Shakespeare's Twelfth Night

Today Twelfth Night is considered to be Shakespeare’s greatest romantic comedy. Written at roughly the same time as Hamlet (1600), it draws from its comic predecessors in clearly identifiable ways, but it also looks forward to the more sombre, emotionally troubled and troubling “problem plays”: Measure for Measure (1602), All’s Well That Ends Well (1604) and Hamlet itself. There is no evidence that Twelfth Night was especially popular in Shakespeare’s day. William Hazlitt, however, thought it Shakespeare’s consummate, quintessential comedy. Many modern critics agree. “Twelfth Night is surely the greatest of all Shakespeare’s pure comedies,” says Harold Bloom, while another American academic, Stephen Booth, judges it to be “one of the most beautiful man-made things in the world”. In it, claims Mary Beth Rose, Shakespeare “completely masters and exhausts this form of drama”. The mastery and the exhaustion are equally important. With Twelfth Night Shakespeare achieved an unmatched blend of plot and subplot, erotic lyricism and festive laughter, edgy satire and romantic melancholy. But he also suggests that the social and personal tensions that comedy is supposed to resolve cannot easily be dispatched in a “happy ending”. With its main plot involving unrequited desire and loss of identity, and its parallel sub-plot of household jealousy and cruel gulling, Twelfth Night is as multi-faceted as any well-cut jewel. It is no wonder critics have disagreed about it so vehemently.