ABSTRACT
As You Like It and Twelfth Night are often seen as the twin peaks of Shakespeare's achievement in romantic comedy, yet within the conventions of the genre they could hardly be more different. While As You like it was almost without conventional comic intrigue, Twelfth Night bristles with plot complications. If the frequent comparisons between Twelfth Night and Jonsonian comedy have any basis, it may be in this sense of sharply distinguishing individuals adrift in a fragmented world, each with his own obsession. Certainly individual characters come more clearly into focus than in any previous comedy of Shakespeare's, and the sense that they can be bound together in a common experience is weaker. The play ends not with a dance or a procession of couples trooping off to bed, but with a solitary figure of Feste, singing of the wind and the rain. And this image of solitude echoes and reverberates throughout the play.
