"Cliff Notes - Twelfth Night" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

can write as well as an educated gentleman. If the venom of
Greene's attack is a measure of envy, Shakespeare must have been
doing well by then.

The fact that a man who had never been to a university
presumed to write plays probably offended Greene's sense of
order and propriety. He was not the only one made uncomfortable
by the changes in the social order brought about by the
Renaissance. Change always brings with it a certain amount of
resentment, especially among those people who were happy with
the status quo.

Twelfth Night was not written as a social treatise, and it
would be a serious mistake to try to make it one. Nonetheless,
in the Illyria of the play you find a society that has much in
common with Shakespeare's London.

The modern idea of equality had no place in Elizabethan
thinking. No one doubted that some people were better than
others. There was a definite hierarchy, an order in society.
Philosophically, this reflected the order in the universe. When
people behaved improperly, either by pretending to be better
than they were or by failing to live up to the standards
expected of them, the whole world would become disordered. In
Twelfth Night, part of the comic disorder is caused by the
aspirations of Malvolio and Sir Andrew, and by the emotional
self-indulgence of Orsino and Olivia.

Orsino and Olivia are important in the world of Illyria
because they are at the top of this social ladder. They are the
nobles, and are expected to behave nobly. Rank definitely had
its privileges, but it had duties as well. Those duties
included behaving suitably and sensibly.

Two of the other characters in Twelfth Night, Sir Andrew
Aguecheek and Sir Toby Belch, belong to the same class as Orsino
and Olivia, though they are at the bottom end of it. Their
failures are far more extreme than those of Olivia and Orsino,
and so they are more ludicrously comic.

Some readers see them as representatives of knighthood in
decline. We cannot help but notice that Sir Andrew seems
completely untrained in the skills a knight should have.
Instead, there is a great fuss about his wealth. This provides
a bit of social satire. In Shakespeare's day, a man with enough
money could buy a knighthood. (Queen Elizabeth I was known to
sell even higher titles on occasion.) You can imagine that the
members of the older aristocracy were less than thrilled to have
their ranks invaded by these wealthy upstarts. If Sir Andrew's
knighthood comes from wealth and not from birth, it is utterly