Shakespearian mystery
Sir: Probably the greatest anagrammatic mystery in Shakespeare is the , identification of the letters M.O.A.I. in Twelfth Night. That Malvolio recognizes that all the letters are to be found in his name means that he finds the riddle to be an anagram, and indeed it is in part. The real question is why or how. this bit of word-play came into being, and some very extravagant suggestions have been made, including that the letters are a rearrangement of "I AM 0(livia)," abbreviations for water, earth, air, fire in Latin (mare, orbis, aer, ignis), or for "My own adored idol" (to which we might just as well add "My only audacious imp!")
There is, however, a perfectly sound way of explaining how the letters came into being. To say that they are simply the first two and the last two letters of Malvolio's name rearranged is true, but in itself too simplistic. What happened was that Shakespeare made some switches when he encountered the name of the heroine, Silla, in his source (Barnabe Riche). Silla, in assuming a masculine disguise, adopted her brother's name: Silvio. Roger Adger Law pointed out some time ago in Texas Studies in English (1951), p.65, that "if we strike out the letters common to both names, Sil-, we have left exactly viola, the name that Shakespeare gives that young lady." Now, since Olivia is an anagram of Viola with an additional i, it follows that the -yolk' of Malvolio may also be related. Professor Law did not take this argument a step farther to show that M.O.A.I. is a further reduction of Malvolio's name. The name-play is schematised as follows:
Silla 4 Silvio -4 Silvio-Silla
Viola -4 Olivia/Malvolio M.O.I.A.
In other words, the letters M.O.I.A. (like various other invented forms of nomenclature in Twelfth Night: Pigrogromitus, Vapians, Quebus) are absurd in their effect; but the absurdity is classifiable: it is the final reductio ad absurdum.
Such an explanation is a via media between two extremes: that which makes the expression out to be utter nonsense, and that of Dr Hotson, in The First Night of "Twelfth Night," which claimed that Shakespeare, like Rabelais, "had meaning even in his strangest locutions." But further elaboration is possible. In his monograph arguing that the play A Knack to Know a Knave was partly by Shakespeare (The Rare Wit and the Rude Groom [Bern, 19711), Hanspeter Born contends that the invention of certain classical references, like the name Ianamyst, was Shakespeare's "deliberate reductio ad absurdum of certain idiosyncrasies of Greene's prose" (p.135). If so, then M.O.A.I. may likewise be understood as a parody of Greene — perhaps for his criticism of Shakespeare in the Froatsworth of Wit.
Robert F. Fleissner The Central State University Wilberforce, Ohio 45384, USA.
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