William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is a play saturated with images of liquids and fluid motion. More than being a mere motif, the play actually employs different types of liquids to illustrate different types of characters. Broadly speaking, the characters of Twelfth Night can be divided into four subgroups, each with correspondent imagery. Good fluidity, transformative agents, bad fluidity, and the dry characters. These categories, in turn, help explain the difference of what the play considers good and bad fluidity.
Good fluidity is fluidity that’s regulated by a transforming and controlling agent. This is represented in the play by the passionate Count Orsino and Countess Olivia and their transformative lovers, twins Viola and Sebastian. Firstly, it’s important to note that Viola and Sebastian are outsiders who come into Illyria and thus are separate from the madcap world of revelry and the fluidity it represents. Or as John Hollander describes it, “A suspension of mundane affairs [a]\ world of indulgence..of food, drink, love, play (Hollander 69).
what is also important to the twins’ entrance to Illyria is that they enter via shipwreck thus being tossed into the water and coming out of it, a kind of symbolic baptism. As Thomas C. Foster explains, “Symbolically, that’s the same pattern we see in baptism: death and rebirth through to medium of water. He’s thrown into the water, where his old identity dies... The self that bobs to the surface...is a new being”(Foster 155). Thus, symbolically purified themselves, they can then set to work purifying Illyria.
Almost all the water imagery associated with Viola and Sebastian is that of sailors and sailing. In their first scene they’re mentioned in, the Captain notes, “When you, and those poor number saved with you, hung on our driving boat, I saw your brother, most provident in peril, blind himself (Courage and hope both teaching him the practice) to a strong mast that upon the sea; Where, like Arion on the dolphin’s back”(Shakespeare I.i.ii. 11-15). The image of them clinging as pillars of stability in a raging sea foreshadow the ordering presence they will bring to Illyria.
Viola, especially in her role as a go-between for Orsino and Olivia is frequently compared to a sailor. First, when Maria says to her, “Will you hoist sail, sir ? Here lies your way.” And her response is, “No, good swabber; I am to hull here a little longer”(II.ii. 201-202). And later, “She is the list of my voyage”(III.i. 77-78). On one hand, this image of ships and shipping shows Viola’s duty Orsino and the business like way she views the wooing of Olivia. Her master and beloved wants her to do this, so she'll do it.
On the other hand, the next illusion to sailing Viola uses in response to Olivia's claim that you will no longer attempt to woo Cesario (Viola’s male disguise). “Then Westward Ho!”(III.i. 137). In reference to the cry sailors give when they change direction on the river puts the sailing imagery in another light. According to Joseph Summers, Viola “cuts through the subterfuges and disguises the others with absolute clarity”(Summers 20). Just as a sailor can easily turn back and forth through the currents of the river, so to can Viola brook the tempestuous passions of Orsino and Olivia and transform them into better people.
Her brother Sebastian aids the transformation process, though in a different way. As Summers remarks, “Sebastian is the reality of which Caesario is the artful imitation”(Summers 18). Sebastian provides a real vessel for which the feelings Caesario sparks in Olivia to grab onto, As such he's given a special type of image. Upon seeing Olivia's affections for him he remarks, “Let fancy still my sense in Lethe steep”(IV.i. 62). By wishing metaphorically to drown in the Lethe, he's giving himself a second symbolic baptism. “Baptizing” himself as Caesario, lover to Olivia. By this transformation he helps solve the tangled plot.
In contrast to the stabilizing images associated with the twins, the images associated with their lovers, Orsino and Olivia are of the wild rushing waters. Even in his first speech, Orsino and his riotous passions are intimately connected with the sea. He says, “O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou, that, notwithstanding thy capacity, receiveth as the sea. Nought enters there, of what vitality and pitch soe’er, but falls into abatement and low price”(I,i, 9-13).
In this speech, Orcino is both the sea and possessed by the spirit of love. Notably, love itself is a shape-shifter, fluid, as it were. Later, love’s sea-like qualities are portrayed in a darker light. “But mine [love] is all as hungry as the sea and can digest as much”(II.iv. 101-102) Orsino says when comparing his love to the love Olivia can muster for him. This analogy suggests that Orsino’s passion can never be satisfied, even if he obtains the object of his desire. Festy undercuts this idea by telling him, “The tailor make thy doublet of changeable taffeta, for thy mind is very opal. I would have men of such constancy put to sea”(II.iv. 74-75). Painting him as fickle and wishy-washy. Orsino's never satisfied passions are purified when he accepts Viola’s love and agrees to let her rule over his passions, saying that she will be his, “Mistress and his fancy’s queen”(V.i. 390).
Olivia has a different problem, when she is first introduced she is described as, “[watering] her chamber round with eye offending blind” (I.i. 30). Connecting her grief for her father with Orsino's stormy, self-indulgent, passions. Indeed, despite her constant cries of grief, she is “a private gluten” (Hollander 78). of passions. Similar phrasing even link the two, Sir Toby comments what a plague it is that his niece grieves so much. And when Olivia falls in love with Caesario she asks, “Even so quickly may one catch the plague”(I.v. 296). This shows that Olivia's out-of-control passions are more an illness than an inborn state.
Unlike Orsino, Olivia constantly questions whether or not she's acting irrationally. Saying, for example, “Blame not this haste of mine”(IV.iii. 20) and to Viola, “The clock upbraids me with the waste of time”(III.i. 132). However, every time she's almost free of the spell, she becomes further entranced by the figure of Caesario. However, she is a logical, organized person at heart. One of the first things Sebastian notes about her, is that she is good at running her household. Which he says, “[She does] with such a smooth and discrete stable barring”(IV.iii. 18). Thus, by giving a Caesario in the form of Sebastian, Olivia is cured of her “plague.” By having the passionate lovers be paired off with stabilizing influences, the play illustrates that good fluidity comes from fluidity that’s properly controlled.
