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Twelfth Night

William shakespeare.

Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Twelfth Night: Introduction

Twelfth night: plot summary, twelfth night: detailed summary & analysis, twelfth night: themes, twelfth night: quotes, twelfth night: characters, twelfth night: symbols, twelfth night: literary devices, twelfth night: quizzes, twelfth night: theme wheel, brief biography of william shakespeare.

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• Full Title: Twelfth Night, or What You Will
• When Written: c. 1601
• Where Written: England
• When Published: 1623
• Literary Period: The Renaissance
• Genre: Comedy
• Setting: Illyria (an ancient area on the coast of the Adriatic Sea, between contemporary Croatia, Albania, and Montenegro)
• Climax: The weddings of Viola and Orsino, and Sebastian and Olivia

Extra Credit for Twelfth Night

What a drag! Twelfth Night is sometimes called a "transvestite comedy" for the obvious reason that its central character is a young woman, Viola, who disguises herself as a pageboy, Cesario. In Shakespeare's time, Viola's part, like all the parts in Twelfth Night , would have been played by a man, because women were not allowed to act. So, originally, "Cesario" would probably have been a boy, dressed up as a woman, dressed up as a man.

Feast of Misrule: Twelfth Night takes its name from an English holiday celebrated on January 5, the so-called "twelfth night of Christmas" or the Eve of the Feast of the Epiphany. In Renaissance England, Twelfth Night was known as a "feast of misrule." For the day, kings and nobles were to be treated as peasants, and peasants as kings and nobles. At the center of the Twelfth Night feast was a large cake with a bean or coin baked into it and served to the assembled company; the person whose slice of cake contained it became King Bean, the Christmas King, or Lord of Misrule—a commoner who would take the place of a king in order to watch over the topsy-turvy proceedings.

Two titles. Twelfth Night is the only play of Shakespeare's with an alternate name: its full title is Twelfth Night, or What You Will . The second title references the holiday season of ritualized disorder and revelry, where you can act out all your fantasies.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Drama Criticism › Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night

Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 26, 2020 • ( 0 )

Twelfth Night is the climax of Shakespeare’s early achievement in comedy. The effects and values of the earlier comedies are here subtly embodied in the most complex structure which Shakespeare had yet created. But the play also looks forward: the pressure to dis-solve the comedy, to realize and finally abandon the burden of laughter, is an intrinsic part of its “perfection.” Viola’s clear-eyed and affirmative vision of her own and the world’s rationality is a triumph and we desire it; yet we realize its vulnerability, and we come to realize that virtue in disguise is only totally triumphant when evil is not in disguise—is not truly present at all. Having solved magnificently the problems of this particular form of comedy, Shakespeare was evidently not tempted to repeat his triumph. After Twelfth Night the so-called comedies required for their happy resolutions more radical characters and devices—omniscient and omnipresent Dukes, magic, and resurrection. More obvious miracles are needed for comedy to exist in a world in which evil also exists, not merely incipiently but with power.

—Joseph H. Summers, “The Masks of Twelfth Night”

William Shakespeare was in his mid-30s and at the height of his dramatic powers when he wrote Twelfth Night , his culminating masterpiece of romantic comedy. There is perhaps no more rousing, amusing, or lyrical celebration of the transforming wonderment of love nor a more knowing depiction of its follies or the forces allied against it. Twelfth Night is the ninth in a series of comedies Shakespeare wrote during the 1590s that includes The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, and As You Like It and is a masterful synthesis of them all, unsurpassed in the artistry of its execution. In recognizing the barriers to love it also anticipates some of the preoccupations of the three dark comedies that followed— Troilus and Cressida , All’s Well That Ends Well, and Measure for Measure —the great tragedies that would dominate the next decade of Shakespeare’s work, as well as the tragicomic romances—Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest—that conclude Shakespeare’s dramatic career. Given the arc of that career, Twelfth Night stands at the summit of his comic vision, the last and greatest of Shakespeare’s pure romantic comedies, but with the clouds that would darken the subsequent plays already gathering. Shakespeare never again returned to the exultant, triumphant tone of sunny celebration that suffuses the play. Yet what makes Twelfth Night so satisfying and impressive, as well as entertaining, is its clear-eyed acknowledgment of the challenge to its merriment in the counterforces of grief, melancholy, and sterile self-enclosure that stand in the way of the play’s joyous affirmation. The comedy of Twelfth Night is earned by demonstrating all that must be surmounted for desire to reach fulfillment.

