Rough Draft of Consonance and Dissonance Within Twelfth Night (better name pending)

John Koerper

Professor Gideon Burton

ENGL 382

23 November 2015

Consonance and Dissonance Within Twelfth Night

            The final climactic action of Twelfth Night, when the twin stories merge with the hugging of the twins themselves, does not take place on stage. Although various productions will include a physical hug, Viola preempts embracing Sebastian through commanding him “to not embrace me till each circumstance of place, time, fortune, do cohere and jump that I am Viola” (TN 5.1.249-251). This conclusive moment hinges on her finding her women’s clothes, left in the hands of the imprisoned captain. His release hinges on Malvolio revealing the circumstances of his imprisonment, and only “when that is known, and golden time covents, a solemn combination shall be made” and the official marriages will occur (5.1.377-378). This final irresolution of plot does not negate the happy ending of the comedy, but does act as a synecdoche for the problems left unfinished in the play as a whole. While the comedy includes the reunion of the siblings, the promise of weddings, and the untangling of mistaken love and identity, it also fails to resolve the mistreatment of Malvolio, the abuse of Sir Andrew, and the final reversion to established gender roles through Viola returning to women’s clothes. In ending with an air of indeterminacy, Twelfth Night complicates the established comedic pattern of reestablishing societal conventions by the end of the play and leads to conflicting interpretations by scholars of the overall meaning of the play.

            Two popular but conflicting interpretations of the mixed resolved and unresolved elements of the play are that of festive purgation and sustained longing. Festive purgation, as Thad Jenkins Logan explains it, is the idea that Twelfth Night provides its audience with “a world given over to pleasure, intoxication, and freedom” (223). This festivity allows an exploration of excess desires, such as for food, revenge, and sex that as “the subtitle implies” are what “the audience wants” (224). The unresolved problems come in the play because at the limits of festival “are violence and indiscriminate passion” that cannot be restrained completely once it is released (237). Through experiencing these desires in the play the viewers can exhaust those desires in themselves. The idea of sustained longing opposes this interpretation. It claims that the point of the play is about prolonging desire, as Yu Jin Ko explains, “If we accept the idea that possession of the desired object necessarily brings about decay of both pleasure and desire, then the sustaining of desire itself becomes the principal pleasure” (397). The unresolved problems are not dark results of uncontrolled passion, but a device used by Shakespeare and the characters of the play to stretch out their desires for that which is not obtained because, once it is obtained, it losses its desirability. My goal in this paper, is to merge elements of these two ideas together through an analysis of Twelfth Night that makes use of the musical elements of consonance and dissonance to explain the divergent resolutions in the play.

            The answer to the ending can be found within the first line of the play: “if music be the food of love play on” (1.1.1). Music not only bookends Twelfth Night but, according to Christopher Wilson, “musical imagery is pervasive” and a complex part of the overall play. Shakespeare’s use of music, including the songs, “reveals both the emotions and thoughts of his characters and something of his own state of mind as he wrote” (Duffin 20). Through studying this aspect of the play the concept of concordia discors becomes apparent. This ancient Greek theory is the idea that the conflict of concord and discord “will produce harmony in the world, continuous tension will result in resolute consonance” (Wilson 28). Musically, through tension between dissonant sounds and sweet (consonant) sounds harmony is produced. The dissonance from the unresolved aspects of Twelfth Night create the prolonged desire, described by Jin, in the audience and characters of the play while the consonance elements provide the audience and characters with the healthy aspects of their festivities. The study of the concord and discord of music in Twelfth Night demonstrates that it is through the tension of achieving some desires, but leaving others unfulfilled, that true harmony is obtained.

            The rest of my paper will deal with explaining concordia discors in more detail and how Shakespeare references that idea in Twelfth Night and other plays. I then will discuss how musical references create link certain characters and moments in the plot with consonance in music (for example, there is one reference made in the play that links Sebastian to order). Afterwards, I plan on discussing how musical references link characters and moments to dissonance (such as Sir Andrew). My conclusion will expound more on how this juxtaposition of unfinished and finished elements in the story creates harmony for the viewers. That idea is still a little murky right now, but I hope to flush it out as I continue to explore this topic.

Works Cited

Duffin, Ross W. Shakespeare’s Songbook. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004. Print.

Ko, Yu Jin. “The Comic Close of Twelfth Night and Viola’s Noli me tangere.” Shakespeare Quarterly 48.4 (1997): 391-405. JSTOR. Web. 22 Nov. 2015.

Logan, Thad Jenkins. “Twelfth Night: The Limits of Festivity.” Studies in English Literature 22.2 (1982): 223-238. EBSCO. Web. 22 Nov. 2015.

Wilson, Christopher R. Shakespeare’s Musical Imagery. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011. EBSCO. Web. 22 Nov. 2015.