Study Edition · Essay 38
from On Some of the Old Actors
Source: London Magazine, February 1822; revised for Essays of Elia (1823). Text from The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas, vol. 2, Project Gutenberg #10343. This edition gives the opening paragraph and the famous passage on Bensley's Malvolio. Archaic verb forms modernized; vocabulary kept and glossed.
An old playbill for Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, from about 1790, sets Lamb remembering the actors of his youth. The heart of the essay, given here, is his account of Robert Bensley as Malvolio, Olivia's proud steward who is tricked into believing his mistress loves him. Lamb argues that Malvolio is not a clown but a dignified man brought low, and his description of Bensley's performance is one of the most celebrated pieces of theatre criticism in English.
45 sentences: 15 simple, 17 moderate, 13 complex. Hover a number for its paraphrase; click it for the full note.
Key Vocabulary
- playbilla printed poster or sheet advertising a play and its cast
- peradventureperhaps (old)
- of no small momentof great importance
- derogationa lowering of dignity or status
- ludicrousridiculous; laughable
- austeresevere and strict
- Puritana strict Protestant opposed to pleasure and display
- roundheada supporter of Parliament against the King in the English Civil War
- levitylight-heartedness; fun
- bespeakto suggest; to be evidence of
- stewarda man who manages a great household
- dowryproperty a bride brings to her marriage
- sottishdrunken; stupid with drink
- buttery hatchthe serving hatch of a pantry where drink was given out
- Jack in officea petty official who is full of his own importance
- consonancyagreement; fitness
- Castiliana native of Castile in Spain, proverbially proud
- coxcomba vain, conceited man
- ineffabletoo great to be described in words
- mannafood from heaven, as in the Bible
- whirligiga spinning toy; something that keeps turning
The Essay
The casual sight of an old play bill, which I picked up the other day (I know not by what chance it was preserved so long), tempts me to call to mind a few of the players, who make the principal figure in it.1 It presents the cast of parts in the Twelfth Night, at the old Drury Lane Theatre two-and-thirty years ago.2 There is something very touching in these old remembrances.3 They make us think how we once used to read a play bill; not, as now peradventure, singling out a favourite performer, and casting a negligent eye over the rest; but spelling out every name, down to the very mutes and servants of the scene; when it was a matter of no small moment to us whether Whitfield, or Packer, took the part of Fabian; when Benson, and Burton, and Phillimore (names of small account) had an importance, beyond what we can be content to attribute now to the time's best actors.4 Orsino, by Mr. Barrymore.5 What a full Shakespearian sound it carries! how fresh to memory arise the image, and the manner, of the gentle actor!6
The part of Malvolio, in the Twelfth Night, was performed by Bensley, with a richness and a dignity, of which (to judge from some recent castings of that character) the very tradition must be worn out from the stage.7 No manager in those days would have dreamed of giving it to Mr. Baddeley, or Mr. Parsons: when Bensley was occasionally absent from the theatre, John Kemble thought it no derogation to succeed to the part.8 Malvolio is not essentially ludicrous. He becomes comic but by accident.9 He is cold, austere, repelling; but dignified, consistent, and, for what appears, rather of an over-stretched morality.10 Maria describes him as a sort of Puritan; and he might have worn his gold chain with honour in one of our old roundhead families, in the service of a Lambert, or a Lady Fairfax.11 But his morality and his manners are misplaced in Illyria.12 He is opposed to the proper levities of the piece, and falls in the unequal contest.13 Still his pride, or his gravity (call it which you will), is inherent, and native to the man, not mock or affected, which latter only are the fit objects to excite laughter.14 His quality is at the best unlovely, but neither buffoon nor contemptible.15 His bearing is lofty, a little above his station, but probably not much above his deserts.16 We see no reason why he should not have been brave, honourable, accomplished.17 His careless committal of the ring to the ground (which he was commissioned to restore to Cesario), bespeaks a generosity of birth and feeling.18 His dialect on all occasions is that of a gentleman, and a man of education.19 We must not confound him with the eternal old, low steward of comedy.20 He is master of the household to a great Princess; a dignity probably conferred upon him for other respects than age or length of service.21 Olivia, at the first indication of his supposed madness, declares that she would not have him miscarry for half of her dowry.22 Does this look as if the character was meant to appear little or insignificant?23 Once, indeed, she accuses him to his face (of what?) of being sick of self-love, but with a gentleness