Ceyda Berk-Söderblom 9/21/23 Ceyda Berk-Söderblom 9/21/23

‘‘For the rain it raineth every day”

Erik Söderblom's foreword to Pentti Saaritsa's translation into Finnish of William Shakespeare's play 12th Night or What you Will.

Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare,

To dig the dust enclosed here.

Blessed be the man that spares these stones,

And cursed be he that moves my bones.

This is what it says on Shakespeare's tombstone. Insofar as the author himself compiled this verse and carved it in the stone, it is most obviously the last words we have of the great bard. It sounds almost like a joke. Can there be anything more banal?

There is irony in the fact that even though Shakespeare's bones have apparently been left more or less undisturbed, the same cannot be said for his dust. Hardly anyone has been dusted as much as Shakespeare, and hardly any literary relic has been cut into such small pieces and examined as thoroughly as Shakespeare's. Since the 1600s, an uncountable number of scholars have tirelessly turned the stones of his literary legacy.

Despite their enthusiasm, the findings have been remarkably modest. Intertextual parallels have been drawn, neologisms counted, metaphors analyzed, but in the end, all that's left is great wonder: how could someone write so insightfully, so profoundly, so sweetly, and so roughly?

William Shakespeare has left us with a few longer poems, an unbeatable series of sonnets, and 36 plays in total, an incredibly diverse, rich literary body of work. Shakespeare's production unfolds before us like an enchanted forest, rising as a mysterious and captivating palace, temple, and tower. It is an ancient relic partly eaten away by time and at the same time a mirror of the present day. It delves into the human mind and at the same time draws a precise picture of our external physical reality. Only one thing it keeps hidden: the demiurge himself. Who was this William Shakespeare? Even the author's biography has not provided any help. No diaries, notebooks, notes, or letters have survived. The name Will or William Shakespeare, Shakespere, Shakspere, Shagspere, or Shaxpere can be found in contemporary sources: church records, property contracts, wills, and elsewhere. We know that Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakespeare was baptized in Stratford--upon--Avon on April 26, 1564, from which we can at least deduce his birth year. -- assuming we are here dealing with the same William. He probably goes to Henley Street School, a stone's throw away from his home.

His father works in Stratford in a position equivalent to the mayor but gets into debt and sinks into poverty. The father is also honoured to be the official beer taster of the town. Around Christmas in 1582, William hastily marries the pregnant Anne Hathaway, Hathwey or Whateley, seven years older than him. He has three children, of whom the son Hamnet dies in 1596. Already around 1588, he leaves his family in Stratford and moves to London, where he first appears as an actor but soon gains fame with the play she writes. He is a partner in the theatre that performs his plays. Little by little, he becomes wealthy. He buys some land and real estate in his home region. A little under fifty years old, he leaves London and returns to his birthplace, now one of the wealthiest burghers in his hometown. Just a few years after his retirement, he dies. Of what, it is not known. The year is then 1616.

If we omit the writer's output and examine a person named William Shakespeare solely based on documented biographical information, we woll have a picture of a moderately successful impresario, a meticulous businessman, a narrow-minded husband, and a decent citizen. There would be no hint of poetry in sight. The link between the writer- Shakespeare and the businessman-Shakespeare is missing.

The most eager and desperate have proposed that Shakespeare, after all. was not Shakespeare. The plays would have been written by someone else who, for one reason or another, did not want his name to be made public. After studying the matter closely from 1925 to 1950, some scientists from Palermo have gone so far as to propose that Shakespeare, actually, would have been born Italian. As if that would solve the riddle. The question's wording is irrelevant; what is essential in this context is that almost everything we can say about Shakespeare - including all the analysis and interpretation related to the plays - is a thinly drawn, flimsy construction. We don't know, and we cannot know. We don't reach out to the 16th century. We can only assume and fantasize. We have a bunch of yellowed papers in our hands, with squiggles, marks, and letters allegedly scrawled by a person named Shakespeare. They form words, and behind the words looms the world. That world is a dream, a projection that inevitably talks more about ourselves than about our source.

Many of the very specific words and expressions established and used by Shakespeare cannot be found in languages other than English, and even if found, the connotation that the word carries with it, its social reference framework, its social context and etymology will almost always remain unreachable. Shakespeare's favored poetic form, blank verse – the iambic pentameter – has a very different sound in English compared to let´s say, Finnish. The iambic pentameter in English is a ten-syllable line with five pairs of stressed and unstressed syllables. In one line, there are usually ten to eleven syllables, theoretically five rising or "stressed" pairs of syllables. The poetic form naturally follows the melody and rhythm of the English language, especially the late Renaissance English.

A well-spoken iambic pentameter differs from prose just enough for the listener to sense that the speaker is expressing something important. It slightly lifts the language; you can feel the underlying rhythm. How to create a similar impression in a language like Finnish, rhythmically structured in a completely different way? In the Finnish language, there are no prepositions, those small sighs that indicate direction or place and create safety before the core of the statement. In Finnish, the stress is always on the first syllable of the word. Finns don't tiptoe when speaking; the word comes suddenly, like a punch in the face. They deliver the punch and then, afterward, they try to explain and soften it with endings. This is related to the language's syntax but is also a quality of the mind. How to translate mood and mindset from one language to another?

Except that mostly he dribbles in easy and elegant flow the blank verse, Shakespeare occasionally rhymes. Regularly, this happens at the end of scenes, in the final lines, where he - in accordance with the practices of his time – wraps the scene up in a pretty package and ends with a bow and a scrape. This was useful. The actors of the next scene, waiting in the wings, were given a hint about when to jump on stage: at least not before the rhyme. For this rhyming technique, a translator can occasionally find a good equivalent, but how to carry along rhymes or rhyme-like structures placed within the text, where certain sounds of the English language are repeated; waves of vowels and consonants forming a separate field of meaning, an onomatopoeia? Shakespeare is a master of linguistic play; in twists, parries, unexpected pockets within the three walls, in everything, he is better than all others combined. Playing with the double meanings of words or their phonetic appearance forms a level of its own. How to make this audible in

Finnish, a language that, under pressure, behaves entirely differently? Where English becomes looser and more verbose, Finnish becomes sparse as haiku; it evaporates into sequences of meaningful sighs and silence. Shakespeare's plays are also full of references to contemporaries and the phenomena of the time. He works against censorship. As censorship always does, also in England at the end of the 16th century it created a sophisticated game of catch-me-if-you-can. Artists know what the censors are looking for; the censors know that artists know, and the audience, which knows that the artist knows that the censor knows, knows how to be sensitive to references. Shakespeare hides his winks behind a mask and points his fingers in the folds of his cloak, and we, today, for whom the topics and gossip of that time are unfamiliar, cannot fathom more than a fraction pf these gestures. Where the text of the play becomes incomprehensible, we can smell the buried dog, but the dog has been lying in its grave for a long time and has had time to decay, and the smell no longer reveals its exact location.

A play - any play - is something between an instruction manual and a recipe. This and that are needed in the pot in this and that order to achieve the desired result: the dish tastes. On the other hand, the relationship of the script to the theatre – that is, to the audience's sensual experience – is the same as the relationship between notes and music. This is how it sounds when played. A script of a play is a kind of musical score. But one thing, that a script is not - even if it sometimes appears between book covers - it is not literature.

Shakespeare did not form his lines out of thin air. He wrote for specific actors, including himself, as far as he had hired himself to act. He knew his instrument and orchestrated his score accordingly. He wrote his plays to be performed in a specific place, indoors or outdoors, at a specific time of year. Just like a chef who uses the current season's harvest, Shakespeare also knew that the conditions in performances cooked according to his recipes are completely different in summer than in winter if - let´s say - the performance was supposed to take place outdoors. Natural light is different from candle lighting, which one had to deal with if the performance took place indoors. In his plays, you can trace back the conditions brought by the venue; perhaps he gave a monologue a certain length only to give the antagonist actor, appearing in several roles, time to change his clothes between scenes or was the length perchance due to the fact, that a character first announcing his or her arrival through a window on the left would have time to circle across the backstage before appearing through the door on the right.

In short: translating plays is a hopeless endeavor that inevitably does violence to the source. Translation easily turns into literature and does not always correspond to the original work even in terms of genre. This is true always, and especially when it comes to Shakespeare's works. The translation is not Shakespeare; it is an artwork of its own.

Why then try? Because culture lives in language. Shakespeare in the original language is not part of Finnish culture; the translation is. Even if the translation is not anymore Shakespeare but something else, it nevertheless – as if by grafting – attaches something to the culture and language of the translation, something that can bear fruit. If thetranslation is something you borrowed, the fruit has already grown on your own tree.

***

Economics, technology, art, and philosophy are interconnected. Under certain circumstances, different aspects of being human seem to feed each other in a way that creates a density, an eruption, and a leap. Humanity's way of moving is not with a steady step but with jumps and leaps. Shakespeare was creating something genuinely new. He leaned on the latest technology and know-how and expressed things that had not been expressed before, in a language that he himself invented for this purpose. Shakespeare was part of the great change and leap that took place in London at the beginning of the 17th century. He was a part of the change but was also making it himself.

It is It is not without interest to consider how a phenomenon like “Shakespeare” became possible. What was the magic potion in which Shakespeare was immersed? What were the ingredients?

Illiteracy. It is ironic that the most sophisticated poetry in the world was created in a culture where the vast majority were illiterate. It is claimed that William would have been the first in his family to know how to read and write. His father—a leading Stratford official—signed the statutes not with his name but with a kind of crowfoot he scratched on the papers. Shakespeare's wife, Anne Hathaway, never read her husband's work.

In 16th-century England, books were still largely handwritten; they were luxury items. Even in print, books were to start with costly, but their price decreased, and availability was constantly improving. Printing presses, which were the latest technology of their time - only a little over a hundred years old - were making their way into the world. Literacy would soon spread. It would eventually affect people's ability to memorize things. It would also isolate individuals from each other. There was no longer a need to go to the market with others in search of knowledge. It was enough to bend over a book, a bulletin, or a newspaper alone. People would become lonelier. Now, however, right now we were living in a transition phase, and this sharpened the mind and sensitized the ear for nuances of language.

There were schools. Boys or someone among them were sent to school. Latin, religion, and rhetoric were taught as subjects. Latin was probably also learned from the dramas of antiquity. Religious doctrine was memorized. It developed mnemonic techniques nicely. Before the spread of books and literacy, the ability to learn by heart was presumably much higher than in modern times.

The late Renaissance and early Baroque were still a time of solid oral presentation. Speaking was a skill of its own. From the beginning of Western culture until those days, all influence was through speech. The world moved by word of mouth. The speech carried weight. What you had said and left unsaid was more decisive than what you had confirmed in writing with your name or seal. A written contract existed only to refresh memory. News was heard, not read. Those who were not credible in their speech and speaking were not credible at all. The difference from modern times is enormous, almost unimaginable.

