Twelfth Night, one of Shakespeare’s less intuitively-named plays, refers to the last day of Christmas (today!). In Shakespeare’s day (and sometimes now), this was celebrated with a feast where anyone—even a child, even a servant—could be crowned king and queen of the party. It was a day when roles could be reversed. Hearing this, we surely think of the swapped, cross-dressed central twins at the center of the play; the aristocrats falling in love with servants; the servants who aspire to marry their masters. But we could also think about Maria.
“I can write very like my lady your niece…”
Maria’s role in the world of her play, a bit like Horatio, not very legible for modern audiences. In productions set closer to our time than Shakespeare’s, you’ll often see her in some kind of maid’s outfit (with or without lacy cap), but that isn’t quite right. She is the waiting gentlewoman to the Countess Olivia—she may even be a kind of secretary, because we know she handles enough of Olivia’s correspondence to mimic her handwriting almost perfectly— and thus an example of the strange (to us) Renaissance role of the noble servant. Sir Toby calls her a chambermaid, but Olivia calls her a gentlewoman, and we’d do much better to trust Olivia’s accuracy. Maria is probably an example of how well-to-do families gained connections and influence by sending their children to serve in the households of more powerful aristocrats. Think of Queen Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting, but on a smaller scale: they did serve the queen, sometimes doing fairly menial tasks, but they were clearly not working-class servants.
The frequent characterization of Maria as a maid introduces an extra class inversion that is thematically fitting, but not actually contained by the text, when Maria marries Olivia’s uncle, Sir Toby Belch, offstage at the play’s end. It seems perfectly in keeping with the play’s other couples, as the servant Viola (who has been disguised as a boy) marries her master, the Duke Orsino; and her double and twin, Sebastian, marries the Countess Olivia. Fitting, in this final tableau, for a maid to marry a knight. Only none of these cases are quite what they seem: Viola and Sebastian are gentry themselves, and Maria likewise is a gentlewoman marrying a knight.
This does still give us a kind of class-crossing role reversal, even though it isn’t one Shakespeare’s audiences would have recognized. Maria shakes up the clear class distinctions we like to draw when looking at stories written in other times. It’s an interesting indicator of the ways Shakespeare’s plays can seem so understandable—woman, her servant, servant marries up, got it—when it fact the social dynamics they contain are much more complex.
But maybe the most interesting thing Maria really does is disappear.
“If you will see it, follow me.”
Maria comes up with the central scheme of the play’s secondary plot, to torment the pompous household steward Malvolio with his (in his eyes, unjustly) unrequited love for Olivia. Maria’s role in this plan is both essential and easily forgotten. She comes up with the idea because Malvolio threatens to get her in trouble with Olivia. He’s been an irritant to everyone, but it’s only when he turns on Maria that she decides to take action. She comes up with the central prop, a fake letter, and sets the scene for Malvolio to find it… and then, like the scene’s director, doesn’t stick around to watch it happen. She does observe later, when Malvolio comes to aggressively moon over Olivia, but why miss the first half of the prank?
We forget that she was at the heart of the plan because she’s all but instantly shunted to the sidelines. It is my personal belief that the plague of excessive sympathy for Malvolio that unbalances so many productions of this play is a result of insufficient sympathy for Maria, who is his first active antagonist… but it’s hard to maintain that awareness when she doesn’t get to fulfill the role she’s set up to hold, or see through the plot that she begins. By the end of the play, Feste the clown has absorbed her place as the person actively pursuing revenge against Malvolio. A tertiary character delivers the news out of nowhere that she has married Sir Toby, who subsequently reappears for the denouement—but Maria does not.
“My lady would not lose him for more than I’ll say.”
I had a brilliant plan for this newsletter. I was going to work through all the possible characters that Maria could be double-cast as, all the roles in the final scene an actor could be occupying that would prevent him from reappearing as Maria. After all, the other theme of this play—the other air of topsy-turvy Twelfth Night energy running through it—is twins, doubles, other selves. People who are not what they seem, who slip into another identity, who become something else. Who might Maria—in a very literal sense—become?
I got extremely excited for about thirty seconds when I thought she could perhaps be double-cast as Sebastian, Viola’s twin brother—but it doesn’t work. She can’t be any of the other women, or any of the other clowns. None of the available roles make any sense. She appears onstage with all but about two of the characters who show up at the end and she can’t double as either of them—the only remaining characters are a priest and some officers (plus some ‘attendants’ for Olivia, but that would be incredibly weird). These roles seem unlikely to be filled by a boy player, though in terms of timing entrances, exits, and costume changes, either are theoretically possible (the priest, in my opinion, slightly more likely, if it has to be one of them). There are also plenty of minor servants, messengers, and sailors who have appeared throughout the play (sometimes in the same scene as Maria) and could take these roles instead.
Practically speaking, Maria’s absence from the final scene means that she isn’t there to confess to her role in the scheme against Malvolio; isn’t there to be scolded by Olivia in person; isn’t there to make the play’s duo of couples into a trio. I want to come up with a thematic reason for it—or even a practical one—but I just can’t. It’s an unfinished thread, one of the play’s many faint traces of revision, of characters who don’t quite do the things they say they will or appear the places they promise to. Rather than a doubled role, the characters are shadowed by their unknown other selves, the parts they played in a version of the story we can never know.
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