3

Remembering Old Boys in Twelfth Night

At the end of 2 Henry IV, Shakespeare makes a promise he does not keep—“to continue the story, with Sir John in it, and make you merry with fair Katherine of France” (epilogue, 28–29). The absence of reference to Henry V hints at an alternate version of history, a comic fairy tale in which Falstaff, and not the king, makes us merry by ending up with the princess of France. In actuality Shakespeare dispatches Hal’s favorite much less glamorously, with what amounts to an accidental hand job from a “quean” (2 Henry IV, 2.1.47). Mistress Quickly reports that she felt the ailing Falstaff’s feet, and then his knees, and then “up’ard and up’ard” but could not raise him, for “all was as cold as any stone” (Henry V, 2.3.23–26). Evidently, she lacks the powers of Lyly’s Cynthia to rejuvenate her favorite. The ending that Shakespeare devises for his lecherous old knight revises the ending of Endymion (1591) to conform to the most satiric strain of anticourt polemics. The status of Falstaff’s death as reported news, the quips about his lubricity, the jokes about his failing phallus, the debate about whether he is “in heaven or in hell” (2.3.8): all rehearse familiar material. Most damningly perhaps, like the “report” on the dead Earl of Leicester proffered by News from Heaven and Hell, Mistress Quickly’s description of Falstaff’s death reduces an old man fond of “handl[ing] women” to an inanimate object handled by women (2.3.36). George Bernard Shaw approved heartily, since in his view such is the fate of all old “soldiers broken down by debauchery.”1

If Shakespeare was hoping thereby to contain his uncontainable creation, to “move on” as we say nowadays, the hope in which he dressed himself was drunk. No sooner does Mistress Quickly conclude but a spirited discussion breaks out among the characters concerning Falstaff’s habits and vices. Their need to “remember” Falstaff (2.3.40) is taken up by the play itself, which seems loath to give up altogether on his “jests, and gipes, and knaveries, and mocks.” Fluellen may have forgotten the name of the “fat knight” but Gower recalls it: “Sir John Falstaff” (4.7.48–51). While the memory of a great man may not outlive him by half a year, the memory of a funny one fares better in Shakespeare’s plays (even Hamlet has more to say about Yorick than about his father). The flurry of remembrances that attends Falstaff’s demise heralds his achievement of a peculiar immortality, of which Shakespeare must already have been aware.2

In the wake of the Falstaff plays, other playwrights capitalized on Shakespeare’s success, creating derivative characters like the elderly braggart-soldier-turned-whoremonger Captain Shift, also known as “Master Apple-John,” in Ben Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour (1599).3 The original ending of that controversial play, likely censored by court authorities, mocks a scenario familiar from Endymion, The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597), and The Henriad (1596–99). Macilente encounters “a player impersonating Queen Elizabeth” and falls down onstage, “dumb and astonished.” The “lean Macilente” then imagines himself basking in the audience’s approval, becoming “as fat as Sir John Falstaff” (Every Man Out, SD 5.6, 5.6.134.)4 Every Man Out was performed at the Globe by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, on the same stage and by the same actors as the Falstaff plays. According to Marvin Carlson, dramatists draw on audience’s memories of previous performances in this manner “to measure themselves against work of the past or to establish their position within a tradition.”5 Macilente’s “ghosting” of Falstaff is consistent with Jonson’s other attempts at antiquating his older rival, like his turn to Aristophanic “Vetus Comoedia” (Every Man Out, induction, 226). In what sounds like an outright challenge to Shakespeare, Jonson rejects old-style new comedies whose “argument . . . . might have been of some other nature, as of a Duke to be in love with a Countess, and that Countess to be in love with the Duke’s son” in favor of new-style old comedy “near and familiarly allied to the time” (Every Man Out, 3.1.406–11).6 Only “autumn-judgments” (3.1.411), Jonson contends, would prefer the former to the latter. Jonson’s generational jockeying for position was successful, in that critics still praise the innovativeness of his comical satires and minimize the continuities between these and Shakespeare’s plays.7 Far from being “completely new,” however, Jonson’s timely satires develop strains of comedy pioneered by Lyly and perfected by Shakespeare.8

Not to be outdone, and certainly not by Jonson, Shakespeare reincarnates his old knight, in a retrospective comic fairy tale about a competition among several men for the “favor” of a “fair princess” (Twelfth Night, 2.3.122, 3.1.97). Phebe Jensen argues that “Falstaff haunts Twelfth Night,” finding in the “play’s consideration of Puritan satire, Catholic satire, the history of festivity and revelry . . . a return to the not-quite-dead Oldcastle controversy.”9 Shakespeare does indeed remember Falstaff by dismembering him, scattering fragments of the fat knight throughout his courtly comedy. The “not-quite-dead” controversy to which Twelfth Night returns, however, is the one first staged by Lyly’s play about love among old men. As allusions to Endymion, to his own Falstaff plays, to Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour and Cynthia’s Revels (1600), and to Sir John Harington’s A New Discourse on a Stale Subject, or the Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596) show, in Twelfth Night Shakespeare considers once again the fact that “what great ones do the less will prattle of” (1.2.33).10 Notably, the baiting metaphors that structure this witty comedy about the dogging of a matrimonially-minded upstart also shaped the “snarling” contests of wit that characterized turn-of-the-century theatrical culture.11 While recent critics have viewed Twelfth Night’s allusions to bearbaiting from the perspective afforded by the “nearly identical cultural situations” of the theatre and the blood sport, I argue that these reflect a concern with the effect that the ad hominem attacks of satiric “substractors” (1.3.34–35) have on public life and collective memory.12

Bearbaitings continued to be tied to Leicester well into the 1590s, as Harington’s Ajax demonstrates. This controversial pamphlet, which retails court gossip while detailing methods for the disposal of human waste, went through four editions, spawning numerous sequels and responses (thirteen imprints altogether) in the year it appeared.13 If the reading public enjoyed learning about the court’s privy doings, court figures were less enthusiastic about the chatter that Ajax provoked. Elizabeth I was especially enraged that the author “had aimed a shafte at Leicester”; after observing her reaction, Robert Markham found he “would not be in [the author’s] beste jerkin for a thousand markes.”14 In the offending passage, the narrator touts his invention of the flush toilet, opining that he “may one day be put into the Chronicles, as good members of our countrey, more worthily then the great Beare that carried eight dogges on him when Monsieur was here.”15 Leicester’s opposition to the French match, which D. C. Peck describes as “the central political event behind Leicester’s Commonwealth,” had first caused the dogs to “bark at the Bear that is so well britched” well over a decade before Ajax was published.16 Yet Harington assumes his readers will still laugh at the allusion. Given that Harington elsewhere advocates using Holinshed’s Chronicles as toilet paper, there can be little doubt regarding what he made of the “great Beare’s” innovative attempts to go down in history as a “good member” of his country.17 No wonder Elizabeth took offense and Shakespeare took note.

Leaving the Chronicles behind, Shakespeare began to experiment in different generic registers with the perdurable materials out of which he had fashioned his own “lugg’d bear” (1 Henry IV, 1.2.74). Leslie Fiedler notes that low comedy or satire is “the proper mode for rendering the foredoomed defeat of Old Age in love.”18 Lyly had pushed against these expectations by celebrating Endymion’s “foredoomed defeat” as a Neoplatonic success, while his portrayals of Sir Tophas and Corsites struck the more conventional satiric note. As we saw in previous chapters, Shakespeare’s initial approach to these materials was synthetic. Royal favorites who dream of becoming made men but who turn into asses instead, Bottom and Falstaff recall all three of Lyly’s aging lovers. While Shakespeare invests them with the aspiring thoughts of an Endymion, “stitched to the stars . . . much higher . . . than [they] can reach,” Bottom’s “rare vision” of the Fairy Queen (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 4.1.205) exceeds his ability to describe or inhabit it, and Falstaff remains weighed down by the mercenary nature of his ambitions.19 Uniquely memorable, both characters are also figures of ridicule.

Twelfth Night follows its predecessors in situating the unsettling convergence of erotic desire and social ambition in aging males, and in provoking derisive laughter at their “certain deformity,” a word identified throughout the early modern period with the targets of social ridicule.20 The treatment reserved for the amorous Malvolio reproduces key aspects of that inflicted on the lecherous Falstaff (or the Falstaffian Leicester, for that matter).21 But Twelfth Night also deploys the bearbaiting trope to new effect, privileging its empathetic potential over its evaluative one, and ultimately insisting that “none can be call’d deform’d but the unkind” (3.4.368). Like the twins, whom C. L. Barber describes as forming a “composite,” the play’s two bears function as two halves of a whole, with Orsino assuming the positive and Malvolio absorbing the negative aspects of the age-in-love figure.22 The “main difference” between these characters is thus not “one of class,” or not of class only, but of generic emphasis and orientation.23 It is as if Shakespeare decided to offer rival portraits of the great favorites: one reflecting the perceptions of others, and drawing on the materials of anticourt writers like Allen and satirists like Jonson; the other reflecting the way they might have seen themselves, and drawing on the materials of court writers like Lyly or Sir Walter Ralegh. The “lunatic” Malvolio (4.2.22) recalls the conventional butts of Elizabethan satire, channeling the anger that a false etymology associated with the genre, and triggering derisive laughter on- and offstage.24 In contrast, the elegant Orsino hearkens back to Lyly’s moon-lover, triggering responses of a different sort.

Until Sebastian and Viola arrive, all Illyrians suffer to some extent from Endymion’s condition of having “waxed old” without “knowing it” (Endymion, 5.1.76). Orsino and Malvolio come to embody a more general condition in this play, endemic in late Elizabethan culture, of waking up from “such a dream that when the image of it leaves” all must “run mad” (2.5.193–94). This disenchantment, far from purging the “dream” in the manner of Jonsonian satires, testifies to its enduring allure by resituating it as an object of reflective nostalgia—a fantasy not about the future but about a rapidly receding past, when such dreams had more purchase on reality.25 According to Svetlana Boym, this form of nostalgia has utopian dimensions, and privileges “longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance,” lingering on “the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time.” When Boym defines the object of reflective nostalgia as located “somewhere in the twilight of the past or on the island of utopia where time has happily stopped, as on an antique clock,” she might as well be writing about Illyria, before the antique clock strikes in the third act.26 Shakespeare’s generic experimentation accounts for the “elegiac,” “melancholy,” or “autumnal” tone of Twelfth Night, which it shares with the sonnets.27 At the turn of the seventeenth century, just a few years before Elizabeth’s death, the playwright turned to a form of longing that mediates between individual and collective memory to counter the reductive fictions about the Elizabethan regime that he had helped disseminate in earlier plays.28

Although no single male character carries the full burden of his legacy, Falstaff haunts Twelfth Night in a variety of shapes. Various critics note that Shakespeare pursues a strategy of twinning in this play, epitomized by the young shipwrecks who share “One face, one voice, one habit,” yet are “two persons” (5.1.216). So Cristina Malcolmson argues that “Viola and Maria are twinned” usurpers of privileged status: one performs the part of the man, the other of her mistress. Viola and Malvolio are “twinned” servants intent on marrying their superiors. And Malvolio and Orsino are “twinned” in their failure to secure Olivia’s hand in marriage.29 These shared qualities establish the inhabitants of Illyria as analogues of one another, in ways that raise concerns familiar to readers of this book. Characters are grouped together in structures of favoritism (Viola, Malvolio), in practices of theatrical usurpation (Viola, Maria), in eroticized forms of social mobility (Viola, Sebastian, Malvolio), and in bearbaiting plots (Malvolio, Orsino).30 The upstart twins who function as catalysts for the plot are meritorious candidates for election by an imperious lady. And the older male characters who surround these twins, and whose unruly energies the twins absorb and redirect, share a common ancestry in the materials that Shakespeare drew on to fashion his “whoreson round man” (1 Henry IV, 2.4.140).

This comparative arrangement of characters is advertised through the play’s multiple signifying names, which invite audiences to collaborate in the construal of meaning. The forged document that incites Malvolio to act on his sociosexual fantasies contains a notorious “fustian riddle” involving the initials “M. O. A. I.” (2.5.107–8). The steward interprets these as a reference to himself, since “every one of these letters are in [his] name” (2.5.141). As a number of readers have noticed, most of those letters are also in Viola’s and Olivia’s names. The three names are near-anagrams, implying an unequal division of material held in common.31 Given that the same “characters crush[ed] . . . a little” (2.5.140) produce different names, the most basic units of dramatic personhood, we are invited to “work . . . out” what else these scrambled “alphabetical position[s]” might “portend” (2.5.127, 119). Malcolmson finds that the missing letters in “Viola” stand for the distinctive trait that she lacks of Malvolio, the “ill will” spelled out in the steward’s name. Orsino’s servant, of gentle status like Olivia’s servant, has the ambition to make an upwardly mobile marriage but not the self-interest that satirists assumed accompanied such ambition.32 In other words, Cesario is a “servingman” worthy of Olivia’s “favors” (3.2.6), one who lacks the traits—including advancing age—that in Malvolio invite ridicule.

As this example suggests, the characters in Twelfth Night emerge from processes of division and subtraction. “How have you made division of yourself?” a stunned Antonio asks Sebastian and Viola/Cesario; “An apple, cleft in two, is not more twin / Than these two creatures” (5.1.222–24). This metaphor borrows from a famous passage in Plato’s Symposium, in which the Greek gods, having made “primeval man . . . round, his back and sides forming a circle,” with “four hands and four feet” and “two privy members,” grow fearful of their own creatures:

Terrible was their might and strength, and the thoughts of their hearts were great, and they made an attack upon the gods. . . . Doubt reigned in the celestial councils. Should they kill them and annihilate the race with thunderbolts . . . then there would be an end of the sacrifices and worship which men offered to them. . . . At last, after a good deal of reflection, Zeus discovered a way. He said: “Methinks I have a plan which will humble their pride and improve their manners. . . . I will cut them in two and then they will be diminished in strength and increased in numbers . . . and if they continue to be insolent and will not be quiet, I will split them again.” . . . He spoke and cut men in two, like a sorb apple which is halved for pickling, or as you might divide an egg with a hair. . . . Apollo was bidden to heal their wounds and compose their forms.33

The image of Viola and Sebastian as a cleft apple recalls the moment Zeus splits his “round” creatures like a “sorb apple” or an “egg.” New creatures forged out of an original “man-woman,” the twins are distinguishable by the “little thing” that Viola lacks “of a man” (3.4.303), an anatomical area to which Twelfth Night; or What You Will returns obsessively.

That Twelfth Night’s “master’s mistress” (5.1.326) is half of a formerly round whole makes her creator an analogue of Plato’s Zeus, whose strained relationship to his creations becomes an allegory of authorial regret. Zeus charges Apollo—the god Shakespeare elsewhere associates with keeping his own poetic “invention” from becoming “deformed”—with refashioning his original work.34 After the originary moment, in other words, creation becomes a form of re-creation or revision. As if to emphasize such aesthetic applications, Plato assigns his myth to Aristophanes, the playwright renowned for cutting personal satire and revered by Jonson for the “dignity of his spirit and judgement” (Every Man Out, induction, 245). Shakespeare often likens his artistry to the forces that produce life; in Sonnet 20, which relies on the same creation myth, the poet and Nature parallel one another in the creation of a “master mistress” (1–2). Where Nature produces the original by adding (“one thing to my purpose nothing,” 20.12), the poet produces his version by subtracting (“a woman’s face, but not acquainted,” 20.3). The same judicious redaction shapes Twelfth Night’s characters, defined more by what they lack than what they have. Contra Jonson, Shakespeare insists that his “creatures,” apparent borrowings from Plautus’s Menaechme, result from artistic processes described by Aristophanes.

Insofar as these processes include the cutting and remastering of the Falstaff materials, Shakespeare also, and perhaps ironically, expresses discomfort with the strain of dramaturgy that produced his “whoreson round man” and inspired Jonson’s comical satires. Twelfth Night pushes against the conventions of satire, which depends on stable demarcations, by giving us a surfeit or excess of these licentious old men. “Increased in number,” the characters deriving from Falstaff are also “diminished in strength,” like Apollo’s redacted creatures. While several critics identify Sir Toby Belch as a version of Falstaff, for example, they “all agree” that “Sir Toby lacks Falstaff’s imaginative brilliance.”35 An old knight much given to “quaffing and drinking,” who cannot “confine” himself to “the modest limits of order” (1.3.9–14), Toby inherits Falstaff’s carnivalesque elements. Jensen suggests that Shakespeare may have derived the idea of splitting Falstaff from The First Part of Sir John Oldcastle (1600), which features “two new Sir Johns with very different devotional identifications.” Interested in confessional conflicts over festivity, she takes Sir Toby, Malvolio, and Feste to be the relevant fragments.36 But other characters, including Malvolio and Orsino, qualify as well. Introducing a signature note of escalation, Shakespeare offers us five or six versions of his old knight, with the meager miles gloriosus Sir Andrew Aguecheek serving as a surplus shard. That cowardly “carpet” knight (3.4.236) receives the unkindest cut of all—the anti-Leicestrian material on erectile dysfunction. An ambulatory castration joke, Sir Andrew has hair that “hangs like flax on a distaff” so that “a huswife” could take him “between her legs and spin it off” (1.3.102–4). Yet another old man reduced to a “feminine suppository,” he illustrates Shakespeare’s strategy of “spending again what is already spent” (Sonnets, 76.13) in Twelfth Night.37

Following theatrical precedent, Shakespeare places a “fair princess” at the center of an erotic meritocracy.38 Olivia is the stationary planet around which the cleft characters orbit, the round “O” or “nought” (1.1.11) targeted by their various wills. Cesario, Sebastian, Orsino, Malvolio, and Sir Andrew all pursue this “cruell’st she alive,” who seems determined to lead her “graces to the grave, / And leave the world no copy” (1.5.241–43). Their language about their “marble-breasted tyrant” (5.1.124) hearkens back to an earlier era, when the queen’s marriage was the most pressing issue confronting the English political nation. Orsino imagines that Olivia’s “sweet perfections” can only be fitted “with one self king” (1.1.38), for example, and Cesario thinks that Olivia’s refusal to give herself in marriage means that she does “usurp” herself, for “what is [hers] to bestow is not [hers] to reserve” (1.5.188–89). Stephen Greenblatt remarks that only Elizabeth I “provided a model” for a “career” like Olivia’s. Shakespeare fosters the parallel at every turn, making Orsino address Olivia in the court’s Petrarchan discourses, figuring Viola/Cesario as “a rare courtier” (3.1.86) and as “Orsino’s embassy” (1.5.166), and having Olivia distribute rings and miniatures, “favors” commonly awarded by Elizabeth I.39 Provided with an “allow’d fool” (1.5.94) who recalls Richard Tarleton, Olivia takes fierce exception to the mistreatment of her favorites, as Elizabeth did (echoeing Markham, Feste warns Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, and Fabian that he “would not be in some of your coats for twopence” [4.1.30–31]). Olivia conducts herself as a queen might, moreover, advertising her powers of life and death over her household and relying on the royal “we” when negotiating with other characters.40 These reimagine Olivia, the “daughter of a count” (1.2.36), as a regal figure, whose tyrannical decision to abjure “the company / and sight of men” (1.2.40–41) has plunged Illyria into a paralytic state of deferred desire.41 Viola’s surmise that Sebastian must be in “Elizium” (as the 1623 Folio spells it, 1.2.4) confounds Illyria not just with the happy fields of Greek mythological lore but also with England, the land of Eliza. Like many things in this retrospective play, the pun is an old one, dating to George Peele’s Arraygnment of Paris (1584), and refurbished by Jonson in Every Man Out of His Humour (2.1.22).42

The parallel between Olivia and Elizabeth may not be an “exact one,” as Carole Levin observes, but it is an evocative one, which sets the tone for the play as a whole and shades all relations within it.43 Orsino announces his intention to emulate Endymion by reclining on “sweet beds of flow’rs” (1.1.39) in the play’s first scene. When he compares his love to the sea, he channels Ralegh’s Ocean, in helpless thrall to a chaste moon. Orsino’s “high fantastical” constructions introduce Olivia as a type of Cynthia or Diana, with some notable consequences for himself:

O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first,

Methought she purg’d the air of pestilence!

