by Steve Newman

Created on: November 17, 2009

In the 1820s, Lord Byron (George Gordon), wrote of the Greek Islands thus:

The Scian and the Teian muse,

The Hero's harp, the lover's lute,

Have found the fame your shores refuse:

Their place of birth alone is mute

To sounds which echo further west

Than your sires' 'Islands of the Blest'...

Which is as good a description of Robert Jones's set - and the ethos - of director Gregory Doran's new RSC production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night your are ever likely to get in just six lines of classic poetry. And it's that Romantic period of the early 19th century - of poets such as Byron, and their wealthy, and, in many cases, rather stupid, upper-class fellow travellers, and the somewhat languid lifestyle of the near east - that trickles its way through this glorious new interpretation of one of the most beloved - and misunderstood - of Shakespeare's plays, because, for all its comedy, it is still, at centre, a tragedy.

And Twelfth Night is always about Malvolio isn't it, and those ridiculous yellow stockings, and how such a man (a foolish, preening unloved man, but at heart a very lonely, and kindly man) gets his come-uppence for being (in the eyes of his colleagues) something of a pain in the backside. And of course it's those stupid upper-class fellow travellers who persuade one of Malvolio's colleagues to write a letter, supposedly from Malvolio's employer, saying how much she - the employer - is in love with her steward, and that he must wear those yellow stockings to show his love. And of course Malvolio's vanity, and loneliness, get the better of him and, when he discovers the 'joke' that has been played on him falls into a deep pit of bitterness and loathing, destroying what kindliness he had, which, of course, is the tragedy.

In other words Twelfth Night is a play about class and social snobbery, which was something Shakespeare suffered from all his life: he was never part of the 16th and early 17th century literary establishment, never one of the college boys. And let's not forget that on the very day that Shakespeare died Oliver Cromwell started his short-lived university career at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and later recalled how that, even then, radical university (Shakespeare had not been university educated) celebrated the playwright's death (not his work or possible legacy, but his actual death) until the early hours. And that snobbery, and the affect it had on him, percolates throughout Shakespeare's work.

As of course does the well tried

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