From the Dark House to the Box Tree: Twelfth Night indoors and out

This summer Twelfth Night has appeared on stages in New York (Shakespeare in the Park—and in the fall on PBS Great Performances), London (Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre), and in Washington, DC (at our very own Folger Theatre). Simon Smith explores the play’s history on indoor and outdoor stages, asking how different spaces shape its performance possibilities.

Twelfth Night probably began life around 1601 at the outdoor Globe playhouse, in a performance space very different from later theatres. Rather than appearing in a controlled indoor environment, with lights and sound and an audience sitting in darkness, the play was lit by the sun, accompanied by acoustic music, and performed to an audience who could see one another clearly. The boy actor playing Viola/Cesario could have directed his first line, “What country, friends, is this?”  (1.2.1), to the visible groundlings standing around the stage, inviting them into the fictional world of Illyria. Sebastian’s gesture to “the glorious sun” (4.3.1) might have been to the sun itself on days when the weather obliged. On other occasions, when the British summer was living up to its damp reputation, it may have been Feste’s closing refrain, “the rain it raineth every day” (5.1.385), that resonated meta-theatrically instead.

Whilst relatively unpopular on the Restoration and 18th-century stages, Twelfth Night saw great success in the 19th century. This was partly thanks to celebrity Viola/Cesarios including Charlotte Cushman, Viola Allen, and Ada Rehan, as well as the popularity of Malvolio with actor-managers such as Henry Irving and Henry Jewett. It remains one of Shakespeare’s most performed plays to this day.

In a return to its Globe origins, the play became a staple of the outdoor stage in the 20th century. In the 1930s, open air theatres in Regent’s Park, London, and Ashland, Oregon, both established themselves with Twelfth Night productions. Beyond the professional stage, amateur and community performances became widespread as far back as the Boston Lend-a-Hand Dramatic Club’s effort in the summer of 1908.

Twelfth Night‘s enduring popularity outdoors

What makes Twelfth Night so popular outdoors? It lacks the forest setting of other open-air mainstays As You Like It and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Neither is it set on an island like the similarly popular Tempest. Granted, it does have memorable outdoor scenes, including Viola’s arrival on the coast of Illyria (1.2), Malvolio reading “Olivia’s” letter as the plotters watch him from a “boxtree” (2.5), and the cod-duel between Viola/Cesario and Sir Andrew at the “orchard-end” (3.4). Yet much of the play’s setting is more ambiguous, scenes just as easily imagined within Olivia’s house as outside in her gardens. It has nothing of the emphasis upon outdoor setting found in Twelfth Night’s comic predecessors As You Like It and Dream, both of which refer insistently to the Athenian and Arden forests. Perhaps Twelfth Night’s outdoor popularity a hundred years ago was less about its literal setting, then, and more about a view of the play as a light-hearted Shakespeare comedy that was firmly established in the 19th century: was Twelfth Night simply (more) matter for a summer afternoon’s entertainment?

Yet in the second half of the 20th century, the play’s darkness, melancholy, and lack of resolution came to the fore in criticism and performance alike. The brutality of Malvolio’s treatment is often foregrounded, as Trevor Nunn’s 1996 film adaptation with Nigel Hawthorne aptly illustrates. Antonio’s unresolved presence in the final scene is often emphasized, marginalized by Sebastian’s marriage to Olivia despite the two having spent “both day and night” in each other’s “company” for the preceding “three months.” The recognition of the play’s complexities has not lessened its popularity outdoors, each summer touring across the UK and US, played in university gardens, and regularly staged at permanent outdoor venues such as the Minack Theatre in Cornwall and the Utah Shakespeare Festival. Owen Horsley’s masterful 2024 production, set in a run-down cabaret café, “Olivia’s,” was no less stark in the distress of Toby’s alcoholism, and no more tidy in its conclusion, for the presence of Regent’s Park’s resident parakeets perching above the stage and occasionally adding to the play’s soundscape of karaoke, chaos, and even the odd snatch of “Happy Birthday” (in 2.3).

The possibilities of Twelfth Night performed indoors

Even though the majority of Twelfth Night’s early performances would have been at the Globe, it is also regularly documented indoors in the 17th century–in 1602 at Middle Temple Hall (where lawyers trained and practiced), and at James I’s royal court in 1618 and 1623. What comes to the fore if we think of Twelfth Night as an indoor play instead, then?

Law student John Manningham, who saw the 1602 Middle Temple Hall production, seems to have been particularly impressed with the Malvolio plot. He describes the “good practice in it to make the steward believe his lady widow was in love with him,” and thus to appear before Olivia (who is not in fact a widow) in yellow stockings. This performance was given as part of the Candlemas revels on 2^nd February, described as a “feast” by Manningham. We might therefore imagine scenes of revelry going down especially well, such as the drunken late-night singing of Toby and Andrew together with Feste that awakens Olivia’s household (2.3).

Later in the play, there is potential for a heightened indoor intensity when Malvolio is imprisoned in “a dark room and bound,” explicitly speaking from “within” as Feste baits him first in disguise as “Sir Topaz,” and then “in [his] own voice” (4.2). The play’s numerous two-hander scenes are also especially suited to more intimate performance spaces, as when Olivia asks to be given “the place alone” with Viola/Cesario (1.5), or when Feste matches wits with Viola/Cesario (3.1) and then again with Sebastian (who he thinks is Cesario) an act later (4.1). Twelfth Night seems to have been as well suited for success indoors in elite 17th-century performance spaces as it is today, from the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, UK, to the Folger Theatre on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.

In over 400 years of stage history, Twelfth Night has proved to be one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays, capable of taking many forms: light-hearted comedy as well as dark tale of mismatched desire; celebrity star vehicle as well as ensemble showcase; quintessentially “outdoor Shakespeare” as well as perfectly intimate indoor play. Perhaps it is its very adaptability to new cultural and theatrical contexts that has given Twelfth Night such an enduring stage life.