“When Golden Time Convents”: Twelfth Night and Shakespeare's Eastern Promise

Abstract

At the British Museum's Shah Abbas exhibition quotations from Twelfth Night reassured visitors Shakespeare was as familiar with ‘the Sophy’ as with Elizabeth. One of four dedicated to empire and globalization, the show used Shakespeare's ‘universalism’ in the debate about ownership of cultural property, to illustrate director Neil MacGregor's idea of the museum as ‘the world under one roof’. But critics of the series object that an emphasis on ‘the food of love’ effaces Islamic or Aztec violence, and by taking the quotations out of context curators also elided religious conflict in Elizabethan England. They ignored the way references to the Shirley brothers in Twelfth Night encode Catholic plots to exploit the Shah for Essex and King James. But a Tate Gallery Van Dyck exhibition showed Robert Shirley in his silk suit as ‘fencer to the Sophy’ and Persian ambassador to Rome; and it is this complexity that Shakespeare stages in his Epiphany play, with its hope for ‘golden time’ but suspense that like Robert's ambiguous suit from Abbas, ‘What's to come is still unsure’.