ABSTRACT
In this paper I would like enquire into what seems to be a widely shared impression that in Twelfth Night there is a web of actions and a web of desires, and that somehow the two don’t quite fit. There is hardly one initial project which isn’t either forgotten or shelved by the characters involved in the tangled love plot, or eased from the centre of the stage by the playwright himself. Readers of Twelfth Night have been having trouble with the motivations of its characters ever since the middle of the eighteenth century. For Charlotte Lennox (1753), Viola’s decision to ‘serve the young bachelorduke in the habit of a man’ is overhasty, lacks probability and goes ‘well beyond the bounds of decency’ (quoted in Jenkins 1986:173). Samuel Johnson in 1765 likewise felt that ‘Viola seems to have formed a very deep design with very little premeditation’, as well as complaining that Olivia’s marriage wanted credibility (quoted in Vickers 1979:108). In our time, when verisimilitude and decorum are hardly problems any more, critics continue to draw attention to the play’s veerings. L.G.Salingar has remarked how ‘The four main actors all reverse their desires or break their vows before the comedy is over’ (1986:193) and more recently Stephen Greenblatt has touched on ‘Viola’s relatively unmotivated decision to disguise herself in men’s clothing’ in discussing the various ‘swervings’ in the plot of Twelfth Night, of which the main one is the failure of Olivia to accept the most socially, politically, economically and erotically logical match with Orsino (Greenblatt 1988:69-70).