Twelfth Night , or What You Will was written between 1600 and 1602. The earliest reference to a performance appears in the diary of barrister John Manningham who in February 1602 recorded that the play was acted in the Middle Temple “at our feast.” He found it “much like the Commedy of Errores or Menechmi in Plautus, but most like an neere to that in Italian called Inganni. ” Manningham provides a useful summary of Shakespeare’s sources and plot devices in which a story of identical twins and mistaken identities is derived both from his earlier comedy and its ancient Roman inspiration, Plautus’s The Twin Menaechmi. This is joined with an intrigue plot of gender disguise borrowed from popular 16th-century Italian comedies, particularly Gl’Ingannati ( The Deceived Ones ), in which a disguised young woman serves as a page to the man she loves. Shakespeare also employs elements of the new comedy of humours, popularized by Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour in 1598, for his own invention of the duping of the choleric Malvolio. Mistaken identities, comic misadventures in love, and the overthrow of repression, pretense, and selfishness are all united under the festive tone of the play’s title, which suggests the exuberant saturnalian celebration of the twelfth day after Christ-mas, the Feast of the Epiphany. For the Elizabethans, Twelfth Night  was the culminating holiday of the traditional Christmas revels in which gifts were exchanged, rigid proprieties suspended, and good fellowship affirmed. Scholars have speculated that Twelfth Night may have been first acted at court on January 6, 1601, as part of the entertainment provided for a Tuscan duke, Don Virginio Orsino, Queen Elizabeth’s guest of honor. Whether it was actually performed on Twelfth Night , the play is, like A Midsummer Night’s Dream , a “festive comedy,” in C. L. Barber’s phrase, that captures the spirit of a holiday in which social rules and conventions are subverted for a liberating spell of topsy-turviness and revelry.

As in all of Shakespeare’s comedies, Twelfth Night  treats the obstacles faced by lovers in fulfilling their desires. In an influential essay, “The Two Worlds of Shakespearean Comedy,” Sherman Hawkins has detected two basic structural patterns in Shakespeare’s comedies. One is marked by escape, in which young lovers, facing opposition in the form of parental or civil authority, depart the jurisdiction of both into a green world where they are freed from external constraints and liberated to resolve all the impediments to their passions. This is the pattern of Two Gentlemen of Verona, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, The Winter’s Tale, and Cymbeline. The other dominant pattern in Shakespeare’s comedies, as employed in The Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Much Ado About Nothing, and Twelfth Night , is not escape but invasion. In these plays the arrival of outsiders serves as a catalyst to upset stalemated relationships and to revivify a stagnating community. “The obstacles to love in comedies of this alternate pattern,” Hawkins argues, “are not external—social convention, favored rivals, disapproving parents. Resistance comes from the lovers themselves.” The intrusion of new characters and the new relationships they stimulate serve to break the emotional deadlock and allow true love to flourish.

As Twelfth Night  opens, Orsino, the duke of Illyria, is stalled in his desire for the countess Olivia, who, in mourning for her brother, has “abjured the company and sight of men” to live like a “cloistress” for seven years to protract an excessive, melancholy love of grief. As Orsino makes clear in the play’s famous opening speech, lacking a focus for his affection due to Olivia’s resistance, he indulges in the torment of unrequited love:

If music be the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken and so die. That strain again, it had a dying fall. O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour. Enough, no more, ’Tis not so sweet now as it was before.

Both have withdrawn into self-centered, sentimental melancholy, and the agents to break through the narcissistic impediments to true love and the stasis in Illyria are the shipwrecked twins Viola and Sebastian. Viola, believing her brother drowned, dresses as a man to seek protection as a page in the household of Orsino. As the young man Cesario, she is commissioned by Orsino, with whom she has fallen in love, as his envoy to Olivia. Viola, one of Shakespeare’s greatest heroines in her wit, understanding, and resourcefulness, is, like Olivia, mourning a brother, but her grief neither isolates nor paralyzes her; neither is her love for Orsino an indulgence in an abstract, sentimental longing. It is precisely her superiority in affection and humanity that offers an implied lesson to both duke and countess in the proper working of the heart. Both Olivia and Orsino will be instructed through the agency of Viola’s arrival that true love is not greedy and self-consuming but unselfish and generous. Initially Viola plays her part as persistent ambassador of love too well. In a scene that masterfully exploits Viola’s gender-bending disguise (as performed in Shakespeare’s time, a boy plays a young woman playing a boy) and her ambivalent mission to win a lady for the man she loves, Viola succeeds in penetrating Olivia’s various physical and emotional defenses by her witty mockery of the established language and conventions of courtship. Accused of being “the cruell’st she alive / If you will lead these graces to the grave / And leave the world no copy,” Olivia finally yields, but it is Cesario, not Orsino who captures her affection. In summarizing the romantic complications produced by her persuasiveness, Viola observes:

. . . As I am man, My state is desperate for my master’s love; As I am woman (now alas the day!), What thriftless sights shall poor Olivia breathe! O time, thou must untangle this, not I, It is too hard a knot for me t’untie.

