L. B. Salingar notes that "Most readers of Twelfth Night would probably agree that this is the most delightful, harmonious, and accomplished of Shakespeare's romantic comedies, in many ways his crowning achievement in [this] one branch of his art" (24). Indeed, Twelfth Night is the last of the "pure comedies" Shakespeare would write, and it seems in many ways to sum up and bid farewell to the genre of pure comedy, as Shakespeare, now in his mid-thirties, would after this play move into a decade dominated most by the great tragedies, beginning with Hamlet, which was likely composed within a year of Twelfth Night.

Although many consider this Shakespeare's funniest play, you may also detect darker undercurrents in Twelfth Night as well, particularly in some of the musings of the "clown" Feste and also in the harshness of the extended joke played upon Malvolio. These hints of darker matters signal a transition in Shakespeare's apparent outlook, as in addition to the great tragedies of the first decade of the 1600s, the remaining three comedies he would write are not so purely light and "comedic" as any of the earlier comedies. In fact, these three comedies written sometime in 1602-1604—All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Troilus and Cressida—are commonly called "problem plays," presenting cynical, satirical and sometimes disturbingly ambiguous attitudes towards sexual and social relations. This is not to say that Twelfth Night is a "dark play," by any means, but do be on the lookout for subtle hints at a darker view beneath the hilarity and fun of this "last and greatest" of Shakespeare's pure comedies.

About the title and the subtitle: The title of this play, Twelfth Night, is a bit curious. "Twelfth Night" refers to the last of the "twelve days of Christmas," January 6th, also known as the Day of Epiphany, which was in Shakespeare's time celebrated as the anniversary of the Magi's ("wise men's") visit to Joseph and Mary in Bethlehem. However, there seems to be little directly significant religious matter in the play at all. David Bevington suggests that the title indicates the spirit of "holiday revelry" in broader terms, as this play resembles As You Like It in presenting a comedic escape from the "real world" into a world where illusion and reality are often inverted and where the normal restrictions of the "real world" can be cast off in ways not permitted in the more serious realms of the history or tragedy. We do not have a "green world" or a "magical forest" in this play, but we do have a world where, as in the earlier play, a "fool" may be the wisest, sanest character among the lot and where a woman can win her beloved while masquerading as a man. The title may bear significance, too, if, as it seems quite possible, Shakespeare knew that Twelfth Night would be the last of his pure romantic comedies: this suggests that in this play written between 1599 and 1601, probably in the latter year, Shakespeare enjoys a sort of "one last fling of holiday revelry" himself, as he would move on from this genre to the more serious matters of the great tragedies of the early 1600s (Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth), for as noted above, even the comedies he would write after Twelfth Night are considered "problem plays" more than pure comedies (they are also called Shakespeare's "dark comedies").

The subtitle, "What You Will," has often been considered freighted with meaning as well. Many have found this play rather elusive in a variety of ways. As Walter King observes, in the long history of commentary on Twelfth Night, "critics disagree about which of the so-called plots is primary, about which of the leading characters is central, about which of the themes is the nucleus around which the others cohere." And further, "Toward which character is our empathy most intensely directed? To Olivia or to Viola? To Malvolio? Or to Feste? Is the play just an amorous romp that eventually leads to the pairing off of Jack with Jill, of Joan with John? Or is it a serious, though laughter-filled, representation of issues relevant not only to the early seventeenth century . . . but also the twentieth?" (5-6). Or as L. G. Salingar asks, is it "a vindication of romance, or a depreciation of romance? Is it mainly a love story or a comedy of humors; a 'poem of escape' or a realistic comment on economic security and prudential marriage?" (24). We will explore most of these issues more closely in discussion, but it is important to note at the outset that the play's elusiveness in interpretation seems likely intentional on Shakespeare's part: the subtitle invites us to "make of this play . . . what we will" in all sorts of respects..

The madness motif: Distinct from the literary theme, the term "motif" generally means "recurrent images, words, objects, phrases, or actions that tend to unify [a literary] work" (Harmon and Holman 322). One motif that occurs with great frequency in Twelfth Night is madness: as you read, be on the lookout for direct references to madness in a great variety of contexts. In one respect or another, it seems almost that every significant character in Twelfth Night is subject to madness of some kind, and it is the sheer "madness" that provides so much of the fun and the zany humor in this play. In fact, it is something of a commonplace to observe that the only fully sane character in this play may be Feste, the fool: Harold Bloom, for one, notes that in Twelfth Night "everyone, except the reluctant jester, Feste, is essentially mad without knowing it" (226). (Note that as something of a stock feature, "fools" are conventionally purveyors of great truths in Shakespeare's plays.) The pervasive madness of so many of the characters, and some are more obvious cases than others, is definitely in keeping with the play's tone of holiday revelry, revelry often being a kind of madness in itself. I will leave it for you to consider and share with the class in discussion whether you think there may be some thematic significance in all this attention to madness—perhaps some connection between love and madness, e.g.

Gender matters: This play raises several interesting questions regarding sex or gender, some of them rather complex. There are interesting comments at a number of points in the play where characters draw attention to typically masculine or typically feminine behavior. See, for instance, the exchange between Viola and Orsino in 2.4.92-118, where the two present opposing notions of how "men love more than women" (Orsino's idea) and how "women love more truly than men" (Viola's claim).

Twelfth Night seems to focus pointedly on the notion of gender as a conscious construct, and without question Viola plays quite heavily on the ironies inherent in her being a woman disguised as a man. These ironies had even greater immediacy in Shakespeare's time since the women characters were played by young boys. Viola spends a good bit of time dressed as a man, and the critical tradition gives serious attention to homoerotic suggestiveness in this play—to homosexual possibilities, that is. The play's key relationships are complicated by Viola's disguise and her apparently uncanny resemblance to her twin brother, Sebastian (as if clothes are all that make the difference), but the sexual tension between Viola-as-Cesario and Orsino, and also Viola-as-Cesario and Olivia, is clearly pronounced.

Explicit and serious public focus on homosexuality was uncommon in Elizabethan England, but some of the implicit potential concern with same-sex attractions in Shakespeare receives quite a bit of attention from critics today (and not just in the "queer theory" school of criticism). While Shakespeare does indeed probe deeply into questions of masculinity and femininity in many of his plays, more conservative views of such plays as Twelfth Night put a good deal of weight on how different Renaissance attitudes towards same-sex "love" (i.e. friendship) were from our typical modern-day attitudes towards non-sexual same-sex relations, especially between men. Shakespeare himself provides an example that according to Renaissance thinking it was "no big thing" that a man might address many dozens of love sonnets to another man; I can't imagine anyone in our modern world, even someone not as radically homophobic as most men typically are, not thinking of something "other than pure friendship" in such a cycle of love poems today!

Another way to put the gender-bending into context, however, is to note that in virtually all of Shakespeare's plays—comedies, tragedies, histories, "problem plays," and romances—the plotting moves the major characters from initial circumstances or rising complications of "chaos" of different descriptions in the early acts to a state of "order" at the play's end. In tragedies, the chaos may involve "something being rotten in the state of Denmark," as in Hamlet, where the king has been murdered by his brother, and the murderer then marries his dead brother's former queen, and the restoration of order might involve the deaths of many of the play's major characters. In comedies, however, the chaos tends to involve, as we have seen, mistaken identities or disruptions in the normal social order, and the plot works to restore things to their proper or better state. So when it comes to gender confusion in the comedies, it may be that Shakespeare is truly conservative in portraying same-sex sexual attractions as a sort of "chaos" that has to be worked through so that characters end up in the more "normal order" of heterosexual relationships.

Friendship vs. romantic love: Not that it's a form of "chaos," by any stretch, but do note in particular the matter of same-sex friendship between Sebastian and Antonio, and keep this relationship in mind, too, as you watch the relationship between Orsino and Cesario (Viola in disguise) develop. One line of interest in this play's many different comments on the nature of love centers on this question of how friendship compares or relates to romantic love. I hope we will delve into many of the different characters' direct comments on the nature of romantic love in your critical responses and in discussion, but it's worth pointing out how some characters fall in love at first sight in this play, while the great love Orsino professes in hyperbolic terms for Olivia is dropped entirely once he realizes that his friend, Cesario, is actually a woman, one who has ironically professed a woman's love for him already, though he doesn't understand the full import of Viola's comments when she makes them initially.

