The Beginning

Now that you have a handle on what goes on in Twelfth Night, the real fun begins. Twelfth Night is one of Shakespeare's later comedies and so he was able to incorporate a lot of devices into the play that had worked for him and others in the past. Mistaken identities. Check. Shipwreck. Check. Women disguised as men. Check. Ensuing confusion. Check and check. But what makes Twelfth Night so special, is that there is some real sustenance behind all the comedy. We can't, and wouldn't want to change the fact that the play is a comedy, so there are a lot of gags pulled for comedic effect, but Shakespeare works with a much tighter plot and is able to illuminate the relationships of the characters a lot better. The play covers a span of three months, so there is not so much love at first sight, though Sebastian does marry Olivia right away but that is more in the name of madness than love. There are no duke brothers trying to kill each other and take over the dukedom, no witches, no angry merchants hankering for a pound of flesh, and no rebellious daughters with overbearing fathers. Because there is no singular enemy, the play becomes much more about the interaction between the characters and what drives them. Key words that are repeated again and again are: dreams, madness, love, and fortune/time. Viola, for example, doesn't scheme about how she can get Orsino, even when she falls in love with him. When she finds herself in the awkward love triangle, she says, "Oh time, thou must untangle this, not I/ It is too hard a knot for me t' untie." The whole reason she is even in Illyria is because her ship just happened to crash there and she did what she needed to do in order to get by.