12th Night--1

The first three scenes of 12th night give us three different sets of characters. Orsino, the mad duke, is first. He is pining for Olivia's love, but she refuses to see him, mourning for her dead brother. This first scene gives us an example of someone speaking very beautifully and yet still being tiresome. Orsino's speech "If music be the food of love..." is great, but again, there's something wrong with this guy. He's too sick for Olivia's love. Sure, she's pretty cool, but it's not like they're old lovers now separated. It's not Antony and Cleopatra. It's more Romeo and Rosaline.

Love throughout this play is going to be something we can't really take all that seriously.

The heart of the play, Viola, is introduced in the second scene, having just washed up on shore from a shipwreck in which she believes her brother to have been killed. She quickly changes into boy's clothes and goes to serve Orsino, I think as a eunuch. She will, rather improbably, fall in love with Orsino even as she pleads on his behalf to Olivia. This particular relationship gives real hope to everyone who ever tried the "deep, sad, smart" routine as a way to get girls in high school. I tried that routine. My initial feeling is that it was hopeless, but looking back, I think I got a little more traction with it than I probably should have. In high school. And college. It was the part where long, deep pauses and the occasional couplet have to give way to dates and conversations and making a move that things fell apart for me. Also, I only ever had a few articles of black clothing.

Anyway, Viola goes to woo Olivia for Orsino, but Olivia falls in love with Viola, whom she takes to be a man named Cesario or something. Whoops! Hijinks afoot!

The third scene introduces a less interesting pair: Olivia's cousin Sir Toby Belch and his friend, Andrew Aguecheek, who is failing even worse than Orsino to win Olivia.

I'm kind of skipping ahead here (which may lead to mistakes, as I haven't read the play for a few years), but I want to dwell for a moment on sexuality/love in this play. Viola, who is wonderful, is dressed as a man, in love with Orsino, but trying to convince Olivia to return Orsino's love. Orsino has a gradually creeping homerotic love for Viola that grows throughout the play and goes through only a mild hiccup when it's revealed that she's a woman. Olivia spurns the love of the effeminates: Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Orsino, and instead loves Viola, whom she takes to be a man. There is some real confusion here, and someone more attuned to sexual politics and queer studies could probably do quite a bit with it. But what really sticks out to me is the silliness of it all.

There's a lot of misdirected passion in this play. Everyone talks about how deeply they love other characters, but the final scene is a kind of musical chairs in which they all change partners rather blithely and no one is very seriously hurt, except Malvolio (more on him in later posts).

Jackie and I are moving to Chicago. If this play has a message (and I'm always hesitant to assign "messages" to these plays), it's something about being at ease in contingency. Just flowing on into the next phase, without blinking and, in Viola's case at least, doing so with a vivacity and grace rarely seen in any circumstances. I'm hoping for something like that (minus the partner change) as I glide into unemployment, then hopefully right back into a real job.

Flux.