Civil War forty years down the road? What was Malvolio’s terrible sin? Self-deception, pomposity and narrow-mindedness don’t seem to deserve being locked in a dark room and driven mad, so that leaves a bit of a stain on the evening. And then there is poor Aguecheek with his broken pate dealing with the harsh rejection of his ‘friend’ and champion Sir Toby. And what about Orsino and Viola?
In the last scene of the play, I still find it unspeakably hard to ditch the logic I have painstakingly built up and suddenly play a Viola who is so thick she doesn’t twig that Sebastian is alive and the cause of everyone’s confusion. After all she was quick enough on the uptake at the end of Act III, Scene 4. When she hears Antonio tell her, ‘Thou hast, Sebastian, done good feature shame’, her immediate reaction as Antonio is led off under arrest is: ‘O, prove true, / That I, dear brother, be now ta’en for you!’
She has almost pieced it together with:
He named Sebastian: I my brother know
Yet living in my glass; even such and so
In favour was my brother…
For him I imitate: O, if it prove,
Tempests are kind and salt waves fresh in love,
but for the sake of his comic dénouement in Act V, Shakespeare changes Viola into a dumb watcher of a ping-pong match. After my initial resistance, I now willingly surrender to the rules of the comedy game, although there is still a slight insecurity in Viola over Orsino’s love. We will be wonderful pals and even maybe have great sex, but will he still dream of Olivia?
At the start of their respective stories, Bassanio and Orsino have this in common: they put women on a pedestal. Their love is idealistic and immature, and they have no real knowledge of the women they adore. On the other hand they experience a strong connection with a boy (in Bassanio’s case very fleetingly), and both are disturbed by this attraction they feel. But all is well in the end, when that boy proves to be a woman. That woman has now gained stature in the man’s eyes by dint of having been enabled by their disguise to show their ‘male’ attributes of daring action, forthrightness and worldly knowledge. They have shown themselves to be one of the lads. Shakespeare could have his fun and then restore convention at the end, to please and appease the crowd.
A feminist postscript
The hardest thing to get behind in Viola is that she trusts that Time will and must sort everything out. She happens to be proved right, but not before various pates have been broken and she herself has volunteered to be sacrificed.
One textual change I have made is in Viola’s ‘I left no ring with her’ speech, where she talks of impressionable women with their ‘waxen hearts’. Instead of
I have substituted ‘For such as we are made, if such we be’. One vowel change makes quite a big difference to me, and I have read this version in one or two editions.
A feminist actor sometimes has to find clues and take chances to express her character in the most positive light possible without damaging the whole truth of the piece. ‘Why do I use this word and not that?’ ‘Why do I agree to betray so and so?’ ‘Why do I allow myself to be treated this way without protest?’ One hopes that honest questioning will lead to honest answers. We can and must try to be as open as possible to new experiences, to be as unprejudiced as possible and willing to learn from other people, but at the end of the day we test everything up against our own truth.
I experience myself as a subjective whole, not as defined by men, or as being that which men are not. I see the women in Shakespeare’s plays as whole people, and, when ‘inhabiting’, I imagine that the constraints I feel as to what I am ‘allowed’ to do or say are equally frustrating to me as they were to the women of the day.
I have thought of Shakespeare as a fixed and finite person, just as we fix our parents’ identities and lock them into some unchanging attitude or role. Then I remind myself that he wrote as a young man and a middle-aged man, and that he was thrashing out ideas throughout his life and changing his mind as we all do. The plays are each written at a different point in his own life story, and his own fluid sexuality weaves through so many of them.
If I glance at the chronological order of his plays, his first really sympathetic female portrayal is Juliet. From Romeo and Juliet till 1600 he writes some fabulous women’s roles: Constance in King John, Margaret of Anjou in Henry VI, Beatrice in Much Ado, Portia in The Merchant, and Helena in the Dream. Then suddenly we get Hamlet and his bitter misogyny, and around the same time he writes Twelfth Night almost to redress the balance. In the Sonnets he seems to be working through the pain of lost, forbidden or unrequited love, and if in Hamlet he expresses the dark side of these themes, Twelfth Night seems to bring them out into the comic light.
Twelfth Night is his most perfectly balanced play. He is kind to all the characters except Malvolio—and even he gets his moment of pity at the end.