Twelfth Night Allusions

William Shakespeare was an English playwright and poet. He was broadly known as " the greatest writer in the English language." Shakespeare wrote Twelfth Night near the middle of his career and wrote it to entertain people because it was near Christmas time when the first production of the play was first performed. Shakespeare's intention in writing this play was to present a Romantic comedy that explored the theme of love, music, and beauty. He successfully completed this play and used many literary devices, particularly he used allusions. An allusion is when an author makes an indirect reference to an event or figure. Shakespeare had a deep understanding of Roman and Greek mythologies as there are many references in the play and there were
Epiphany celebrates the arrival the Three Wise Men, to deliver their gifts to baby Jesus. Epiphany celebrations are known to be "a time of masques, revels, defiance of authority, and general foolishness." The Epiphany celebrations are quite similar to the play because the themes like love, disguise, indecency are shown throughout the play. These themes are shown in the antics of Maria, Sirs Toby Andrew, Feste and Fabian. Specifically, the treatment of Malvolio can be seen as indecent as they decided to have Malvolio locked up in total darkness making him think that he is a madman when Feste dresses up like a priest and made him believe that he is in a bright room not a dark one in act 4, scene 2. Disguises are a part of the Epiphany celebration and is a theme throughout the play because Viola plans to disguise herself as a boy, which also captured the theme of "defiance of authority" as it is against what people want or think is right. Finally, we also have the love triangles in the play, which capture the theme of romance. We can see exactly how Shakespeare's play portrays all of the above themes of Epiphany, making Twelfth Night, the perfect title for the play written for an Epiphany