Twelfth Night (Vol. 34) | Karen Greif (essay date 1981)
Karen Greif (essay date 1981)
SOURCE: "Plays and Players in Twelfth Night," in Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakespearian Study and Production, Vol. 34, 1981, pp. 121-30.
[In this essay, Greif claims that Twelfth Night views "playing" as a means both to conceal and to reveal truth.]
'The purpose of playing,' says Hamlet, is 'to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.'1 Hamlet himself employs 'playing', in various guises, as a means of penetrating false appearances to uncover hidden truths, but he also discovers how slippery illusions can be when their effects become entangled in the human world. Like Hamlet, but in a comic vein, Twelfth Night poses questions about 'the purpose of playing' and about whether illusion is perhaps too deeply embedded in human experience to be ever...
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