Rhetoric - a discipline that we cultural consumers, spoiled by printed information, unfortunately, have almost nil contact with - was a technique of oral influencing developed and refined since antiquity. More than just voice - to which attention was also paid - it was about the structure and formulation of speech. Antistrophe, paraprosdokian, hyperbaton, aporia, syllepsis, hendiadys, asyndeton, catachresis - these are just a few examples out of a long list of rhetorical figures that the speaker was expected to master. Even these central terms of rhetoric are not understood by many today; only a few of us can now recognize some basic ones: synonym, metaphor, tautology, paradox, cacophony... The rules of rhetoric were generally known - at least among those who had received some education. They started with rhetoric. First, one learned to speak, and only then to read. A speaker's skill was measured by how skillfully they could play with figures of speech. Virtuosity was appreciated in the same way as we appreciate a jazz musician's ability to develop a familiar melody. For Shakespeare, theatre was speech, not writing. He composed speeches for his actors, which gave them the opportunity to shine. His audience, on the other hand, could behave much like a modern-day school class: noisy, throwing things around, and as soon as something astonishing was not happening on stage, they were more interested in the boy or girl sitting next to them than in the events on stage. One important difference was that Shakespeare's audience perceived speech not only through content but also through structure. The audience would have been trigged not only by the chopped-off heads but also by the cleverly constructed sentences and lines the actors produced before their characters were beheaded.

You had to know rhetoric. Relatively new, on the other hand, in Shakespeare's time was his extensive use of blank verse. It must have sounded modern and fashionable.

Reference group. Shakespeare was not alone. There was a large number of talented writers starting their careers at the same time as he. Robert Greene, George Peele, George Chapman, John Lyly, Thomas Nashe, Philip Massinger, Ben Jonson, Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher are just a few. Unlike Shakespeare, they often had aristocratic backgrounds; most of them - unlike Shakespeare - had also studied at university, which they had then left for the wide road.

That road came with a cost. By 1600, most of them had already died: some from syphilis, some from the plague, some from a dagger stab, and some simply from the harshness of a poet's life. The learned gentlemen were boisterous and arrogant, meticulous about their erudition and haughty in their erudition: only those who had attended university could put eloquent words into the mouths of uneducated actors that were suitable for the ears of the societé. There was tension between Shakespeare and this group of intellectuals. William was a upstart from the countryside - and even worse - an actor, and a poor one at that. Where could he have acquired his education?

Within the group as well - even though its members generally got along - there was competition. The men were just over twenty years old, in the prime of their debauchery. Their plays were performed in various theatres in London. Everyone both learned from their friends and tried to outdo each other. They freely borrowed and stole from each other's material, and many of the references, allusions, and quips that remain obscure to us today were aimed at the recent works of these rivals. Apparently, the audience was also familiar with them.

Unified culture. Everyone who had read books had read the same ones. References were possible because of this. It was possible to refer to an outside literary world common to all in the theatre. This world willingly stepped to the writer's support with just a little wink.

London, with its 200,000 inhabitants, was a city the size of present-day Turku in Finland. It was filthy. However, there may not have been more bacteriological pollution there than there is noise pollution in our environment. In Shakespeare's time, people went around holding their noses but with their ears pricked. We walk around with earplugs in our ears and hardly smell anything, as the smells have been exported to the third world.

The crucial point is the dynamism here as well. In the second half of the 16th century, London had grown rapidly. The city was in chaos. Legislation had not kept up. This created a sense that everything was, if not permissible, at least possible; all sorts of things could be tried. As long, of course, that you stayed in the right political corrals.

Those who crossed the boundaries often returned from their forays with their heads shorter. London was a legal Wild West and a political dictatorship. Actors had been wanderers in England from the beginning until the early 16th century. Performances took place in marketplaces or possibly temporarily in indoor spaces prepared for the purpose. It was only in 1567 that the first building specifically built for theatre performances was erected in London. It was like an inner courtyard built for a market square, with a permanent stage on the side.

This was entirely new. The industry was in a vigorous state of development. Shakespeare became an entrepreneur in emerging markets. During his time theatres were built that could hold up to two thousand people or more, and he himself was one of the developers.

Theaters became a part of the city's power economy. The stories presented in them connected and separated people and social classes. They brought things to the surface. Time acquired a shape. London was not yet too large; the city's inhabitants saw themselves as part of the same growing dough. The theaters dealt with common, universally known, and universally touching issues.

The theaters were located at the center of the community. They were under the protection of the royal court or circles close to it. This was a convenient arrangement. From the actors' perspective, it meant they were not outlaws; for the court, it meant they could directly influence what was being performed. Unpleasant surprises did not occur.

Ultimately, however, it was commercial theater. The landscape is the same that we can still encounter today in the entertainment business in London's West End. We, today, perceive Shakespeare's theatre as art. Shakespeare's time, art was straightforward entertainment. People wanted above all to be entertained, but the things that they found entertaining were more sophisticated than today. It is all about how you define education. We are, perchance, more educated today, but are we more sophisticated?

The religious fundament wobbled underfoot. The most significant difference between Catholicism and Protestantism is not surprisingly, to perhaps the most significant event in human life: death. A Catholic believes that there is still some bargaining to be made post-mortem. Before its final placement, the soul is deposited in purgatory, where stains are bleached using various, mostly painful, methods. At this stage, it is possible for those who for the time being continue their earthly journey to influence the duration of the deceased's torment and the quality of his suffering by means of intercessory prayers and masses and other things. In this procedure, the clergy takes on the role of agents in this procedure and receives a corresponding reward.

Protestantism, on the other hand, claims the dead are dead, period, and the clerical agency is a big hoax. The soul goes where it goes and is in God's hands at this stage, a God who is indeed good and forgiving. At least for those who believe Jesus's claims about Christ's claims to be true.

Throughout the 1500s, from the time when Martin Luther nailed his theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg, England swung between being Protestant or Catholic, depending on the ruler's decision, and often fiercely so. Queen Elizabeth was a Protestant. As Shakespeare grew up, she had ruled long enough to become staunch in her views: Catholicism needed to be uprooted from its roots among the people!!

According to the chronicles, the treatment of a captured high-ranking courtier, who was revealed to be a Catholic, would have been as follows: They are initially squeezed into a chambre in the Tower called "Little Ease", which is so cramped that one cannot stand or lie properly. After having soaked there a few days in their own stools they will be interrogated. To make them understand the seriousness of the matter, their feet are placed in iron boots, which are gradually tightened until the bones of their ankles break.

