Context
The most influential writer in
all of English literature, William Shakespeare was born in 1564 to
a -successful middle-class glove-maker in Stratford-upon-Avon, England.
Shakespeare attended grammar school, but his formal education proceeded
no further. In 1582 he married an older woman,
Anne Hathaway, and had three children with her. Around 1590 he
left his family behind and traveled to London to work as an actor
and playwright. Public and critical acclaim quickly followed, and
Shakespeare eventually became the most popular playwright in England
and part-owner of the Globe Theater. His career bridged the reigns
of Elizabeth I (ruled 1558–1603)
and James I (ruled 1603–1625),
and he was a favorite of both monarchs. Indeed, James granted his
company the greatest possible compliment by bestowing upon its members
the title of King’s Men. Wealthy and renowned, Shakespeare retired
to Stratford and died in 1616 at age fifty-two.
At the time of his death, literary luminaries such as Ben Jonson
hailed his works as timeless.
Shakespeare’s works were collected and printed in various
editions in the century following his death, and by the early eighteenth century
his reputation as the greatest poet ever to write in English was
well established. The unprecedented admiration garnered by his works
led to a fierce curiosity about Shakespeare’s life, but the dearth
of biographical information has left many details of Shakespeare’s
personal history shrouded in mystery. Some people have concluded
from this fact and from Shakespeare’s modest education that Shakespeare’s
plays were actually written by someone else—Francis Bacon and the
Earl of Oxford are the two most popular candidates—but the support
for this claim is overwhelmingly circumstantial, and the theory
is not taken seriously by many scholars.
In the absence of credible evidence to the contrary, Shakespeare must
be viewed as the author of the thirty-seven plays and 154 sonnets
that bear his name. The legacy of this body of work is immense. A
number of Shakespeare’s plays seem to have transcended even the category
of brilliance, becoming so influential as to affect profoundly the
course of Western literature and culture ever after.
Shakespeare wrote Twelfth Night near
the middle of his career, probably in the year 1601.
Most critics consider it one of his greatest comedies, along with
plays such as As You Like It, Much Ado About
Nothing, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Twelfth
Night is about illusion, deception, disguises, madness,
and the extraordinary things that love will cause us to do—and to
see.
Twelfth Night is the only one of Shakespeare’s
plays to have an alternative title: the play is actually called Twelfth
Night, or What You Will. Critics are divided over what
the two titles mean, but “Twelfth Night” is usually considered to
be a reference to Epiphany, or the twelfth night of the Christmas
celebration (January 6). In Shakespeare’s
day, this holiday was celebrated as a festival in which everything
was turned upside down—much like the upside-down, chaotic world
of Illyria in the play.
Twelfth Night is one of Shakespeare’s
so-called transvestite comedies, a category that also includes As
You Like It and The Merchant of Venice. These
plays feature female protagonists who, for one reason or another,
have to disguise themselves as young men. It is important to remember
that in Shakespeare’s day, all of the parts were
played by men, so Viola would actually have been a male pretending
to be a female pretending to be a male. Contemporary critics have
found a great deal of interest in the homoerotic implications of
these plays.
As is the case with most of Shakespeare’s plays, the story
of Twelfth Night is derived from other sources.
In particular, Shakespeare seems to have consulted an Italian play
from the 1530s entitled Gl’Ingannati, which
features twins who are mistaken for each other and contains a version
of the Viola-Olivia-Orsino love triangle in Twelfth Night. He
also seems to have used a 1581 English story
entitled “Apollonius and Silla,” by Barnabe Riche, which mirrors
the plot of Twelfth Night up to a point, with a
shipwreck, a pair of twins, and a woman disguised as a man. A number
of sources have been suggested for the Malvolio subplot, but none
of them is very convincing. Sir Toby, Maria, and the luckless steward
seem to have sprung largely from Shakespeare’s own imagination.
