1 00:00:02,170 --> 00:00:06,280 Yes. OK. So this week's lecture is on Twelfth Night. 2 00:00:06,280 --> 00:00:10,850 The play, which comes from the end of the Elizabethan period, we think he's written about 60. 3 00:00:10,850 --> 00:00:16,210 You know, one. We know it's first recorded performances in 16 or two. 4 00:00:16,210 --> 00:00:19,600 And that puts it at the end of Shakespeare's comic period. 5 00:00:19,600 --> 00:00:26,830 So as you probably are getting a sense of during the 15 nineties, Shakespeare mostly writes histories and comedies. 6 00:00:26,830 --> 00:00:30,070 There's a couple of tragedies at the beginning. Around 60, No. 7 00:00:30,070 --> 00:00:40,660 One, the dates of Hamlet ish just after Julius Caesar were sort of moving towards the tragedies which dominate the early part of the Jacobean period. 8 00:00:40,660 --> 00:00:49,570 It's first printed in the First Folio in 16 23. And it's a play which has got as near Thematic Neighbours Hamlet. 9 00:00:49,570 --> 00:00:55,120 Surprisingly, perhaps, it shares the death of fathers and the threat of madness. 10 00:00:55,120 --> 00:00:58,090 King Lear, with which it shares a melancholic fool. 11 00:00:58,090 --> 00:01:07,030 And in fact, Feste, a song at the end of Twelfth Night, is echoed by The Fool in King Lear, the comedy of errors with which it obviously shows twins. 12 00:01:07,030 --> 00:01:10,420 The Tempest with which it shares the storm. 13 00:01:10,420 --> 00:01:17,500 And of course, it also fits with previous comedies of cross-dressing, including two gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice. 14 00:01:17,500 --> 00:01:24,010 And as you like it chronologically, its most closely related to Hamlet, I think, and probably to Troilus and Cressida. 15 00:01:24,010 --> 00:01:30,080 And I might give you some sense of the kind of mood you might want to think more about in the play. 16 00:01:30,080 --> 00:01:35,590 But I'm going to try and do this morning is to turn the lecture around one marginal character. 17 00:01:35,590 --> 00:01:42,470 And I'm stressing that he is marginal, kind of as an experiment to see what we might do with that. 18 00:01:42,470 --> 00:01:44,630 And this is the character of Antonio. 19 00:01:44,630 --> 00:01:51,340 And I think Antonio's role may help us think about some important questions for the play about desire and sexuality, 20 00:01:51,340 --> 00:01:55,360 but also about the way comedy works, the way Shakespeare and comedy works. 21 00:01:55,360 --> 00:02:01,480 And I hope that that will be something which might be useful for you to transfer to the study of other plays. 22 00:02:01,480 --> 00:02:07,510 So we first meet Antonio in Act two, scene one of Twelfth Night, and already a lot has happened. 23 00:02:07,510 --> 00:02:15,460 He and his companion Sebastian are the final pieces in the jigsaw. The last characters to be introduced in the play. 24 00:02:15,460 --> 00:02:18,880 And they're a sign of how the play's complications are going to be resolved. 25 00:02:18,880 --> 00:02:26,080 So the fact the first act in a way sets up the complications and the second act begins by saying this is how they're going to be resolved. 26 00:02:26,080 --> 00:02:31,270 What's happened then so far and I apologise for this, if you if you know this play already like the back of your hand. 27 00:02:31,270 --> 00:02:34,140 But as I said at the start of last week's lecture, 28 00:02:34,140 --> 00:02:40,840 I am going to assume that not everybody particularly does do that and that we need to give as much necessary information as possible. 29 00:02:40,840 --> 00:02:46,510 So let's think what's happened so far in the play. We've met the lovesick Orsino languorously in love. 30 00:02:46,510 --> 00:02:50,590 Perhaps like the speaker in a sonnet in love with being in love. 31 00:02:50,590 --> 00:03:00,370 He's in love with Olivia, a woman who disdains him because she's an extended, potentially excessive mourning for her dead father and her brother. 32 00:03:00,370 --> 00:03:07,810 We found a shipwrecked woman, let's call her Viler, although if we were watching the play, we wouldn't know that that was her name at this point. 33 00:03:07,810 --> 00:03:15,410 Going to talk more about that in a moment. A woman whose brother has been drowned, who wishes she could attend. 34 00:03:15,410 --> 00:03:22,720 Olivia as a servant, recognising their shared status as morning brothers. 35 00:03:22,720 --> 00:03:30,610 And we like to hear fathers, but instead vows to enter the service of all Orsino in male disguise. 36 00:03:30,610 --> 00:03:38,290 Her male persona, says Aria, is such a hit with all see, you know that he sends his new servant to woo Olivia on his behalf, 37 00:03:38,290 --> 00:03:48,160 but says Aria reveals to us that he she is in a difficult position because he she is in love with Orsino himself, herself and problem. 38 00:03:48,160 --> 00:03:52,210 Not going to keep that pronoun thing all the time. Is it slightly irritating? 39 00:03:52,210 --> 00:04:00,040 But we do need to stress that there is a lot of gender ambiguity in this play, which is something I'm going to be spending a good deal of time on. 40 00:04:00,040 --> 00:04:04,270 So the encounter between DeSario and Olivia goes much too well. 41 00:04:04,270 --> 00:04:07,960 Olivia is clearly attracted to the messengers, assured confidence, 42 00:04:07,960 --> 00:04:13,750 and the pair have a charged, somewhat coded conversation in which Orsino supposed love. 43 00:04:13,750 --> 00:04:24,060 Olivia becomes erotically animated by violence, secret passion for Orsino and attracts Olivia to Caesarea. 44 00:04:24,060 --> 00:04:29,110 So, as well as this love triangle, we've been introduced to tensions within Olivia's household. 45 00:04:29,110 --> 00:04:38,270 Her strict steward, Malvolio, possibly intended to signal a Puritan or an extreme Protestant. 46 00:04:38,270 --> 00:04:41,620 A strict steward, Malvolio has clashed with her for first day. 47 00:04:41,620 --> 00:04:47,860 It is clear that the bon vivant Sir Toby Belch uncle to Olivia and his friend and her would be suitors. 48 00:04:47,860 --> 00:04:56,320 Andrew Ague, Cheek and Olivia's waiting woman Maria are a riotous comic problem waiting to happen. 49 00:04:56,320 --> 00:05:01,670 So into this way, they establish relationships between the two households of Orsino and Olivia come Sabbat. 50 00:05:01,670 --> 00:05:07,320 Martin. Violence twin. The one supposedly drowned in the shipwreck. 51 00:05:07,320 --> 00:05:14,700 So it's easy to see why Sebastian would be introduced at this point. We've had one act of introduction or exposition. 52 00:05:14,700 --> 00:05:19,740 The second act begins the long movement towards a new monk in this comedy, 53 00:05:19,740 --> 00:05:25,780 at least Shakespeare doesn't leave the that the way the comedy is going to be resolved too long. 54 00:05:25,780 --> 00:05:30,170 Yes, it is. It's in that way. It's quite a comfortable comedy because no sooner, 55 00:05:30,170 --> 00:05:39,310 if you've got the difficulties established than the source of their resolution is introduced, that's quite comfortable. 56 00:05:39,310 --> 00:05:46,150 Sebastian is, of course, the fourth character who will enable the triangle, which is Orsino scenario. 