Viola, shipwrecked and believing her twin brother drowned, disguises herself as a young man to find work and ends up delivering love letters, on behalf of the duke she secretly loves, to a countess who promptly falls for the messenger instead of the sender. Shakespeare builds an entire comedy out of desire that keeps aiming itself at the wrong — or, depending how you read it, exactly the right — target.
The subplot is crueler than the main romance: Malvolio, the countess’s puritanical steward, is tricked with a forged love letter into humiliating himself so thoroughly that even the play’s other characters seem uneasy about how far the joke has gone, and he exits vowing revenge on everyone, a genuinely bitter note inside an otherwise festive comedy.
Its full title, Twelfth Night, or What You Will, names it for the last night of Christmas revelry, when social order was traditionally allowed to invert itself for an evening — exactly what happens, gleefully, to everyone in Illyria.
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