Let's start.

Okay, so this week's lecture is on 12th night, the play which comes from the end of the Elizabethan period.

We think it's written about 1601, we know its first recorded performances in 1602.

And that puts it at the end of Shakespeare's comic period.

So as you're probably getting a sense of, during the

1590s, Shakespeare mostly writes histories and comedies. There's a couple of tragedies at the

beginning. Around 1601, the date of Hamletish, just after Julius Caesar, we're sort of moving

towards the tragedies which dominate the early part of

the Jacobian period. It's first printed in the first folio in 1623, and it's a play which has got

as near thematic neighbours, Hamlet, surprisingly perhaps, it shares the death of fathers and the threat

of madness, King Lear with which it shares a

melancholic fool, and in fact, Festi's song at the end of 12th night is echoed by the fool in

King Lear. The comedy of errors with which it obviously shares twins, the tempest with which it

shares the storm. And of course it also fits with previous comedies

of cross-dressing, including two gentlemen of Verona, the merchant of Venice, and as you like it.

Chronologically, it's most closely related to Hamlet, I think, and probably to Troilus and Cressida,

and that might give you some sense of the kind of mood you might want to think more about in the play.

What I'm going to try and do this morning is to turn the lecture around one marginal character,

and I'm stressing that he is marginal, kind of as an experiment to see what we might do with that.

And this is the character of Antonio.

And I think Antonio's role may help us think about some important questions for the play,

about desire and sexuality, but also about the way comedy works,

...