Twelfth Night, or What You Will is an Epiphany play. Shakespeare celebrates the sheer joy and redemption of the Christmas season even as he brings his characters to their own epiphanies.

Duke Orsino is in love with the idea of being in love. Since he “loves” someone who will not have him, he need not engage in real life or real marriage. The Countess Olivia, for her part, is in love with melancholy, a common 16th-century sense of proud world-weariness, which makes her want to withdraw from marriage and love. Her melancholy is a condition stimulated by the influence of her Puritan servant Malvolio, who seems to see despising of the world as a virtue.

Into this static world come the shipwrecked twins, Viola and Sebastian. Exemplifying the second theme of the Epiphany (the Lord’s Baptism) they are “drowned” by the tempest that destroys their ship and reborn into the world of Illyria. Disguised as a young man called Cesario, Viola (note how close her name is to Olivia) brings genuine love and activity to this enervated world.

Sir Toby Belch is a man full of the Catholic spirit of joy, who has gone to seed (and lots of drink), lost in a Puritan world that suppresses such joy. If the other main characters learn whom they really love, he learns to remember what a man he once was and act like him again in battle and in love with Maria.

All of these characters join in the joy of the Wedding Feast at Cana—the third theme of the Feast of Epiphany, all but Malvolio, who chooses not to learn but only to seek revenge.

In the contrast between the original joylessness of Olivia’s house and the over-ripe comfort of Duke Orsino’s palace, there is a mirror of the Protestant/Catholic quarrel about the world, a theme that a critical tradition is just beginning to deal with. But all audiences seem to feel the joy of the feast, presided over by Feste the clown, as we come to the water and eat and drink the wine of laughter at the wedding of this Epiphany.