Twelfth Night study guide contains a biography of William Shakespeare, literature essays, a complete e-text, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. Twelfth Night, or What You Will is a romantic comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written around 1601–1602 as a Twelfth Night's entertainment for the close of the Christmas season. It could be interpreted as a new lifestyle choice, reflecting a truer version of the person that Viola/Cesario is but has never before had the opportunity to present; or more simply, it could be a plot device and part of the means to an end for the play’s storyline of confused lovers. Let us turn now to the characters of Sebastian and Antonio, described by Stephen Orgel as ‘the only overtly homosexual couple in Shakespeare except for Achilles and Patroclus’. Questions of Value in The Merchant of Venice; At the conclusion of Twelfth Night, Antonio uses language which recalls this story. Mark Rylance plays Olivia in a modern return to the original practice of all-male casting. [4] Madhavi Menon, ‘Queer Shakes’, pp. This was one reason some anti-theatrical writers gave for wanting to close down the playhouses: not only did they provide an arena in which spectators could show off their own inappropriately dressy outfits, but when not watching each other they could enjoy the spectacle of mere common players dressed up as lords and kings. Twelfth Night, Act 5, Scene 1 by William Hamilton. A book of puritanical invective against various festivities, pastimes and practices. Questions of sexuality in Shakespeare, and indeed questions about Shakespeare’s own sexuality, began scarcely before the ink was dry. Viola goes into service with Count Orsino of Illyria, disguised as a young man, "Cesario." Please consider the environment before printing, All text is © British Library and is available under Creative Commons Attribution Licence except where otherwise stated. Usage terms ART File P718 no.1 (size M) Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Plato, whose vision of love is both homosexual and heterosexual. With the complications produced by Viola’s disguise as a page boy occupying its main plot and the steward Malvolio’s sartorial transformation from steward to aspiring lover providing the central image of its subplot, Twelfth Night is very much a play about the potential hazards of dressing up, and with its dramatisation of the antagonism between the hedonistic, alcoholic and gluttonous Sir Toby Belch and the puritanical steward who longs to discipline him, it is also very much a play about the social implications of festivity. This dismissal of queerness in canonical works of literature, particularly from this period, is not only disappointing and intellectually dishonest; it is also simply inaccurate: labels such as homosexual or heterosexual ‘did not exist as conceptual categories’ at the time Shakespeare was writing. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Her writing on Shakespeare has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement and The Independent, and last year she convened Gesture Lab at the Globe: a public engagement workshop exploring shaming gestures in Shakespeare’s plays. Usage terms © Photo of John Tramper, courtesy of Shakespeare's Globe, Usage terms © Photo of John Tramper, courtesy of Shakespeare's Globe. Sumptuary laws, designed to make a person’s place in life legible at a glance by regulating how much the members of different classes were allowed to spend on clothes, were reinforced by a series of proclamations throughout the reigns of Henry VIII, Mary I and Elizabeth I: it was actually illegal to wear fabrics or colours deemed inappropriate to one’s station. Shipwrecked twins are lost among love-sick aristocrats, unruly servants, mischievous pleasure seekers, clowns, and a puritan. It is quite possible that Shakespeare himself called this play only by what subsequently became its subtitle, What You Will, perhaps thereby signalling its status as a contrasting companion piece to his previous comedy As You Like It. Galleries, Reading Rooms, shop and catering opening times vary. As famously declared by the gender theorist Judith Butler, ‘there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender … identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results’. Upon gazing at the identical twins, Viola and Sebastian, he is agog: How have you made division of yourself? [6] As such, looking for LGBTQ identities in plays such as Twelfth Night enable us to rediscover approaches to gender and sexuality that defy the binaries imposed on Western society since the introduction of the terms ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’ in the late 19th century. Composed at the end of