TEXT, DATE, SOURCES AND THEMES
The earliest known text of Twelfth Night was printed in the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays (1623). But we can be sure that a finished version of the play existed by 2 February 1602 (N.S.) - the feast of Candlemas - when it was performed in the Great Hall of London's Middle Temple. A law student who was there, John Manningham, wrote in his diary that it was “much like The Comedy of Errors, or Men[a]echmi in Plautus, but most like . . . that in Italian called Inganni.”
Indeed, Twelfth Night's main plot - or at least its central chain of romantic devices - has a long Renaissance lineage that can be traced to an …
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