This past week was a haze of midterm exams and essays, including for my less than favorite Shakespeare class. Thankfully, I've survived, and it's officially spring break, which means I get to hang out at my parent's house with my dogs. For those of you interested, I figured I'd share with you my second essay for the Shakespeare class, a reading of "Twelfth Night" through a historicist lens of gendered and religious politics.

Gender Politics, Puritanism, and Myth in Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night”

“If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction,” (3.4.136-137): Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” is a fascinating exploration of Elizabethan era anxieties around religion, female autonomy and sovereignty, and gender expectations that seeks to resolve these anxieties within the space of a fictional work. “Twelfth Night” is estimated as having been written in 1601; at this time, Queen Elizabeth is in her late sixties, with no husband, no blood heir, and she will die in 1603. As noted in Stephen Greenblatt’s introduction to “The Norton Shakespeare,” early on in her rule, “all submitted to Elizabeth’s cult of love … the queen’s gender was transformed from a potential liability into a significant asset.” By 1601, however, her age and her lack of successor heighten the anxieties that had surrounded her entire rule and begged the question: what will happen to England when Elizabeth dies and the country is monarch-less? Therefore the dating of the play further complicates the issues it addresses. Ultimately, Shakespeare is working out through fiction what cannot be worked out in real life. While the play begins as rather subversive, with its cross dressing, gender confusions, homoerotic moments, and religious discord, it ends by neatly resolving all these issues with heteronormative, class appropriate unions, and the dispelling of the problematic Puritan.

Olivia acts as the stand in for Queen Elizabeth. “The daughter of a count that died twelvemonth since, then leaving her in the protection of his son, her brother, who shortly also died” (1.2.37-40), Olivia is a young, single, guardian-less woman in charge of her own estate, a privilege afforded only to single or widowed women. As noted in Greenblatt, “married women had no such rights,” which makes Olivia’s singleness and initial refusal of Orsino’s proposals even more politically important. To marry was to give up one’s power. The anxieties surrounding the single female come out in this play, where they can be rectified in the fictional (and therefore safe) space of the work. Early on, Olivia “will not match above her degree, neither in estate, years, nor wit” (1.3.107-108) and risk losing her autonomy. As the play progresses, Olivia slowly acqueises, first by falling in love with Cesario/Viola. Although Olivia loves Cesario, she will not allow herself to fully entertain the possibility, telling Cesario that “I will not have you. And yet when wit and youth is come to harvest, your wife is like to reap a proper man” (3.1.138-140). Eventually, Olivia will fulfill her womanly duties by marrying Sebastian, who has far greater estate and status than she. The purpose of the play is to right the wrongs of the contemporary society, starting with disempowering the female sovereign and putting her in her proper, submissive place, through union with a male who possesses more power and will dominate over her. Also in contrast to the real life Elizabeth, Olivia is young, and still has time to bear a male heir to carry on what is now her husband’s estate.

However, had Olivia not been married to Sebastian, she would have eventually had to give in to Orsino’s proposals; due to his class, he is the only other suitable pairing. This is also why Olivia cannot be married to Sir Andrew or Malvolio; class stratification and the maintenance of strict class division are important for maintaining order in Elizabethan society. Sebastian has a whole kingdom, making him the ideal match for Olivia, because her status is not great enough to be threatening to him. Elizabethan audiences can therefore insert Queen Elizabeth into Olivia’s role and be comforted by the possibility that her power could be quelled. Orsino would be the next ideal candidate, because his status is equal to Olivia’s, and once married, Olivia would lose control of her estate anyways. Olivia would certainly be marrying below her station if she entered into a union with Sir Andrew, but, to his credit, he at least has a title. That makes Malvolio the least desirable match because he is her steward, and belonging to a completely different social class than she does. The other suitors are either members of the landed aristocracy or posses even minor status. While marrying Olivia would elevate Malvolio’s status to count (2.5.34), Olivia would still be more powerful than him - legally she wouldn’t have the rights, but there would still be a tension that the property and power were initially hers - creating a disparity and doing nothing to soothe the audience’s anxieties about a female in power.

Though Malvolio’s quest for status and power through union with Olivia is problematic enough on its own, Malvolio’s role is further complicated by the fact that he is a Puritan. Queen Elizabeth has enough problems deflecting suitors and, at this point in her life, maintaining her youthful, virginal image, yet she is also faced with Puritan opposition to the Church of England and its practices. At the same time Shakespeare is attempting to rectify female authority in Twelfth Night, Shakespeare is, according to James Westfall Thompson - a leading scholar of early modern European history - also “issuing a direct attack on Puritanism.” This attack is underscored by Shakespeare’s use of paganism and pantheistic myth to describe the characters themselves and their relationships with other characters. Shakespeare is, of course, writing during the late Renaissance, which is, in the Puritan worldview, a product of Italian barbarism; according to Thompson, “the Puritans looked upon the culture of the Italian Renaissance then flowing into England like a flood as half pagan and half Catholic, and frivolous dalliance to boot.”

Shakespeare draws on the Puritan’s disgust that the Renaissance was Italian in origin to choose his myths for this play: of the six myths overtly mentioned or alluded to, three are Roman in origin. The myth of Diana and Actaeon is alluded to by Orsino while he’s pining over Olivia: “That instant was I turned into a hart, and my desires, like fell and cruel hounds, e’er since pursue me” (1.2.22-24). This myth illustrates Olivia’s power by suggesting she has the same capabilities as a Roman goddess. Later, Cesario/Viola alludes to the myth of Echo and Narcissus: “Hallow your name to the reverberate hills and make the babbling gossip of the air cry out “Olivia!”” (1.5.275-277). This would again imply that Olivia possess the traits of a goddess, in this case, Juno, married to Jupiter, the chief deity in Roman mythology. However, this indicates that Olivia is becoming subservient to a man as she is falling in love with Cesario. Finally, Orsino references Vulcan (5.1.49), the Roman god of fire and the forge. It is in this scene that the truth starts to unravel and the “affairs” are made known; this makes Vulcan the best choice of god because in the Roman mythology, his wife Venus, goddess of love, has an affair with Mars, god of war; in “Twelfth Night” Vulcan can be seen as Orsino, Viola/Cesario as Venus, as she’s cheating Orsino out of Olivia’s love, and Olivia as Mars, because she is arguably the cause of all the strife in the play.

At the end of it all, Malvolio is conspicuously left out of the happy, heteronormative, class-appropriate unions precisely because he is representative of Puritanism. Unlike the other strangers - Antonio is coded as homosexual, Sir Andrew is too lowly in class, Fabian is too minor a character, Feste’s occupation precludes him - Malvolio’s antagonistic Puritanism prevents him from entering into a union. Again to consider Elizabeth, for all the suitors she might have entertained, she could not enter into a union with a Puritan because Puritanism was too radical, and it would destabilize her already tenuous rule further.

To an extent, Shakespeare succeeds in rectifying the anxieties of Elizabethan by ending the comedy with the appropriate unions. Olivia, Elizabeth’s double on the stage, is married to a man possessing both greater estater and authority, and thereby forcing her into a submissive role, satisfying audiences and allowing them to pretend that all was right with the world. Shakespeare’s use of myth to further his agenda against the Puritan Malvolio is ultimately successful, when considering that the myths allow the proper unions to occur. Though the play begins as radical, much like Elizabeth’s reign, it concludes by doing what Elizabeth, in reality, cannot: dispelling the Puritan and finding a proper match for the autonomous female. At the end, even for a moment, audiences are soothed and can feel as though the world has been righted.