On Shakespeare's Twelfth Night

Abstract

　The use of disguise is an old stratagem in drama. As a valuable element in comedy, the female page first appeared in Gl' Ingannati, an Italian Renaissance play, written and performed by the Sienese Academy of the Intronati in 1531. But much more importance was still put on the complexity of the plot than the character there. The motive itself came into prominence in the English Renaissance drama when Shakespeare gave his disguised heroines their own individuality.
　Twelfth Night (1601) comes last of the family tree of Gl' Ingannati. In the main plot, it deals with two loves, one seemingly impossible for the heroine's male disguise, and the other truly so for the sameness of the gender.
　These loves, however, will eventually be requited by the heroine's fairhfulness and the sudden appearance of her twin brother.
　It also has the subplot, where one-sided loves are represented as a parody of the main plot. As to the sources of the subplot, none have as yet been known except the general Saturnalian background of the Twelfth Night.
　Twelfth Night is the best romantic comedy Shakespeare ever wrote until the last act when it suddenly changes its character into a dark ironical comedy. One of the reasons is that England was swept over unexpectedly early by the Continental Renaissance at around the seventeenth century, so that the romantic comedy rapidly went out of fashion.
　The English theatres were closed in 1642 by the Puritan Revolution. But about twenty years after when they reopened at the Restoration, new comedies performed there were those of pan-European realistic comedies of manners, quite different from the world of fantasy based on the animistic idea of Nature.