That instant was I turn’d into a hart,

And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds,

E’er since pursue me. (1.1.15, 18–22)

In a few brief lines Orsino assigns himself the roles of Actaeon and of Endymion, the classical figures closely identified in the period with the perils and pleasures of royal favoritism.44 To cite the most pertinent example, Jonson had combined these myths to target courtiers seeking to become “eternally engallanted” in The Fountaine of Selfe-Love or Cynthia’s Revels (4.3.3). A parody of Endymion, this play satirizes a whole host of behaviors associated with court favoritism, including the “painting, slicking, glazing, and renewing old rivelled faces” (Palinodia 21), and the staging of “scene[s] of courtship” with recycled “play-particles” (3.4.40, 3.5.96). Jonson illustrates the reciprocal relationship between court and theater when he borrows the “play-particle” Philautia or Self-Love from a disastrous 1595 Accession Day entertainment that Francis Bacon wrote at the Earl of Essex’s behest. According to the political wisdom of the time, “self love” was a “false believe” avoided by good “Counslers.”45 Although the earl had meant to persuade Elizabeth I that he loved her more than himself in the Accession Day entertainment, she came away unconvinced.46 Like Essex or Leicester, also allegedly given over to “selfe love of him selfe,” Jonson’s courtiers drink from the Fountain of Self-Love, where “young Actaeon fell, pursued and torn / By Cynthia’s wrath, more eager than his hounds” (1.2.82–83).47 When Shakespeare recycles Jonson’s lines at the beginning of Twelfth Night, he avails himself of the same technique to place Orsino’s courtship of Olivia in comparative relation to “scene[s] of courtship” from the past. These include his own, since Merry Wives had also fused the Actaeon and Endymion myths to show the horned Falstaff, whose lusty “flames aspire” too high, “wink[ing]” and “couch[ing]” on stage before his Fairy Queen (5.5.97–98, 48), in imitation of the moon’s lovers. Orsino’s opening performance comprises the same elements as Falstaff’s concluding turn, even if this noble “hart” appears far more decorous than that “brib’d buck” (Merry Wives, 5.5.24).

Olivia casts such a powerful spell that all her suitors conjure past performances in this manner. The enthralled Sebastian agrees to be ruled moments after they meet; he too hopes to perform an elegant version of the lapse into bestiality by letting “fancy still [his] sense in Lethe steep / If it be thus to dream, still let me sleep!” (4.1.60–63). Like Circe’s island, which according to Boym signifies the paradoxical pleasures of nostalgic longing, “the seduction of non-return home,” Illyria is “an ultimate utopia of regressive pleasure and divine bestiality,” an “Elyzium” constituted of the “reliques” and “memorials” (3.3.18–23) of an earlier time.48 When the captain claims that Sebastian stood “like Arion on the dolphin’s back” (1.2.15) in emulation of the “Arion . . . ryding aloft upon his old friend the Dolphin” at Kenilworth, he identifies Illyria more with the rarefied world of the old Elizabethan court entertainments.49 In this fantastical world—the world of Leicester’s Kenilworth, of Peele’s Arraygment, of Lyly’s Endymion, of Ralegh’s poetry—time is held in suspense, while mature men abandon themselves to the adoration of a queen whose “summer ever lastethe.”50 Like the courtiers described by Cardinal Allen, who committed to the “single lyfe to the danger of their soules, and decay of their families, to attend [Elizabeth I’s] pleasure,” Olivia’s suitors appear destined to forgo marriage and the begetting of lawful children.51 Into this somnolent state of affairs, the young twins arrive like time-keepers, ominous reminders that the older characters are wasting “the treasure of [their] time” (2.5.77).

By drawing on the competing languages of nostalgia and satire, Twelfth Night stages rival evaluations of its central characters, putting into conflict the discourses of praise and blame that shaped Elizabethan conversations about “what great ones do.” Elizabeth’s admirers lauded her management of “houshold affaires,” for example, noting she “kept the like equall hands balancing the sloth or sumptuousnesse of her great Stewards, and white staves, with the providence, and reservednesse of a Lord Treasurer.”52 In much the same way, Shakespeare invites us to admire Olivia’s ability to “sway her house, command her followers, / Take and give back affairs, and their dispatch, / With such a smooth, discreet, and stable bearing” (4.3.16–20). But he also puts this regal woman in humiliatingly compromising positions. The business with Malvolio enacts a grotesque parody of the Actaeon myth.53 Claiming unauthorized knowledge of Olivia’s “c’s, her u’s, and her t’s” (2.5.88), Malvolio wants to trade “services” with his mistress, hoping thereby to become “Count Malvolio” (2.5.158, 35). As Dympna Callaghan points out, the numerous puns on “Count” and “cunt” and “cut” help put Olivia’s “private parts . . . on display for everyone’s amusement.”54 Orsino (an actual count) and Sebastian (a future count, since the play endows Olivia with the power to encount her husband) participate in this public exposure, even if they claim no special knowledge of Olivia’s “great Ps” (2.5.87). For all her “smooth, discreet, and stable bearing” poor Olivia fares at times little better than Sir Andrew’s huswife, Falstaff’s Mistress Quickly, or the “naked feind in the forme of a lady” who exposes “her bettelbroude urchin” to Leicester’s “gase of . . . retoricke speculation” in News.55

Indeed, the “sport royal” (2.3.173) of Twelfth Night borrows broadly from satiric representations of “Cynthia’s sports” (Cynthia’s Revels, 4.6.37). “Swagger[ing] it in black and yellow” and kissing “away [his] hand in kindness” (Cynthia’s Revels, 3.5.99, 3.4.41), Malvolio epitomizes the Jonsonian courtier “sick of self-love” who tastes “with a distemp’red appetite” (Twelfth Night, 1.5.90–91).56 When one of Jonson’s courtiers seeks preferment with the ladies by “dancing” (Cynthia’s Revels, 4.5.48), he chooses men like Ralegh or Christopher Hatton as aspirational models, taking the malicious gossip about their theatricality seriously.57 Likewise, Malvolio feels that he need only deliver the right performance, aimed at satisfying his lady’s eccentric erotic tastes, to become a “made” man (2.5.155). Numerous in-jokes confirm Malvolio’s status as a vehicle for such “pastime” (3.4.138) by encouraging audiences to remember past times. Disguised as the provocatively named Sir Topas, Feste serenades Malvolio with “Hey, Robin, jolly Robin, / Tell me how thy lady does” (4.2.72–73), an old song about a provocatively named courtier’s currying favor with a lady.58 Topas’s questions about “th’opinion of Pythagoras” (4.2.57) point back, meanwhile, through Cynthia’s Revels (4.3.110–18) to Endymion, where Cynthia mocks “the ridiculous opinions” that Pythagoras holds (4.3.46–47). Of course, the idea that a man’s soul might inhabit an animal’s body is relevant to those undergoing “suche a metamorphosis” at a lady’s hand “as poetes do seyn was made of the companyons of Ulisses.”59 Predictably enough, Malvolio follows Sir Tophas, Bottom, and Falstaff in being made an “ass” (2.3.168).60

Designed to provoke the “scornful” laughter that Sir Philip Sidney says we reserve for “deformed creatures,” Malvolio is “ridiculous” (3.4.38) in part because he deviates from age-related ideals of comportment.61 Sir Toby first directs our attention to Malvolio’s age when he sings “There dwelt a man in Babylon” (2.3.78–79), an old ballad about the “filthy lust” of the town “Elders” for the chaste Susanna.62 Shakespeare resorts to the disciplinary discourses that policed male sexuality to shape audience reactions to Malvolio throughout the play. Where Sebastian is in the bloom of what Cicero calls “unadvised adolescencye,” when men are subject to “the fervent heate” of sexual passion, Malvolio occupies the position of an advisor who has “lead his prince to virtue by his worth and authority,” a role that requires being “old (because knowledge rarely comes before a certain age).”63 Olivia relies on her steward’s counsel, valuing him for his age-appropriate “sad and civil” (3.4.5) affect. Unfortunately, Malvolio himself fails to appreciate that “love is not a good thing in old men, and those things which in young men are the delights, courtesies, and elegances so pleasing to women, in old men amount to madness and ridiculous ineptitude, and whoever indulges in them will cause some women to despise him and others to deride him.”64 Behind on his reading of “politic authors” (2.5.161), Olivia’s steward ignores learned advice on aging, lapses into “midsummer madness” (3.4.56), and becomes “a common recreation” (2.3.135) to all.

