The Texts of Twelfth Night

Abstract

To all appearances, Twelfth Night has one of the least problematic texts in the Shakespearean canon. Unlike Hamlet and King Lear, each with one Folio and one or more Quarto versions, Twelfth Night has a single text because the play only appears in the Folio. Moreover the Folio edition is remarkably clean and free of error. Consequently, the text of Twelfth Night appears particularly stable. Only the most extreme of textual critics would claim that the first Folio constitutes a flawed text because the stage direction in the middle of act 1, scene 5 reads enter Violenta instead of enter Viola.' Yet even that small typographical error, and the subsequent correction of the name in later Folios, mark the text as a copy, subject to the same kinds of editing that the new textual bibliographers have examined in other Shakespearean plays. The implications of their work reveal the multiplicity of the apparently single text of Twelfth Night. The impetus for the recent interest in editing begins in plays such as Lear where editors have combined the Folio and Quarto versions of the play to produce a King Lear that is neither. As critics such as Michael Warren and Randall MacLeod point out, we have been reading the works of editors and assuming that we are reading the work of Shakespeare. This revelation has inspired an increasing interest in the problems of editing Shakespeare's texts and in the implications of the ways past editing influences what we think about these plays.2 Such explorations have led, in the case of King Lear, to a radical reconsideration of the texts we use. In The Division of the Kingdoms an array of convincing arguments asserts that, because the first Quarto and the Folio of Lear are sufficiently different in structure and characterization, they must be considered as separate texts.3 As a result, the new Oxford edition of Shakespeare's works includes two versions of King Lear.4 As Barry Adams has argued, even in a play such as Twelfth Night, where we have only one text, editors have manipulated the text in ways that alter meaning. Adams's concern is with Rowe's emendations of lines nine through fourteen of the first scene, which include changes in capitalization, spelling and punctuation. Adams argues