The Eve of Epiphany
F.R.R. Mallory
October 30, 2006

William Shakespeare in his play Twelfth Night, or What You Will, offers his audience a deniable venue to engage in the sadistic pleasure of torture. By staging the play to portray events occurring on the final night of the celebratory period extending between All Hallows Eve and the Eve of Epiphany (January 6) Shakespeare takes advantage of the season of inversion, where society grants permission to violate roles and rules of conduct. This permission extends to the audience, relieving them of their obligation to moral outrage and going even further to invite a form of observer participation or in terms of the season of inversion makes victims into perpetrators and perpetrators into victims. In this way Shakespeare turns the audience into tacit participants or blends actors and play to audience and reality.

Shakespeare's choice of title What You Will invokes the "ethic of reciprocity" or what we commonly call the "Golden Rule." However, when this ethic is coupled to Twelfth Night the meaning of the ethic also becomes inverted asking the audience to take a position opposite to this ethic. The Christian version of the "Golden Rule" is often stated as "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" (Jesus (ca. 5 BCE-33 CE). By applying the inversion concept, this ethic shifts from an argument in prevention of violence against others into an advocacy for such violence. This coupling of the two titles also provides the promise of social support for immoral acts.

The play immediately launches into a collection of scenes establishing the position of each character and exposing their relationships to the other characters. As these scenes unfold it becomes clear that each character is presenting themselves deceptively, establishing their tainted moral qualities. By repeatedly offering examples of one character making a fool of or conning another, Shakespeare begins the process of desensitizing the audience to this pattern of behavior. By utilizing 'love' as an acceptable umbrella under which to demonstrate and forgive these deceptions, Shakespeare lulls the audience from acceptance to support of or collusion with this behavior. This also allows the audience to find humor in the angst-ridden lovers' various dilemmas since it is acceptable to be made to feel 'unsafe' in love or until your feelings are returned to you. In this way Shakespeare creates the environment for his actions against Malvolio.

Actions of violence frequently emerge from feeling insecure or unsafe. When presented with people or events who appear different from what we know or are comfortable with, our 'worldview' is questioned. In a love affair if we love another person and they haven't indicated if they love us or not, we feel vulnerable and exposed - the other person is not yet 'sharing' our experience and this difference is experienced as anxiety or fear that they may not come to share our experience, in some way informing us that our experience is 'wrong' or that we have been fooled by our own feelings. This perspective of being wrong challenges our belief in our competence to comprehend and be supported by others. Taken further, this challenge exposes a sense of being 'othered' or informs that the other is outside of the safety of the group, community, relationships. Full 'othering' becomes an opportunity for members of the collective group to act against the other with the support of the group. So, the establishment of a process of 'othering' in the play becomes a necessary forerunner to acting upon Malvolio. Once Malvolio has become collectively othered the audience is pressed with the choice to align with the collective group or the person being othered. The question actually being presented here relates to the observer's analysis of who owns the position of domination or is most likely to possess the position of domination at the end of this scenario.

The audience is not indifferent to this question even though they have now become aware that the play itself is deceptive in its presentation, their choice becomes to co-create the enactment of the torture scenes with the actors or to choose nonparticipation by withdrawing from the audience. It's worth noting here that this duplicity of presentation is a nonconsensual betrayal of the audience or that at this point the audience understands that it has been conned (is now in the position of victim.) If an audience member leaves at this point in the play then, due to the aforementioned blending of stage/reality, that individual has indicated some type of alignment with the victim (what the stage character represents), which can be extended to be identified with the victim in real life. An easier way to look at this might be to say that the audience member who leaves exposes the remaining audience to the fact that by staying they are colluding with the processes and acts of torture and through this exposure makes visible to those audience members the shame of not only their inability to competently identify duplicity upon themselves, but the shame of participating in low or immoral acts - doing 'unto' others. The audience has been acted upon. The only way to prevent this experience is to justify why these immoral actions are right and just. Inherently the individual recognizes that this is yet another failure or deception since for a right to exist for one it must exist for all. By colluding against a 'victim' a person is identifying their lack of personal power to act in their own defense or saying that their right NOT to be so victimized does not exist.

In the final scene of the play Shakespeare offers "why laugh you at such a barren rascal...he's gagged"-and thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges" (Shakespeare 1105). Feste, who offers this speech, correctly notes that as a result of the torture Malvolio has been silenced. The acts of torture have stripped Malvolio of his power and his sense of self, reducing him before and with the entire assembled company (including the audience.) This informs the audience or reminds them that the actions of the play have in much the same way reduced them, making them complicit, regardless of the tacit support of this being the last day of festival. On the Eve of Epiphany Shakespeare grants all an exposure of their inner complicity, their failure to act. So, of course he ends with Feste (Latin for hostile) saying, "A foolish thing was but a toy,...But that's all one, our play is done" (Shakespeare 1105).

Works Cited and Referenced

Hartling, L.M., Rosen, W., Walker, M., Jordan, J.V. "Shame and Humiliation: From Isolation to Relational Transformation." Work in Progress. (2000)

Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night,What You Will . The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 7th ed. Vol 1. New York; W.W. Norton & Company. 2000.

Trumbull, D. "Shame: An Acute Stress Response to Interpersonal Traumatization."  Psychiatry (2003): 66, 53-64.

Twelfth Night

This play was truly my introduction to Shakespeare as an adult. As a child, my parents occasionally thought it was good to 'punish' us for our misdeeds by requiring us to read 'great literature' and be able to discuss what we read. That was my introduction to Joyce, Vonnegut, Buck, Steinbeck and others. In some ways my teenage rebellion made perfect sense because it took the form of me reading serialized genre literature or about as opposite to 'classic' literature as I could manage.

However, I'm here to share with you the concept of parallel karma. Basically the notion of karma is that what you experience in this life is in some ways attached to debts or wrongs you did in previous lives which is why you don't want to screw up or screw over people in this life because, well, if you do your next life is liable to be rather sucky. In my case I have successfully generated what they call parallel karma - this phenomenon occurs when you do something in this life which you have to undo in this life. I've discovered I seem to have a rare talent for this gift.

I was so adamant about never being a writer that I used to habitually shoot spit wads at my English teacher. I hated learning English. They (the English academic establishment) had absolutely nothing to do with the books I liked to read - and I read copiously. Therefore, they could all flake off.

Not only did I shoot spitwads but I successfully didn't learn much English grammar - after all, I was an artist (my first incarnation of self in this life) and the rest of my family could go blow smoke out their writerly pens. I really DIDN'T like writers and being told what was good (in terms of books). I still don't like being told what is good or not. The problem with this juvenile resistance was this, as my sister might tell you, I started writing stories pretty young - and hiding them mostly and hiding them particularly from 'the establishment'. Keep in mind that my mother was an English teacher at this time, as well as a writer and ewwww.

Parallel karma acts in this way - the thing you decry the most will visit you in spades. There was an epiphamous moment in my life where someone asked me to write something (which I couldn't do) so I decided to 'warm up' by writing this wee story that had been in my brain a few years. About 4 days later I had my first novel.

The problem was - I couldn't even remember how to use quotation marks much less the common comma. And, if you have ever had to reverse engineer your life you will understand when I say that learning something later in life once you have worn the wrong things into the groove - is damn evilly hard.

But once I had written that first novel I knew I would write and write and write - it's like trying to turn away from a third level orgasm.

So, I'm old now and in the archeological dig that is my life I am shovelling up wheelbarrow loads of great works from writers who have teeth. And I'm intent on learning because I discovered the empty holes I dug for myself all those years ago and until I fill them in - I won't have my real teeth.

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