" . . . 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.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. 70-109.
 
Freedman, Barbara. Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and
Shakespearean Comedy. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991.
 
Freud, Sigmund. New Introductory Lectures  on Psychoanalysis. New York: Norton,
[1964].
 
Grosskurth, Phyllis. "The New Psychology of Women," The New York Review of
Books Oct. 24, 1991: 25-32.
 
Hartman, Geoffrey. "Shakespeare's poetical character in Twelfth Night."
Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey
Hartman. New York: Methuen, 1985. 37-53.
 
Hartwig, Joan. Shakespeare's Analogical Scene: Parody as Structural Syntax.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984.
 
Holland, Norman. The Brain of Robert Frost: A  Cognitive Approach to
Literature. New York: Routledge, 1988.
 
Knight, Chris. Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture. New
Haven: Yale University Press, [1991?].
 
Pfister, Manfred. The Theory and Analysis of Drama. European Studies in English
Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988.
 
Salingar, L. G. "The Design of Twelfth Night," Shakespeare Quarterly 9 (1958):
117-139, and collected in Dramatic Form in Shakespeare and the Jacobeans.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,  1986. 53-77.
 
Scragg, Leah. "'Her C's, Her U's, and Her T's: Why That?' A New Reply for Sir
Andrew Aguecheek." RES 42.165 (1991): 1-16. [i.e., CUT Purse.]
 
Vonnget, Kurt. Mother Night. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.