7

Twelfth Night and Othello

Those Extraordinary Twins

Although this essay gets general at the end—and preachy—its immediate occasion is particular and mundane: concern that, conditioned as you might be by theme-park thinking, you will wonder at, and object to, the coupling here of plays so variously and urgently unlike one another as Twelfth Night and Othello.

By “theme-park thinking” I mean the kind of thinking that causes teachers and publishers and repertory companies to assign or publish or schedule works in groups determined by some shared topic. An obvious instance is the pairing of Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story on syllabuses, in paperbacks, and at Shakespeare festivals. Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead make an equally popular, equally handsome couple, and Richard III and Josephine Tey’s novel Daughter of Time keep company almost as steady. The same sort of urge results in thematically chosen seasons of Shakespeare plays. For instance, Shenandoah Shakespeare Express called its 1993 repertory (Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream) “a season of love,” and, one year when it couldn’t find a common denominator for its four chosen plays, the California Shakespeare Festival felt impelled to fake it by tagging its season “His Infinite Variety.”

Theme-park thinking is, of course, not exclusive to the Shakespeare industry. Instructors in mandatory composition courses for college freshmen routinely choose readings on the basis of a common theme. I can’t think of any actual examples at the moment, but the kind of thing I’m talking about would be pairing Cyrano de Bergerac with Pinocchio (works of heightened nasality), or grouping Lady Windermere’s Fan, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Lad, a Dog.

The label I give it and the flippancy of my last examples have, I trust, betrayed my distaste for theme-park thought. I will come back later to that distaste and attempt to validate it. For the moment, however, I must get on with the job I was brought in to do, namely justifying the choice of two patently dissimilar plays, justifying the choice in exactly the terms I have been sneering at.

So.

Twelfth Night and Othello are plays that tell stories that appear radically different in kind and that evoke radically different responses from audiences, but in actuality—in an actuality I will later say is irrelevant—they are remarkably similar. Some of the likenesses between Twelfth Night and Othello are ones that would not be worth a second thought if they did not occur in plays that share a deeper similarity. I want to start with some trivial, incidental points of likeness and work my way down gradually to the plays’ deep thematic likeness.

To begin with, the truly minimal, central deceivers in both Twelfth Night and Othello echo and play on “I am that I am,” the phrase in Exodus 3:14 by which Jehovah so unsatisfactorily defines himself for Moses. In Twelfth Night, during their second interview, Olivia asks the disguised Viola “his” opinion of her and thereby opens the way into an ontological cul de sac:

Olivia. Stay. I prithee tell me what thou think’st of me.

Viola. That you do think you are not what you are.

Olivia. If I think so, I think the same of you.

Viola. Then think you right: I am not what I am. (3.1.137–41)1

In Othello, Iago uses the same words in celebrating the difference between what he is and what he appears to be:

For when my outward action doth demonstrate

The native act and figure of my heart

In complement extern, ‘tis not long after

But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve

For daws to peck at! I am not what I am. (1.1.61–65)

For one more petty likeness between Twelfth Night and Othello, both plays are at pains to introduce false ocular evidence into deceptions that succeed without that hard-won evidence. In Twelfth Night, the scene in which Feste the clown visits the imprisoned Malvolio begins with instructions from Maria to Feste: “Nay, I prithee, put on this gown and this beard, make him believe thou art Sir Topas the curate, do it quickly” (4.2.1–3). While Feste puts on the disguise, Maria leaves the stage to fetch Sir Toby. Although she returns immediately, Maria does not speak again until the first Feste/Malvolio interview is over. Only then does she say the second of her two speeches in the scene: “Thou mightst have done this without thy beard and gown, he sees thee not” (4.2.64–65). And in Othello Iago contrives to plant Desdemona’s strawberry-spotted handkerchief upon Cassio and then is so typically lucky as to have Bianca bring the handkerchief onto the stage and confront Cassio with it in sight of the concealed Othello. Iago’s scheme works perfectly: his charade convinces Othello that Desdemona has been false to him with Cassio. But any handkerchief would have served as evidence. After Cassio and Bianca exit, Othello comes forward to Iago:

Othello. How shall I murther him, Iago?

