Twelfth Night: The Experience of the Audience

Summary

Let the claret which Shakespeare drank, as we know, on expense account symbolize the general experience of Twelfth Night. The taste of this play has the same tension between sweetness and dryness, which translates easily into the indulgent reveries of the opening and the realities of rain, ageing, and work, in Feste’s final song. To analyse this tension is surely the business of criticism. The experience of Twelfth Night blends our sense of the title metaphor with the growing magnitude of the joke that goes too far, and with it our grasp of the relation between the gulling and romantic actions. It is a matter of changing expectations, of a modified sense of the initial données of the play. Twelfth Night is played out, as it were, on a metaphysical revolving stage, which slowly rotates through half a revolution: the profiles that were presented to us at the beginning are not those of the end. The heads remain the same, the presented view is much altered. In the end the audience is asked to revise its judgement, not simply of people, but of a convention, ‘festive’ comedy itself. And that is bound to be disturbing.