Twelfth Night

Believed to have been written around 1600 as a celebration of the end of the Christmas festivities, Twelfth Night is a Shakespearean comedy. However, much as the end of the Christmas revelry in its European setting is both a celebration and a foreshadowing of a bleaker time ahead, Twelfth Night is an ambiguous mix of celebration and melancholy. The play is a complicated tale of requited and unrequited love, in which a lovelorn prince becomes entangled with shipwrecked twins in various disguises, and the antics of those understairs create further chaos. But it is a traditional comedy, and the escapades of misrepresentations, misunderstandings and deliberate inversions eventually culminate in true love, rightful roles and reinstated identities.

The power of Shakespeare’s language and its classic 5-act structure all offer opportunities for students to explore the rich possibilities of dialogue as a communication mechanism.

The play explores the nature of both love and loss in many forms. It addresses questions of identity, and the fluid notion of gender has particular relevance today. As always, the bard demonstrates a compelling insight into human nature.