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Mistakes in Twelfth Night and Their Resolution: A Study in Some Relationships of Plot and Theme

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Porter Williams Jr.
Porter Williams Jr.*
Affiliation:
North Carolina State College, Raleigh
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Extract

A study of the significance of the mistakes in Twelfth Night, like the study of any important aspect of Shakespeare's art, must be made upon several levels, for mistakes by the protagonists are both a part of the superficial fabric of the plot and a subtle means of revealing underlying themes that often manifest themselves only indirectly below the surface action. This is not to say that the artificial devices of disguises and mistaken identities, all timeworn devices, are nothing more than a mere plot framework for the profundities that lie beneath. Rather, as Miss Bradbrook expresses it, there is an “interdependence of the natural and the artificial, the human and the literary.” The ridiculous mistakes that control the plot are therefore like Freudian slips which incite their superficial laughter and at the same time reveal subconscious patterns of human behavior. It is these slips, the mistakes of all the leading characters, that we must follow into the thematic material of the play, for it is on this level that they become of most interest.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 76 , Issue 3 , June 1961 , pp. 193 - 199
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1961

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References

Note 1 in page 193 M. C. Bradbrook, Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry (London, 1951), p. 228.

Note 2 in page 193 M. C. Bradbrook, The Growth and Structure of Elizabethan Comedy (London, 1955), pp. 78, 86.

Note 3 in page 193 Leslie Hotson, The First Night of Twelfth Night (London, 1954), pp. 97–99. See also Sir E. K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage (Oxford, 1903) on Epiphany customs and the Feast of Fools.

Note 4 in page 193 Sir E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare (Oxford, 1930), i, 405, and Hotson, The First Night of Twelfth Night.

Note 5 in page 193 Bradbrook, Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry, p. 230.

Note 6 in page 194 John Russell Brown, Shakespeare and His Comedies (London, 1957), p. 160.

Note 7 in page 194 All references to Twelfth Night are from The New Shakespeare, ed. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and John Dover Wilson (Cambridge, 1949).

Note 8 in page 194 See i.ii.17; i.v.305; ii.iii.28; ii.iv.67; iii.i.43ff.; iii.iii.38ff.; iii.iv.343; iv.i.18; iv.iii.2; v.i.27ff.

Note 9 in page 195 H. B. Charlton, Shakespearian Comedy (London, 1949), p. 281.

Note 10 in page 195 Bradbrook, The Growth and Structure of Elizabethan Comedy, p. 92.

Note 11 in page 196 Brown, p. 164.