randy_byers | Twelfth Night (1996) (Reply)

'Keats catches precisely this quality in his ode "To Autumn" where he defines the perfection of the autumn day by reminding the reader of those things that threaten it -- the hint of transience in the "soft-dying day" and in the "gathering swallows", about to depart to escape the approach of winter. And he might be describing the quality of Twelfth Night itself when he writes in his "Ode on Melancholy" that "in the very temple of delight | Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine".'

-- Roger Warren & Stanley Wells, introduction to Twelfth Night (Oxford, 1994)

Feste: Good madonna, why mourn'st thou?
Olivia: Good fool, for my brother’s death.
Feste: I think his soul is in hell, madonna.
Olivia: I know his soul is in heaven, fool.
Feste: The more fool, madonna, to mourn for your brother’s soul being in heaven.

-- Act 1, Scene 5

'Nunn has chosen to set the film in a 19th-century Illyria (actually mostly filmed in Cornwall) because it is a world where the gender gap is strongly seen both in the extreme contrast of clothing (Nunn calls it "the dress silhouettes") and in social attitudes. It is a society where the class structures of the play’s world are immediately comprehensible, where it is genuinely transgressive for Maria, Olivia's servant, to marry Sir Toby, Olivia’s kinsman, and where Malvolio's final public humiliation is all the more painful for being witnessed by the servants over whom he would normally have had authority. But, above all, the choice of period makes clear and powerful the journey Viola has to make. Nunn shows Viola changing her silhouette into Cesario's: cutting her hair, binding her breasts, putting on men’s clothing. But she then has to negotiate the world of male activity: she must relearn how to walk or how to yawn and learn new skills like fencing or, most awkwardly for her, how to have a conversation with her master while Orsino is in the bath. The distance she travels to make that transformation is clear, and the profundity of its effects on her and on all who come into contact with her is equally striking.'

-- Peter Holland, The Dark Pleasures of Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night

'But Nunn’s brashest choice is to set the play in Cornwall in the nineteenth century. The strict mores associated with the Victorians give the play an even fresher, more transgressive feeling. The contrast between, say, mourning dress and lust moderates love and loss, light and dark, in a way that is, in fact, very Shakespearean, regardless of the setting. TWELFTH NIGHT brims over with sex and intimations of sex, both heterosexual and homosexual. The film did poorly in the United States, at a moment when Shakespearean adaptations were a going business. Perhaps the hypocrisy between Victorian ideals and pronouncements, and the marvelous infirmities of the flesh that Shakespeare puts on stage in TWELFTH NIGHT uncomfortably reminded Americans of our own self-deception about the sexual variety within our culture and ourselves, about our own frustrated desire to explore Illyria.'

-- Kevin Hagopian, Film Notes: Twelfth Night: Or What You Will

I am the man. If it be so, as 'tis,
Poor lady, she were better love a dream.
Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness
Wherein the pregnant enemy does much.

-- Viola, Act 2, Scene 2