and considerateness which could not have been, if she had not thought that this particular infirmity shaded some virtues.24 His rebuke to the knight, and his sottish revellers, is sensible and spirited; and when we take into consideration the unprotected condition of his mistress, and the strict regard with which her state of real or dissembled mourning would draw the eyes of the world upon her house-affairs, Malvolio might feel the honour of the family in some sort in his keeping; as it appears not that Olivia had any more brothers, or kinsmen, to look to it; for Sir Toby had dropped all such nice respects at the buttery hatch.25 That Malvolio was meant to be represented as possessing estimable qualities, the expression of the Duke in his anxiety to have him reconciled, almost infers.26 Pursue him, and entreat him to a peace.27 Even in his abused state of chains and darkness, a sort of greatness seems never to desert him.28 He argues highly and well with the supposed Sir Topas, and philosophises gallantly upon his straw.29 There must have been some shadow of worth about the man; he must have been something more than a mere vapour (a thing of straw, or Jack in office) before Fabian and Maria could have ventured sending him upon a courting-errand to Olivia.30 There was some consonancy (as he would say) in the undertaking, or the jest would have been too bold even for that house of misrule.31
Bensley, accordingly, threw over the part an air of Spanish loftiness.32 He looked, spoke, and moved like an old Castilian.33 He was starch, spruce, opinionated, but his superstructure of pride seemed bottomed upon a sense of worth.34 There was something in it beyond the coxcomb.35 It was big and swelling, but you could not be sure that it was hollow.36 You might wish to see it taken down, but you felt that it was upon an elevation.37 He was magnificent from the outset; but when the decent sobrieties of the character began to give way, and the poison of self-love, in his conceit of the Countess's affection, gradually to work, you would have thought that the hero of La Mancha in person stood before you.38 How he went smiling to himself! with what ineffable carelessness would he twirl his gold chain! what a dream it was! you were infected with the illusion, and did not wish that it should be removed! you had no room for laughter!39 If an unseasonable reflection of morality obtruded itself, it was a deep sense of the pitiable infirmity of man's nature, that can lay him open to such frenzies; but in truth you rather admired than pitied the lunacy while it lasted; you felt that an hour of such mistake was worth an age with the eyes open.40 Who would not wish to live but for a day in the conceit of such a lady's love as Olivia?41 Why, the Duke would have given his principality but for a quarter of a minute, sleeping or waking, to have been so deluded.42 The man seemed to tread upon air, to taste manna, to walk with his head in the clouds, to mate Hyperion.43 O! shake not the castles of his pride; endure yet for a season bright moments of confidence; stand still ye watches of the element, that Malvolio may be still in fancy fair Olivia's lord; but fate and retribution say no; I hear the mischievous titter of Maria, the witty taunts of Sir Toby, the still more insupportable triumph of the foolish knight; the counterfeit Sir Topas is unmasked; and thus the whirligig of time, as the true clown has it, brings in his revenges.44 I confess that I never saw the catastrophe of this character, while Bensley played it, without a kind of tragic interest.45
Sentence Notes
In plain English: Coming across an old theatre programme the other day (I don't know how it survived so long) makes me want to remember some of the main actors listed on it.
In plain English: It shows the cast of Twelfth Night at the old Drury Lane Theatre thirty-two years ago.
Reference & context: That is, around 1790, when Lamb was about fifteen. Twelfth Night is Shakespeare's comedy of mistaken identity, set in Illyria. The old Drury Lane theatre was demolished in 1791.
In plain English: There is something very moving about these old memories.
In plain English: They remind us how we used to read a programme: not, as we perhaps do now, picking out one favourite and glancing carelessly at the rest, but reading every single name, right down to the silent extras and servants. Back then it mattered hugely to us whether Whitfield or Packer played Fabian, and minor names like Benson, Burton and Phillimore seemed more important than we'd now admit even the best actors of today are.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Lamb captures the intense, all-absorbing enthusiasm of a young theatregoer.
In plain English: “Orsino: played by Mr. Barrymore.”
Reference & context: Orsino is the lovesick Duke in Twelfth Night. William Barrymore was a Drury Lane actor.
In plain English: What a rich Shakespearean ring it has! How vividly I remember the look and the style of that gentle actor!
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A single line from a cast list brings a whole past back to life.