Iago. Did you perceive how he laugh’d at his vice?

Othello. O Iago!

Iago. And did you see the handkerchief?

Othello. Was that mine?

Iago. Yours, by this hand! (4.1.188–94)

For another sort of likeness entirely between Twelfth Night and Othello, listen to the following lines:

Why should I not (had I the heart to do it),

Like to th’ Egyptian thief at point of death,

Kill what I love?—a savage jealousy

That sometime savors nobly. But hear me this:

Since you to nonregardance cast my faith,

And that I partly know the instrument

That screws me from my true place in your favor,

Live you the marble-breasted tyrant still.

I like to put those lines on spot passage tests—ungraded spot passage tests—to see what percentage of my students will guess that Othello is the speaker. Sometimes every member of a class will agree that the lines are Othello’s, when, in fact, they are Orsino’s in Twelfth Night (5.1.119–26).

For larger evidence of kinship between Twelfth Night and Othello, consider the surprising similarity between the Toby-Andrew relationship in Twelfth Night and the Iago/Roderigo relationship in Othello. In both cases, a foolish, well-to-do young man, desperately ambitious of a woman he cannot hope to have, is gulled for profit by another man. Moreover, the engineered fight into which Cassio and Roderigo are gulled and into which Montano intrudes to become its chief victim (2.3) echoes the engineered fight into which Viola and Andrew are gulled and into which Antonio intrudes to become its chief victim (3.4).

And “following” and “service” are motifs common to the two plays.

But the big likeness between Twelfth Night and Othello is their common denominator in the topic of evidence, a topic I have already touched on incidentally and one that is central to both plays. The centrality of evidence to the events of the plays is obvious in Malvolio’s readiness to accept the (extremely persuasive) false evidence of Maria’s letter, in various characters’ confidence that clothes make Viola a man and that anyone who looks just like one of the twins must be that twin, and in Othello’s readiness to accept Iago’s fiction on evidence insufficient to withstand any slight effort to test it. What is not so obvious is that the topic of trustworthy and untrustworthy evidence recurs incidentally and in a variety of dimensions all over both plays and gives each the kind of extra unity and thus identity that unostentatious alliteration or internal rhyme can give a line of verse.

I want to start my list of examples of concern for evidence in the two plays with an example of unreliable evidence from which a character draws a valid conclusion. When in her soliloquy in 2.2 of Twelfth Night Viola examines Olivia’s behavior toward her and draws a conclusion from it, her evidence is no stronger than—is in fact rather weaker than—Malvolio’s when he is fooled by Maria’s letter. The big difference is that Viola’s guess happens to be right.

I left no ring with her. What means this lady?

Fortune forbid my outside have not charm’d her!

She made good view of me; indeed so much

That methought her eyes had lost her tongue,

For she did speak in starts distractedly.

She loves me sure, the cunning of her passion

Invites me in this churlish messenger.

None of my lord’s ring? Why, he sent her none.

I am the man! (2.2.17–25)

The reading of evidence is pervasive in Twelfth Night. For instance, Viola’s soliloquy follows immediately upon the exit speech of Malvolio, who has followed Viola to return to her the ring she never gave Olivia: “Come, sir, you peevishly threw it to her; and her will is, it should be so return’d. If it be worth stooping for, there it lies, in your eye; if not, be it his that finds it” (2.2.14–16). At the end of 1.5, Olivia called Malvolio onto the stage and told him to run after “that same peevish messenger, / The County’s man,” who, she says, “left this ring behind him, / Would I or not. Tell him I’ll none of it” (1.5.300–302). Building only upon Olivia’s word “peevish,” Malvolio reads “left this ring behind him” as evidence of a fully imagined, wholly imaginary scene in which “Cesario” “peevishly threw” the ring to Olivia.

The following speech, the one in which Viola asks her rescuer to help her to a disguise, is a series of variations on the theme of evidence:

There is a fair behavior in thee, captain,

And though that nature with a beauteous wall

Doth oft close in pollution, yet of thee

I will believe thou hast a mind that suits

With this thy fair and outward character.

