Post on 22-Feb-2023
‘An Apple Cleft in Twain’:
Shakespearean Heroines and the Penalty of Eve
The closing tableau of Twelfth Night shows us two people who, to
the eyes of all the other characters on the stage, look
identical. They do not normally appear identical to the
audience, but Tim Carroll’s 2012-13 production for
Shakespeare’s Globe, which had an all-male cast and modelled
the twins’ appearance so closely on a rather flamboyant
portrait of the earl of Southampton that the eye was drawn to
the clothes rather than the features, showed that it is
perfectly possible that they might do. That production, along
with the similarly all-male Propeller production which was
touring concurrently, also drew attention to an important
feature of Shakespeare’s original conception of the play: all-
male casting, which convention and contemporary notions of
decency mandated on the Shakespearean stage, meant that not
only the costumes but the bodies of the two twins were the
same. As Antonio puts it, ‘An apple cleft in twain is not
more twin / Than these two creatures’.1
1
Antonio’s image of the apple, however, encodes difference as
well as similarity. It does this on (at least) three
different levels. In the first place, in classical mythology
a golden apple was the prize which Paris was required to award
to the goddess he deemed most beautiful; his decision to give
it to Venus was rewarded by the gift of Helen, but ultimately
resulted in the destruction of Troy and the translation of
empire overseas. In this sense, the apple emblematises
women’s superficiality and concern with appearances, as it
does too in the story of Atalanta, distracted during a race by
the beauty of some golden apples, who is twice mentioned in
the course of another play about cross-dressing, As You Like It.2
In the second place, the apple has a crucial role in the
Christian story, for when Eve eats from it and subsequently
tempts Adam to do so, Man falls, and this is a story we are
explicitly invited to remember in Twelfth Night when Feste says
to Maria ‘If Sir Toby would leave drinking, thou wert as witty
a piece of Eve’s flesh as any in Illyria’ (I.5.24-6) and, too,
in As You Like It, not only in the name of the character Adam but
in Duke Senior’s ‘Here feel we not the penalty of Adam’
2
(II.i.5) and perhaps too in Orlando’s ‘He dies that touches
any of this fruit’ (II.vii.99).
The visible legacy of this was the Adam’s apple, which as
Helkiah Crooke explained in Mikrokosmographia marked a
difference between the sexes in that it appeared in the sons
of Adam ‘as if stucke still in the throate of all his
posterity, whereas the woman swallowed it well enough’.3 In
the context of Twelfth Night, it is noteworthy that though Adam
and Eve are both guilty, Eve was generally adjudged to be more
so, and her punishment was certainly greater: both of them are
Fallen, but she bears the additional penalty of childbirth and
all it entails.
There can be little doubt that Twelfth Night is interested in
examining, and to a considerable extent critiquing, the
question of gender difference. The whole point of the play is
that, on the surface at least, the male and female twins
cannot be distinguished from each other. It is also notable
that Viola’s role proves to a certain extent to be
interchangeable with that of another male character, Feste.
The structure of Twelfth Night bears the scars of what appears to
3
be a potentially very destructive accident. When Viola first
decides to adopt male disguise, the reason she gives is that
‘I can sing’ (I.2.54). In the event, however, Cesario never
sings a note. If music is called for, it is invariably Feste
who must supply it, even when this is at the cost of
disturbance to credibility or plot function and takes fourteen
lines to arrange (2.4.1-14).4 While Feste does this, some of
the functions he might have been expected to discharge in
Olivia’s household fall to a character who appears midway
through the play, Fabian. What appears to have happened is
that the voice of the boy actor playing Viola broke at some
point between the initial design of Twelfth Night and the version
of the text that we now have, and the trail of damage left by
that event is visible as scar tissue in the fabric of the
play. The main purpose of the substitutions is the purely
practical one of redeploying the songs which were presumably
originally assigned to Viola, but there is an additional
subsidiary effect of revealing an underlying similarity
between the things that Viola was originally envisaged as
being able to do and the things that Feste is able to do: one
4
is a girl and one is a man, but in this respect at least, they
are able to fulfil a similar function.
