Twelfth Night (Vol. 34) | Helene Moglen (essay date 1973)
Helene Moglen (essay date 1973)
SOURCE: "Disguise and Development: The Self and Society in Twelfth Night," in Literature and Psychology, Vol. XXIII, No. 1, 1973, pp. 13-20.
[In this essay, Moglen postulates a set of Freudian psychological theses that underlie Shakespeare's portrayal of disguised characters in Twelfth Night.]
Mistaken identity and sex disguise are familiar, rather hackneyed devices used with some regularity in romantic comedy. Critics of Twelfth Night have taken these conventions for granted and have been content simply to describe their use in the articulation of plot and character.1 Surprisingly little allowance has been made for the possibility that Shakespeare might have defined quite differently, at different points in his career, the varying functions of devices as rich in implication as these. Because critics of the play have largely ignored the psychological premises of romance, they have...
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