Twelfth Night

Abstract

In 1959 C. L. Barber’s book Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy¹ and John Hollander’s article “Twelfth Night and the Morality of Indulgence”² challenged, with similar arguments, Morris P. Tilley’s long-accepted thesis that Twelfth Night advocates a mean between extremes. Tilley saw Twelfth Night as “a philosophical defense of a moderate indulgence in pleasure, in opposition on the one hand to an extreme hostility to pleasure and on the other hand to an extreme self-indulgence”, (pp. 550–1).³ Hollander reacted against the entire tendency to place Twelfth Night to find a moral “position” for the play. Hollander argued that in Twelfth Night Shakespeare substituted “what one might call a moral process for a moral system” (p. 229), that the “essential action” of this moral process is:

to so surfeit the Appetite upon excess that it “may sicken and so die”. It is the Appetite, not the whole Self, however, which is surfeited: the Self will emerge at the conclusion of the action from where it has been hidden. The movement of the play is toward this emergence of humanity from behind a mask of comic type. (p. 230)