At this stage, it is believed that all valuable information has leaked out. They are properly sentenced to death. This is followed by being dragged on the executioner's sled to the execution site. This dragging is a great public amusement. More entertainment follows.

The condemned person is hanged, but only halfway. Before they can suffocate, they are lowered and castrated. Then their abdomen is cut open, and and in front of their - one can assume - bewildered eyes, their intestines are pulled out and boiled in a hot cauldron. At this point, they die. Just to be sure, their body is torn into four pieces by horses. The head is removed. It is placed on the end of a stick, and the stick is erected near London Bridge as a warning: do not conspire, gentlemen, especially not on behalf of Catholics.

It's all politics, of course. It's about world domination. In 1588, the same year Shakespeare began his career in London, England defeated the Spanish Armada. This gave England the opportunity to expand its activities in overseas colonies, which in turn brought prosperity, enough for entertainment, such as theatre.

The earth shakes, the world expands. This is the first wave of globalization. Shakespeare's theatre - a building he partly owned and in which he housed a theatre company he also partly owned - was symptomatically named "The Globe". However, England's position as a growing superpower, Elizabeth's position as the queen of this power, and the preservation of Protestantism as the state religion of England were far from certain. Philip of Spain, backed by Catholic Europe, awaited an opportunity to strike back. France was scheming, and the Pope saw fit to excommunicate Elizabeth. In Scotland, Catholic Mary Stuart sat imprisoned - many considered her the rightful heir to the English throne. Elisabeth, guided by her advisers, decided – albeit reluctantly – to execute her. Ultimately, it was a conflict familiar even to modern Europeans: the conflict between profligate, pleasure-seeking Southern Europe and the more austere, literalist Northern Europe that upheld law and the Bible. The conflict erupted into open war two years after Shakespeare's death, in 1618, a war, that would then continue for 30 years. Elisabeth had by then already been resting in her grave for a long time. England had since 1603 been ruled by her successor, James I, a religious mystic who, even before his rise to power, had published an extensive treatise called Daemonologie, in which he sorted out and systematized all known demons and devils with great expertise. James personally enjoyed interrogating women accused of witchcraft.

Shakespeare wisely refrains from revealing his own religious beliefs. For those who approach him through the lens of Romanticism, trying to draw lines between the work and the life of the artist, this is frustrating. But in the political situation of Shakespeare´s time this discretion was, of course, a way of staying alive. However, in a wider perspective this strategy of concealment may very well be at the core of Shakespeare's artistic project, and perhaps his life's project as well.

Shakespeare lived in a world where even what was proclaimed in church was uncertain, as tomorrow could bring something entirely different. The world could turn upside down at any moment. Clinging to a stable identity could be deadly. It's not "existential uncertainty" as we understand it today but rather a life defined by a set of mutually exclusive worldviews. The Earth is round and flat simultaneously. The dead are dead and alive. Adding to the confusion is the unprecedented rapid economic development. The city around him is growing uncontrollably, leading to recurrent plague epidemics.

Returning merchants from overseas bring stories and goods that were unheard of before. Those who survive are the ones who quickly adapt to the new, change their ways, bridge the chasms in their fragmented minds.

Shakespeare's time in London lasted 20 years. It's an incredibly short period, a sudden burst, like a lightning flash in the timeline of cultural evolution. We still marvel at the tumult and thunder.

***

Twelfth Night; or What You Will. Where does the name come from? One researcherclaims that Shakespeare's original idea for the name was simply "What you will," which was then rejected, possibly because John Marston had already presented his own play with the same title during the late 1601-02, according to assumptions. Shakespeare would have added the prefix "Twelfth Night," which is suitable, but perhaps too straightforward: the play's first performance likely took place on Twelfth Night in 1612.

There is a record of this performance in the court records. There is also a commission from Queen Elizabeth: "to make choyse of the play that shalbe best furnished with rich apparell, have greate variety and change of Musicke and daunces, and of a Subiect that may be most pleasing to her Maiestie." Shakespeare did as he was instructed. If the above information is correct, the play's name "What You Will" could refer to this as well.

Therefore, the translation could just as well - or rather - be:: According to your wishes, Byorder, At your request, According to your opinion or more boldly: You get what you ask for. However, the name without an explanation remains unclear to both English and Finnish contemporary audiences.

Bisexuality. The narrator of Shakespeare's sonnets is a man who is in love with another man. At the same time, he is drawn to the Dark Lady. Should we draw conclusions from this? And what kind? Sonnets were a poetic form built on subtle and mysterious references to real people and events. They were perfumed gossip, erotic games, poetic masquerades, as exciting as secret notes passed in classrooms. Could the narrator of the sonnets be Shakespeare himself? The narrator of the sonnets is in a situation similar to Cesario in Twelfth Night, with the difference, that Cesario is in the reality of the play Viola, a woman, disguised as a man.

The whole discussion surrounding the sonnets, whether explicitly or implicitly, revolves around the question: could Shakespeare have been gay? Speculating about this is entirely futile. What's more interesting is to think more broadly about the sexuality of people in Shakespeare's time and how it may have influenced Twelfth Night's dramaturgy.

In the 16th century, society in England life was structured like a locker Things were what they were, and you yourself were who you were. If you were a servant, you were a servant, and in that case, you were supposed to have a master. Masterless servants were punished severely: they were publicly whipped and tied to the shame pole. If you were a master, you were a master. Then you were expected to behave like a master, dress like a master, and speak like a master. You were either Protestant or Catholic. If you were a Protestant, you were required, under penalty of a fine, to attend church on Sundays. If you were Catholic, you were killed. It is against this backdrop of immutability and absolute categories that Shakespeare's artistic strategy appears in all its boldness and innovation. To be, or not to be, that is the question. Shakespeare portrays the in between, he dares to look between the chairs, into the most frightening chasm, where phenomena that fall outside categorization reside, and from which arises a chaos threatening the unshakable world order inherited from the Middle Ages. Consistently, he pursues this theme of ambivalence also in the realm of sexuality."