Like the costume change that marks Bottom’s translation, Malvolio’s cross-gartered stockings signal his conclusive transformation into an ass. That the steward finds his new outfit challenging to wear—“this does make some obstruction in the blood, this cross-gartering” (3.4.20–21), he fusses—indicates a bad fit not between costume and class, as is often thought, but between costume and bodily composition.65 Doctors, who believed that “obstruction” resulted from the cooling effects of aging, advised “olde men” to “beware” of making “obstructions,” which “with clammy matter stoppe the places where the natural humours are wrought and digested.”66 While a youth like Sebastian might wear tight garments without injury to his health, this was not the case for older men. Judging by Sir Toby’s reference to “Peg a Ramsey,” another old ballad, about a married man who yearns for the yellow stockings he wore in his bachelorhood, Malvolio compounds the problem by wearing clothes that had been fashionable in his youth. Not only is he too old for his clothes, but these are also old-fashioned.67

The ladies’ horrified reaction to Malvolio’s turn as a youthful gallant confirms that the “delights” which are “pleasing to women” in “young men” appear as “madness” in older ones. Maria, “a beagle, true bred” (2.3.179) complains that the steward “does smile his face into more lines than is in the new map, with the augmentation of the Indies; you have not seen such a thing as ‘tis.” She can “hardly forbear hurling things” at Malvolio, and she feels confident that Olivia “will strike him” (3.2.75–82), as indeed Olivia does in some productions. Taking their cue from the fairies in Endymion and Merry Wives, Maria and her accomplices bind Malvolio up—possibly to a stake or pillar—so as to “fool him black and blue” (2.5.10).68 Malvolio thus endures what amounts to a “bear-baiting” (2.5.8) for his violations of generational decorum. Fabian claims that if the gulling of Malvolio “were play’d upon a stage now, I would condemn it as an improbable fiction” (3.4.127–28). The metatheatrical joke is all the more delicious for the fact that these “play-particles” had been played on all manner of public stages before. Shakespeare insists on the familiarity of this satiric pattern, reproduced here for “our pleasure and [Malvolio’s] penance” (3.4.137–38).

As an aging steward pursued by dogs for violating his “due tyme and season,” Malvolio would have raised familiar historical ghosts as well as theatrical ones.69 The staff of office that he brandishes (5.1.284), like the steward’s chain that he fingers, evoke not just actual bears, but also Elizabeth’s former Lord Steward, the Earl of Leicester, whose staff had become a lightning rod for age-related ridicule.70 Like that allegedly hypocritical nobleman, Shakespeare’s “kind of Puritan” (2.3.140) dreams about marrying his noble mistress, wishing to cast “nets and chains and invisible bands about that person whom most of all he pretendeth to serve.”71 Olivia’s steward looks to “the Lady of the Strachy” who married “the yeoman of the wardrobe” (2.5.39–40) for a historical precedent. Although they do not always know what to make of this glancing allusion, or numerous others like it, even modern critics feel prompted by it to consider real life models for Malvolio.72 Original audiences might have recalled another “example” of a “time-pleaser” or “affection’d ass, that cons state without book . . . the best persuaded of himself, so cramm’d (as he thinks) with excellencies, that it is his grounds of faith that all look on him love him” (2.3.147–52). Like the “great Beare” who schemed to obtain a crown he could not claim by “right, title” or “descent of blood,” Malvolio imagines himself a prince. He fantasizes about “sitting in his state” and, Leslie Hotson points out, “a state is no count’s chair, but a canopied royal throne.”73 Here, then, is Shakespeare’s most explicit rendering of the familiar scenario by which an aging favorite who is not born great attempts an erotically appealing performance to “achieve greatness” or “have greatness thrust upon ’em” (2.5.145–46).

By giving this undignified scenario a scatological bent, Twelfth Night enhances the leveling effect of its satire. Peter Smith argues that the riddling “M.O.A.I.” in Maria’s letter form “a deliberate echo of the title of The Metamorphosis of A Iax.” And indeed, there is a logic to having Malvolio spell out “the abbreviated title” of this obscene work, since it intimates that Elizabeth’s steward was as well-informed about his lady’s “great Ps” as Olivia’s steward claims to be.74 In discussing “close vault” privies in Ajax, “my Lord of Leicester” objects to the contraption on the grounds that in “a Princes house where so many mouthes be fed, a close vault wil fil quickly.”75 The earl’s concern about the vast quantity of waste produced at court spoofs the “exquisite combination of intimacy, degradation, and privilege” Gail Kern Paster identifies in her discussion of Malvolio as “belonging to the body servants of the great.”76 Improving on an old pun, Ajax collapses serving Elizabeth with servicing her privies. The narrator is “so wholly addicted to her highnesse service” that he “would be glad, yea even proud, if the highest straine of my witte, could but reach, to any note of true harmony in the full consort of her Majesties service, though it were the basest key that it could be tuned to. . . . If men of judgement thinke it may breed a publike benefite, the conceit thereof shall expell all private bashfulnesse.”77 His tongue-in-cheek “publike” discussion of the queen’s great P’s, meant specifically to appeal to “men of judgement,” is among the numerous precedents for the Malvolio plot in Twelfth Night.

Twelfth Night was probably written or rewritten with an eye to pleasing these same “men of judgement,” since it was performed at the Middle Temple on February 2, 1602.78 Its more salacious moments recall the verse satires popular at the Inns of Court, like Thomas Nashe’s The Choice of Valentines; or Nashe, his Dildo (1592–93?) or John Marston’s The Metamorphosis of Pygmalions Image (1598), both of which elaborated with pornographic panache on the contradictions inherent in a cult of virginity that employed tropes of sexual service. Like Jonson’s comical satires, or Harington’s Ajax, these verse satires catered to and cultivated a “simultaneous enthrallment with and distaste of court culture.”79 Government authorities evidently regarded this development as a threat, since they censored key works by Marston, Middleton, Nashe, and others through the Bishop’s Ban of 1599.80 Significantly for my purposes, the average age of those banned was thirty and the average age of those doing the banning was sixty-three.81 The period’s pornographic satire was especially appealing to younger Elizabethan men-about-town, in other words, who used it to indulge their negative perceptions of the aging court.

Twelfth Night’s outré material, its legal terminology, its shafts aimed at Jonson, and its reference to the “bay windows transparent as barricadoes” of the Middle Temple Hall (4.2.36–37)—all appear designed with these disgruntled young men in mind.82 Anthony Arlidge proposes that in “laughing at Malvolio’s social pretensions,” the Middle Templars “would also have been laughing at themselves, for there were few better places than the Inns of Court to climb the greasy pole of social advancement.”83 I think it even more likely that they were laughing at their elders. Harington’s pamphlet and Jonson’s comedies show that jokes about Elizabeth’s favorite men—even those who were long dead—were de rigueur at the Inns of Court, and for good reason. All three of the queen’s “upstart” favorites had launched their storied careers from the Inns of Court. Chosen Revels Prince by the Inner Temple in 1561–62, Robert Dudley brought Gorboduc—a play meant to advance his courtship of the queen—to the Twelfth Night feast of 1562. Christopher Hatton’s handsome personage had attracted Elizabeth’s attention on the same or a similar occasion.84 The last of the queen’s carpet knights, the Middle Templar Walter Ralegh, who had been knighted on Twelfth Night in 1585, had probably attended the 1597/98 Twelfth Night festivities, “play-particles” of which found their way into both Every Man Out and Twelfth Night.85 When Feste alludes to “King Gorboduc” (4.2.14) in a play called Twelfth Night performed at Middle Temple, the joke invokes this institutional history, reminding audiences of the men who had greatness thrust on them by the queen. The fantasy of election by a powerful woman may have retained its allure for this younger generation, since John Webster, a likely attendant at the Middle Temple performance of Twelfth Night, would go on to write The Duchess of Malfi (1612–13), which grants the steward Antonio the aristocratic marriage denied the steward Malvolio.86 After Essex’s rebellion, however, Elizabeth for all intents and purposes isolated herself, and none in attendance that night could hope to follow the great favorites’ path to promotion. This state of affairs seems to have generated a good deal of resentment, which the Malvolio plot exploits.

That resentment extended to ladies who vainly make men dream of advancement. Indeed, the bearbaiting “device” (3.4.140) in Twelfth Night operates like the “straw-devices” of slanderers mentioned by Jonson (Cynthia’s Revels, 3.3.6) or the “slanderous devices” that the Privy Council had objected to in the 1580s.87 It implicates Olivia in a public shaming; “you wrong me,” Malvolio snarls at her “and the world shall know it” (5.1.302–303). Earlier in the play, when speaking to Cesario about the favors she has granted him, Olivia compares her honor to a baited bear:

Under your hard construction must I sit,

To force that on you in shameful cunning

Which you knew none of yours. What might you think?

Have you not set mine honor at the stake,

And baited it with all th’unmuzzled thoughts

That tyrannous heart can think? (3.1.115–20)

Olivia’s keen sense of being on a stage, vulnerable because of her gender and sexuality, subject to “hard construction” and “baited . . . with all th’unmuzzled thoughts / that tyrannous heart can think” expresses something of the shock that court figures must have felt when they found themselves objects of public speculation by satirists. Olivia openly calls bluff on Jonson’s disingenuous claim that only a “hard construction” would find topical reference in the scenarios of satire, like the one in which “a countess” who has “graced” men “beyond all aim of affection” is humiliated (Every Man Out, 2.3.328, 228–32).88 Branding those who set her sexual “honor at the stake” as tyrants, Olivia casts the satiric processes that result in popular judgments as a usurpation of royal authority.

