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When Shakespeare’s Twins Are Shipwrecked by Warmer Seas
Two scholars take opposing sides on Twelfth Night. But there’s a third option
The sea can get pretty rough off the coast of Albania and Croatia. One of Shakespeare’s most popular plays, Twelfth Night, takes place after a shipwreck along that coastline.
Two of the passengers on board ship – a brother and a sister – are twins. Each thinks the other has drowned.
When the young woman reaches the shore, she asks the sea-captain what country they are in. He replies, “This is Illyria, lady.”
The young woman wonders what she is going to do in Illyria when she believes her brother is now in Elysium – the Greek version of heaven.
In a recent essay in the London Review of Books, a Shakespeare scholar stresses the shipwreck to draw attention to the dire situation the twins are in.
They wouldn’t have been on that ship for a pleasure trip. Were they forced migrants?
Shakespeare gives no explanation where the twins, Viola and her brother Sebastian, were coming from or where they were sailing towards.
One recent production has even characterised the sea captain as a people smuggler.
In the following issue of the LRB, there is a lengthy letter from another Shakespeare scholar taking exception to the idea of Viola and Sebastian as forced migrants.
In this scholar’s opinion, Twelfth Night is about love and artifice, discord and harmony. It does the play a disservice to twist it into being about something that happens to be on the front pages of today’s newspapers.
In this second scholar’s view, a shipwreck had a special meaning in Elizabethan theatre. A storm wrecking a ship is an act of nature. It shows that all humans, however mighty or powerful, were vulnerable to the accidents of “mere weather”.
Here are two scholars holding fundamentally opposing views. On the one side, you have the world of war, geopolitics and displaced populations, where characters become forced migrants as the result of human actions. On the other side, you have a world where nature is an entirely arbitrary force. It’s an argument between the…
