SparkNotes - Twelfth Night: No Fear Shakespeare Deluxe Student Edition

Shakespeare attended grammar school, but his formal education proceeded no farther. In 1582 he married an older woman, Anne Hathaway, and had three children with her. Around 1590 he left his family behind and traveled to London to work as an actor and playwright. Public and critical acclaim quickly followed, and Shakespeare eventually became the most popular playwright in England and part-owner of the Globe Theater. His career bridged the reigns of Elizabeth I (ruled 1558 1603) and James I (ruled 16031625), and he was a favorite of both monarchs. Indeed, King James granted Shakespeares company the greatest possible compliment, bestowing on its members the title of Kings Men.

Wealthy and renowned, Shakespeare retired to Stratford and died in 1616 at age fifty-two. At the time of his death, literary luminaries such as Ben Jonson hailed his works as timeless. Shakespeares works were collected and printed in various editions in the century following his death, and by the early eighteenth century his reputation as the greatest poet ever to write in English was well established. The unprecedented admiration garnered by his works led to a fierce curiosity about Shakespeares life, but the dearth of biographical information left many details of Shakespeares personal history shrouded in mystery. Some people have concluded from this fact and from Shakespeares modest education that Shakespeares plays were actually written by someone elseFrancis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford are the two most popular candidatesbut the support for this claim is overwhelmingly circumstantial, and the theory is not taken seriously by many scholars. In the absence of credible evidence to the contrary, Shakespeare must be viewed as the author of the thirty-seven plays and 154 sonnets that bear his name.

The legacy of this body of work is immense. A number of Shakespeares plays seem to have transcended even the category of brilliance, becoming so influential as to affect profoundly the course of Western literature and culture ever after. Shakespeare wrote Twelfth Night near the middle of his career, probably in the year 1601. Most critics consider it one of his greatest comedies, along with plays such as As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, and A Midsummer Nights Dream. Twelfth Night is about illusion, deception, disguises, madness, and the extraordinary things that love will cause us to doand to see. Twelfth Night is the only one of Shakespeares plays to have an alternative title: the play is actually called Twelfth Night, or What You Will. Critics are divided over what the two titles mean, but Twelfth Night is usually considered to be a reference to Epiphany, or the twelfth night of the Christmas celebration (January 6).

In Shakespeares day, this holiday was celebrated as a festival in which everything was turned upside downmuch like the upside-down, chaotic world of Illyria in the play. Twelfth Night is one of Shakespeares so-called transvestite comedies, a category that also includes As You Like It and The Merchant of Venice. These plays feature female protagonists who, for one reason or another, have to disguise themselves as young men. It is important to remember that in Shakespeares day,