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.

The question driving much of the action of Twelfth Night (which is asked several times) is the same as the question that drives the action in Hamlet: “But tell me true, are you not mad indeed? or do you but counterfeit?” In both plays what Barber says of Twelfth Night is true: “Shakespeare spins out the misapprehensions until the last moment.” The same goes for this comment from Kermode: “Viola is always reminding herself that she is not identical with the role she is playing, and this introduces a note of dubiety into other self-identifications.”

What would we think if someone played Hamlet as a farce? It could be done, just about, with cuts, and a dark Chekhovian mode.

Hamlet. But what is your affair in Elsinore?
Horatio. My lord, I came to see your father’s funeral.
Hamlet. I pray thee, do not mock me, fellow-student;
I think it was to see my mother’s wedding.
Horatio. Indeed, my lord, it follow’d hard upon.
Hamlet. Thrift, thrift, Horatio! the funeral baked-meats
Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.

In the scene where he tells Polonius the clouds are like a camel and a whale and so on, it would be easy for Polonius, through his reactions, and Hamlet through the swift confusions of strong farce, to play the scene for laughs. When Claudius talks to Laertes in I.ii, and when Polonius talks to him in I.iii, the cue line, or something very similar, is used two or three times in the middle of a speech. The effect in rehearsals would be to have the actor playing Laertes go to start his line, only to find himself interrupted.

The humour of passages like this stands sentinel at the edge of sanity. It makes the madness when it comes all the more grim, all the more suitable as a punishment for Hamlet’s cruelty. As it is for Malvolio.

And Malvolio has a lot to do with Hamlet. Taking an evolutionary view of Shakespearean characters, in which we see them adapt to successive plays while inheriting essential traits, we can see the darkness and ambivalence of Romeo coupled with his deeply authentic passion descend in parallel to the ineffable Falstaff whose inability to finally conquer death and self-assuredness are inherited by Malvolio: both men rise above their station, Falstaff by valour and wit, Malvolio through erotic misapprehension. They are both what Harold Bloom called “displaced spirits.”

Hamlet inherits all of this: Romeo’s thanatos, Falstaff’s self-invention, Malvolio’s madness, his outrage at his prison cell. Like Falstaff and Rosalind, Hamlet is a Lord of Misrule, a self-improviser. This the festive mode gone dark. Misrule turns to horror. In Hamlet no-one knows if Hamlet is mad; in Twelfth Night madness lingers off-stage, and no-one realises it is waiting for them and not only for Malvolio. They are saved by narrow margins of luck. Malvolio dreams of being a Count, unreasonably by the standards of the play, and Hamlet dreams of being King, also it would seem unreasonable.

Both exist in dream worlds. The sadism that punishes Malvolio is a form of antic madness and when Sebastian arrives in the middle of the farce’s unravelling, not having had time to get used to what was going on, he simply says, “or I am mad or else this is a dream.” In this society, Malvolio constantly professing sanity is like Hamlet professing madness: it only confuses things more.

Hamlet is bounded in a nut-shell of bad dreams; Malvolio is trapped in the dark house of his moralising. Both are deemed mad because they are (in different ways) dangerous, ironic characters unsuited to their ambitions. They seem moralising and misanthropic, but they are self-serving, time-serving.

They are a diptych, a dual dream of madness, the comic and the tragic contorted together. When Malvolio walks off the stage and cries “I’ll be revenged upon the whole pack of you” we feel a little chill that he is about to come on stage in Elsinore. You might think that Malvolio is to be sympathised with, that he becomes a comic-villain. There is a historical argument for seeing him as having a much darker side than that… As Oscar James Campbell said,

Malvolio is given the usual Elizabethan treatment for an insane man: he is bound and cast into a dark prison. This has seemed so brutal to many actors that they have often presented him as the pathetic victim of cruel horseplay. That was certainly not Shakespeare’s intention. When at the end of the play Malvolio frantically rushes offstage, shouting, “I’ll be revenged of the whole pack of you,” Shakespeare expected his audiences to follow him with the scornful laughter that he, taught by Jonson, thought it was the business of comical satire to arouse.

Malvolio was laughed off stage because he was unsympathetic, was cruel, and because he, like Hamlet, was all too ready to dissemble at the edge of madness. They both dislike the people around them, have a cynical despair of their ambitions in the world. Both have “mala voglia”—an ill will. Malvolio thus was, by Elizabethan standards, rightly mocked.

But there is also a hint of ambiguity. “He hath been most notoriously abused”, Olivia says. We laugh, but we are closer than we know to not laughing. In Hamlet the laughter fades. The chuckling slips nervously from scorn to dark farce, from farce to Chekhovian terror, and then to the mournful jests of the Yorick speech.

And the rest is silence.