Dramaturg's Note

 

“Are all the people mad?”

 

Madness abounds in Twelfth Night. The play’s setting of Illyria is a world that defies order and logic. We encounter characters mad from grief, from love, from self-importance, and from drink. The only character who seems unaffected by, and thus native to, this topsy-turvy world is Feste the fool. Illyria’s disorder mirrors festivities associated with the Twelfth Night of Christmas, which were common during Shakespeare’s life. Communities would appoint a Lord of Misrule to preside over raucous celebrations that upended social order.

 

Shakespeare wrote Twelfth Night sometime between 1600 and the beginning of 1602. Preceding this he wrote Hamlet between 1600 and 1601. Madness was clearly on Shakespeare’s mind at this time, as was separation and grief. Writing Hamlet undoubtedly asked Shakespeare to revisit the death of his son Hamnet just four years earlier in 1596. Hamnet left behind his twin sister Judith and it cannot be coincidence that we first meet Twelfth Night’s Viola thinking she has just lost her twin brother. Like Hamlet, Twelfth Night explores themes of madness and loss but does so through comedy, putting the madness of profound grief alongside the madness of profound love. In Illyria, Shakespeare conceives a world where emotional extremes in many forms can be explored, where the lost can be found, where fools take care of madmen. Perhaps he created a world that he needed, that he thought his daughter Judith might need, indeed that we all need to help make sense of the rain in life, which Feste reminds us “raineth every day.”

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