Twelfth Night:

why Shakespeare?
Chapter aims:
• This chapter will explore Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night, a comedy which is
concerned both with love and the social worlds in which our romantic
relationships inevitably take place.
• We will begin directly with the question of Shakespeare’s reputation, and then
turn to the language he uses in Twelfth Night.
Introduction
• William Shakespeare is considered the greatest writer of his
age, the greatest writer in the English language, and perhaps
the greatest writer of all time. For over 400 years, he has held
the preeminent place in world drama. His plays are known the
world over and are a standard for timeless art. He is taught at
every level of education in every country, and it is a near-
universal opinion that the plays of Shakespeare are great art
and are something we should all read and understand.
Canonical and iconic figures in the fields of
arts, literature and music are often portrayed!
• Do you think this portrait of Shakespeare
resembles the original picture?

• By observing the facial depiction carefully, what

can you say about Shakespeare’s portrait ?
 The Portrait of Shakespeare
• Figure 1 shows the portrait of Shakespeare by
Martin Droeshout, which adorns the title page of
the 1623 First Folio, the first collected edition of
Shakespeare’s plays.

• The portrait is criticised:

1. It’s likely that this portrait wasn’t drawn from the

life with Shakespeare in the room, but was
instead copied from another image (Schoenbaum,
1975, p. 258).
2. The huge head ... One eye is lower and larger Figure 1 Martin Droeshout, Portrait of William

than the other, the hair does not balance at the Shakespeare; title page engraving from ‘Mr. William
Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories and Tragedies’, 1623.
British Library, London. Photo: © British Library Board/
sides, light comes from several directions (ibid). Bridgeman Images.
 The painter needs to be a
psychologist.

Figure 1 Martin Droeshout, Portrait of William Shakespeare; title page Figure 2 Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Don Luis de Góngora,
engraving from ‘Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories and 1622, oil on canvas, 51 × 41 cm. Prado, Madrid. Photo: ©
Tragedies’, 1623. British Library, London. Photo: © British Library Board/ Bridgeman Images.
Bridgeman Images.
Canonical and iconic figures in the fields of arts,
literature and music are often praised by poets!
Ben Jonson’s Poem
Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show,
To whom all the scenes of Europe homage owe. He was not of an age,
but for all time!
And all the muses were still in their prime, When like Apollo he came
forth to warm
Our ears, or like a Mercury to charm!

(Jonson, 1975, p. 264)

What can you say about Jonson’s poem?
What’s the significance of Johnson’s poem?
• It associates Shakespeare with great classical dramatists and Greek
gods (who are also associated with arts).
• Shakespeare is better than all previous human dramatists, and is
aligned with the Greek gods who created these arts. The key phrase
here – which encapsulates Jonson’s sense of Shakespeare’s excellence
and has been repeated numerous times since 1623 – is the line ‘He was
not of an age, but for all time!’.

What do you think of Jonson’s poem?

Reactions on Johnson’s poem
My main feeling about this passage is that it is extravagantly over the top.
Indeed, the work I’ve done to explain what Jonson is driving at suggests the
datedness of some of his central assumptions about culture. Apollo, the Muses
and Mercury are no longer as familiar as they were; the same goes for
Aeschylus and Euripides. You will have similar queries about references like
these as we study Twelfth Night: not everything Shakespeare wrote about still
feels like it was written ‘for all time’. And yet that’s not the whole story.
Jonson’s line is famous precisely because it expresses so well what so many
people feel generally about Shakespeare – that his work is in some way
universal and is ‘for’ as broad an audience as possible.
Shakespeare’s Language
The language of Shakespeare and his contemporaries is distant from us. It’s
worth noting that although neither Jonson nor Shakespeare went to university,
Jonson was formidably learned, and his works show an intimate knowledge of
the classics. Jonson writes that Shakespeare had ‘small Latin, and less Greek’
(Jonson, 1975, p. 264). Although it’s true that Shakespeare was not as scholarly as
Jonson, as we shall see, he did read widely (though perhaps he was not as much
of a show-off).Shakespeare’s language is distant from us not just in terms of
cultural assumptions but also in terms of specific usages, idioms, and taste.
More with Shakespeare’s Language
1. Stressed and rhythmic language.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5lsuyUNu_4
2. Shakespeare produced new terminology to English.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMkuUADWW2A
3. Shakespeare’s language is full of images.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTdRl3OvvvQ
4. The language is Jacobean and Elizabethan (old fashioned).
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7nUtoe18_Q
 Twelfth Night
Study Guide
https://www.litcharts.com/lit/twelfth-night#context
Activity 1: Paraphrase the Priest’s speech about love in one or two sentences. ( Act 5, Scene 1 … 2:23:16)
Activity 2: Why the Priest might be wordy (Act 5, Scene 1 … 2:23:16)?
Activity 3: Is the language of Orsino iambic (stressed)? (Act 5, Scene 1 … 2:23:16)
Activity 4: Find Viola’s soliloquy speech (Act 2, Scene 2 … 42:06)?
Activity 5: What Viola’s dilemma is (Act 2, Scene 2 … 42:06)?
Activity 6: Think about where Viola in her soliloquy turns from the question of the ring into broader issues, such as the lines about disguise
and female agency (Act 2, scene 4 … 59:49).
Activity 7 (Act 1, scene 3 … 8:38):
1. What stylistic differences do you notice between this passage and the Priest’s
speech and Viola’s soliloquy?
2. Using Warren and Wells’s notes, what joke is Maria making when she describes
Sir Andrew as ‘almost natural’ (l. 26)?
3. Bearing in mind that this is the first time we encounter them in the play, what
impression does this dialogue give you of Sir Toby’s and Maria’s roles? Just a
few adjectives here will do – I’m looking for your initial sense of these characters
based on this extract, though you may use your broader knowledge of them based
on the play as a whole.
 Globe’s performance of Twelfth Night.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnnmKxICYvM