Introduction

Samuel Pepys wrote in his famous diary that Twelfth Night is a silly play and that its title is misleadingly unrelated to its subject matter (see Introduction, p. 3 ). Roughly 200 years later, William Archer was similarly critical about the structure of the play: ‘the elements of beauty and of humour’, he claims, ‘are kept very much apart in Twelfth Night ’. The play, Archer continues, ‘contains two actions in one frame – a romantic intrigue borrowed from Italy, and a pair of practical jokes [. . .] invented by Shakespeare’. According to Archer, ‘these two actions can be said really to touch at only one point, and then as it were, unwillingly; for it is where Viola’s blade crosses Sir Andrew’s. . . . The play has just as much unity as two spheres in contact’ (see Early Criticism, p. 56 ). These comments usefully challenge us to establish whether the different strands in the plot of Twelfth Night do in fact relate to each other in meaningful ways.