William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night: Comedy, Conflict, and Community

This module provides an overview of Twelfth Night and introduces the play by exploring key aspects of the world it imagines. The interviews, lectures, and faculty roundtable explore the carnivalesque quality of the play, its humor, its language, and significant historical contexts. Dialogues with scholars and theater practitioners provide multiple perspectives on the nature of this narrative universe.

This module focuses on Shakespeare’s understanding of human psychology, especially the experience of desire. Twelfth Night dramatizes the folly associated with love, and also—as with all of Shakespeare’s comedies—revels in the tumult love creates. The world depicted in this play is characterized by a kind of collective madness that grows ever more chaotic as it progresses.

Module Three emphasizes how assumptions about social order fuel conflict in the play. The previous module emphasized the humor that derives from desire, but also the awareness of grimmer aspects of desire. The lectures, interviews and roundtables in this unit focus on desires that are not allowed. Desire creates conflict. This aspect of Twelfth Night is most obviously evident in the interactions among a number of the play’s minor characters, especially the conflict between Malvolio, on the one hand, and Sir Toby and Maria, on the other.

This module focuses on how Shakespeare’s play both conforms to the expectations of the comedic genre and challenges the genre’s conventions. Such tensions are especially evident in the play’s resolution. Even as the play provides the marriages expected at the end of a comedy, the play also draws attention to characters excluded from such happy endings. Twelfth Night derives great humor from the chaos prompted by love; but the conflicts unleashed in the course of the play’s action cannot all be resolved by the marriage of some members of the community.