Harold Bloom’s discussion of Twelfth Night in his Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is, as would be expected, insightful. It displays his deep love of poetry, and includes some truly eloquent descriptions of Orsino: “that sublimely outrageous lover of love” and “amiable erotic lunacy.” Bloom is worth reading just to enjoy his sentences.
However, as usual, his perspective is fundamentally flawed. In what way? Two ideas in particular stand out: 1) the idea that Shakespeare was a secular poet with an essentially post-enlightenment disdain for Christian faith and 2) the idea that his audience would have enjoyed merely secular plays which left out all serious allusion to Christian faith. In Bloom’s words, “Cheerfully secular, like almost all of Shakespeare, the play of “what you will” makes no reference whatsoever to Twelfth Night.”1 “Cheerfully secular” describes Bloom himself better than Shakespeare, who actually did sneak in a reference to “Twelfth Night” in a relatively noticeable place, which we usually call “title.”
In profound and historically verifiable contrast to the skeptical bias of modern and postmodern enlightenment presuppositions, Hannibal Hamlin offers the following on the first page of his excellent, The Bible in Shakespeare:
“This book is about allusions to the Bible in Shakespeare’s plays. It argues that such allusions are frequent, deliberate, and significant, and that the study of these allusions is repaid by a deeper understanding of the plays. A supplementary argument, or perhaps a presupposition, is that Shakespeare’s culture as a whole was profoundly and thoroughly biblical, a culture in which one could assume a degree of biblical knowledge that is difficult to imagine in today’s mass-media global culture. One gropes for a modern analogy, but there is none. Imagine a television program that everyone in the country has been watching every week, sometimes more than once, for their entire lives, having seen some episodes dozens of times. Suppose your parents and grandparents had watched all the same episodes, and suppose further that millions of people in other neighboring countries had watched these episodes too, dubbed into their own languages. Suppose people had actually been watching this show, in still other languages, for over a thousand years, and that vast libraries had accumulated over the centuries full of books about how best to interpret the show. Suppose that it was illegal not to watch this show and, moreover, that your eternal salvation was understood to depend on it. Suppose that this TV show was the basis for your country’s literature and art, its political theory, its history, its philosophy, its understanding of the natural world as well as human nature, and essential to most other fields of knowledge as well. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, the Bible was that show; it was always in reruns, and it never went off the air.”2
To appreciate the full depth of Hamlin’s introduction, one needs to read the entire book, where he documents in detail what he means by saying that “Shakespeare’s culture as a whole was profoundly and thoroughly biblical.” In such a culture in which the twelve-day celebration of Christmas was perhaps the greatest celebration of the year — twelve days of rest in the winter for an agricultural society! — a play titled “Twelfth Night” would certainly invoke images of that happy season, especially since it seems that the twelfth night was a night for doing plays.
It is true that the play is a comedy, though the word “comedy” does not mean exactly the same thing in Shakespeare’s day as it does in ours. In Shakespeare, a tragedy is a play that ends in death, usually rather clearly as judgment for sin; a comedy is a play that ends in marriage. The contrast between death and marriage might sound odd to someone unfamiliar with the end of the Bible. But in fact that is where the Bible also ends: with the contrast between death and marriage — the second death versus the marriage of Christ to His church.
Twelfth Night, as befitting its title and the celebration of the twelfth night in Shakespeare’s day, is uproariously funny in the depiction of Malvolio’s deception by Sir Toby and others, and profoundly sarcastic in is representation of the vainly Narcissistic Orsino, who is less in love with Olivia than with the image of his own love.
I recently watched the BBC version of the play with Japanese friends, who did not understand the English and could only follow the play through subtitles. Note: after 400 years, an audience in a totally different culture who did not understand Shakespeare”s English still laughed at all the appropriate places — aided of course, by the actors and Malvolio’s ridiculous clothing.
What they could not pick up on — which Harold Bloom, among others, also missed — was the Biblical background for the play. Lets just go through the first scenes.
Act 1, scene 1 of the play introduces us to Orsino and his so-called love for Olivia, who is also introduced through Orsino’s servant’s report that she will mourn the death of her brother for seven years.
