But tell me true, are you not mad indeed?

Twelfth Night and Hamlet: a diptych of madness.

Hamlet and Twelfth Night are twin masterpieces of Shakespeare’s miracle years of 1599-1601. Both contain much that goes beyond the sources. You often hear the folk argument that Shakespeare didn’t invent his plots, but that is a misleading simplification. Malvolio, for example, has no known source, and without Malvolio Twelfth Night isn’t the same play at all.

C.L. Barber said this in Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, about Shakespeare’s use of multiple sources of Twelfth Night,

Shakespeare can be inclusive in his use of traditions because his powers of selection and composition can arrange each element so that only those facets of it show which will serve his expressive purpose. He leaves out the dungeon in which Rich’s jealous Orsino shuts up Viola, as well as Sebastian’s departure leaving Olivia with Child; but he does not hesitate to keep such events as the shipwreck, or Sebastian’s amazing marriage to a stranger, or Orsino’s threat to kill Viola. It is not the credibility of the event that is decisive but what can be expressed through it. Thus the shipwreck is made the occasion for Viola to exhibit an undaunted, aristocratic mastery of adversity—she settles what she shall do next almost as though picking out a costume for a masquerade:

I’ll serve this duke:
Thou shall present me as an eunuch to him:
It may be worth thy pains; for I can sing
And speak to him in many sorts of music…

What matters is not the event, but what the language says as gesture, the aristocratic, free-and-easy way she settles what she will do and what the captain will do to help her…

This is, I think, the essence of Shakespeare. Events are transformed by “language as gesture”. It is often said that The Tempest is plotless; well, so Twelfth Night almost is, and in exactly the same manner. The plot is resolved by Sebastian crossing the island. Barber points out that the first half is largely discursive. It is largely people sitting around and talking “before the farcical complications are sprung.” The old saw, beloved of those who give out writing advice, that you should start your story as close to the end as possible was not observed in Twelfth Night. (If these so-called rules about writing were true, Twelfth Night would be a dull affair, rather than one of the most popular and important Shakespeare plays.)

I wrote recently that Hamlet is not like this. In Hamlet, action predominates. We are constantly aware that Hamlet might turn violent, might go mad. Viciousness simmers in nearly every line. The famous to be or not to be speech is often played slowly and contemplatively, but it is best done with a swift excitement—with the manic energy of one who has come to a dangerous philosophical insight, an idea that has a sharp edge, a performance for the benefit of his spies.

What gives Twelfth Night its intrigue is the same thing that animates Hamlet: madness.

They are a diptych of light and dark, comedy and tragedy, on the same theme. In Twelfth Night the madness is festive, a frenzy; in Hamlet it is a torment, an almost literal rising up from Hell. What Barber says of Twelfth Night applies so much to Hamlet too, but without the festive mode it has very different implications.

People are caught up by delusions or misapprehensions which take them out of themselves, bringing out what they would keep hidden or did not know was there.