Magic versus time: As You Like it and Twelfth Night
As You Like It, by its contrasts, illuminates Shakespeare’s use of the rhetoric of consciousness. Here we learn about Rosalind and the other characters not through self-revelation in soliloquy, the basic strategy of the New Comic model, but through their interaction with other characters and the contrasting of one attitude with another, of Touchstone’s physicality with Silvius’ pastoral laments, for example. In fact, the play has only one soliloquy, which closes the first act, in which Oliver expresses his hatred of Orlando. Though Shakespeare has Rosalind use asides to juxtapose her true feelings with her assumed pose as critic of love, these remarks are always addressed to another character, usually Celia. And because Rosalind’s disguise is self-consciously assumed, it does not lead to the kind of confusion and suffering experienced by the Antipholi in Errors, or by Bottom and the lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Despite the play’s dearth of soliloquies or monologues which manifest a rhetoric of consciousness, we inevitably experience Rosalind as a complex character. Readers of As You Like It generally agree that the play is about testing and education.1 Rosalind’s disguise is intentional; she uses it to expose the conventional postures of love which the other characters assume, to educate Orlando, Silvius and Phoebe to less idealized and less self-dramatizing passions.2 In the process, Rosalind moves back and forth between two identities, as Rosalind and as Ganymede, and in doing so she is educated herself.3 Sexual disguise brings about this education, but at those moments in the play where self-address and the rhetoric of consciousness might generate in the audience a sense of the inner workings of Rosalind’s mind, instead Shakespeare distances us from his characters through scenes of dialogue, through formal, highly stylized language, and through miraculous or supernatural events.
Consider first the scene in which Rosalind is exiled by Duke Frederick. Instead of leaving Rosalind alone on stage to lament her plight in soliloquy, Shakespeare advances the action through a scene of dialogue with Celia. And we should note that Rosalind does not begin as the gallant and powerful impresario of action whom we later encounter in Arden. When Celia insists on following her and suggests they seek refuge in the forest, Rosalind responds in a stereotypically feminine manner:
Alas, what danger will it be to us,
Maids as we are, to travel forth so far?
Beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold.4
(I, iii, 104–6)
Celia, undaunted, suggests disguise, and Rosalind develops Celia’s plan by proposing to disguise herself as a man. Celia leads in this scene, not Rosalind, and it is she who speaks the famous lines, ‘Now go we in content/To liberty, and not to banishment.’ In the forest, Rosalind’s language changes, but rather than show us a mind in conflict, Shakespeare has her adopt the linguistic stereotype of a man. Her first words are an oath, a testament to her masculine identity; she assumes the male role of Celia’s comforter and exhorts her to courage. Though Shakespeare presents us with a changing Rosalind, we have no insight into how this change comes about other than through her mechanical assumption of masculine disguise and the linguistic stereotypes of male and female.
More important to As You Like It than the inner life are social games which lead the characters not to greater understanding of themselves, but to greater capacities for social interaction and harmonious commitments in love and marriage. Where we might expect to find Rosalind reflecting upon her plight, as at her discovery that Orlando is in the forest writing verses to his beloved Rosalind, Shakespeare reveals her feelings instead through dialogue with Celia and Touchstone. Her many questions are not rhetorical, as we have found so often in characters whose identities are threatened, but literal: ‘What did he when thou saw’st him? What said he? How looked he? Wherein went he?’ (III, ii, 216–17). At Orlando’s appearance, she determines to ‘speak to him like a saucy lackey’ and proceeds to mock his declared love. Rosalind’s love mockery, so different from her extravagant excitement, love sickness, and desperate inquiries to Celia, suggests for us her inner turmoil. What is missing is not a sense of her inner life or personal struggles, her capacity to hold the contrasting views of love she expresses in the play in a poised and balanced equilibrium, but rather self- consciousness about that equipoise expressed through soliloquy. Rosalind’s inner debates are externalized in her role as Ganymede/Rosalind, and we are correspondingly distanced from her feelings, however much we may appreciate her character. We share the pleasures of flirtation, of transvestism, of shifting roles and playful irony, all of which testify to Rosalind’s fascination by giving her dimensions in excess of her function. We are called upon to hold together, in the study or in performance, the multiple aspects of her character, but we never have the sense that she herself recognizes or struggles with that multiplicity.
