ABSTRACT
“So full of shapes is fancy / That it alone is high fantastical”: the climax to Orsino’s opening speech in Twelfth Night metamorphoses the poly-sensuous into the polysemous. Love is imagined as food that can be tasted; sound, as a breath that touches the ears and carries odor to the nostrils; the “spirit of love,” as something “quick and fresh” (the violets on the bank? motion that can be seen? motion that can be felt like a breeze? motion that can be touched?), then as the sea, receiving and confounding waters of varying “validity and pitch,” waters that in turn become marketplace commodities with falling prices (TN 1.1.9, 12, 14–15, in Shakespeare 1997). What is “fancy” that it should have such powers to conflate the five senses and to undo the fixity of words? Glosses of the term in current editions of Twelfth Night fail to explain these metamorphic and deconstructive powers. The editors of Twelfth Night in the Arden Shakespeare, series 2 and 3, do connect fancy with image-formation, but they are content to define “fancy” as “love” and to paraphrase “high fantastical” as “imaginative in the highest degree’ (Shakespeare 1975, 6). The Norton edition lets “fancy” pass without comment and modernizes “high fantastical” as “uniquely imaginative.” My own edition of the play, which incorporates text and notes from David Bevington’s fourth Riverside edition, limits “fancy” to “love” and paraphrases the last line as “it surpasses everything else in imaginative power.” Given these cues, Shakespeare’s twenty-first-century readers and listeners are apt to conclude that “fancy” is just another word for “imagination,” with a pun on sexual desire or falling in love.
