Dating the play

An early performance of Twelfth Night was recorded in a diary by the law student, John Manningham. He notes that a play called 'Twelve Night or What You Will' was part of the entertainment laid on for the students and lawyers of the Middle Temple in celebration of the feast of Candlemas on 2 February 1602. The play's topical references to the Sophy and 'the new map with the augmentation of the Indies' suggest a composition date of a year or two earlier. It was at his time that Sir Anthony Shirley published his accounts of serving as ambassador to the Shah of Persia and new maps were published with more detailed and accurate representations of the East Indies. Shakespeare was also writing Hamlet in 1600-01. Twelfth Night was not printed until 1623 when Shakespeare's plays were collected in the First Folio edition, published seven years after the dramatist's death.

Shakespeare's Sources

In 1594, Shakespeare would have been able to read the third reprint of Barnaby Riche's popular Farewell to the Military Profession, in which the story of Apolonius and Silla is told. The young Duke, Apolonius, is attempting to win the hand of a beautiful, rich widow while he himself is loved by another young woman, Silla. Silla has pursued him, only to be shipwrecked and washed up on his shores. She models herself on her twin brother and, in male disguise, finds service with the unsuspecting Duke. She is sent to woo on her master's behalf only to find herself the object of the lady's love. The plot thickens as Silla's twin brother arrives and is accosted by the beautiful widow. Their ensuing night of passion results in pregnancy. After some confusion and threatened violence all is resolved and two weddings crown their happiness.

Barnaby Riche found the elements of this story in the prose narratives of Belleforest's Histoires Tragique, published in 1570, and in the Italian tales of Bandello's Novelle (1554). These authors were, in their turn, remodelling the entertaining wooing games they found in popular sixteenth-century Italian comedies. Nicolo Secchi's Gl'Inganni, printed in 1562, has a woman disguised as a man, reluctantly wooing another on his behalf. The earliest of this kind of play is Gl' Ingannati (The Deceived), produced in Siena in 1531. These plays drew on the rich tradition of the comedies of the Roman dramatist, Plautus, most particularly the Menaechmi, in which lost twins, mistaken identities and the subsequent complications entertain and delight. Shakespeare had, earlier in his career, made good use of this Latin play when he took it as the basis for The Comedy of Errors. Cross-dressing, cross-wooing and deceptions in matter of the heart are all devices Shakespeare had already employed to great effect in plays such as As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, Two Gentlemen of Verona and Much Ado About Nothing.

Twelfth Night's other plot strand, that centring on Sir Toby and the gulling of Malvolio is Shakespeare's own invention.

Written by Rebecca Brown