Twelfth Night and Epiphany

Abstract

This chapter explores William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Beyond any reasonable doubt, Twelfth Night is pervasively an Epiphany play; it calls for a set positively festooned with holly. Twelfth Night marks the end of a festive season in which there were other occasions alluded to by Shakespeare rather than Twelfth Night. But the correlations with Twelfth Night itself are salient: its customary activities provide plot material, and its emotional tone, as the last of festivity, can be sensed in the melancholy atmosphere of transience. Viewed as a seasonal mélange, the themes of Twelfth Night fall into place and gain coherence. The chapter then looks at the Platonic and Pythagorean content of Twelfth Night. Meanwhile, in Shakespeare’s unfolding of true love, narrative motifs are not the only resource; others range from implicit emblem to rhetorical explication. If Twelfth Night presents a philosophy of love, and traces the moderating of various erotic passions, there is nevertheless a focus on one excess in particular: love melancholy.