ABSTRACT
Twelfth Night’s alternative title is What You Will. What’s in a name? we might ask with Juliet. A parent’s impulse to play? In Will Shakespeare’s ‘romantic comedies’ will-meaning, for the Elizabethans, both the assertion of power and sexual desire1 —is the principal concern of the characters and motivator of the plot. Twelfth Night, in particular, offers multiple images of ‘the mobility of desire’2 —a theme which was taken up enthusiastically in performance in response to the ‘sexual revolution’ of the 1960s and 1970s, but was increasingly sidestepped in the more conservative atmosphere of the 1980s.
