SOURCE: Tan, Marcus Cheng Chye. “‘Here I Am … Yet Cannot Hold This Visible Shape’: The Music of Gender in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.” Comitatus 32 (2001): 99-125.

In the following essay, Tan discusses the relationship of music to Twelfth Night's theme of sexual ambivalence.

The Elusive Nature of Twelfth Night

Taken as Shakespeare's farewell to romantic comedy and written around the same time as Hamlet, Twelfth Night presents a high comedy of elusive complexity that preempts the problem plays. Contesting a “universal consent [that] the very height of gay comedy is attained in Twelfth Night,”¹ modern critics note that Twelfth Night possesses “darker” features of the problem plays but, as C. L. Barber suggests in Shakespeare's Festive Comedy, the play manages to restore the festive through its comic resolution,² affirming what Jonathan Dollimore terms “the telos of harmonic integration.”³

Elements of “dark tragedy” constantly complicate the “sunny identity of spirit...