The atmosphere of overindulgence is established right at the beginning, where the lovesick Duke speaks his famous lines:

 

If music be the food of love, play on,

Give me excess of it, that surfeiting,

The appetite may sicken, and so die.

 

In the holiday revels Shakespeare would have witnessed as a child, a Lord of Misrule was selected to indulge the excess. Mardi Gras is a remnant of those traditions that is still with us today. In Twelfth Night, Shakespeare evokes the Lord of Misrule in the figure of Sir Toby Belch. Like Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Sir Toby is an unemployed knight and he must depend on the largess of his wealthy niece. To quote Ralph Berry, “he has rank and nothing else, hence his addiction to spectator sports, conversation, drinking and practical jokes. . . . His is the classic ennui of the unemployed.” Sir Toby’s nemesis is Malvolio, and their opposition reflects a profound change in Elizabethan society.

 

Sir Toby is a remnant of an England that under Elizabeth I moved from its medieval past into the modern world. That world, with its emerging middle class and work ethic, has no place for a knight-errant bon vivant, who has no function in this new society. For his part, Malvolio is a model of cool, upwardly mobile efficiency that is still with us today. He may be foolish, but he is no fool. As Steward, he has charge of Olivia’s household. Whether Malvolio is a true Puritan or merely a “time-pleaser” as Maria calls him – someone who is religious because it is fashionable – he and Sir Toby are natural enemies in a changing social order.

 

Toby rages when Malvolio tries to put an end to a late-night binge with his companions: “Dost thou think because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” Their volcanic confrontation sets off much of the action of the play. What makes the scene so memorable and so utterly Shakespearean in its complexity is the intimation that the excess we see here and elsewhere in the play masks the loneliness underneath.

 

Indeed, melancholy runs underneath the entirety of this sparkling comedy. Shakespeare’s earlier love comedies may present us with a man who remains single, notably Jaques in As You Like It, but four bachelors remain alone at the end of Twelfth Night. For their part, the three couples who are to be married are examples of movement up and down the social ladder. Shakespeare shows us a cross-section of Elizabethan society at a time when there was unprecedented social mobility in England, and it is the potential couplings that are closest in class – Orsino/Olivia or Olivia/Aguecheek – that are thwarted.

 

In good holiday tradition, the Lord of Misrule must be overthrown before we return to the serious world of work. And so Sir Toby is beaten by Sebastian, who everyone believes is Cesario, a name derived from Caesar. The emergence of this new king is another layer of the play’s title, for Twelfth Night, January 6, is also the Feast of the Epiphany, when the new king was revealed to the three Wise Men.

 

Wisdom and folly in love are recurring motifs in the play, and Feste, the professional fool, reminds us that the truly wise man admits that he is a fool. He is another example of the changing Elizabethan world. In an earlier time, he would have been attached solely to one household, as Touchstone is in As You Like It. Although Feste lives in Olivia’s house, he also seems to freelance, working for both Olivia and the Duke, and he must constantly ask for money.

 

Feste also reminds us that words can be twisted to mean their opposite. And deception in all its forms runs rampant through Illyria, as the lovers of the play must indulge their individual follies to excess before they learn the lessons of love. Mad and madness are also recurring words in Twelfth Night, and from its half-way point through to the end, its love-sick characters ask if they are mad indeed.

 

Only Malvolio refuses to admit that he is, and only he remains outside the new social order that is established at the play’s end. His parting shot, “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you,” however, reminds us that he will not remain low on the social ladder for very long. Forty years after Shakespeare wrote Twelfth Night, the Puritans, under Cromwell, would overthrow the British monarchy – and close the theatres.

 

Twelfth Night is the last party of the Christmas season, and Twelfth Night is a farewell to an England that is now on the brink of the Queen’s death. The word carnival means farewell to things of the flesh. Feste ends the play with a song that begins:

 

When that I was and a little tiny boy,

With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,

A foolish thing was but a toy,

For the rain it raineth every day.

 

That melancholy song goes on to list work and love among the foolish things of the world of adults, where the constant wind and rain are alleviated only by fleeting entertainments such as the glorious one Shakespeare gives us here.

 

Robert Blacker is Dramaturge for the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. 

 

In play after play, Shakespeare combines elements from different eras, blends historical fact with obvious fantasy, and juggles styles that range from the highest flights of poetic fancy to the authentic voice of the common man. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is an obvious example, bringing together as it does figures from classical Greek mythology, a supernatural world of fairies and sprites, and a comic troupe of “Athenian” tradesmen who hail unmistakably from Shakespeare’s own England.

 

Even at his most self-consistent, Shakespeare is always writing as much about his own time and place as about his story’s nominal setting, whether it be eleventh-century Scotland or ancient Rome, and this dual focus was reflected in the costuming of his actors. On the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, modern dress was the norm, with the theatre companies of the time relying heavily for their regal wardrobes on cast-off finery from the aristocracy.

 

There is evidence, though, that the contemporary clothing was sometimes combined with elements from other eras to evoke remote or exotic settings. In a pen-and-ink drawing from the late sixteenth century, one Henry Peacham left us what is believed to be the only contemporary illustration of a Shakespearean performance. The drawing is of Titus Andronicus, and it shows Titus wearing a rough approximation of a Roman toga with the other characters in full Elizabethan attire. We can only assume that Shakespeare’s original audiences saw nothing untoward in such a “mash-up” of periods.

 

The use of deliberate discrepancy seems particularly appropriate to the world of Twelfth Night – a play whose alternative title, What You Will (or, as a teenager might say today, “Whatever”), practically dictates a postmodernist approach. Certainly the “Illyria” where the action takes place is not so much an actual geographic setting as it is a confused and ever-changing state of mind. In this topsy-turvy fairy-tale world, the hierarchy has been turned upside down: the ruler, Duke Orsino, has essentially abdicated his responsibilities in order to moon over a woman who won’t give him the time of day, leaving a power vacuum that allows the likes of Sir Toby Belch to become a “lord of misrule.”

 

The play’s title refers to the Twelfth Night of Christmas, though nothing else in the text points to that time of year. We instinctively feel that its action, which covers a span of three days (or three months; here too the play contradicts itself), is taking place in the summer. But the meaning of the title is conceptual, not literal. The idea of Twelfth Night suffuses the play: the last giddy day of holiday time before you go back to work. This is a world of play – of eating and drinking, of gambling and sport and, particularly, of music. Music abounds, not only in the multitude of songs but in the poetic imagery as well. Mellifluous sounds drift through the air and at times Illyria seems to float in space, as if we’ve all entered some kind of musical dream.

 

To provide a framing device for this eclectic world of imagination, I have turned to the past sixty years of popular music. Since the middle of the twentieth century, diverse genres from various eras and cultures have been adapted, combined and reinvented to produce some of the most exciting music in the world – whether folk, rock, blues, country, folk-rock, country rock, electro-pop, electric-country-blues, reggae or zydeco, as Polonius might have put it. Popular music has informed the production by giving us an eclectic style that serves costumes, lighting and scenery. In our production, Illyria is the magical world of music on a holiday weekend.

 

If music, as Orsino says, be the food of love, then perhaps the songs that dominate Twelfth Night have a central role to play in advancing the emotionally mixed-up inhabitants of Illyria toward a more balanced and integrated state of mind in which love can be trusted again so we can all go back to work.

 

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