Shakespearean Criticism | Twelfth Night (Vol. 62) - Jane K. Brown (essay date 1990)

Jane K. Brown (essay date 1990)

SOURCE: “Double Plotting in Shakespeare's Comedies: The Case of Twelfth Night,” in Aesthetic Illusion: Theoretical and Historical Approaches, edited by Frederick Burwick and Walter Pape, Walter de Gruyter, 1990, pp. 313-23.

[In the following essay, Brown contends that Twelfth Night has two plots, one ruled by Olivia and one ruled by Orsino. These plots, argues Brown, are dramatized differently and correspond to two distinct worlds within the play.]

Doubleness of all sorts is typical of Shakespearean comedy. Nowhere, however, is doubling so fully worked out as in Twelfth Night: or, What You Will, the only play for which Shakespeare himself provided a double title, as Anne Barton points out.¹ The play's dramatis personae reveals not only the twins at its center, but two rulers (a countess and a duke referred to as count), two sea captains, two authority figures (an...

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