Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare April 27, 2026

 

Twelfth Night First Folio (1623) Facsimile of first page

Music pervades the play

Shakespeare  was a natural born song-writer and brought as much brightness to his songs as to his poetry contained. His plays are no less a repository for his poetry than the sonnets and long poems. In Twelfth Night we witness songs in many moods all written for Feste, the fool or jester who undertook to entertain the people and was employed by Olivia for the express purpose. One of the songs, O Mistress mine, is about a lover longing for the lady of his heart, and was the subject of a reading by Devika, and taken up for singing by Talitha.

These songs were motivated, in part, by the player, Robert Armin, who acted the part in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, which was the troupe organised and owned in part by Shakespeare ca.1594, which later became The King’s Men in 1603 after James I ascended to the throne. Armin’s singing talent could have inspired Shakespeare to write these songs, knowing how much entertainment they would yield to the theatre-goers.

Comedy for misplaced identity

The comedy of misplaced identity in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is the driving force of the play, rooted in intentional disguise, the arrival of identical twins, and the resulting romantic chaos. The audience knows the truth, heightening the humour, while characters navigate absurd situations based on false perceptions.

Shipwrecked Viola disguises herself as a man, Cesario, to navigate Illyria safely. This immediately sets up a comedic situation where she becomes a ‘male’ servant to Duke Orsino while being a female in reality. Olivia whom Orsino professes to love adoringly falls in love with Viola (disguised as Cesario), leading to the absurdity of a woman wooing another woman disguised as a man, while Viola herself has fallen in love with her master, Orsino. Orsino shares his lover’s thoughts with ‘Cesario,’ creating dramatic irony, as he is pouring his heart out to the person he will eventually love, while totally unaware of her gender.

The arrival of Sebastian, Viola’s identical twin brother, presumed by her as lost in the shipwreck, turns the confusion into chaos. Characters mistake Sebastian for Cesario/Viola. Olivia, believing Sebastian to be the witty and charming ‘Cesario’ (who was actually Viola), proposes to him. Sebastian, shocked but enchanted by Olivia’s beauty, accepts, creating a truly misplaced – yet ultimately happy – marriage.

The role of the fool

Feste, the fool (or jester) in Twelfth Night, serves as the play’s emotional and intellectual anchor, using wit to expose the follies and emotional absurdities of noble characters like Olivia and Orsino. He functions as a truth-teller, musical entertainer, and bridge between the play's romantic and comic subplots.

In the role of Wise Fool Feste exposes folly, for example, when he proves Olivia is a fool for excessively mourning her brother, saying: 

The more fool, Madonna, to mourn for your brother's soul in heaven

Fools in Shakespeare’s plays have the latitude of speaking the brutal truth to their master or others, without penalty. That is often a feature of Twelfth Night as Feste goes  about his work criticising noble characters like Orsino for their inconstancy.

Feste, played by Robert Armin in Shakespeare’s company, was so musically inclined that Shakespeare expressly wrote moving songs that whose lyrics would have been set to a tuneful melody by the actor and sung. Songs such as Come away, death and The wind and the rain, highlight the play's melancholy, and the theme of fleeting time.

The authorship question

The authorship question regarding Shakespeare's plays stems from a perceived mismatch between the relatively modest, provincial life of William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon (not a college man, not blessed with learning in Latin and Greek), and the profundity and depth of the characters he presented on stage, not to mention, the stirring language, ranging between prose and verse, that he could summon to carry the drama.

This perceived lack of high-level education, and the paucity of personal documentation (letters, manuscripts) from Shakespeare, prompted suggestions that the plays were written by a more aristocratic, educated figure. Edward de Vere has been suggested as a candidate; others think it could have been Sir Francis Bacon, or even Christopher Marlowe his rival dramatist of those times. 

Shakespeare Candidates – clockwise from top left, Edward de Vere (Earl of Oxford), Sir Francis Bacon, William Stancley (earl of Derby), Christopher Marlowe

Skeptics argue that a country actor from Stratford without university education could not have possessed the deep knowledge of law, court life, foreign languages, and classical literature evident in the plays. In modern times Mark Rylance and Derek Jacobi are among those who have at minimum urged scholars to subscribe to a Declaration of Reasonable Doubt. This is an internet petition and document created by the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition in 2007, aiming to promote open academic inquiry into whether William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon was the true author of the works attributed to him. 

Actors Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance authors of the Declaration of Reasonable Doubt

Mainstream scholars, or ‘Stratfordians,’ reject these theories, arguing that Shakespeare’s inborn genius, combined with his experience in the London theatre scene as a shareholder and actor, account for his insights. They hold that the documentary evidence—title pages, contemporary praise, and legal documents—affirms his authorship, and that authorship studies based on biography are fundamentally unreliable. 

The paucity of  primary documents concerning the author

Shakespeare has left few primary documents underpinning his biography. No diaries or personal writings whatsoever record his thoughts, opinions, or personal recounting of the events of his life.  For the first 28 years of his life, only five or six records mention William by name.  

The Folger Shakespeare Library has an extensive list of records stored digitally pertaining to the author’s life as seen by Stratfordians relating to his Family, Legal and Property. See

https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/resource/family-legal-property-records

Here are some statements from a 2015 PhD thesis by Kevin Gilvary submitted to Brunel University in London which examined in depth the historical evidence and commentaries by various persons who attempted to write biographies of William Shakespeare:

“A proper biography of Shakespeare, that is to say a narrative account of his life based on primary sources, is not possible on existing material. 

“This very lack of biographical materials allows the biographer to indulge narrative flair and imaginative insight within an established framework,

“Many academics present their own work as biography rather than as fiction.

“Those who wish to adopt a biographical approach to Shakespeare should beware the biographical fallacy of deducing details about a writer’s life from the works; instead, the investigator should only undertake sceptical examination of topics for which there are primary sources.

The document that has acquired the greatest notoriety is page 3 of his last will and testament that contains the words I gyve unto my wife my second best bed with the furniture:

Page 3 of Shakespeare's will with the intercalatory line (pointed by the red arrow) 'Item I gyve unto my wife my second best bed with the furniture' (click to enlarge)

Anne Hathaway

by Carol Ann Duffy from The World's Wife

'Item I gyve unto my wife my second best bed ...'

(from Shakespeare's will)

The bed we loved in was a spinning world

of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas

where we would dive for pearls. My lover's words

were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses

on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme

to his, now echo, assonance; his touch

a verb dancing in the centre of a noun.

Some nights, I dreamed he'd written me, the bed

a page beneath his writer's hands. Romance

and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste.

In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on,

dribbling their prose. My living laughing love -

I hold him in the casket of my widow's head

as he held me upon that next best bed.

Carol Ann Duffy