‘Two lips, indifferent red’: Queer styles in Twelfth Night
Queer style is colloquially understood to be about excess, breaking a code and ‘camp’. It instantiates a performance which associates desire with spectrality and it facilitates re-examining history from a queer lens, while also being a source of visual and aural pleasure. In literature, style is a material and formal property of a text. In art, it is ‘materialistic incarnation’ and an instance of history.1 Ernst Gombrich’s idea of style as a feature of art and of art analysis is of use to a philological exploration of style in drama, which is the subject of this essay, because style viewed as a formal feature opens up the possibility to think about the materiality of language as an incarnation which the theatre of the body and desire expresses. The Elizabethans paid attention to the material weight of language as an oral-aural phenomenon both in theory and in literary and dramatic practice. Shakespeare responded to this affiliation in his drama: ‘Shakespeare’s witty exploitation of the sound and weight of words suggests that … the reification of language is a virtue, that stressing the materiality of the word is one of his principal goals, and that consciousness of its sensory properties unites the audience in a common experience’.2 In Twelfith Night, in which ‘words are very rascals’, words can be turned inside and out, can make things wholesome or wanton at a whim, and can make things understandable at the same time that they strip things of all meaning (3.1.11–24). It is no accident then that Feste sees his role not as fool but as a ‘corrupter of words’ (3.1.24–35), for words can be played with, toyed with, twisted and turned to make something material before the audience’s very eyes.
The materiality of language is inextricable from the materiality of the body that speaks it, and from the means by which that body is represented. Style and body have a long history of association.
Early modern writers and theorists were closely bound by the notion of style as linguistic materiality. Constituent of early modern theories of poetry, for early modernists, style represented a choice and arrangement of words and phrases in the first instance. Political, philosophical and ideological meanings of style in poetry came second in early descriptions of style. For instance, the late sixteenth-century theorist of poetry, William Scott, advises the poets among his contemporaries to ‘consider that to the coupling and framing of style goes the words as the matter and the connection or composition of these words in sentences and clauses as the form, in both which need diligent choice in the poet’.3 In keeping with Cicero’s advice about style in De Oratore (3.31.125),4 fullness of style (copia verborum) was equally important as fullness of matter (copia rerum). The materiality of the parts of language that make up style is also the central idea in Puttenham’s definition of style – itself stylistically sonorous definition – ‘a constant and continual phrase or tenor of speaking and writing’, being ‘of words, speeches, and sentences together a certain contrived form and quality’.5 The idea that style was made up of small and large linguistic units was ingrained, not only in the early theory of poetic development, but in poetic practice as well. This sense of style that was not only a part of rhetoric in the practice of teaching young boys to write and speak effectively and persuasively, but that was also understood to be a vehicle which communicates meaning, alerts a critic of queer style to the fact that sexual meaning is both embodied in, and produced at, the level of language itself.6 Shakespeare’s dramatic and non-dramatic poetry shows that the rhetoric of persuasion is also the rhetoric of passion, and thus gives new force to the material weight and presence of words and the styles used to frame them. Scott highlights that ‘coupling’ is essential to the practice of style, already presaging that intermingling is both the venue for and the goal of stylistic performance.
I propose that queer style emulates as well as embodies queer meaning in Twelfth Night in a way that preserves a memory of time when desire was not determined by sexual dichotomies. I share Carla Freccero’s notion of ‘queerness understood as a certain effect ‘in and of language’.7 The effect that a style produces is a difficult and slippery notion to locate with surety, especially when those would be receivers of the language addressed to them are either historical subjects that left no records of such an impact of language upon them, or because effect as such can be considered too subjective to lead to universal conclusions. But a formal approach to the queerness of language uncovers directions in which language operates in order to produce desires, just as – and this is a feature of Twelfth Night that stands out – linguistic parsing can show that desires also produce language.
As a formal and materialist mode of expression, language forms queer style, a subject to which queer literary theory has recently directed some of its critical acuity. Kevin Ohi’s idea of the ‘queerness of style’8 that emerges from his nuanced close readings of the language of Henry James and Jeffrey Masten’s approach to the history and historiography of queer sexuality as a ‘detailed study of the terms and related rhetorics that early modern English culture used to inscribe bodies, pleasures, affects, sexual acts and, to the extent we can speak of these, identities’, investigation, that is, which he calls ‘queer philology’.9 Queer early modern critics have practiced the semiotics of sexuality, because modern critics’ textual encounters with early modern sexualities has inevitably been through language and through the unpacking and decoding of the erotic meaning hidden from us by the archives. But ‘queer philology’ sharpens our sense of the depth and extent of those meaning, by revealing historical instantiations of small, isolated and diverse linguistic and verbal instances in print and in rhetoric. Thinking about queer style in Shakespeare’s romantic comedy entails, in fact, a philological process of uncovering layers of erotic signification in this play.
In his assessment of sexual meaning expressed in terms of sensual experience in Twelfth Night, Bruce Smith points out that ‘Queer theory … is concerned with what comes after words, with the arbitrariness of language, the failure of words to match the realities they purport to name, even as the speakers of a given language use those words to construct personal identities and outlaw certain forms of sexual behavior’.10 Feste’s aforementioned discourse on words with Viola in 3.1 serves as a reminder of such arbitrariness and of such failures. This essay on Twelfth Night, however, is engages with lexical and semantic properties as carriers of erotic meaning and conduits of desire. If words come before queer theory, as Smith defines queer theory as a field of theoretical inquiry, then queer style manifests openly how those words produce meaning in the first place that makes it possible to grasp them as material instances that queer theory claims for its own arguments. This essay explores the role desire plays in the philological composition of certain passages and, crucially, how desire shapes the literary.
One of the most remarkable plays in which cross-gendered casting creates illusions of desire and attraction in Shakespearean drama, Twelfth Night has elicited much analysis of the body as a signifier for the sexuality and desire released by the transvestite theatre.11 The emphasis on the cross-dressed body of a boy actor playing a female part at the heart of the romance plot characterized by miraculous turns of events has led Stephen Greenblatt to observe – in an intriguing and perhaps unintentional play on words – that ‘The play’s delicious complications follow from the emotional turbulence that Viola’s transformation [to Cesario] engenders’.12
Explorations of such ‘delicious’ moments have been taken up by critics in formulating arguments about the engendering of love and erotic desire. As Valerie Traub has pointed out, the transvestite theatre of Twelfth Night has offered ‘literary critics an initial point of access to the textualization of homoerotic desire’.13 Writing along the lines of Traub’s argument, David Orvis has captured the critical polemics about the operation of desire produced by cross-dressing in Twelfth Night, stating that ‘For feminist and queer critics, the important debate is not whether transvestism instantiates homoerotic desire, but rather how this homoerotic desire operates in a play that attempts, or at least gestures towards, heterosocial marital closure’.14 Such debates are further complicated by the play’s actual ending, which calls for marriage without dramatizing it, which opens up the possibility of Malvolio refusing to bring the captain holding Viola’s ‘maid’s garments’ out of ‘durance’ (5.1.269–70), and which leaves one genuinely wondering whether the ‘solemn combination[s]’ called for by Orsino will ever actually take place (5.1.373); in fact, what closure is provided may be hinted at by Orsino closing the play still calling Viola by the name of Cesario. Yet neither homoerotic desire so presented or the heterosexual marital closure as suggested in this comedy could be discerned without considering how both are further by the verbal style that blurs boundaries between sameness and difference, that shatters the illusion of heterosexual bonding leading to marriage, and that determines identities, not via, but with the linguistic terms themselves. In other words, the queer style of Twelfth Night is both an audible and linguistic property of the play. As such, it marks an entry into the body. It is not the body itself that produces the style of its representation, but the verbal style that makes an entry into the body.
What do we make of the wooing in 1.5? This first encounter between Viola-Cesario and Olivia illustrates more expressly and more complexly than other stage encounters in the play the range of emotional and erotic meanings created by language in Twelfth Night. Is Viola-Cesario’s speech only ‘something rehearsed and insincere’? Is this scene about ‘[m]utual femine curiosity to see [Olivia’s] competition with Orsino, or for … more subjectively erotic reasons’?15 What kind of erotic reasons might be implied? The scene raises more questions than critics have raised thus far. A boy actor playing a young woman (Viola) playing a male youth (Cesario) already creates confusion by virtue of this double act of transvestism and at the moment in the scene at which a delayed entry of Viola-Cesario is accompanied by the verbal excesses and peculiarities that accompany this entry. ‘Most radiant, exquisite and unmatchable beauty’ (1.5.165), says Viola-Cesario, as she enters the stage. She continues: ‘I would be loath to cast away my speech, for, besides that it is excellently well penned, I have taken great pains to con it. Good beauties, let me sustain no scorn: I am very comptible, even to the least sinister usage’ (1.5.167–71). If Feste is the play’s ‘corrupter of language’, Viola serves as its controller, and it is her words, as much as her ‘outside’, that have charmed both Olivia and audiences (2.1.18). The persuasive effectiveness of Viola-Cesario’s speech engendered in language – the speech is linguistically self-referential – is aimed at winning Olivia’s interest in Viola as a prospective servant, not as a desirable cross-dressed body. But the desire that fuels this intention exceeds its purpose; its doubles as an affect produced by the cross-dressed and cross-gendered body, even if its full signification and direction is not revealed, or clear. Putting language before the body at the point of this main entry is a reminder of the ‘overwhelmingly linguistic’16 school training that gave the language of literary invention and ornamentation multiple signifying possibilities; it is also a reminder of the play’s original audience, for the young law students and barristers who saw the play in 1602 at the Middle Temple would have been well versed in classical rhetoric and the powers of invention and ornamentation.17 Yet Shakespeare uses this linguistic resource to craft desire that exceeds social signification of service. The semantic function of a single word, ‘comptible’, within a speech whose subject matter is language and whose use is persuasion, is much more complex than it might seem on the surface of the word’s invented, obscure form.
Yet the word ‘comptible’ complicates the affective basis of Viola-Cesario’s intention to be considered by Olivia as only a prospective servant. According to the OED, the word appears to be Shakespeare’s coinage, used only once, in this instance and in this play only. Its meaning is ‘liable to answer to, sensitive to’ (1c). David and Ben Crystal define the word as ‘sensitive, thin-skinned, impressionable’.18 Adopting some variations in spelling, modern editors gloss the word in a similar way, following the OED.19 But earlier editors, more liberally, considered other meanings of ‘comptible’, which opened up the erotic politics of the speech. Henry Howard Furness’s gloss in the New Variorum Shakespeare edition of Twelfe Night registers those early editors’ solutions for ‘contemptible’. Furness suggests replacing ‘comptible’ with the French ‘domptable’, meaning ‘apt to be subdued or tamed’ (John Monck Mason) to glossing it as ‘being treated with scorn, because she is very submissive’ (George Stevens).20 It is not just the immediate semantic environment in which ‘comptible’ teasingly pushes the idea of sensitivity into the realm of sexual submissiveness, suggested by ‘sinister usage’, which Viola proposes to Olivia. The dramatic situation that invites editors to speculate on the semantic possibilities of this phrase further complicates the erotic plot caused by cross-dressing. The affect that conflates the economic need for service and the pleasure of offering oneself to submission and usage gains power from a double meaning in this linguistic introduction. The meanings of submission and of being tamed intersect with erotic meaning in a way that makes servitude and sexuality (and power relations therein) conjoined, rather than separated. Viola is accountable to Orsino both as his servant and as her love, while she has ‘taken great pains to con’ both her words and her performance as a young man (1.5.165–7). Words and body have come together in this performance. The meanings with which editors in the past toyed when glossing and speculating about this dramatic moment but that modern editorial decisions passed over, nevertheless represent inextricable parts of the history of editorial glossing the erotic meaning of the play. Such past editorial comments reveal signification of the queer style of the play that has been occluded by the history of critical annotation. Given that the textual history of Twelfth Night is relatively straightforward, in that the earliest printed text of the play is that in the Folio of 1623, and given that the play’s text in the Folio is ‘generally clean’ and that none of the ‘obvious errors’21 which appear in the text show up in 1.5, we can conclude that ‘camptible’ carries within itself layers of these competing, erotic, meanings, and that Shakespeare’s incommensurate language itself works just in the direction of the creative multifariousness offered by this chosen word.
