Twelfth Night Notes: Page 1 of 4
Sources and Parallels
‘Twelfth Night was seen by London law student John Manningham in February 1602, at the Middle
Temple Hall. He wrote in his commonplace-book: ‘at our feast wee had a play called Twelve Night, or
What You Will, much like the Commedy of Errores, or Menechmi in Plautus, but most like and neere
to that in Italian called Inganni’. – ‘
Middle Temple Hall, where Twelfth Night was first performed in 1602
Gl’Ingannati (The Deceived Ones) acted in 1531, includes the shipwrecked girl, the lady, the duke,
and the twin brother the lady eventually ends up marrying. Changes WS made include making Olivia
not pregnant when she marries, and not having Viola strip to the waist to reveal ‘her’ identity (on
the Italian stage, women were played by women). The theme of twins together with mistaken
identity is a common one and goes back to Plautus (c. 254 – 184 BC), with Menaechmi. Here both
twins are male and represent the serious and frivolous sides of a character – for this, think of The
Comedy of Errors, which is an earlier and much more direct rendition of the story. The twins theme
may have had a special resonance for WS, as he was the father of twins himself: Hamnet and Judith.
Hamnet had died five years before the first performance of this play, and the themes of bereft
sisters mourning lost brothers (both Viola and Olivia) may have had special resonance personally.
Setting:
Antonio recommends that Sebastian stay at the ‘Elephant’ public house ‘in the south suburbs’–
which was in London near the Globe Theatre in a bit of a dodgy area. Orsino’s house is an Italianstyle court, embracing a leisurely life of music, hunting and literary love-fantasies, Olivia’s is more
like a genteel English establishment, with its garden and a population of servants and hangers-on.
Twelfth Night Notes: Page 2 of 4
THEMES
Twelfth Night and Misrule
Why are so Toby Belch & Co there? Because of the 12th night festivities, when servants pretended to
be masters, fools were given special license, and the Roman spirit of Saturnalia came out of the
shadows. (Think Plautus.) Sir Andrew: ‘I delight in masques and revels sometimes altogether.’ (They
practice their dance steps… while drunk.)  Ties in with the next two themes of insanity and
outward show versus inward reality. This is why it’s heavy on the ‘hey nonny nonny’, and the quips
and puns and in-jokes. It’s being performed to drunken lawyers.
Insanity
Via Plautus, the mistaken identities make people think they’re going mad. How do you judge
whether someone’s mad? What guideline do we have?
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Malvolio is shoved in the darkened room, simply because the others wanted revenge on him
– in this instance it’s not particularly drastic but it could be much grimmer than a night’s
imprisonment if you were wrongly accused or framed.
Sebastian thinks everyone is mad when he comes to town, but he lets himself in for it
because he’s getting a good deal – like in the Comedy of Errors the themes of infidelity,
theft, madness and demonic possession are at the forefront. Like Antopholus of Syracuse,
he’s heaped with money and sexual favours, and is suspicious but goes along with it. Funnily
enough, while he’s being accosted by Feste Sebastian says ‘I prithee foolish Greek, depart
from me.’
When Malvolio’s letter is read out at the end, Olivia says: ‘this savours not much of
distraction.’ Everyone is reconciling what seems and what is.
Inward and Outward show
Prominent theme the start, with Viola’s assessment of the Captain:
‘There is a fair behaviour in thee, captain,
And though that nature with a beauteous wall
Doth oft close in pollution, yet of thee
I will believe thou hast a mind that suits
With this fair and outward character.’
Even Sebastian has apparently called himself Rodrigo to Antonio, and is unveiling his real name to
him when we first see them. At the end, Antonio berates ‘Sebastian’ for being vile inside and
beautiful on the out:
‘But O, how vile and idol proves this god!
Thou hast, Sebastian, done good features shame.
In nature’s no blemish but the mind.
None can be deformed but the unkind.
