ABSTRACT
The central animating feature of the plot of Twelfth Night is that of mistaken identity – in this case, one twin’s being taken for another. Apart from the comic potential of this mistake, exploited perhaps most fully in A Comedy of Errors, there is also the hint that it provides of Shakespeare’s analysis of how our thoughts make contact with the world, and specifically singular thoughts about individual people. In this paper, a case is that he is exploring something like the ‘Way of Ideas’ made explicit in later writers such as Locke: that our thought about the world is indirect, mediated by our representations. The direct object of thought is a purely intentional, constructed, object, which may fail to correspond in various respects to reality. Thus, Shakespeare may not only be anticipating an important element of empiricist philosophy, but providing two problem cases for it: First, if reference to external objects is mediated by the ideas (mental descriptions) we have of those objects, what happens when two external objects correspond to those ideas? Second, if love involves an idealisation of the loved, does the way of ideas not entail that love is essentially directed to a purely intentional object, a thesis illustrated by almost all of the play’s central characters. Such an interpretation has to be treated with some caution, no doubt, but it receives some support from the various remarks the characters themselves, and in particular Viola (‘Cesario’) and Olivia make about the nature of identity. It also offers to solve one of the most perplexing scene’s of the play: Olivia’s ready acceptance of the fact that the man she has married is not the individual she fell in love with.