57 00:05:46,150 --> 00:05:50,950 Olivia will enable that triangle to reconcile into two pairs. 58 00:05:50,950 --> 00:06:01,960 And of course, he is the literal embodiment of the fictive scenario, the male version of Viler who will enable Viler to return to herself. 59 00:06:01,960 --> 00:06:08,380 It is only when Sebastian recognises her in five long scene, 60 00:06:08,380 --> 00:06:14,110 which in reading can look rather ridiculous when the twins don't seem able to recognise that they are twins 61 00:06:14,110 --> 00:06:20,650 and instead go through this long account of their father and their upbringing to reassure each other. 62 00:06:20,650 --> 00:06:28,630 But one which in performance is often extremely moving. It's only in that dialogue that Violet's name is spoken in the play. 63 00:06:28,630 --> 00:06:37,780 So anybody who is watching the play rather than reading it, would have had no name for this person other than her disguised identity of Sario. 64 00:06:37,780 --> 00:06:41,260 So the audience watching is in the same position as the people in Illyria. 65 00:06:41,260 --> 00:06:53,180 They don't know who this mysterious person is. The introduction of Sebastian, therefore, is the means to secure violence, own separate identity. 66 00:06:53,180 --> 00:07:00,500 Now, violence assumption of male dress in this play is rather under motivated in plot terms. 67 00:07:00,500 --> 00:07:06,890 It is, after all, an odd decision for a young, noble woman shipwrecked on a shore, whereas she admits she knows fire. 68 00:07:06,890 --> 00:07:14,540 Her father, one of the prominent local citizens or. Not to send the message saying bring blankets and hot soup to the beach and 69 00:07:14,540 --> 00:07:20,810 instead to wonder which of the local dignity she should become a servant to. 70 00:07:20,810 --> 00:07:26,120 Violet decides to dress herself in male clothes. At this point, she says, she's going to be a eunuch. 71 00:07:26,120 --> 00:07:31,370 Something happens seems to happen in the play where we forget that she's supposed to be a unicorn. 72 00:07:31,370 --> 00:07:35,150 That may be something actually to do with the practicalities of putting the state put in the play. 73 00:07:35,150 --> 00:07:39,850 On the beginning of the play, it looks as if Bilour is played by somebody who's going to do singing. 74 00:07:39,850 --> 00:07:44,570 And a unique is a way of introducing the fact that you'll have a high voice. 75 00:07:44,570 --> 00:07:52,550 But we never get that singing Viler. So Viler is shipwrecked on the beach and takes the extraordinary decision that 76 00:07:52,550 --> 00:07:58,010 the best thing to do is to dress herself in male clothes and become a servant. Now, in some ways, 77 00:07:58,010 --> 00:08:03,380 the same common sense exception to Markus's behaviour towards Lavinia that I discussed last 78 00:08:03,380 --> 00:08:08,990 week when we were talking about Titus Andronicus and the same counterarguments apply here. 79 00:08:08,990 --> 00:08:15,650 Shakespeare's plays are not always or only realistic. Characters sometimes serve their plots rather than the other way round. 80 00:08:15,650 --> 00:08:23,250 It is important for the consequences of violence. Dressing as a man are the most important thing, not necessarily the motivations for it. 81 00:08:23,250 --> 00:08:28,520 And it's quite interesting to think about that as a way that Shakespeare. I think sometimes divides us. 82 00:08:28,520 --> 00:08:35,360 His plotting, sometimes motivation and what leads up to an action is the most important thing we might think about, 83 00:08:35,360 --> 00:08:40,010 say, Julius Caesar as an example of that sometimes, or even Hamlet. 84 00:08:40,010 --> 00:08:49,280 Sometimes what what comes afterwards, what the consequences are. I would think of Macbeth as a play in that kind of structural category. 85 00:08:49,280 --> 00:08:55,100 So Shakespeare's plays are not always our only realistic characters sometimes serve their plots rather than the other way round. 86 00:08:55,100 --> 00:09:01,550 But there's also a more compelling psychological explanation for violent behaviour in becoming her dead brother. 87 00:09:01,550 --> 00:09:11,330 She keeps him alive. So she does a comic thing by resisting death rather than a tragic thing by going along with it. 88 00:09:11,330 --> 00:09:17,390 She tells us later at the end of Act three, I, my brother, know, yet living in my glass, 89 00:09:17,390 --> 00:09:25,430 even such and so in favour was my brother and he well, and he went still in this fashion colour ornament for him. 90 00:09:25,430 --> 00:09:28,930 I imitate so for him I imitate it. 91 00:09:28,930 --> 00:09:35,290 It's only then that it becomes clear that that's her motivation. She's imitating her brother. 92 00:09:35,290 --> 00:09:39,530 So Sebastian is a necessary introduction. Who has a role in the plot? 93 00:09:39,530 --> 00:09:49,190 Perhaps not so much a character as a device. His main purpose is to be substituted effectively for someone he looks like. 94 00:09:49,190 --> 00:09:54,500 It's a kind of opposite or a perverse version of the bad trick that Shakespeare uses in plays like that. 95 00:09:54,500 --> 00:10:01,060 All's well that ends well in measure for measure. The Bedrick is based on not seeing the person and so them looking the same. 96 00:10:01,060 --> 00:10:09,800 Catsuit grey in the dark. We here, we've got Sebastian is in a kind of bedrick in the plot in that he is his only role 97 00:10:09,800 --> 00:10:18,060 is to substitute for someone else who the love object thinks that they're talking to. 98 00:10:18,060 --> 00:10:22,770 So since his only purpose is to be substitutive effectively for someone he looks like we 99 00:10:22,770 --> 00:10:28,680 might think it's important for Sebastian to be as individually underdeveloped as possible. 100 00:10:28,680 --> 00:10:38,310 OK. So if he's going to slot in to be the male Vilo, we don't want him to be a unique individual established yet on his own in the play. 101 00:10:38,310 --> 00:10:43,530 So Antonio, his companion here, is therefore not only unnecessary. 102 00:10:43,530 --> 00:10:48,930 We don't really need him in plot terms, but he might also be thought to be positively undermining. 103 00:10:48,930 --> 00:10:55,330 He undermines the attempt to retain Sebastian's character as a blank sheet. 104 00:10:55,330 --> 00:11:00,070 Now, when Antonio and Sebastian enter, they're already on the verge of parting from each other. 105 00:11:00,070 --> 00:11:04,600 Antonio is the first to speak. Will you stay? No longer, nor will you. 106 00:11:04,600 --> 00:11:08,860 Not that I go with you. Sebastian's answer is no. 107 00:11:08,860 --> 00:11:18,640 He needs to bear his ill's alone. He reveals to Antonio in a kind of strange, unnecessary bit of exposition. 108 00:11:18,640 --> 00:11:26,830 I guess he reveals to Antonio that he is not who Antonio has thought he has hitherto been pretending to be someone called Rodrigo. 109 00:11:26,830 --> 00:11:30,430 We don't know why he now tells Antonio his real name. 110 00:11:30,430 --> 00:11:34,780 Sebastian, son of the Sebastian of Mescaline, who is the father of twins. 111 00:11:34,780 --> 00:11:40,930 We might remember their hamlet son of Hamlet, says Sebastian of Misselling, was the father of twins. 112 00:11:40,930 --> 00:11:50,950 The girl has now drowned. Antonio's responses to this story as it unfolds suggests that whereas in the past they've had a relationship of equals. 113 00:11:50,950 --> 00:11:58,440 This new revelation about who's Sebastian really is means that his Sebastian social status is much higher than Antonio's. 114 00:11:58,440 --> 00:12:03,430 These are Antonio's next remarks. Pardon me, sir. Your bad entertainment. 115 00:12:03,430 --> 00:12:09,040 And then let me be your servant. Sebastian rebuffs him. 116 00:12:09,040 --> 00:12:16,840 But as he leaves, he does tell Antonio where he is going. I am bound to the council cenotes court left on stage alone. 117 00:12:16,840 --> 00:12:22,270 Antonio gives a short verse soliloquy, the form of his words here, 118 00:12:22,270 --> 00:12:28,180 unlike the prose of the scene before, suggests heightened emotion as it does elsewhere in the play. 119 00:12:28,180 --> 00:12:34,270 And the content expresses love for Sebastian. The gentleness of all the gods go with the. 120 00:12:34,270 --> 00:12:39,370 I have many enemies in all cenotes court. Else I would very shortly see the there. 121 00:12:39,370 --> 00:12:47,090 But come what may. I do adore these so that danger may seem sport and I will go. 122 00:12:47,090 --> 00:12:52,480 I hope you can see already that something in this short scene replays the associations of household service. 123 00:12:52,480 --> 00:12:57,520 Let me be your servant and romantic love. I'll do anything for you. 124 00:12:57,520 --> 00:13:06,010 Which has already been part of the complicated interactions between Orsino and his page, DeSario and Olivia and her messenger DeSario. 125 00:13:06,010 --> 00:13:12,550 These are gonna be replayed again by Malvolio is tricked into thinking his mistress is in love with her Malvolio servant, 126 00:13:12,550 --> 00:13:21,100 thinking that his relationship with his mistress is not one of of households a service but romantic service. 127 00:13:21,100 --> 00:13:25,540 These confusion's play on the overlap of servitude and eroticism and on the 128 00:13:25,540 --> 00:13:31,380 overlaps between the language of devotion and courtship and those of service. 129 00:13:31,380 --> 00:13:39,370 And they do something to parallel relationships of those of different social status with those of different sexes. 130 00:13:39,370 --> 00:13:45,850 And just as viler as servant or Seno enters into a relationship of passionate devotion, 131 00:13:45,850 --> 00:13:51,220 which Orsino can barely understand because of not recognising who Viler is. 132 00:13:51,220 --> 00:13:55,240 So, too does Antonio with Sebastian. 133 00:13:55,240 --> 00:14:03,520 But the overlap of the erotic and the romantic with the devotion of the servant in this scene with Antonio and Sebastian is a striking one. 134 00:14:03,520 --> 00:14:10,600 One way to understand this scene is as a lover's Break-Up. One party is saying, Don't come with me. 135 00:14:10,600 --> 00:14:14,950 Don't come with me. It's not you. It's me. I haven't got over my father's death. 136 00:14:14,950 --> 00:14:18,340 I'm not the person I think that I am, not the person you think I am. 137 00:14:18,340 --> 00:14:23,950 Probably I'm not even the person I think I am. I'm not the person you think I am. And the other partner is saying, Don't you want me? 138 00:14:23,950 --> 00:14:29,290 Tell me where you're going. I'll do anything for you. I'm sorry. I didn't understand how things were for you. 139 00:14:29,290 --> 00:14:33,760 It ends with the wonderfully conflicted remark from Sebastian. Don't follow me. 140 00:14:33,760 --> 00:14:41,320 I'm going to Orsino was caught. No wonder that Lindsey positive directing the play for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 141 00:14:41,320 --> 00:14:49,030 Stratford in 2001 had the two men getting dressed on an unmade double bed as they talked. 142 00:14:49,030 --> 00:14:54,760 Now we've learnt in scholarship to be more cautious than this kind of staging might suggest. 143 00:14:54,760 --> 00:15:00,100 Two historical trajectories have made us mindful of reading the intensity of this scene. 144 00:15:00,100 --> 00:15:03,100 As a gay relationship in the modern sense, 145 00:15:03,100 --> 00:15:11,770 the first is the history of sexuality outlined by fuko and elaborated and modified by numerous other cultural historians. 146 00:15:11,770 --> 00:15:20,920 The consensus from this work is that before somewhere around the 18th century, sexual practises did not constitute an identity. 147 00:15:20,920 --> 00:15:26,570 So the labels, hetero or homosexual, we're not we're not we're not really available. 148 00:15:26,570 --> 00:15:33,070 You did things that didn't make you things. You might do things, but you are not defined by them. 149 00:15:33,070 --> 00:15:39,550 You might have read The Guardian columnist Suzanne Moine in the weekend papers suggesting we've actually gone backwards in this respect, she wrote. 150 00:15:39,550 --> 00:15:47,710 Now it seems homosexuality is as fixed as heterosexuality. It's not about what you do, but who you are. 151 00:15:47,710 --> 00:15:58,660 Now, historians of sexuality tell us that binary modes sorry, binary models of sexuality and binary identities formed by sexual practises post date. 152 00:15:58,660 --> 00:16:03,610 The Renaissance period is that they come after this period and therefore the identity homosexual, 153 00:16:03,610 --> 00:16:12,990 which is very available to us as a label for intense same sex desire, is not really a very appropriate one to read on to early modern culture. 154 00:16:12,990 --> 00:16:22,620 The second and related important historical context is the high value placed in this period on male male friendship. 155 00:16:22,620 --> 00:16:34,250 Humanist theories of mailed friendship idealised it as the perfect union of souls, the Aristotelian idea of a soul in two bodies. 156 00:16:34,250 --> 00:16:39,230 These are terms which we would often now allocate to heterosexual marriage. 157 00:16:39,230 --> 00:16:45,320 And in fact, the marriage service in the Book of Common Prayer, a book derived from humanist learning, 158 00:16:45,320 --> 00:16:54,590 really uses that Aristotelian idea of the union, its souls carried over from male friendship discourse into the discourse of marriage. 159 00:16:54,590 --> 00:17:03,630 For Montand, the emotional bond between male friends far exceeded any pragmatic alliance with a wife. 160 00:17:03,630 --> 00:17:13,340 And for Francis Bacon, also writing an essay on friendship, a man without a friend may quit the stage, may quit the stage. 161 00:17:13,340 --> 00:17:17,840 He has no role. It's quite interesting to literals this in plays. 162 00:17:17,840 --> 00:17:28,850 Men without friends in plays are in tragedies. Hence the problem of Horatio in Hamlet, who is a threat to Hamlet's tragic isolation. 163 00:17:28,850 --> 00:17:33,890 Tragic characters don't have best friends. That's the that's the trope, isn't it? 164 00:17:33,890 --> 00:17:39,440 Of that YouTube phenomenon, the gay best friend coming in at the end of Shakespeare's tragedies. 165 00:17:39,440 --> 00:17:44,760 Have you seen any of those so incomes of wonderfully camp figure who says, come on, 166 00:17:44,760 --> 00:17:50,510 you know, let's get your hair done and you're too good for him or something? 