Viewed in the context of the performance at Middle Temple, Twelfth Night stages the revenge of a “whole pack” (5.1.378) on a domineering woman and the men “so wholly addicted to her service” that they are willing to strike the “basest key.” Olivia is punished not just because she pretends to “social” and “bodily autonomy,” as Paster and others argue, but also because she presides over an erotic meritocracy.89 Audience members who laugh at the Malvolio plot become participants in this baiting, which Sir Toby likens to a form of legal judgment when he considers that “we may carry it thus . . . till our very pastime, tir’d out of breath, prompt us to have mercy on [Malvolio]; at which time we will bring the device to the bar” (3.4.137–39). As we saw in previous chapters, anticourt polemicists promoted the idea that public figures could be brought to trial in the court of public opinion. Toby imagines tiring of this familiar “pastime,” which Twelfth Night plays out to the point of exhaustion. The taste of surfeit that attends the baiting of Malvolio reflects a sense that “the joke . . . goes too far,” to quote Ralph Berry, and that it goes on for “too long.”90 By indulging the satiric impulse to the point of surfeit, Twelfth Night generates the feelings of remorse and regret that darken its mood. Even Feste’s fooling “grows old” (1.5.110–11), although the weary clown is the only one attuned to what Anne Barton calls the “realities of death and time.” His melancholy final song underlines that aging, the bodily process by which time hastens us toward death, is among the play’s principal concerns.91

Twelfth Night is not just a satire—it is also a romantic comedy, which hews to its own time by depicting “the follies” of the age (Every Man Out, induction, 15) as the folly of age. And the ridiculed Malvolio is not the only character who violates generational decorum. Until that antique clock upbraids Olivia for wasting time, most Illyrians ignore the fact that “youth’s a stuff will not endure” (2.3.52). Sir Andrew, who prides himself on how his leg looks dancing a galliard, prefers not to “compare” himself to “an old man” (1.4.118–119). But a “dry hand” signals “age and impotence;” in Sir Toby’s felicitous locution, Andrew is an “old boy” (3.2.8).92 This oxymoron, which recalls the boys who cross-dressed like old men to depict old men behaving like boys in Endymion, indicates that misrule in Illyria does not result from gender or class reversal only. The play’s adult males are all old boys, aging usurpers of youthful privileges, generation-bending counterparts of the gender-bending twins. In its focus on these elderly “boys quarreling over worthless things and . . . engrossed in childish preoccupations,” Twelfth Night evokes Petrarch’s “ninety-year-old little boys,” whose “most notable folly . . . was his desire to continue to have love affairs.”93 Barber argued long ago that “madness” is the play’s operative word.94 In the particular sense of a disrespect for the limits set by time, madness is a condition affecting not just Malvolio, but all Illyrians, including Olivia, who acknowledges being “as mad” as her steward (3.4.14).95

If literary critics rarely comment on Twelfth Night’s preoccupation with aging, theatre practitioners have long been alert to it. Twelfth Night is often staged as a fin-de-siècle affair, in which an old order exhausts itself, an interpretation that involves the use of aging actors. So John Barton’s influential production (1969/70), which highlighted the “elegiac” elements in the play, cast Maria as an elderly woman desperately eager to secure a marriage.96 Trevor Nunn’s melancholy 1996 film featured several aging males in the cast, including Nigel Hawthorne (Malvolio), Mel Smith (Sir Toby), and Ben Kingsley (Feste). And in Tim Carroll’s recent production for the Globe (2012–13), all major parts, with the exception of the twins, were performed by actors well beyond the third age, the period that Ralegh identifies as appropriate for indulging in “days of love, desire, and vanity.”97 Orsino (Liam Brennan) was in his early fifties, Malvolio (Stephen Frye) in his mid-fifties, and Sir Andrew (Roger Lloyd Pack) in his late sixties—all “old boys” in hot pursuit of Mark Rylance’s Olivia. Crowned, heavily made-up, and dripping with pearls, this regal lady conjured up images of aging and raging queens appropriate to the play’s subject matter. According to the New York Times reviewer, even modern-day American spectators found themselves “thinking of . . . Elizabeth I.”98

While the all-male cast of the Globe production showcased the play’s gender-bending effects, the advanced median age of the actors highlighted generational transgressions, contrasting the dignified behavior of the twins to the undignified behavior of their elders. Besides unleashing the satiric potential of the play, this production made visible the unusual configuration of the generational conflict in Twelfth Night, in which two youthful outsiders struggle to integrate into an alluring social elite constituted of aging celibates. Even without the difficult business of Malvolio’s disruptive final line, this represents a substantial revision of the argument of new comedy as explained by Northrop Frye, in which the younger generation endeavors to replace the older generation, not to mate with it. Twelfth Night’s odd swerves from convention follow its preoccupation with the Elizabethan past, albeit in an unexpected way. Like Jonson’s comical satires, Twelfth Night caters to a desire to see old men beaten “before [their] whore” (2 Henry IV, 2.4.257). But this punitive spectacle, satisfying to theatergoers eager for a specific kind of satiric fare, is amended by the twin youths who embrace Olivia and Orsino, redeeming them—and the court figures they evoke—from the general curse of resentment.

Expanding on ambiguities already present in his portrayal of Falstaff, Shakespeare splits this source material in Twelfth Night, refashioning the age-in-love trope by calling attention to its reproducibility and to its generic malleability. Multiple allusions establish a dizzying number of precedents for the aging lovers of Twelfth Night, ranging from the historical Leicester to Lyly’s devoted lover to Shakespeare’s own lecherous old knight to Jonson’s benighted courtiers. This wealth of models shows the innovative performances of Elizabeth’s favorites to be radical not just because they prompt public debate or provoke judgments but also because they serve as “example[s]” and inspire imitations, including those of the satirist and of the comic dramatist. Ralegh, who knew a thing or two about the process by which “greatnesse” might be achieved, explains in “Of Favorites” that if “one man acted ill his part / Lett an other mend the play.”99 The emulation of former favorites can lead to refinement; where Malvolio acts “ill his part,” Orsino is the “other” who “mend[s] the play.” Orsino lacks the social ambition and mercenary motives that deform most Elizabethan iterations of the aging lover, since his “love, more noble than the world, / Prizes not quantity of dirty lands” (2.4.81–82). Mocked by other characters, he is spared by the play itself, which displaces his less attractive traits, like “self-love” or “narcissism and potential effeminacy,” onto Malvolio.100 By providing these mirrors more than one of the queen’s favorites, Shakespeare counters one-sided accounts of the court’s impact on English culture and underlines the logical glitch in Jonson’s attack on the probability of romantic comedies, showing that these could reflect the dreams which structured Elizabethan political reality.

Olivia describes her suitor as “of great estate, of fresh and stainless youth” (1.5.259), which may appear to disqualify Orsino for the role that I am here proposing. Yet Orsino’s views on marriage show that he is older than Olivia. A proponent of letting “still the woman take / An elder than herself” (2.4.29–30), he is “elder” than Olivia, who in turn is “elder” than Viola. We are encouraged to think Olivia “cannot love” Orsino (1.5.262) because of his age when Toby explains that “She’ll not match above her degree, neither in estate, years, nor wit; I have heard her swear’t” (1.3.109–11). Orsino sends Cesario to Olivia because he thinks she would reject “a nuntio’s of more grave aspects” (1.4.28), a fear shown to be warranted when Olivia decides to “show favor” to Cesario because he is a “youth” (3.2.19). Shakespeare endows Orsino with a substantial past, which links him not just to the seasoned Antonio but also to Viola’s deceased father, who reported to his young daughter that Orsino “was a bachelor then” (1.2.29). Olivia’s suitor is uncle to a daring “young nephew Titus,” old enough to have been injured in the naval skirmish with Antonio (5.1.63). All this backstory dates Orsino, identifying him with an older generation of men, including Malvolio and Sir Andrew. That Orsino has remained a bachelor indicates an unwarranted delay and even a breach of marital norms; “he might have took his answer long ago,” Olivia shrewishly observes (1.5.263).

Through a verbal demotion of his duke, Shakespeare strengthens the parallels between this aging “Count Orsino” (1.5.101) and the “overweening rogue” who dreams of being made “Count Malvolio” (2.5.29, 35). The captain in 1.2 first identifies Orsino as “a noble duke” who governs Illyria (1.2.25), a man whose “favors” causes others to be “advanc’d” (1.4.1–2), not one who need beg favors for himself. Yet Orsino speaks like “an aspiring courtier,” Leonard Tennenhouse observes, and negotiates “sexual relations which completely overturn his position of political superiority in relation to Olivia.”101 If Orsino’s Petrarchan rhetoric is hard to reconcile with that of a “Duke . . . in love with a Countess,” perhaps he is not a duke after all, just as Olivia is not really a countess. Only the captain refers to Orsino by this title. Other characters refer to Orsino as “the Count” who “woos” Olivia (1.3.107–8). Sir Toby assures Sir Andrew that “she’ll none o’ th’ Count” (1.3.109–11), for example, and Olivia consistently calls her unwanted suitor “Count Orsino”—“if it be a suit from the Count, I am sick, or not at home” (1.5.107–8). Cesario is identified as “the County’s man” by Olivia (1.5.301; 3.1.100), Olivia’s servant (3.4.57–58), Maria (2.3.132), and Sir Toby (3.2.34). And Antonio remembers having fought “‘gainst the Count his galleys” (3.3.26) when he is arrested “at the suit of Count Orsino” (3.4.326–27).102 A preponderance of evidence thus reframes Orsino’s relationship to Olivia as one in which a “Count Orsino” courts a maiden “princess” (5.1.299).

This scenario is more in keeping with Twelfth Night’s retrospective elements, especially when we consider that “Count Orsino” translates to “Earl Little Bear.”103 Baited by his “desires, like fell and cruel hounds,” Orsino raises the same familiar ghosts as Malvolio does. Although he was sometimes referred to as a “great Beare,” Leicester deferred to his older brother, the Earl of Warwick, describing himself and Ambrose to Elizabeth as “your Ursus Major and Minor, tied to your stake.”104 Satirists followed suit when they called the earl a “Bearwhelp.”105 With his telltale name, his dashing nephew, and his Petrarchan posturing, Orsino evokes the more romantic aspects of the elegant earl who had courted Elizabeth in the guise of “Deep Desire” and whom “dogges” had wanted to see “fast chained to a stake, with muzzle-cord, collar, and ring, and all other things necessary” for his amorous efforts.106 Unlike this bear-like target of Elizabethan satire, and unlike his counterpart Malvolio, Twelfth Night’s “little bear” avoids the humiliation of a protracted public baiting. He deviates further still from historical and satiric precedent when he secures the marriage conventional to the ending of romantic comedy. If the Malvolio plot caters to “men of judgment,” the Orsino plot helps Shakespeare mount a defense of the “autumn judgments” that Jonson had mocked.

