ABSTRACT
The purpose of playing says Hamlet, is to hold as twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. Hamlet himself employs 'playing' in various guises, as a means of penetrating false appearances to uncover hidden truths, but he also discovers how slippery illusions can be when their effects become entangled in the human world. Twelfth Night it offers no pat solutions. In a comic world devoted to playing and yet mirroring the actual world of being, in which identities are both mistaken and revealed, in which deception can both conceal truths and expose them, and in which bonds have disgraced the words on which men are dependent for communication, no permanent resolution of these ambiguities is ever possible. Shakespeare himself shrugs off the task of providing any final illumination with delightful finesse.