167 00:17:50,510 --> 00:17:58,730 So there's a maybe that friendship is friendship, even in that even in that sort parodic version, friendship is against tragedy. 168 00:17:58,730 --> 00:18:02,060 If you've got a best friend, you're not in a tragedy. And Hamlet knows that. 169 00:18:02,060 --> 00:18:09,680 I think that's why he can't really deal with Horatio and Shakespeare knows that, which is why he doesn't know what to do with that character. 170 00:18:09,680 --> 00:18:14,300 So Shakespeare engages with this important tradition of male friendship in two plays 171 00:18:14,300 --> 00:18:18,770 whose indicate who titles indicate that their primary concern is with male friendship, 172 00:18:18,770 --> 00:18:25,900 not romantic courtship. The two gentlemen of Verona and the collaborative work with John Fletcher, the two noble kinsmen. 173 00:18:25,900 --> 00:18:31,490 So we know that this is a this is a field of interest for Shakespeare. 174 00:18:31,490 --> 00:18:37,340 The unfortunately named Walter Dork in a short pamphlet on friendship, which you published in fifteen eighty nine, 175 00:18:37,340 --> 00:18:42,690 and a pamphlet which seems to have been designed to filter down to the slightly lower classes, 176 00:18:42,690 --> 00:18:47,660 these this more aristocratic and noble idea of male friendship describes. 177 00:18:47,660 --> 00:18:57,140 He looked upon his faithful friend, doth behold, a perfect pattern of his own person being, as it were, an alter ego. 178 00:18:57,140 --> 00:19:01,250 That is another himself, an alter ego. 179 00:19:01,250 --> 00:19:09,050 That is another himself. So Antonia and Sebastian then are just good friends. 180 00:19:09,050 --> 00:19:17,210 Well, perhaps it's also true that that phrase in Sebas in Antonios soliloquy, I do adore thee. 181 00:19:17,210 --> 00:19:22,940 So I do adore this. So is unexpectedly fervent. 182 00:19:22,940 --> 00:19:31,790 The word adore turns up again in the play in the supposed letter of Olivia to Malvolio, where it is clearly in a context of erotic love. 183 00:19:31,790 --> 00:19:37,130 I may command where I adore Sir Andrew Ague cheek's poignant. 184 00:19:37,130 --> 00:19:44,420 I was adored once to follows Sir Tobey's acknowledgement that Maria is one that adores me again, 185 00:19:44,420 --> 00:19:50,750 linking the word with romantic or erotic love, using a concordance either a printed one or more. 186 00:19:50,750 --> 00:19:56,520 Usually now a searchable text of Shakespeare online would enable us to broaden out the connotation of the word. 187 00:19:56,520 --> 00:20:02,390 Just glancing at that this morning made me think that almost all the occurrences in Shakespeare 188 00:20:02,390 --> 00:20:08,330 imply either heterosexual idealisation or some kind of relationship with the gods. 189 00:20:08,330 --> 00:20:12,980 So this research would suggest that perhaps Antonios language, the use of the word adore, 190 00:20:12,980 --> 00:20:23,810 has connotations of Eros rather than Filia as the Greek terms for erotic love and deep friendship allow us to separate out. 191 00:20:23,810 --> 00:20:28,040 So while theatre directors like Lindsay Posner, who I started a moment ago, 192 00:20:28,040 --> 00:20:35,150 have no particular obligation to the historical meaning of their texts, so perform texts are not historical reconstructions. 193 00:20:35,150 --> 00:20:47,120 Thank goodness. It may be that there is some semantic support for the idea of a strong, possibly sexual bond between Antonio and Sebastian. 194 00:20:47,120 --> 00:20:51,900 Those critics who attempt to suggest that Antonios love for Sebastian is unrequited. 195 00:20:51,900 --> 00:20:57,730 Yes, that's the one to acknowledge that that's how you kind of retreat from the difficult potential difficulties of this, maybe, 196 00:20:57,730 --> 00:21:02,630 and ignoring the importance of Sebastian's greeting to him in Act five, 197 00:21:02,630 --> 00:21:08,940 entering the stage to clear up the misapprehension that Olivia has married DeSario and that Caesarea has beaten up. 198 00:21:08,940 --> 00:21:13,370 So, Toby. Both these things involve Sebastian, not Azaria. 199 00:21:13,370 --> 00:21:21,180 Sebastian addresses his new bride formally and courteously. I am sorry, madam, I have hurt your kinsman. 200 00:21:21,180 --> 00:21:25,340 But he turns to greet Antonio in altogether more enthusiastic terms. 201 00:21:25,340 --> 00:21:32,360 Antonio. Oh, my dear Antonio. How have the hours wracked and tormented me since I have lost the emotional 202 00:21:32,360 --> 00:21:36,170 focus which might be all the more remarkable given that as well as his new wife, 203 00:21:36,170 --> 00:21:41,540 his supposed drowned twin sister is also present on stage. 204 00:21:41,540 --> 00:21:48,530 So why would this be important? Well, it's important structurally precisely because Antonio is so unnecessary to the plot. 205 00:21:48,530 --> 00:21:52,400 He has just four percent of its lines, the same as Fabian. 206 00:21:52,400 --> 00:21:59,060 He appears in just four scenes in two of these, which comprise about three quarters of his lines in the play. 207 00:21:59,060 --> 00:22:02,480 He is with Sebastian expressing his love in Act three. 208 00:22:02,480 --> 00:22:08,660 Scene three, the pair meet again. Sebastian opens the scene, admitting he is glad to see Antonio. 209 00:22:08,660 --> 00:22:15,200 And Antonio says in reply, My desire, more sharp than Filer's Steel did spur me forth. 210 00:22:15,200 --> 00:22:25,220 My desire did spur me forth. Antonio gives him his purse for no reason other than for Sebastian to buy himself something nice haply. 211 00:22:25,220 --> 00:22:34,310 Or I shall light upon some toy you have desire to purchase there to meet the elephant in the two other scenes in which he occurs. 212 00:22:34,310 --> 00:22:39,110 Antonio begins to unravel the plot of the two identical twins. 213 00:22:39,110 --> 00:22:42,540 His intervention when Violet is fighting Andrew in the mistaken belief it is 214 00:22:42,540 --> 00:22:48,560 Sebastian and his subsequent arrest when he asks Sario for his purse back. 215 00:22:48,560 --> 00:22:57,320 These are the means by which the play world catches up with the fact of the two twins and comes slowly to unpick the confusions in this role, 216 00:22:57,320 --> 00:23:02,540 Antonio resembles Tromeo of Syracuse in the comedy of Errors. 217 00:23:02,540 --> 00:23:10,460 But that doesn't that doesn't get can get away from the fact that his passion for Sebastian is quite unnecessary in terms of that role. 218 00:23:10,460 --> 00:23:14,840 I've already mentioned that plots require characters rather than the other way round. 219 00:23:14,840 --> 00:23:18,980 But Antonio is a slight counter to this. 220 00:23:18,980 --> 00:23:22,860 He's a character. The plot doesn't really need it. 221 00:23:22,860 --> 00:23:32,330 So I think Antonio Israel must be a thematic one. His desire for Sebastian resonates with all seniors for Sario and with Olivia's for Viler, 222 00:23:32,330 --> 00:23:40,970 which is to say, however hard we might want to try, it is hard fully to straighten out this play. 223 00:23:40,970 --> 00:23:46,400 It's hard to reconcile it to the conventional drive towards marriage in this light. 