Open Lecture: More matter for a May morning’ Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and the thresholds of foolery

More matter for a May morning’ Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and the thresholds of foolery

24th May 2025 5pm

Tickets: £10.00 Please call Caroline direct on 01244 532350 to order your tickets.

The 1623 First Folio labels Twelfth Night a comedy.
But how comfortably does this chaotic and subversive play actually sit in that genre?
Do modern sensibilities demand a more nuanced interpretation of it?

In thinking about comedy’s limitations and the thresholds of foolery, I’ll use Trevor Nunn’s glorious 1996 film adaptation as a springboard into considering the shadows that haunt three of the play’s characters: Feste, Malvolio, and Antonio. Is this a comedy suited, as the roguish servant Fabian suggests, to the folly of a bright May morning, or is it more properly placed, as its title proposes, firmly in the melancholy darkness of January?

Emma Rees

In 2016 Emma Rees was Gladstone’s Library’s first Political Writer in Residence. She is professor of literature and gender studies at the University of Chester where she has taught Shakespeare’s works for a quarter of a century. In 2017 she finally achieved her goal of seeing every one of Shakespeare’s plays live on stage at least once, and she ran her first residential Gladstone’s Library Shakespeare course in 2018, on The Taming of the Shrew. She returned in 2019 with The Merchant of Venice; led a weekend course on Macbeth in 2023; and on The Tempest in 2024. She’s delighted to be returning in 2025 with Twelfth Night.