Twelfth Night

Points to ponder:

Structure – how many storylines do we get? Why?

Disguise – what does identity mean for ‘Cesario’? For Viola?

Deception – its many uses (think in terms of Malvolio’s fate as well as that of Viola/Cesario’s frolics).

Love – think of the various forms, between friends, lovers, masters and servants.

Consider both the possible homosexual and heterosexual passions that the brother-and-sister duo, Viola and Sebastian, seem to invite.

Compare with the presentation of love in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Social hierarchy – why are there so many references to social positions and social mobility in a play ostensibly about ‘love’?

The role of the fool.

‘Fooling’ the Puritan – Malvolio’s punishment.

Suggested reading:

See the usual suspects – the volumes on Twelfth Night in the Casebooks and New Casebooks series, as well as specialist journals such as Shakespeare Survey and journal articles available through JSTOR (

Also explore some of the following:

Bloom, Harold, “Twelfth Night’” in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998)

Gay, Penny. “Twelfth Night: Desire and Its Discontents” in As She Likes It: Shakespeare’s Unruly Women (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 17–47

Howard, Jean, “Crossdressing, the Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England,” Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988), 418-440

Hutson, Lorna, “On Not Being Deceived: Rhetoric and the Body in Twelfth Night” in Shakespeare and Gender, ed. with an introduction by Stephen Orgel and Sean Keilen (1999)

King, Walter N., ed., Twentieth Century Interpretations of Twelfth Night (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1968)

Leech, Clifford, Twelfth Night and Shakespearian Comedy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965)

Leggatt, Alexander, Twelfth Night: Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love (London: Methuen, 1974)

Malcolmson, Cristina, “ ‘What You Will’: Social Mobility and Gender in Twelfth Night” in The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. by Valerie Wayne (New York & London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), pp. 29-58

Neely, Carol Thomas, “Lovesickness, Gender and Subjectivity: Twelfth Night” in A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Dympna Callaghan (2000)

Orgel, Stephen, Impersonations: the performance of gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996)

Perquigney, Joseph, “The Two Antonios and Same-Sex Love in Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice,” English Literary Renaissance, 22 (1992), 201-221

Wells, Stanley, ed., Twelfth Night: Critical Essays (New York: Garland, 1986)

White, R.S., ed., Twelfth Night: Critical Essays (1996)