Instead of a confessional soliloquy, when confronted with Oliver’s highly stylized, almost allegorical tale of Orlando’s heroism, Rosalind swoons. In the next scene, when Orlando refuses to continue their game and cries out that he ‘can live no longer by thinking’ (V, ii, 50), far from fearing the loss of Orlando’s company and courtship, Rosalind claims miraculous powers given her by a magician: she promises to materialize Rosalind. Orlando reacts directly: ‘Speak’st thou in sober meanings?’ (line 69). Her response, however, both answers and evades. She reiterates her promise in language which hints, in its formal balance and repetitions at a magician’s spell, ordering Orlando to prepare for the wedding, ‘for if you will be married tomorrow, you shall; and to Rosalind if you will’ (lines 72–4).
Rosalind’s lines have only hinted at the formal and distancing rhetoric which follow. Each character in turn repeats the words of the preceding in response to Silvius’ enumeration of ‘what ’tis to love’.5 It is almost as if the characters are under a spell or in a trance, and significantly, after another series of such repetitions, Rosalind breaks the spell, complaining that they all sound ‘like the howling of Irish wolves against the moon’ (lines 110–11), activity traditionally associated with strange happenings and mysterious, supernatural events.
In the final scene we find Shakespeare using once again the language of spells, vows and the like. It serves to emphasize the ritual festivities of marriage and harmony with which the play ends. The action is no longer directed and ratified by Rosalind, but by Hymen whose miraculous arrival or descent brings about the marital harmony of the play’s finale. Whatever sense we might have of the characters’ development or maturation is subordinated to a sense of magic and wonder.6 Only in As You Like It and the late Cymbeline does Shakespeare use the device of the deus ex machina literally. The Abbess of The Comedy of Errors, the Duke of Measure for Measure, Paulina in The Winter’s Tale, Prospero in The Tempest, all partake of the supernatural through the roles they play in the final scenes, but only in As You Like It among the early comedies does Shakespeare have a god speak and control the action on stage.
Rosalind’s claims of magical powers and the incantatory, stylized and repetitive stichomythia of the two preceding scenes among the lovers prepare for Hymen’s arrival and role in the action. The god of marriage’s language continues what we have already heard from the other lovers, but with the addition of rhyme:
You and you no cross shall part.
You and you are heart in heart.
You to his love must accord,
Or have a woman to your lord.
You and you are sure together,
As the winter to foul weather.
(V, iv, 130–5)
Having given his blessing to each pair of lovers, Hymen speaks a final quatrain to the assembled company:
Whiles a wedlock hymn we sing,
Feed yourselves with questioning,
That reason wonder may diminish
How thus we met, and these things finish.
(V, iv, 136–9)
The ensuing action, however, far from explaining away wonder, intensifies it, for before Rosalind can utter a word of explanation, the second and heretofore unintroduced brother of Orlando and Oliver arrives to tell of yet another strange miracle, the conversion of Frederick by ‘an old religious man’. We may remember here that Rosalind/Ganymede has told Orlando that she owes her education to ‘an old religious uncle’. At III, ii when Rosalind speaks these lines the audience believes them to be false. But at the end of the play, when we hear of the ‘old religious man’ who converts Duke Frederick, we are reminded of Rosalind’s uncle who made a convert of her as well; magic and wonder increase rather than diminish. Even Jaques, whose satiric role has served to offer, along with Ganymede’s, a corrective view of life and love, speaks this language of patterned, repetitive rhyming incantation:
You to your former honour I bequeath,
Your patience and your virtue well deserve it.
You to a love that your true faith doth merit:
You to your land and love and great allies:
You to a long and well-deserved bed:
And you to wrangling, for thy loving voyage
Is but for two months victuall’d. So to your pleasures.
I am for other than for dancing measures.
(V, iv, 185–92)
Rosalind’s prose epilogue breaks the magical spell which envelops the final action. Her words are designed to call attention to the play as play, to her role as actor, and thereby to dispel the sense of wonder which the finale conveys. This emphasis on magic links As You Like It in some ways more closely to A Midsummer Night’s Dream than to Twelfth Night and Much Ado with which it is often grouped. Certainly Twelfth Night is a comedy in which wonder plays an important part, but in Twelfth Night wonder is associated with fortune, time and human action rather than with magic and the supernatural.
