Secrecy and Gossip in Twelfth Night

Summary

Renaissance secrecy is no longer quite as secret as it was. Art historians and iconologists have returned to the myths and emblems explored by Panofsky and Edgar Wind, and reassessed (often sceptically) their claims to hermetic wisdom. Thanks to Jonathan Goldberg and Richard Rambuss, we now have a better understanding of the early modern English secretary, and of how his pen could produce, in Lois Potter’s phrase, Secret Rites and Secret Writing. Not just in popular biographies of Marlowe and Shakespeare, but in such Foucauldian accounts of high culture as John Michael Archer’s Sovereignty and Intelligence, the world of Renaissance espionage is being analysed afresh. William W. E. Slights has written at useful length about conspiracy, fraud and censorship in middle–period Jonson. And, though the tide of Puttenham studies has now begun to ebb, students of Elizabethan England are still profiting from the work done by Daniel Javitch and Frank Whigham on what The Arte of English Poesie calls ‘false semblant’ or ‘the Courtly figure Allegoria’ –a line of enquiry which leads back to the civilized dissimulation advocated by Castiglione, but also to the politic ruthlessness of ‘1’ art machiavelien d’être secret’.

These investigations have not advanced in a state of mutual ignorance, but they have, inevitably, suffered from a degree of exclusive specialism. What interests me, on the other hand, is how different modes of concealment operated together. Certainly, I have found it impossible, in thinking about Twelfth Night, to separate iconography from secretarial inscription (as when Malvolio unpicks the Lucrece seal of silence on Maria's riddling letter), or to divorce Sebastian's intelligence-gathering, among 'the memorials and the things of fame' in Illyria, from that rhetorical discretion in him which is equally recommended in courtesy literature.