In plain English: Malvolio in Twelfth Night was played by Bensley with a richness and dignity that, judging by some recent productions, the stage has completely forgotten.
Reference & context: Robert Bensley (c. 1742–1817) was a leading actor at Drury Lane. Malvolio is the steward of the Countess Olivia; the other characters trick him with a forged love letter so that he makes a fool of himself, then lock him in a dark room as a madman. (The earlier part of Lamb's essay, on other actors and on Bensley's Iago, is omitted here.)
In plain English: No theatre manager then would have dreamed of giving the part to a comedian like Mr. Baddeley or Mr. Parsons. When Bensley was occasionally away, John Kemble, the great tragic actor, didn't think it beneath him to take it over.
Reference & context: Robert Baddeley and William Parsons were low comedians. John Philip Kemble (1757–1823) was the leading tragic actor of the age, famous as Hamlet and Coriolanus.
In plain English: Malvolio is not ridiculous by nature. He becomes funny only by accident.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Lamb's central argument in two short sentences.
In plain English: He is cold, strict and off-putting; but he is dignified, consistent, and, as far as we can see, morally over-strict rather than bad.
In plain English: Maria, Olivia's maid, calls him a kind of Puritan. He could have worn his steward's gold chain with honour in one of the old Parliamentarian families of the Civil War, serving someone like General Lambert or Lady Fairfax.
Reference & context: Twelfth Night, Act 2, Scene 3: “Marry, sir, sometimes he is a kind of puritan.” John Lambert and Thomas Fairfax were Parliamentarian generals in the English Civil War (1642–1651). A steward's chain of office was his badge of rank.
In plain English: But in Illyria, a land of fun and romance, his morals and manners are out of place.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Malvolio's tragedy in seven words: the right man in the wrong play.
In plain English: He sets himself against the play's natural light-heartedness, and loses an unequal fight.
In plain English: Still, his pride or seriousness, whatever you call it, is genuinely part of him, not fake or put on; and only fakes and poses deserve to be laughed at.
Reference & context: An idea from the comic theory of the time, especially Henry Fielding's preface to Joseph Andrews (1742): affectation is “the only source of the true Ridiculous.”
In plain English: His character is unlovable at best, but he is neither a clown nor contemptible.
In plain English: He carries himself proudly, a little above his social position, but probably not much above what he deserves.
In plain English: There's no reason to think he wasn't brave, honourable and talented.
In plain English: The careless way he throws the ring on the ground, when he was told to return it to Cesario, suggests a gentleman's birth and spirit.
Reference & context: Twelfth Night, Act 2, Scene 2. “Cesario” is Viola in disguise as a young man.
In plain English: His way of speaking is always that of an educated gentleman.
In plain English: We mustn't mix him up with the stock comic figure of the old, lowly steward.
In plain English: He runs the household of a great noblewoman, a position probably given to him for reasons other than age or long service.
In plain English: When Olivia first thinks he has gone mad, she says she wouldn't want any harm to come to him for half her fortune.
Reference & context: Twelfth Night, Act 3, Scene 4: “I would not have him miscarry for the half of my dowry.”
In plain English: Does that sound as if he's meant to seem small or unimportant?
In plain English: Once, it's true, she accuses him to his face, of what? Of being “sick of self-love”; but she says it so gently and considerately that she must have thought this one weakness was hiding some good qualities.
Reference & context: Twelfth Night, Act 1, Scene 5: “O, you are sick of self-love, Malvolio.”
In plain English: His telling-off of Sir Toby and his drunken friends is sensible and lively. Remember that his mistress has no man to protect her, and that because she is in mourning (real or pretended) the world is watching her household closely. Malvolio might well feel that the family's honour is in his hands, since Olivia seems to have no other brothers or male relatives to guard it; Sir Toby had abandoned such scruples at the drinks hatch.
Reference & context: Twelfth Night, Act 2, Scene 3, where Malvolio scolds the late-night revellers: “My masters, are you mad?” Olivia is mourning her brother. Sir Toby Belch is her drunken uncle.
In plain English: The Duke's worry that Malvolio should be made friends again almost proves that he was meant to have admirable qualities.
In plain English: “Go after him and persuade him to make peace.”
Reference & context: Twelfth Night, Act 5, Scene 1, after Malvolio storms off swearing, “I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you.”
In plain English: Even when he is cruelly locked up in chains and darkness, a kind of greatness never seems to leave him.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Lamb sees nobility even in Malvolio's humiliation, which is a radical reading for 1822.
Reference & context: Twelfth Night, Act 4, Scene 2.
In plain English: He argues intelligently and well with the man he thinks is the priest Sir Topas, and talks philosophy bravely while lying on his straw.
Reference & context: The clown Feste disguises himself as a curate, “Sir Topas,” to torment Malvolio in his dark cell.
In plain English: There must have been some real merit in the man. He must have been more than just hot air, a straw man or a self-important little official, or Fabian and Maria would never have dared send him to court Olivia.
In plain English: There was some sense, as he would put it, in the idea, or the joke would have been too outrageous even for that house of chaos.
Reference & context: Malvolio uses the word himself when reading the forged letter: “there is no consonancy in the sequel” (Act 2, Scene 5).
In plain English: So Bensley gave the part an air of Spanish grandeur.
In plain English: He looked, spoke and moved like an old Spanish aristocrat.
Modernized: spake → spoke
In plain English: He was stiff, neat and opinionated, but his towering pride seemed to rest on a real sense of his own worth.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: An architectural image: the pride is a tall building, but it stands on solid foundations.
In plain English: There was more to it than mere vanity.
In plain English: His pride was large and puffed up, but you couldn't be sure it was empty.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A subtle observation: pride can be inflated without being hollow.
In plain English: You might want to see it brought down, but you felt it stood on genuinely high ground.
In plain English: He was magnificent from the start. But when the character's sober self-control began to crack, and the poison of self-love, in his fantasy that the Countess loved him, slowly took effect, you'd have thought Don Quixote himself was standing in front of you.
Reference & context: Don Quixote, “the hero of La Mancha,” is Cervantes's deluded Spanish knight (1605), noble and absurd at once.
In plain English: How he walked about smiling to himself! How unbelievably carelessly he twirled his gold chain! What a dream it was! You caught the illusion yourself and didn't want it to end! You had no room to laugh!
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A rush of exclamations that makes the reader share Malvolio's intoxicating dream.
Reference & context: In the play, the forged letter tells Malvolio to smile constantly and wear yellow cross-gartered stockings to please Olivia.
In plain English: If some untimely moral thought did intrude, it was a deep sense of how pitiably weak human nature is, that it can be carried away by such fantasies. But honestly, while it lasted you admired the madness more than you pitied it; you felt one hour of such a wonderful mistake was worth a lifetime of seeing clearly.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A romantic paradox: a beautiful illusion can be worth more than dull truth.
In plain English: Who wouldn't want to live, even for one day, believing that a lady like Olivia loved him?
In plain English: Why, Duke Orsino, who loves Olivia hopelessly, would have given his whole dukedom for fifteen seconds of that delusion, asleep or awake.
In plain English: He seemed to walk on air, to taste the food of heaven, to have his head in the clouds, to be the equal of a sun god.
Reference & context: Manna is the food God sent the Israelites in the desert (Exodus 16). Hyperion was a Greek Titan, the father of the Sun; “to mate” here means to match or equal.
In plain English: Oh, don't knock down his castles of pride! Let his bright moments of confidence last a little longer! Stop, you hours of the sky, so that Malvolio can still imagine himself lovely Olivia's husband! But fate and punishment say no. I hear Maria's naughty giggle, Sir Toby's clever jeers, and the even more unbearable gloating of the foolish knight Sir Andrew; the fake Sir Topas is exposed; and “thus the whirligig of time,” as the real clown says, “brings in his revenges.”
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Lamb's prose rises into a plea to stop time itself, then collapses into the play's ending, just as Malvolio's dream does.
Reference & context: “Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven” comes from Marlowe's Doctor Faustus; “watches of the element” means the hours marked by the sky. The final quotation is Feste's line in Twelfth Night, Act 5, Scene 1.
Modernized: hath → has
In plain English: I admit that I never saw this character's downfall, when Bensley played it, without feeling something close to tragic sympathy.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Lamb's verdict, which changed how Malvolio has been played ever since.
Fun Fact
Lamb's view of Malvolio as a figure of near-tragic dignity changed the theatre. Henry Irving played him that way in 1884, and most modern productions follow Lamb's lead. Famous Malvolios such as Laurence Olivier, Derek Jacobi and Stephen Fry have been as moving as they are funny. Malvolio's last line, “I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you,” is now usually played as genuinely painful.