the Elizabethan era, its plot is thought to spring from a number of possible sources, many of which influence Twelfth Night’s fixation with sexual identity and gender. Because female performers were banned from the English stage in Shakespeare’s day, all of a play’s characters – be they male, female, or somewhere in between – were played by men. [7] The Renaissance period was keen to promote the strong bonds of male friendships, but the words exchanged between these two characters certainly moves beyond this into the language of erotic love. According to Malvolio, described by Maria as ‘a kind of puritan’ (2.3.135), such behaviour is not a legitimate expression of festivity but merely ‘uncivil rule’ (2.3.119). Finding queer love and identity in Shakespeare’s plays would not have been defined as queer back then, but the practice of censoring same-sex relationships in Shakespeare, from Benson and beyond, is still in the process of being righted and re-explored by both critics and performers. Unlike Viola, Silla takes the name of her lost brother, Silvio, when she presents as a different gender. About Twelfth Night; Twelfth Night Summary; Character List; Act 1 Summary and Analysis; About Shakespearean Theater: Read the Study Guide for Twelfth Night… Usage terms © Colin Willoughby / ArenaPal. The play centres on the twins Viola and Sebastian, who are separated in a shipwreck.Viola (who is disguised as Cesario) falls in love with Duke Orsino, who in turn is in love with Countess … Some of these pairs were both male, some both female, and some partnerships contained a male and a female. [1] Bruce R. Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. Michael Dobson is Director of the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon, and Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Birmingham. Twelfth Night, Act 3, Scene 4, by Johann Heinrich Ramberg. Your views could help shape our site for the future. But secondly, as Bruce R Smith has noted, it implies that gender, is more like a suit of clothes that can be put on and taken off at will than a matter of biological destiny … However temporary such cross-dressing may be, it serves to remind audiences that masculinity is a matter of appearances.[1]. How were the Jews regarded in 16th-century England? Of course, the plot of Shakespeare in Love is fictional: there is no evidence that Shakespeare based the character of Viola upon a real person. That Viola has disguised herself as a man, and that her disguise fools Olivia into falling in love with her, is genuinely funny. About Twelfth Night; Twelfth Night Summary; Character List; Act 1 Summary and Analysis; About Shakespearean Theater: Read the Study Guide for Twelfth Night… Malvolio (with stockings cross-gartered), Maria and Olivia. Twelfth Night—an allusion to the night of festivity preceding the Christian celebration of the Epiphany—combines love, confusion, mistaken identities, and joyful discovery.. After the twins Sebastian and Viola survive a shipwreck, neither knows that the other is alive. On a more serious note, however, Viola's transformation into Cesario, and Olivia's impossible love for … Shakespeare writes his lady into a plot where, once again, she must disguise herself as a man, only to fall in love and be unable to declare it due to her newly assumed gender. The alternate title for Twelfth Night is What You Will, a phrase which nods to a freedom of agency in terms of both sexual orientation and gender identity, while also recalling the name of the playwright himself. [2] When Olivia falls for Cesario, she does so in the full belief of the servant’s masculinity. Twelfth Night, Act 3, Scene 4, by Johann Heinrich Ramberg. Twelfth Night—an allusion to the night of festivity preceding the Christian celebration of the Epiphany—combines love, confusion, mistaken identities, and… Act 1, scene 1 At his court, Orsino, sick with love for the Lady Olivia, learns from his messenger that she is grieving for… The Tiger Who Came to Tea by Judith Kerr: sketches and original artwork, Sean's Red Bike by Petronella Breinburg, illustrated by Errol Lloyd, Unfinished Business: The Fight for Women's Rights, The fight for women’s rights is unfinished business, Get 3 for 2 on all British Library Fiction, Discovering Literature: Shakespeare & Renaissance, Why you need to protect your intellectual property, Setting Shakespeare's music – and the music of Shakespeare settings, Benedick and Beatrice: the 'merry war' of courtship. In this tale, Silla disguises herself as her brother Silvio to work for and win the love of Apolonius, the duke. In the Elizabethan period, 'Twelfth Night' was a festival celebrated with music, masked balls, misrule and general revelry. However, Zeus decided to punish humans for