Twelfth
Night; or What You Will was composed by William Shakespeare in either 1600 or 1601. Like The
Comedy of Errors or The Taming of the Shrew for instance, Twelfth
Night is essentially a romantic comedy with love as main theme. The play
has many of the elements common to Elizabethan romantic comedy, including the
devices of mistaken identity, separated twins, and gender-crossing disguise,
and its plot revolves around overcoming obstacles to "true" love.
The origin
of many a mistaken-identity plot, including Shakespeare's own Comedy of
Errors is the Italian Gl'Ingannati
("The Deceived Ones").
(Shakespeare's
Twelfth Night in Sources and Performance by Joseph L. Lockett,
http://ise.uvic.ca/Annex/links/Shakespeare_Sites/Criticism.html#toc_Twelfth_Night)
As You Like
It was most likely written around 1598–1600, during the last years of Elizabeth’s reign.
The play belongs to the literary tradition known as pastoral. The most
fundamental concern of the pastoral mode is comparing the natural world,
represented by the Forest of Arden, to the world built by humans (the Court),
which contains the joys of art and the city as well as the injustices of rigid
social hierarchies. But As You Like It also deals with
love and shares some elements with Twelfth Night, like mistaken identity,
disguise and gender confusion.
(http://www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/asyoulikeit/context.html)
3.1.
Similarities between both plays;
Twelfth Night is clearly part of the same tradition as As You Like It, and many of the
dramatic elements are very similar. In both plays, the main plot features a
young, intelligent female faced with the task of negotiating her way through a
courtship with a man who needs to be educated into an understanding of what it
means to love intelligently. To carry out this task, she adopts a disguise as a
young man and improvises her way through a series of meetings and conversations
with a wide variety of people (prominent among them the young man who is the
object of her affections), until, through a series of circumstances the
complexities are happily (and somewhat implausibly) resolved. Part of the plot
clearly raises gender issues and explores homoerotic possibilities in much the
same way.
All of this
takes place in an environment far away from the realities of urban political
life: in As You Like
It the environment is the Forest, the nature,
far away from urban political life. In Twelfth Night the country
estate of Olivia and the court of Orsino are places
almost exclusively devoted to leisure, music, love, and much fun. In that
sense, they are removed from the realities of urban life and continue the
pastoral tradition.
Another similarity between these two plays is the continuing attention
in As You Like It and Twelfth Night to
the language of love.
The central issue in the courtship of Viola and Orsino,
as in the courtship of Rosalind and Orlando, is the
need to educate the man out of his excessively sentimental vision of love so
that he reaches a more intelligent and aware vision of the reality of the
experience. By the end of the process, the men (both, Orsino
and Orlando) have learned to alter the language with
which they express their feelings.
(The
Ironies of Happy Endings by Ian Johnston
http://www.mala.bc.ca/~Johnstoi/eng366/lectures/twelfthnight.htm)
Academic year 2006/2007
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Latorre Arnedo, Isabel
usuario@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de Valčncia Press