Missing Fathers: Twelfth Night and the Reformation of Mourning

Abstract

Twelfth Night (ca. 1602) begins and ends with references to dead fathers whose link to the action of the play is clearly significant and significantly unclear. A lady richly left by one father is eroti cally paralyzed. Another of slightly lower status, also fatherless, leaves the family home. The fathers reveal themselves merely in traces: Olivia's is mentioned in an aside telling us that he was / That died twelvemonth since, and Viola notes hers just in passing until act 5, when she and Sebastian verify each other's identities.1 One might as sume that this paternal absence would free the plot from being the sort that Jonson crafted, with the older generation hovering over the libidos of the young. After all, the casual approximation of some twelvemonth since suggests the count's insignificance, and the quantitative play on count and account underscores the imprecision of the dating and the wealth of the estate left Olivia by her father. But rather than cele brating post-adolescent freedom, the play reverberates with the sense of familial loss that accompanies entry into the sexual adult world. That loss is a social lacuna, literalized as paternal death. Less subtle than the appearances of the fathers whose mentions book end Twelfth Night in acts 1 and 5 is Twelfth Night's twinning and dou bling. The shipwrecked dyad of Viola-Sebastian replicates Viola's dual identity as herself and her transvestite alter ego Cesario; it also copies the similarity of Viola's and Olivia's names and circumstances, with the two quasi-anagrammatic women mourning for brothers. Even the doubled recounting of Olivia's circumstances, the mistaking of Feste

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