Context — Twelfth Night — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Context
Introduction
What you need to know
The Elizabethan context of Twelfth Night: the festival of Twelfth Night and its licensed disorder, Puritans and their opposition to revelry,
boy actors and cross-dressing on stage, marriage, rank and service in a great household, and the play's sources and date.
How to use this context in an answer about the play rather than as background.
When the play was written and first seen: around 1600 to 1602, first recorded in performance at Middle Temple Hall on 2 February 1602, Candlemas, and first printed in the 1623 First Folio as the only Shakespeare play published with a subtitle.
The festival of Twelfth Night: the eve of Epiphany at the end of the Christmas season, a time of revelry when servants dressed as masters and men as women, presided over by a Lord of Misrule, and a play full of songs and disorder that suits that mood.
Puritans and their strict opposition to festivals, revelry and the theatre, and Malvolio described as 'a kind of puritan'.
Boy actors: women's parts played by boys, so that Viola was a boy playing a woman disguised as a young man, and the comedy and ambiguity this creates.
Marriage, rank and service: matches made for wealth and status, women expected to marry and obey, a countess running her own household after the deaths of her father and brother, and a steward, a gentlewoman and a fool among her servants.
Sources and setting: the Italian comedy Gl'ingannati, Barnabe Riche's story of Apollonius and Silla, Plautus's comedy of twins, and an Illyria on the Adriatic coast with English touches such as Antonio's lodging at the Elephant, the name of a London pub.
Shakespeare's own twins, Hamnet and Judith, born in 1585, and the suggestion that Hamnet's death in 1596 lies behind a story of a twin believed drowned.
Melancholy as a fashionable mood in England at the time, and the lovesick Orsino and the mourning Olivia as its examples.
Edexcel's Shakespeare question has two parts: part (a) on the printed extract marks only language, form and structure (AO2), so context earns nothing there; part (b) on the play elsewhere, from memory, marks the argument and its references (AO1, 15 marks) and context (AO3, 5 marks), not language analysis. Say which part each worked paragraph and exam tip is for.