At the same time, though, the play also makes it clear that
men and women are not the same, or at least do not have the
same opportunities. It is for instance notable that Olivia is
never once seen outside her own house and grounds, in line
with sixteenth-century ideologies of proper behaviour for
aristocratic women which dictated the construction of long
galleries inside the house and flat leaded roofs on top of it
so that the ladies of the household might take exercise
whatever the weather without straying beyond the bounds
appointed for them. Even when Olivia finds herself madly in
love with the supposed Cesario and desperate to communicate
with him, she feels unable to follow him herself and instead
sends Malvolio with a ring and a message which she hopes will
bring Cesario back to her. In this context, it is no wonder
that Viola seeks the freedom offered by male disguise; one
might think of Montaigne’s account of how ‘seven or eight
girls from a place called Chaumont-en-Bassigni plotted
together “to dress up as males and thus continue their life in
5
the world”’; when one was recognised, ‘she was condemned to be
hanged, which she said she would rather undergo than return to
a girl’s status’.5 One of the things which ‘a girl’s status’
entails is the inability to move freely, and it is this which
Viola secures for herself when she adopts the identity of
Cesario.
It is an identity which she proves able to take on very
easily. One might initially suppose that the requirement to
fight would catch her out, and to a certain extent it does do
that, but in fact Shakespeare dilutes the force of the
expected exposure very considerably, for Sir Andrew, whose
gender is at least securely established even if his
intelligence is in grave doubt, cannot fight either, so
Viola’s inability to do so is not just a consequence of her
femininity. In this respect, as in the equivalence apparently
originally envisaged between the abilities of Viola and the
abilities of Feste and in the visual interchangeability of
Sebastian and Viola, male and female are the same. However,
it is suggestive that the scene in which Viola’s performance
of masculinity is put through its most searching test should
6
take place in an orchard, as is hammered home to us by the
fact that the location is specified three separate times
(‘Marry, I saw your niece do more favours to the count’s
servingman than ever she bestowed upon me. I saw’t
i’th’orchard’; 3.2.4-6; ‘Go, Sir Andrew. Scout me for him at
the corner of the orchard’, 3.4.170-1; ‘thy intercepter, full
of despite, bloody as the hunter, attends thee at the orchard
end’, 3.4.217-8), and this is a setting shared with As You Like It
where Orlando when Oliver asks him where he is replies ‘here
in your orchard’ (I.i.41). The orchard does not only mean
gender - Hamlet’s father is poisoned in his in an episode
which has nothing to do with the question of gender - but it
does always mean the fall. Moreover, Viola herself is an
apple: Malvolio tells Olivia that Cesario is ‘Not yet old
enough for a man, now young enough for a boy, as a squash is
before ’tis a peascod, or a codling when ’tis almost an apple.
’Tis with him in standing water between boy and man’ (I.5.152-
4). This underlines to the extent that Viola and her male
comparators are not the same in terms of the penalty meted out
for eating the apple, and as the anecdote told by Montaigne
7
reminds us, they are also not the same in the eyes of the
world, for ‘a girl’s status’ is different from that of a man.
What Shakespeare’s play invites us to ask is what
justification there is for this being so, and in this respect
it is notable that the play is haunted by memories of a
particularly exceptional female, Queen Elizabeth herself. As
editions of the play routinely observe, Fabian’s ‘This is to
give a dog, and in recompense desire my dog again’ (V.i.6-8)
certainly relates to an anecdote which John Manningham of the
Middle Temple recorded that he had from ‘Mr Curle’ about the
queen, her cousin Dr Boleyn, and his dog: meeting her cousin
with his dog, the queen admired it so much that she requested
it as a present, to which Dr Boleyn supposedly replied that
she could have the dog if she would give him whatever he
desired in return, and, when she agreed, said ‘Then I pray you
give me my dog again’. As Charles Nicholl observes, ‘Mr
Curle’ was Edward Curle, a fellow-student at the Middle Temple
who often fed Manningham anecdotes,6 and this moment would no
doubt have been particularly appreciated when Twelfth Night was
performed at the Middle Temple on 2 February 1602.
