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Article: The serious comedy of Twelfth Night: dark didacticism in Illyria.(Critical Essay)
- Article from:
- Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature
- Article date:
- September 22, 2003
- Author:
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IN "Or What You Will," Barbara Everett notes that Shakespeare's Twelfth Night "poses in a nicely acute form a problem inherent in all the earlier comedies: why do we take them seriously? Or how, rather, best to explain the ways in which it is hard not to take them seriously-the sense that at their best they achieve a lightness as far as possible from triviality" (294). Everett has discovered a question that surely concerns any scholar of Shakespearean drama, for the bard's comedies are undoubtedly serious. But what, precisely, accounts for the dark dimension that pervades so many of the plays? My response is this: close scrutiny of the dramas indicates that, beginning as ...