A review of Power and Transgression in Twelfth Night

Abstract

If the distinction can be made (and, in a sense, it cannot), the main interest of Twelfth Night is poetic rather than human. The characters lack the idiosyncratic vigor of Shakespeare's best comic characters, and very little that they say or do is very funny. Their emotions are never intense; the lovers, with all their pleading and scorning, their smiling and sighing and blinking back tears, are, as has been pointed out before, less in love with each other than with love itself. The play's charms derive very largely from its rather limp-wristed, but very pretty, love poetry.