In Twelfth Night Shakespeare uses mistaken identity not only as a means of complicating the plot, but also as a figure for self-delusion, for the mistakes men make about themselves. Though the central mistakes in identity arise from Viola’s disguise as Cesario and the eventual confusion between Cesario and Sebastian, there are also, as many readers have noted, the ‘identities’ created by the imagination: Orsino’s as melancholy lover to Olivia; Olivia as mourner to her brother; Malvolio as lord to Olivia and her household; and even Sir Toby’s fictitious version of Sir Andrew.7
Both Olivia and Orsino demonstrate the limits of their ‘identities’ by their erratic behavior, which they express primarily through language. In the course of his first six lines, the duke praises music as the food of love and then declares ‘Enough, no more;/’Tis not so sweet now as it was before.’8 He calls attention to his own irrational behavior, attributing it to the ‘spirit of love’ and equating love with fancy. So in II, iv, in his conversation with Viola, first Orsino affirms that like all true lovers he is ‘Unstaid and skittish in all motions else,/Save in the constant image of the creature/That is belov’d’ (II, iv, 18–20). But following this avowal of constancy, and marked by the emphatic full stop in the middle of the line, is an abrupt change of subject: the question to Viola ‘How dost thou like this tune?’, a tune which we learn, ironically enough, helps to relieve his passion. Within fifteen lines he then contradicts himself when he affirms that instead of being constant, men’s ‘fancies are more giddy and unfirm,/More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn/Than women’s are’ (lines 33–5).9 And finally he tells Viola, ‘Make no compare/Between that love a woman can bear me/And that I owe Olivia’ (lines 102–4). As in so many of Shakespeare’s comedies, the clown speaks truth; he affirms the duke’s changeableness: ‘Now the melancholy god protect thee, and the tailor make thy doublet of changeable taffeta, for thy mind is a very opal’ (II, iv, 73–5).10
Some critics observe only the absurdity of Orsino and Olivia, but Shakespeare endows them with poetry which makes them sympathetic rather than ridiculous. If we compare Silvius’ language in As You Like It with Orsino’s, we can see that both lovers are preoccupied with the postures of the romantic lover. Silvius, however, is ridiculous because of the mechanical, imitative quality of his verse and actions. In his confession of love to Corin in II, iv, 30–9, Shakespeare parodies the rhetoric both of the Petrarchan and the pastoral lover. Silvius’ mechanical series of ‘if thou’ clauses along with the monotonous repeated choral lines ‘Thou has not loved’ prevent our taking his feelings seriously. The same is true of his actions, for his abrupt departure crying Phoebe’s name, which he carefully explains is caused by his passion, makes him absurd. For Silvius, love motivates predictable actions – folly, rehearsals of ‘thy mistress’ praise’, and the lonely retreat from company. Orsino plays with the clichés and expected behavior of the lover in highly figurative verse, but he is not governed by them. For him, the postures of love provide tropes which he uses creatively, as in his imaginative reworking of the pun on hart in I, i, 19 ff. He plays selfconsciously with the conventions – with the relation between love and music, with the analogy between love and the hunt, with mythological allusions – measuring the distance between himself and ideal romantic behavior. Despite his affectation, the quality of his poetry proves him a worthy lover to Viola.
Olivia also suffers from an unlimited imagination, first in creating her fictive identity as ‘cloistress’ and then, like Orsino, showing her changeable nature and unreadiness for love by loving the epicene Cesario. The clown exposes her ‘disguise’ as mourner in I, v, 50 ff. when he ‘proves’ her a fool, but her relation to Cesario is more complex. Again like the duke she recognizes something in Cesario which attracts her, but her feelings also betray a fear of marriage and adult love. Orsino has already described the ambiguous nature of Cesario’s sexuality; Malvolio’s description, which precedes their first meeting, emphasizes the page’s effeminancy. Olivia’s soliloquy at the end of the scene effectively conveys a sense of her inner life by revealing the change wrought in her by love:
‘… I am a gentleman.’ I’ll be sworn thou art:
Thy tongue, thy face, thy limbs, actions, and spirit
Do give thee five-fold blazon. Not too fast: soft! soft!