their arrogance, splitting the creatures down the middle and detaching ourselves from our literal ‘other halves’. But if Malvolio is vanquished within the play, storming out of its denouement vowing vengeance on the ‘whole pack’ of his tormentors (5.1.374), it was his kindred spirits offstage who were destined for ultimate victory. For many in the Tudor establishment, however, proper social hierarchy was perceived to be under threat, so that the Lady Olivia’s preference for a supposed page over a count, never mind her steward’s fantasy of marrying her so as to become ‘Count Malvolio’ (2.5.33), would have carried a definite transgressive thrill for this play’s first audiences in 1601. [2] Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 57. Your views could help shape our site for the future. Even after the restoration of Charles II, the ex-puritan Samuel Pepys’ dislike of Twelfth Night may have stemmed from a continuing sympathy with Malvolio: ‘the business of abusing the Puritans begins to grow stale, and of no use,’ he wrote in 1668, ‘they being the people that, at last, will be found the wisest’. In her introduction to Shakesqueer, Madhavi Menon describes queerness as a concept which, ‘recognizes the absurdity of limits and interrupts the ways in which we live our lives and write our texts’. Originally, he says, humans were conjoined, with each pair making a complete person. When Viola dresses as Cesario, one of their most poignant lines is, ‘I am all the daughters of my father’s house, / And all the brothers too’ (2.4.120–21). Although James I eventually published a ‘Book of Sports’ soon after Shakespeare’s death declaring certain pastimes, even maypole dancing, definitely legal on Sundays, the playhouses would in time be closed down during the rule of a puritan Parliament (1642) and James’s son Charles I deposed and executed (1649). Choose Yes please to open the survey in a new browser window or tab, and then complete it when you are ready. But it isn’t inappropriate that this play should be associated with a day which in Shakespeare’s time came as the climax of the festive season, the occasion for music, elaborate fancy-dress masked balls, and parties during which whoever found the bean baked into a special cake would be declared ‘Lord of Misrule’ for the night. For the puritans, the whole year should be equally sober: there should be no more carnival, only a perpetual, law-abiding Lent. ‘Is there no respect of place, persons, nor time in you?’, demands Malvolio (2.3.88–89), roused in the middle of the night to complain about Sir Toby’s drunken singing of, among other things, a carol (‘O’ the twelfth day of December’, possibly a misquotation of ‘On the twelfth day of Christmas’ 2.3.81). Word Count: 286. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Orsino, Viola as Cesario, and Olivia. The text in this article is available under the Creative Commons License. And yet as early as 1640, editors were keen to expunge any whiff of homosexuality from the sonnets, with John Benson publishing an edition of the poems with many of the pronouns ‘he’ and ‘his’ revised to ‘she’ and ‘her’. This possible source for Twelfth Night also features twins and cross-dressing. Act IV Questions and Answers. ... act haughtily, smile constantly, and refuse to explain himself to anyone. Usage terms © Robbie Jack / Robbie Jack / Corbis. by William Shakespeare. First of all, it would have inevitably lent an extra frisson to the heterosexual relationships portrayed onstage, which would only be further enhanced by a play like Twelfth Night, where you have a boy actor pretending to be a woman pretending to be a man. But the film introduces us to one of the key elements of Twelfth Night: the way in which gender can be constructed, or performed, by anyone with the means to do so. Cesario is both beloved of Olivia and infatuated with Orsino: gender fluidity, then, serves as the play’s central dramatic irony. In this he is indeed akin to the puritan faction within the English Church in Shakespeare’s time, who wanted those pre-Reformation festival practices which remained part of the ecclesiastical calendar removed, and who were especially keen to ban recreational activities on Sundays and the fund-raising parish booze-ups known as ‘church ales’. A short summary of William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night This free synopsis covers all the crucial plot points of Twelfth Night. [5] Philip Stubbes, The Anatomy of Abuses (London: 1584), p. 38; quoted in Dympna Callaghan, ‘“And all is semblative a woman’s part”: Body Politics and Twelfth Night’, in Twelfth Night: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. (5.1.223–25). Orsino The Duke of Illyria and its ruler. An outline of what garments