(HOST) Today is "Twelfth Night" – the traditionally festive twelfth day after Christmas. Commentator and executive director of the Vermont Humanities Council Peter Gilbert, has been thinking about Shakespeare’s play by the same name.
(GILBERT) In his romantic comedy Twelfth Night, Shakespeare shows us many different kinds of love — all of them familiar. He shows us two examples of the familial love between siblings — brothers and sisters. He shows us both the love and loyalty of a close friend and the chaste affection that one might feel for a protégé. He shows us love for someone who’s deceased, which, if excessive, becomes unhealthy and inappropriate. He shows us self-love: for the vain character Malvolio, love and possible marriage relate only to self-aggrandizement; for him, unlike all the other characters, it’s all about getting, not giving.
Shakespeare shows us idealized courtly love, in which a medieval knight or nobleman devotes himself to a noblewoman who’s usually unattainable – perhaps because she’s already married. In the play, Duke Orsino knows the courtly love routine, and so he swoons and sighs for the Lady Olivia, who will not hear his suit because she’s observing an excessive seven years of mourning for her late brother.
Shakespeare also shows us youthful love: Olivia falls in love at the first sight of the Duke’s messenger, who’s actually a woman dressed as a boy. Olivia’s attracted to cute, somewhat feminine boys, like young girls today who have a crush on the cute singers in so-called boy bands. In my day it might have been Davy Jones of The Monkeys.
At the end of the play, Olivia is happy to marry the disguised messenger’s twin brother, who was thought to be dead. And so the audience enjoys the comedy of Olivia’s easily shifted affections – first, she entertains no suitors because she’s mourning her late brother, then she falls in love at first sight with the disguised messenger (who’s actually a girl), and finally, she’s smitten by the messenger’s twin brother.
And there’s the Duke Orsino, who’s not so much in love with Olivia as he is in love with being in love. (I knew a guy like him in college; he was madly in love with a different girl every week.) When Orsino speaks the very first line of the play, he shows us how much he is indulging himself with the pleasure of being in love. He tells the musicians, "If music be the food of love, play on,/Give me excess of it, . . . But in fact, music is not the food of love. Any love that requires background music isn’t really love at all.
Usually the plot of a romantic comedy has to do with resolving some kind of obstacle to boy and girl getting together; often it’s parental disapproval. In Twelfth Night, what delays the lovers’ uniting is their own foolishness, their self-deceptions, and lack of self-awareness. It all basically works out in the end, we’re not supposed to take any of it too seriously, and the play reminds us in a cheerful way what fools we mortals be.