Twelfth Night (Vol. 74) | Roger Warren and Stanley Wells (essay date 1994)
Roger Warren and Stanley Wells (essay date 1994)
SOURCE: Warren, Roger and Stanley Wells. Introduction to Twelfth Night, or What You Will, by William Shakespeare, edited by Roger Warren and Stanley Wells, pp. 1-76. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.
[In the following excerpt, Warren and Wells survey Twelfth Night's setting, sources, themes, and major characters. The critics' discussion is often informed by insights gleaned from twentieth-century stagings of the play.]
Twelfth Night is one of the most popular of Shakespeare's plays in the modern theatre, and its success seems to have begun early; the sole surviving reference to it during Shakespeare's lifetime is to a performance. On 2 February 1602, John Manningham, then a law student of the Middle Temple in London, wrote in his diary:
At our feast we had a play called Twelfth Night, or What You Will, much like The Comedy of Errors or...
[The entire page is 19136 words long]
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