In the social structures of Shakespeare's time, antiquity was still strongly present in the late 16th century. “Man” equaled man, it was a time of men. Women was not allowed into public life, unless they happened to be queens. Consequently, women were not seen on the stage of the theatre either. Men – according to the ancient model – occupied both male and female roles; however, women were already allowed in the stands. After all, it was possible to tinker with all kinds of interesting things in the dim light of the theatre's private boxes, spurred on by the events on stage.

The drag show on stage adds an extra layer to the sexual ambiguity of the female characters in Shakespeare's comedies, which from a modern perspective has been considered fascinating. Viola is played by a man or a boy who plays a woman who plays a man. Ultimately, all love in the plays of this time was between men.

Homosexuality or bisexuality was not officially accepted in England during Shakespeare's time, but it is very possible that these forms of sexuality, which our "tolerant" time, despite the “tolerance”, accepts as a kind of deviation, in the time of Shakespeare, were considered to fit within the scope of normality. Europe's esoteric or history with its direct connection to pre-Christian era, which later, with the rise of the bourgeoisie, would become invisible, was still strongly present in everyday life during the late Renaissance. In hidden history, homosexuality has been - and still is - a strong force holding the world together and moving it. Ever since the time of the apostles, through the medieval mystics, the Knights of the Round Table, the Freemasons, the Rosicrucians, and the later Männerbunds, the struggle for the "true good" has taken place among groups of men who meet in secret. This unofficial, hidden, history naturally becomes visible through the theatre and in the case of Shakespeare very clearly. In other words, it may be that the audience in the late 16th century theater did not associate the did not associate the gender masquerades in the comedies with perversion at all; rather, they linked it to a broader ethical framework and humanity's struggle to achieve truth and goodness. The woman's outfit carried by a man would have been somewhat like a freemason's ritual apron.

Although human sexuality is the driving force in Twelfth Night, the characters in the play are remarkably innocent, like children. It's almost impossible to imagine them engaged in the act of love, in physical contact. Love, to them, is more of an idea, a concept. The go for ecstasy, and they are ready to twist themselves into a zigzag to achieve it but like an orgasm of the mind, not of the body, a state of nirvana. It's a dream of balance, harmony, and rest, and the end of all striving. They long for paradise Carnival. The play Twelfth Night is linked to an ancient ritual. As a celebration of the Christian church year, Epiphany ends the winter season that begins on All Hallows Eve, or Halloween, or All Saints' Day. Epiphany – even as a Christian celebration probably much older than Christmas – is the celebration of the revelation of God, an epiphany: God – who is also a sun god – appears through his son, the messenger of returning light, who in Christian terms reminds us of the possibility of rebirth.

On Epiphany Eve - twelve nights after the birth of Christ which takes place four nights after the winter solstice - three kings, wizards, or sorcerers from the East, guided by the Star of Bethlehem, arrive with offerings. Shakespeare completely bypasses the Christian interpretation and instead bases his play on an older tradition that was still valid in his time.

In pagan times, the meaning of the celebration was more concrete and brutal. All Saints' Day was a day of the living dead. It marks the beginning of the dark and dead season. The Finnish word for November, "marraskuu" contains a remnant of this. The word "marras" is related to the French word" mort," which has almost disappeared from the language in its original form, but its original meaning can – in Finnish - be guessed from words like "marraskesi" - dead skin. Originally, Twelfth Night was a celebration of heavenly revelation. Two weeks after the winter solstice, the return of light can already be visually observed. The sun returns, bringing with it the hope of a new sprout. Even though this had happened every year before, there was no certainty in the early days that this phenomenon would repeat itself. The celebration of returning light was called Saturnalia in Roman times, named after the ringed planet, Saturn, that rises higher and higher in the morning sky day by day.

Our ancestors must have seen time as if it were moving backward with the return of light. Time did not circulate like a clock; instead, the world was perceived as a big swing or pendulum. We lived in the swing of the world. At the winter solstice, the pendulum changed direction and existence flipped over. Saturnalia was a celebration of the world turning upside down.

The setting of Twelfth Night, Illyria, is a land where everything works in a topsy-turvy way: a noble lady finds herself as a boy, in the role of a servant and the target of her master's affections; a noblewoman falls in love with her own suitor's servant; at the same time, the same woman's steward is made to believe that she desires him. A drunken relative turns night into day and day into night. Knights are cowards, cowards are chivalrous, fools are priests, and priests are fools. The one who has been declared a fool is ultimately the only one who has kept his wits about him, the only one who deserves our pity. And the wisest of them all is the fool.

Shakespeare was likely familiar with this tradition. The setting of Twelfth Night, Illyria, is a land where everything works in a topsy-turvy way: a noble lady finds herself as a boy, in the role of a servant and the target of her master's affections; a noblewoman falls in love with her own suitor's servant; at the same time, the same woman's steward is made to believe that she desires him. A drunken relative turns night into day and day into night. Knights are cowards, cowards are chivalrous, fools are priests, and priests are fools. In the end, the one who has been driven mad, declared a fool and made a laughingstock is the only one who has kept his sanity and who deserves our pity. And the wisest of the whole bunch is the jester. In Victor Hugo's novel "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame," the same post-Christmas holiday is celebrated. In it, they call it the Feast of Fools. The ugliest person in town, Quasimodo, is first crowned king and then ridiculed. Day of the False King – The false king. like Jesus with his crown and borrowed donkey - is one of the archetypal figures in our culture. In the primal carnival, the community selects an individual who, for a limited time, enjoys all the benefits of absolute power. At the end of this period, this individual is killed and eaten. With of the slaying of the scapegoat evil turns into good. The community and individuals have defecated evil from themselves, and in a sacred transfiguration, they are cleansed. The ritual gathers the community around a totem and allows each individual to examine and possibly update their position within the community. The tension that had caused hysteria or paralyzed the community is released.

