Hidden within a New Yorker article by Charles Van Doren was a surprising revelation about Twelfth Night:

Along with Vivienne Nearing and eight others, I later pleaded guilty to second-degree perjury, a misdemeanor, for lying to the grand jury about getting answers from producers. The six weeks between my confession and Christmas of that year, 1959, were mostly agony.

But a small gift from my father helped me through it. He had wrapped a square box in tissue paper, sealed with Scotch tape. The box contained a gyroscopic compass, the kind you can start spinning and put on the edge of a glass, where it will stay upright till the spinning stops. A card in the box read, “May this be for you the whirligig of time that brings in his revenges.” I knew the quotation. It’s from “Twelfth Night.” Feste, the mean-spirited clown, has been unmasked, but those are his last words, thrown over his shoulder. The play’s audience knows that somehow he will survive and live to taunt some other master. I didn’t ask my father what he had meant by it, because I knew he was saying that I, too, would survive and somehow find a way back. I just hugged him and said, “Thank you, Papa.”

If I were under any previous illusions about being a Feste expert for having played him as a Freshman at St. John's in Elise Berg's production, they would have to end now. I had never even considered the possibility that there was any kind of severing of Feste's relationship with Olivia, or that the bitterness he reveals toward Malvolio is much marked by anyone except perhaps Malvolio himself. Was this obvious to everyone but me? If not, does this interpretation strike you as convincing?