The Alternating Narratives of Twelfth Night

Abstract

All readers of Shakespeare are aware in differing degrees and ways of the ambiguity of the dramas: the tendency of Shakespearean criticism has been to create from inferences or cryptic structures within the plays an awareness of implicit alternative meanings in a work. For example, Ralph Berry and Norman Rabkin have demonstrated or persuasively suggested the existence of meanings of Henry V that drastically subvert the commonly held notions about the play. In Berry’s words, ‘Shakespeare’s strategy is to keep his Crispin Crispian audience happy, while leaving on record the reservations that the “other” audience can pick up.’¹ And to Rabkin ‘in Henry V Shakespeare created a work whose ultimate power is precisely the fact that it points in two opposite directions, virtually daring us to choose one of the two opposed interpretations it requires of us’.² The concern of these and most critics who are intrigued by the multivalence of Shakespearean drama remains, nonetheless, a concern with how Shakespeare meant, in a sense, to be misunderstood. Rabkin suggests that the more acute members of Shakespeare’s early audiences might well have consisted of those who returned home from the theatre at least uncertain as to the meaning of what they had seen³ (Berry’s ‘other’ audience).