Twelfth Night

Tonight is the Twelfth Night of Christmas, tomorrow the Epiphany.

I'm done with my Xmas but I've been thinking, a bit, about Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. A friend recently suggested to me that I confuse love with power. Then he helpfully, or was it condescendingly, pointed to Twelfth Night, indicating that this play is about confusing love with power. I am not overly fond of Twelfth Night. Heretofore, it had not struck me as a play about confusing love with power although certainly I have seen it as a play about the confusion of love. Mostly, I have always thought Twelfth Night was boring. This guy has a doctorate in modern thought from Stanford so I trusted his interpretation of Twelfth Night more than my own. Sheesh. When will I wholly trust my own knowing?  Power had absolutely nothing to do with my struggle, and that guy was trying to tell me what my own private experience meant. This same guy often chastised me to ever daring to comment on what he referred to as his side of the net.  I was never supposed to say anyhing about him but he was free to assess me, tell me what I was thinking and feeling and even make a referene to Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, and I assure you that Twelfth Night did not have one damned thing that related to the inner challenges I faced.

It was interesting to me that this friend referenced Shakespeare in relation to the struggle I have had in recent months related to him. I myself had been thinking my insignificant tempest was more like Midsummer Night's Dream. I am convinced that Shakespeare wrote Twelfth Night well before he wrote Midsummer and that in Twelfth Night he was still working out his thinking about romantic love, its deceptions and its conceits. By the time he wrote Midsummer, I posit, Shakespeare had come to understand that there is nothing rational about love, romantic of otherwise, which is why he set Midsummer in a fairy forest random with the deceptive, illusionary, irrationality of fairy dust and other delusions (such as love). NB:  nowdays, I consider fairy tales to be real, probably more real than the limited, mechanistic material world most are mired in today.  Contrasted with the fact that I have thought that Twelfth Night is a boring play, I love the pixilation of Midsummer, which seems like a close proximation to the irrationality that infects humans and leads them to think they 'love' one human being as opposed to another.

To elucidate myself, I have now watched two films versions of each of these plays, courtesy of my Netflix account. Judging by these DVDs, I am happy to report that there are lots of great productions of the bard available to the masses. I have also spent a few hours researching scholarly opinions about Twelfth Night at Stanford. Truth be told, I am in love with the libraries at Stanford and I look for reasons to go there and look something up. They have real librarians who seem to get involved in the thrill of my little chases. My research was by no means exhaustive but I could not find any writing around the idea that Twelfth Night is about the confusion of love with power. Even without authoritarian citations, however, I am willing to concede that Tall is right, that one of the themes of Twelfth Night is 'confusing love with power' although I tend to think that this play is about an aspiration for power disguised by ill-fitting cultural norms associated with 'love'. I do not think there is much love in this play.

I was not, when that guy suggested I was, confusing love with power. I was confusing what I felt with the wholly mistaken belief that the guy loved me. That's not power and I sure as shit was not, as he suggested, confusing love with power. And I don't think 12th Night is, even remotely, about confusing love with power.  It's about the confusion of love.

Let's take a look at Twelfth Night. Then I will talk about Midsummer.

Viola and Sebastian, twins, are shipwrecked. Each of them believe the other has drowned and has to make their way in the society of the island upon which they washed up. Viola deems it best to disguise herself as a male and enters the service of the local grand poobah, Duke Orsino. For much of the play, each of these twins believes the other to be dead. Duke Orsino seeks the hand of the grandest female in the land, Olivia. Olivia is of lofty birth and wealth. Wealth has almost always been an aphrodesiac, I guess! Orsino wants Olivia's hand because, he says, he loves her but it seems to me he really thinks she should be his mate because, like him, she is well born and rich. Orsino sents Viola-disguised-as-Cesario to pitch his woo to Olivia. Olivia get struck by the irrationality of love and declares herself in love with Cesario. Olivia repeatedly rejects Orsino. Viola-as-Cesario rejects Olivia. Viola-hiding-as-Cesario loves, perplexingly, Orsino, who is really a self-absorbed jerk with power and wealth. Orsino is attracted to Cesario-hiding-as-Viola. Shakespeare does not overtly address the transgendered issues and neither will I. Also, there are lots of subplots in this play but they mostly irritate me and I will not address them here.

Sebastian undergoes some separate adventures. Near the end of the play, Sebastian shows up. Olivia believes Sebastian is Viola-as-Cesario and asks him to wed her immediately. Sebastian takes a look around at her wealth and beauty and he says, sure, why the heck not, how bad could it be being married to a rich, beautiful, powerful woman? Sebastian makes no empty declarations of love for Oliva. He just goes along with her out-of-the-blue proposal. When he marries Olivia, he believes himself to be alone in the world (thinking his twin sister dead), cast into the unfamiliar society of the island and he accepts Olivia's life raft happily. Why not?! Olivia may believe herself 'in love' with Cesario-as-Viola-confused-with-Sebastian but Sebastian does not have many illusions about love.

There's a bunch of confusion, silly games that have always bored me. In the big denouement, Viola-as-Cesario is mistaken for Olivia's husband, Sebastian. Finally, Sebastian and Viola realize their beloved twin is not dead. In these moments, everyone else realizes that Viola is a girl. Orsino is free to love Viola-as-Viola whereas until this moment there were, apparently, some social norms that prohibited Orisno from loving Viola-as-Cesario.

All's well that ends well, mostly.

I think the only people who simply loved one another in this play were the brother and sister, Sebastian and Viola. Everyone else in this play is strategizing to improve their position in life through, it seems to me, the illusion of materiality. Even though most people would tell you that love is more important than wealth in theory, it is the rare person who is not pixilated by wealth. Most folks will tell you it is just as easy, if not easier, to love a rich person as a poor person. I disagree: I think most people think it is a whole lot easier to love a person with wealth. If this play is about love and its confusions, it is about confusing love with material prosperity. Even in the snarky subplots, the aspiration to mate is rooted in bettering one's material position.

Mating for money and position is a time honored tradition. Jane Austen wrote brilliantly about this stream in human society.

Now Midsummer.

In Midsummer Night's Dream, Hermia, daughter of the local grand poobah, has been ordered by her father to marry a man she does not love. She flees with the object of her affection, Lysander, into the nearby fairy forest. Demetrius is in love with Hermia so he follows the pair. Helena is in love with Demetrius so she follows him into the woods.

essay unfinished. . . . . .