Unless the master were the man. How now?
Even so quickly may one catch the plague?
Methinks I feel this youth’s perfections
With an invisible and subtle stealth
To creep in at mine eyes. Well, let it be.
(I, v, 295–302)
Shakespeare makes Olivia seem lifelike by casting her musings about Cesario’s enigmatic responses about his parentage in dialogue; she uses rhetorical questions, self-address in the admonition to herself ‘Not too fast: soft! soft!’ and the caesura to indicate shifts in thought. The traditional courtly conceit of love’s entering by the eyes, unlike Silvius’ description of the events of courtly love, is personal – ‘Methinks I feel’ she says, eschewing hyperbole. Her willingness to accept love’s transforming power (‘Well, let it be’) rather than lament it wins our sympathy and prepares us for her marriage to Sebastian. The final lines continue the courtly metaphor used to present Olivia’s divided mind: she fears her eye is opposed to her mind. In Measure for Measure, Shakespeare gives us no inkling of what is to come of Angelo’s discovery that he desires Isabella, but he is careful to establish and confirm our comic expectations for Olivia’s love. The lady resigns herself to fate rather than human agency, but she is willing enough to help fate along by sending Cesario her ring. More important is the immediately following scene in which we learn Sebastian is alive and well, knowledge which reassures us that the comic confusion of Olivia’s love for the disguised Viola will be resolved happily.
Disguise and wooing by proxy are nevertheless dangerous business. Viola’s beauty, sincerity, and particularly her description of how she would woo (I, v, 254 ff.), win Olivia’s love. In her soliloquy which follows Sebastian’s first scene we find many features of the rhetoric of consciousness we have noted in comedy:
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: if it be so, as ’tis,
Poor lady, she were better love a dream.
Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness,
Wherein the pregnant enemy does much.
How easy is it for the proper false
In women’s waxen hearts to set their forms!
Alas, our frailty is the cause, not we,
For such as we are made of, such we be.
How will this fadge? My master loves her dearly,
And I, poor monster, fond as much of him,
And she, mistaken, seems to dote on me:
What will become of this? As I am man,
My state is desperate for my master’s love:
As I am woman (now alas the day!)
What thriftless sighs shall poor Olivia breathe?
O time, thou must untangle this, not I,
It is too hard a knot for me t’untie.
(II, ii, 16–40)
Rhetorical questions establish the I/you opposition characteristic of inner debate, as do the semantic reversals of antithesis (‘As I am man … As I am woman’), and the inserted parenthetical elements which convey the confusion Viola feels. But because she understands full well how the mistakes have come about, Viola does not fear madness or believe she dreams. It is Sebastian, her other self, who is subjected to those aspects of mistaken identity, who believes he is mad or dreaming.
Shakespeare divides Viola’s speech into three distinct sections. The first ten lines comment upon the preceding interchange with Olivia. They include a mirror passage in which Viola describes and interprets Olivia’s gestures and behavior; their function is essentially reportorial.11 Viola’s apostrophe of ‘Disguise’ marks the second section. She shifts from the first person singular to the plural to extend her audience much as Angelo does in Measure for Measure. But whereas Angelo’s pronoun shift signals his recognition of a shared humanity, Viola’s transfers responsibility for her predicament from herself to her sex and its alleged susceptibility to Satan’s inventiveness. Though she personifies disguise, Viola attributes Olivia’s confusion and her predicament not finally to a supernatural power, but to human nature, or more precisely, women’s ‘frail’ natures. And because she captivated Olivia without guile, she does not believe herself responsible for the consequences of her disguise. In the soliloquy’s final section, Viola rehearses the complications of the intrigue. Shakespeare emphasizes Viola’s comic plight and her sexual ambiguity through the alternating pronouns, the ‘I’ versus ‘him’ (line 33) and ‘she’ versus ‘me’ (line 34), and through the succeeding lines which describe her situation as man and as woman. In a final rhyming couplet, Viola decides to let time untangle the knot her love has tied. Both Olivia’s and Viola’s willingness to give over control, to count on fate or time rather than themselves or magic, distinguish them from the powerful Rosalind.