224 00:23:46,400 --> 00:23:54,200 The play's teasing subtitle or What Will or What You Will has a decidedly saucy ring to it. 225 00:23:54,200 --> 00:24:02,330 Anything goes. Whatever you like. Every which way. Or perhaps even as the ambiguous ending of Billy Wilder's analogous cross dress film comedy. 226 00:24:02,330 --> 00:24:12,750 Some like it. Hot has it. Nobody's perfect. Critics have tried hard to suggest that the attraction of scenario for Orsino is that he is feminine. 227 00:24:12,750 --> 00:24:19,940 Thy small pipe is as the maiden's organ, shrill and sound and all is Sembler TIV a woman's part. 228 00:24:19,940 --> 00:24:21,920 That's all seen as description of Caesarea. 229 00:24:21,920 --> 00:24:28,580 So the idea there seems to be that all Seno is actually falling for a woman at some level or sener responds. 230 00:24:28,580 --> 00:24:36,110 This is area's femininity. In this interpretation, when the page is revealed as Vialet the play's conclusion. 231 00:24:36,110 --> 00:24:39,620 There is a kind of recognition and retrospective understanding. 232 00:24:39,620 --> 00:24:44,870 This is the take in Trevor None's highly enjoyable film of the play, which I recommend. 233 00:24:44,870 --> 00:24:49,370 The whole thing is available in segments on YouTube, which I'm not allowed to recommend. 234 00:24:49,370 --> 00:24:56,360 Toby Stephens as Orsino and Imogene Stubbs as DeSario find themselves repeatedly drawn together, 235 00:24:56,360 --> 00:25:01,310 almost kissing during one of FSD songs before Orsino pulls back, horrified. 236 00:25:01,310 --> 00:25:05,750 Is he gay? His demeanour when Viler is revealed in the film is one of relief. 237 00:25:05,750 --> 00:25:14,390 Ah, that's what was going on, of course, in a film in which Vialet is played by Imogene Stubbs or any other female actor. 238 00:25:14,390 --> 00:25:20,840 There is at heart a certain gender stability. We all know that DeSario is really female because he's played by a woman. 239 00:25:20,840 --> 00:25:26,510 The character of violence is always somewhere in evidence. Not so, of course, on the Elizabethan stage, 240 00:25:26,510 --> 00:25:34,130 where there is no reassuring physical femininity to sort out the play's queer moments underneath the characters. 241 00:25:34,130 --> 00:25:39,830 Azaria's pretence of maleness was, oh, maleness. 242 00:25:39,830 --> 00:25:45,130 But even if Orsino does fall for a fictional woman in the play, that can't really help us with Olivia. 243 00:25:45,130 --> 00:25:50,490 She also does or Mark, rather, it moves the plays. 244 00:25:50,490 --> 00:26:02,820 It's sort of tantalising frisson of same sex desire across from Olivia Insys area to from sorry, from Orsino in Syria to Olivia DeSario. 245 00:26:02,820 --> 00:26:11,230 And just as we've looked at the word a door across Shakespeare's works to try and pin down its meanings so we might look at the name Antonio used in 246 00:26:11,230 --> 00:26:19,990 the Merchant of Venice five years previously to name another man tied emotionally to a man to whom he gets money and whose marriage he witnesses. 247 00:26:19,990 --> 00:26:26,260 In conclusion, something of Antonio in Twelfth Night echoes with this more developed picture 248 00:26:26,260 --> 00:26:30,880 of a male friendship structurally and effectively opposed to marital coupling, 249 00:26:30,880 --> 00:26:32,350 yet enabling it. 250 00:26:32,350 --> 00:26:41,560 So Antonio in The Merchant of Venice is both the threat to Pisania and Portia's marriage, but also the enabler, the kind of sugar daddy. 251 00:26:41,560 --> 00:26:46,990 We might also look at another Antonio and Sebastian remembered in The Tempest. 252 00:26:46,990 --> 00:26:53,170 There's something about this name and something about this pairing which keeps turning around in Shakespeare's head. 253 00:26:53,170 --> 00:27:02,440 I'm going to talk more about these adjacent characters and these echoes in a moment when we talk about Antonio's role in the ending of Twelfth Night. 254 00:27:02,440 --> 00:27:08,110 So a sexual transgression then, I think is a crucial part of the play's comedy. 255 00:27:08,110 --> 00:27:12,960 And Antonio's role enables us to see that more clearly. 256 00:27:12,960 --> 00:27:21,150 Critical attitudes to this and the visibility of this relationship have changed along with social attitudes. 257 00:27:21,150 --> 00:27:26,580 Writing in the late 1950s in a book which is still otherwise very influential. 258 00:27:26,580 --> 00:27:30,120 His Shakespeares festive comedy s.L. 259 00:27:30,120 --> 00:27:37,020 Barber describes Twelfth Night in these terms. It's quite a long quotation, so read out twice. 260 00:27:37,020 --> 00:27:43,120 The most fundamental distinction Twelfth Night brings home to us is the difference between men and women. 261 00:27:43,120 --> 00:27:49,150 To say this may seem to labour the obvious for what love story does not emphasise this difference. 262 00:27:49,150 --> 00:27:57,370 But the disguising of a girl as a boy in Twelfth Night is so exploited as to renew in a special way our sense of the difference, 263 00:27:57,370 --> 00:28:05,560 just as a Saturnalia and reversal of social role, roles need not threaten the social structure, but can serve instead to consolidate it. 264 00:28:05,560 --> 00:28:14,980 So a temporary, playful reversal of sexual roles can renew the meaning of the normal relation one can add with sexual, as with other relations. 265 00:28:14,980 --> 00:28:19,690 It is when the normal is secure. That playful operation is benign. 266 00:28:19,690 --> 00:28:27,020 OK, so the normal is secure. It's a great idea, but I think it's a completely wrong one that we would have to find, 267 00:28:27,020 --> 00:28:33,130 would have to look quite hard to find a normal or a secure normal in in Twelfth Night. 268 00:28:33,130 --> 00:28:39,660 And in fact, the whole point of the play seems to be to challenge that on every front. 269 00:28:39,660 --> 00:28:46,890 Barbic ends that section I've just been quoting this basic security of the normal explains why there is 270 00:28:46,890 --> 00:28:53,040 so little that is queasy in all Shakespeare's handling of boy actors playing women and playing women, 271 00:28:53,040 --> 00:29:01,320 pretending to be men queasy must be a sort of euphemism for kind of homo erotic muscatel homosexual in that in that sentence. 272 00:29:01,320 --> 00:29:06,350 That's what Bob. But that's what's important for bother to try and assert in the late 1950s. 273 00:29:06,350 --> 00:29:07,860 And if you look at more recent criticism, 274 00:29:07,860 --> 00:29:16,800 you'll see there's been an entire shift away from that and away from those kind of assumptions so that the normal is secure. 275 00:29:16,800 --> 00:29:21,810 Seems to me to underestimate the play's charms or to put that another way, 276 00:29:21,810 --> 00:29:30,480 we could see that Antonios role is in part a challenge to the idea of normative city in these terms. 277 00:29:30,480 --> 00:29:40,670 But he may also, as I want to try and explore, be a kind of scapegoat for the play's movement away from sexual transgression towards marriage, 278 00:29:40,670 --> 00:29:49,650 a scapegoat for the movement from queer to straight. He's arrested on a charge which even the play itself seems to acknowledge is trumped up. 279 00:29:49,650 --> 00:29:57,420 It's related to some mysterious past sea battle. It's a kind of odd moments in the play, which doesn't really seem motivated. 