Twelfth Night or What You Will

Twelfth Night or What You Will

With Twelfth Night, Shakespeare provides us with an extravagantly farfetched and thoroughly entertaining romantic comedy. He goes to all extremes to make this play unpredictable and unconventional, while staying within the boundaries of earlier romantic comedy enough to make this his most exaggerated, supreme romantic comedy. In an age where popularity for romantic comedy had already greatly dwindled, Shakespeare did everything possible to make Twelfth Night his grand finale of this particular genre of festive, lighthearted comedies. He implements many new ideas in this play with his use of altered gender roles, untraditional relationships, and marriages involving unusual circumstances. At the same time, he stays within the traditional formula for romantic comedy that he used in his earlier works. The result is a play that has evolved from it's traditional form, yet goes all out to exaggerate and accentuate all things that make a romantic comedy.

The use of disguises, mistaken identity, and twins are nothing new to Shakespeare, as it is seen in earlier plays like As You Like It and A Comedy of Errors. As in other Shakespearean works, Viola uses reversed gender as a disguise with which she gains many things, such as access to a male dominated world, control over her own fortune, and a relationship with Orsino, with whom she ends up falling in love with and marrying. A side effect of this is that, to Viola's surprise, she is the only person in the play "man enough" to win the love of the most sought after woman in Illyria. Women have fallen in love with other women in disguise in previous Shakespearean comedies. However, the aspect of a twin brother, coming into the play and taking over the role of himself from his sister, and no one being able to tell who is who is a more original twistand seems an appropriate addition to this whimsical comedy. While it's farfetched under the close scrutiny of the video we watched, it would have been wonderful performed on a stage of the early seventeenth century, and regardless of where the play is performed, it's not a challenge to convince oneself that it's all quite believable.

The most peculiar part of this play takes place in the closing act, when a plethora of completely bizarre marriages and relationships culminate. In an era where marriages outside of one's social class, particularly in the aristocracy, are extremely rare to nonexistent, they come out of the woodwork at the conclusion of this play.