Twelfth Night

15 Pages 3734 Words

Plays are one of the most subtle forms of literature: while a novel reveals almost everything in its text and description, much of a play depends on the matter between the lines, or the behavior and interpretation of the actors who play the roles. And these influences are invisible, unless we examine the context of the play: its sources, the circumstances of its composition and performance. Shakespeare's Twelfth Night is one such play: in examining the works Shakespeare drew on to write the play and evidence about his audience, we can reconstruct many of his intentions in this variegated comedy.


Shakespeare's main source, and certainly his most accessible, is the prose tale of "Apolonius and Silla" in Barnabe Riche's Riche his Farewell to Militarie Profession (1581). Yet "Apolonius and Silla" itself has sources which Shakespeare may have been able to peruse. The earliest (apart from the Plautine Menaechmi, the origin of many a mistaken-identity plot, including Shakespeare's own Comedy of Errors) is the Italian Gl'Ingannati ("The Deceived Ones"), written and performed at Siena by the Academy of the Intronati in 1531. Shakespeare may well have read that plot (he knew some Latin, after all, so Italian would not have been too much of a stretch), or at least its French incarnation, in the author Pierre de Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques (part IV, no. 59) (1570). (Henry V III.iv certainly proves a passing acquaintance with French.) But Shakespeare's reading list is far less important than what he did with his discoveries.


Gl'Ingannati is quite a different work from Twelfth Night: more Plautine farce than romantic comedy. But the similarities and differences between the two do much to reveal the aims of Shakespeare's play. The siblings Fabrizio and Lelia are separated during the sack of Rome in 1527, when Lelia is thirteen years old (a likely source for Viola's father, who died "that day that made my sister thirteen years" (T‚N...