English 345.01 Critical Response Assignment—Twelfth Night

Due in class on Thursday 4 March 2004; titled; length: 500-600 words, double-spaced.

 

This writing assignment directs you to explore the play’s dramatic representation of a significant issue or rhetorical strategy that is identified in relation to specific cultural and historical contexts. Your topic and focus may be prompted in part by one of the enclosed or online study questions, by the suggestions presented below, by our discussions in class and online, and of course by your reactions and understanding. You might think of the response as a scaled down, sharply focused critical essay, one that contains the kernel of a hypothesis and topic that might serve as the cornerstone or shaping idea for a longer essay. Your analysis can be quite “thesis-driven,” or you may prefer a more reflective, question and problem-posing approach.

 

For example, you might explain the social dimensions or importance of a particular character’s desires and relations to and for another (or to others, including a group or ‘category’ of people); your analysis may also speculate on the degrees of authority or power exercised or available to particular ‘individuals’ or subjects in the play; moreover, how are such identities or relationships represented and enacted (presented rhetorically in language and as performed in action on stage--for instance, such as in the initial encounter between Olivia and Viola-as-Cesario in 1.5, or in the conversation between Orsino and Viola in 2.4 and in 5.1, or in the duping of Malvolio in 2.5 and 3.4, or in 3.3 and 3.4 with Antonio and Sebastian).

 

Your observations will need to be succinct, but I encourage you to develop and to support your ideas as clearly and as cogently as space allows, including brief citations of specific lines or scenes that illustrate your interpretation, and perhaps use of summary and paraphrase in support of your analysis. Your response should include a statement that makes a claim or presents a thesis with brief explanation and support (such as in the form of “One of Viola’s main concerns is that she . . . because . . . . But her desire for . . . conflicts with . . ., and she must . . . in order to . . . . The play thus represents . . . in its depiction of . . . . Moreover, it is only through X’s relationship to Y that Z can be realized or established or resolved, even though . . . .” This is just a partial and overstated (!) example of a structure that might inform your reasoning and writing for this assignment—the main advice is to consider that you may find it effective to compose a thesis for your response that maps out for readers the important points or problems that you want to develop and to discuss.

 

Assume your audience is familiar with the play, but take care to articulate clearly your understanding and interpretation of the material, especially problems or contradictions that seem difficult to resolve.

 

Keep in mind that your critical response should supplement or build upon our work; in short, don't simply repeat an argument we have already substantially discussed unless you were engaged substantially in that discussion.

 

As with the previous writing assignment, you are not required to consider to what extent and how a secondary piece of criticism (one of the essays on the play from works on reserve, for example) has influenced your views and understanding, but if you wish to incorporate what you have learned from external criticism, please do so.

 

Some writers, for example, use the first paragraph to describe an interpretative problem that arises in a specific passage or in a character (and the relations of that character to others or to the play's cultural context), or to present a conflict of critical approaches to Shakespeare's drama. Here are some more ways to question and to explore the functions and effects of these plays.

 

In what ways, for example, does Twelfth Night represent a particular cultural (social, political, economic, class, religion, gender) perspective, problem, or conflict?

 

Recent cultural and historical criticism of Shakespeare's drama often turns upon debate over whether the plays represent (instantiate, produce?) efforts to subvert or resist dominant ideology, or whether the plays' final effects work to contain, appropriate, or even reproduce such efforts, thus sustaining the power of the dominant order of things. Consider the utility of this opposition between subversion and containment in relation to specific conflicts and contradictions in the play. Moreover, when does this polarized opposition seem less useful and incisive? Are there ways to negotiate the seeming impasse?

 

What kinds of solutions does the play offer to the problems it articulates? Why?

 

Is there something about your own cultural/personal position and history that you want to explore in relation to your interpretation?

 

How would you draw upon the kinds of analyses and issues noted above by the framework of this assignment to offer insights and advice for the direction of a particular scene? What are a director's responsibilities/opportunities in this regard?

 

Study Questions on Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (Norton ed., p.1768 ff.)

 

1. Explore the play's economy of love, desire, and imagination, beginning with Orsino's opening lines (1.1.1-15). Why does he speak of excess, surfeit, and abatement? How does Orsino regard (and refer to) Olivia?

 

2. Reflect on Viola's interest in disguise, beginning with her adopting the role of Cesario. What prompts and sustains her reliance on being Cesario?

 

3. Sir Toby Belch vows "I'll confine myself no finer than I am" (1.3.8; 2.3). Speculate on the ideological implications of this declaration of identity and evaluate Toby's confident self-assertion. Describe his relations with (use of/need for?) Maria and Sir Andrew.

 

4. Why does Orsino enlist Cesario to court Olivia (1.4ff)?

 

5. Explain Feste's role/position/perspectives (1.5ff). What does he do or want? For example, Karin Coddon argues that Feste is an "ironic commentator" on aristocratic myth, including the myth of a feudal world of loyal, ideal service; Feste also destabilizes or "corrupts" the words of his noble superiors to expose the slipperiness of ostensibly stable categories, ranks, and values.

