Free Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare Page A

(3.1.157):
    Olivia should kiss Viola … Lindsay’s suggestion was that after Olivia initiated the kiss, Viola, rather than pulling away instantly, should respond for a brief moment. Lindsay’s intention was to highlight the sexual ambiguity that reverberates through the play … Although Viola’s instinct might initially be to pull away, the experience of such a loving kiss became fleetingly seductive for her too. Brimful as she is with love for Orsino, she is living with her own unexpressed erotic charge and readiness, and the joy, or comfort, of sensual human contact is not to be underestimated! 84
    The relationship between Antonio and Sebastian in recent times has often been played as a sexual one. Director John Caird believes that this is a vital misreading:
    [Antonio] deserves gratitude, friendship, filial love—all the most pure things. In other words, he has built Sebastian into something of an idol, and that is one of the most powerful forms of love there is. But if you make it sexual … then you diminish the other much more important aspects of the play that surround it. 85

    4. Lindsay Posner production, 2001: Ben Meyjes as Sebastian “getting himself together after a romp on a large bed with Antonio … the butch black sailor who’s plucked him from the waves” (with Joseph Mydell as Antonio).
    Conversely, Terry Hands believes that “It’s a wonderful mirror to the Orsino–Cesario relationship … but also enables us to see doom very clearly in front of our eyes and to relate that to the other love stories in the play.” 86
    Antonio sees things as they are, deals in the every-day realities of a relationship, while the lovers discover perhaps more heady and ambiguous truths by dalliance and impulse. Antonio is as much an outsider in his way as Feste and Malvolio are in theirs … The lovers swirl and exit, perhaps still wrongly paired, it matters not; but they leave Antonio stranded in front of the painted Narcissus, a baffled figure. 87
    It seems that in the last fifty years all possible sexual permutations have been explored. But does the overt imposing of a sexual reading on every character connected with the love plot provide maybe one dynamic too many? John Caird, who directed
Twelfth Night
for the RSC in 1983, pointed to what he felt was key about Viola’s male/female persona:
    Viola puts on men’s clothes and behaves like a boy, she finds out what life is like in both camps, and by the end of the play she is more sexually complete than she was before. The male and the female have been married in her. Sebastian is going through a similar sort of journey. He is having a relationship of one sort or another with a man in which his masculinity is made passive. 88
    It is only on breaking the social conventions of their sex that the characters can meet on a spiritual level outside the affectations of courtly love. We see Orsino reverting to type when he refers to Viola as his “fancy’s queen.” The formulaic modes of communication which had been broken down by Viola’s disguise appear to be reinstalled. Cesario, the catalyst of sexual turmoil, has gone, leaving behind him self-awareness—an understanding of both male and female aspects of the self, for all the lovers involved. As a Lord of Misrule he has been more successful than Feste.
“This Fellow Is Wise Enough to Play the Fool”
    The Fool knows that the only true madness is to recognize the world as rational. 89
    Between the worlds of festivity and reality, self-delusion and sanity, sits Feste. He has been played variously as the orchestrator of the play’s action, knowing commentator on the folly of the lovers, and even elevated “to an almost superhuman position.” 90 This enigmatic character is “rarely played as genuinely funny.” 91 The melancholic nature of his songs and his bitterly humorous remarks place him outside the “comic” plots, with the effect that in many productions the play is depicted from Feste’s