All those references to bearbaiting signal Shakespeare’s interest in engaging the same audiences about the same subjects as Jonson, although with different ends, and arguably greater success. By the turn of the century, bearbaiting, like the related words “device” and “sport” used in Twelfth Night, had become linked with the genre for which Jonson professes a “caninum appetitum” (Every Man Out, induction, 305).107 Thomas Middleton’s Microcynicon: Six Snarling Satires (1599) and William Goddard’s A Mastif Whelp with Other Ruff-Island-lik Currs Fetcht from Amongts the Antipedes. which Bite and Barke at the Fantasticall Humorists and Abusers of the Time (1615) show that satirists habitually figured attacks on actual persons as a form of dogging.108 When Thomas Dekker accused Jonson of being “a Ban-dog” that bites after collaborating with Nashe on the tantalizingly titled Isle of Dogs (1597), Dekker hinted at the reason that this play ran afoul of authorities, namely its satiric treatment of real people.109 Although homonymically Jonson may have “loved dogs,” the Elizabethan authorities did not share his enthusiasm. Jonson later acknowledged that Isle of Dogs was censored for glancing at “particular persons.”110 We may never know why the play raised the government’s hackles or whom it targeted, but Jonson was instrumental in furthering the association of personal satire with “dogs [that] do bark” (Cynthia’s Revels, 3.3.29).

Jonson is a particular target of Twelfth Night for other reasons, including the fact that he arrogates unprecedented powers to satirists. His “public, scurrilous, and profane jester” Carlo Buffone is a “bandog” who specializes in “absurd similes” that “swifter than Circe . . . transform any person into deformity,” for example (Every Man Out, “Characters,” 19–20; 1.2.185–86). The comparative allusion to Circe invokes the public debate about the queen’s transformative powers to insist on the satirist’s superior abilities. Through their “absurd similes” satirists can degrade even the men elevated by the queen, a point Buffone makes and illustrates. According to a credible anecdote, Jonson based the character on Charles Chester or Jester, an “impertenent fellow” who had provoked Ralegh into sealing his “mouth . . . with hard wax.”111 In Every Man Out, Puntarvolo plays Ralegh to Carlo’s Charles. The Petrarchan, Ovidian, and Arthurian affectations of this “vainglorious” courtier—back from hunting deer, the self-identified “knight errant” finds himself “planet-struck” by his wife, a “brighter star than Venus” (“Characters,” 11; 2.2.120, 105–6)—are “tedious” (2.2.135) because they borrow from the stale discourses of the Elizabethan court.112 Constituted of the same “play-particles” as Puntarvolo, Orsino mitigates such satiric depictions of the queen’s courtiers.

Although Jonson avers himself greedy “to catch at any occasion that might express his affections to his sovereign,” his mockery of the aging court undermines his praise of the “Blessèd, divine, unblemished, sacred, pure / Glorious, immortal, and indeed immense” Elizabeth (Every Man Out, 5.6.79–80).113 And at every turn Jonson identifies Shakespearean forms of theatricality with the “old stale” (4.3.237) targets of his political satire. His attempts to usurp Elizabeth’s royal authority are thus also attempts to establish artistic supremacy over Shakespeare. Eager to revise old models of subject and sovereign relations, Jonson proposes an alliance of sovereign and satirist, in which the (young) satirist’s masculine judgment compensates for the (aged) sovereign’s feminine lack of judgment. While the comical satires appeal to virile rational faculties, the “old” new comedy caters only to effete pleasures, “servilely” fawning on the audience’s “applause” (Every Man Out, induction, 55).114 By his personification, Jonson links old-style romantic comedies with old-style courtiers. When Macilente likens the ladies’ shallow preferment of well-clad revelers over men of sober judgment to their worship of “my lord chancellor’s tomb” (3.3.22), he also equates effeminate theatricality with bygone royal favorites, acknowledging Christopher Hatton’s “gravity, his wisdom, and his faith / to my dread sovereign” only in passing (3.3.23–24). The female “comet” at which Jonson’s court gallants “wonder,” meanwhile, recycles Shakespearean comic repartee “of the stamp March was fifteen years ago” (3.3.119–21). And Captain Shift, the Falstaff clone, prides himself on having “seen Flushing, Brill, and the Hague with this rapier, sir, in my Lord of Leicester’s time” (3.1.299).

Despite their rejection of the tired tropes of new comedies, Jonson’s comical satires rely on that most old-fashioned of mechanisms, election by a queen, for closure. Indeed, Jonson defended the controversial 1599 ending to Every Man Out by explaining “there hath been precedent of the like presentation in divers plays” before.115 While this may be true, Jonson’s comedies substantially revise the relationship between the queen-figure and her elect man. Like Macilente, Criticus becomes Cynthia’s chosen “minion” (Cynthia’s Revels, 4.5.26) by play’s end, deputed to pass judgment and impose punishment on other courtiers. In contrast to Lyly’s sovereign goddess, this much weaker Cynthia needs help to “distinguish times / And sort her censures” (5.5.186–87). Criticus is better equipped to decide who is fit and “Unfit to be in Cynthia’s court” (4.6.33) than she is. The goddess accepts his advice, acknowledging that “Princes that would their people should do well / Must at themselves begin, as at the heads” (5.5.257–58). In proposing that the queen’s judgment needs masculine correction, Jonson aligns himself with the polemicists who justified their attacks on the queen’s men as invitations to commit “the noble act of justice.” These arguments were grounded, as Jonson’s satires are, on the misogynist assumption that Elizabeth’s feminine passion distorted her judgment. Leicester’s Commonwealth warns against “the general grudge and grief of mind, with great mislike” generated on account of the “excessive favor showed to” Leicester “so many years without desert or reason,” noting that “the grief and resentiment thereof doth redound commonly in such cases not only upon the person delinquent alone, but also upon the sovereign by whose favor and authority he offereth such injuries.”116 For all its startling insinuations, the passage reflects the common view, shared by Jonson, that “the Prince is a publique person, and therefore ought to be without private affection and respect, or partialitie.”117 By combatting the effects of regal partiality, Criticus enacts a “fantasy of wish-fulfillment” in which advancement at court reflects “learning and moral probity” rather than personal charisma—values that Leah Marcus argues Jonson saw himself as embodying and that he hoped would “earn him the place of royal favorite.”118

Insofar as satire renders up private matters for public discussion, it is a perverse reenactment of the favorite’s desire for intimacy with “great ones.” Although Jonson does not seem attuned to this irony, Shakespeare is. The Falstaff plays endorse the idea that the critical detachment of theatrical audiences enables them to compete with their monarch in the exercise of “right wits” and political “good judgments” (Henry V, 4.7.47–48). But in Twelfth Night “private affection” and “excessive” emotion define all participants in the bearbaiting scenario, including the dogs who become interchangeable with the bears they pursue. From Valentine to Feste to Orsino, characters react to the perception of favoritism by the bitter show of “grief and resentiment,” passions that turn out to be as distorting as “excessive favor.” Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, and Feste all loathe Malvolio because he is Olivia’s favorite, and their own good fortunes depend on securing or maintaining her favor for themselves. Like Orsino, they are motivated by the desire to act out against the “instrument / That screws” them from what they take to be their “true place” in Olivia’s “favor” (5.1.122–23). The rancorous resentment of Olivia’s “minion” (5.1.125), far from distinguishing the other men from the ambitious steward or the upwardly mobile twins, implicates them in their own judgments. When Orsino suspects Viola of having usurped Olivia’s affections, he calls her a “dissembling cub”—that is, a younger, craftier, smaller bear: “what wilt thou be,” he asks, “when time hath sow’d a grizzle on thy case? (5.1.164–65). As a “cub” Viola is quite literally the “Count’s youth” (3.2.34). The “whirligig of time” (5.1.377), which raises Viola and Sebastian aloft, ensures Orsino’s demotion to a snarling dog, who threatens to “tear” Viola to pieces (5.1.127). The proliferation of “coxcomb[s]” and “assehead[s]” (5.1.205–6) at play’s end further attest to the ready transformation of baiters into baited.119

In emphasizing the masculine competition for a place in Olivia’s affection, Twelfth Night presents the resentment of favorites as a distempered form of self-love. Since this resentment is the product of thwarted desire, the play’s ban-dogs are invested in the same structures of desire as the bears they bait. Malvolio is “dogg’d” (3.2.76) for acting on a fantasy held in common—not just “the dream of acting the part of a gentleman,” of “laying claim to higher status,” as Greenblatt would have it, but the much more specific Elizabethan dream of being preferred by a powerful woman.120 Like Jonson’s Criticus, the participants in Malvolio’s baiting believe that their “sport” enacts a form of justice, that it enforces civilized constraints of behavior, that it protects class and generational hierarchies. Shakespeare reframes it as a violent revenge instead, “a savage jealousy” that “savors nobly” only to those who give in to it (5.1.119–20). Fabian defends the “device against Malvolio” by claiming that it “may rather pluck on laughter than revenge” (5.1.360–66). But Fabian’s defense would have rung hollow to Sidney, whose presence also haunts this play, and who saw laughter “at deformed creatures” as “most disproportioned to ourselves and nature.”121 On one end of the spectrum, comedy resembles a scapegoating mechanism in which social revenge is exacted from individuals charged with breaking decorum.122 Pushed far enough it approaches what Frye calls “a lower limit,” “the condition of savagery, the world in which comedy consists of inflicting pain on a helpless victim,” and shades into something altogether different, like the revenge tragedies that haunt the final moments of Twelfth Night.123 When the unregenerate Malvolio threatens all assembled, the medicinal qualities that Jonson claims for satire are shown to work like the poisons of revenge tragedies instead.124 If the bearbaiting “device” has a self-perpetuating power in Twelfth Night, its ability to reproduce itself involves the spread of complicity and guilt, a contaminating process that leaves some audience members “ashamed” of themselves, as Ralph Berry is.125 Unlike Fabian, or Jonson for that matter, Shakespeare had second thoughts about the ethics of engaging in such “sportful malice” (5.1.365).