8
The implicit invocation of Elizabeth, who coupled the body of
a weak and feeble woman with the heart and stomach of a king,
is one of the play’s many reminders of the potential
separability of bodies and souls. The purported attempt to
investigate Malvolio’s sanity centres on Pythagoras’ doctrine
of the transmigration of souls from one body to another, and
Antonio imagines that Sebastian might have made ‘division of
yourself’ (V.i.220). The greater guilt of Eve may be
inscribed upon the female body, which ingested the apple more
fully than Adam’s more innocent one was prepared to do, but
the play riddles the question of gender distinction
intradiegetically through being written for single-sex casting
and extradiegetically through its glances at the figure of
Elizabeth and its obvious amenability to the one-sex model,
and it also raises the possibility that the body might be
separable from the soul, in which case physical gender might
presumably be an irrelevance.
Is there, then, any actual element of difference between the
genders which justifies the difference in the treatment and
9
position of each? The ultimate biological difference between
them is the ability of women to give birth. Even among
Shakespeare’s comedies, though, Twelfth Night is remarkable for
the paucity of its references to mothers or motherhood. Feste
tells Olivia that she has spoken for fools ‘as if thy eldest
son should be a fool’ (1.5.108-9), but although there is
reference to Viola and Sebastian’s father, there is none to
their mother, and while Rosaline imagines Orlando as her
child’s father, Viola never thinks of Orsino in similar terms,
any more than Olivia does of Cesario; in fact the only real
image of the production of young is Orsino’s accusation that
Viola is a ‘dissembling cub’ (5.1.160). The play’s
referencing of Elizabeth, too, has a secondary effect of
keeping the idea of motherhood at bay. Women’s different
biological potential, then, is not an issue in Twelfth Night.
The play does however seem a little more committed to a rather
different distinction, for there is a recurrent opposition
between self-love and selfless love. When Cesario/Viola and
Orsino discuss love, it is explicitly in terms of gender, with
Viola emblematising a woman’s devotion as ‘Patience on a
10
monument’ (II.iv.115) and Orsino focused solely on possession
of the beloved object. Viola will seek Olivia for Orsino
regardless of her own love for him, while Olivia tells
Malvolio that he is ‘sick of self-love’ (1.5.86). Linda
Shenk, in an article entitled ‘Essex’s International Agenda in
1595 and his Device of the Indian Prince’, discusses the
courtly device known as Of Love and Self-Love and suggests that
Shakespeare knew this,7 and its figure of a blind Cupid has
perhaps something in common with the enforced blindness of
Malvolio in his prison. However it is notable that in the
device, the figure of Philautia - the Greek for self-love - is
female. Under close inspection, then, the distinction between
love and self-love too proves an unreliable guide to
difference between the genders.
Nothing in Twelfth Night, however, can override the force of the
apple, and at the close of the play Viola must doff her male
disguise and ‘return to a girl’s status’, even if nothing in
the play has convinced us that there is a reason why this
should be so. Only in the last plays can the girls miss the
apple and its consequences, and this is, I think, because a
11
rather different narrative paradigm from that of the Christian
story is operative: that of the story of Snow White, except
that it is a version of the story which pointedly avoids any
mention of the poisoned apple. There was no written version
of ‘Snow White’ at the time, and it is impossible to prove the
existence of an oral version, let alone one to which
Shakespeare could be shown to have had access. However, the
similarities with Cymbeline in particular are compelling, and
have often been remarked on. Imogen, like Snow White, is led
into the countryside be a servant armed with a weapon provided
by her stepmother; like Snow White, she appears dead, but is
miraculously resurrected and reunited with her prince, while
the wicked stepmother dies. Imogen even identifies herself as
a deer when she asks Pisanio ‘Why hast thou gone so far, / To
be unbent when thou hast ta’en thy stand, / Th’elected deer
before thee?’,8 and in the fairy tale the huntsman passes off
the heart of a deer as that of Snow White. It is no wonder
that Martin Butler should remark that ‘“Snow White” was not
written down until the eighteenth century, but its
resemblances to Cymbeline tempt one to speculate that it must
have been in oral circulation much earlier’.9
12
What is less often observed is that to a greater or lesser
extent the same pattern can be observed in all of the last
plays. In Pericles, Marina too is led to an isolated place by a
would-be killer in the service of a queen who if not an actual
stepmother is certainly a foster-mother, though the
resurrection motif is displaced from Marina herself onto her
mother, Thaisa. In The Winter’s Tale, Perdita is taken into the
wild to be killed by Antigonus, but survives, and this time
both she and her mother miraculously reappear when both are
believed to be lost. Finally in The Tempest Miranda is first
cast adrift, later said by her father to be dead, and
ultimately revealed to be alive.
