Twelfth Night Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Ralph Berry

Critical Essay by Ralph Berry

SOURCE: "Twelfth Night: The Experience of the Audience," Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakespearian Study and Production, 34, 1981, pp. 111-19.

In the following essay, Berry examines the means by which Shakespeare manipulates audience perceptions of the characters in Twelfth Night.

Let the claret which Shakespeare drank, as we know, on expense account symbolize the general experience of Twelfth Night. The taste of this play has the same tension between sweetness and dryness, which translates easily into the indulgent reveries of the opening and the realities of rain, ageing, and work, in Feste's final song. To analyse this tension is surely the business of criticism. The experience of Twelfth Night blends our sense of the title metaphor with the growing magnitude of the joke that goes too far, and with it our grasp of the relation between the gulling and romantic actions. It is a matter of changing expectations,...
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