and fabrics could be worn by men and women of different ranks. In connection with the themes of deception, disguise, and performance, Twelfth Night raises questions about the nature of gender and sexual identity. It is cruelly fitting that the revenge of Sir Toby, Sir Andrew and their servant cronies involves tricking Malvolio into a different inappropriate outfit, forging a letter by which he comes to believe that Olivia wants him to wear yellow stockings, cross-gartered (2.5.148–49). Not only was cross-gartering hopelessly outmoded by 1601, but wearing brightly-coloured hose was a badge of the young, free and single (there was even an Elizabethan popular song, in which a husband longs for his carefree bachelordom, called ‘Give Me My Yellow Hose Again’). Michael Dobson considers the place of festivity and disguise in Shakespeare's play of the same name. STC 20996.8. See a complete list of the characters in Twelfth Night and in-depth analyses of Viola, Orsino and Olivia, Malvolio, Sebastian, and Antonio. What are the ... Twelfth Night. Barnaby Riche’s Riche his farewell to his military profession (1581), contains a number of stories, the second of which is a source for Twelfth Night: ‘Apolonius and Silla’, a tale of two twins and their respective love interests. Malvolio finds the letter, assumes that it is addressed to him, and ... Next section Five Key Questions. Than these two creatures. In 1601, then, Sir Toby’s famous retort carried a topical edge as well as a grossly snobbish one: ‘Art any more than a steward? But, as Valerie Traub notes, ‘it is as object of another woman’s desire that Cesario finds her own erotic voice’. At the opening of the comedy, he is desperately in love with Lady Olivia, who spurns his romantic overtures in spite o The gulf of social status between the two could be one reason for the language of servile devotion, which also occurs in the exchanges between Olivia and Cesario, and Cesario and Orsino; but if the latter two relationships are noted for their erotic charge, we must also consider the possibility of a romance between Sebastian and Antonio. Believing her brother to be dead, Viola keeps him alive by dressing in drag and assuming his identity. We may never know Shakespeare’s own sexual identity, but it doesn’t matter. These concerns resonated in Shakespeare’s time in ways which in ours – when public transvestism is legal and almost commonplace, and when the idea of a man wearing yellow cross-gartered stockings is suggestive of a golf tournament rather than of a come-on – have definitely faded. ‘Unsex Me Here’: Lady Macbeth’s ‘Hell Broth’, The Duchess of Malfi and Renaissance women, An introduction to the poetry of Aemilia Lanyer, Character analysis: Isabella and Angelo in, Manhood and the ‘milk of human kindness’ in, Daughters in Shakespeare: dreams, duty and defiance, Shakespeare and gender: the ‘woman’s part’, Women playing Shakespeare: The first female Desdemona and beyond, Subversive theatre in Renaissance England, Proclamation against Excess of Apparel by Queen Elizabeth I, Glove design in Costume Bible from Shakespeare's Globe's production of, Lithograph of the Cushman sisters as Romeo and Juliet, Playbill advertising the Cushman sisters as Romeo and Juliet, Photograph of Mark Rylance applying makeup for Shakespeare’s Globe production of Twelfth Night, 2002, Photograph of Mark Rylance in Olivia costume in Shakespeare's Globe's production of, Photograph of Michael Brown as Viola/Cesario and Rhys Meredith as Sebastian in Shakespeare's Globe production of, Galleries, Reading Rooms, shop and catering opening times vary. Twelfth Night was written around 1601 and first performed in 1602. Directed by Tim Carroll. Antonio says of Sebastian, ‘I do adore thee so / That danger shall seem sport’ (2.1.43–44). When he first meets her, she is dressed as a boy as she is determined to act upon the Elizabethan stage despite its ban on female performers. Dost thou think because / thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?’ (2.3.109–11). Why not take a few moments to tell us what you think of our website? Twelfth Night Act 5, scene 1 Summary & Analysis | LitCharts. [3] Cesario dresses as a man, and therefore for all intents and purposes is a man in the eyes of the other characters. [7] Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 51. Twelfth Night Introduction + Context. Its similarities of plot were first noted by John Manningham in 1602, whose diary records a performance of Twelfth Night he saw: he commented that it was ‘most like a neere to that Italian called Inganni’, given that the plays share a set of identical twins who are confused with each other. Although the existence of an increasingly influential merchant class had been complicating matters