Twelfth Night (2012)

About the Play

Twelfth Night

Twelfth Night was an important date in Shakespeare's England, the night of the twelfth day after Christmas and the last day of the traditional Christmas holiday period. As such, it was generally celebrated with plenty of revelry, feasting and drinking, misrule, and, often, the performance of plays at Court. The attitude was something like: "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we go back to work."

There's not much in the play that suggests a direct connection to the Twelfth Night holiday — other than one little snippet of a song — but the portrayal of revelry and misrule in many scenes certainly reflect this general feeling to some extent.

A Turning Point

It's rarely possible to know exactly when Shakespeare wrote any of his plays, but Twelfth Night appears to have been the last of Shakespeare's major romantic comedies to be written. Its first known performance was in 1602 and occurred not at the Globe but in the hall of the Middle Temple, one of the Inns of Court where lawyers were trained in Shakespeare's London. They often invited acting companies to perform as part of their holiday celebrations, and one student's record of this performance of Shakespeare's play has survived. The hall is just a big open room filled with dining tables, as can be seen here:

No one can say for sure exactly how Shakespeare's company would have set up their performance in the space — perhaps at one end, perhaps in the middle with the tables cleared away.

The time of composition is significant because this was the time of a major shift in direction in Shakespeare's writing career. Prior to this, the majority of his plays had been romantic comedies (A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, etc.) and history plays, with a few isolated tragedies thrown in. But somewhere in the vicinity of 1600-1602, he shifted his focus and began the sequence of great tragedies that dominated his output for the next decade or so: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and so on. The comedies he wrote after this time have a very different tone and feel from the earlier ones — more cynical, more satirical, less romantic. Twelfth Night seems to have been written right around this turning point in Shakespeare's career. As such, it's the last of its kind, a romantic comedy written by a playwright who was about to turn away from romantic comedy toward darker genres. It might be said to be the greatest, funniest, and most perfect of the romantic comedies, written by a playwright at the very top of his game. But it also contains some surprisingly dark material, especially near the end, mixed in with the comedy and romance, hinting at the turn toward more serious subjects and greater realism that was soon to come.

"We'll Have The Bear Again"

Bears and bear-baiting are referred to frequently in the play, and this has been another important aspect of our approach to this production. Bear-baiting was a cruel and violent Elizabethan sport in which a bear was chained to a stake and then "baited" — taunted and attacked — by dogs. As uncomfortable as it may be for us to consider, this activity was closely linked to the theatres of Shakespeare's time. Theatre and bear-baiting were included in the same basic class of popular entertainments, with theatres and bear-baiting arenas often located right next to one another or used interchangeably for both activities. And the famous design of the outdoor Elizabethan theatres like the Globe may even have been based on the very similar design of the bear-baiting arenas.

In the play, a number of characters compare Malvolio to the bear being baited, and we have taken this metaphor seriously in the later stages of the trick that is played on him. Our staging of Act 4, Scene 2 is intended to evoke the general set-up of a bear-baiting, as shown in images like this one:

If Malvolio is the bear, then those who attack him are the dogs, and his last line in the play refers accordingly to "the whole pack of you." Exactly who he includes in this "pack" is not clear — it might be just the characters who played the trick on him, or the entire cast, or perhaps it extends to the audience as well, since we become part of the "pack" that laughs at him earlier in the play.