Twelfth Night, or What You Will is a romantic comedy about a cross-dressing young woman who finds herself at the center of a weird love triangle. Secret crushes, separated twins, and elaborate practical jokes by day drinkers and schemers result in hilarious confusion. The play was written between 1599 and late 1601 (around the time that Shakespeare also wrote Hamlet), and premiered in the great hall of the Middle Temple in London on February 2 during Candlemas, a feast to celebrate the end of the Christmas season. Shakespeare borrowed plot elements from the short story "Of Apollonius and Silla" by Barnabe Rich, which in turn had been based on one of the Italian novellas by Matteo Bandello. The play was published in the First Folio of 1623.
"Twelfth Night" is a reference to the twelfth night after Christmas Day, also called the Eve of the Feast of Epiphany, a holiday which was also an occasion for revelry: servants often dressed up as their masters, men as women, and so forth. The actual Elizabethan festival of Twelfth Night would involve the antics of a Lord of Misrule, who before leaving his temporary position of authority, would call for entertainment, songs, and mummery; the play has been regarded as preserving this festive and traditional atmosphere of licensed disorder. This leads to the general inversion of the order of things, most notably gender roles, but also status reversal between master and servant.
When the twins Viola and Sebastian are shipwrecked and lose each other
on a strange island in the kingdom of Illyria (a region in the western part of the Balkan Peninsula, probably around the present Croatian city of Dubrovnik), the girl dresses up as
her brother to enter the service of the Duke Orsino, who is trying to woo a
young lady called Olivia while there are competitors on the horizon. The cross-dressing is particularly provocative, as the role of Viola would in Shakespeare's time have been played by a boy actor, cross-dressing as a female character, who in turn cross-dresses as a young man.
[Olivia, by Edmund Leighton (1896)]
The main themes of the play are:
- Love as a cause of suffering. In a romantic comedy, romantic love is the grand theme, but Shakespeare shows that love can cause pain. The characters who are in love in this play see love as a "curse," besetting defenseless victims and disrupting their lives. Despite these difficulties, the characters are never heavy-handed. The
opening line, by the Duke's mouth, immediately sets a lighthearted tone:
If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it
- Gender confusion. Twelfth Night is one of Shakespeare's "transvestite comedies" in which a female character - in this case Viola - disguises herself as a man, thereby creating a confusing situation between the sexes.
- The folly of ambition. This theme is personified in the character of Malvolio, who is first a competent but dull servant and then acquires an immoderate ambition to improve himself socially. This folly is set - as the title suggests - against the backdrop of the feast of Twelfth night in which the roles in society are reversed and the social order is overthrown.
[Orsino and Viola, by Frederick Richard Pickersgill (c. 1850)]
The main characters are:
- Viola: a young, aristocratic woman. She is the protagonist of the play. After the ship she is traveling on with her twin brother is wrecked in a storm, she washes up on the coast of Illyria. In order to search for her brother, she disguises herself as a man and manages to enter the service of Duke Orsino as "Cesario." She falls in love with him, while Olivia, the woman Orsino is courting, falls in love with "Cesario." Viola cannot tell Orsino that she loves him, nor can she tell Olivia that she is actually a woman. This awkward situation is the central conflict of the play.
- Orsino: a powerful nobleman of Illyria. Orsino is infatuated with the beautiful Lady Olivia, but is increasingly attracted to his page, Cesario, who is actually a woman. In fact, the self-centered Orsino is in the first place in love with the idea of being in love. All the time he is running around bemoaning how lovesick he is.
- Olivia: a rich, beautiful and noble Illyrian lady who is courted by both Orsino and Sir Andrew Aguecheek. She rebuffs both by saying that she is still in mourning for her brother who recently died, and that she wants to wait another seven years before getting engaged. She is a bit like Orsino in character, as she too likes to wallow in her own misery. With the arrival of "Cesario," for whom she develops tender feelings without realizing that "he" is a "she", her self-imposed melancholy comes to an end, but her romantic feelings remain superficial.
- Sebastian: Viola's lost twin brother. When he arrives in Illyria in the company of his friend and protector Antonio, he finds to his surprise that many people seem to know him. Lady Olivia, whom he has never met, even wants to marry him... This plot element may have been suggested by the Roman comedy The Brothers Menaechmus by Plautus, the plot of which also involves twins who are mistaken for each other.
- Malvolio: Lady Olivia's prudish head servant. He is very efficient in the performance of his duties but also very rigid where his views on drinking, singing and having fun are concerned. His high-handedness leads Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, and Mary to play a mean trick on him: they make him believe that Lady Olivia is in love with him. He begins to fantasize about his "beloved" and the possibility of marrying her, and this unexpectedly fuels his social ambition.
The play consistently ranks among the greatest plays ever written and has been dubbed as "The Perfect Comedy" - perhaps because of its rebellious portrayal of gender ambiguity. Orsino finally marries Viola, whom he has adored in the guise of a boy. Olivia, so ardent in her passion for Cesare/Viola, instead gets to marry Viola's twin brother, Sebastian. That is the end of the play, but in the mind of the reader various intriguing and delicious permutations seem probable, a kind of sexual "musical chairs," as in one of the novels of Iris Murdoch.
Twelfth Night from Speakthespeech.org (listen to the play while you read along)
Twelfth Night Navigator Includes annotated text, line numbers, scene index with scene summaries, and a search engine.
MIT's "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare"