Jonson seems to have fallen out with Shakespeare’s acting company early in the new century. At this time he wrote a play called The Fountain of Self-Love, or Cynthia’s Revels for the Children of Her Majesty’s Chapel, the “boy-actors” company that, to judge from a famous piece of dialogue in Hamlet, was perceived by Shakespeare and his fellows as something of a threat to their own prestige. Jonson’s double title was innovative and not a little pretentious: Shakespeare may well have been mocking it with Twelfth Night, or What You Will (his only double title). In pricking the bubble of inflated language, as he habitually does, Feste may be glancing at Jonson’s verbosity. “I might say ‘element,’ but the word is over-worn”: “element” is a key word in Jonson’s humoral lexicon. And again, in response to Antonio’s “I prithee vent thy folly somewhere else,” Feste says “Vent my folly! He has heard that word of some great man and now applies it to a fool. Vent my folly!” Since The Fountain of Self-Love contains such phrases as “vent thy passion” and “vent the Etna of his fires,” “some great man” might almost be Jonson.

The fountain in Jonson’s play is that of Narcissus, who drowned while trying to kiss his own reflection. Shakespeare’s Illyria is also a place of self-love. Yellow-stockinged Malvolio in particular is a Narcissus figure, but there is also a certain vanity about Orsino as he plays the role of the courtly lover. Viola, by contrast, is the opposite of a self-lover. She comes back from drowning and speaks in the voice of the desiring woman whom Narcissus neglected:

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!

As intimated by the “reverberate hills” and the echo effect “ ‘Olivia!’ O,” the “babbling gossip of the air” alludes to the mythological figure of Echo, who pined away as a result of her unrequited love for Narcissus.

Jonsonian comedy is peopled by narcissists. Twelfth Night responds with an astonishing exploration of the relationship between knowledge of self and sympathy for others—which we might call “echoing”—in the composition of human identity. “I am not what I am”; “Be that thou know’st thou art”; “I swear I am not that I play”; “Ourselves we do not owe”; “Nothing that is so is so”; “You shall from this time be / Your master’s mistress.” These paradoxes and promises are the word-music of Illyria that “gives a very echo to the seat / Where love is throned.”

MASTER-MISTRESS

The play begins with what sounds very like a fifteen-line unrhymed sonnet, spoken in the voice of an archetypal Renaissance lover, an aficionado of the great Italian poet Petrarch’s sonnets in praise of his lovely but unobtainable Laura. This kind of love thrives on unrequitedness. The poet-lover uses imagery of music and the sea, of food, of rising and falling. Such language is typical of the vogue for sonneteering in the 1590s: every self-respecting Elizabethan poet had a sheaf of sonnets to his or her name. Like the conventional sonneteers, Orsino alludes to figures from classical mythology, in his case Ovid’s Actaeon hunted down by the dogs of his own desire for lovely but chaste Diana. When Olivia appears, Orsino says that “heaven walks on earth,” which is just what an orthodox sonneteer would say. He revels in the “sovereign cruelty” of his stony lady, as all Petrarchan lovers do.

But he is then thrown by the beauty of a lovely boy. The audience, however, knows that Cesario is really Viola, a girl in disguise, and that the body parts so lovingly blazoned by Orsino really are the “woman’s part”—except they are not, since (at least the majority of) the audience also knows that Viola is a part written for a boy actor. “Thou dost speak masterly” says Orsino in response to Cesario’s eloquence. In so doing, he allows himself to become the master mastered by the servingman. Or rather the boy. Or is that the girl? Or the boy actor?

Orsino claims that a woman’s love is of less value than a man’s because it is driven solely by “appetite,” which may be sated, whereas his capacity for desire is infinite:

There is no woman’s sides

Can bide the beating of so strong a passion

As love doth give my heart, no woman’s heart

So big, to hold so much. They lack retention.

Alas, their love may be called appetite,

No motion of the liver, but the palate,

That suffer surfeit, cloyment and revolt.

But mine is all as hungry as the sea,

And can digest as much.…

Here he again resembles a sonneteer, whose love is limitless because it is defined by being unrequited. And when he reappears at the end of the play, Orsino duly speaks another of his fifteen-line sonnets, this one ending with the most hackneyed rhyme in the sonneteer’s repertoire:

Why should I not, had I the heart to do it,

Like to th’Egyptian thief at point of death,

Kill what I love? — a savage jealousy

That sometimes savours nobly. But hear me this:

Since you to non-regardance cast my faith,

And that I partly know the instrument

That screws me from my true place in your favour,

Live you the marble-breasted tyrant still.

But this your minion, whom I know you love,

And whom, by heaven I swear, I tender dearly,

Him will I tear out of that cruel eye,

Where he sits crownèd in his master’s spite.

Come, boy, with me. My thoughts are ripe in mischief:

I’ll sacrifice the lamb that I do love,

To spite a raven’s heart within a dove.

But then he discovers that Cesario is really Viola and he is able to resolve the tension—which is also the tension of Shakespeare’s sonnets—between love for a lovely boy and desire for a woman:

Your master quits you. And for your service done him,

So much against the mettle of your sex,

So far beneath your soft and tender breeding,

And since you called me master for so long,

Here is my hand. You shall from this time be

Your master’s mistress.

If Orsino is the conventional Elizabethan sonneteer, Olivia is parodist of the genre.