Twelfth Night gives the satiric impulse free reign but in a way that undermines the satirist’s normative claim to moral and intellectual superiority.126 Since characters are versions of one another, efforts to draw lines, arrive at distinctions, or establish standards founder. In the Falstaff plays the old knight’s isolation renders judgment possible; Hal and Poins, or Mistress Ford and Mistress Page, can bait Falstaff without finding themselves implicated in this baiting. Because Falstaff only is guilty of the generational and gendered transgressions associated with the court, his baiting results in the reassertion of commonly held norms and values. But the elaborate system of similitudes linking the characters of Twelfth Night challenges attempts at stable judgments. As Berry points out, “the movement upwards is caricatured in Malvolio, but the others demonstrate it too. There is a general blurring of social frontiers in Olivia’s household, and this contributes to the frictions and resentments of the play.”127 If Falstaff stands for judgment, Malvolio stands for the limits of judgment. According to satiric norms, Malvolio deserves punishment for thinking he can convert sexual appeal into sociopolitical advantage. But what about Maria, Sebastian, or Viola, then? Or any Elizabethan intent on advancing himself by serving a powerful woman in some base function, as Leicester, Hatton, Harington, Jonson, Shakespeare, and the lawyers of Middle Temple did? How, under such circumstances, can anyone claim with certainty to tell the dog from the bear? In provoking these questions, Twelfth Night performs a metatheatrical version of what Sidney claims is the highest function of comedy: opening the satirist’s “eyes” by having “his own actions contemptibly set forth.” Taking his cue from Leicester’s brilliant nephew, who had ample reasons to distrust “people who seek a praise by dispraising others,” Shakespeare proposes that “instead of laughing at the jest” we “laugh at the jester.”128

Although it reproduces the patterns of the Falstaff plays, Twelfth Night thus comes to a more skeptical evaluation about the discourses of embodiment that marked the advent of the public sphere. The slanderous “pastimes” associated with this phenomenon assume an uncontrollable life of their own in this play. Like the sea described by Orsino in the first scene, “nought enters there, of what validity or pitch so’ever, / But falls into abatement and low price / Even in a minute” (1.1.11–13). The play’s maritime images of ravenous, indiscriminate hunger combine with its multiple references to dogs to evoke yet another myth, that of Scylla, the monstrous creature furnished with a ring of baying dogs’ heads for a waist. The licentious, satiric, and pornographic works of disgruntled Elizabethan subjects sought redress for the perception that serving a queen was an emasculating condition. Like Malvolio, the queen’s great favorites became scapegoats for the regime itself because they epitomized this condition, which was common to all Elizabethans. The barking authors of satires sought to distinguish themselves from these submissive men by placing limits on their monarch’s sovereignty. When they unmuzzled their “tyrannous” thoughts, these “substractors” may well have gone about bringing to light a worse alternative. As Olivia points out in one of the play’s many oblique allusions, “If one should be a prey, how much the better / To fall before the lion than the wolf!” (3.1.128–29). In these days of media-fueled resentment and toxic masculinity, Shakespeare’s old-fashioned comedy can seem oddly prescient in expressing reservations about the new forms of “sportful malice” transforming Elizabethan society.

Not that Twelfth Night concludes on the violent notes that haunt it. The characters who are able to recognize and acknowledge their similarities to one another manage to escape with their dignity partially restored. When Olivia movingly identifies herself with a baited bear, she inspires Viola to “pity” (3.1.123). Olivia claims “that’s a degree to love,” a claim that Viola denies because “very oft we pity enemies” (3.1.123–25). Olivia confirms the wisdom of Viola’s observation, when she in turn finds it in her heart to pity Malvolio, who has publicly accused her of having wronged him, exposing her to “much shame” (5.1.308). Olivia’s “Alas, poor fool, how they have baffled thee” shows her recognition that he has been “notoriously abus’d” (5.1.369, 379), as she herself is. The structures of kinship among the characters encourage moments of kindness that unsettle satiric judgment. If Twelfth Night gives us in Malvolio a courtly servant become communal enemy, it also asks us to feel an adulterating compassion for this troubled and troubling butt of ridicule. Readers from Charles I to Charles Lamb to Ralph Berry have modeled their responses to Malvolio on Olivia’s, finding that something about the play’s “design” forces us into “reversing” the satirical “judgments” it initially provokes.129 The claim that “none can be call’d deform’d but the unkind” (3.4.368) gets at this aspect of the play, and conveys an abiding skepticism regarding the satirist’s task as Jonson defined it: to use the stage as a “mirror” where the audience might see “the time’s deformity / Anatomized in every nerve and sinew” (Every Man Out, induction, 116–19). Twelfth Night undermines the credibility of the satiric tradition it draws on, offering a critique of the “whole pack” of writers dogging the Elizabethan government, and urging us to temper our judgments of public figures with compassion.

It also generates a revised version of satiric materials, which values the aging lover for his longstanding and controversial association with the performative arts. Shakespeare does not seek to persuade, correct, or provoke rational judgment in his portrait of Orsino. The traits he ridicules in Malvolio he aestheticizes in Orsino, who is a poet and a lover, rather than a lunatic.130 While all of Olivia’s suitors think about courtship in theatrical terms, Orsino is interested in this performance as an end in itself. A playwright of sorts, he unclasps “the book even” of his “secret soul” to the boy actor Cesario, giving him tips on how not to be “denied access,” and appreciatively noting that “it shall become thee well to act my woes” (1.4.14–16, 26). The pleasure that Orsino takes in refining this performance helps shield him from the ridicule endured by Malvolio, as does the fact that we never see Orsino courting Olivia in person. This omission allows audiences to respond to the lyrical count on grounds other than the ones proposed by satirists. If Orsino fails as Olivia’s lover, he succeeds as an artist, since his intended “audience” (1.4.18) proves receptive to his “book,” albeit not in the way he had hoped. His actual audience is even more susceptible. Like the “little western flower, / Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound” (2.1.166–67) in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Viola is transformed by the erotic energies Orsino misdirects at a fair vestal. Insofar as her enraptured response serves as model for our own, Orsino “seduces rather than convinces,” as all nostalgic creations do.131 His desire for Olivia may be vain, in that it produces no biological issue, but it inspires Viola’s affection and engenders the play’s strange, melancholic beauty.

Orsino’s continuance in the “old tune” has made his courtship “fat and fulsome” (5.1.108–9) to Olivia, a metaphor that links his failed suit with the past, and with the music that he claims, in his famous first line, as “food for love” (1.1.1). The count never enters without a retinue of musicians, to a soundtrack designed to generate feelings of loss, longing, and melancholy by contrasting an “inadequate present” to an “idealized past.”132 Orsino prefers these “old and antique song[s]” over the “light airs” of “these most brisk and giddy-paced times” (2.4.3–6) because they dally “with the innocence of love / like the old age” (2.4.47–48). Orsino’s songs feed a love for an “old age” that he both represents and recreates on stage. As Boym points out, music “is the permanent accompaniment of nostalgia—its ineffable charm . . . makes the nostalgic teary-eyed and tongue-tied and often clouds critical reflection on the subject.”133 Shakespeare’s musical refashioning of his “whoreson round man” suspends “critical reflection” in this manner, encouraging audiences to indulge affective and aesthetic responses instead. The conjunction of “innocence” with “the old age” revises the trope of the “old boy” along nostalgic lines, making the aging lover a figure for a desire shared by all those past the first age. Hearing and recalling the “antique” tunes played at the count’s request, an audience member may even revisit the time when he himself was “a little tine boy” (epilogue, 1), bringing these individual memories to bear on the play’s representation of a collective past. Orsino makes a utopia out of this past, imagined longingly as a refuge from the present, a place where “free maids . . . weave their thread with bone,” sit “ in the sun,” and “chaunt” all day long (2.4.43–49). In love of old, with a love for old songs, Orsino acquires the patina of an antique, consistent with his self-identification as Endymion, the aging hero of an old play about an aging court.

A glamorous version of the senex amans, Orsino embodies a powerful longing for an earlier Elizabethan moment, when artists collaborated with aristocrats in generating the rich court culture that haunted Shakespeare throughout his career. As we saw in previous chapters, Leicester had been the premier patron in this former age, his generosity the munificent force that drove the flowering of the arts and letters in Elizabethan England. A great innovator, he also had a reputation for loving antiquities, and patronized both antiquarians and historians. Eager to secure an afterlife for his efforts, Leicester had tried to keep Kenilworth “exactly as it had been in July 1575. . . . the deliberate fossilization of the castle and its picture collection suggests a desire to create a lasting memorial to the revels of 1575.”134 Goran Stanivuković proposes that the chivalric Orsino represents a lost “masculine ideal,” of the sort popularized by the medieval romances alluded to in the retrospective Kenilworth entertainments.135 We might glimpse in Orsino’s interactions with Cesario and Feste a “memorial” to another lost ideal, especially relevant to the theatrical artists who brought Twelfth Night to the stage. Orsino behaves like a gracious patron, recalling aspects of Leicester’s legacy not remembered in the satiric tradition, including his generous support of musicians, artists, actors, and fools, or his attempts to conserve the “reliques” of earlier times. Viola honors Orsino’s reputation as a discerning patron by presenting herself as a performer who can “sing / And speak to him in many sorts of music” (1.2.57–58). It’s hard not see in her trajectory a reflection of the now aging playwright’s youthful dreams and hopes, which needs must have involved establishing a level of intimacy with the great. If Leicester exerted an uncommon pull on Shakespeare’s memory, it was not only because the earl was ridiculous, as satirists proposed. “One remembers best what is colored by emotion,” Boym explains, and that emotion can be either negative or positive.136 Where anger and resentment fueled most contemporary representations of the queen’s dead favorites, Twelfth Night draws on other emotions as well, including pity, loss, longing, and affection.

