Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Often scholars, students, and teachers need to use more than one academic discipline to come to an enriched understanding of a subject. The fields of Historical Anthropology, Literary Criticism, and Textual and Performative Analysis can usefully be employed to illuminate my thesis, that the character, Feste, in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, is modeled at least in part on the English Gypsies who proliferated along the sides of the country roads and on the wrong side of the Thames in the Taverns and Ordinaries, and with whom Shakespeare would have been familiar. I read the travelling musician, Feste, as a property-less wanderer, a free man, the voice of Time and Timelessness, a spirit of grace come among a fallen people, and Fate’s sorcerer. Such an approach casts new light on both the gypsies of the Tudor period and on the play, and leads to the discovery of new ironies in both cases. Such a reading can also help us as we move into a new global world of mass migrations and misunderstandings among people.