The sonneteer customarily enumerates his lady’s beautiful body parts, one by one in that device known as the “blazon.” Olivia enumerates her own: “I will give out divers schedules of my beauty. It shall be inventoried, and every particle and utensil labelled to my will: as, item, two lips, indifferent red: item, two grey eyes, with lids to them: item, one neck, one chin and so forth.” But then love—for Cesario—catches up on her and she finds herself deploying the blazon in all seriousness: “Thy tongue, thy face, thy limbs, actions and spirit, / Do give thee five-fold blazon.” She begins to wish that “the master were the man”—or the man her master. Viola, meanwhile, gains a voice by becoming Cesario. In the sonnet form, the object of desire is just that, an object. In Twelfth Night, Viola, desired by both man and woman, is a feeling subject. Vulnerable, and thus forced to become an actor (“I am not that I play”), she soon finds herself in the situation of desiring the man she has been sent to persuade to love someone else—an analogous twist to that of Shakespeare’s sonnets, which begin with the speaker persuading the fair youth to marry, then dissolve into the speaker’s own love for the youth.

Sonnet 20 startlingly begins “A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted / Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion.” There is only one other phrase in the literature of the age that may be readily compared with the coinage “master-mistress”: Orsino’s “Your master’s mistress.” Perhaps as good an answer as any to the hoary old question of the identity of the lovely youth to whom the bulk of Shakespeare’s sonnets are addressed is “a figure who resembles Cesario.”

Twelfth Night is an extraordinary exploration of the permutations of desire or, to use the terminology of an Elizabethan admirer of Shakespeare called Francis Meres, of “the perplexities of love.” Both Orsino and Olivia love Viola in her disguise as Cesario. Viola loves, and wins, Orsino, while Olivia has to settle for Sebastian. Orsino insists on continuing to call Viola Cesario even after he knows that she is a woman. Sebastian is puzzled, though grateful, to find himself whisked to the altar by the wealthy and beautiful Olivia, but he cannot have had time to fall in love with her. The person who really loves him is Antonio, who reminds him that for three months, “No interim, not a minute’s vacancy, / Both day and night did we keep company.” He follows his beloved despite the risk to his own life: “But come what may, I do adore thee so, / That danger shall seem sport, and I will go.” Like a sonneteer, he speaks of being spurred on by his “desire, / More sharp than filèd steel” and, again, of paying “devotion” to “his image, which methought did promise / Most venerable worth.” He is rewarded for his devotion by being left alone and melancholy, again in the exact manner of a sonneteer turned away by his frosty mistress. It is very easy to imagine Antonio going away at the end of Twelfth Night and writing something on the following lines, addressed to Sebastian:

They that have power to hurt and will do none,

That do not do the thing they most do show,

Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,

Unmovèd, cold, and to temptation slow:

They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces

And husband nature’s riches from expense.

They are the lords and owners of their faces,

Others but stewards of their excellence.

This is actually the speaker of Shakespeare’s sonnets (in Sonnet 94) as he finds himself rejected by the fair youth or the lovely boy. In so many of the plays it is Shakespeare’s chilly, self-controlled young men—Prince Hal in Henry IV, Angelo in Measure for Measure, Bertram in All’s Well That Ends Well—who take, who are the lords and owners of their faces. His open hearted women—Rosalind in As You Like It, Innogen in Cymbeline, Viola above all—are never like this. They do do the things they most do show. They move others but they are never stone themselves, unless men turn them to coldness. His women give—of their selves, their wit, and their courage. And that is why his women’s parts, even though written for boys, have been great gifts to actresses down the ages.

ABOUT THE TEXT

Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date—modernizing the spelling, punctuation, and typography (though not, of course, the actual words), providing explanatory notes in the light of changing educational practices (a generation ago, most of Shakespeare’s classical and biblical allusions could be assumed to be generally understood, but now they can’t).

Because Shakespeare did not personally oversee the publication of his plays, with some plays there are major editorial difficulties. Decisions have to be made as to the relative authority of the early printed editions, the pocket format “quartos” published in Shakespeare’s lifetime, and the elaborately produced “First Folio” text of 1623, the original “Complete Works” prepared for the press after his death by Shakespeare’s fellow actors, the people who knew the plays better than anyone else. Twelfth Night, however, exists only in a Folio text that is exceptionally well printed. It is one of the few Shakespeare plays where there is hardly any textual difficulty or controversy.

The following notes highlight various aspects of the editorial process and indicate conventions used in the text of this edition:

Lists of Parts are supplied in the First Folio for only six plays, not including Twelfth Night, so the list here is editorially supplied. Capitals indicate that part of the name which is used for speech headings in the script (thus “SIR TOBY Belch, Olivia’s kinsman”).

Locations are provided by the Folio for only two plays, of which Twelfth Night is not one. Eighteenth-century editors, working in an age of elaborately realistic stage sets, were the first to provide detailed locations (“another part of the town”). Given that Shakespeare wrote for a bare stage and often an imprecise sense of place, we have relegated locations to the explanatory notes, where they are given at the beginning of each scene where the imaginary location is different from the one before. In the case of Twelfth Night, the entire action is set in Illyria, on the eastern Adriatic coast, and moves principally between the households of Duke Orsino and Countess Olivia.

Act and Scene Divisions were provided in the Folio in a much more thoroughgoing way than in the Quartos.