Through an analysis of lexical, rhetorical and textual arrangements in this scene, a new emotional reality unfolds. It comes out of the manipulation of the Petrarchan convention of amorous address whose register, vocabulary, tone and syntax in turn manipulate the audiences’ perception of the bodies and identities that are the subject of rhetorical addresses. Petrarchism in Twelfth Night is not an ornament that corresponds to the kind of love and courtship performed within its poetics, but a stylistic form used to energize new erotic possibilities, emotional fantasies and vicissitudes of love that run counter to that familiar convention and style; before we take the cross-dressing dimension into consideration even having one’s servant woo on one’s behalf is already to break with convention. Such breaks are further suggested dramatically by Viola’s confusion upon entering the stage, as she tries to make sure that she has the right Olivia and that her speech is not wasted. This note of confusion is soon shared by the audience, as Shakespeare upends conventional Petrarchism in order to explore its new possibilities in performing desire and sexuality. This dramatic tactic on Shakespeare’s part shows how ‘the queerness of style’22 alters the expectations this love encounter offers, because the emotional and erotic purpose of the speech is not easily definable. This upended Petrarchism gives new emphasis and force to Viola’s image of the knot that is too hard for her to unite (2.2.40–1). Not only does this use of Petrarchism suggest complications that time itself may not be able to untie, but it also suggests both erotic intertweaving and entanglement. Such use of Petrarchism also show the ways in which such entanglements dissolve definition and difference, with no one person or no one gender distinguishable or separable from the rest. Not even time can untie such knots. Dramatized on the stage, Petrarchism itself acquires a new purpose in serving to facilitate ideas about the kind of desire and sexuality for which there was no clear-cut name within the context of transvestite theatre.
Offered as a way into the world of erotic desire and sexuality in Twelfth Night, queer style is explained through the strategies of reading that bring detail into focus within a larger discussion23 of both how Shakespeare’s text produces queerness, and how it anticipates queer theory, not just how the play text releases new meanings when captured by queer theory. Shakespeare’s use of Petrarchism to express female- female desire in 1.5 shows Shakespeare’s engagement with the Petrarchan style as a philological and speech act underpinned by the action involving the women. This specific philological exercise, which is at the same time an exercise in imaging other erotic options, gives critics an opportunity to move away from a more general consideration of homoeroticism in the play to a consideration of specifically female homoeroticism as an erotic fantasy of linguistic and stage performances.
The language of the play and the details of its verbal style do not capture the body and identity at the point of their cultural formation as they are represented on the stage; rather, the main subject of the play is not the body but the linguistic form by which the body is presented. In that sense, Lorna Hutson has cautioned that ‘even the disembodied nature of the language in which it articulates the desires of its protagonists, [Twelfth Night] has nevertheless become the touchstone of [the] “body” criticism within Shakespeare studies’.24 Hutson’s ‘counter-argument’ to post-structuralist criticism about the body in Twelfth Night rests on the point that the plot structure of this romantic comedy depends, ‘not on the emergence of identity’, but on the strategies of rhetorical invention and structures aimed at enabling ‘men’s discursive ability to improvise social credit, or credibility’,25 strategies offered as compositional models in Terence’s and Plautus’s plays, with their clever slaves such as Pseudolus constantly and comically always having to think on their feet, which served as the sources for this and other romantic comedies. Along similar lines of argument, Arthur F. Marotti has suggested that in Shakespeare’s romantic comedies ‘marriage for love was a metaphor for advancement by merit rather than by birth or influence’.26 Both imaginatively and emotionally, the subject/object relation and the love-match in Twelfth Night play simultaneously along and against this dramatic pattern in comedy. The style in which this intersection of economic and erotic concerns itself is meant to bring lovers together as partners in marriage, that presenting desire between women as a more embodied poetic exchange before heterosexual love is expressed. The ‘interdependence’ of the verbal and the social, which Russ McDonald characterized as a feature of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies27 and which Hutson explores in her interpretation of rhetoric as a formative strategy of representing a particular kind of the social body, represent ways of reading the body in Twelfth Night that are alternative to the history of the somatic body. As a medium through which desire speaks and bursts out on the stage, style is the textual, verbal and audible, as well as cultural and historical, form through which ambiguous and conflicting discourses about the body contained within the cross-dressed body articulate themselves rhetorically. In other words, and to slightly alter the meaning of Buffon’s adage that ‘Le style c’est l’homme même’, ‘the style is the body’.
In his introduction to the Arden 3 edition of Twelfth Night, Keir Elam emphasizes the dependence of emotion and sexuality on the figurative rhetoric of the play. He uses rhetorical tropes as illustration for his point and states that ‘[h]yperbole, usually in the form of exaggerated metaphor or simile, is at times used as earnest, as in exchanges of intensely polite and possibly homoerotic compliments’,28 showing style to be in the service of the expressions of love, though mostly of parody. To put it more plainly, Elam’s reading of figurative rhetoric oscillates between acknowledging the possible erotic underpinnings of language and speculating about the trope’s effect (always a difficult feature to establish because of the lack of records of audience’s reception and reaction to specific rhetorical forms). The relationship between hyperbole and youth is noted by Aristotle, who says in Rhetoric that ‘There is something youthful about hyperboles; for they show vehemence. Wherefore those who are in a passion most frequently make use of them’.29 Aristotle’s definition of the trope draws attention to the relationship between rhetorical ornament, or decorous style, and nature, in a way that is pertinent for a discussion of the queerness of hyperbole in Shakespeare’s text. The association of hyperbole with high emotions establishes a more obvious Aristotelian relationship between hyperbole and various scenarios in which young lovers speak in terms of incredibility and excess, as they do, for instance, in Love’s Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet. In the latter, Juliet even chides Romeo for knowing so well the love language of incredibility and excess – the staple of the Petrarchan aesthetics of love – that he may not truly love; she, on the other hand, needs only ‘three words’ to impart her message of love, namely that he will marry her before their affair can go any further (2.1.185). Apart from the fact that hyperbole is one of the key tropes of the Petrarchan poetry of courtship and in the blazons of lady’s beauty within the Petrarchan poetics of love (Canzoniere abounds in it), this trope shapes literary meaning in ways that exceed its primary definition as a figure of exaggeration. At a deeper level of meaning at which hyperbole operates in an utterance, this trope implies that nature reveals its full meaning in, paradoxically, the language that exceeds its properties, that goes beyond what can be believed about that natural subject of persuasion. Thus love and desire in the wooing scene are couched in the language of excess and exaggeration to create another kind of truth from the one that the ornament, hyperbole, has exceeded.
Henry Peacham defines hyperbole as ‘when a saying doth surmounte and reach aboue the truth’.30 This possibility of hyperbole reaching for a higher truth while also possibly containing a greater falsehood, informs Puttenham’s description of hyperbole as both ‘the over-reacher’ and the ‘loud liar’.31 Hyperbole that offers a lie as truth allows Shakespeare to stylize expressions such as ‘If you will not murder me for my love, let me be your servant’ (2.1.323) or ‘Most radiant, exquisite and unmatchable beauty’ (1.5.165) both as flattery that is not true and as passion different from the one claimed in the utterance. These possibilities intersect in John Hoskins’s description of the ways hyperbole can be used: ‘Sometimes it [hyperbole] expresseth a thing in the highest degree of possibility, beyond the truth, that it descending thence may find the truth; sometimes in flat impossibility, that rather you may conceive the unspeakableness than the untruth of the relation’.32 Hoskins leaves it to the speaker or the hearer to make the truth out of the possibilities yielded by the utterance. Shakespeare leaves it to his audience to grasp the truth about the wooing in Twelfth Night, truth enabled by hyperbole and by the context of the transvestite theatre that the trope serves. Shakespeare’s hyperboles are an important feature of Shakespeare’s queer style in Twelfth Night because, by giving attention to going beyond truth and by presenting the improbable as probable, they guide the audience to think about the improbability of ‘lesbian’ desire as the probability enacted before their eyes, now. If we merely register the presence of hyperbole in a text without delving into the semiotics this trope draws on from the context in which it is used, we lose sight of how its nuanced history offered early modern writers ‘directions’, to echo Hoskins, for using the trope in order to craft nuanced and surprising meanings. If Olivia hid her growing love by losing her tongue and by speaking in ‘starts, distractedly’ (2.2.20–1), the audience could see in such silences and broken language the beginning of desire. Elam speculates that the Balkan setting of the play offers a further context to imagine homoeroticism underpinning the wooing in Shakespeare’s Illyria, which is a claim that deserves a more developed and documented justification from cultural and social history but that nevertheless indicates the role this setting plays in this discussion,33 especially given how Shakespeare’s English contemporaries perceived the historical Illyria of their times. Yet, the play reveals its queer meanings elsewhere in more stylized and bold ways.
Petrarchan aesthetics and the queerness of style
In 1.5, Shakespeare’s text is richly endowed with stylistic characteristics that give form to sexual ambiguities and uncertainty about identity, as Viola proclaims: ‘I am not that I play’ (178). Discussing the politics of sexuality and erotic identity in Twelfth Night, Valerie Traub has argued that:
In the course of the play’s action, Shakespeare teases his audience with a culturally available, if implicit, association between crossdressers, hermaphrodites, and tribades; then, through the force of the marriage plot, the audience’s attention ultimately is directed away from the specter of such erotic possibilities.34
This audience teasing resulting from valences of queerness that may be adopted in a staging of the play, is also enabled by Petrarchism, which defines one of the most dramatically striking moments in the play – the first long wooing scene involving Olivia and Viola. And Shakespeare ‘teases his audience’ first by troubling the gender boundaries of the conventional Petrarchan aetiology of love that ‘constitutes itself in relation to a feminine object’,35 as Carla Freccero puts it, by an adoring and speaking male subject. Then he consequently changes the gendered and erotic perspectives from within which the lexicon, syntax and style of such emotional expressions are directed from Viola-Cesario to Olivia. Again, the note of confusion and unsettlement that opens their meeting is meant to confuse and unsettle more than simply Olivia and Viola. In moments like this, Shakespeare’s text invites the audience to consider that service, the motive that brought Viola to the door of Olivia’s household, matters as much as all the lexical choices articulating desire which muddles the socio-economic need that Viola has and that Olivia is ready to respond to, despite her initial surprise and confusion. Olivia says:
O sir, I will not be so hard-hearted. I will give out divers schedules of my beauty. It shall be inventoried, and every particle and utensils labelled to my will, as, item, two lips, indifferent red; item, two grey eyes, with lids to them; item, one neck, one chin and so forth. Were you sent hither to praise me?
(1.5.236–41)
The catalogue of female beauty is all too familiar as it stands out by the obviousness of items included in the inventory of female beauty: lips, eyes, neck, chin. The list goes ‘so forth’, and Shakespeare knows that his audience knows it too, that there is a limit to which playing with a convention can be an exciting game. So the catalogue of virtue breaks off with a cue, in the form of a question, to Viola to pick up on the theme of praise (‘Were you sent hither to praise me?’). What is, however, more curious about this inventory of beauty parts is that, being recognizable clichés, those parts are subordinate to the meanings that combine legal, textual and print forms in which trust, loyalty and virtue are confirmed and materialized. The now obsolete meaning of the word ‘schedules’ refers, the OED informs us, to ‘a separate paper or slip of parchment accompanying or appended to a document, and containing explanatory or supplementary matter’ that was in ‘16-17th c. sometimes used for a codicil to a will’. For example, the scroll that mocks Arragon’s choice of the silver casket in The Merchant of Venice, a choice grounded in the marriage contract, is described as a ‘schedule’ (2.6.54), while the oaths and commitments made by the young men in Love’s Labour’s Lost are also contained in a statue, or ‘schedule’ (1.1.18). The mixing of the vocabulary belonging, on the one hand, to the aesthetic of Petrarchan praise of lady’s beauty with the lexicon of legal bonding that is an addition to a will, on the other hand, makes this curious relationship a kind of ‘codicil’ to the marriage theme pursued in the play at this point. In contemporary stylistics, Olivia’s Petrarchan vocabulary renders her the submissive object to Viola’s desire, confirming the bond between two women in terms that render female homoeroticism that complements other forms of desire in the play.
Viola’s response to Olivia, ‘if you are the devil you are fair. / My lord and master loves you. O, such love / Could be but recompensed, though you were crowned / The nonpareil of beauty’ (263–6), not only develops the blazoning praise into the master–mistress relationship familiar from sonnet 20, but also it teasingly transposes those terms in such a way that Viola becomes the conduit through which both a woman’s praise of another woman is conveyed and the absent male lover’s desire for a distant lady is transmitted. Viola’s body is thus doubly transvestized, through dress and through poetry. The speaking subject of the line ‘I am not that I play’ (179) and of ‘If I did love you [Olivia] in my master’s flame / With such a suffering, such a deadly life, / In your denial I would find no sense’ (256–8) undergoes, what Catherine Bates has called in her discussion of cross-dressing in Philip Sidney’s prose romance, New Arcadia, ‘a radical dislocation’ of identity, and of ‘a fragmentation into multiple parts’36 – as Viola can be read as either a young man or a young woman; either looking for service or falling in love, or both; playing a part or performing identity; appearing to know and to ‘not understand’ (258) what love flame is. While the dramatic poetry gives room to interpret the relation between Olivia as the object of Viola’s courtship, and Viola playing a messenger of Orsino’s love to the mourning Olivia and the subject initiating one’s own desire for Olivia, in heterosexual terms, that poetry also delineates other scenarios of desire and identification: a woman wooing and blazoning a woman, a young man blazoning a woman (a boy actor dressed as a woman); a castrated youth, Cesario, wooing a woman.37 The subject/object relation initiated by Viola’s appropriation of the Petrarchan love aesthetics to woo a lady on behalf of a master points to a parody of the tradition of love poetry, so that difference of erotic desire from that tradition has been replaced by sameness as well.
The circular, and circulating, desire in Twelfth Night,38 desire that involves Viola-Cesario, Olivia and Orsino, makes Petrarchan style the main language exchanged between lovers. This scenario, as Bruce Smith has already suggested, raises ‘the prospect of female homoerotic flirtation’.39 But the passage further expands the play’s erotic scenarios. Petrarchan style depersonalizes both the subject and the object in this passage because the play’s lexicon shifts identities beyond the proposed historical accuracy of the one-sex model40 used to explain its stylized presentations in the transvestite comedies. Viola’s appropriation of the Petrarchan style in a courtship situation in which the subject/object referent is shifting shows that Shakespeare uses Petrarchism not to ‘underwrite […] the economy of masculine desire’41 but to expose the arbitrariness of any attempt to attach desire to a gendered body, by promoting desire as a force that brings different kind of staged bodies together and outside the heterosexual matrix.
The roles of the subject and the object of praise and adoration are exchanged between Viola and Olivia, whose blazoning of Viola (‘Thy tongue, thy face, thy limbs, actions and spirit / Do give thee fivefold blazon’ [1.5.284–5]), turns the Petrarchan style into a verbal medium of shared desire between two speaking parts, two bodies present on stage, two speakers using clichés of flattery as the form for a shared desire that is neither charged with overtones of monstrosity, as early modern lesbianism sometimes was, nor presented as transgressive. This complete lack of disapproval, and of any form of reprobation, suggests that this is not a play that has been injected with modern readings and interpretations that Shakespeare would have been unable to foresee; instead, it suggests that the freedom and liberating queerness of the play and its complete upending of heteronormativity was there from the beginning. Bruce Smith has argued that at the end of the play, when Cesario is called a man (‘Cesario, come; / For so you shall be while you are a man’ [5.1.378–9]), ‘the sexual sameness of lover and beloved’, which ‘has not been emphasized earlier in the play’ is ‘certainly flirted with in the end’.42 But as we have seen, these linguistic markers have been confused very early in the play. They are confused at the beginning and throughout, and they will remain, wholly and unapologetically, confused at the end.
The dialogue that follows expands the idea of female same-sex desire coded in terms of Petrarchan stylistics.
viola |
Make me a willow cabin at your gate |
|
And call upon my soul within the house; |
|
And sing them loud even in the dead of night; |
Hallow your name to the reverberate hills |
|
|
And make the babbling gossip of the air |
|
Cry out ‘Olivia!’, you should not rest |
|
Between the elements of air and earth |
|
But you should pity me. |
(1.5.260–8)
The speed with which Viola runs through these lines owes much to the passage consisting of mostly monosyllabic words, which both formally and semantically are caught by the ear easily. Rhyme, or ‘concord’, as Puttenham calls it because it produces the effect of harmony that pleases the ear or the listener, is missing in this passage that lacks rhyme, but it is compensated for, ‘cunningly’,43 as Puttenham might say, by the feminine endings (gate, house, night, hills, air, rest, earth, me). These produce a different kind of ‘concord’, pair or harmony: between women at the heart of the Petrarchan dialectic of love. Thus the queerness of style extends from vocabulary to prosody. The use of feminine rhyme adds an additional acoustic dimension to the presentation of lesbian desire. On the one hand, feminine rhyme provides an acoustic dimension to the queer textual moment. On the other, feminine rhyme shows that prosody is a producer of erotic meaning as much as ideas crafted by poetry are.44 The difference between the acts of viewing the play and that of reading it inevitably plays part in the perception of the queer style generated through prosody. What the reader would ‘hear’ on the page might not be the same that an audience member might hear coming from the stage.45 However, printed text enables the idea that the female-female desire and wooing are supported by feminine rhyme. Desire is here positioned in relation to language and the forms with which desire is associated.46 The queerness of Shakespeare’s style is realized through an awareness of versification, and it is recognizable because Shakespeare invented a style that offers formal grounds for thinking about that style as queer. The context of queer style expands beyond the frame of prosody, and sharpens our sense of the textual milieu that shapes the life of Twelfth Night in the history of queer early modern drama.