If good fluidity is controlled fluidity, then it stands to reason that bad fluidity is fluidly that is uncontrolled. The play gives us two examples of such bad fluidity: Uncontrolled fluidity as represented by Olivia's drunken uncle, Sir Toby and unscrupulous. Fluidity as represented by fool for hire.
Unlike Orsino or Olivia, who's fluid images are always in their control (Orsino is the sea, Olivia waters her chamber, Orsino wears the coat of changeable taffeta), Sir Toby’s fluid images are out of his control. Toby constantly imbibes stoops of wine, leading him into a state of unhinged drunkenness, or as Olivia bluntly puts it when she sees him in this state ” He’s drowned”(I.v.135). Toby himself blames his stumbling and hiccuping on pickled herring. These two watery images , that of a drowned bloated corpse and that of something pickled both suggest that , unlike good fluidity which transforms you into a better person, bad fluidy turns you into something grotesque. However, Toby isn’t just drowned, he also drowns, as he is conning a fellow knight, one Sir Andrew out of “Some two thousand strong or so”(III.ii. 55-56).
Unlike good fluidity, which helps transform and ennobles as Viola did with Orsino, bad fluidity uses and consumes people for its own ends. Also, unlike Viola and Sebastian, whose transformative mission is couched in terms of baptism and purification, Toby’s main mission in the play, that of the tricking of Malvolio is couched in the opposite terms those of punishment and damnation. Upon hearing Malvolio brag, he calls for “fire and brimstone bolts and shackles”II.v. 50, 55),and asks “Shall this fellow live?”( II.v.62).
This shows that rather than a mission of chastisement or benevolent transformation, his is a mission of crude punishment and revenge. It is, perhaps, not coincidental that Sebastian, who transforms Olivia into her true self, also transforms Toby into his true self by thrusting yet another fluid on him. Blood. By giving him a “bloody coxcomb”( V.i.190) Sebastian shows Toby for what he is: an intemperate rouge who stumbles around cursing and screaming impotently.
Similarly, the fluid images associated with Feste can also be read as a series of contrasts with the characters associated with good fluidity. While Orsino serves the benevolently shapeshifting spirit of love, Feste makes appeals to the fluid god of deception, Mercury, in the first scene he’s in, implying a more amoral shapeshifting. He is “The one professional [fool] in a crowd of amateurs”(Summers 18) and such professionalism has a sinister side. He serves Olivia, but he’ll also turn dishonest fool for Orsino, the suitor she wants to be rid of, and encourage Sir Toby and his rowdy revenue to continue drunkenly carrying on as long, as they will pay him for the trouble. In short, he’ll help anyone who offers him money. As he notes to Viola he change the meaning of words (and masters) with the same fluid motion as one can turn “a chev’ril glove”(III.i.12). That is to say, how ever he wants to.
Like Viola Feste too is compared to a ship, he describes himself as “for all waters” (IV.ii. 65). Unlike Viola, who was brooking fluid out of control passions out of duty and love, Feste’s image suggests he’ll follow whatever waters he needs to come out on top. Feste’s final fluid image is his most powerful, that of rain, as he sings “The rain it rainth every day”(V.i 394). Feste’s connection with rain is unique in the play, he both is and is not the rain. On one hand, the rain represents Feste and his work for ever shifting masters. “Foolery… shines everywhere”(III.i.39-40).
Feste notes drolly, just the rain falls everywhere, so too does Feste make money everywhere. However he’s able to do so because it “rainth every day” or because their are bad times all over and people will always need a fool to lighten them. This song also likens him to Toby, just as Toby takes Andrew’s money while privately considering him an ass, Feste takes Toby’s money despite calling him “A tosspot still had drunken head”(V.i.405). The characters of Sir Toby and Feste illustrate, while fluidity can be used to positively transform, it can also be used to swindle and deceive for selfish ends.
“Malvolio and Sir Andrew are ruled by their mistaken notions...they fail to perceive the gaps in their ideals... and solid reality”(Summers 18-19). So we come to our last category: the dry characters, the characters with no possibility of fluid transformation within them. There many striking similarities between them. Both are directly called dry. Andrew is for a having a dry hand by Maria upon his first appearance and indeed a dry wit. Feste taunts Malvolio by calling him “a barren rascal” ( V.i.375) after he humiliates himself.
Both Andrew and Malvolio try and fail to use the fluid atmosphere as a ride to happiness. Andrew tries to take advantage of the fluid revelry atmosphere to woo Olivia but losses all of his money and gets a coxcomb for his troubles. Malvolio tries to ascend the fluid social structure as Maria “and the lighter people”(V.i.334) do but is too heavy to, even when he does the unfluid act of crushing reality to fit his will as he does with the letter in act II.
Indeed, the only fluid associated with these characters comes out of them, Urine. While cruelly playing with Andrew’s ego Toby says “I would not so much as make water but in a sink-a-pace”(I.ii.112). Likewise, while playing their trick on Malvolio, Fabian suggest they “Carry his water to the wise woman”(III.iv.108). The dry characters serve two functions. Firstly, they illustrate not everyone has the fluid potential to deal with changing situations. Secondly, they further illustrate how fluidity can be used to carry off others for selfish ends by people who do have such fluidity.
Twelfth Night presents such a spectrum of fluidity to comment on an ever changing world. Some will take advantage of such fluid changes to dupe the unsuspecting, while others will use the upheaval to encourage a similar fluidity in others for the better.