Twelfth Night: All or Nothing, What You Will, It's All One - Or Is It? " . . . styles, like persons, are interchangeable." Declan Kiberd, "Bloom the Liberator," TLS 3 Jan. 1992: 5, writes: "Ulysses is constructed on the understanding that styles, like persons, are interchangeable." Part I Twelfth Night is full of substitutes, including the main title. As Donno (3-4) points out, the references within the text suggest "not a mid-winter season but either spring of summer," indicating "the metaphorical nature of the title Twelfth Night." In this paper, I use both Donno and G. B. Evans as texts. Neither is totally satisfactory. Dramatic figures who stand in for, act in behalf of, or take the place of other dramatic figures; dramatic figures who pretend to be, impersonate, some other dramatic figure; dramatic figures who, for various reasons, assume preconceived roles, roles that could be played by anyone, roles in which they are, if you will allow, only substitutes, since another dramatic figure might as easily stand in and assume these roles; the main title itself has a substitute: What You Will which suggests that anything goes. The concept of substitution contains the concept of doubles or doubling, since a substitute demands that an original exists - or existed at one time. To assume a role, to act a part, to act in behalf of, is to acknowledge the preexistence of that role, of that part, or of someone for whom one acts. A substitute is a double for her original, a replacement, and, if the substitute proves that he or she can play the part as well as the dramatic figure for whom he or she is substituting, then what is to keep the substitute from displacing the original? And so temporary replacement moves on to permanent displacement. Dramatic figures, like the parts of a Ford or a Carthaginian ship, are interchangeable. As Kurt Vonnegut has commented, "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be" (v). Or as Feste has it, "'That that is, is,' so I, being Master Parson, am Master Parson; for what is 'that' but 'that' and 'is' but 'is'?" (4.2.13-14). Berry calls Feste's words "perhaps the clearest statement in the canon of the very Shakespearean idea of being-as-role playing" (202). For the purposes of this essay, I would like to place this continuum that moves from representation to impersonation, from mimicry to transformation, from replacement to displacement, or, to pun along with Geoffrey Hartman (47), from clowning to cloning, under the rubic of surrogation, a word which Shakespeare, perversely, never uses. I would like to talk about the ways in which surrogates function in this play and then to speculate about some possible meanings and significances. I realize that surrogation is a metaphor, a rather inclusive metaphor, and that other critics have used other metaphors, such as masquerade (e.g., B. Evans 120) or disguise, to talk about some elements that I have included under surrogation. In my thinking about metaphor, I'm influenced by Holland 112-34. Of course, I could have called these substitutes "factors." Agnew 119 quotes Dekker: "Players are . . . [poets'] factors who put away the stuff and make the best of it they possibly can, as indeed 'tis their parts to do so" (The Gulls Horn-Book in The Non-Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Alexander Grossart, 5 vols. [1885; rpt. New York, 1963], 2:246-7). Hal did. "Percy," he claims, is but my factor . . . To engross up glorious deeds on my behalf; And I will call him to so strict account That he shall render every glory up, Yes, even the slightest worship of his time, Or I will tear the reckoning from his heart. (3.2.147-52) Hotspur acts as Hal's surrogate, a sinister double who will be displaced and destroyed by his original. This, at least, is how Hal sees it, and for Hal to call Percy a "factor" is appropriate to the economic language of 1 Henry IV, but, as a term for a general concept, surrogation may be more useful, especially to twentieth century brains that are used to hearing about "surrogate mothers" or "surrogate for President Bush" and contemplating the problems attendant upon these surrogations. Metaphors, with which this play abounds, are obviously about surrogation, since one term is surrogated for another. Geoffrey Hartman, "Shakespeare's poetical character in Twelfth Night," has a similar feeling about the play's metaphoric quality: "a riot of metaphors [work] against distinctions, until, to quote the ballad at the end, 'that's all one'" (47). The conditional clause that begins Twelfth Night - "If music be the food of love" - may alert the attentive auditor or reader to the possibilities of substitution: if music is food. As with most metaphors, Orsino's conditional replacement seems pragmatically wrong. Music is ethereal, played on instruments, listened to by the ear. Food is material (compare Sidney's "Give me some food"), prepared by cooks in a kitchen, taken in by mouth. If we use I.A. Richards's distinction between tenor and vehicle, we may decide that neither music