Twelfth Night is the only play of Shakespeare's with an alternate name: its full title is Twelfth Night, or What You Will. At the center of the Twelfth Night feast was a large cake with a bean or coin baked into it and served to the assembled company the person whose slice of cake contained it became King Bean, the Christmas King, or Lord of Misrule-a commoner who would take the place of a king in order to watch over the topsy-turvy proceedings. In Renaissance England, Twelfth Night was known as a "feast of misrule." For the day, kings and nobles were to be treated as peasants, and peasants as kings and nobles.
So, originally, "Cesario" would probably have been a boy, dressed up as a woman, dressed up as a man.įeast of Misrule: Twelfth Night takes its name from an English holiday celebrated on January 5, the so-called "twelfth night of Christmas" or the Eve of the Feast of the Epiphany. In Shakespeare's time, Viola's part, like all the parts in Twelfth Night, would have been played by a man, because women were not allowed to act. What a drag! Twelfth Night is sometimes called a "transvestite comedy" for the obvious reason that its central character is a young woman, Viola, who disguises herself as a pageboy, Cesario.
0 kommentar(er)
