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Twelfth Night: context
- Module
- Unit 1 - Drama
- Institution
- PEARSON (PEARSON)
Important and niche context for Twelfth Night. These notes are of an A* standard.
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Elizabethan theatre‘The androgyne appears on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage in a singularly un-
Spenserian guise as a mere grotesque, stripped of positive value.
The freakish Androgyno in Jonson’s Volpone (1606) taints by quasi-familial
association the theatrical shadow-life of that play’s title character.
The male-to-female disguise in Epicoene (1609) treats folly in a plot that ends not in
marriage but in divorce.’
Performances of twelfth night/ film version/
directors
‘Ultimately, the degree of our sympathy for Malvolio can be manipulated by director and
actor. If Malvolio is impudent and arrogant throughout the ordeal, that is one thing; it is quite
another if we hear him weeping in the darkness. The text will always allow for a weeping
Malvolio, although this kind of portrayal seems to have been more common in the last
century than it is today.’
The Victorian producer Henry Irving was famous for playing the dark house scene all out for
pathos, with much weeping and appeal to audience sympathies.
In Hentshell’s 1939 production, Feste, Sir Toby and Maria jump up and down on Malvolio’s
trap door.
Kenneth Branagh’s decision to give his 1987 stage production the decor of a Victorian
Christmas, so that Malvolio reassembled Scrooge, did not please everyone.
In Frenton’s 1995 production, Malvolio tries to exit during the final scene but Feste blocks
him to gloat.
Conventions of comedy
Comedy is a radical, anti-authoritarian form: less ‘feel-good’ than ‘feel-uneasy’. This is
exemplified in Umberto Eco’s medieval whodunit ‘The Name of the Rose’, which circles
around a lost Aristotelian treatise on comedy, suppressed by the church because a serious
philosophy of comedy is too dangerous to its own hierarchical structures.
The historian Keith Thomas writes that in the Tudor period, ‘mockery and derision were
indispensable means of preserving orthodox values and condemning unorthodox behaviour’:
laughter functions as a means of social control.
Biographical context:
Shakespeare: 1564-1616, born in Stratford Upon Avon
, At eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway, a woman seven or eight years his senior.
Together, they raised two daughters: Susanna, who was born in 1583, and Judith
(whose twin brother, Hamnet, died in boyhood), born in 1585.
Literary context:
Blank verse in drama:
During the 16th century, blank verse was introduced into English drama. It enabled
playwrights to vary the kind of language spoken by their characters, and hence to
allow the audience to hear different patterns of language for different purposes.
Blank verse= unrhymed iambic pentameter.
Shakespeare’s other plays + connections/similarities:
The central characters in several of Shakespeare’s early works are sexually
ambiguous, eg Venus and Adonis.
The representation of women throughout Shakespeare’s comedies:
‘they are active- think Viola in Twelfth night; witty- think Beatrice in ‘Much Ado about
Nothing’; and they get what they want- think ‘As You Like It’’s Rosalind. Prominent, active
roles for women are one of the defining features of comedy for Shakespeare’ - Emma Smith
‘We can be sure if any woman in a Shakespeare comedy assets that she does not want a
husband, the plot will contort itself to make sure she gets one: springing Isabella from the
convent to plead for her brother Claudio’s life in ‘Measure for Measure’, letting loose the
twins amidst Olivia’s excessive mourning in Twelfth Night, setting the elaborate hoax to
persuade Beatrice who ‘would rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves
me’ (Much Ado About Nothing).’ - Emma Smith
The Taming of the Shrew (written 1592-94, COMEDY): explores the roles
that men and women are expected to play in their relationships with
each other and in society.
Marriage
Gender roles
Social hierarchy
Feste’s manipulation of Malvolio in Act4 is similar to Petruchio’s machinations upon Kate in
The Taming of the Shrew. Both perpetrators are malpracticers- at least from the point of
view of the victims - who consciously and strategically employ the methods of madness for a
carefully designed effect. The aims are different, however the design is the same and
centres on lunacy.’ -Priest
‘In his manipulation of Malvolio, Feste employs a paradox that recalls Petruchio;s changing
of the sun into moon on the road to Padua. Both practices transform darkness into light and
sanity into madness.’ -Priest
The Comedy of Errors (1594, COMEDY): two sets of twins who experience a
great deal of mistaken identity, causing confusion among themselves and other
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