Darker undercurrents: There are several veins of a "darker tone" often detected in Twelfth Night which seem to run counter to the general tone of well-being and happiness in the end that pervades all the earlier comedies. As noted above, these suggestions of darker elements seem in retrospect to provide harbingers of the development Shakespeare's plays would take in the tragedies and even in the few remaining comedies, the "problem plays" All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Troilus and Cressida.

The hints at homosexual attraction may be considered something of a "darker element" in Twelfth Night, but two more obviously emphasized aspects of the play suggesting a sort of unease beneath the comedic veneer are found in Feste's apparent melancholy, especially in some of his songs, and also in the sheer extravagance of Malvolio's humiliation at the hands of Sir Toby and Maria and their comical crew.

Most of the real comedy in the play centers on the drunken Sir Toby and his high-spirited fun with Sir Andrew, Fabian, and Maria. There is great fun in Toby's pitting of Andrew and Viola/Cesario against one another as unwilling combatants in Act 4, for instance. But the prank Sir Toby and Maria orchestrate against Malvolio seems unusually thoroughly developed. Their plot to make a fool of the affected, arrogant, and officious Malvolio through the ruse of the forged love-letter, written supposedly by his mistress, Olivia, definitely provides some of the more hilarious humor in the play, but the extremity of their humiliation of the self-important Malvolio—his being locked up as a madman and then toyed with by Feste—has long been considered excessive, even malicious or sadistic. In different periods Malvolio has been portrayed with notable sympathy, and during the later 1600s the play was sometimes even called Malvolio instead of Twelfth Night; such eminent critics as Charles Lamb, in the early 1800s, considered Malvolio to elicit in smaller measure the same sort of "tragic interest" we have typically for proper tragic heroes (Boyce 669). This play does not end "happily for all," certainly, as Malvolio, irritating as he may be, leaves the stage in great anger, promising revenge. Of course, more contemporary audiences may not be so willing to extend sympathy to such an irritating, self-important buffoon as many did in earlier times, when the phrase "the Malvolio problem" became current. In any case, the punishment of Malvolio is drawn-out and harsh in comparison to what similar types of characters are made to endure in the earlier plays (compare with Bianca's earliest suitors in The Taming of the Shrew, e.g.).

Lastly, Feste seems tinged at times with a sort of melancholy sadness we might not expect to find in a licensed jester in such a very funny comedy as Twelfth Night. Consider, for instance, that his song in 2.3.45-50 emphasizes that we'd better love while young because what comes after youth is "unsure"; that his song of 2.4.50ff pleads with death to carry him away; and that his song closing the play in 5.1.385ff laments the loneliness of the drunkard, "For the rain it raineth every day." Hardly the uplifting stuff we look for in the typical romantic comedy!

Malvolio (meaning "ill-wishing") and Feste (suggesting "festive") have long been considered significant as reflecting Shakespeare's mockery of his competitor Ben Jonson's popular "comedies of humors," where characters portray in exaggerated forms the various "humors" once thought to dictate the human passions (blood, phlegm, choler, etc. If these two characters are indeed drawn to facilitate Shakespeare's satirical criticism of his rival dramatist, they do nonetheless bring a pronounced "anti-romantic" aspect to this last of Shakespeare's real romantic comedies.

Reading points: As you read, consider or be on the lookout for the following:

Different kinds of madness in the play: where are different characters considered mad, and how do the various "madnesses" differ?

Different comments on the nature of love presented in the play. What legitimate views or aspects of romantic love does the play present beneath the humor?

The depiction of gender roles or gender expectations in the play: note specific passages on gender matters.

Friendships in the play: specifically, consider how love between friends is portrayed as different from romantic love.

The "darker undercurrents" evident in the play as explained above: consider Malvolio and Feste in particular, but also look for other possible "dark elements" or other anti-romantic features of the play.

The questions noted above regarding where the audience's primary sympathies should lie: with Olivia, Viola, Malvolio, or Feste? Does the play present serious examination of issues relevant to our day (and Shakespeare's), or is it just an "amorous romp" for the fun of it?  Is it a vindication of romance or "depreciation" of romance?

Different types of humor: verbal, physical, et al; look for different techniques of humor also: exaggeration, mistaken identity, malapropism (misusing of words), etc.

Thematic significance in Feste's various songs throughout the play: consider how they comment upon or interrogate specific scenes or situations in the play.

Genuine wisdom from Feste.

Works Cited (and consulted)