A Sketch on Morality in Twelfth Night
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is rough, a work in progress, and so I have no idea if this ends up being correct on real textual examination.
I, being a structuralist at heart, obviously love thinking about literature and drama in a Dan-Harmon-ass way where you can break down characters into their plot functions or things they represent. I love when a piece becomes a little clockwork puzzle where you set fundamental ideas (instantiated by characters who are nominally, I guess, full and complicated people) and let them bounce off each other and create a story through their conflict.
And so my early sketch of an idea is that: in Twelfth Night, you might be able to argue that the comic subplot of the servants is a case of five characters who have distinct (and contradictory) fundamental notions of morality, and what happens when they bash up against each other.
Three of them I feel pretty strongly about: for Sir Toby Belch, he lives according to a code where what is fun is right. He’s Epicurean, I guess, if you want to go all greek philosophy on it. And he is morally offended primarily by people who are being killjoys: Olivia with her mourning, and Malvolio with his prudishness.
Malvolio, then, operates more of a classic lawful neutral alignment: what is proper is right. And right there you can see conflict: Sir Toby wants to have fun, Malvolio wants everyone to follow the rules, fighting ensues. Malvolio is deeply offended by the whole notion that he has to be in a comedy.
Sir Andrew Aguecheek then is also, I think, pretty clear cut, in that he seems to believe that what is chivalrous is right. He’s, in actuality, a parody of a chivalrous knight, because he’s an idiot and a coward, but his worldview is one that presupposes he is in fact neither of those things. He thinks he’s Lancelot and thinks that Lancelot is who everyone should aspire to.
Feste and Maria then are the two that are the most difficult to pin down. Feste because he’s a deliberately nebulous character. The closest I have (which stems from the particular read I and my director ran with the one time I played him) is that he has a tremendous capacity for psychotic and over-the-top revenge. He has his little line at the end where he says he basically tortured Malvolio in the prison cell because he was mean to him once1. He also is fiercely loyal to Olivia (and distrusting of Viola/Cesario until he gets a sense that she’s not there to hurt his mistress) and by implication given how much he was said to be beloved of Olivia’s father, one could assume he was equally loyal and protective of him. So for Feste maybe his axis centers around loyalty? In my head I kind of personify him as a fiercely loyal, and maybe not-quite-properly trained dog. But again, he’s a slippery character so I’m not positive this is exactly right.
Maria is to some extent even harder because….. she’s the closest thing to just a normal human being of the five of them? Like look at her vs the other four, and these are all complete lunatics in comparison. Sir Toby is a drunk, Sir Andrew is a moron, Malvolio is prude, Feste is psychopath, Maria just…. kind of behaves reasonably? Her morality is perhaps just normal Western Judeo-Christian morality, where you need to balance joy and bravery and respect and loyalty, and it’s hard and kind of contradictory?
So anyway, sketch of an idea, I don’t know if I’ll ever get around to re-reading the play in this light, but I do think (on my recollection) you certainly could run with this interpretation in a production, if it helps. I’d be very curious in particular if that would help clear up some of the contradictions in Malvolio’s arc (is he confronting or shifting his prior moral understanding? Is his prior moral understanding a cover for something deeper?) and if it grants a greater depth to Maria (the idea that she’s the only well-adjusted person out of this quadrant of Looney Tunes characters)?
Idk, that’s what you get this week! It’s a free substack!
“But do you remember? 'Madam, why laugh you at such
a barren rascal? an you smile not, he's gagged:'
and thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges." That is “Hey do you remember when you said this mean thing to me at the beginning of the play? Well, that’s why I imprisoned and psychologically tormented you by pretending to be a Spanish priest.”