Truth in Masquerade: Shakespeare's Twelfth Night as Storyteller's Manifesto

Conceal me what I am, and be my aid
For such disguise as haply shall become
The form of my intent.
(Shakespeare 1.2:50-51)

Scholars have long recognized William Shakespeare's comedy Twelfth Night as a celebration of the carnivalesque in Elizabethan England.  As the editors of The Norton Anthology of English Literature write in “Twelfth Night,” their introduction to the play of the same name, “[In Elizabethan England], Twelfth Night, the Feast of the Epiphany...marked the culminating night of the traditional Christmas revels...A rigidly hierarchical social order...temporarily gave way to raucous rituals of inversion” (1078), allowing the relief of class resentment and envy.  Twelfth Night's disguises, deceptions, eventual comic revelations, and assortment of happy endings mirror the Twelfth Night festivities.  The masquerades around which Twelfth Night's plot revolves, however, do more than express humanity's need for occasional communal games of dress-up and pretend.  A deeper significance lies in the statement Twelfth Night's masquerades make about the power of performance itself:  that some truths can only be transmitted through artifice, and that the theater serves a vital role in the transmission of those truths.