In none of these stories, however, is there any mention of an
apple, and in all of them the female characters escape the
consequences of the sin of Eve. To Marina in particular an
odour of sanctity accrues. Pericles is introduced by Gower’s
observation that ‘It hath been sung at festivals, / On ember
eves and holy ales’,10 and Lorraine Helms observes that ‘Like
the romances and saints’ lives, Pericles presents only one side
13
of the declaimers’ argument, theatrically representing a
valiant virgin whose eloquence and courage are rightly
rewarded’.11 Although the framework is ostensibly pagan, and
Diana appears to Pericles in a vision and tells him to go to
Ephesus (5.1.227-9), Cerimon’s restoration of Thaisa has the
feel of a miracle, as does Marina’s remark that ‘there is
something glows upon my cheek / And whispers in mine ear, ‘Go
not till he speak’ (5.1.86-7). Marina herself is certainly
like a saint: her own account of herself is that
I never spake bad word, nor did ill turn
To any living creature. Believe me, la,
I never killed a mouse nor hurt a fly.
I trod upon a worm against my will,
But I wept for’t.
(4.1.72-6)
This is confirmed when the First Gentleman observes that the
effect of her presence in the brothel is ‘to have divinity
preached there’ (4.5.4). Any hint of the contaminating
association with the apple is displaced from Marina and firmly
located elsewhere when Pericles looks at Antiochus’ daughter
14
and says that the gods ‘have inflamed desire in my breast / To
taste the fruit of yon celestial tree’ (I.1.21-2).
Imogen, Miranda and Perdita all emerge almost equally
unscathed and free from and potential of taint. In the case
of Miranda, this effect is achieved partly by a technique
which Shakespeare had already trialled in the case of
Cordelia, which is to keep her as far as possible removed from
the scene of the action: Cordelia famously speaks fewer than a
hundred lines, while Miranda is put to sleep by Prospero as
soon as Ariel appears, and there is in fact no evidence that
she has any awareness at all of either him or any of her
father’s other spirits. She is thus kept as if in a bubble,
isolated from any sense of guilt or danger that might accrue
to Prospero’s plans or to his use of magic; even the textual
history of the play and the editorial interventions this has
provoked appear to collude in the process of marginalising and
quieting her, by making questions of whether she or Prospero
taught Caliban language and which of them is the object of
Ferdinand’s ‘wonder’. The end result is that she can stay
safely in the realm of what Sir Philip Sidney would have
15
classed as poetry, where the ideal can preserve its mystique
by dint of not being looked at too closely, and where
classical rather than Christian paradigms are evoked, in ways
which invite us to think of pomegranates rather than apples,
when Ceres appears and speaks of Persephone.12 Perdita too
evokes Persephone, and the idea of the apple is again
displaced by other fruit as the Clown lists the ingredients he
must buy: ‘four pound of prunes, and as many of raisins o’th’
sun’.13 In the case of Perdita we also encounter a
consistently high level of abstraction. Partly this is
because of only her name, since unlike the Rosalinds and
Violas of earlier plays, Marina, Imogen, Miranda and Perdita
are names which invite us to think in allegorical terms:
Perdita represents loss, Miranda what is to be admired or
wondered at, Marina the ebb and flow of the sea, and Imogen is
in fact a printer’s error for Innogen, wife of Britain’s
mythical founder Brutus, who connotes the buried British past.
However, it is also evident in the way in which her
conversation about plants is so obviously a debate about art
and nature and the fact that the whole scope of the narrative
16
firmly positions her as primarily symbol and actant rather
than person.