I prithee (and I’ll pay thee bounteously)

Conceal me what I am, and be my aid

For such disguise as haply shall become

The form of my intent. I’ll serve this duke;

Thou shalt present me as an eunuch to him,

It may be worth thy pains; for I can sing

And speak to him in many sorts of music

That will allow me very worth his service.

What else may hap, to time I will commit,

Only shape thou thy silence to my wit. (1.2.47–61)

Viola begins the speech by saying that she will take the captain’s outward behavior as evidence for his inner virtue, saying so in a sentence wrapped around a reminder that “a beauteous wall / Doth oft close in pollution.” Then she asks the captain’s help in making the evidence of her outside deceptive.

As I have implied, the topic of evidence and conclusions drawn from it occur even in the play’s minutiae. One more example is the casual reference to “the picture of ‘we three’” (2.3.16–17). The picture in question was common, a kind of canned practical joke: a drawing of two donkeys or of two idiots captioned “We Three.” The picture and its caption invite the viewer to square the evidence of the picture of two creatures with the caption’s assertion of three by concluding that he or she is the third jackass or the third fool.

Before continuing with the topic of evidence in Twelfth Night and Othello, let me first acknowledge that that topic, like any pervasive topic in a literary work, is a theme and, second, insist on the difference between the kind of attention to themes that I objected to when I talked about theme parks and a kind I recommend. When two or more works are grouped on the basis of a common theme, the theme can become the object of study rather than the individual literary works it inhabits. And, when that happens, students get confirmation of a long-held suspicion, the suspicion that they are only made to read difficult works because they are difficult, that a Shakespeare play is to their real purposes as penitential pushups in army boot camp are to service in the field, that Twelfth Night or Othello or Hamlet is only a humbling obstacle course between them and discussion of topics more conveniently embodied in any day’s news and in any number of current movies. If one is to show students valid reason for reading and/or seeing a Shakespeare play (as opposed to a readily accessible work in the students’ own idiom), then one must show them how that play works, what gives a vast and various Shakespeare play its intense oneness, its identity as a thing rather than a string of narrative parts. What I am pushing is the idea of considering themes in the plays—particularly unobtrusive themes, themes that are not specifically discussed by the characters—as skeletal structures that hold a play together. In doing that, one gets closer to the play, rather than moving away from it.

I placed that digression where I did because it leads nicely into the next elements in my demonstration of the pervasiveness of evidence as a topic in Twelfth Night and Othello. A way to get students to see the skeletal structures I’ve been talking about is to direct their attention to elements in a play that seem out of place or useless. The technique works particularly well in exploring the thematic ribs that the topic of evidence furnishes to Twelfth Night. Consider the evidentiary minuet Viola and Sebastian perform at the moment of their reunion:

Sebastian. Do I stand there? I never had a brother;

Nor can there be that deity in my nature

Of here and every where. I had a sister,

Whom the blind waves and surges have devour’d.

Of charity, what kin are you to me?

What countryman? What name? What parentage?

Viola. Of Messaline. Sebastian was my father,

Such a Sebastian was my brother too;

So went he suited to his watery tomb.

If spirits can assume both form and suit,

You come to fright us.

Sebastian.                 A spirit I am indeed,

But am in that dimension grossly clad

Which from the womb I did participate.

Were you a woman, as the rest goes even,

I should my tears let fall upon your cheek,

And say, “Thrice welcome, drowned Viola!”

Viola. My father had a mole upon his brow.

Sebastian. And so had mine.

Viola. And died that day when Viola from her birth

Had numb’red thirteen years.

Sebastian. O, that record is lively in my soul!

He finished indeed his mortal act

That day that made my sister thirteen years.

