Shipwrecks and Strangers
In TWELFTH NIGHT, Shakespeare returns to some of his favorite plot devices: storms, shipwrecks, and new worlds
“O, if it prove, / Tempests are kind and salt waves fresh in love.” Viola says these words late in Twelfth Night — onstage at Lantern Theater Company May 18 through June 18, 2023 — when it she first suspects that her beloved brother may be alive after all. Tempests and trips are recurring elements of Shakespeare plays, from the storm that gives The Tempest its name to the forest of Arden’s transformative power in As You Like It, Shakespeare returns again and again to the winds of nature and the wonder of an unknown land to break and remake families and turn the characters into someone new.
Shakespeare’s storms on the sea are almost always about tearing apart families before they can be put back together. Twelfth Night’s inciting incident is the storm that wrecks Viola and Sebastian’s ship and washes them up on Illyria’s beach. The Comedy of Errors, which also plays with twins and mistaken identity, is likewise set in motion by a storm and shipwreck that separated a family, including two sets of twins, on separate shores. Pericles features not one but two tempests; one washes the title character up in a new land where he meets his wife, and the other sunders his family for more than a decade before they can reunite.
Two of these Shakespearean storms are different: The Tempest’s storm, under the control of Prospero (and therefore the only one that is not the result of fate or chance), reunites an already-broken family on a magical island. There is also a tempest in King Lear, though this one remains on land; as the aged king leaves his second daughter’s home, he is left exposed to a fierce storm, the thunder and wind mirroring the disorder in his mind. And this time, the broken family cannot be reunited in this life.
Lear’s escape into the wilderness is another element Shakespeare returns to — the trip into an unknown place, often nature, that fundamentally changes a character. While they don’t feature shipwrecks or storms, As You Like It and A Midsummer Night’s Dream do use this construction; Rosalind and Celia escape into the forest to make a new life as new people, while the lovers of Midsummer leave the enchanted forest different from when they entered it. And in the plays that do feature storms at sea, the shipwrecks inevitably bring their characters to a new place, where they are a “stranger in a strange land.”
Twelfth Night combines all of these recurring themes in one play: the storm at sea and the shipwreck, the splintered families eventually made whole, and the need to leave the known world behind to make a place and an identity in a new one. A storm at sea tears Viola and Sebastian apart, after fate has already rendered them orphans on land. Each thinks the other is dead; each mourns the loss of their adored sibling. But the seemingly cruel sea is kind, washing them each up on shore and giving them both the chance to build a new life — one that will bind them closer together than before their trial by water.
In all but The Tempest, these storms reflect the randomness of life, or fate, or the gods. There is something bigger directing the course of the protagonists’ lives, and they are not in control. It is up to them to determine how they respond to the cataclysm; those who respond with care and openness are rewarded.
In Viola’s case, she meets her stormy fate and the resulting alienation with quick thinking and courage, and with the willingness to walk forward into the unknown. She may not being escaping into the forest of Arden or the woods outside Athens, but Illyria is an unfamiliar land. Named for the ancient Greek’s term for the area on the Adriatic coast that now includes Croatia and Serbia, in Shakespeare’s time there was no place by that word. His audience would likely have associations with the ancient name, imbuing it with a sense of mystery and wonder. It may even have sounded like paradise to them, due to the sonic qualities it shares with Elysium — a paradise for the dead. And like that paradise, the real joys of Illyria can only be found by passing first through grief.
There is a major difference in how Twelfth Night treats its transformative travel: the new land becomes the destination, not a midpoint in the journey. Prospero brings people to his island to make the family fit to leave it. Once reunited with his family, Pericles brings them home. After Rosalind, Celia, and the Midsummer lovers have found their matches and themselves, they leave the forest behind. Viola and Sebastian, though, make themselves a new home in Illyria, marrying nobles with deep ties to that community. They are no longer strangers in a strange land — they are at home in what is now their own place. The storms of fate and the sea have washed them clean, remaking their family in on new shores.
Lantern Theater Company’s production of Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare is onstage May 18 through June 18, 2023, at St. Stephen’s Theater. Visit our website for tickets and information.
