‘Twelfth Night’ might seem an odd choice for this week’s Shakespeare Sunday theme: Villains. We usually think of the ending in terms of the usual comedic conventions – reconciliations, songs, marriages.

I studied this play for ‘O Level’ – back in 1985. What’s really stayed with me for 40 years hasn’t been the generic celebratory end. It’s been Malvolio’s chilling parting shot:

‘I’ll be revenged on the pack of you.’ [b]

Not because of the metre or syntax. Because it’s Malvolio who delivers the line: even at 15, I felt complicit, almost guilty. Maybe even a little scared.

Malvolio isn’t especially likeable.

With his ‘no more cakes and ale’ worldview, he’s a dusty Puritanical foil to Sir Toby, Maria, and the endless carnivalesque which seems to happen under Olivia’s roof whilst she’s mourning her brother. Worse than being a pompous killjoy, he seems to have ideas above his servant status – ideas which involve his elevation from steward to lord. If Orsino and Andrew have an eye for Olivia, why not him?

The prank which came to stay.

The plot hatched by the revellers goes on. And on.

A faked letter suggests Malvolio’s dreams of marriage are about to come true. It enables one of Shakespeare’s hilarious ‘eavesdropping’ scenes, where we’re invited to laugh at his gullibility and ambition. 

And it IS funny!

The hilarity is compounded by Malvolio’s next encounter with the oblivious Olivia. He looks absolutely ridiculous in the cross-gartering and yellow stockings the fake letter asked for, and he compounds this with the haughty, confident, saucy way he speaks to his mistress. He’s had greatness thrust upon him, and he’s not going to be found wanting.

And it IS funny!

Next, we’re treated to Malvolio isolated and incarcerated as a madman, gaslit and taunted by his nemesis and polar opposite, Feste.

And …

Shakespeare always asks us to draw the line ourselves.

Time and again, his characters reach stages where they declare, ‘enough!’

Shakespeare writes memorable villains, but we can never take them in isolation. Context is everything, as I often tell my students. Who in literature – or life – is 100% good, or bad? 

The careers of these characters, and the charge sheet against them often challenge us.

‘Twelfth Night’ appears not that long before Francis Bacon declares revenge a kind of ‘wild justice’. I think we discourage revenge as a defence against anarchy, but when and why does it become attractive?

The desire for revenge seems a function of despair – the loss of hope in any intervention, in any person or organisation saying ‘enough!’

No one steps up for Malvolio before he exits stage left.

Not Olivia.

Not any repentant figure from the gang who teased him. Actually, Maria is rewarded (at least in terms of social mobility) with an advantageous marriage.

Not us, in the audience.

None of this excuses revenge.

None of this makes Malvolio a hero.

But it should make us think.

Villains: Born? Made? Invited in?

This is why I was ‘scared’ back in 1985, I think. Part of me wondered when teasing Malvolio turned to bullying Malvolio, and how complicit I was in his decision to become a villain.

Did laughing at everything that happened to Malvolio say more about me than it did about him?

Every pack is surprised when one of its victims eventually bares its teeth and fights back.

Maybe they shouldn’t be.

References

[a] ‘Just’, Radiohead, The Bends (1995)

[b] Shakespeare, William, Twelfth Night, ed. by Keir Elam, The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2008)