ABSTRACT
In a book on Twelfth Night published four years ago Dr. Leslie Hotson suggested that the play was written to compliment an Italian nobleman, Virginio Orsino, Duke of Bracciano. The interesting thing of course is that in short a time Shakespeare ultimately wrote this play, he had in a sense been composing it during most of the previous decade. Twelfth Night exhibits in its action one of the fundamental motifs of comedy: the education of a man or woman. The most important source for Twelfth Night is The Two Gentlemen of Verona. If Twelfth Night is the greatest of Shakespeare's romantic comedies, it is partly because of its success in embodying these feelings of wonder in the principal persons of the play. Orsino, with whom Twelfth Night begins and who draws us from the start into the aura of his imagination, is in some ways the most perfect of Shakespeare's romantic lovers simply because he is so much more.