of social status since the later middle ages, the Tudors continued to make last-ditch attempts to enforce visible markers of rank. Productions such as Lyndsey Posner’s for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2001 emphasise such readings, with the two men enacting Act 2, Scene 1 while getting dressed beside an unmade double bed. However, while Shakespeare in Love toys but briefly with the queerness of Shakespeare having a relationship with a person who dresses as a man, the plot ultimately reinforces heteronormativity (that is, traditional expectations of gender and sexuality) in a way that Twelfth Night more actively questions. However, unlike Twelfth Night, Gl’Ingannati would have featured women on the Italian stage. While married to Anne Hathaway, who remained in Stratford-upon-Avon throughout Shakespeare’s career in London, he addressed 126 of his sonnets to a young man. by R S White (Hampshire and New York: Palgrave, 1996), p. 135. [3] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York and London: Routledge, 2007 [1990]), p. 34. Twelfth Night study guide contains a biography of William Shakespeare, literature essays, a complete e-text, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. While the audience would certainly suspend their disbelief over the actual gender identity of the actors, the effects of this casting should not be underestimated. His publications include The Making of the National Poet (1992), The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (with Stanley Wells, 2001, revised edition 2015), England's Elizabeth (with Nicola Watson, 2002), Performing Shakespeare's Tragedies Today (2006) and Shakespeare and Amateur Performance (2011). Study Questions 1. Although this poem is to a man, Benson titles it ‘An intreatie for her acceptance’. But of course, that is the whole point of Cesario’s transformation: Twelfth Night depicts one’s gender as essentially a performed role, a simple change of costume marking a change in identity. It is a beautifully genderqueer moment, and different productions of the play may interpret Viola’s gender presentation in a number of different ways. Attempts to tie Twelfth Night too directly to the festival from which its title derives have sometimes backfired – when the Duke of York’s theatre revived it on January 6th 1663, for instance, Samuel Pepys complained that it was ‘a silly play and not relating at all to the name or day’, while Kenneth Branagh’s decision to give his 1987 stage production the decor of a Victorian Christmas, so that Malvolio resembled Scrooge, didn’t please everyone. Stephen Fry as Malvolio in yellow, cross-gartered stockings. Miranda Fay Thomas is writing up her PhD at King’s College London and Shakespeare’s Globe, where she works on gender and performance in Early Modern drama. The Tiger Who Came to Tea by Judith Kerr: sketches and original artwork, Sean's Red Bike by Petronella Breinburg, illustrated by Errol Lloyd, Unfinished Business: The Fight for Women's Rights, The fight for women’s rights is unfinished business, Get 3 for 2 on all British Library Fiction, Discovering Literature: Shakespeare & Renaissance, Why you need to protect your intellectual property, Gender, sexuality, courtship and marriage. [4] While it is true that straightness (either in terms of sexual orientation or gender identity) as a category did not fully exist in Shakespeare’s day, some were outspoken against what would now be described as cross-dressing. Twelfth Night, with its homosexual overtones and its depiction of a character presenting as an alternate gender, is a particularly rich case in point. The Italian play Gl’Ingannati has also been noted as a possible source for Twelfth Night. Twelfth Night was written around 1601 and first performed in 1602. Usage terms STC 20996.8. [6] Mario DiGangi, The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 39. Choose Yes please to open the survey in a new browser window or tab, and then complete it when you are ready. An apple cleft in two is not more twin ART File P718 no.1 (size M) Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. At the end of the film Shakespeare in Love, a heartbroken Shakespeare bids farewell to his lover and immortalises her in a new play that he begins to write as the film credits roll. How were the Jews regarded in 16th-century England? Anti cross-dressing literature: Stubbes writes against ‘Women wearing Dublets and Jerkins’. In addition to her thesis, she is starting work on a new project on the history of the Renaissance history play, and will teach on summer schools at both King’s and Oxford University this summer. The practical joke turns Malvolio into a ludicrous and alarming fashion hybrid: sober steward above the waist, satyr below.