Historical Context
What is the
“twelfth night” of this play’s title? In Shakespeare’s time this was an
unambiguous reference to January 6th, the final night of January the
twelve-day-long Christmas season (a tradition that survives in the well-known
carol). More particularly, the “twelfth night” was seen as a time of general
revelry and mild mayhem, a time when social and sexual mores could be freely
flouted. Whether this play was written for performance at just such a Christmas
season festival, or whether Shakespeare intended into to have a winter-time
setting at all, are matters of scholarly debate. What is more certain, and more
important, is that this play draws its inspiration from this tradition, dating
from medieval times, of temporary sexual freedom and social release.
This Christmas
tradition was threatened in Shakespeare’s time by a more recent religious
phenomenon. After the Reformation was brought to England in 1534, a number of
figures in the new Anglican Church sought to purify England of the religious
ceremonies that lingered from Catholicism. Beginning in the 1570’s and
1580’s, the English “Puritans,” as they were called, sought to purify
England of the artistry and amoralism which they felt was incompatible with a
properly Reformed Christianity. “Twelfth night” ceremonies were, obviously,
a prime target. The cruel treatment of Malvolio puts off many readers – and
indeed it is probably excessive if we think of Malvolio merely as a boring
servant. But Malvolio unambiguously embodies Puritanism – he is frequently
called a “puritan” by the other characters – and so the characters’
pranks at his expense are more political than their playfulness suggests. At
root, these constitute a rebellion against the encroaching forces of Puritanism.
This might be dismissed as an insignificant political rivalry of Shakespeare’s
day were it not for what followed in the years following Shakespeare’s death.
In the 1640’s, Puritan forces were the driving force behind a civil war
against the monarchy; in 1649, they beheaded King Charles I, and Puritan Thomas
Cromwell became the ruler of England. The Puritans, as promised, stripped
England of the vestiges of Catholicism, and, most significantly from our point
of view, shut down the theaters. The hatred directed towards Puritans, in the
guise of Malvolio, in Twelfth Night, is, more than anything, disturbingly
prescient.
Many readers
find it strange that Shakespeare probably wrote Twelfth Night,
immediately before or after he wrote Hamlet (both in 1601). How, some
wonder, could Hamlet, a play of profound religious and political themes,
stand back-to-back with the light revelry of Twelfth Night? There are
surely a number of misleading assumptions that go into that question, but the
relevance of Twelfth Night to the controversy over Puritanism dispels at
least one of them. Even at its funniest and bawdiest, this play is deadly
serious about a political and religious movement that threatened to go after the
soul of England. It was a movement that would eventually cause a civil war, one
which would destroy the social institutions – the monarchy, the theater –
that were the foundations of Shakespeare’s art.
The information in the "Historical Context" and "Did You
Know?" sections is partly drawn from the edition of Twelfth Night,
edited by Roger Warren and Stanley Wells, in the Oxford Shakespeare series.