Finally in the case of Imogen (the Victorians’ favourite
heroine because of she, like Snow White, cooks and cleans for
the cave-dwellers), the effect is dependent partly on the
crude handling of some of the other characters - the queen and
Cloten in particular - and partly by the careful preservation
of a fairy-tale atmosphere: the play stresses its own
affiliations with romance and folk tale when the First
Gentleman says of the disappearance of the king’s young sons
‘Howsoe’er ’tis strange, / Or that the negligence may well be
laugh’d at, / Yet is it true, sir’ (I.i.65-7) and when the
queen tells Imogen ‘No, be assured you shall not find me,
daughter, / After the slander of most stepmothers, / Evil-ey’d
unto you’ (I.ii.1-3).14 Almost equally notable, though, is the
extent to which the motif of the apple is avoided. The queen,
intent on poison, gathers not fruit but flowers - ‘The
violets, cowslips, and the primroses / Bear to my closet’
(I.vi.83-4) - while Iachimo associates poison with the cooked
rather than the raw when he speaks of ‘Such boil’d stuff / As
17
well might poison poison!’ (I.vii.125-6). When the fall is
glanced at, it is specifically in order to rewrite it in ways
which revise the role of the apple: Lucius says to Imogen
‘Some falls are means the happier to arise’ (IV.ii.403), and
Posthumus’ ‘Hang there like fruit, my soul, / Till the tree
die’ (V.v.263-4) depends on an idea of fruit that is precisely
not picked and eaten.
Collectively, then, what what Twelfth Night and the last plays
show is the difference made to the tonality of Shakespeare’s
treatment of the question of gender by the presence or absence
of the idea of the apple. Viola may look like a man, perform
a role which echoes that of a male charcter, and perform no
worse in a duel than an actual man does, but but an orchard
setting and repeated use of apple imagery underline the
inferiority of her status as a daughter of Eve. In the last
plays, by contrast, the idea of the apple is emphatically kept
at bay, and the fact that so many other aspects of these plays
echo the story of Snow White may well make the absence of the
apple look like a deliberate and pointed move to allow the
heroines to escape the taint of the Fall.
18
1 William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, edited by Keir Elam (London:
Cengage Learning, 2008), 5.1.219-20. All further quotations from the
play will be taken from this edition and reference will be given in
the text.
2 William Shakespeare, As You Like It, edited by Agnes Latham (London:
Methuen, 1975), III.ii.144 and III.ii.271-2.
3 Helkiah Crooke, Mikrosmographia (London: William Jaggard, 1615), p.
636.
4 See for instance Tiffany Stern, Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page
(London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 70-1.
5 Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Fiction and Friction’, in Shakespearean
Negotiations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 66-
93.
6 Charles Nicholl, The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street (London: Allen
Lane, 2007), p. 240.
7 Linda Shenk, ‘Essex’s International Agenda in 1595 and his Device
of the Indian Prince’, in Essex: The Cultural Impact of an Elizabethan Courtier,
edited by Annaliese Connolly and Lisa Hopkins (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2013), pp. 81-97.
8 William Shakespeare, Cymbeline, edited by J. M. Nosworthy (London:
Cengage Learning, 2007), III.iv.109-11.
9 William Shakespeare, Cymbeline, edited by Martin Butler (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005), Introduction, p. 7.
10 William Shakespeare [and John Fletcher], Pericles, edited by Suzanne
Gossett (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2004), 1.0.5-6. All further
quotations from the play will be taken from this edition and
reference will be given in the text.
11 Lorraine Helms, ‘The Saint in the Brothel: Or, Eloquence Rewarded’,
Shakespeare Quarterly 41.3 (autumn, 1990), pp. 319-32, p. 326.
12 William Shakespeare, The Tempest, edited by Virginia Mason Vaughan
and Alden T. Vaughan (London: Thomas Nelson, 1999), 4.1.88-89.
13 William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, edited by J. H. P. Pafford
(London: Methuen, 1963), IV.iii.47-8.
14 For comment on this aspect of the play see Andrew King, ‘ Howso’er
’tis strange … Yet it is true”: The British History, Fiction and
Performance in Cymbeline’, in Shakespeare and Wales: From the Marches to the
Assembly, edited by Willy Maley and Philip Schwyzer (Farnham: Ashgate,
2010), pp. 157-176, p. 157.