Bruce Smith has offered a compelling comparative reading of this passage alongside a passage from Ovid’s Heroides, ‘in the verse epistle [in which] Ovid imagines the Greek poet Sappho writing to the male lover Phaon, who has just abandoned her for another woman’. As the complaint, which was translated by George Turberville and printed in 1567, continues, Sappho recollects delights she had with other ‘Lesbian lasses’,47 now forgotten. Phaon, Smith reminds us, won Sappho because of his androgynous look, being a youth without facial hair and of tender age. As a thematic resource for Twelfth Night, Ovid’s text reveals desire charged with lesbianism, even where that desire might be obfuscated behind the stylistic ornament of Petrarchism. Regarded from this comparative perspective, this parallel reading shows that Shakespeare’s verbal practice of emulating the classical past in a new creation shows Twelfth Night, even if only in this particular case, cannot be treated as an isolated textual whole, if a full range of possibilities for reading desire in it is to be made apparent. Queer style reveals itself fully in a comparative reading of related texts from different time periods. Such a style dilates queer meaning of Shakespeare’s drama. So understood, queer style covers the study of sources as influences that cannot be determined by establishing a direct and linear contact between texts but that constitute a resource, one that spurns new creation.48
At a time when the understanding of a stable, coherent idea of the subject did not exist, both in actuality and in drama – Shakespeare’s favourite poet, after all, was Ovid, who depicted and praised instability and mutability of body and desire – the notion and practice of style as a medium that would convey the idea of the coherence of identity did not exist either.49 Shakespeare’s use of the Petrarchan style shows that he imagines desire without gender boundaries. In that sense the notion of desire stylized without gendered limits dispenses with the chronological boundaries of desire and puts Shakespeare’s text in close proximity to modern queer theory. In its search for disciplinary, conceptual and ideological space in contemporary critical dialogue between the past and the present, queer theory has made the past a domain of queer historiography and the present of theory. Sharon Holland has argued that Twelfth Night is ‘as much a play bout how to play at love as it is about the fact that whom we love is of little consequence’.50 Yet the interplay of language and desire in this play sharpens, rather than blurs, our perception about the erotic charge that creates relationships between desiring objects in Twelfth Night.
In Twelfth Night Shakespeare’s handling of the Petrarchan poetics exceeds parody, with which this well-worn aesthetic ideal in poetic composition has often been met in his works. The handling differs from the straightforward parody of Petrarchan poetics in Romeo and Juliet, for instance, where Mercutio, talking to Benvolio about Romeo, says: ‘Now is he for the numbers that Petrarch flow’d in, Laura to his lady was a kitchen wench’ (2.4.39). This parody fits the consistently heteroerotic orientation of this tragedy; it is an overt parody of heterosexuality. In Twelfth Night, however, Shakespeare treats Petrarchism as a resource with which he transforms expectations of erotic desire. He enlivens a convention deeply moored in artifice in ways that he also does when he uses it to imagine male same-sex desire in the Sonnets. For Shakespeare, Petrarchism is more than a cliché and more than a love convention: it is a source of new sexual meaning by which he turns a romantic comedy into a series of stage performances of queer desire. A style of writing is more than a set of clichés and ornaments. It is a series of formal linguistic signs coded in such a way that they transmit new meanings transformed by the action on the stage. The queer style of Petrarchan desire also shows that in Twelfth Night Shakespeare emerges as a poet of new sexual range and morality. The lesbianism of this passage is neither crushed by action, nor is it rendered monstrous, rather, the lesbianism in Twelfth Night is imagined as a powerful source of sexual teasing and rhetorical invention as combined processes. In that sense, queer style is not a repressive but a progressive aesthetics of desire and sexuality in Twelfth Night. Queer style animates, moves and energizes the speakers to discover erotic meanings that are produced by the Petrarchan poetics.