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Virtue is beauty, but the beauteous evil
Are empty trunks e’er flourished by the devil.’ … He even rhymes for extra finality.
(Sonnet 93)
So shall I live, supposing thou art true,
Like a deceived husband; so love's face
May still seem love to me, though alter'd new;
Thy looks with me, thy heart in other place:
For there can live no hatred in thine eye,
Therefore in that I cannot know thy change.
In many's looks the false heart's history
Is writ in moods and frowns and wrinkles strange,
But heaven in thy creation did decree
That in thy face sweet love should ever dwell;
Whate'er thy thoughts or thy heart's workings be,
Thy looks should nothing thence but sweetness tell.
How like Eve's apple doth thy beauty grow,
If thy sweet virtue answer not thy show!
Dress-up, trickery, androgyny and homoeroticism
Once again, not only is Olivia in love with Viola, but ‘Cesario’ is in love with Orsino, and Antonio is in
love with Sebastian. The notion of women being not-quite formed men, and of boys with women in
a miraculously perfect form, was entirely familiar. See Sonnets (20 in particular?) Olivia herself is an
honorary ‘man’, governing the household, in control of her own finances, taking the extremely active
part in lovemaking.
Cloying appetite
Opening theme, with Orsino, lounging about. Very first words:
‘If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.’
… followed just three and a half lines later with
‘Enough; no more:
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.’
Boy, that worked fast, didn’t it?
 Purcell’s rewriting of this in his ‘if music be’ song: ‘If music be the food of love, sing on till I
am filled with joy, for then my listening soul you move with pleasures that can never cloy.’
There’s no way we’re meant to have a particularly good opinion of Orsino, first he’s feeding a fitful
fancy and then he’s off to lounge about in beds of flowers and to make sure his ‘love thoughts’ are
rich. He keeps going on about who has the longer staying-power in a relationship, men or women,
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and frankly he seems to be in two minds about it because in Act 2 Scene 3 he contradicts himself
twice over
‘For boy, however we do praise ourselves,
Our fancies are more giddy and infirm
More longing, wavering sooner lost and worn,
Than women’s are’
Saying that unless men can have a woman that’s young and pretty they’ll wander away with ADHD.
And then a few lines later, he says women can only nibble at concepts of love:
‘Alas, their love may be called appetite,
No motion of the liver, but the palate,
That suffer surfeit, cloyment, and revolt.
But mine is hungry as the sea, and can digest as much.
Is this more a comment on the character of the Duke than any general statement – Feste says his
doublet should be made of the changeable taffeta, and says in a reasonably diplomatic way that he’s
bumbling about like a blue-arsed fly.
 Examples everywhere. Sudden love in both sexes, but suddenly changing love mostly in men.
MSND, R&J, 2 Gents of Verona, Much Ado, Othello, Winter’s Tale… could we even include
Hamlet and Measure for Measure in that list?
NOTES:
‘Overhearing” device
The dropped letter, baiting, much like ‘Much Ado’. Letters are used there too, only afterwards, as
evidence when B&B try to deny being in love. In the meantime the bait is dropped conversation, not
letters. How about Hamlet and Polonius in the arras?
Sudden marriage of Orsino
The idiotic Master Slender in ‘The Merry Wives’ turns up accidentally married to ‘a great lubberly
boy’ instead of Anne Page he says ‘for all he was in woman’s apparel, I would not have had him.’ As
if that was an option.
Victorian responses to the play
In Charles and Mary Lamb’s version, all reference to the Household Gang are cut out. Namely, all the
elements that have been put in there to emphasise the theme of misrule. They find it necessary to
justify Viola’s dressing up, because it’s such an unladylike thing to do. They find Olivia’s wooing of
Cesario pretty much unjustifiable. They acknowledge and excuse the suddenness of Orsino’s change
at the end. In other adaptations, they also cut out clowns: Launce, Lancelot Gobbo, for example,
even though they have large parts.