Duke Orsino's realm is clearly in crisis. Past wars are mentioned, but the crisis doesn't seem to be military. We are informed that there is some kind of order-maintaining body in the city: towards the end of the play, a couple of police-like officials show up, but they are just as lethargic as everyone else. There's an odd stillness, like an eternal vacation. How are all these people living? None of the play's characters seem to work. Instead, they idle away their time. Each one revolves around their own boredom, trying to find entertainment: should they go hunting? Maybe not, because they don't feel like it. In this atmosphere of uselessness and lack of prospects, desire starts to bother them. A conquest could spice things up. But even flirting is so incredibly complicated when you can't lift your gaze beyond your own navel. Duke Orsino's realm is clearly in crisis. Past trade wars are mentioned, but the crisis doesn't seem to be military. We are informed that there is some kind of order maintaining body in the city: towards the end of the play, a couple of police-like officials suddenly show up, but they are just as lethargic as everyone else, as if they've just woken up from a nap. There's an odd stillness, like an eternal vacation. How are all these people living? None of the play's characters seem to work. Instead, they idle away their time. Each one revolves around their own boredom, trying to find entertainment: should they go hunting? Maybe not, because they don't feel like it. In this atmosphere of uselessness and lack of prospects, lust starts to bother them. A conquest could spice things up. But even flirting is so incredibly complicated when you can't lift your gaze beyond your own navel. The citizens of Illyria have a problem that bears a striking resemblance to our own. Illyria is a welfare state floating in the air. Underneath the stagnation, something is boiling; somehow this strange feeling needs to be released. If there were flies, you could rip their wings off, but you can't even be bothered to catch them. Fortunately, there's a humorless, aging gentleman perfectly suited for tormenting, Countess Olivia's steward Malvolio. Malvolio becomes the false king of the day and of the play. He is truly put through the wringer.

At the beginning of the ritual, everyone follows the pattern of the ritual, but then Shakespeare does an interesting trick. He secretly and sneakily aligns himself with the victim. Just at the moment when Malvolio is being tormented most cruelly, Shakespeare draws a human face for him. As viewers, we have identified with the tormentors, these eloquent or at least funny characters. Suddenly, we see Malvolio's suffering and the grotesqueness of his tormentors. This is the masterful playwright Shakespeare's way of realizing the theme of an upside-down world: he burrows into his audience's minds and hearts and turns his viewers inside out, like a bloody glove made of human skin, Malvolio is Shakespeare's stage ritual Christ. Twelfth Night, with its early Christian roots is a deeply Christian play.

Twelfth Night is a deeply unchristian play. It turns Christianity on its head. Malvolio's final line is, "I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you" – vengeful Christ, the core idea of Christianity turned upside down. In such an insightful, precise, and deliberate way, the dramatist Shakespeare takes full advantage of the theme of the topsy-turvy world.

***

Out of the same ingredients: a desire for revenge, the Christ figure, and madness, Shakespeare has cooked up another dish: Hamlet. The intriguing fact is that Shakespeare had these two texts on his desk at the same time or one after the other. These two masterpieces of drama, one a comedy and the other a tragedy, are interestingly related. Both deal with madness, feigned, alleged, or real; both are driven by passionate desire; both pit the individual against society; both address the issue of vicarious suffering. At the impulse level, it's the same play. In one, the perspective is – at least initially – the community´s, and in the other, it's stubbornly the individual's. Malvolioand Hamlet are the same person, one described from the inside, the other from the outside.

The juxtaposition provides an interesting view into Shakespeare's dramaturgical thinking. Shakespeare's uniqueness is related to the concept of the self. The transitional phase he describes can be seen as a turning point in history, but it can also be examined through the development of culture. The development of the individual and the development of culture seem to follow the same laws. At the end of the 16th century, when Shakespeare began his career, European culture was prepubescent, just entering adolescence. Culture was like a twelve-year-old child at its best: still playful and already wise, still naively confident in its own abilities, curious to reach beyond the horizon, invincible in its strength, like a young man going through voice change, who can still sing a boy soprano with an innocent voice. The shadow had not yet fallen; the first pimples of the soul were just starting to simmer; the first difficult questions of adult existence were taking shape in the depths of the mind. Shakespeare spoke these questions out loud, but at the same time, he knew how to linger in a culture that was not yet troubled by the issue of self. Shakespeare had a detached self.

Shakespeare's seemingly limitless ability to change perspectives in his plays shows that he did not perceive the world from his own self. Although his subjects often relate to the emergence of the self, writing was not the realization or manifestation of his personal self; it was simply craftsmanship. His mastery of craftsmanship was enough for him. Most contemporary writers write the same story – their own – over and over again.

