We’re going to go down these stairs. Although we’ve had a fair amount of feasting during these holidays, and although it is some way down, let’s keep going. Watch your step, please, because it is dark down here. Now, down this hallway. It’s just a little way up ahead, after we go quietly through this door. Shhhh. Listen. Can you hear them? Talking?
A man seems to be pleading with someone. Can you see that man up ahead? Dressed in parson’s robes? Except, if you notice, beneath those robes, he seems to be wearing the multi-coloured clothes of a jester. Yes. Look at his leg as he moves. Look at that boot. Definitely a jester, dressed as a clergyman. But what is he doing?
This jester/parson seems to be arguing with another man, and tormenting him. We can’t see this second man, who seems to be confined beneath that trap door. We can hear Malvolio’s voice though, pleading to be let out of his confinement.
MALVOLIO
Sir Topas, never was man thus wronged: good Sir
Topas, do not think I am mad: they have laid me
here in hideous darkness.Clown
Fie, thou dishonest Satan! I call thee by the most
modest terms; for I am one of those gentle ones
that will use the devil himself with courtesy:
sayest thou that house is dark?MALVOLIO
As hell, Sir Topas.
Clown
Why it hath bay windows transparent as barricadoes,
and the clearstores toward the south north are as
lustrous as ebony; and yet complainest thou of
obstruction?MALVOLIO
I am not mad, Sir Topas: I say to you, this house is dark.
Clown
Madman, thou errest: I say, there is no darkness
(Twelfth Night 4.2.26-39)
but ignorance; in which thou art more puzzled than
the Egyptians in their fog.
In Twelfth Night, Feste the Fool poses as a parson named Sir Topas in order to torment Malvolio while he is confined for suspected madness. Although Malvolio is not really mad, his sanity is suspected after he has been tricked by some of the household (the carousing Sir Toby and his confederates) into believing that Olivia, who employs Malvolio as a household steward, is secretly in love with him. Known for his bitterly serious, sanctimonious puritanical outlook, Malvolio, does as the fake letter bids him to do, and appears to his employer cross gartered in yellow stockings, grinning a vulpine leer at the secret love that he supposes is between them. The ridiculous spectacle of the incongruously smiling Malvolio showing off his legs in yellow stockings is one of the great comic moments in the play, and perhaps one of the greatest in the dramatic canon. Knowing nothing of the false letter, Olivia believes that her steward has gone mad.
Subsequently, Sir Toby and his accomplices confine Malvolio in a dark room (a treatment often recommended for madness), and he is tormented by Feste, part of which is related in the above dialogue. Of course, Malvolio is literally in the dark, but he is also metaphorically so. Knowing nothing of the trick that has been played on him, he is left frightened and bewildered, and the play often works best when the audience are made to loathe Malvolio in the first part of the play, and then begin to feel sorry for him as they see Feste torment him.
Malvolio’s darkness remains multifold. When the other characters confine him, his ‘darkness’ is not just the literal lack of light where he is confined, but also a darkness of attitude. It is not so much Malvolio’s narrow moral perspective that the others condemn as it is his overbearing attempts to enforce his own idea of morality on others. As steward, he would govern Olivia’s household puritanically, shutting down everything he sees as potentially wicked. To Malvolio, anything that he sees as exceeding his own set of personal moral rules becomes not only debauchery, but also a kind of personal affront. His enormous ego perceives festive celebration as disrespectful: to his employer, to his employer’s household, and most of all to him as the principal officer of household management.
Not that Feste tortures Malvolio without reason. As the self established representation of persistent sober morality, Malvolio remains diametrically opposed to almost everything for which the jester stands. Feste lives by means of wit and humour, which he uses to illustrate points and promote a broader perspective, even in those who become targets of his joking. As ironic as it may seem, the fool takes his jesting seriously, dedicating himself to broadening and deepening others’ perspectives where he can. Malvolio’s more constricted outlook, on the other hand, suggests living life in absolute terms, with one’s behaviour governed by a strict set of rules derived from moral correctness. He not only disapproves of the fool, but he also belittles Feste’s work.
Malvolio is not really nearly as virtuous as he believes himself to be. He suffers from the same malady displayed by many other characters in the play. As his employer, Olivia, tells him, “Oh, you are sick of self-love, Malvolio, and taste with a distempered appetite.“(1.5.80-1) He’s not only generally immensely unhappy, but he is also a killjoy, behaving in a way that almost insists that others should be unhappy too.
