Учебное пособие 4 unit I. The renaissance 1485-1649

TWELFTH NIGHT
Twelfth Nigh
t is the most mature of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies and
one that recalls his own earlier plays. It was written probably in 1601 and
was published for the first time in the Folio of 1623. We know it was
performed in the winter of 1602 at the Middle Temple, one of London’s law
schools. It is a play of great emotional range, from farcical
misunderstandings (based on a set of separated twins, as in The Comedy of
Errors) to poignant moments in which a woman in disguise must serve the

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man she loves (as in
Two Gentlemen of Verona
). The play ends with lovers
happily paired, but with the ambitious Malvolio isolated (like Jacques in
As
You Like It
or Shylock in
The Merchant of Venice
) and swearing to “be
revenged upon the whole pack of you.”
The comedy may have been written specifically for presentation at a
festival of
Twelfth Night
, which occurs 12 nights after Christmas Eve and
was once a time for mirth and merrymaking, marking the end of the
Christmas revels. The play’s outrageous antics, especially for Sir Toby
Belch, reflect in spirit the outrageous behavior permitted at Twelfth Night
celebrations during the Middle Ages. Yet there is a darker side to Twelfth
Night. Not only is Malvolio unreconciled to the community at the end, but
Sir Andrew, Antonio, and the clown, Feste, all stand apart from the final
celebrations, and Feste’s final song reminds the audience of how far our day-
to-day world is from the idealization of comedy.
UNIT VIII.
 PROBLEM COMEDIES
Three plays—
All’s Well That Ends Well, Troilus and Cressida
, and
Measure for Measure
—written soon after the mature comedies are usually
called by modern critics “problem plays,” a term first coined for them in
1896. The problem comedies touch on complex and often unpleasant themes
and contain characters whose moral flaws are graver and more difficult to
change than the shortcomings of the characters in the farces or the joyous
comedies. Little of the light-hearted humor of the earlier comedies, nor the
easy satisfactions of their endings, appears in these plays. They are, however,
emotionally rich and dramatically exciting, and have become increasingly
successful on stage and stimulating to readers.