nor food is the tenor. Food only replaces music as vehicle; the implied tenor of Orsino's imagery is love and the possibility of killing love through a surfeit - a surfeit that begins with excess, moves to nausea, then to vomiting - and thus an end to "appetite" - a conflation of sexual longing and the desire for food. Metaphors are improbable and complicated substitutions. One way, although not the only way, to view surrogation is as a metaphor - a tenor and vehicle - with the vehicle as surrogate for the "original" tenor. Count Orsino and his role as lover may be imagined as a tenor and a vehicle. Of course, the actor acting the part of Orsino is playing a role, and Orsino as dramatic figure is assuming the preconceived role of passionate, unrequited lover. It seems obvious to me that Orsino is the vehicle, the surrogate, the replacement, since the role is the constant and the player of the role is the variable. To a greater or lesser degree, any actor will do. "It's all one" (1.5.129), and Orsino is simply another surrogate in a socioliterary role that has been, according to Jaques, played and replayed many times. The pun is a condensed metaphor though the relation of vehicle to tenor may be obscure. When Curio asks Orsino if he will hunt the "hart," Orsino punningly replies, "Why, so I do, the noblest that I have" (1.1.17), and, then, on his own first view of Olivia: Methought she purg'd the air of pestilence! That instant was I turn'd into a hart, And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds, E'er since pursue me. (1.1.19-22) The surrogation here is complex. First, Orsino substitutes heart for hart; then he substitutes Olivia and himself for Diana and Actaeon, and, following from that substitution, he is replaced by a hart, while his desires are replaced by cruel hounds - a rather impressive series of surrogates. Valentine, himself to be replaced by Cesario, is perhaps a more traditional surrogate: one appoited by authority to act in place of another, a deputy. Why Orsino needs, or uses without apparent need, a surrogate to woo Olivia is a central question in the play, one which I will address later. For the present we need only note that Valentine is an ineffective surrogate: "I might not be admitted" (1.1.23), he confesses to Orsino who seems not at all upset by the failure. Of course, the more interesting surrogations begins in the second scene when Viola decides to disguise herself as a eunuch and serve Orsino, "for," she says, "I can sing/And speak to him in many sorts of music/That will allow me very worth his service" (1.2.57-9). I wonder if Viola is supposed to think of a eunuch as lacking both penis and testicles, and thus the perfect kind of man for her to play. In any case, Viola seems to have replaced this plan with another by the time she reaches Orsino's court, and, while Feste replaces her as the play's singer, she decides to impersonate her presumably dead brother. "I my brother know/Yet living in my glass," she says, even such and so In favor was my brother, and he went Still in this fashion, color, ornament, For him I imitate. (3.4.379-83) She purposefully becomes a surrogate for her brother (unbeknownst to him, of course) who later will inadvertently become a surrogate for her. Each can be replaced and/or displaced by the other, and it is, apparently, all one. But in Viola's second scene (1.4), she replaces Valentine as Orsino's surrogate wooer of Olivia. As a surrogate of her brother, she now becomes the surrogate of a surrogate (i.e., Valentine), while acting as Orsino's surrogate. Viola captures some this in her comment to Olivia: "Your servant's servant is your servant, madam" (3.1.87). And, of course, to make things more complicated, Viola not only replaces Orsino as wooer; she displaces him - winning Olivia for herself. The love object, Olivia, is herself part of the play's surrogation. When Viola first confronts Olivia and Maria, she's not sure which is which and has to ask "the honorable lady of the house" to identify herself (1.5.139), indicating that Olivia and Maria are interchangeable figures. There are other explanations. Viola may be taking a cut at Olivia's ego, or she may be laughing at her own embassy. If Olivia were truly an "unmatchable beauty" (1.5.141), why is she not distinguishable from Maria? Apparently they are both veiled, and so are, indeed, indistinguishable doubles. Maria as Olivia's double is relevant later in the play. Of course, for Orsino, Olivia is merely a surrogate object, a substitute for a genuine love, and, quite apparently, any surrogate will do. Like Orsino, she herself has assumed a preconceived role, the role of mourner, and also like Orsino she overplays her role so that she is perceived as a surrogate - an actor - rather than as a true mourner. In her opening banter with Feste (1.5.36ff), where he makes precisely this point, she becomes a surrogate fool as well: "The more fool, madonna, to mourn for your brother's soul, being in heaven" (70-1), comically displaced by her own fool whose place