Twelfth Night or What You Will is often regarded as a romantic comedy that takes some unexpected dark turns, packed with mistaken identities, love triangles and devious schemes.

The play opens after a violent shipwreck separates twins Viola and Sebastian, leaving each to believe the other has drowned. Washed up on the shores of Illyria, Viola must now find her own way in a strange new land. Whilst this might seem like a far cry from the festive comedy that follows, Twelfth Night’s opening reflects its wider interest in the relationship between the comic and the tragic, joy and pain.

Shipwrecks and stormy seas feature in several of Shakespeare’s other plays, including The Comedy of Errors, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Pericles, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. Across these plays, we can recognise recurring tropes related to shipwrecks. Shakespeare uses maritime disasters to separate families, wreck personal fortunes and generally throw lives into chaos. In the aftermath of these events, the plays become concerned with restoring social harmony. In plays like Twelfth Night, shipwrecks temporarily throw their dramatic worlds into social disorder, and characters are able to subvert conventions surrounding gender, class and sexuality. In the process, shipwrecks allow the affected community to redefine or reconstruct itself through chaos and catastrophe.

Most of Shakespeare’s plays draw on classical texts, and his representation of shipwrecks is no different. Homer and Virgil were particularly fascinated with the dangers humans face on the seas. Virgil’s The Aeneid follows the Trojan Aeneas, whose journey across oceans to found a new nation in Italy is repeatedly thwarted by destructive storms. When his fleet is damaged by rough conditions, Aeneas is forced to pause his imperial venture to take refuge in Africa and later Sicily. In this way, Virgil creates links between imperialism, sailing and shipwrecks that can also be found in plays like The Tempest, where a group of Italian shipwreck survivors are washed onto an island under the command of Prospero. In Homer’s The Odyssey, Odysseus’s experience with shipwrecks has more devastating effects. Following two major disasters on the seas, it takes him ten years to return home from the Trojan War, and he loses all his men and ships in the process. We can see traces of this narrative, in which the reunification of families and communities comes at a great cost, in Shakespeare’s plays.

Shakespeare may have also been inspired by the contemporary reality of maritime voyages. We don’t know the exact number of ships which were wrecked in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but these events were regular occurrences. Historians estimate that between 1624 and 1628, roughly 130 ships were lost each year, and this sobering statistic gives us a sense of the regularity of losses at sea. As a result of global expansion and colonial efforts, English ships and sailors were increasingly placed in unfamiliar waters, and certain sea routes were well known for being exceedingly dangerous.

Within Shakespeare’s lifetime, the shipwreck of a vessel called the Sea Venture was notorious, and some scholars argue that this event was a source of inspiration for The Tempest. In 1609, the Sea Venture was enroute to resupply the Jamestown colony in Virginia when a brutal storm tore the ship apart, stranding its passengers in Bermuda for months. A passenger named William Strachey went on to write a vivid account of the disaster that circulated in manuscript, before finally being published in 1625. Strachey paints a terrifying picture of the ‘swelling or roaring’ storm, in which the ‘winds and seas were as mad as fury and rage could make them’. This firsthand account is a reminder that tragic shipwrecks were not just dramatic devices but also a reality of travelling by sea.

In Twelfth Night, we learn about the shipwreck after the event. Dazed from the chaos of the storm, Viola asks the captain, ‘What country, friends, is this?’ The answer is Illyria, a region of the world which we now recognise as the Balkan peninsula, extending from northern Greece to Trieste in Italy. In early modern England, Illyria retained its classical associations, being understood as the home of a warlike people and a hotbed for piracy. As a shipwrecked woman in a foreign and potentially dangerous country, Viola must salvage her fortunes by disguising herself as a male page to enter the service of Duke Orsino.

In many ways, the shipwreck that opens Twelfth Night provides a dramatic structure for the rest of the play. Whilst the inhabitants of Illyria do not experience the wreck, they are similarly forced to navigate grief, uncertain futures and social disorder. The boundaries of class, gender and sexuality become increasingly blurred, and the confusion caused by the shipwreck is only resolved in the play’s final moments. Even as Viola leans into the festivity of Illyria and its romantic possibilities, she is haunted by the loss of Sebastian until their reunion in the last act. The chaos and tragedy of the shipwreck ripples out across Twelfth Night, as Shakespeare intricately interweaves the comic and the tragic.

Twelfth Night or What You Will, directed by Robin Belfield, opens 8 August.

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