Like the Duke Orsino, who is more in love with the idea of being a great lover than he is with Olivia (whom he initially pursues romantically), or Olivia herself, who proudly believes her own storied beauty makes her desirable to all men, Malvolio thinks highly of himself, “practicing behaviour to his shadow”, and strutting about the household like a moralistic peacock in constant judgement of those around him. When he begins to believe that Olivia may be in love with him, Malvolio’s thoughts shift quickly from the idea of a romance with her to the idea of being master of the household himself, with the authority to rule the household as he sees fit, forcing others like Sir Toby to bow and scrape to him and his power.
Opposite Malvolio, Sir Toby Belch reels drunkenly and sometimes maliciously through the play while promoting his own brand of self serving debauchery. Belch isn’t an admirable character either (although he can be funny, which sometimes makes him more accessible and more likeable than the ill humoured, unpleasant, and astringent Malvolio). Sir Toby pretends friendship with the hapless Sir Andrew Aguecheek solely for the purposes of maintaining a predatory access to Sir Andrew’s fortune. Yet, Belch is also a relatively clever character, and his analysis is frequently on point. When Malvolio insists that Sir Toby will have to leave his cousin Olivia’s house if his carousing continues, Sir Toby responds:
Art any more than a steward? Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale? (2.3.104-6)
Those who seek to remake the world in terms of their own perspective will always come up short, and this caution reverberates through the play, trembling at the core of it. Characteristically, the play also practices its point on the audience too.
As an audience, we laugh at Sir Toby’s jokes only to have our laughing cut short when he coldly dismisses his former companion, Sir Andrew, as “a thin faced knave, a gull.” We laugh at Malvolio’s ridiculous attempt at courting until the cruelty of his confinement in darkness comes home to us. By the time Malvolio exits, with his final line, “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you” (in 5.1), even Olivia realises that we are now on the doorstep of a very different kind of play–a sequel that might easily become a revenge tragedy. Duke Orsino sends after Malvolio to seek peace, but the outcome remains unclear.
Earlier in the play, Feste sings a song of death to the Duke Orsino:
Come away, come away, death,
And in sad cypress let me be laid.
Fly away, fly away, breath;
I am slain by a fair cruel maid.
My shroud of white, stuck all with yew, O, prepare it!
My part of death, no one so true
Did share it.Not a flower, not a flower sweet,
(2.4.50-65)
On my black coffin let there be strown.
Not a friend, not a friend greet
My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown.
A thousand thousand sighs to save,
Lay me, O, where
Sad true lover never find my grave,
To weep there!
In Twelfth Night, this song, along with the duels where no one is ultimately killed, serves as a festive appeasement of death, paving the way for the play’s proper comic ending. However, the song also reminds us that Malvolio’s ‘mal’ or ‘bad’ perspective arises not just from his character’s emotional truncation, but also from a deep kind of wound, from the very discontent that accompanies so much of the unsatisfied human condition. Malvolio’s dress and manner in attempting to be attractive to Olivia is ridiculous, but it also represents the steward’s honest attempt to transcend the boundaries of his own existence–seeking to discover for himself a terrain based in a love that he may never have known, and for which he lacks all vocabulary or understanding.
In part, we laugh at Malvolio because he lacks the navigational tools that would make him a successful lover. In a play replete with couplings, it is Malvolio and Sir Andrew who seem to exit the stage with no real glimmer of future satisfaction on their horizons. Where Sir Andrew is a sad, even a tragic figure, Malvolio’s exit, vowing revenge, suggests a nascent Iago to Sir Andrew’s disappointed Roderigo. Sir Andrew remains sad and betrayed, but Malvolio exits in a rage that makes him dangerous.
Feste’s final song, about the creation of the world (the festive foundation of comedy) also reminds us of the rain that falls into the human condition every day, and of the everyday theatre of trying to get along with others, of striving to please. Again, the fool bids us to think of human life. Striving to do our best in life remains a condition of our existence, but denying human nature, or attempting to force others to see as we see, or to behave as we may expect them to is not. Cruelty may wreak havoc, but it cannot triumph over human adversity. Really only kindness or love have any chance, ultimately, of doing that:
When that I was and a little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.
But when I came to man’s estate,
With hey, ho the wind and the rain,
‘Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate,
For the rain it raineth every day.
But when I came, alas! to wive,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
By swaggering could I never thrive,
For the rain it raineth every day.
But when I came unto my beds,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain.
With toss-pots still had drunken heads,
For the rain it raineth every day.
A great while ago the world begun,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
But that’s all one, our play is done,
And we’ll strive to please you every day. (5.1.383-402)