Twelfth Night

SALON DETAILS:

• Facilitated by Jane Wymark
• Eight virtual meetings, Mondays, 6-8.00 pm GMT, 14 February – 4 April 2022
• £200 for eight-meeting study
• Recommended edition: Twelfth Night, or, What You Will by William Shakespeare, Folger Shakespeare Library, June 2019, editors Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine, ISBN-13: 978-1982122492 (Simon & Schuster)

In 1578, Queen Elizabeth I made the earliest known visit of a ruling monarch to an Inn of Court, the Middle Temple Hall, which had opened six years earlier and was reputed to have the most magnificent hammerbeam roof in London. Having survived the Great Fire of London, the building was badly damaged in the Blitz, but extensive restoration means that today we can see it as Elizabeth did, and we know she visited on at least one further occasion: the premiere of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night on 2 January 1602.

Masques, revels and plays were a feature of the Elizabethan court, especially during the time of winter feasting – a tradition far older than Christianity. Although the Lord of Misrule and Feast of Fools were condemned as Papist and banned by the Protestant queen, the second half of the Christmas festivities leading up to Twelfth Night on 6 January were less about the Magi and more ‘What You Will’ . . .

In Twelfth Night (or What You Will) Shakespeare revisited the dramatic device of twins that had been so successful in The Comedy of Errors, adding to it the cross-dressing that had been a big hit in As You Like It. We are presented with a self-pitying lovelorn Duke, a lady in deep mourning for her dead brother, a puritanical social-climber of a steward, and a bibulous knight milking a gullible suitor. Where is Feste the clown? Will there be no more cakes and ale? Enter Cesario!

In our eight-week study we will read the whole play and reflect on melancholy and adoration, on love and loss, on feasting and fasting. We will also consider revenge and how the light of comedy is shadowed by cruelty and the ‘dark house’ in the ‘whirligig of time’.