by Professor Paul S. Fiddes
Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night opens, like all his comedies, with a situation in which relationships are already disturbed or broken, and in which characters feel a profound sense of loss. The play ends with some restoration of relations and a partial establishing of justice, but we are acutely aware that the process of restorative justice is far from complete. All is not a happy-ever-afterwards. Though often called a ‘happy comedy’, with many amusing scenes, there are dark strains throughout and as in all Shakespeare’s comedies, a shadow is left at the end, despite (in this case) the event of a double marriage.
We discover just how disturbed the situation is in the first scene. We begin by meeting Orsino, the young Duke of Illyria, who is—it seems—deeply in love with the Countess Olivia who is failing to reciprocate his persistent, ardent advances. She has, we learn, refused the company of all males for the sake of mourning her dead brother. If this seems an unhealthy attitude, it is no more so than Orsino’s, who cannot respect her decision and seems more in love with the idea of being in love than truly knowing what love is. Olivia’s household is also marked by tensions, with a simmering war between her steward, an efficient but puritanical figure named Malvolio and her cousin, Sir Toby Belch, who is a drunken reprobate who resents Malvolio’s influence in the house and the restraints he is placing on his behaviour. Sir Toby is encouraging his companion, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, a pitiful wastrel, to think he has a chance of marrying Olivia in order to get money from him. This inadequate couple are aided and abetted by Maria, the shrewd waiting-woman of Olivia and Feste, Olivia’s fool or household jester who speaks wisdom in his nonsense. On this scene there arrives the young woman Viola who is suffering her own broken relationship; she believes that she has lost her twin brother, Sebastian in a storm at sea, and finds herself unable to re-start a normal life; she is accompanied by the virtuous sea-captain of the wrecked ship who has been acting as her protector.
In a way typical of all his comedies, Shakespeare works towards a restoration of loss and brokenness by making the situation even more disturbed. It appears that a strong dose of confusion is needed to shake things up, to break open the surface of things, and to show characters the truth that is hidden deep beneath. The world is turned upside down to show people that it was the wrong way up all the time. In Elizabethan comedy the basic tool of confusion is deception and pretence. Viola makes the fundamental act of pretence, playing a trick which is to affect everyone’s lives in Illyria: she adopts the disguise of being a page-boy—taking the name Cesario— and becomes the valued personal servant of Orsino, quickly falling in love with him but barred by her position from declaring it openly. When he sends her to woo Olivia on his behalf, Olivia falls desperately in love with the supposed Cesario. Now Viola loves Orsino, Orsino loves Olivia and Olivia loves Cesario/Viola, but it seems no one can be satisfied. Viola, having inflicted this far-reaching pretence, now refuses any temptation to manipulate people through it and is willing to suffer its consequences herself: ‘Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness …./ Time, thou must untangle this, not I.’
Meanwhile, another pretence is taking place. After Malvolio has rebuked them for drunkenness and loud singing at night, Malvolio, Sir Toby, Maria and Feste hilariously trick him through a forged letter into thinking that Olivia is in love with him. The letter, supposedly from Olivia, instructs him to show his response to her by wearing the outlandish garb of cross-gartered yellow stockings and by constantly smiling at her. His compliance reveals him to be not only puritanical but an ambitious social-climber. Understandably, Olivia concludes he is either mentally ill or possessed by a demon and has him locked in a dark room for his own protection, where he is mercilessly mocked by Feste and his companions.
The resolution of all this turmoil begins when Sebastian the identical twin-brother of Viola, who has not been drowned after all, turns up looking exactly like the pretended Cesario. He quickly woos Olivia, who marries him supposing him to be Cesario. At the same time he does some injury to both Sir Toby and Andrew Aguecheek who challenge him to a duel, resentful of Olivia’s affections towards him, and again wrongly supposing him to be the fearful and harmless page-boy. Truth dawns when Viola/Cesario and Sebastian meet and are re-united: all realize they are twins and that Viola is a woman. Everyone is pleased since Olivia is perfectly happy with Sebastian, and Orsino is delighted to be able to marry the companion to whom he has become increasingly bound in his affections. Sebastian and Viola are equally satisfied with their partners. Love, in different ways, has grown between them. The disturbing features with which the play began—the breaking of a family in a sea-wreck, the immature love of Orsino, and the unhealthy attitude of Olivia to sex—have been faced up to and resolved. Moreover justice is done in two further ways. First, the play had also begun with social conflicts in the household of Olivia; the trick played on Malvolio is now admitted, and the grievances which lay behind it are exposed: ‘if that the injuries be justly weighed/ that have on both sides passed’. Second, the sea-captain had been deeply hurt by the apparent ingratitude of Viola when he met Sebastian, thinking him to be her, and Sebastian refused to recognize him or return the purse he had loaned Viola. Having been arrested as an enemy to the state, his virtue is now fully recognized by all.
There are obviously elements of the play which do not fit with what we now know to be the process of restorative justice. Clearly, restorative justice does not operate with tools of pretence and deception. Quite the opposite, transparency and integrity in conversation is essential. But this is a stage-comedy, not an actual RJ process or a model for it.
Watching the play and enjoying the tricks and pretences, we may nevertheless feel the healing power of facing up to the truth of relationships, and the transformative effect of coming to know the truth of a situation that had been hidden from sight but which is now brought to light. The facilitator in an RJ conversation will aim to lead people to this point, but without of course the comedic confusions.
Moreover, there is a key moment when we can feel the restorative power of the empathetic sharing of experience. In Elizabethan stage convention, the putting on of male attire gave a woman character (though of course played by a boy!) social permission to talk frankly and openly with a male character. In the guise of Cesario Viola can express her feelings to Orsino, and unconsciously he responds to them:
Viola. My father had a daughter loved a man,
As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman,
I should your lordship
Orsino. And what’s her history?
Viola. A blank, my lord. She never told her love …
Orsino. But died thy sister of her love, my boy?
Viola. I am all the daughters of my father’s house
And all the brothers too, and yet I know not.
Such oblique conversations are the foundation for Orsion’s later realization that he is in love with Viola, enabling him to put behind him his infatuation for Olivia. Practitioners in restorative justice will encourage conversations in which participants have permission to express their feelings about a hurtful situation and are heard with respect.
However, the play shows that even when the truth is revealed, and some relations have been re-made, damage can remain. When the trick is revealed to Malvolio he is not reconciled with the other characters. He storms out declaring ‘I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you’ and Olivia judges that ‘he hath been most notoriously abused’. The sea-captain has also been abused by the sequence of events, and has suffered an injury to his spirit that does not seem to be healed. Even more seriously, perhaps, we are not convinced of an unclouded future happiness for Orsino and Viola; when he thought that she had betrayed him with Olivia he revealed a streak of cruelty (‘my thoughts are ripe in mischief’) that he will need to control in the future.
What is lacking here is the finding together of a path into the future for all concerned, which must be the aim of any true process of restorative justice. But Shakespeare knows what he is doing as a dramatist. For all the ‘feel-good’ factor of the ending, members of the audience are left with a sense that restoration is not complete. They are also provoked to wonder how a fuller restoration might be achieved, and Shakespeare leaves them to work this out in their own conflicts as they leave the theatre for the continuing drama of everyday life.
Paul S. Fiddes is the author of More Things in Heaven and Earth. Shakespeare, Theology and the Interplay of Texts (University of Virginia Press).
We are delighted that Wild Goose Theatre are putting on a charity performance of Twelfth Night for us next week (Thursday 27 June, 2024). More information and a link to buy tickets can be found here: