Twelfth Night, or What You Will

Twelfth Night, or What You Will is essentially a celebration of romantic love and can be viewed as a traditional romantic comedy. The play has many of the elements common to Elizabethan romantic comedy, including the devices of mistaken identity, separated twins, and gender-crossing disguise, and its plot revolves around overcoming obstacles to “true” love. And, like other representatives of the genre, this show also features a sub-plot in which a self-inflated “sour” or “blocking” character, the steward Malvolio, is brought to his knees through a trick orchestrated by a ribald if also self-inflated character in the person of Sir Toby Belch.