Shakespeare

Twelfth Night and the Morality of Indulgence 275He is “for all waters” primarily in that he represents the fluidity of revellingcelebration. And finally, when all is done, “The rain it raineth every day,” andFeste reverts to gnomic utterance in a full and final seriousness. Water is rain thatfalls to us from Heaven. The world goes on. Our revels now are ended, but theactors solidify into humanity, in this case. “But that’s all one, our play is done /And we’ll strive to please you every day.”IIIIn this interpretation of Twelfth Night, I have in no sense meant to infer thatMalvolio is to be identified as Ben Jonson, or that the play functioned in anysystematic way in the war of the theatres. There are, of course, a number ofpropitious coincidences: Marston’s What You Will, coming some six or sevenyears after Twelfth Night, devotes much effort to lampooning Jonson. What couldhave been meant by the title, however, as well as Shakespeare’s real intention inhis subtitle, remains obscure. Perhaps they both remain as the first part of someforgotten proverb to the effect that what you will (want) may come to you in anunexpected form. Perhaps they are both merely throwaway comments to theeffect that the play is really “whatyoumaycallit”. (It has been frequentlysuggested that it is a translation of Rabelais’ “Fay ce que vouldras.”) Then there isthe dig, in Every Man Out of His Humour, at a comedy with a romantic (Italianate)plot more than vaguely resembling that of Twelfth Night. Every Man Out has beendated in 1599, but the idea that Shakespeare may have chosen just such a“romantic” story with which to oppose Jonson’s comic theories is notinconceivable.My point, however, is that Twelfth Night is opposed by its very nature to thekind of comedy that Jonson was not only writing, but advocating at the time; thatit is a moral comedy, representing human experience in terms of a fullydramatized metaphor rather than a static emblematic correspondence; and,finally, that it operates to refute the moral validity of comedy of humours in itsinsistence on the active metaphor of surfeiting the appetite, upon which thewhole plot is constructed. It is only romantic in that it shares, with As You Like It(and with Love’s Labour’s Lost, too, for that matter) a hint of the world oftransformation of the last plays. Its moral vision is as intense as that of theproblem comedies.N OTES1. Ben Jonson, Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), Induction, ll. 120–122.2. See the extremely provocative commentary on the Duke’s opening linesin Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (Baton Rouge, 1941), pp.344–349.