280 00:29:57,420 --> 00:30:05,490 This arrest might be read as the necessary precondition for Sebastian to undertake his heterosexual plot work to resolve the plots. 281 00:30:05,490 --> 00:30:11,640 Erotic triangulation. In the second half of this lecture, 282 00:30:11,640 --> 00:30:18,420 I want to try and use Antonio to talk about the play's ending and thereby to discuss some of the conventions of Shakespearean 283 00:30:18,420 --> 00:30:29,310 comedy and how these might be extended or modified in a useful contemporary summary of the differences between comedy and tragedy. 284 00:30:29,310 --> 00:30:33,270 The playwright and theatrical apologist Thomas Heyward described them. 285 00:30:33,270 --> 00:30:38,280 In these terms, tragedies and comedies differ us in comedies. 286 00:30:38,280 --> 00:30:43,720 Turbulent Uprima Tranquila, Ultimate in Tragedies Tranquila, Premer, turbulent. 287 00:30:43,720 --> 00:30:47,820 Ultimate comedies begin in trouble and end in peace. 288 00:30:47,820 --> 00:30:53,610 Tragedies Beginning CALM's and end in Tempest. Comedies begin in trouble and end in peace. 289 00:30:53,610 --> 00:31:02,490 Tragedies beginning CALM's and end in Tempest. It's it's a it's an enjoyable kind of structural sense of the difference in 290 00:31:02,490 --> 00:31:08,040 tragedy and comedy being largely a sense of why you choose to start and stop. 291 00:31:08,040 --> 00:31:16,540 Perhaps the lowest common denominator of that peaceful comic ending in Shakespeare is marriage. 292 00:31:16,540 --> 00:31:19,500 Now, that's not always true, actually, in Shakespeare's plays. 293 00:31:19,500 --> 00:31:27,660 Comedy of Errors, for instance, is very clearly a comedy which doesn't end in marriage and ends with a different kind of family reconciliation. 294 00:31:27,660 --> 00:31:35,520 But it still felt to be such a conventional trope. Concluding trope that Love's Labour's lost to highly aloof and self-conscious play 295 00:31:35,520 --> 00:31:41,280 about plays and about comedy and about language can mockett in its conclusion. 296 00:31:41,280 --> 00:31:48,750 You may know that that play ends with the marriages deferred, having set up a very obvious sense of how this is going to work out. 297 00:31:48,750 --> 00:31:53,310 King and his three noblemen in the opening scene of Love's Labour's Lost say that 298 00:31:53,310 --> 00:31:58,320 they're going to devote themselves to study and not have anything to do with women. 299 00:31:58,320 --> 00:32:03,160 And immediately somebody gallops up and says, the princess and her three ladies are here at the gate. 300 00:32:03,160 --> 00:32:08,160 You know, it's kind of obvious setup. This is what's going to happen. There are these four marriages at the end. 301 00:32:08,160 --> 00:32:12,600 But the play ends with the marriages deferred by the women for a year. 302 00:32:12,600 --> 00:32:19,550 So the king says at the end of Love's Labour's Lost are wooing does not end like an old play. 303 00:32:19,550 --> 00:32:25,420 Jack, have not Jill. These ladies courtesy might have made our sport accommodate. 304 00:32:25,420 --> 00:32:33,150 So comedy is seen there as an old form in which Jack hath Jill at the end. 305 00:32:33,150 --> 00:32:37,650 Now Twelfth Night is clearly heading towards marriage, towards multiple marriages. 306 00:32:37,650 --> 00:32:42,390 Olivia and Sebastian have already married, albeit under slightly false pretences. 307 00:32:42,390 --> 00:32:49,470 Orsino accepts Azaria as all seen as mistress and his Fancy's queen. 308 00:32:49,470 --> 00:32:57,190 Even Maria and Toby have married in recompense for her work in writing the letter to Malvolio. 309 00:32:57,190 --> 00:33:02,670 But Twelfth Night is still a play more than usually concerned with bringing into its long, 310 00:33:02,670 --> 00:33:12,180 final scene characters for whom the comedy has failed, characters who do not have a comic resolution. 311 00:33:12,180 --> 00:33:18,690 And this is in part the sense in which it's been identified variously as dark or post festive. 312 00:33:18,690 --> 00:33:24,900 Heading towards the problem plays where the question of how comic the ending is is is very, very pressing. 313 00:33:24,900 --> 00:33:37,230 Plays like measure for measure and all's well that ends well. Most prominent, I think, of these anti comic figures is Malvolio. 314 00:33:37,230 --> 00:33:43,740 Malvolio is rolling the network of desire and transgression that make up Twelfth Night is an interesting one. 315 00:33:43,740 --> 00:33:51,030 His aspiration to marry Olivia Mursalin, exploited by Maria's penmanship, is depicted in great detail. 316 00:33:51,030 --> 00:33:57,270 He has a long fantasy in which possession of his mistress is figured in terms of the possession 317 00:33:57,270 --> 00:34:04,220 of a range of high status consumer goods indicative of luxury and breeding a day bed, 318 00:34:04,220 --> 00:34:13,600 a branch red velvet gown. Elizabethan sumptuary laws prevented all but the most the highest echelons of society from wearing velvet. 319 00:34:13,600 --> 00:34:23,460 So even that adjective velvet is very significant. He even wants the latest miniaturise technological gizmo a watch. 320 00:34:23,460 --> 00:34:29,460 The letter, supposedly from Olivia, explicitly encourages these dreams of social mobility. 321 00:34:29,460 --> 00:34:36,450 Some are born great. Some achieve greatness. Some have greatness thrust upon them where great means. 322 00:34:36,450 --> 00:34:41,940 I think, according to OBD of persons eminent by reason of birth, rank, wealth, 323 00:34:41,940 --> 00:34:48,780 power or position of high social or official position, case of great is a social term. 324 00:34:48,780 --> 00:34:56,370 And Olivia is encouraging Malvolio to rise socially, to think of himself ambitiously and aspiration early. 325 00:34:56,370 --> 00:35:01,240 Amid all the play with sexual identity in Twelfth Night, which I've been talking about already. 326 00:35:01,240 --> 00:35:10,380 Malvolio transgression is a different one. He wants social elevation and for this, of course, he is roundly punished. 327 00:35:10,380 --> 00:35:18,630 The play moves from the often highly comic scene of his humiliation in Cross Carter's face contorted into an unfamiliar smile. 328 00:35:18,630 --> 00:35:19,980 There's a great joke. 329 00:35:19,980 --> 00:35:26,880 One of the best jokes, I think, in Shakespeare when he replies to Olivia's concerned that he is ill, Olivia says, will go to bed at Malvolio. 330 00:35:26,880 --> 00:35:31,590 He says brilliantly and appropriately to bed, I sweetheart and I'll come to thee. 331 00:35:31,590 --> 00:35:36,180 So we move from a scene which is often very funny in the theatre. Funnier than you obviously found it then. 332 00:35:36,180 --> 00:35:40,010 But perhaps I am. Perhaps I spoilt it. I won't try again. 333 00:35:40,010 --> 00:35:41,450 It is actually really funny. 