Twelfth Night - Privilege and High-horsism

 Malvolio – Privilege and High-horsism

Tuesday, July 18, 2023

 

Again, the cold reading group gives me ideas. The latest play was Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and I got to be Malvolio. Since I have trouble with double-identity plays, I looked for help on Youtube and found a course (Shakespeare and Politics) by Paul Cantor of the University of Virginia, who highlights Maria calling Malvolio a Puritan, the enemies of theater who eventually prevailed, closing the theaters in 1642 – and whose traveling arm, the Brownists, were the beginning of U.S. cultural history as it derived from Europe. 

 

As I looked at Malvolio’s speeches, he seemed to me to define the dynamics around privilege. In India, in the army during the colonial era, the greenest British soldier outranked the most senior Indian soldier. Likewise, in this story, the most dissolute aristocrat outranks the most responsible and accomplished commoner. Malvolio’s position is made worse because he is responsible for relaying Olivia’s dis-satisfaction at the escapades of her relatives – turning them out, even. He does this too forcefully for his rank (but he shouldn’t have to do it at all):

 

My masters, are you mad? or what are you? Have ye
no wit, manners, nor honesty, but to gabble like
tinkers at this time of night? Do ye make an
alehouse of my lady's house, that ye squeak out your
coziers' catches without any mitigation or remorse
of voice? Is there no respect of place, persons, nor
time in you?

 

One effect of being understood as metaphysically inferior, irremediably inferior, is that one develops a conception according to which one is metaphysically superior – by virtue of virtue. I call this high-horsism. It is an understandable response to injured dignity. When privilege meets high-horsism, the result is, over and over, civil war. So, it is important that Malvolio storms out at the end, wrecking the happy ending -- three blissful marriages. Nobody has attended to the impossible situation of Malvolio. He has been treated cruelly, and the audience has been invited to laugh at him. But, as in Midsummer Night’s Dream, where the audience is invited to laugh along with the aristocrats at the artisans’ play, there’s a double-take to be taken here. Everyone in 17^th Century audience, except the king, is metaphysically inferior to somebody, as everyone in the 21^st Century audience has been so regarded at some point (as a child, as a female, as trans, as an adjunct, as not rich, as not really, really rich, as not smart enough, as old, as disabled), and the memory of the ways that that metaphysical, irremediable difference has been emphasized and used for other’s amusement will come back up for people, like the taste of a bad dinner. The audience is left with two impressions: happiness at how well it all worked out for most of the people, and a residue of unease at how badly it all worked out for Malvolio. One might also notice: Malvolio has a way of thinking available to him that gives him ultimate metaphysical superiority – as one among the predestined elect of God’s new kingdom. He has a way of turning the tables.

 

I think many normal romantic comedies deserve to end with the song that ends Brecht’s Three Penny Opera. It is astonishing how close Shakespeare comes to that sentiment:

Und so kommt zum guten Ende 
Alles unter einen Hut 
Ist das nötige Geld vorhanden 
Ist das Ende meistens gut.

Dass er nur um trüben fische 
Hat der Hinz den Kunz bedroht. 
Doch zum Schluss vereint am Tische 
Essen sie des Armen Brot.

Denn die einen sind im Dunkeln 
Und die andern sind im Licht. 
Und man sieht nur die im Lichte 
Die im Dunkeln sieht man nicht.

The last verse reads: so some are in the dark, and some are in the light. You see the ones in the light; you don’t see the ones in the dark.