James Schiffer (ed.), Twelfth Night: New Critical Essays.

Selleck, Nancy

James Schiffer (ed.), Twelfth Night: New Critical Essays. New York: Routledge, 2011.

This volume of essays on Twelfth Night offers a range of approaches to the play, from a reassessment of key editorial puzzles, to explorations of the plays social and intellectual contexts, to significant instances of its performance history. Two especially rich essays elaborate the ways early modern theories of the faculties and the passions inform the language and action of Twelfth Night. There are also intriguing pairings of essays on topics such as exoticism and masculinity, with one essay analyzing the issue in the text and the next exploring it in specific productions. This back-and-forth between literary and theatrical criticism succeeds in raising interesting questions about the relationship between performance and scholarship as complementary modes of interpreting Shakespeare.

Schiffer's introduction gives an overview of the intertwining history of criticism and performance of Twelfth Night through four centuries, citing some of the most notable commentaries of each kind and demonstrating their relatedness. Much of this swift-moving "long view" provides food for further thought--for instance, about changing responses to the play's female roles on the part of producers as well as scholars. And Schiffer's lucid accounts of "twentieth-century revolutions" and "postmodern dissonance" in the evolving understanding of Twelfth Night would be especially beneficial for graduate students and advanced undergraduates.

An illuminating essay by Patricia Parker takes up a variety of ways in which editors of Twelfth Night have tended to obscure what Parker calls "the ambiguous, portmanteau, or polysemous quality" of the 1623 Folio text (58). Sir Toby's malapropisms are a case in point, through which Parker argues for a more intentional confusion in the text--a drunken multiplicity of meanings which many editors wrongly try to simplify. She also suggests an important new reading of Viola's use of the term "eunuch" early in the play, one that attends to the "multiple resonances of its early modern meanings" (58). Subsequent essays in the collection also emphasize the early modern meanings of the play's terms, as in Bruce Smith's discussion of "fancy" as a faculty that (contrary to modern assumptions) connects rather than separates speech and sense. In this reading, "fancy" constitutes a creative capacity that's always in play and that leads not to "binary possibilities" but to the strangeness of early modern sexuality (65, 78). Similarly, David Schalkwyk starts with the early modern sense of "passions" (as opposed to the modern "emotions"), which captures "something suffered by the soul rather than moving outward--'emoted'-from within" (81). Schalkwyk's powerful reading finds competing discourses of the passions within the play: Orsino's humoral discourse is contradicted by the play's larger portrayal of the passion of love as "dedicated behavior and action" (89).

Laurie Osborne also finds a debate about love within the text of Twelfth Night. Through Cesario's extravagant love, which belongs to the Renaissance ideal of male amity, Shakespeare implicitly challenges Montaigne's contention that women cannot participate in that highest form of friendship (110). The focus on gender continues in a pair of essays on masculinity, in which Goran Stanivukovic suggests Shakespeare is rewriting prose romances as part of a "shift from chivalric to romantic masculinity" (118) and Marcela Kostihova studies the politics of performing Twelfth Night--in particular, of staging the relationship between Antonio and Sebastian--in the post-communist Czech Republic.

Another group of essays turns to the topic of exoticism. Arguing against the commonplace that Illyria represented the unknown for Shakespeare's audience, Elizabeth Pentland surveys a range of sixteenth-century texts to show that it was not just "a place of lyricism, illusion, and exotic fantasy," but was fairly well known "as an ancient kingdom with a long and fascinating history of piracy, resistance to Rome, and female rule" (163). Exploring the figure of the stranger, Catherine Lisak contends that the play rehabilitates the notion of strangeness, cancelling the "Anglo-foreign dichotomy" and merging "we and they ... communally and morphologically into a complex state of being" (182). Nathalie Rivere de Carles's essay on staging the exotic is more tantalizing than successful in describing the scenic elements of recent productions--for instance, when she refers to "a horizontal stage tempted by verticality" without any further explanation or description of the stage design in question. (Unfortunately, this essay also contains a number of misquotations from the play.) More satisfying is Christa Jansohn's account of German productions of Twelfth Night, which offers thicker descriptions of the stagings she discusses, and also introduces many interesting ideas and problems of performance itself--including the "recent tendency of contemporary theatre to replace traditional character concepts [with] visual appeals" (212).

Two intriguing essays toward the end of the collection focus on the play's relation to social hierarchies* Ivo Kamps explores its representation of social class in the context of festive comedy, entertaining the idea that Malvolio too may be a figure of "Misrule" who ultimately suggests a more permanent possibility of social change than the "safetyvalve" model of C. L. Barber. Perhaps, Kamps muses, the play's ending suggests "that the rise of commoners like Malvolio cannot be stemmed"; Shakespeare may be asking his audience "to see the old madness as the new sanity" (241). On the other hand, Jennifer Vaught's essay connecting and comparing Twelfth Night with the post-Civil War New Orleans traditions of Carnival which she argues arose out of "nostalgia for a rigidly hierarchical culture"--shows that Misrule "can also be appropriated for conservative, elitist, and repressive purposes" (250). Her analysis of the Twelfth Night Revels extends our sense of the play's contexts as well as the notion of performance important to this volume* Introducing the Epiphany traditions with an astute discussion of Carnival, Vaught's essay would also be well suited to an advanced undergraduate audience.

Such is the case with most of the essays in this lively and suggestive collection, which ends with Cynthia Lewis's amusing and salutary cautions about the unsolved mysteries of Twelfth Night. Despite the "profuse epiphanies" of the play's ending, our full understanding is frustrated by deferred information, narrative gaps, and lack of complete resolution. As with an unsolved crime, "the truth is out there, but ... it escapes human apprehension" (261,268).

Reviewed by Nancy Selleck, University of Massachusetts Lowell