she must logically assume. And, finally, like Orsino, she acts through a surrogate, in her case, her steward, Malvolio. And, of course, she falls in love with a surrogate, and later marries a surrogate of that surrogate. Or is Sebastian the tenor and Viola the vehicle? Should we conceptualize their kinship as a kind of living metaphor where Viola's image both masks and reveals Sebastian's reality? Should we see the metaphor solved as a kind of equation (as it is), when Olivia marries Sebastian? The roisterers - Uncle Toby, Maria, Sir Andrew, Fabian, and Feste (who is mainly, but not totally, attached to this group) - will hardly be bothered by such delicate questions - if dramatic figures can, as only surrogate humans, have questions in mind. But these roistering dramatic figures are also engaged in their surrogations. Salingar 132-35 and Hartwig 135-52 describe the parodic elements in the subplot. These elements can be described in terms of surrogation, as replacements that have the effect of parody. Fabian replaces Feste (inexplicably) in playing the surrogate letter trick on Malvolio; and Feste impersonates Sir Topas for the edification of Malvolio who is now a kind of surrogate madman (4.2). "Nay, I prithee put on this gown and this beard; make him believe thou art Sir Topas the curate," Maria tells Feste (4.2.1- 2), and, then as his impersonation ends, she tells him, "Thou mightst have done this without thy beard and gown; he sees thee not" (51-2). So why does Shakespeare create this little playlet for Feste, and then have Maria indicate that, except for the vocal mimicry, the physical disguise is pointless? Surely, theatrical economy would have led the playwright to revise, rather than underline this redundance - unless, of course, the pointlessness, the purposelessness, of the surrogation is itself the point. Maria's letter, a substitute of sorts, mimicks Olivia's hand, and influences Malvolio, in turn, to mimick its descriptions, to play a certain role: "Be opposite with a kinsman, surly with servants; let thy tongue tang arguments of state; put thyself into the trick of singularity" (124-5). And, of course, wear yellow stockings with cross-garters. Like Orsino, he assumes a preconceived role, but, unlike Orsino, the role is, in a sense, thrust upon him, not freely assumed. And Sir Andrew similarly has the role of revenging swordsman thrust upon him by Sir Toby. Toby's Andrew becomes the surrogate duellist, Maria's Malvolio the surrogate lover. Scragg 4 suggests that Maria replaces Shakespeare as the author in Malvolio's play-within-the-play, i.e., his finding and reading the letter (2.5). In 2.3, there is a farrago of surrogation. Feste asks, "Did you never see the picture of 'We Three'?" (14-15). "We Three" is a substitution joke, a picture of two fools or two asses. The viewer must stand in for the third. Since Feste is already the "fool," Toby welcomes him as "ass" (16). Instead of the catch requested by Toby, Feste substitutes "O mistress mine," though this is apparently followed by a catch "Hold thy peace, thou knave." Catches are a special type of round, sung antiphonally in three or more parts, in which during the singing an "internal" meaning is substituted for an "external." Feste plays on this fact when he tells Sir Andrew: "I shall be constrain'd in't to call thee knave, knight" (57-58), since, of course, Sir Andrew is external knight and internal knave. The caterwauling of this catch constrains Olivia to send her surrogate, Malvolio, to quiet them. Malvolio accuses them of substituting Olivia's house for an alehouse, and Toby responds by pointing out that Malvolio is himself a mere substitute: "Art any more than a steward?" (2.3.97). To get revenge on Malvolio, Maria explains her plan of the surrogate letter: "we can hardly make distinction of our hands" (135-6). Maria's purpose becomes a "horse" that will make Malvolio into an "ass" (141-2). Maria alludes to the "We Three" substitution: "I will plant you two, and let the fool make a third" (146), and Toby calls her a "beagle" (151). And so on and on, substitution after substitution. Sebastian and Antonio play their surrogate parts as well. As Malvolio leaves to find Cesario who is the twin of Sebastian (1.5.262), Sebastian, her double, enters in her place. If the doubling is adequately done (and I have never seen it adequately done), the audience may be initially confused, and this confusion emphasizes one powerful aspect of surrogation: displacement. Shakespeare plays with the concept of doubling in this play. Doubling usually refers to one actor playing more than one dramatic figure in the same play. Here, essentially, the same dramatic figure is played by two different actors. Cf. Fineman 72-3. Reinforcing this idea, Sebastian admits to Antonio he's not Roderigo (2.1.12). Why he's kept his geniune identity from Antonio, why he's assumed a surrogate identity, he doesn't say. Perhaps next week or next month, who knows, he'll be pretending to be someone called Cesario. He also tells Antonio that he is Sebastian, son of Sebastian. Our Sebastian appears to be a substitute all around. Antonio has, apparently, found him highly satisfactory, and, rather than let the dear boy go off unattended, volunteers to become his surrogate valet. But, mistaking Cesario for Sebastian and being jailed for taking Cesario's part - a kind of surrogation - in her farcical duel with Sir Andrew, Antonio can not keep Sebastian from becoming his sister's substitute, a surrogation that causes as much confusion as it apparently clears up. Although willing to be substituted for a woman substituting as a boy, he's apparently no wimp, so Toby's practical joke on Andrew and Cesario has potentially tragic consequences. Sebastian also replaces and displaces Toby in Olivia's household. Toby's attack on Sebastian may be his attempt to hold on to his honored position as Olivia's closest kin in residence. And Olivia's shock at finding she's married the wrong person is revealed by her initial silence and her later feeling that she'd like to think "further" on "these things" (5.1.295). Sebastian's attempt at humor - "You are betrothed both to a maid and man" (247) - fits nicely into the concept of surrogation, but doesn't seem to get him much credit with his wife. Orsino, sillily, misses the point: "Be not amazed, right noble is his blood" (248). She has, unknowingly, just married a surrogate, the twin of the person she fell in love with; her true love, she now finds, is a woman; and Orsino tells her it's all right because this unknown substitute has noble blood. It's all one. Orsino's comment tells me more about his attitude than it tells me about Olivia's. When Orsino finds that Olivia is married, he seems easily to shift his undying love to a substitute, even though Viola is still dressed as a young man, and until minutes before Orsino has considered her a male. He simply surrogates a Viola for an Olivia; after all, they have the same letters in their names. All for nothing, and nothing for all. See Stephen Booth 164-65, 472, for nothing = vulva, and, 177-78, for all = penis. Part II How do I account for all this surrogation? First, let me give the large - perhaps too large - answer: culture itself is a surrogation, a substitution, a replacement for something else. A Platonist like Henry More might see culture as a substitute, and so might Hobbes, Hooker, Calvin, and Luther. Nietzsche, Freud, Otto Rank, Norman O. Brown, Ernest Becker, and Hans Peter Duerr would surely agree that culture is a substitute for something else. But what culture apparently replaces, what it is a substitute for, varies according to one'e religious, philosophical, or intellectual stance. Thus, what surrogation means is equally in dispute. Is this surrogation a meaningful reflection of, a substitute for, divine order? Or is it only a meaningless iteration, one thing substituted for another, without end? Or is surrogation merely a societal structuring device? As one of my friends once said, "some times any mother will do." But if I am merely a replaceable part, if I myself am only a surrogate, a temporary stand in, of what importance am I? That question, of course, has a variety of culturally standard and conflicting answers. But my point here is that Twelfth Night keys into this cultural debate over the meaning of surrogation, and that a good part of its dramatic tension relies on this conflict. One specific meaning is psychological. As Ralph Berry has already noted, "the outrageous substitution of Sebastian for Cesario - the news of which is received with silence and assent by Olivia - raises unanswerable questions concerning her psychology." Orsino's "passion" is equally "ambivalent," comprehending as it does "his taste for a girl-like boy - or is it a girl reminiscent of a boy? Or a girl, reminiscent of a boy who was a girl in disguise, played in any event by a boy?" (Berry 203-4). Yes, it's the old Chinese box trick. Or is it the center of the onion question? In any case, we may talk about the play from the vantage point of Freud's Family Romance where substitution is the name of the game. Since we can't get any of Shakespeare's dramatic figures on our couches, for psychoanalytic reasons, that is, I will make certain assumptions. Of the central figures, Orsino alone has not recently lost, permanently or for the time, one of his nuclear family. Olivia, Viola, and Sebastian have, and I assume that each carries a sense of that loss, however lightly. And each of these four is willing, perhaps eager, to accept a surrogate for the lost loved one: Olivia accepts Cesario (Viola) for her drowned brother and, later, Sebastian for Cesario; Viola accepts Orsino for her apparently drowned brother; Sebastian accepts Olivia for his apparently drowned sister; and, as the play ends, Orsino accept Viola for Olivia. Each gets a surrogate for a lost love object, of whatever kind, be it sister, brother, or potential lover. Replacement, as Freud suggests, is demanded by one's psychological needs; call it what you will, transference, sublimation, displacement, or