Material Dispossessions and Counterfeit Investments: The Economies of Twelfth Night

Abstract

In the final moments of Mark Norman and Tom Stoppard’s film, Shakespeare in Love, Will Shakespeare and Viola deLesseps conceive the plot for Twelfth Night. This new comedy is intended to recuperate Shakespeare’s loss of a love object—Viola deLesseps herself. In this fictive account, Twelfth Night would serve to disavow the very economic forces at the film’s center—that is, those that produce the need to marry the wealthy merchant’s daughter (Viola) to the financially strapped aristocrat (Lord Wessex) in order to save the Lord’s investment in the Americas. Thus this Twelfth Night is imagined to rewrite Shakespeare in Love in perhaps the same way that the actual Twelfth Night writes over the merchant forces central to one of its own sources, Gl’Ingannati. Moreover, even as the film foregrounds the economics of the theater in Shakespeare’s need for 50 pounds in order to become Burbage’s partner, the film marks the separation of the economic sphere from that of the aesthetic and the affective. Ironically it does so by having the very marker of that separation also serve as the means by which Shakespeare gets the money he needs. Shakespeare acquires the 50 pounds by winning a wager that a play can show us the “very truth and nature of love”; “culture” and love with it are elevated from the base economic on which they depend and are even purified of it.