Shakespeare had no interest in his own story. On the contrary, it seems as if he deliberately concealed his traces. His surviving 36 plays are remarkably different in terms of their stories. Shakespeare picked his stories from his few favorite sources. Sometimes he even copied outright. He was not an auteur; he wouldn't even have understood the concept. Nowadays, he would be considered a plagiarizing adapter. In his life's work, Shakespeare depicts a transitional state, a turning point, in which the self has not yet grown adult boundaries but is already self-aware. He effortlessly shifts from one self to another, walks easily through people. Shakespeare is all his characters and none of them. He is both Prospero – the demiurge, the creator of everything, eternally the same and immobile, inward-looking – and Ariel – the all-seeing, omnipresent. The play that Prospero and Ariel concocted, "The Tempest," is apparently his last work. It is also the only one in which he seems to sign his life's work by referring to himself directly through the characters. "The Tempest" ends with Prospero giving up his magic. He breaks his staff, releases Ariel, and dresses in proper citizen attire. This can be seen as Shakespeare's personal farewell ritual as he concludes his career as a playwright in London and moves on to spend his retirement in his hometown of Stratford. In a broader sense, Prospero's relinquishing of power marks the end of an era. With Prospero renouncing power, the period of cultural development also ends. Magic turns into superstition, myth shrinks into fairy tale. Shakespeare illustrates how the whole, the life cycle, breaks into pieces; how the individual, once united, through self awareness, disintegrates. Shakespeare is the chronicler of the end of childhood.

One is constantly amazed at how precise and conscious a dramatist Shakespeare was in his plays. The fact that his entire artistic oeuvre almost textbook-like follows the laws of drama, including the turning point, feels almost too strange. It seems impossible that he could have controlled not only the dramaturgy of individual plays but also the entire body of work he created. Yet, it appears to be the case. In his entire body of work, the peripeteia occurs between "Hamlet" and "Twelfth Night," precisely between these two plays, one a tragedy and the other a comedy, like the two adjacent masks that often symbolize theater. At the same time, these two plays foreshadow the conclusion of the entire dramatic arc, just as the peripeteia is supposed to occur.

In "Twelfth Night," the last word belongs to the fool, Feste. This character – whose name means "celebrations" – performs a song that depicts a person in different stages of life –or in the various stages of culture's development. In one's lifetime, one can engage in all sorts of activities: as a child, one thing; as a youth, another; as an adult, something else; as an elderly person, yet another. And what is the wise conclusion we eventually draw from it all? That it rains every day! We get wet, but we don't learn anything; tomorrow we get wet again. This goes on for our entire lives, from birth to the grave. We don't even learn that we don't learn anything. This mockery of education consistently ends here. It ends with the birth of time and the disintegration of man. It ends in the modern era, a time that has become nightmarish, an endless carnival. The gears of the pendulum have jammed, the world spins upside down like a carousel operated by a madman, and there's no way out.

Sometimes Shakespeare's face seems to flash before us, and then it doesn't. He stirs restlessness.

Ceyda Berk-Söderblom 3/27/20 Ceyda Berk-Söderblom 3/27/20

‘‘Living in a double world’’

We get information about our surroundings through our senses.

- The senses are five or seven or nine depending on who counts and what you count as a sense. But whatever way you count, the senses you count are there to provide us with information about the concrete, physical world we live in. They help us orientate in a concrete three-dimensional, physical space common for all of us.

- When I say that this is black (brown, red) I assume, even if I cannot be sure, that you see the same thing as me, that your perception of the colour is the same as mine. At least we can compare our impressions, agree or disagree about something that is our common observation.

II.

Parallel to this outer world, there is another inner one.

- Of the inner world, we have no common observations. We know something of it, and recognise, or assume, that also all other persons have it, but we have no means to directly look into that world, not into our own, and not into that of other people.

- This inner world as the world of memories, dreams and visions.

- The conscious conception of the world is, in reality, very limited, and very young. The conscious mind, if you look it neurologically, is located in the youngest part of the brain, forming a thin slice on the brain surface. What happens in the deeper parts stays hidden.

- The consciousness is like a small flickering light in the big darkness that surrounds us; it is a lonely island rising from an endless sea.

- Only a small part of our mind is awake. The bigger part of us is asleep; asleep in the sense of not being recognised by the conscious part. A big part of our life takes place underwater, in darkness.

III.

Why is this interesting, talking of spaces?

- The inner world, even if it follows a bit different rules concerning, for example, the dimension of time (memory does not go the clock, everything in the inner world seems to be timewise equally close or far), there is still a dimension of space. Our memories, dreams and visions take place in a three-dimensional space, in a room.

- Considering this fact, and the parallel existence of the outer and inner reality we can say that all rooms are two rooms, one concrete physical one, and the parallel inner one. All rooms are two rooms, all houses are two houses, all cities are two cities.

- The psychologists speak of the collective unconscious. One could also think of an inner landscape, an internal topography, parallel to the outer.

IV.

- Why is this interesting right now, as we are in a theatre?

- A theatre is a place where we, together, as a group, tribe or flock, can get a collective insight or rather a glimpse of that inner space. The stage is an imprint or reflection of the inner world upon the outer.

- We can share this inner world only through metaphors; when we try to share experiences of the inner world with other people, we find ourselves stumbling around in labyrinths, where meanings mirror meanings that mirror meanings. Faces are hidden behind masks that are masks for other masks. This is the world of theatre. In theatre, nothing is what it is.

- The theatre, the stage, is a place where the inner world can become visible and tangible in our common outer world. In the theatre, inner entities can be touched, can be discussed, can be shared in a seemingly objective way. In the theatre, dreams become objects.

- When inner things take tangible three-dimensional shape, there is the fourth dimension added: time. Time as ”before and after”. With this before and after comes causality, which is the tool of reason, which again is the way we can cope with the outer world as opposed to the associative relations between entities in the inner world. We can speak of reason as opposed to association. Reason is like a life-jacket for the mind swimming around in the big sea. In the theatre, the logic of the outer world is superimposed on the inner experiences as a kind of reality-test. In the theatre, the clash between the “inner” and the “outer” results in what we call dramaturgy. A good dramaturgy does not kill the inner, associative stream of images, but lets it, on the contrary, run through the before-and-after-logic of the concrete outer perception like a life-giving stream.

Now, what makes the theatre?

- What makes the theatre Is the presence of a stage. What makes the stage, is the ”ramppi (Finnish)”, the ramp, the verge, the edge that divides this physical space here the stage, from that over there, the audience.

