A Question for William Shakespeare

Dear William
Why did you call Twelfth Night, Twelfth Night?
Yours,
Skippy

Dear Skippy,
It’s nice, for once, to have a relatively straightforward question (some people are very up close and personal). Many of my plays were written to be performed at specific season in the life of the court; Twelfth Night is one of these. In our festive seasons, which were modelled on the religious calendar, ‘twelfth night’ is the last night of the Christmas season and the end of a great time of entertainment, merry-making, misrule and general festivity.

Many of the games and puzzles we indulged in during this season were about what you might call a kind of topsy turvy world, where those with power were made powerless and vice versa. Twelfth Night takes this idea to an extreme. The powerful are impotent, girls become boys, and identity is unstable so what you think you know you discover you don’t know at all. And so on. It’s as simple as that.
Was your Christmas like this Skippy?

Yours,
William