ABSTRACT
This chapter provides how the relationship between space and memory in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night informs contributors' understanding of romantic comedy in this play. In direct comparison with Shakespeare's late romances, Twelfth Night delivers a number of its characters into a hostile, unknown, and in some ways undefined space. That Twelfth Night was performed at Middle Temple Hall on February 2, 1602 and not in a public outdoor amphitheatre may serve to complicate our understanding of the play's treatment of space and memory. Twelfth Night's dominant masculine friendship between Antonio and Sebastian exists in a space that that is designated as apart from Illyria, or as another part of it, and this location also has implications for the play's understanding of genre. Both Twelfth Night and The Winter's Tale urge audiences to reflect at length upon the magical, the wondrous, and the threatening lands while investing in romantic tropes governed by expectations of betrothal and marriage.