Critics since Johnson have found Olivia’s marriage to Sebastian hard to accept. E. M. W. Tillyard, in discussing the bed trick in Measure for Measure, complains of Twelfth Night:
it may be useful to ask why popular opinion has objected to the bed trick and not objected to something equally disgusting in Twelfth Night, namely Olivia’s accepting Sebastian as a substitute lover for Cesario. The idea that Viola and Sebastian had interchangeable souls is a monstrous insult to human nature.12
What Tillyard and others forget is that Olivia does not fall in love with Cesario’s soul, by which I take him to mean personality or inner nature, but with his ‘perfections’ which crept in through her eyes. The quality of her love is not undermined by winning the appearance of the man she loves, for his identity all along is subsumed in what Viola/Cesario calls her ‘outside’ (II, ii, 17). Through that outside Olivia has ‘insight’ into Sebastian’s nature and identity. The epicene figure of Cesario can be compared to a trompe Voeil perspectivist painting. When Olivia sees him from her point of view, she ‘sees’ Sebastian; when Orsino looks at Cesario, he ‘sees’ Viola. The figure of Cesario illustrates the ambiguous Renaissance attitude toward the verbal-visual problem which fascinated poets and theorists alike.13 Cesario’s ‘outside’ is both an accurate and a mistaken reflection of reality; his sexual ambiguity embodies both twins and neither.
One of the recurring themes of the play is whether or not appearance reflects the true self. In her first scene Viola speculates on the captain’s inner nature:
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, ii, 48–51)
Later in III, iv, Antonio mistakes Cesario for Sebastian and is rebuffed. He laments that ‘to his image, which methought did promise/Most venerable worth … Thou hast, Sebastian, done good feature shame.’ Though ‘a beauteous wall/Doth oft close in pollution’, the action of the play argues that outward appearance finally reflects inward truth, even in the complex case of Cesario. To fault Shakespeare’s conception of identity in human relations by saying that they are reduced to physical appearance alone is to ignore the importance in the Renaissance of appearance as a speaking picture of the inner self. Such an attitude was no doubt influenced by widely diffused neo-Platonic doctrines which taught that visible beauty bespoke hidden reality. Throughout the sixteenth century and certainly in Shakespeare there is an uneasy trust in the relationship between the visual sign and its inner meanings, if one is initiated, like Viola, into the rites of ‘seeing’. Viola’s role is to lead both Olivia and Orsino to recognize in Cesario what they seek in love.
Sebastian’s response to Olivia, his faith and generosity, prove him a worthy partner in marriage. To Sebastian, the world of Illyria seems strange and fantastic. Like Antipholus of Syracuse, he thinks he is mad or dreaming, motifs associated with mistaken identity as we have seen throughout classical and Renaissance comedy. But unlike the mistakes of The Comedy of Errors, the error, the content of the ‘dream’, answers his true and natural desires. He recognizes that he is neither mad nor dreaming in the free act of giving himself to Olivia.14 Like other characters whose identities are mistaken – the Antipholi, Sosia – he asserts the reality of sense experience: ‘This is the air, that is the glorious sun,/This pearl she gave me, I do feel’t, and see’t’ (IV, iii, 1–2). Like so many of Shakespeare’s comic characters, he must lose himself to find his true identity as husband to Olivia. The wonder that Sebastian declares ‘enwraps me thus’ is quite different from the madness of Errors or the magic of As You Like It. It is not a controlling impresario of action who brings about Sebastian’s marriage to Olivia, but his willingness, so similar to that of Olivia and Viola earlier, to accept what comes.15
Many readers have seen in Malvolio a satirical portrait of the puritan or melancholic, or a foil whose delusions parody the delicate or rowdy aberrations of the court characters. But since Lamb’s essay ‘Oh Some of the Old Actors’, some critics have claimed Malvolio as a tragic figure who learns from his error.16 Certainly Shakespeare endows him with an inner life in his series of revealing monologues, but unlike the other characters for whom the rhetoric of inner debate suggests conflict, struggle and development, Malvolio’s soliloquies are diffused in various ways to emphasize Malvolio’s unselfconsciousness. He neither questions his own behavior nor is willing to abandon reason to rely on time or fortune to resolve his predicament.
