Twelfth Night

Abstract

That was how Robert Manningham described a production of Twelfth Night at the Middle Temple at Candlemas (2 February) 1602. It was not the first performance, which must have taken place at least a year earlier, as Shakespeare wrote the play before or during 1600. But the record of it that Manningham gives (Manningham was a barrister at the Temple) provides us with two useful pieces of information. The play was suitable for private performance on one or other of the festive occasions at the Inns of Court and elsewhere during the winter (Leslie Hotson believes that the first performance was in honour of another festive occasion — the entertainment of Orsino, Duke of Bracciano at Whitehall on 6 January 1601). We do not have to take its title too seriously. None of the three ‘contemporary’ occasions when we know it was performed fell on a Twelfth Night. Two of them (this one and one in 1623 at court) fell on Candlemas. The other (for King James in 1618) on Easter Monday. Only Hotson’s hypothetical first production took place on an actual Twelfth Night.

At our feast we had a play called ‘Twelve Night or What You Will’, much like the Commedy of Errores, or Menechmi in Plautus, but most like and neere to that in Italian called Ipgani. A good practice in it to make the Steward beleeve his Lady widdowe was in love with him, by counterfeyting a letter as from his Lady in general termes, telling him what she liked best in him, and prescribing his gesture in smiling, his apparaile, etc, and then when he came to practise making him beleeve they tooke him to be mad.