Beyond the “lyric” in Illyricum

Critics of Twelfth Night have long treated Shakespeare’s setting for the play, Illyria, as an exotic and unfamiliar locale associated with literary romance, lyricism, and illusion. Leah Marcus remarks in Puzzling Shakespeare that “Illyria was scarcely familiar territory, more significant, perhaps, for its evocation of like-sounding exotica – Elysium, delirium – than for concrete geopolitical associations” (1988, 161). Kenneth Muir has similarly suggested that Illyria was a “conveniently obscure location” and Geoffrey Bullough refers to it as “that little-known coast” (quoted in Stanivuković 2004, 404). While most current editions of the play point out that Illyria “could be found on a map” in Shakespeare’s time (Smith 2001, 10), or that the name “could still be used to refer to part of the Adriatic coast – roughly Dalmatia – at the time under the dominion of the Venetian republic” (Elam 2008, 71), most tend to agree with Keir Elam’s assessment that there are “few traces in the comedy of this heritage” (Elam 2008, 71). The result has been a critical tradition that treats Illyria as a place that, in many respects, “resembles nothing more than Shakespeare’s England” (Elam 2008, 75), or that is “also very much a country of the mind, or a nowhere place, whose name simultaneously suggests and combines the words illusion and lyrics, both very present in the comedy” (Laroque 2005, 211; cf. Warren and Wells 1994, 9). While all of these critics point to important elements of the play’s language, setting, and performance, including the musical or sonorous qualities of the name itself – Bruce R. Smith goes so far as to suggest that “in a theater without illusionistic scenery, Illyria is more a soundscape than a landscape” (2001, 10) – this continuing emphasis on Illyria as a “mythical” place (Elam 1996, 31) has tended to divert our attention away from what Shakespeare’s earliest audiences would have known about the real history and geography of the region. Shakespeare’s choice to move the action of Twelfth Night from Constantinople or Ancona, ¹ where his sources were set, to the coast of Illyria (frequently glossed as “Sclavonia” by early modern writers) was not motivated by a desire for mystery or obscurity, but for reasons that had everything to do with the region’s concrete historical and geopolitical associations.