Feste

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In the Globe Theatre Company's production of Twelfth Night, Feste was played by Peter Hamilton Dyer.

Peter Hamilton Dyer

This is Peter's second season at Shakespeare's Globe; last year, he played Oswald in King Lear. He played Feste in the Globe Theatre Company's production of Twelfth Night at Middle Temple Hall in Spring 2002. Peter has also worked with a range of theatre companies including the RSC, Birmingham Repertory Theatre and Shared Experience. Film and TV work includes Doctors, EastEnders and Doctor Who.

Click on the numbered links to follow Peter's journey as he creates and plays the character of Feste in the Globe Theatre.

Peter Hamilton Dyer - Character Notes 1

These comments are the actor's thoughts or ideas about the part as s/he goes through the rehearsal process – they are simply his/her own interpretations and frequently change as the rehearsal process progresses.
This is my second season at the Globe; last year I played Oswald in King Lear. This experience is invaluable at the moment as we start rehearsals for Twelfth Night. One thing that particularly struck me last year was that the actors working in the Globe need to be very honest in the way they portray their characters. In a conventional theatre, where you can’t see the audience, it's easy to lose yourself in playing a role, but when I’m working on the Globe stage I feel like a storyteller with a responsibility to lead the audience through the play. Overplaying your character in the Globe Space is a dangerous thing to do, as the audience won’t necessarily believe it. You have to be totally truthful, both in the way you address your lines to others, and in the way you respond when they address you.

I played Feste when we took this production of Twelfth Night to Middle Temple Hall earlier this year, but the production feels totally different now. This is partly due to the setting, as we’ve moved from an Elizabethan hall to a reconstructed Elizabethan playhouse, but also because only five of the cast from Middle Temple Hall have stayed with the company for the summer. This has been very refreshing, as we are re-exploring the play and continually making new discoveries about the characters.

We’ve just been looking at Act 5 today, and did a useful exercise to help us understand the relationships between the characters. We all stood in a circle, in character, and threw a tennis ball from one character to the next. The way in which you pass the ball to someone else depends on both the nature of your character and your relationship with the recipient. So, if you had very little respect for them, you might throw the ball very hard at them, or perhaps put the ball on the ground for them to come and fetch from you. When I passed the ball to Orsino, who I wanted to impress with my gift, I polished the ball before handing it to him. This exercise was really helpful in helping us understand how the characters interact with each other before we approach the text. We have also been using improvisation to help us develop our characters. We improvised the funeral service for Olivia's brother where we had Olivia, Maria, Malvolio, Sir Toby Belch, Aguecheek, Orsino, Feste, Curio and Valentine all together to pay their respects. This improvisation created lots of useful background to the characters, especially concerning Sir Toby – why was he there, and why was he staying on after the funeral.

Feste is unique, as he feels equally at home in both Olivia's and Orsino's household. At the beginning of rehearsals, the whole company did an exercise where we all made three lists of lines from the play. The first contained what our character said about themselves, the second what they said about other people, and the third what others said about them. All we know about Feste's past is that Olivia's father enjoyed his company, and I’m trying to find out more about who Feste is and what he's been doing. When he first meets Maria in Act 1 scene 5, she says that one of the phrases he uses ("I fear no colours") originates in "the wars." She could be implying that he's simply been roughing it, or she could mean that he has been fighting as a soldier. Shakespeare and his circle were connected to the Earl of Southampton, who, in the years before Twelfth Night was written, had been fighting in Ireland. In the end, he disobeyed the queen and was only saved from hanging by the appeals of his friends in high places, but, anyway, it would make sense that Feste could have been away fighting for some time before the action of the play begins. Nevertheless, he is very independent.

Feste is a singer, a man of wit and pleasure; in many ways a total contrast to Malvolio. I think this is why he went away, as a house of mourning is no place for a fool. But he comes back because he has a great deal of affection for Olivia's household, and he fears for them should Malvolio remain in control. Still, Olivia does not rule him in any way; he does not feel he needs to tell her where he has been, nor will he plead on her behalf. In a way, Feste seems to be outside the world of the play. His final song at the end of the play is a musical soliloquy – he is informing the audience of his state of mind, and reminding them that he is not part of the world in which Olivia and Orsino's marriages are soon to take place. He is an outside observer.

Activities

What is said about Feste?

At the beginning of the rehearsal period Peter read through the play and made lists detailing:

everything Feste says about himself
everything Feste says about other characters in the play
everything that other characters say about Feste
Make these three lists for Feste. What do you find out about the character by doing this? Send your lists and observations to Peter so he can compare them with his own.

Character Reactions

In the activity above you made lists of what Feste says about other characters in the play. Many of these comments are made behind that character's back. How do you think that character might react if s/he heard what Feste said about them?

Try improvising this situation in pairs with a) as Feste and b) as one of the characters he talks about. What do you find out about Feste from this activity? Send your discoveries to Peter.

Relationships between the characters in Twelfth Night

In small groups, stand in a circle. Assign each person a character from the play and hand one person a tennis ball. They will then call out the name of another character in the play, and throw the tennis ball to that character in a way that reflects the relationship between their characters.

Actors on the Globe stage have to constantly use the whole space to ensure that they are seen and heard. This is especially true for more intimate scenes.

Now do the exercise again experimenting with the size of the circle. How does this affect the exercise: what do you the participants have to change to allow for the change in circle size? Does a larger or a smaller circle allow others to better understand the relationships between the characters? How does this exercise inform how you would stage any scene from Twelfth Night?

