So we've gathered here in Boulders Norlin Library to discuss a few key passages from Twelfth Night. I thought we'd begin with the beginning. Act 1, scene 1 with Orsino, a stereotypical melancholic lover caught in the throes of desires. The famous set piece, if music be the food of love, play on. I've got to get the conversation going a little bit by inviting you, Tim to talk about this [inaudible] Shakespeare festivals production of Twelfth Night, and you chose not to begin to play with act 1; scene 1. You switched act 1, scene 1 and act 1; scene 2 where we meet Viola and the ship wreck [inaudible]. So I wonder if you talk a little bit about that choice. Yeah, sure. So we just produced this play. We just closed it last summer, about six months ago, and I directed it. I have seen it done both ways. Obviously, I didn't come up with this idea but act 1, scene 1, as we know is Orsino launching into the famous speech, if music be the food of love, and he's talking to his two servants, Curio and Valentine, and then Shakespeare's act 1, scene 2 is the ship wreck, the storm viola washing up on the beach, and it seems to me that we are producing this for a modern audience obviously. It just seems to me that's a more theatrical, more engaging, more punchy way to start the show is to start it with a storm and a ship wreck. We're producing this in a large outdoor venue. So I think it is difficult in that environment to create a theatrical world where you are popped out of your own reality unless there is a lot of stuff coming at you and a lot of things happening. I also think that it should have been written that way, and maybe it was a printer's error or something that reverse those two scenes. Because, I mean, Shakespeare was a theater producer like myself. He was an actor as well. He would've known what's the best way to grab hold of an audience by the front of their shirt and not let go of them. Also, we don't know who Orsino is in act 1, scene 1, if music be the food of love. We know nothing about him. We don't know the situation of anything yet, but all of that is explained in Shakespeare's act 1, scene 2, Viola. We get all this exposition about who Orsino is, where he lives, what he's all about, the world, the relationships and all of that. So it seems to make a little more sense to start there, and then introduce Orsino but it can work either way. If you are in a small, little intimate space with a small audience you want to lure the audience in first with a little bit of unknown mystery, then yeah, maybe starting with that Orsino scene is the best way to go and get them really drawn in and engaged, and then surprise them with a storm after that. But that was our choice going in. Yeah, and it worked wonderfully. It was done to great effect. Oh, thank you so much. It's just a departure from the play as we have it, and I think that that choice, I think reveals some really interesting things about the player. It tells us something, there is something odd about being immersed into the world of the play through a melancholic. Talking about the experience of love and it make me may have to do with how Shakespeare is playing with the conventions of comedies, he's experience pushing against the conventions in many ways in this play. What does it do to begin the play that Act 1, scene 1 as we have it. What kind of world are we being invited into here? What Tim's remarks made me think that [inaudible] is visceral, it's real, it's, painful, it's fraud, it's full of grief and sorrow, which when you look back at scene 1, it seems so artificial in a way that Shakespeare's audience might have been acquainted with. Because this is just typical. As you're saying, there's is typical love language, love melancholy. I'm in love with this woman. I may only have seen her once, but that I really, really I'm in love with her. Like Romeo. Like Romeo. Yeah, exactly. I wonder dramaturgically, I agree theatrically. [inaudible] the storm. I've wondered dramaturgically, since we know nothing about this, any of the peoples on stage. I know it's always dangerous to wonder what the Elizabethan audience was thinking. But Shakespeare's writing for them, and the title is, Twelfth Night. It's topsy turvy world. So is he starting to say, this is going to be a comedy, it's not going to be a scary thing. So I'm not going to start with a storm, I'm going to start with a comedy, and I wonder underlie how ridiculous lovers are. I want to start that trope, then we'll go to drama and tragedy or potential tragedy. So I don't know. That's a great point. Because it is called Twelfth Night, it's never explained in the play. But if Shakespeare's writing for the world of topsy turvy and indeed scratch an Elizabethan and you find a medieval man. He's got the melancholy way out of whack. That's great. But to build on that, I think the subtitle is important too, "Twelfth Night or What You Will." Yeah. Right, which brings us right into the topic of desire from the start of the play. Yeah, desire is all over this play. Yeah, and I'm wondering, what kind of picture of desire do we get here with Orsino just looking at his language, in this opening speech. If I might just read it and just to really focus on who this guy is and how he's narrating his experience. "If music be the food of love, play on. Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die. That strain again! It had dying fall." He's listening to music and hears something he likes. "It had a dying fall. O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound, that breathes upon a bank of violets, stealing and getting odor. Enough; no more: 'Tis not so sweet now as it was before. O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou, that, notwithstanding thy capacity receiveth as the sea, nought enters there, of what validity and pitch soe'er, but falls into abatement and low price, even in a minute. So full of shapes is fancy that it alone is high fantastical." How do we characterize the language here? Again, what kind of experience of desire is being put on display here? He wants his desire to die and it does. That's right. Within the course of his speech. Yeah, I've had enough that worked. I'm not really interested in any more, and so I'm thinking of him as not just a standardized lover, but a very fickle one. That's why, my opinion, I think Orsino is a great comedic character. I know that he is being melancholy, but I think he thinks he's being melancholy and he's in love with being melancholy. Whenever I hear that speech, I hear Ron Burgundy from Anchorman. That kind of, I'm in love with being in love and he has to be a lovable idiot in order for Violet to fall for him so quickly, to play and be believable with an audience. That he needs to be this fun, lovable buffoon, like that and I think you can play that speech for a lot of laughs of him constantly re-correcting himself. Yeah, I think that's really sharp. On one hand, Shakespeare is using the language of the sonnets. There's the language of paradox, there's synesthesia. There is this thinking through the logical situation, but it's also irrational. I think Catherine and I think you're right, there's this way in which, Orsino, he wants the love to the over, it's like desire is not entirely a pleasant phenomenon. There is a paradox here. The lover who is actually trying to fall out of love. In that way, he's a familiar character in the canon of Shakespearean characters and that so many of them. There's a rich emotional life, but perhaps not a strong command of it, and so many of Shakespeare's characters have some strong emotion, be it jealousy or infatuation or ambition in the driver seat. They're just unable to get that emotion out of the way, off the steering wheel. But what's interesting to me later, he says in this scene, he says, yeah, the moment I saw her, "Methought she purged the air of pestilence." So the moment before for him is that he was probably deeply depressed. He's looking for some distraction from the pestilence that he was experiencing. For the moment anyway, Olivia is that, but can we trust that? Can Olivia trust that? Indeed, I think she doesn't, which is why she's not interested. Yeah, she says so. I think going back to the performance of melancholy, etc. I think Shakespeare sets it up brilliantly that Olivia is his match. She knows she looks fabulous in morning gear. She looks fabulous. So I think Shakespeare is purposely matching them, so I totally agree. I think the duke is absolutely set up to be the comic character and then he's perfectly matched by her because they're performing love exciting us. Yeah. But I also want to point out the way that Shakespeare just balances you on the knife edge between comedy and tragedy. That there's a lot of language of violence here. He wants to kills off his own affection and going on from the line that tells about it, "When mine eyes did see Olivia first, Methought she purged the air of pestilence," which is the plague, "That instant was I turned into a hart, and my desires like fell and cruel hounds. E'er since pursue me." This is a reference to the classical myth of the hunter who goes and spies on the goddess Diana while she's bathing, and she's enraged, she turns him into a deer, a hart, and his dogs chase him down and kill him. That's a comedy. There's just this little threat of violence that keeps coming back in this play, sometimes isn't quite so little anymore. Yeah. I think that's right. That anticipates some of the stuff at the end where Duke Orsino will out of jealousy over Olivia's perceived love for Cesario, he will go offer to kill Cesario. So not funny. It's pushing the comedy to the point of tragedy or flirting with that. One thing is interesting too, is that he just swings wildly from that to this in the very next speech that he gives, "O she that hath a heart of that fine frame to pay this debt of love but to a brother." Valentine gives Orsino the news that Olivia is not entertaining any visitors for seven years. She's going to mourn her brother and her father for seven years, and he just gets excited, "How will she loved when the rich golden shaft have killed the flock of all affections else that live in her, when liver, brain, and heart, the sovereign thrones are all supplied and filled her sweet perfections with one self king." It's as if he's oscillating wildly between this sense of victimization and this violence. I'm thinking of the desire in a desirous death to a radically just the opposite position. It's my love will kill all the other loving her and I will be her sovereign in this desire to dominate in some way. He'd better be lovable. Otherwise, this is really dangerous language. It's a tough sell. Yeah. Yeah, it is. He needs to be lovable for Viola to be likable, and for us to identify with her journey. The play is really about her. He's a very minor character in the play when we balance them out with all the others. That was a part that's troubling at the end when he says "I'm going to take Cesario now and kill him," and Cesario and Viola willingly goes. It's not something that the audience always catches, it's not something that the cast always catches either in the language because it happens so quickly before it's all abruptly stopped. But trying to make sense, and that's part of the genius of these plays as they can be re-interpreted over and over and over because all the characters in them are so unpredictable by whatever measure, by common storytelling arc measure of a character. They all make these choices that are just so out of character from scene to scene and were left to try and make sense of it.