The next scene turns to a shipwreck in which Viola and her twin brother Sebastian were separated. Viola presumes him drowned, and we learn later that he assumed the same of her. Identical twins, one male and one female — not possible, but Shakespeare is not presenting us with a biology class, but with something more like a parable, a parable about love. Viola decides that she will dress as a young man and seek employment from Orsino, of whom she had heard her father speak.
The third scene of the first Act introduces us to Olivia’s zany household. At the end of the first Act, then, we have a three-part story: Orsino and Olivia, Viola and Sebastian, and Olivia’s bizarre household. This aspect of the play accounts for the words in the title: “Or What You Will” — ridiculous playfulness of the sort that often characterized the 12th night. Shakespeare weaves these three threads into the complex cloth of the play.
As the play unfolds, Viola soon becomes the young boy Cesario in order to serve Orsino, the Duke of Illyria. Because of Cesario’s youth, favorable appearance, and demeanor, Orsino choses “him” to be the go-between to appeal his case to Olivia, bringing two stories together. Cesario, as Viola is now known, visits Olivia meeting Malvolio and eventually, too, Sir Toby Belch and the others, bringing all these people and the three stories into the intricately woven fabric.
There is too much detail to attempt to unfold the whole story, but we must note that Olivia’s oath not to meet anyone for seven years is almost immediately forgotten when she meets the “boy” Cesario and falls in love at first sight, or at least, at first conversation. Near the end of the play, the Duke’s absurdly inflated professions of love meet utter disappointment when he discovers that Olivia is in love with the one he chose to represent his infinite passion to Olivia — his servant Cesario.
In violent rage provoked by Olivia’s failure to respond to his love — not a characteristic of the Bible’s description of love, which Shakespeare’s audience would have been well-aware of — Orsino threatens to “sacrifice the lamb that I do love.” Cesario, in spirit now entirely Viola, vows to joyfully die a thousand deaths to give “rest” — a Biblical word for salvation — to Orsino, whom she professes to love more than life. When the enraged Orsino and Cesario/Viola make a move to depart, Olivia objects, calling Cesario “husband,” language that surprises Cesario/Viola no less than the irate Orsino.
(Of course, we have already seen the scene where Sebastian accidentally meets Olivia and agrees to marry her. We know what Orsino and Viola — not to mention Olivia — do not even remotely suspect. The characters of the play are in the dark. We wait to see what Shakespeare will do with this!)
The priest appears and confirms that he did indeed perform “a contract of eternal bond of love” between Olivia and Cesario/Viola. Then, there is a short interruption by the foolish men from Olivia’s household.
Suddenly, Cesario/Viola’s identical twin, Sebastian, appears. Olivia is confused. The startled Orsino declares: “one face, one voice, one habit and two persons.”
To her astonishment, Olivia discovers that she did not marry Cesario, but his/her twin brother.
As Viola and Sebastian stare at each other in disbelief, each having assumed the other was dead, Viola asks him if he is a spirit and says she is afraid. The scene clearly alludes to Luke 24, where the disciples are afraid when they first see the resurrected Jesus. Viola and Sebastian both died and came back to life, but it is the revelation that Sebastian is alive that clearly alludes to Jesus’ resurrection.
Now Olivia knows that Cesario is actually Viola and she has accidentally married her twin, but it is a happy ending for Olivia because Sebastian is no less noble than his sister.
It is also a happy ending for Viola because now she can reveal herself to Orsino, whom she loves. He has also learned to love her because of her faithful and cheerful service as Cesario and he rejoices to marry her.
Someone living in Shakespeare’s day in which people knew the Bible well would naturally notice all these Biblical allusions. They could not miss the message of a Christmas play which spoke of a mysterious shipwreck bringing salvation to a land in trouble, the lamb being sacrificed and the dead coming back to life — a story which contrasts selfish, self-centered love with the true love of Christ.
This is not a secular play by a secular poet. To see it as such requires that we firmly blind our eyes to the title itself and the Biblical allusions the play presents.