 

6. Analyze Malvolio's situation and desires. Respond to Olivia's claim that Malvolio is "sick of self-love" (1.5.77), and note Maria's sense of Malvolio's character (2.3.131ff). What provokes Malvolio's interests in Olivia, and why (how) is he duped by "M.O.A.I." (2.5). Read Donna Hamilton (Ch.4, see reference online), or John Astington--Hamilton argues that Malvolio is a scapegoat for those attacking puritans, and Greenblatt states that "Malvolio is scapegoated for indulging in a fantasy that colors several of the key relationships in Twelfth Night (Norton Shakespeare 1764). What are the relations among gender, erotic desire, social mobility, and religious nonconformity in the scenes involving Malvolio?

 

7. Barbara Freedman suggests that each of the play's characters is "faced with the threat of abandonment, loss, or disillusion in relationship and is indeed character-ized by a particular means of responding to that threat" (Staging the Gaze 203). How might her view enable you to reconsider the play's tone and its characters' behavior?

 

8. The play refers repeatedly to signs, language, and interpretation (e.g., Andrew 2.3.4-5; Feste 3.1.10-21 ff.; Malvolio 2.5.108ff and 3.4.60 ff..; Cesario-Viola 1.5.157ff.; Toby 3.2.35ff, 3.4.166ff). What issues become represented, problematized in such scenes? For instance, consider Viola's courtship of Olivia, and such statements as "that question's out of my part (1.5.175) and Olivia's "You are now out of your text" (1.5.227). Consider, for example, the extent to which one's identity is realized through language and through others' recognition and affirmation of (or opposition to) one's self via signs. How do we assure ourselves of our identities--might we assert, echoing Malvolio, "I will be point-device the very man. I do not now fool myself, to let imagination jade me . . . "(2.5.142-44).

 

9. What does the play disclose about gender roles, desires, and identities? Does Orsino love Olivia or Cesario? Does Olivia love Cesario or Viola? Compare Viola's behavior with Orsino (e.g. 2.4) to her exchanges with Olivia (e.g., 1.5, 2.2, 3.1.76ff). Is Antonio "masculine" or "feminine?" (Antonio and Sebastian, 2.1, 3.3, 5.1.66ff, 201ff.; Sebastian and Viola, 3.4.315ff) Are such polarities, terms adequate to define what is represented or suggested? See Valerie Traub (130ff) who explores the homoerotic and homosocial (even homophobic?) configurations and effects of these relationships. Bruce Smith sums up the play’s erotic confusions in this way: “Desire of male for female (Orsino for Olivia, Sebastian for Olivia), of female for male (Olivia for ‘Cesario,’ Viola for Orsino), of male for male (Antonio for Sebastian, Orsino for ‘Cesario’), of female for female (Olivia for Viola), of male for either, of female for either, of either for either: the love plots in Twelfth Night truly offer ‘what you will’” (Twelfth Night: Texts and Contexts 15).

 

10. Though Viola does something apparently transgressive/radical in disguising herself as Cesario, she seems rather passive in her refusal to shape her destiny or others (2.2.38-39). Why? Is she passive? active? What does she want?

 

11. In his introduction to the play, Greenblatt states that the "transforming power of costume unsettles fixed categories of gender and social class and allows characters to explore emotional territory that a culture officially hostile to same-sex desire and cross-class marriage would ordinarily have ruled out of bounds" (1762), which may lead to something "irreducibly strange about the marriages with which Twelfth Night ends" (1764). Explore such issues of disguise, displacement, and deferral.

 

12. By Act 5, the festive tones of intrigue and carnival acquire overtones of violence, death, betrayal, and revenge. What do these scenes and motifs contribute? Can they be integrated with or reconciled to the previous action and to the play's "comic" form? What are the effects, for instance, of Orsino's declarations (5.1113-27) or Antonio's final lines and situation (5.1..215) or Malvolio's treatment and perspective (5.1.320-365)?

 

13. Consider the play's action, characters, and preoccupations in the context of Feste's final song.

 

14. Read Stephen Greenblatt's introduction to the play in the Norton edition (1761-67). What do you find of interest/use in his comments or questions? For example, he states that in Twelfth Night, "conventional expectations repeatedly give way to a different way of perceiving the world" (1762). With what effects or purpose? Examples?

 

15. Jean Howard argues that the "play enacts . . . the containment of gender and class insurgency . . . . the play seems to me to applaud a crossdressed woman who does not aspire to the positions of power assigned men and to discipline a non-crossdressed woman who does” (The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England 112). How do Howard's comments affect your understanding of the play?

 

16. Explore the importance of direct and figurative references to money, payments and tokens of exchange, and material goods. Viola, for example, bestows payments upon the Captain (1.2.16) and Feste (3.1.37), Orsino also rewards or promises rewards to Feste and to Cesario-Viola as well as to Olivia, Antonio lends his money purse to Sebastian, Sir Toby avails himself of Sir Andrew's largesse (3.2.46), and Olivia states that "youth is bought more oft than begged or borrowed" (3.4.3).