Setting
Illyria, the setting of Twelfth Night, is important to the play's romantic atmosphere. Illyria was an ancient region on the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea covering parts of modern Albania, Croatia, and Montenegro, and the city state of Ragusa has been proposed as the setting. Illyria may have been suggested by the Roman comedy Menæchmi, the plot of which also involves twins who are mistaken for each other. Shakespeare himself mentioned it previously, in Henry VI, Part II, noting its reputation for pirates. It has been noted that the play's setting also has English characteristics such as Viola's use of "Westward ho!", a typical cry of 16th-century London boatmen, and also Antonio's recommendation to Sebastian of "The Elephant" as where it is "best to lodge" in Illyria; the Elephant was a pub not far from the Globe Theatre.
Read more about this topic: Twelfth Night
Famous quotes containing the word setting:
“Linnæus, setting out for Lapland, surveys his “comb” and “spare shirt,” “leathern breeches” and “gauze cap to keep off gnats,” with as much complacency as Bonaparte a park of artillery for the Russian campaign. The quiet bravery of the man is admirable.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The world is ... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not “inhabit” only “the inner man,” or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.”
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1907–1961)
“something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,”
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)