transformation (Freud 9, 18, 86), surrogation rules in the world of personal needs. Freud in Analysis Terminable and Interminable sees two "themes" in the female: "an envy for the penis, a positive striving to possess a male genital" (Standard Edition, Vol. 22, p. 250, as quoted by Grosskurth 32). From this perspective, Viola's replacement of her brother Sebastian is a fantasy attempt at gaining what she desires - a female penis. But in this case, it is not all one since Viola has "no thing." Sexuality is, obviously, one of the limitations on surrogation. What would a Lacanian say about Viola's female penis? Fineman, e.g., 70-3, takes a different approach: he sees Shakespeare diffusing the danger of "erotic homology" in the family romance through encapsulation "within a comic form." The tensions are, however, not resolved (71). Fineman, in turn, acknowledges his debt to Rene Girard (106). As for the other dramatic figures, only Toby is able to replace his dependence on Olivia by marrying Maria, an Olivia surrogate. Antonio and Malvolio are left without replacements for Sebastian and Olivia, and Sir Andrew, who never had a hope of attaining Olivia and has romanced Sir Toby in her stead, is finally rejected. Feste and his surrogate Fabian don't seem to require any replacements. And as the play ends, the haves are balanced by the have nots, those who have surrogates and those who don't. Psychologically, surrogation is an excellent adjustment strategy for the person crushed by loss; it allows for survival. But if one's drowned brother is readily replaced by another person, of what value is that drowned brother - since he is so easily replaced? It's similar to the question we find Hamlet contemplating. The problem with surrogation is that it calls into question the unique value of the individual identity. If one love can be easily replaced by another, if Viola is an easy surrogate for Olivia, then, to paraphrase that villainous pragmatist Aaron, perhaps any snatch will do. Perhaps the "I" is meaningless outside of its own desires to be unique. Fears of the loss of self lead to thoughts of the doppelganger and demonic possession. Both ideas appear to underlie The Comedy of Errors - a play that many critics link to Twelfth Night and that also has its doppelganger and its reported demonic possession. Either the dispossessing double or the displacing demon threatens to destroy the "I." The internal self will be lost, and no outside observor will know the difference, so superficial is our knowledge of others. Olivia takes Viola's doppelganger in marriage with no questions asked. And in Feste's final words - "But that's all one, our play is done, / And we'll strive to please you every day" (5.1.384-5) - the audience is invited to consider its own surrogation; it too will be replaced during the next performance (or over the next decades) by a similar audience - another "you" to be "pleased" - as the play is performed "every day" - infinitely replacing itself with a surrogate of itself, as meaningful or meaningless as the rain that raineth every day. The play builds a tension between one's feeling of uniqueness, that one has a distinct place in this "theatre," and one's knowledge of inevitable displacement, replacement, that one's place in the "audience" will be taken by someone else. The theatre invites such speculations: an actor is a surrogate who will inevitably be surrogated, acting in a play which itself is a surrogate: Chinese boxes replacing Chinese boxes. But Malvolio will accept no substitutes. Antonio, too, seems to be of the same persuasion: it's Sebastian or no one. While the other dramatic figures play musical chairs of surrogation, these two stand out. Unlike some auditors, I don't find this play to be the tragedy of Malvolio; he does not reach Shylockean proportions. But I think that his and Antonio's refusal to accept an easy substitute for the loss of a loved one, their insistence on uniqueness, are minor and muted triumphs. They resist the play's romantic closure, and insist that, for them, at any rate, any surrogation is not good enough. It's not all one. Three cheers for a modicum of constancy, I say. W. L. Godshalk University of Cincinnati Selected Bibliography Agnew, Jean-Christophe. Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Berry, Ralph. Shakespeare's Comedies: Explorations in Form. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972. Booth, Stephen, ed. Shakespeare's Sonnets. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977. Donno, Elizabeth Story, ed. Twelfth Night. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Evans, Bertrand. Shakespeare's Comedies. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960. Evans, G. Blakemore. The Riverside Shakespeare. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976. Fineman, Joel. "Fratricide and Cuckoldry: Shakespeare's Doubles," Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray Schwartz and Coppelia Kahn. 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