SHAKESPEARE'S TWELFTH NIGHT

Shakespeare's Twelfth Night

Shakespeare's Twelfth Night

Introduction

William Shakespeare wrote Twelfth Night evidently to be performed on the twelfth feast day, the joyous climax of the Renaissance Christmas season; however, the feast day itself otherwise has nothing to do with the substance of the play. The play's subtitle suggests that it is a festive bagatelle to be light, but artfully, tossed off. Indeed, Shakespeare may have written the play earlier and revised it for the Christmas festival, for it contains many signs of revision.

Analysis of Technical Theatre

Twelfth Night is the theatrical genre of comedy. This arises in Greece, and shows the everyday problems of characters that belong to any class, and it does not usually miss the humor. Specifically, the work belongs to the English Elizabethan Theater. He summarized the survival of a popular theater and social experience. The medieval lore and merged with the collective experience and historical consciousness. The popular drama was to be enriched by Renaissance humanism.

English drama was primarily based on medieval mysteries and moralities, which were allegorical works in which personified natural forces or qualities, and mixed with features of Renaissance. Elizabethan Theatre summarized the historical experiences of the people. Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe, both playwrights, theater led to a dynamic, epic and without prohibitions which resulted in the work of William Shakespeare (Levin, 2005).

Description and Analysis

The tone of Twelfth Night is consistently appropriate to extreme merriment. With nine comedies behind him when he wrote it, Shakespeare was at the height of his comic powers and in an exalted mood to which he never returned. Chronologically, the play immediately precedes Shakespeare's great tragedies and problem plays. Twelfth Night recombines many elements and devices from earlier plays — particularly The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1594-1595) and The Comedy of Errors (pr. c. 1592-1594, pb. 1623) — into a new triumph, unsurpassed in its deft execution (Berry, 2002).

It is a splendid irony that Shakespeare's most joyous play should be compounded out of the sadnesses of its principal characters. However, the sadnesses are, for the most part, those mannered sadnesses that the Elizabethans savored. Orsino, for example, particularly revels in a sweet, melancholy reminiscent of that which afflicts Antonio at the beginning of The Merchant of Venice (pr. c. 1596-1597, pb. 1600). Orsino's opening speech, which has often been taken over seriously, is not a grief-stricken condemnation of love but rather owes much more to the Italian poet Petrarch. Orsino revels in the longings of love and the bittersweet satiety of his romantic self-indulgence. He is in love with love.

On the other side of the city, is the household of Olivia, which balances Orsino and his establishment. Although Olivia's sadness at her brother's death initially seems more substantial than Orsino's airy, romantic fantasies, she, too, is a Renaissance melancholic who is wringing the last ounce of enjoyment out of her grief. Her plan to isolate herself for seven years of mourning is an excess but one that provides an excellent counterbalance to Orsino's fancy; it also ...