That I might be the organ.

KING CLAUDIUS

It falls right.

You have been talked of, since your travel, much,

And that in Hamlet’s hearing, for a quality

Wherein they say you shine. Your sum of parts

Did not together pluck such envy from him

As did that one, and that, in my regard,

Of the unworthiest siege.

LAERTES

What part is that, my lord?

KING CLAUDIUS

A very ribbon in the cap of youth,

Yet needful too, for youth no less becomes

The light and careless livery that it wears

Than settled age his sables and his weeds

Importing health and graveness.

L. After ‘match you’ at 4.7.85, Q2 has these additional lines continuing the King’s speech:

Th’escrimers of their nation

He swore had neither motion, guard, nor eye

If you opposed them.

M. After 4.7.96, Q2 has these additional lines continuing the King’s speech:

There lives within the very flame of love

A kind of wick or snuff that will abate it,

And nothing is at a like goodness still,

For goodness, growing to a plurisy,

Dies in his own too much. That we would do

We should do when we would, for this ‘would’ changes,

And hath abatements and delays as many

As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents;

And then this ‘should’ is like a spendthrift’s sigh,

That hurts by easing. But to the quick of th’ulcer—

N. After ‘Sir’ at 5.2.107, Q2 has these lines (in place of F’s ‘you are not ignorant of what excellence Laertes is at his weapon’):

here is newly come to court Laertes, believe me, an absolute gentleman, full of most excellent differences, of very soft society and great showing. Indeed, to speak feelingly of him, he is the card or calendar of gentry, for you shall find in him the continent of what part a gentleman would see.

HAMLET Sir, his definement suffers no perdition in you, though I know to divide him inventorially would dizzy th’arithmetic of memory, and yet but yaw neither in respect of his quick sail. But in the verity of extolment, I take him to be a soul of great article, and his infusion of such dearth and rareness as, to make true diction of him, his semblable is his mirror, and who else would trace him his umbrage, nothing more.

OSRIC Your lordship speaks most infallibly of him.

HAMLET The concernancy, sir? Why do we wrap the gentleman in our more rawer breath?

OSRIC Sir?

HORATIO Is’t not possible to understand in another tongue? You will to’t, sir, rarely.

HAMLET What imports the nomination of this gentleman? OSRIC Of Laertes?

HORATIO (aside to Hamlet) His purse is empty already; all ’s golden words are spent.

HAMLET (to Osric) Of him, sir.

OSRIC I know you are not ignorant—

HAMLET I would you did, sir; yet, in faith, if you did it would not much approve me. Well, sir?

OSRIC You are not ignorant of what excellence Laertes is.

HAMLET I dare not confess that, lest I should compare with him in excellence. But to know a man well were to know himself.

OSRIC I mean, sir, for his weapon. But in the imputation laid on him by them, in his meed he’s unfellowed.

O. After 5.2.118, Q2 has the following additional speech:

HORATIO (aside to Hamlet) I knew you must be edified by the margin ere you had done.

P. After 5.2.154, Q2 has the following (in place of F’s ‘HORATIO You will lose this wager, my lord’):

Enter a Lord

LORD (to Hamlet) My lord, his majesty commended him to you by young Osric, who brings back to him that you attend him in the hall. He sends to know if your pleasure hold to play with Laertes, or that you will take longer time.

HAMLET I am constant to my purposes; they follow the King’s pleasure. If his fitness speaks, mine is ready, now or whensoever, provided I be so able as now.

LORD The King and Queen and all are coming down.

HAMLET In happy time.

LORD The Queen desires you to use some gentle entertainment to Laertes before you fall to play.

HAMLET She well instructs me. Exit Lord

HORATIO You will lose, my lord.

TWELFTH NIGHT

TWELFTH NIGHT, the end of the Christmas season, was traditionally a time of revelry and topsy-turvydom; Shakespeare’s title for a play in which a servant aspires to his mistress’s hand has no more specific reference. It was thought appropriate to the festive occasion of Candlemas (2 February) 1602 when, in the first known allusion to it, John Manningham, a law student of the Middle Temple in London, noted ‘at our feast we had a play called Twelfth Night, or What You Will’. References to ‘the Sophy’—the Shah of Persia (2.5.174; 3.4.271)—probably post-date Sir Robert Shirley’s return from Persia, in a ship named The Sophy, in 1599; and ‘the new map with the augmentation of the Indies’ (3.2.75) appears to be one published in 1599 and reissued in 1600. Shakespeare may have picked up the name Orsino for his young duke from a Tuscan nobleman whom Queen Elizabeth entertained at Whitehall with a play performed by Shakespeare’s company on Twelfth Night 1601. Probably he wrote Twelfth Night during that year.

Twelfth Night’s romantic setting is Illyria, the Greek and Roman name for Adriatic territory roughly corresponding to the former Yugoslavia. Manningham had noted that the play was ‘much like The Comedy of Errors or Menaechmi in Plautus’, thinking no doubt of the confusions created by identical twins. Shakespeare may also have known an anonymous Italian comedy, GI’Ingannati (The Deceived Ones), acted in 1531 and first printed in 1537, which influenced a number of other plays and prose tales including Barnaby Riche’s story of Apolonius and Silla printed as part of Riche’s Farewell to Military Profession (1581). Riche gave Shakespeare his main plot of a shipwrecked girl (Viola) who, disguised as a boy (Cesario), serves a young Duke (Orsino) and undertakes love-errands on his behalf to a noble lady (Olivia) who falls in love with her but mistakenly marries her twin brother (Sebastian). Shakespeare idealizes Riche’s characters and purges the story of some of its explicit sexuality: Riche’s Olivia, for example, is pregnant before marriage, and his Viola reveals her identity, in a manner impractical for a boy actor, by stripping to the waist. Shakespeare complicates the plot by giving Olivia a reprobate uncle, Sir Toby Belch, and two additional suitors, the asinine Sir Andrew Aguecheek and her steward, Malvolio, tricked by members of her household into believing that she loves him. More important to the play than to the plot is the entirely Shakespearian clown, Feste, a wry and oblique commentator whose wit in folly is opposed to Malvolio’s folly in wit.

Twelfth Night is the consummation of Shakespeare’s romantic comedy, a play of wide emotional range, extending from the robust, brilliantly orchestrated humour of the scene of midnight revelry (2.2) to the rapt wonder of the antiphon of recognition (5.1.224-56) between the reunited twins. In performance the balance shifts, favouring sometimes the exposure and celebration of folly, at other times the poignancy of unattained love and of unheeded wisdom; but few other plays have so consistently provided theatrical pleasure of so high an order.