“What he wills”

Books on Shakespearean comedy – like those by Cesar Barber, Theodore Weiss, Ralph Berry, W. T. MacCary, G. Beiner, and Michael Mangan – routinely conclude with a chapter on Twelfth Night, as if in this play Shakespeare’s comic writing somehow culminates. ¹ Even Erich Segal, in his dour presage of the Death of Comedy, notes how Shakespeare surpasses Lyly and Plautus in what he calls transvestite comedy: “Twelfth Night is arguably Shakespeare’s finest comedy, the culmination of his ‘first comic phase’” (2000, 310). Whether it is his “finest comedy” in a “comic phase” (as if the author were a teen taken with blue hair), certainly it is a rich text in several senses, offering a cascade of jewels or tokens; if for Barber the play tests courtesy with liberty, it also anticipates Timon as rigor tests generosity. Titled for a festal date in the Renaissance calendar, the one associated with Christmas gift-giving in imitation of the Magi, Twelfth Night also embraces other Renaissance ceremonies from which only vestiges remain.