Just as A Midsummer Night’s Dream leaves the audience with a choice of how to interpret the edgy subjects the play brings up, Twelfth Night ends with a similar option. In this play, gender roles, homosexuality, the concept of love, and of course class distinctions are all up in the air even at the end of the play, and it is up to each individual in the audience to determine whether the play is just light hearted entertainment, or is actually suggesting something serious about society.
When Twelfth Night debuted, all female parts were performed by male actors. Twelfth Night not only pokes fun of this by confusingly casting a man as a woman pretending to be a man, but also brings this accepted normality into question. If women are not even fit to act on a stage, then isn’t there something inherently blasphemous about a woman infiltrating the court of a duke by dressing up as a male? Shakespeare probably intended the audience to react to this, but he does it while also shoving the fact that men are dressing up as women in the faces of those who feel its wrong, causing those people to question their initial thinking.
Homosexuality is also brought into the room by Orsino’s obvious flambiguity** and the fact that Olivia falls in love with a woman. Almost every guy in the play, except for sir Toby who is related to her, and I guess also Antonio, is in love with Olivia. However, after vowing not to be with any of them, the one guy who doesn’t love her is the one she breaks this vow for, and Olivia ends up loving Cesario. This also probably generated a huge reaction in the audience, because courtship as a means to acquiring a wife was a well accepted practice, and the fact that this works for no one in the play puts into question whether or not a woman is actually happy with the man she ends up with. With Olivia in fact, its the only guy who doesn’t court her who she falls in love with.
Tied closely to this is the concept of love. As we see with Malvolio, his real motivation for wanting to marry Olivia is his own desire for power, which means if he were to marry her, she would only be a means to an ends and not an ends herself. This definition of “love” is not really grounded in the emotions between two people, but rather in the greed of one individual.
Lastly, Shakespeare includes some class conflicts by separating out the noble, higher classes from the lower ones, and then assigning them unconventional roles. For instance, the higher class (Andrew, Toby, Malvolio, ect) are running around all worked up about one woman who actually may be bisexual, and are professing love when actually its just a means to self empowerment. The lower class though (mainly the fool) seems to be the voice of reason and the only one making an honest living.
At the end of the play, the fool ends similarly to Puck in Midsummer, with a song:
“A great while ago the world began, / with hey, ho, the wind and the rain, / but thats all one, our play is done, / and we’ll strive to please you every day” (5:1:428). This ending, following a slightly dreary poem about a lot of “wind and rain”, allows the audience to interpret the play however they like. On one hand, the line “a great while ago the world began” makes me think that Shakespeare wanted to remind his audience that humanity has been around much longer than Britain its traditions and ‘normalcies’. This line makes the audience have an open mind about the taboo subjects the play brings up, and causes them to think twice about their traditions. However, if they don’t want to have this open mind, they have that choice. The line “and we’ll strive to please you every day” gives the audience the option to dismiss the play as just entertainment.
**(if shakespeare can make up words, so can I)