SOURCE: Champion, Larry S. “The Perspective of Comedy: Shakespeare's Pointers in Twelfth Night.” Genre 1, no. 4 (October 1968): 269-89.

In the following essay, Champion argues that Twelfth Night features some of Shakespeare's most well-developed comic characters whose true but hidden identities are revealed over the course of the drama.

It is commonplace to speak of the different kinds of Shakespearean comedy. The “happy” or “joyous” comedies, for instance, are contrasted with the “enigmatic” or “problem” comedies on the one hand and the “philosophic” or “divine” comedies on the other. And, among the first group, we are sometimes told that The Two Gentlemen of Verona is a less successful “romantic” comedy than Much Ado About Nothing or that Twelfth Night is pure comedy whereas As You Like It incorporates potentially tragic motifs. In a broad sense, of course, the attitudes toward life expressed by comedy can range from the satiric to...