History
Background and Context to Enrich Understanding
Play Background
Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night gets its name from the Twelfth Night of the Christmas holiday, also called Saturnalia. Saturnalia was a winter festival honoring the god Saturn for his sunlight and warmth in the darkness of winter.
It was a holiday full of feasting, misrule, and role reversals. Imagine a bit of a topsy-turvy day from the popular film The Hunchback of Notre Dame: servants can be kings, kings become slaves and so on. Taking inspiration from the holiday, Twelfth Night celebrates a world turned upside down: disguises, mistaken identities, and chaos before order is restored.
Cultural Context
Written and performed around 1601–02, Twelfth Night reached audiences in an England grappling with growing Protestant restraint. From fashion policing, where sumptuary laws forbade people from “status jumping” by dressing above their class (sound like any yellow, cross-gartered fellows we know?), to strict controls on print and performance, it seems almost a miracle the play ever made it to the stage.
Just two years earlier, the Bishops’ Ban of 1599 had “suppressed satirical and dramatic works deemed immoral or subversive.” And yet, from this suppression came the theatre’s familiar answer: rebellion. The ban sparked what became known as the “War of the Theatres”: a fierce exchange of satire and wit onstage, where the strictures of censorship turned into rich fodder for entertainment and, by extension, public discussion.
It is against this backdrop that we see Twelfth Night emerge, offering audiences a reprieve from the overbearing political landscape. Twelfth Night offered a night of revelry and love that carved out space for gender play, music and folly, while also poking sly fun at the ambition and social climbing of bureaucrats and courtiers.
This was a society where fashion policing was quite literal: “Until 1604, England had laws which governed what any particular person could wear.” Add to that the Elizabethan Religious Settlement, which placed Elizabeth herself as head of the Church of England and enforced conformity in worship, and the Bishops’ Ban tightening creative expression — and the resilience of theatre becomes even more striking.
Original Performances
The first known performance took place at the Middle Temple, a London law school, for an audience of courtiers and legal professionals. Notable spectators included King James I and King Charles I. These audiences would have delighted in the festive humor, music, and witty wordplay, though some critics found it frivolous or indecent.
Audience Perceptions
Suffice to say the reception was split. Many audience members enjoyed the topsy-turvy laughter and lively disguises while others, especially more Protestant fundamentalist voices, found fault with its themes of misrule and cross-dressing especially up against the puritan movement of the later 1600s. This divide set the stage for centuries of shifting interpretations: some eras highlighted its playfulness, others its ambiguities.