334 00:35:41,450 --> 00:35:48,660 The removal of a scene which many theatregoers and readers or at least myself have enjoyed to one that many people have felt uncomfortable with. 335 00:35:48,660 --> 00:35:54,500 When first day visits the imprisoned Malvolio to persuade him that he is mad that what he is seeing, 336 00:35:54,500 --> 00:36:00,180 that he sees perceptions are twisted and he is not seeing the world as it really is. 337 00:36:00,180 --> 00:36:07,050 The joke perhaps seems to have gone too far. Malvolio is returned to the stage in the last scene, 338 00:36:07,050 --> 00:36:16,820 swearing revenge on the whole pack of you acknowledges the way the community is really interesting would pack because it makes us the people on stage. 339 00:36:16,820 --> 00:36:25,640 The people in the audience into a kind of a lot of hands and lots of imagery in this play of hunting bloke, but both classer sized in the myth of act. 340 00:36:25,640 --> 00:36:34,080 Him and Diana right at the beginning, but also bear baiting and bloodsport and those kinds of hunting with dogs. 341 00:36:34,080 --> 00:36:40,530 A malvolio language that implicates us all in that, I think, in really interesting way. 342 00:36:40,530 --> 00:36:49,200 So Malvolio swearing revenge on the whole pack of you acknowledges the way the community has turned on him and on his ambition. 343 00:36:49,200 --> 00:36:54,540 It's really important to notice that no such punishment is handed down for sexual transgression. 344 00:36:54,540 --> 00:37:02,250 It doesn't seem to matter in this play that women dressed as men, even though we think that must be very challenging and dangerous. 345 00:37:02,250 --> 00:37:06,860 The cross dress viler is the only person at the end of the play who really gets what she wants. 346 00:37:06,860 --> 00:37:14,430 He is rewarded for that deception. It's a good reminder that perhaps playing with gender identity is less fraught. 347 00:37:14,430 --> 00:37:22,190 On the early modern stage than playing with with class or rank, we might just say in a kind of parenthesis there. 348 00:37:22,190 --> 00:37:23,550 Critics have have, I think, 349 00:37:23,550 --> 00:37:33,770 come to feel that the spectre of Viler dressed as a man being the play's challenge to normative ideas of femininity is a bit of a decoy, 350 00:37:33,770 --> 00:37:40,110 and that the most challenging figure in this play to conventional ideas of femininity is actually Olivia. 351 00:37:40,110 --> 00:37:44,970 Olivia is a highborn female character who says she will not get married. 352 00:37:44,970 --> 00:37:50,760 She runs her own household. She doesn't need a man to enable her to do that. 353 00:37:50,760 --> 00:38:01,740 She's an efficient, effective woman who is withdrawing herself from the emotional and kind of social forms of marriage. 354 00:38:01,740 --> 00:38:06,090 She's like women in Shakespeare. Any woman in Shakespeare's comedies who says she isn't going to get married, 355 00:38:06,090 --> 00:38:09,990 we know there's going to be some plot convulsion which makes sure she does get married. 356 00:38:09,990 --> 00:38:16,320 And that happens to Olivia, too. It's one argument says that Olivia has been humiliated by her treatment in the play. 357 00:38:16,320 --> 00:38:22,260 She's being cheeky, like Malvolio, who's being punished for not fulfilling her proper role. 358 00:38:22,260 --> 00:38:27,660 So back to my early mother is a prominent outsider in the play's conclusion, but so too are others. 359 00:38:27,660 --> 00:38:35,450 First day is also outside the unions, which structure the ending of the play free to deliver, then his melancholy epilogue in the form of a song. 360 00:38:35,450 --> 00:38:42,650 But to some extent. Foster has been an outsider throughout an observer of events rather than a participant. 361 00:38:42,650 --> 00:38:48,320 But next to them, and perhaps even more alienated from the comic denouement, because he has so few lines to speak. 362 00:38:48,320 --> 00:38:56,760 Is Antonio. Antonio has his longest speech in Act five when he expresses the pain of his betrayal by Sebastian, 363 00:38:56,760 --> 00:39:03,920 are most in grateful boy who has repaid him for saving his life with false cunning and deny denial. 364 00:39:03,920 --> 00:39:08,130 And the idea that Sebastian is a most in grateful boy to Antonio really 365 00:39:08,130 --> 00:39:12,750 anticipates the speech where we'll see no thinking that says Mario has married. 366 00:39:12,750 --> 00:39:18,240 Olivia also turns on that page and feels a great weight of betrayal. 367 00:39:18,240 --> 00:39:26,100 Now in the scene, as is Aria situation, it's recoupable because his aria has not married in Libya and in fact, is there to marry or. 368 00:39:26,100 --> 00:39:34,830 Would get the same speech. Essentially, I think twice, once from Antonio talking about Sebastian and once from Orsino talking about his aria. 369 00:39:34,830 --> 00:39:39,150 But the Antonia Sebastian one. Nothing can be done about that. But have a look at them. 370 00:39:39,150 --> 00:39:44,510 I think they're the same. They are the same speech, really. 371 00:39:44,510 --> 00:39:55,280 Antonio then looks on as the plots unravel in 300 lines, which, as we know from last week, would take about 20 to 25 minutes on stage. 372 00:39:55,280 --> 00:40:00,500 Antonio has four lines of speech yet he's on stage throughout. 373 00:40:00,500 --> 00:40:11,270 Since he's so little used, this seems rather extravagant. An analysis of the casting of Twelfth Night suggests that 14 actors could play it. 374 00:40:11,270 --> 00:40:15,260 It's not particularly demanding in terms of casting, 375 00:40:15,260 --> 00:40:21,080 but one of those 14 actors is someone to deliver just one hundred and six lines by Antonio Spread. 376 00:40:21,080 --> 00:40:26,780 As I said, across four of the play's 18 scenes, it's not much of a part. 377 00:40:26,780 --> 00:40:30,620 But the possibilities that the actor playing Antonio could double could play other 378 00:40:30,620 --> 00:40:35,360 small roles as a common structural structuring principle of Shakespeare's plays. 379 00:40:35,360 --> 00:40:42,860 These possibilities are severely hampered by having Antonio onstage in Act five, scene one, which requires 12 characters. 380 00:40:42,860 --> 00:40:47,810 So if Antonio weren't on stage in this scene, he could double up with all kinds of other characters. 381 00:40:47,810 --> 00:40:52,610 The fact that he is onstage in this scene means really another person in the play, 382 00:40:52,610 --> 00:40:57,170 another person on the payroll and getting all this information from care. 383 00:40:57,170 --> 00:41:02,270 Elam's album three edition of Twelfth Night, which has got a grid about who appears in what scenes. 384 00:41:02,270 --> 00:41:08,660 It's actually really easy to do a casting grid yourself. Obviously, you just do the characters on one side and the scenes across the top. 385 00:41:08,660 --> 00:41:11,680 Quite useful, actually, to see who who is it, who's where. 386 00:41:11,680 --> 00:41:19,060 And it just it just got a different visual sense of what's happening in a place that could be a good way of getting through or all of the talk. 387 00:41:19,060 --> 00:41:23,390 There in Shakespeare. I don't say you should try and get all the time. 388 00:41:23,390 --> 00:41:28,670 Talk is the point, but can be good to have a different vision or visual representation of the play. 389 00:41:28,670 --> 00:41:33,080 So Antonio doesn't say much in the scene that prevents him from doubling up roles. 