ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews what audiences and authors can say with some certainty about the play's sources before reviewing some of the core issues around the straightforward approach. It discusses some of the most prominent "red herring" the play seems to make available, inviting audiences and authors to make sense of what in his eponymous book Stephen Booth brilliantly describes as Precious Nonsense, leaving audiences and authors, potentially, baffled as well as delighted. The chapter explores The Comedy of Errors, to which, of course, Twelfth Night is affiliated in many ways. It suggests that the play then plays with and mocks audiences’ and authors’ desire to pin the motifs down to specific theme-linked "meanings." The chapter also suggests another source for the play in Robert Armin's writing, and it is at least plausible that the jokes were in fact Armin's own improvisations and scripted into the book of the play.
