Greig played Malvolio in Twelfth Night 3 not as Malvolio the male steward, but as “Malvolia”, a
female steward and by extension (since Malvolio wants to marry Olivia) a lesbian character.
For Malvolia in Twelfth Night, the ending of the letter scene in Act 2 scene 5, in which Malvolia
has been led to believe that Olivia is in love with her, becomes a revelation about her sexuality,
complete with a baptism in the garden fountain. It is as if the promise of requited affection
transformed the repressed and neurotic steward into a liberated, fully sexual being.
Since Malvolia wants to marry Olivia, the familiar steward is now a lesbian and the
state of Illyria is necessarily one in which gay marriage is possible. The reading of the line, ‘To
be Countess Malvolia’ 4 becomes as forward thinking and as radical to the modern audience
as the original line may have been to Shakespeare’s audience (albeit for reason of being a
gay marriage rather than for being a marriage of a non-aristocrat to a countess). However,
when Sir Andrew responds with ‘Fie on him, Jezebel’ 5 (rendered ‘Fie on her, Jezebel’ in this
production), the strangeness of accusing the steward of feminine lasciviousness, and the
implied unnaturalness of the male steward that attends this line is lost to the audience.
Therefore, whilst this cross-gender casting offers lively new readings of a familiar character,
meaning that it is held within the text pertaining to the character’s original male sex, it is
jettisoned by transposing Malvolio into Malvolia. This is most powerfully displayed in the gulling
plotline in which gender and sexual identity complicate the notion that Malvolio’s gulling is a
being a benign mockery intended to lead him/ her to clarity 6 .
When lawyer, John Manningham, saw Twelfth Night in 1602, he wrote in his journal that
the main plot is based on Menaechmi by Plautus, the sub-plot receives equal mention, and he
explicates the plot to humiliate Malvolio that he describes as ‘good practise’ 7 . We are left to
infer whether he means it is a good dramatic practice for a comedy or a good social practice
to correct follies such as haughtiness and lustfulness. However, this “practise” is familiar to
readers of Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his World, a seminal work on festive rites and rituals
and their impact on literature of the time. Bakhtin writes that folk comedy and laughter
disrupted and subverted the mainstream culture dominated by the powerful: the church and
the state;
No dogma, no authoritarianism, no narrow-minded seriousness can
coexist with Rabelaisian images; these images are opposed to all that
Twelfth Night. [Live broadcast] Directed by S. Godwin. London: The National Theatre, 2017.
William, Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Or What You Will, ed. Roger Warren and Stanley Well.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 2.5.32
5 Ibid., 2.5.38
6 C.L. Barber argues that misrule and mockery serve society by allowing release that leads to
clarification in Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959), 6.
7 Bruce R Smith, Twelfth Night: Texts and Contexts (London: Palgrave, 2001), 2.
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4
2