A decade after Endymion appeared in print Shakespeare revisits the aging Elizabethan court to find that its revels have now ended. He returns home to “the unrealized dreams of the past and visions of the future that became obsolete,” acknowledging his artistic dependency on the fantasies fostered by the court in its heyday.137 Not only does the autumnal Twelfth Night embrace the fantastical elements of the new comedy derided by Jonson, but it embraces them as “old,” identifying itself, and by extension its writer, with the aging court that Jonson targeted.

Perhaps the best evidence that Shakespeare found pity in his heart for the faded and fading stars of the old regime is the final treatment he reserves for Olivia and Orsino. Neither of them achieves the rejuvenation of an Endymion. But if Orsino and Olivia are not restored to their youths, Shakespeare restores them, by the artificial means of his twin youths, to versions of themselves. In their loving union with Orsino and Olivia, Viola and Sebastian set about redeeming the Elizabethan past. The elevation of the meritorious twins in Twelfth Night balances the failure of Malvolio’s fantasy, reendowing the dream of eroticized social mobility with a utopian resonance. The humbled Olivia is able to partner without diluting her sovereignty, since she secures Sebastian’s compliance to her rule before she marries him (4.1.63–64).138 And the castigated Orsino is allowed a marriage with his “fancy’s queen” (5.1.388) which is founded on male amity and thus bypasses the problem of his indecorous, age-defying erotic desire.139 By these magical means, Illyria attains the renewal that eluded Elizium. Orsino’s retreat into a compensatory fantasy fulfills the promise made in the epilogue of 1 Henry IV. And Shakespeare conclusively shows Jonson that comedies about “a Duke . . . in love with a Countess” could be “near and familiarly allied to the time.”

Twelfth Night finds in the experience of lost enchantment an aesthetic magic of its own. The Sonnets take up where this play leaves off, embracing the impulse to identify with the aging lover. The fate from which Viola saves Orsino haunts the sonnet speaker, who is also in love with “antique” forms and whose “besetting sin” is also “self-love” (62.1).140 In Endymion, Lyly identified sonnet-writing as an activity likely to induce age-inappropriate behavior. His hero, after devoting the “prime of his youth” to “devising sonnets” ends up “having waxed old and not knowing it”: “how could my curled hairs . . . be turned to grey and my strong body to a dying weakness?” (1.2.64–65, 5.1.74–76). It might be said of Shakespeare’s sonnet speaker that he has waxed old, and knows it, but devises sonnets nonetheless—devises sonnets, in fact, about the “dying weakness” of aging bodies. The nostalgic atmosphere of the sequence, its famous sense of generic and cultural belatedness, owes much to its invocation of an aging court. By the time Shakespeare picked up his “antique pen” (19.10), the fashion for sonnets had, along with the queen’s two eldest favorites, died away. In their evocation of “the rich proud cost of outworn buried age” (64.2), the sonnets betray an ongoing imaginative engagement with these bygone “great princes’ favorites” (25.5). The aging speaker posits a homology between himself and the favorites, grounded in what the sequence describes as a vain form of sexuality—at once futile and arrogant, biologically sterile but imaginatively reproductive.

In a sequence initially committed to persuading “fairest creatures” (1.1) to adopt the reproductive habits of the rose, Shakespeare offers royal favorites at first by way of contrast, since they are “But as the marigold at the sun’s eye, / And in themselves their pride lies buried, / For at a frown they in their glory die” (25.5–9). “Those who are in favor with their stars” can, as Leicester and Hatton did, boast of “public honour and proud titles” (25.1–2), but they die childless. The sequence’s frequent antitheses of youth and age trade in the Endymion effect, associated with the queen’s men, by reproducing in the space of a line or two the deep devastation of having waxed old without knowing it. Struck by how quickly “Sap” is “check’d with frost and lusty leaves quite gone” (5.7), the speaker pleads with the young man to reproduce before “forty winters shall besiege thy brow, / And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field” (2.1–2). The anxiety about procreation is linked to the court through military and heraldic metaphors, which construe aging as the attenuation of aristocratic identity, the gradual reduction of “youth’s proud livery” to “a tott’red weed of small worth” (2.4–5). A few sonnets hold the “mortal moon” who “hath her eclipse endured” (107.5) to account. Sonnet 7, for example, uses an epic simile to compare the young man to a monarchical sun, to whom all pay “homage” (3) at first,

But when from highmost pitch, with weary car

Like feeble age he reeleth from the day,

The eyes (‘fore duteous) now converted are

From his low tract and look another way:

So thou, thyself outgoing in thy noon,

Unlook’d on diest unless thou get a son. (7.8–14)

The pun on son links the young man’s failure to reproduce to the decline of the sun’s “sacred majesty” (7.4). Shakespeare was struck by this aspect of the Elizabethan court. “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” a poem about the relationship between Elizabeth and an unidentified courtier, also characterizes the love between the “Turtle and his queen” as beautiful but sterile, “leaving no posterity” because of their “married chastity” (31, 62).

The sonnet sequence retains a conventional emphasis on the waste, vanity, and futility of the age-in-love trope throughout, an apparent indictment of the court this figure evokes. But the advice so liberally bestowed on the young man in the procreation sonnets comes from a failure, for, like the queen’s favorites or the old boys in Twelfth Night, the speaker has been a poor manager of his own “youthful sap”(15.7). And if in Sonnet 138 he initially experiences the persistence of sexual desire into old age as a form of categorical degradation, the speaker embraces by the sonnet’s end the deviant idea that faults can be flattering. By adopting the adulterating viewpoint of this “decrepit” speaker (37.1), Shakespeare returns the category of age to the central place it occupies in Castiglione’s account of the distinction between lust and love. Because the sonnet speaker is “no longer youthful,” his struggles to leave “sensual desire behind” take on a desperate cast. And yet few readers find this aging lover to be a “senseless fool” like Malvolio.141 The conventions of the sonnet work toward the unconventional end of empathy with the figure of “age in love,” charged now with the poetic search for nonbiological modes of perpetuation and immortality.

As he ceases to advocate for conventional forms of procreation, the speaker’s “barren rhyme” (16.4) begins to transform into “pow’rful rhyme” that outlives “the gilded monuments of princes” (55.2). In the process, the “wrackful siege of batt’ring days” (65.6) becomes less an obstacle to than a source of beauty. Time itself is an artist who etches faces, a rival of and therefore also a figure for, the sonneteer. As indelible as “the lines and wrinkles” (63.4), or the “parallels” that Time sets in “beauty’s brow” (60.10), the speaker’s “black lines” (63.13) paint his age far more memorably than the young man’s youth. In Sonnet 73, he turns the gaze on himself and discovers there the fairest creature of them all. The sonnet evokes the lingering beauty of “the twilight of such day / As after sunset fadeth in the west,” arguing that it makes “love more strong” to love that which one “must leave ere long” (73.5–6; 13–14). Like the “great favorites’” who have “spread” their “fair leaves” to the sun, the speaker admits to “yellow leaves, or none, or few” that appear at first to signal his barrenness (73.2). By reminding the readers of the “quires” of “yellow leaves” in their hand, however, where the sonnets still sing, the first quatrain testifies to the speaker’s successful transcendence of his own mortality—a transcendence secured not despite his aging but because of it. Christopher Martin argues that Shakespeare’s sequence celebrates youth at the expense of age by opposing beauty to age.142 But the speaker’s sense of aesthetics, preoccupied at first with salvaging beauty from the ravages inflicted by time, shifts over time to accommodate the idea of beauty worn—even enhanced—by those ravages. The “bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang” (73.4) are more, not less, lovely for being “rn’wd” (to use the original spelling) and for thus containing the promise of both death and renewal. In its concluding phoenix-like image of the loving speaker as a “glowing . . . fire,” who “on the ashes of his youth doth lie . . . Consumed with that which it was nourished by” (73.8–12), Sonnet 73 represents “age in love” not as a figure of ridicule, but as a figure of tragic beauty.

As he grew old along with his monarch, Shakespeare returned compulsively and with ever greater complexity to the topic of aging male sexuality. An extended meditation on the subject, the sonnets follow the great favorites in exploiting the speaker’s unorthodox erotic experiences to secure his unparalleled status. The phoenix is the epitome of beauty because it is immortal and unique, the reason Elizabeth I chose it as an emblem. The sequence’s search for timeless beauty paradoxically ends in the elevation of timeworn beauty; what we remember, finally, is not the “fair,” “kind,” “true,” and anodyne young man, but the magnificent and highly individual ruin he occasions. “Beauty spent and done” (“A Lover’s Complaint,” 11) is beauty still. In making “age in love” a vessel for his peculiar aesthetics of ruin, the Virgin Queen’s most observant male subject showed he had learned a thing or two about how to convert limitations into greatness, transgression into transcendence. These are lessons that he carried into Antony and Cleopatra (1608), a play about an aging queen and the “noble ruin of her magic” (3.10.18).