The cruelty and comedy of Twelfth Night cannot be separated. John R. Ford writes, ‘the play […] explores a cruelty, latent within its comic pleasures, so disturbing that both characters and audience often experience ethical discomfort, sometimes even shame.’
In the first scene Orsino says, ‘my desires, like fell and cruel hounds, / E’er since pursue me’ (I. i. 23–24). So unrequited love is cruel, but we are also invited to find Orsino’s self-indulgence comic.
Surely the cruellest character is Sir Toby. Take his very first statement: ‘What a plague means my niece to take the death of her brother thus? I am sure care’s an enemy to life’ (I. iii. 1–2). Or his question to Malvolio: ‘Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?’ (II. iii. 88–89). Behind his superficially Falstaffian persona, and in the total absence of care and virtue, in Toby there is great potential for cruelty. (His attitude to Sir Andrew is that of a psychopath: because Sir Andrew can be parted from his money, he deserves to be.)
And consider the rest of the group who gull Malvolio: Sir Andrew is both gulled and guller; Feste disguises himself as Sir Topas to persecute Malvolio in Act 4, Scene 2; and, of Maria, Harold C. Goddard says that she ‘plainly means it when she says that if Malvolio really does go mad, it will be well worth it: the house will be the quieter! There is a cruel streak in her as there generally is in practical jokers.’
Toby explicitly pitches his ‘dark room’ idea as a sadistic pleasure: ‘Come, we’ll have him in a dark room and bound. My niece is already in the belief that he’s mad. We may carry it thus, for our pleasure’ (III. iv. 103–04).
(A dark room was ‘A place of confinement for a person considered insane’ [OED].)
We feel for Malvolio when he pleads, ‘Good Sir Topas, do not think I am mad. They have laid me here in hideous darkness’ (IV. ii. 21–22). But does he in any way deserve what he gets? Maria’s charge seems to be that he is not virtuous but rather a virtue-signaller:
The devil a puritan that he is, or anything constantly, but a time-pleaser, an affectioned ass, that cons state without book and utters it by great swarths. The best persuaded of himself, so crammed, as he thinks, with excellencies, that it is his grounds of faith that all that look on him love him. And on that vice in him will my revenge find notable cause to work. (II. iii. 111–15)
(Strange to think of Twelfth Night as a ‘revenge play’.)
And when Malvolio reads the forged letter in Act 2, Scene 5, we as it were see the puritan’s eyes bulge in private:
I will be proud, I will read politic authors, I will baffle Sir Toby, I will wash off gross acquaintance, I will be point-device the very man. I do not now fool myself, to let imagination jade me: for every reason excites to this, that my lady loves me. (II. v. 118–21)
The final scene/act contains several examples of Malvolio complaining about his cruel treatment, e.g. in his letter to Olivia:
By the Lord, madam, you wrong me, and the world shall know it. Though you have put me into darkness and given your drunken cousin rule over me, yet have I the benefit of my senses as well as your ladyship. […] I leave my duty a little unthought of, and speak out of my injury. The madly-used Malvolio. (V. i. 285–91)
Remember that Fabian reports Toby and Maria have married: ‘Maria writ / The letter, at Sir Toby’s great importance, / In recompense whereof he hath married her’ (V. i. 347–9). If we want to imagine of what they will be capable together we might think of the Macbeths.
How interesting that the one character credited with a lack of cruelty is Viola, when Fabian says that Cesario ‘bears in his visage no great presage of cruelty’ (III. ii. 43). Almost as if Viola is the antidote to all the cruelties of the play.