Twelfth Night

The play opens in Duke Orsino’s court, where he indulges his melancholy passion for the Countess Olivia with the famous line, “If music be the food of love, play on.” Olivia, mourning her dead brother, has sworn to avoid all male company for seven years. On a nearby coast, Viola is washed ashore after a shipwreck and fears her twin brother Sebastian has drowned. With the help of a Sea Captain, she decides to disguise herself as a young man named Cesario and seek employment at Orsino’s court. Orsino quickly grows fond of his new page and sends Cesario to carry his love messages to Olivia. The plan misfires spectacularly: Olivia rejects Orsino yet falls in love with Cesario, while Viola, in her disguise, falls silently in love with Orsino.

A parallel plot unfolds in Olivia’s household. Her drunken uncle Sir Toby Belch is sponging off his foolish friend Sir Andrew Aguecheek, whom he has persuaded is a suitor for Olivia. Her steward Malvolio, a pompous Puritan-leaning figure, disapproves of the late-night revels and is loathed by the household. Maria, Olivia’s quick-witted servingwoman, hatches a revenge: she forges a letter in Olivia’s handwriting to make Malvolio believe his mistress loves him. The conspiracy draws in Toby, Sir Andrew and Fabian. The letter instructs Malvolio to smile constantly, wear yellow stockings cross-gartered and behave with haughty superiority. Reading that “some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em,” he believes himself singled out by fortune.

When Malvolio appears before Olivia in this absurd costume, she assumes he has gone mad and entrusts his care to Sir Toby, who locks him in a dark room and torments him further, with Feste the clown disguising himself as a curate called Sir Topas. Meanwhile, Sebastian has in fact survived the shipwreck, rescued by the sea-captain Antonio, who follows him devotedly to Illyria. The twins’ identical appearance produces a cascade of confusion: Sir Andrew, goaded by Toby into challenging Cesario, instead meets Sebastian and is beaten; Antonio, seeing Cesario, believes Sebastian has betrayed him; and Olivia, encountering Sebastian, sweeps him into an immediate betrothal that the astonished but delighted young man accepts.

In the final act, all the strands converge before Orsino. Antonio is brought in as a prisoner, Olivia arrives calling Cesario her husband, and Sir Andrew and Sir Toby stagger in wounded. The confusion breaks when Sebastian enters and sees Viola: the twins are reunited and the disguise is revealed. Orsino, realising that Cesario is a woman who has loved him all along, offers Viola his hand: “Here is my hand; you shall from this time be / Your master’s mistress.” Olivia is happily matched with Sebastian, and Maria and Toby have secretly married. Malvolio is released, realises he has been gulled by the forged letter and storms off crying “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you.” The play closes not with wedding songs but with Feste’s haunting solo about wind and rain, leaving the comedy’s happiness tinged with loss.

Twelfth Night takes its name from the twelfth night of Christmas, celebrated on 5 or 6 January as the eve of Epiphany. In Elizabethan England this was the climax of the Christmas holidays, marked by feasting, music, cross-dressing games and the appointment of a “Lord of Misrule” who presided over an inverted social order for the night. Servants were briefly served by masters, and the normal rules of dignity and deference were suspended. Shakespeare’s play absorbs this festive atmosphere into its plot: Sir Toby’s revels, Feste’s licensed mockery, Viola’s cross-dressing and Malvolio’s humiliation all echo the rhythms of the Twelfth Night feast. The subtitle “What You Will” reinforces the mood of holiday freedom.

On the Elizabethan stage, all female roles were played by boys, since women were forbidden from acting publicly. This convention shapes the gender play of Twelfth Night at every level. When Viola dresses as Cesario, the audience watches a boy actor playing a woman playing a young man - a layering that the play explicitly draws attention to in moments like Viola’s aside, “A little thing would make me tell them how much I lack of a man.” The first audience would have found the device less jarring than a modern one, and the fluidity between male and female roles was part of the theatrical pleasure. When Orsino addresses Viola as “Cesario” at the close of the play, the line acknowledges that the boy-actor on stage has not, in fact, changed costume.

Shakespeare also drew on the long tradition of Italian commedia erudita and commedia dell’arte for the play’s structure. A direct source is the Italian play Gl’Ingannati (“The Deceived”, 1531), which features separated twins, a disguised heroine who falls in love with her employer, and a mistaken-identity resolution. Shipwrecked twins and cross-dressing heroines were staples of Italian comedy, and English dramatists borrowed freely. Shakespeare adds the melancholy songs, the sub-plot of Malvolio’s gulling and the figure of Feste, transforming the conventional comic formula into something unusually reflective. Twelfth Night was performed at the Inns of Court in February 1602 and is thought to have been written in the preceding months, placing it alongside Hamlet as one of the plays of Shakespeare’s great transitional period.