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Peter Hamilton Dyer - Character Notes 2

These comments are the actor's thoughts or ideas about the part as s/he goes through the rehearsal process – they are simply his/her own interpretations and frequently change as the rehearsal process progresses.
Feste is the only character in the play that sings regularly, and I’ve been wondering why he does it. I think he believes that the words a person says aren’t necessarily truthful; he tells Cesario that "words are very rascals" (iii.1. 19-20). In Twelfth Night, a play about hidden identities and a lack of obvious truths, words, though entertaining, are uncomfortably malleable. Most of the characters in the play are not truthful with each other, and when they look for truths in each other, they often look in the wrong places. Whereas words are highly cerebral, (hence the wit required for one to become a "corrupter of words" (iii.1. 34), music speaks directly to the heart. Singing is often accompanied, and in this production, I have to play a pipe and tabor at certain points during the play. Although I’ve been practising hard, playing a drum and a pipe with only one hand for each instrument is quite tricky! I thought I was getting somewhere, but then Keith [McGowan, one of the Globe Musicians] came in to give me a lesson, and I realised how much I have left to learn! When a professional musician plays the pipe and tabor, it's something to simply watch and admire. So, I still have some practice to do…

We’ve been working on what I call the drinking scene (ii.3), when Sir Toby brings Aguecheek back to the house. At the beginning of the scene, I think Aguecheek half wants to end the evening and go to bed, but Belch persuades him to continue and when Feste appears, he lifts their spirits, as they feel that they can now have song to entertain them. They then sing a catch, a round, making more and more noise until Maria, then Malvolio, comes down to stop them, interruptions that they treat as great successes.

Feste and Malvolio have a rather curious relationship, as each is in many ways the opposite of the other. Malvolio believes in structure and order, Feste in freedom from such ties. The challenge facing Olivia is to balance these contrasting forces. At the beginning of the play, the stricture of Malvolio suits Olivia in that it corresponds with her mourning duties. By the end of the play however, she is more ready to embrace freedom and truly live her life. Feste is very keen to relieve Olivia's despair, as he loves her. I don’t mean he loves her in a physical sense, but he knows the household; he was probably her father's fool, and later her brother’s. After both Olivia's father and brother died he left the house, as there's no place for a fool in a house of double death. By the time of the play, he's returned to revitalise the household and to restore Olivia's interest in life; although he recognises a need for sorrow and mourning, he doesn’t want the household to be irreversibly distorted by Malvolio's influence. Those close to Olivia are very pleased that he's returned, because they see him as a catalyst that will help to move the household out from the shadow of Malvolio's influence; Maria really wants to intercede with Olivia on Feste's behalf and tell her why he's been away so long.

Feste wants to affect Olivia, to change her outlook on life, but in the same way, I think he also wants to affect Malvolio. Once Feste has finished playing Sir Topaz, Belch remarks that he wishes Malvolio could be "conveniently delivered," but I don’t think Feste agrees. He wants to change Malvolio, to teach him that we must rely on others, and in the end Malvolio is forced to ask him to "help [him] to a candle, and pen, ink and paper" (iv.2.81). I think Feste hopes this might teach him that to despise others is ridiculous, as we’re all the same, but we don’t get a chance to find out whether he learns this lesson. People have argued over whether Malvolio leaves Olivia's household at the end of the play, but I think he does; surely it would be very difficult for him to stay, having admitted to a passionate yet unrequited love for his boss. Like Malvolio, Feste also leaves the household at the end of the play, but I’m not sure what this means yet.

I’ve been thinking about how I might communicate with a Globe audience, whether there are any lines I could deliver directly to them. In Middle Temple Hall, we (as a company) tried to directly engage with the audience as much as possible, but it seems to me that Feste doesn’t have that many opportunities to do so. The first time I speak directly to the audience is in Act 1 scene 5, when Feste is musing on the nature of a wise man and says to them "For what says Quinapalus? ‘Better a witty fool than a foolish wit.’" (i. 5. 32-3). He is asking the audience to back him up. In Act 4 scene 2, I think Feste reluctantly dresses up as Sir Topaz, as his reaction to Maria's urging is not exactly enthusiastic; "Well, I’ll put it on…" But he then goes on to wish that he were "the first that ever dissembled in such a gown." (iv.2. 4-6). When I directed this line at individuals watching the show at Middle Temple Hall, the audience as a whole would start to chuckle; the line seemed rather pertinent in the home of London's lawyers. At the Globe, the impact of the line will be less focused, the idea being simply that those who wear uniforms, whether members of the nobility, the church, the legal profession, the army or any other organisation, are capable of dissembling and deceiving others. There are terrible scandals breaking in the news every day, scandals taking place in different organisations worldwide. It's all about appearances and deception: that's what this play's about. Of course, this is slightly ironic, as all actors are dissemblers when they stand on stage pretending to be someone else. Having said that, the Globe space is a very honest space to work in, as unlike most theatres with their "realistic" sets, it's very clear to an audience that the actors on stage are, well, exactly that.

Activities

1. Peter mentions that he thinks Feste views songs as being more truthful than words.

Songs are often used to convey ideas which people may not feel able to spread by other means. Make a list of any songs you can think of which could be said to do this.

Write a poem/song for another character from Twelfth Night to sing about Feste and/or fools. You might want to consider:

How they feel they should act towards him
How they really want to act towards him and why
Who does the singer intend to hear the song? Do they want Feste to hear it, or is it simply about him?
2. Peter says that Feste and Malvolio could be viewed as opposites.

Do you agree? Make a list of comparisons and differences between these two characters. Which lines from the play support your observations?

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