Twelfth Night is the ninth in a series of comedies Shakespeare wrote during the 1590s that includes The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, and As You Like It and is a masterful synthesis of them all, unsurpassed in the artistry of its execution. There is perhaps no more rousing, amusing, or lyrical celebration of the transforming wonderment of love nor a more knowing depiction of its follies or the forces allied against it. William Shakespeare was in his mid-30s and at the height of his dramatic powers when he wrote Twelfth Night, his culminating masterpiece of romantic comedy. More obvious miracles are needed for comedy to exist in a world in which evil also exists, not merely incipiently but with power.
After Twelfth Night the so-called comedies required for their happy resolutions more radical characters and devices-omniscient and omnipresent Dukes, magic, and resurrection. Having solved magnificently the problems of this particular form of comedy, Shakespeare was evidently not tempted to repeat his triumph. But the play also looks forward: the pressure to dis-solve the comedy, to realize and finally abandon the burden of laughter, is an intrinsic part of its “perfection.” Viola’s clear-eyed and affirmative vision of her own and the world’s rationality is a triumph and we desire it yet we realize its vulnerability, and we come to realize that virtue in disguise is only totally triumphant when evil is not in disguise-is not truly present at all. The effects and values of the earlier comedies are here subtly embodied in the most complex structure which Shakespeare had yet created.
Twelfth Night is the climax of Shakespeare’s early achievement in comedy. Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night
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