ABSTRACT
Most readers of Twelfth Night would probably agree that this is the most delightful, harmonious and accomplished of Shakespeare's romantic comedies, in many ways his crowning achievement in one branch of his art. Shakespeare has taken a familiar kind of love story and transformed it so as to extend the interest from the heroine to a group of characters who reveal varying responses to the power of love. The analysis of love as a kind of folly was a common theme of Renaissance moralists, who delighted in contrasting it with the wisdom of the stoic or the man of affairs. Shakespeare's treatment of the theme in Twelfth Night is a natural development from his own previous work, but he could have found strong hints of it in the possible sources of his Viola-Orsino story. The leading characters in Twelfth Night form the most subtle portrayal of the psychology of love that Shakespeare had yet drawn.