Shakespeare creates for Malvolio an inner life that consists of little more than fantasies of wish-fulfillment in which he imagines himself lording it over Olivia, Sir Toby and his cohorts. In II, v, Malvolio enters in soliloquy:
’Tis but fortune, all is fortune. Maria once told me she did
affect me, and I have heard herself come thus near, that
should she fancy, it should be one of my complexion.
Besides, she uses me with a more exalted respect than any
one else that follows here. What should I think on’t?
(lines 23–8)
These lines come at a time in the play that allows us to judge whether or not Malvolio’s reflections correspond with his actions and character thus far presented. We have seen Olivia in I, v, chastise him for his ‘self-love’ and ‘distempered appetite’ and our memory of her words discredits his claim that she treats him with ‘a more exalted respect’. We are amused by his fantasy that Olivia’s wanting a lover of a melancholy temperament means she fancies him. The rhetorical question which ends the passage would seem to initiate an inner debate, establishing the I/you oppostion of dialogue we have elsewhere analyzed. But, in what follows, the role of interlocutor is taken over by the eavesdroppers, and Malvolio’s soliloquy, instead of inner debate, becomes stage dialogue. Malvolio, far from questioning himself, immediately takes off into his social and sexual fantasy of ‘Count Malvolio’. That fantasy is questioned of course, not by a created inner self, conscious of the discrepancy between an imagined reality and the lived world, which in his view (‘There is example for’t’) serves only to confirm his desires, but by the outraged comments of Sir Toby, Andrew, Fabian and Maria. The fantasy becomes a dialogue with Sir Toby, not with conscience or self. Like Berowne in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Malvolio’s interlocutor is not the self. But whereas for Berowne, an imaginative created persona and his own rhetorical inventiveness prevent self-analysis, for Malvolio it is prevented by the limits of his egotism and by the dramatic scene itself in which he gets his come-uppance from the eavesdroppers’ malicious commentary.
When Malvolio finds the forged letter, his responses parody the parallel speech of Olivia’s that we have already considered in which she discovers her love for Cesario. Instead of mental movement back and forth as she struggles with newly discovered feelings, the forged billet-doux simply confirms what Malvolio has just been fantasizing. His softly (line 122) and soft (line 142), parallel Olivia’s in I, v, 297, but far from holding him back or suggesting conflict and the need for caution, they are linked to moments of impetuosity. At line 122, softly leads to his discovery of the anacrostic on his name, and at line 142 soft leads on to the text of the letter itself about which he exclaims after having read it, ‘Daylight and champaign discovers not more! This is open.’ To Malvolio, everything, every action, every silence, every gesture, is self-evident, generates no debate, and can only serve to confirm his already firm good estimate of himself. Far from suggesting development or change, Malvolio’s monologue here simply emphasizes what we already know of him; he is full of self-love. So also in his next soliloquy at III, iv, 64 ff. in which the dialogue is not with the self, but with the letter. In a moment of unwitting self-revelation he gloats ‘nothing that can be can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes’. Certainly not good sense, self-doubt, a sense of decorum or of social place.
Malvolio’s seriousness and the recognition of his exclusion from the harmonious finale of Twelfth Night are intimations of a tragic possibility which Shakespeare develops more insistently in Much Ado and the so-called problem comedies. Malvolio has affinities with Bertram in All’s Well. Both are male lover-protagonists, though Malvolio merely parodies that character function. Bertram is reclaimed by the requirements of the comic love plot, but as generations of audiences have admitted, we feel dissatisfied because of his refusal to learn from his experiences, by Shakespeare’s stubborn insistence that he fails to change. Both Bertram and Malvolio infuse the final acts of their respective plays with bile – whether in Malvolio’s threats to be revenged, or in Bertram’s shrewd boggling (V, iii, 232). Both refuse to be reformed by the comic action, and both have been given enough character, enough of that residue or excess we have identified with Shakespearean characterization, to leave us uncomfortable. Already in Malvolio’s portrayal in Twelfth Night, though subdued and unemphasized by his subsidiary role, refuses us the simple pleasure we might take in a comic butt or stereotype. In Twelfth Night we have already a hint of the discomfort audiences have so often complained of in the portrayal of Claudio in Much Ado, and of Angelo in Measure for Measure.