‘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

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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’

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(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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

Lisa Hopkins

Sheffield Hallam University

Notes

19

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.