Page:Twelfth Night (1922) Yale.djvu/117

Under date of February 2, 1601–2, a London law student of the Middle Temple, John Manningham, made this entry in his Diary: 'At our feast wee had a play called "Twelue Night, or What you Will," much like the Commedy of Errores, or Menechmi in Plautus, but most like and neere to that in Italian called Inganni.' This single sentence anticipates, at least roughly, the general trend of later critical investigation of the sources of the main plot of Twelfth Night. Definite features of that story are certainly present alike in Latin comedy and sixteenth- century Italian drama. As Manningham suggests, Shakespeare in one of his earliest plays, The Comedy of Errors, had already used the theme of mistaken identity on which the Menæchmi of Plautus is essentially based. In several plays of Terence and Plautus, furthermore, the complications due to woman's disguise in man's dress suggest a general dramatic situation which became popular with writers of the Renaissance and was shaped to his own ends by Shakespeare in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and in As You Like it.

Manningham recognized not merely general resemblances between Twelfth Night and Latin comedy but a more immediate connection with Italian drama. Investigation of his reference to the play in Italian called Inganni' [The Cheats] has resulted in the discovery of two Italian comedies with that title—one, by Nicolo Secchi, acted in 1547, and printed at Florence in 1562; the other, by Curzio Gonzaga, printed at Venice in 1592. In both, the complications of the plot turn on the resemblance of a brother and sister clad in man's attire. 'The name assumed by the lady in disguise in Gonzaga's play,' says Hunter, 'is