Viola. If nothing lets to make us happy both

But this my masculine usurp’d attire,

Do not embrace me till each circumstance

Of place, time, fortune, do cohere and jump

That I am Viola . . . (5.1.226–53)

Like some critics, many directors, and most audiences, students are likely to find fault with such scrupulosity about drawing an obvious conclusion from evidence. In finding the extravagant meticulousness of Viola and Sebastian superfluous and foolish, we demonstrate our failure to learn what might be called the moral of Twelfth Night: “Don’t let overwhelming evidence overwhelm you.” (Note that I said “what might be called.” Since Twelfth Night has never delivered that moral or any other, to fish a moral up would be wantonly creative. To work a workable lesson—or “point”—out of Twelfth Night would be to present as a fact of the play—the play we actually have—what might have been true of a play Shakespeare could have made with the materials he used to make Twelfth Night. If the moral of a literary work isn’t apparent, then it doesn’t exist. I introduce the matter of moralizing because, just as students are used to being asked to see that a play or poem or story has something “to say,” they are also used to the idea that themes in literary works are what those works are “about.” I want it understood that I am not saying that Twelfth Night and Othello are about evidence but that (to exchange my endoskeletal metaphor for an exoskeletal one) evidence is about them—wrapped around them—that the theme of evidence is one of the elements that gives each its identity, its integrity.

Let me now come back from that prophylactic detour to point out that the very syntax of the last five of the lines quoted above from the exchange between Viola and Sebastian is such as to invite audiences to jump to a false conclusion. These are the five lines:

If nothing lets to make us happy both

But this my masculine usurp’d attire,

Do not embrace me till each circumstance

Of place, time, fortune, do cohere and jump

That I am Viola

“If nothing lets . . . / But” (that is, “if nothing stands in the way except”) is a familiar kind of construction, one that customarily brushes aside some negative consideration as trifling and one that promises a succeeding imperative clause that instructs the pauser to go forward (for instance, “If nothing’s keeping you from going away this weekend but finding someone to feed your goldfish, go ahead; I’ll take care of the fish”). Here the imperative “Do not embrace me” is exactly the opposite of the one signaled. Moreover, since the dismissive gesture appears in the context of a long and seemingly superfluous rehearsal of minor facts confirming the obvious, it presumably echoes audiences’ impatience with the extreme caution of Viola and Sebastian. The “If nothing lets . . .” / “. . . Do not embrace me” lines are one last bit of bait in a passage that all but begs its audiences to leap to conclusions.

Othello too is woven through with variations on the theme of evidence. And it too has something that could be called, but should not be called, a moral. Here the moral would be “Do not confuse what is probable for what is true.” The confusion is encapsulated in the phrase “what he found himself was apt and true” (5.2.212). When Emilia challenges Iago to contradict Othello’s assertion that it was Iago who told him to suspect Desdemona of infidelity, Iago’s response is “I told him what I thought, and told no more / Than what he found himself was apt and true” (5.2.176–77).

Whereas in Twelfth Night Viola and Sebastian appear to have learned the lesson the play doesn’t teach us, in Othello no one involved—no one on stage and no one in the audience—learns anything. Consider Othello’s unending supply of weapons. In the last scene, Othello draws his sword and runs at Iago; Montano takes the sword and gives it to Gratiano, whom he charges to keep Othello prisoner: “Take you this weapon / Which I have here recover’d from the Moor. / Come, guard the door without; let him not pass, / But kill him rather” (5.2.239–42). Moments later, Othello tells us that he has another weapon in the chamber; Shakespeare has him pause to tell us more about it than we need to know: “It was a sword of Spain, the ice-brook’s temper” (5.2.253). Then, in an exchange with Gratiano, Shakespeare makes Othello take time to furnish an endorsement for this second sword: “Behold, I have a weapon; / A better never did itself sustain / Upon a soldier’s thigh” (5.2.259–61). Twenty-five lines later, Othello is disarmed a second time. Then, when Othello proves to have one weapon more and stabs himself to death, Cassio says, “This did I fear, but thought he had no weapon” (5.2.260). No one laughs at Cassio’s remark, even though we have witnessed a painstaking demonstration of the folly of assuming that the loss of one weapon means that Othello is weaponless, and even though that demonstration comes at the end of a play that repeatedly shows us people casually interpreting evidence and casually concluding from it on the basis of probabilities.

As with Twelfth Night, a close look at elements apparently gratuitous to the job of dramatizing the story of Othello can help students toward seeing the architectural coherence the topic of evidence gives the play. A good instance of this kind of non-essential activity is the opening sequence of 1.3, a sequence in which the Duke of Venice and his council of senators perform a forty-four line exercise in weighing evidence and drawing probability-based conclusions from it. The Duke and the senators have several different reports of the number of ships in the Turkish fleet (1.3.1–6). The council sees that the evidence at hand is useless as to the number of ships, but, since all reports agree that the fleet is headed for Cyprus, the council accepts that much of the evidence in the disparate accounts is trustworthy (7–13). Then a messenger comes in to contradict what they took to be their one reliable piece of intelligence: “The Turkish preparation makes for Rhodes” (1.3.14). Thereupon the councilors change the logic on which they base conclusions about the Turks. They shift from reliance on the probability that the reports are reliable when and if they are in consensus to reliance on the probability that a given kind of people will do what one’s previous experience leads one to expect them to do. The Duke asks one of the senators to comment on the new report of the Turks’ destination. This is the senator’s analysis and the conclusion the Duke draws from it:

This cannot be

By no assay of reason; ‘tis a pageant

To keep us in false gaze. When we consider

Th’ importancy of Cyprus to the Turk,

And let ourselves again but understand

That, as it more concerns the Turk than Rhodes,

So may he with more facile question bear it,

For that it stands not in such warlike brace,

But altogether lacks th’ abilities

That Rhodes is dress’d in—if we make thought of this,

We must not think the Turk is so unskillful

To leave that latest which concerns him first,

Neglecting an attempt of ease and gain

To wake and wage a danger profitless.

Duke. Nay, in all confidence, he’s not for Rhodes. (1.3.18–30)

Another messenger enters immediately to announce that the fleet has changed its course and is now openly making for Cyprus (39–46).

Like Viola in Twelfth Night when she correctly concluded that she was the object of Olivia’s affections, the senators and the Duke just happen to be right. They are lucky. They insist on the foreignness of “the Turk” and yet assume that his motives and movements can be predicted. The Duke and senators are, as I say, lucky. Others in the play are not. Their excellent logic is regularly blind to possibilities they themselves embody. Desdemona runs off with an elderly exotic and assumes that everyone else’s behavior will be not only rational but based on premises obvious to her. Iago, as he says, knows what he is—unnatural by any standard we bring with us into the theater—and therefore assures us that Desdemona will act as experience has shown him eccentric women ordinarily do: “knowing what I am, I know what she shall be,” he says at 4.1.73, and—earlier, in the “put money in thy purse” speech to Roderigo—“It cannot be long that Desdemona should continue her love to the Moor. . . . It was a violent commencement in her, and thou shalt see an answerable sequestration. . . . She must change for youth; when she is sated with his body, she will find the error of her choice” (1.3.341–43, 344–45, 349–50). From Brabantio—who is confident that the possible actions of his daughter are limited to the probable ones—to Emilia—who, improbably enough, never says “O, that handkerchief” and yet speculates confidently on the probabilities of human behavior in her “all the world” speeches in 4.3 and is similarly confident about Bianca’s guilt in the attempt on Cassio’s life in 5.1—the characters in Othello rush headlong to reasonable wrong conclusions on the basis of the same sort of assumption-based logic by which the Duke’s council reached a right one.

I said that narratively useless passages like the council scene in 1.3 are good places to go to show students the skeletons that support the narrative flesh of Shakespeare plays. Another good starting place is the very existence of characters like the generally superfluous clown who appears briefly at the beginning of 3.1 of Othello and at the beginning of 3.4. In 3.1, he does some standard clowning with the musicians. Then Cassio speaks to him:

Cassio. Dost thou hear, mine honest friend?

Clown. No, I hear not your honest friend; I hear you.

Cassio. Prithee keep up thy quillets. (3.1.21–23)

This too is standard clowning, but consider its kind. What the clown does in his absolutism is refuse to let context and idiom limit his interpretation of Cassio’s words; the clown refuses to draw the conclusion that the meaning of Cassio’s question is the obvious one. When he makes his second and last appearance, the clown does nothing at all but (1) exercise caution about inferring the obvious meaning of what he hears and (2) insist on the frailty of the human mind (note, moreover, that the exchange between Desdemona and the clown is not only one in which Desdemona’s purpose is to get information but one in which reliable information and the means of getting it become actual subjects of the conversation):

Desdemona. Do you know, sirrah, where Lieutenant Cassio lies?

Clown. I dare not say he lies any where.

Desdemona. Why, man?

Clown. He’s a soldier, and for me to say a soldier lies, ‘tis stabbing.

Desdemona. Go to! where lodges he?

Clown. To tell you where he lodges, is to tell you where I lie.

Desdemona. Can any thing be made of this?

Clown. I know not where he lodges, and for me to devise a lodging and say he lies here, or he lies there, were to lie in mine own throat.

Desdemona. Can you inquire him out, and be edified by report?

Clown. I will catechize the world for him, that is, make questions, and by them answer.

Desdemona. Seek him, bid him come hither. Tell him I have mov’d my lord on his behalf, and hope all will be well.

Clown. To do this is within the compass of man’s wit, and therefore I will attempt the doing it.

Clown exits. (3.4.1–22)

I set out many paragraphs ago to demonstrate likenesses between Twelfth Night and Othello. I think I have done that. In recent paragraphs I have drifted from demonstrating the existence of an element common to the two plays into demonstrating the pervasiveness of one of them—one theme, evidence and conclusions derived from it—within the individual plays. I changed my focus in preparation for insisting once again on the radical difference in value between the two enterprises. To talk about a thematic or situational link between Twelfth Night and Othello (or any other pair of works) in order to focus not on either of them but on a likeness accidental to the essence of each is thus to move away from the objects one purports to study and onto a middle ground. On the other hand, to talk about alliteration-like thematic repetitions within a play is to talk about that play, that play, not what that play talks about. One needs to avoid slipping into the sort of folly one would commit if one said or seemed to be saying that, for instance, Twelfth Night and Othello are plays about evidence, are disguised tracts in which Malvolio and Othello are mere furniture. But if one avoids that particular escape route from one’s putative topic, to examine the warp and woof of a Shakespeare play (or any other literary work) is to go a good way in the direction of an answer to the big questions about the works we study and teach: “What is all the fuss about?” “Why do people read and study and teach some things and not others?” “If the dramatized situation in a play is what matters—if our purpose in a classroom is to discuss the kinds of things that happen in it—why bother with the play; why not move directly to discussion of the issue or issues the play presents?”

And that brings me back at last to my objection to theme-park thinking: it provides a focus for study that is not of the literary works but of something else. For instance, I don’t think that any student ever truly believes that the reason he or she values the movies or television programs or other fictions he or she values above others of their kind is anything like the sorts of reasons teachers and editors’ introductions to Shakespeare texts imply that they do or should. We will never dispel the all-but-universal belief that what one thinks about plays and stories and poems and what one should think are naturally different until we look at the objects we teach as they are (which is to say, as they seem to be) and not as awkward stepping stones to socially or morally or intellectually more dignified concerns.

I think I have demonstrated enough likenesses between Twelfth Night and Othello successfully enough to put down fears that the plays will seem too different to be profitably studied in tandem. The demonstration, however, is little more than a critical parlor trick. Remember that “Those Extraordinary Twins” in my title comes from Mark Twain, who used it as the title for a farce about an imaginary circus freak. My demonstration of likenesses between two plays that do not show that likeness is an open and foolish invitation to teachers and students alike to make Twelfth Night and Othello into a purely imaginary freak—an invitation to think and talk about Twelfth Night and Othello as if they, each and together, had the identity foisted upon them by the arbitrary and alien focus of this essay. The likenesses between the plays are indeed many and deep, but they amount to nothing as compared to the truth that prompted this essay: Twelfth Night and Othello are different, urgently different.

And being so urgently different, they are perfect candidates to cohabit a syllabus. If one thinks as I do that it is pedagogically desirable to block off any path away from one’s putative object of study—that one does students harm if one leads them to think that we do, and they should, value Twelfth Night or Othello (or any of the other works that adults have loved so much and so long) as sites for considering other things—things other than the plays themselves—then Twelfth Night and Othello, a pair that does not of itself offer any open avenues out, are the perfect pair.

Note

1. Quotations are from William Shakespeare, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).