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Twelfth Night or What You Will

This, the most sad of Shakespeare comedies, is based on an Italian novella that begins with a shipwreck. A ship sinks. A brother and sister (who are twins) manage to rescue themselves but they lose one another. He thinks she is dead and she thinks he is dead. They are stranded separately on a coast called Illyria. Illyria is the location, the world of this drama. A bitter-sweet, withdrawn world, inhabited by eccentrics and droll figures. It is one of the worlds of being different – like the forest in A Midsummer-Night’s Dream and the island in The Tempest, created from the shipwreck, from failure, from sinking, which is followed by a dreamed of not-of-this-world existence. Illyria is a place outside the world and in a time outside a life-regulating time sequence. The main title of the play What You Will is Twelfth Night.

Christoph Marthaler is directing Was ihr wollt. Photo: Bernd Uhlig

Time for feelings

January 6th is the climax and finale of Christmas festivities. This is the night when anything is possible before day-to-day life begins again. The people in Illyria let time go by. Whether it be Olivia and her playful relatives or Orsino with his melancholy, they all take time for their feelings and for rendering them in speech, verse and song. All persons in this drama are unhappily in love. Orsino loves Olivia in vain. It appears that this has always been the case. Olivia is grieving for her dead brother. She does not want to hear Orsino’s messages of love and lives playfully from one day to another, surrounded by her whimsical relations and servants, her uncle Sir Toby Belch, his friend Sir Andrew Aguecheek, the steward Malvolio, her companion Maria and the clown Feste. Orsino listens to the sad love songs which Feste sings. All those who are unhappily in love are looking for Feste and his songs and that is how the locations become mixed up. It could remain this way forever and not be changed.

Beautiful confusion

However, the young girl Viola disguised as a boy introduces a new and beautiful confusion to Illyria. She bestows on Illyria a few more unknown verses of love, other kinds of longing and a different suffering and amazement at individual desire. Viola, stranded in Illyria, has disguised herself as a man to help Orsino. She goes in his place to Olivia and courts her for him with wonderful verses. And then Olivia falls in love, however not with Orsino but with the disguised girl Viola who has long been in love with Orsino. He wonders why he finds the young man serving him so strangely attractive. Viola is the centre of unfulfilled desires because she represents something other than what she is. But why does Viola not interrupt the game, why does she behave so indifferently towards her own feelings and why does she speak so passionately as the representative of Orsino?

Unfulfilled falling in love

Falling in love as experienced in Illyria requires the sense of lacking fulfilment and ambivalence. The man is also a woman, the woman also a man. And it is not known if one is in love with a person or in what that person represents. Viola is a separated twin. She needs her brother in order to be the woman Viola again. Thus everyone in Illyria remains in a state of intoxicated anticipation from whose melancholic lethargy a feeling of staggering happiness occasionally arises. Sir Toby, Maria and Aguecheek play with Malvolio’s longings with a lasting maliciousness.
In the end the wonderful world of the crazy people becomes ordered. What is ambivalent becomes clear, the hermaphrodite is revealed, the couples are brought together. Everything is fine. Everything is love but without longing, without songs, without art. The maltreated Malvolio remains unresolved like a memorial of misfortune. And Feste has the last words in long and beautiful verses, the most serious and most intelligent clown in all Shakespeare’s dramas.