390 00:41:33,080 --> 00:41:35,810 And for Shakespeare, who is a playwright uniquely for this period, 391 00:41:35,810 --> 00:41:42,950 who writes for a fixed group of actors and knows how about how to use his personnel effectively. 392 00:41:42,950 --> 00:41:51,700 This is unusually inefficient. The only logical explanation, I think, must be that Antonio silent presence in the final scene is important. 393 00:41:51,700 --> 00:41:56,690 It's worth devoting an actor to for that time. Elsewhere in Shakespeare, 394 00:41:56,690 --> 00:42:02,400 I think we have become critically very attentive to silences when a character is 395 00:42:02,400 --> 00:42:07,220 onstage and not saying anything is of course very easy to read over that one. 396 00:42:07,220 --> 00:42:14,660 We're working from print. But a character on the stage who isn't saying anything is always meaningful. 397 00:42:14,660 --> 00:42:18,260 An actor not speaking is full of meaning by their body language. 398 00:42:18,260 --> 00:42:20,750 They may be attentive. They may be distracted. 399 00:42:20,750 --> 00:42:29,300 They may be dissatisfied or enthusiastic or any number of things from the way they stand in the way they relate to the characters who are speaking. 400 00:42:29,300 --> 00:42:33,550 There are some important silences in Shakespeare that have become critical cruxes. 401 00:42:33,550 --> 00:42:37,420 Silvius response to Valentine at the end of two gentlemen of Verona, 402 00:42:37,420 --> 00:42:42,680 Isabella's silence as the Duke proposes marriage to her at the end of measure for measure, 403 00:42:42,680 --> 00:42:49,590 the failure of another Antonia, this time in The Tempest, to reply when Prospero offers him forgiveness. 404 00:42:49,590 --> 00:42:57,710 So these are all silences which have become critically very important for how we think about their plays and their moments in plays, 405 00:42:57,710 --> 00:43:04,880 which you might want to compare with this moment of Antônio silence, which we haven't really yet identified. 406 00:43:04,880 --> 00:43:11,660 How Antonio should behave in this final scene of Twelfth Night on stage is something worth thinking about. 407 00:43:11,660 --> 00:43:19,280 There are no clues, no direct clues in the scene, but as I've suggested, he must be there for a reason. 408 00:43:19,280 --> 00:43:20,870 You might have to look out for him. 409 00:43:20,870 --> 00:43:27,560 If you watch the Trevor Nunn film or the films, of course, a slightly different in that they can turn away from characters who are not interesting. 410 00:43:27,560 --> 00:43:33,140 But that's different from the experience of watching a whole lot of people on stage. 411 00:43:33,140 --> 00:43:42,950 The Cheek by Jowl Production, directed by Declan Donnellan had an interesting take on this, but also Pixar, Antonio's sexuality. 412 00:43:42,950 --> 00:43:49,760 The problematically jilted Antonios has the review and the independent hooks up with first day on the wedding party dance floor. 413 00:43:49,760 --> 00:43:56,690 I'm not sure I would want to hook up with best day, but I guess people always hook up with the wrong people at wedding parties. 414 00:43:56,690 --> 00:44:04,550 OK, so perhaps one answer. One final answer then to this, to the question of Antonio's role in this final scene. 415 00:44:04,550 --> 00:44:08,120 It's how we think about comedy itself. 416 00:44:08,120 --> 00:44:15,350 Northrop Frye, an important structuralists critic of Shakespeare's plays, whose broad brush observations have shared myths and patterns. 417 00:44:15,350 --> 00:44:21,710 I really recommend to you what Fry does is to say that these are big patterns like the killing of the king. 418 00:44:21,710 --> 00:44:26,180 The movement from winter to spring, kind of big mythical soul types. 419 00:44:26,180 --> 00:44:27,680 But it doesn't do any detailed work. 420 00:44:27,680 --> 00:44:35,960 So it means it's quite useful thing to read, which doesn't stop you actually trying to explore it in relation to particular plays. 421 00:44:35,960 --> 00:44:40,910 Fry notes that the end of comedy is always tinged with something darker. 422 00:44:40,910 --> 00:44:42,780 This is a quote from him. 423 00:44:42,780 --> 00:44:49,730 This quoting him, which I really like because it tries to link something about the mood at the end of comedy with the mood at the end of tragedy. 424 00:44:49,730 --> 00:45:02,570 The sense of alienation, Frei says, which in tragedy is terror is almost bound to be represented by somebody or some thing in the play. 425 00:45:02,570 --> 00:45:08,480 We sell them consciously, feel identified with him, for he himself wants no such identification. 426 00:45:08,480 --> 00:45:12,260 We may even hate or despise him, but he is there to. 427 00:45:12,260 --> 00:45:18,020 The sense of alienation is almost bound to be represented by somebody or something in the play with seldom conscious. 428 00:45:18,020 --> 00:45:21,980 We feel identified with him, for he himself wants no such identification. 429 00:45:21,980 --> 00:45:25,460 We may even hate or despise him, but he is there. 430 00:45:25,460 --> 00:45:33,890 It seems to me a good description of the evasive Antônio in this scene present, not inviting conspiracy or identification. 431 00:45:33,890 --> 00:45:41,300 There are no asides, for example, but he is monitoring something about that Shondra boundary, 432 00:45:41,300 --> 00:45:45,650 just as in saving Sebastian from the waves before the play begins. 433 00:45:45,650 --> 00:45:53,060 He enables the plot to resolve itself just as he maintains Sebastian's identity as a separate character. 434 00:45:53,060 --> 00:46:01,940 So here Antonio becomes the figure of alienation whose presence secures the comedy. 435 00:46:01,940 --> 00:46:05,900 So I've tried to show in today's lecture how if we ask about a minor character in a play, 436 00:46:05,900 --> 00:46:11,900 if we say why the church would bother to write this small character, how that might open up some of its wider themes. 437 00:46:11,900 --> 00:46:14,030 It's something you can easily do with other plays. 438 00:46:14,030 --> 00:46:22,580 And you might want to use the RISC Shakespeare collected edition of Shakespeare, edited by Jonathan Bate and Rasmussen, 439 00:46:22,580 --> 00:46:30,430 not least because it has the useful facts at the beginning of each play of the proportion of lines for each character. 440 00:46:30,430 --> 00:46:34,630 So it's quite an interesting way of just getting a different snapshot of who's important. 441 00:46:34,630 --> 00:46:42,100 And as I've said in the method for this lecture, who in terms of lines at least, is not important. 442 00:46:42,100 --> 00:46:49,780 So those themes in Twelfth Night are about desire and sexuality, and they're also about the genre of comedy and the nature of comic endings. 443 00:46:49,780 --> 00:46:58,300 And what I've tried to do today is to show some different ways of thinking about how Antonio's role gives us an angle on these different contexts. 444 00:46:58,300 --> 00:47:01,390 Next week, I'm going to be talking about the history play, Richard. 445 00:47:01,390 --> 00:47:15,539 The second I think the question I'm asking is whether it was a good thing for Bowling Brook to depose him.