Notes on Twelfth Night, Act I
Confession time: if you tell me your favourite Shakespeare play, I will judge you by your choice. If you pick The Tempest , Richard II or Othello , you’ll get a small inward nod from me – if you go with Much Ado , Richard III or Macbeth , I hate to say it but my conclusion will be that most likely you haven’t read much Shakespeare, or don’t like him that much. And don’t even get me started on Marx claiming that Timon of Athens was his favourite play… Anyway, if you say that Twelfth Night is your favourite play, the chances are we’re going to get along. It might be the closest Shakespeare ever got to perfection. It’s the play that balances all of the elements of Shakespearean comedy most succinctly: gender and identity, love and loss. It also has the best fool. --- The play opens with the usual Shakespearean trope of a Petrarchan lover, where we can instantly see that there’s something phony about their love: Orsino twice uses images of purging in his first two speeches, as w...