How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare (12 page)

Soon after giving the Willow Cabin Speech, Cesario leaves Olivia’s house. At that point, Olivia has a short dialogue with herself, a sort of soliloquy where she asks herself, in essence, “Where did this wonderful creature come from?” She realizes that she has just fallen in love, and she can hardly believe it. She says to herself:
OLIVIA

Thy tongue, thy face, thy limbs, actions, and spirit

Do give thee fivefold blazon
[stature as a gentleman].
Not too fast! Soft, soft!

Unless the master were the man. How now?

And then she says a line so clever that your children should memorize it right now:

Even so quickly may one catch the plague?

“Even so quickly may one fall in love?”

Olivia is one of the wittiest women in all of Shakespeare, and by likening love to the plague, she deepens the metaphor and makes it more than trivial. Plague was serious business in Shakespeare’s time, and it came on quickly. In 1564, the year of Shakespeare’s birth, when an outbreak of plague swept England, the death rate in Shakespeare’s hometown of Stratford
was about ten times higher than normal, with an infant mortality rate of about two-thirds.

Even so quickly may one catch the plague?

The line has a gentle irony and shows Olivia making fun of her own self-imposed gravity, for which we like her the more.

Even so quickly may one catch the plague?

The Final Bribe

Finally, as your children get close to memorizing the whole passage, make them an offer they can’t refuse: If they get it down cold, you’ll tell them the biggest surprise in the whole play, one so amazing that it will blow back their hair. So here goes. See if they can recite the passage by heart:
CESARIO

If I did love you in my master’s flame
,

With such a suff’ring, such a deadly life
,

In your denial I would find no sense
.

I would not understand it
.

OLIVIA

Why, what would you?

CESARIO

Make me a willow cabin at your gate

And call upon my soul within the house
,

Write loyal cantons of contemnèd love

And sing them loud even in the dead of night
,

Hallow your name to the reverberate hills

And make the babbling gossip of the air

Cry out “Olivia!” O, you should not rest

Between the elements of air and earth

But you should pity me
.

OLIVIA

You might do much
.

If they nailed it, you can now tell them the surprise. Are you ready?

Cesario isn’t a boy at all. She is a young woman disguised as a boy. Her real name is Viola. So the Countess Olivia has just fallen deeply in love with a feisty young woman and wants to marry her.

Who wants to hear the rest of the story?

W
ith
Twelfth Night
we reach one of the absolute peaks of Shakespeare’s career. It was written about 1601, around the time of
Hamlet
, and it runs the gamut of emotions: Some moments in it are genuinely hilarious and others are deeply moving. As usual, I think we’ll discover how and why it is such a great work of art by memorizing several passages of it together. Before we continue, however, let’s look at the story, which has two almost independent plots, one centering on Viola, the heroine, the other on Malvolio, Olivia’s steward, or butler.

The Viola Plot

The Viola Plot opens with a rich bachelor named Orsino who is in love with that beautiful Countess Olivia whom we met in the last chapter. As we saw, Orsino has had no luck wooing Olivia, so he has sent his servant Cesario to give it a try. Unbeknownst to Orsino, his clever new servant is not really a chirpy boy; he is a young woman named Viola who was recently shipwrecked on the shore of Illyria, the country where the play is set.

In many ways, it is Viola’s heart that makes the play such a masterpiece. Her curious, spunky, faithful heart is at the play’s center. Viola has a sort of yearning in her voice that we’ll come to recognize, and the yearning is there because her story begins in heartbreak: When she’s washed
ashore in Scene 2, she believes that her beloved twin brother, Sebastian, went down with the ship, and she spends the rest of the play searching for the love and security that her brother gave her.

At the end of Act I, as we’ve seen, Viola (as Cesario) visits Olivia to plead Orsino’s case, and she does it so well that Olivia falls head over heels in love with her. Shakespeare resolves this complication with the same elegance with which he got himself into it: Viola’s twin brother Sebastian arrives in Illyria, and Olivia marries him, thinking he’s Cesario.

The Viola Plot has a couple of more twists and turns in it, and one of them involves Olivia’s drunken uncle, Sir Toby Belch, and his cowardly friend, Sir Andrew Aguecheek.

Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Sir Toby Belch

Sir Andrew and Sir Toby enter the play together in the first act and remain throughout as a sort of comic duo. They are profoundly humorous and richly absurd, and in sheer comic genius they stand easily next to Mr. Collins in
Pride and Prejudice
, Lady Bracknell in
The Importance of Being Earnest
, Tony Lumpkin in
She Stoops to Conquer
, and Sam Weller in
The Pickwick Papers
. Sir Toby is the more knowing of the two, rougher and darker, while Sir Andrew is the innocent who thinks well of himself but is in fact clueless.

Sir Toby, who lives at the manor house with his niece Olivia, has invited the rich Sir Andrew to stay with them and woo Olivia. Olivia, of course, has no interest in a fool like Sir Andrew, which leaves him little to do but drink and carouse till all hours with Sir Toby.

A typically rich exchange between the two occurs in their first scene together, just after Maria, the housekeeper, has bested Sir Andrew in a verbal exchange. You and your son or daughter should each take a part and read the following exchange aloud. Comic writing simply does not get any better than this.

TOBY

O knight, thou lack’st a cup of canary
[wine]!
When did I see thee so put down?

ANDREW

Never in your life, I think, unless you see canary put me down. Methinks sometimes I have no more wit than a Christian or an ordinary man has. But I am a great eater of beef, and I believe that does no harm to my wit.… I’ll ride home tomorrow, Sir Toby
.

TOBY

Pourquoi,
my dear knight?

ANDREW

What is
“pourquoi”?
Do, or not do? I would I had bestowed that time in the tongues
[languages]
that I have in fencing, dancing, and bearbaiting. O, had I but followed the arts!

TOBY

Then hadst thou had an excellent head of hair
.

ANDREW

Why, would that have mended my hair?

Twelfth Night
at Westport Country Playhouse with Jordan Coughtry as Andrew Aguecheek and David Schramm as Sir Toby Belch
(photo credit 12.1)

TOBY

Past question, for thou seest it will not curl by nature.… It hangs like flax on a distaff
[staff used for spinning thread],
and I hope to see a huswife take thee between her legs and spin it off
.

One of my favorite moments in the play tells us worlds about Sir Andrew in just five words. About midway through the play, Maria the housekeeper has just left the room, and Sir Toby remarks on his affection for her:

She is a beagle true bred, and one that adores me
.

To which Sir Andrew replies sadly:

I was adored once, too
.

Funny. Touching. It goes right to the heart of Sir Andrew and makes us feel instant sympathy for this foolish, frightened man.

I was adored once, too
.

Passage 6
Orsino’s Heart

If music be the food of love, play on
.

Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting
,

The appetite may sicken and so die
.

That strain again! It had a dying fall
.

O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound

That breathes upon a bank of violets
,

Stealing and giving odor. Enough; no more
.

’Tis not so sweet now as it was before
.

(
Twelfth Night
, Act I, Scene 1, lines 1–8)

A
s
Twelfth Night
opens, Orsino is in his palace listening to music with his friends and servants. As we can hear from this passage, Orsino is Viola’s polar opposite: He is moody, subject to excess, and romantic in a saturated, self-reverential sort of way. We will learn in the rest of this scene that Orsino is pining for his beautiful neighbor Olivia and that she refuses to see him.

This is one of the most famous speeches in Shakespeare, and I think this is partly because the language is so beautiful and partly because these eight lines introduce us to virtually all the major themes of the play.

If music be the food of love, play on
.

Like all of Shakespeare’s comedies,
Twelfth Night
is about love, and it is no coincidence that the word
love
is only the seventh word of the entire play.

If music be the food of
love
,
play on
.

Orsino is using a metaphor that equates love with physical hunger, and the only food that will satisfy that hunger is music.

love = physical hunger

music = food for that hunger

Orsino then says, in essence, that he doesn’t want to be in love, so he tells his musicians “please give me
too much
music so that my appetite will be glutted and killed by overeating.”

Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting
,

The appetite may sicken and so die
.

Surfeiting
means having too much of something. In other words, it’s painful for him to be in love with this beautiful countess, and he wants it to stop. He wants his musicians to overfeed his longing so that he can get sick of it and turn away. Already we have a clue about Orsino’s character: He is excessively romantic and on the feverish side.