ABSTRACT
Hospitality is a recurrent theme in Shakespeare, but nowhere does inhospitality so pointedly implicate the household as a social institution as it does in Twelfth Night through the figure of the stranger. In the opening scene, four survivors from a shipwreck make their ways into the society of Illyria, a place that, as Antonio warns Sebastian, “to a stranger, / Unguided and unfriended, often prove / Rough and unhospitable” (3.3.9-11).1 Antonio may be biased, since he is a known enemy to Orsino’s men, and can walk abroad only at peril to himself. But as we learn towards the end, even the Captain, one “bred and born / Not three hours’ travel from this very place,” and familiar enough to catch its latest gossip (1.2.20-21), inexplicably ends up in prison. In truth, neither of Illyria’s two noble houses seems ready to entertain strangers, the one headed by a nubile countess who has cloistered herself from the world, the other by an eligible duke occupied with entertaining himself. While Viola finds service with the Duke, Sebastian engages in the tourist’s “mere extravagancy” (2.1.9-10), assuming roles that fit into Illyria’s household and commercial economies. Sebastian is buying his right to be in Illyria, Viola is earning it. While neither requires hospitality, the issue remains latent in the play’s persistent interest in strangers and “ domesticating strangeness,”2 to borrow a term from Catherine Lisak’s essay and title.
