The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare

• The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare
• About

Twelfth Night

Twelfth Night; or, What You Will
One of Shakespeare's best-loved comedies, encompassing a formidable range of moods and dramatic styles, Twelfth Night is first mentioned in the diary of a law student, John Manningham, who saw it performed in the hall of Middle Temple on 2 February 1602. The play was probably at most a few months old at the time, as a number of details in the text suggest. Maria mentions ‘the new map with the augmentation of the Indies’ (3.2.74–5), usually identified as one first published in Richard Hakluyt's Voyages in 1599; 2.3 quotes from a number of songs first published in 1600 (in Robert Jones's First Book of Songs and Airs); while Feste's view that the phrase ‘out of my element’ is ‘overworn’ (3.1.57–8) alludes to a running joke against the expression in Thomas Dekker's Satiromastix, premièred by Shakespeare's company in 1601. The Chamberlain's Men performed an unnamed play on Twelfth Night in...

[The entire page is 3574 words long]

Oxford University Press Titles

• The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology
• The Oxford Dictionary of Economics
• The Oxford Companion to American Literature
• The Oxford Companion to American Military History
• The Oxford Companion to Classical Civilization
• The Oxford Companion to English Literature
• The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales
• The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare
• The Oxford Dictionary of Plays
• The Oxford Dictionary of Art
• Oxford Dictionary of Sociology
• Oxford Dictionary of World History
• Oxford Dictionary of World Mythology