- This line is in most theatre spaces accentuated through a very distinct architectural gesture, as a kind of border, but in fact, this border is not a physical, but psychic one. It forms a symbolic division between those in the audience and those on the stage. And those on the stage are not just anybody. Those on the stage are physical representations of psychic entities from the inner world.

- Actors at work are in a specific state of mind, they are ”empty". They have, in order to be able to embody entities from the inner reality, using techniques that are thought in theatre schools, or learned by practice, freed themselves of their individual, private personalities. These psychic entities are what we normally call role characters.

- Theatre, even in its most modern post-dramatic form, is an atavistic sport, dealing with a mechanism that has been there for tens of thousands of years. To be more exact, from that very moment, when the human mind for the first time, put up the head of consciousness above the surface of the big sea; from the very moment when we became conscious of our own existence; from the moment Adam took the famous bite of the famous apple. This was the moment that split the human mind into two and created the double world.

- Thus, in the theatre, we have, on the other hand, the audience and the so-called actors on the other. The audience on the conscious side of the border, living in concrete physical reality, and the actors on the other, in the area of the unconscious, inner reality. Those in the audiences are awake, alive, those on the stage are asleep, hypnotised, or auto-hypnotised, in a form of trance. We have the side of the living, and we have the side of the dead, dead in the meaning of ”soul” or ”spirit”.

- We have the realm of the living, and we have the realm of the dead. This realm is called ”Hades”, in the classical Roman mythology, “Tuonela” in the Finnish mythology. These realms are separated by a river. In classical Roman mythology, the river is called "Styx". In Finnish mythology. we know it as the "River of Tuonela", "Tuonelan joki".

Language carries memories in itself. "Tuo”, “tuolla”, “tuonpuoleinen” are Finnish worlds that relate to this, meaning “over there”, on the “other side”. In the German languages the corresponding word is “hin”, like “dahin” meaning to go "over there"; in Swedish "hän” like “därhän” going "over there", or "hänförd”, meaning enchanted, lumoutunut (which is Finnish), or "hädangången" meaning passed away. In Swedish, there is moreover an old name for the devil: Hin den Onde, ("Hin the Evil)). In English, we have ”hind” like in ”behind” or ”hindsight” or, interestingly enough, "hindbrain", meaning the deep part of the brain. These are all old words, reminding us of a time, when a holistic view of existence was still prevailing, and when the things I here try to articulate, were common knowledge.

- The border between the audience and the stage, the ramp, "ramppi", is equivalent to this river. Sitting in the audience, we can safely look over the river, into the lands of the dead. There, on the other side, on the stage, naughty, devilish ongoings take place. We have all experienced the awkwardness, when an actor, over the river, looks directly at us. It is the gaze of the dead looking at the living that frightens us.

- What happens in the theatre today, is, even if we seldom reflect on it, precisely the same as we can imagine might have happened thousands or tens of thousands of years ago. The hero, the shaman, in a state of trance, achieved using specific techniques (dance, drumming, usage of psycho-effective drugs (mushrooms, plants)) departs on a trip into the lands of the dead. There he, or she, meats with the ancestors, and with magic creatures (totemistic power animals). He returns to the realm of the living to share what he, or she, has learned. (Compare for example with the New Testament episode describing the time Christ spent in the desert) In this process, characters existing in inner reality, characters that somebody calls ”archetypes”, help the tribe to overcome its current shortcomings and problems relating to its life in the concrete physical reality. In this sense, the characters of any play, old or new, classic or modern are our totemistic ancestors. More than often they are also historically dead, the story set to take place long ago.

VI.

Thus, the cruel fate of mankind, having tasted the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

- is to live in a double world. The Paradise and the Hell are actually just two sides of the same coin, both representing the inner reality. The crucial point here is that we, the humans, after The Fall of Man are excluded from direct access to this inner reality, now hidden. The life is eternally divided, the human perception of reality painfully split.

- We can talk of this split in the human constitution also as the breach between the human in the human and the animal in the human. The human part is ”awake”, the animal part is ”asleep”. The exclusion from Paradise is the punishment the human gets for becoming human. Once a human, the human is no longer free, innocent. Consciousness brings shame. The hybris of the human is, by becoming a human, to have challenged God (the order of nature) in an irreparable way.

- The history of man is the history of the ongoing war between reason and instinct, between human and the animal hidden in the mind of the human. Somehow I think that this conflict, this "mega-bug" in the system will turn out to be, for the human race, if not directly fatal, at least a question of fate. (like the size of the dinosaurs turned out to be critical for the survival of this group of reptiles). In the end, the question is epistemological. What is knowledge?

- There is a need, I think, to find a way back to the holistic view on existence, that our predecessors had. There is valuable wisdom hidden in the realm of souls. As a result of the way western thinking took in ancient Greece and Rome, we have been extremely suspicious of this kind of wisdom. We tend to speak of it as superstition.

What is superstition? It is knowledge backstabbed by another knowledge. Persecuted, expelled knowledge.

- This esoteric knowledge, I think, in a situation, where humanity seems to be dragging itself towards a major abysm, should be carefully re-evaluated. So-called soft data would need to be accepted as hard data. It sounds like a small thing to do but accepting this would, in fact, be a major change - in almost everything.

- We would, for example, need to accept art as a source of hard data. We would need to accept, that the "search" process of art can be valid as "research". Art would need to be esteemed, not as something primitive, something you do when the rest of the things are done, not as a mere cherry on the cake, but as a main source of solid, valid information. Many things would need to change. We are not there yet. Let´s hope we get there in time.

Erik Söderblom, October 2019

Text is keynote from the “Experience Space” event, organized by Aalto University Experience Platform in collaboration with Espoo City Theatre