Not too hard, however, for the playwright, as Shakespeare sets in motion some of his funniest and ingenious scenes leading up to the untangling.

The romantic comedy of Orsino, Olivia, and Viola/Cesario is balanced and contrasted by a second plot involving Olivia’s carousing cousin, Sir Toby Belch; his gull, the fatuous Sir Andrew Aguecheek, whom Toby encourages in a hopeless courtship of Olivia for the sake of extracting his money; the maid Maria; Olivia’s jester, Feste; and Olivia’s steward, Malvolio. Maria describes the dutiful, restrained, judgmental Malvolio as “a kind of puritan,” who condemns the late-night carousing of Sir Toby and his companions and urges his mistress to dismiss her jester. As the sour opponent of revelry, Malvolio prompts Sir Toby to utter one of the plays most famous lines: “Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?” Virtues, Toby suggests, must acknowledge and accommodate the human necessity for the pleasures of life. All need a holiday. Malvolio as the adversary of the forces of festival that the play celebrates will be exposed as, in Olivia’s words, “sick of self-love” who tastes “with a distemper’d appetite.” Malvolio is, therefore, linked with both Orsino and Olivia in their self-centeredness. By connecting Malvolio’s particular brand of self-enclosure in opposition to the spirit of merriment represented by Sir Toby and his company of revelers, Shakespeare expands his critique of the impediments to love into a wider social context that recognizes the efficacy of misrule to break down the barriers isolating individuals. The carousers conspire to convince Malvolio that Olivia has fallen in love with him, revealing his ambition for power and dominance that stands behind his holier-than-thou veneer. Malvolio aspires to become Count Malvolio, gaining Olivia to command others and securing the deference his egotism considers his due. Convinced by a forged love letter from Olivia to be surly with the servants, to smile constantly in Olivia’s presence, and to wear yellow stockings cross-gartered (all of which Olivia abhors), the capering Malvolio prompts Olivia to conclude that he has lost his wits and orders his confinement in a dark cell. Symbolically, Malvolio’s punishment is fitted to his crime of self-obsession, of misappropriating love for self-gain.

With the play’s killjoy bated, chastened, and contained, the magic of love and reconciliation flourishes, and Twelfth Night  builds to its triumphant, astounding climax. First Sebastian surfaces in Illyria and, mistaken for Cesario, finds himself dueling with Sir Andrew and claimed by Olivia as her groom in a hastily arranged wedding. Next Viola, as Cesario, is mistaken for Sebastian by Antonio, her brother’s rescuer, and is saluted by Olivia as her recently married husband, prompting Orsino’s wrath at being betrayed by his envoy. Chaos and confusion give way to wonderment, reunion, and affection with the appearance of Sebastian on stage to the astonishment of Olivia and Orsino, who see Cesario’s double, and to the joy of Viola who is reunited with her lost brother. Olivia’s shock at having married a perfect stranger, that the man she had loved as Cesario is a woman, and Orsino’s loss of Olivia are happily resolved in a crescendo of wish fulfillment and poetic justice. Olivia fell in love with a woman but gains her male replica; Orsino learns that the page he has grown so fond of was actually a woman. Viola gains the man she loves, and the formerly lovesick Orsino now has an object of his affection worthy of his passion.

The one discordant note in the festivities is Malvolio. He is released from his confinement, and Olivia learns of the “sportful malice” of his deception. Invited to share the joke and acknowledge its justification, Malvolio exits with a curse on the guilty and the innocent alike: “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you.” Shakespeare allows Malvolio’s dissent to the comic climax of love and laughter to stand. Malvolio, as Olivia acknowledges, has “been most notoriously abused.” Much of the laughter of Twelfth Night has come at his expense, and if the play breaks through the selfish privacy of Orsino and Olivia into love, companionship, and harmony, Malvolio remains implacable and unresolved. He is an embodiment of the dark counterforce of hatred and evil that will begin to dominate Shakespeare’s imagination and claim mastery in the tragedies and the dark comedies. Twelfth Night  ends in the joyful fulfillment of love’s triumph, but the sense of this being the exception not the rule is sounded by Feste’s concluding song in which rain, not sunshine, is the norm, and Twelfth Night comes only once a year:

When that I was and a little tiny boy, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, A foolish thing was but a toy, For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came to man’s estate, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, ’Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate, For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came, alas, to wive, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, By swaggering could I never thrive, For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came unto my beds, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, With tosspots still had drunken heads, For the rain it raineth every day.

A great while ago the world begun, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, But that’s all one, our play is done, And we’ll strive to please you every day.

Twelfth Night Oxford Lecture by Prof. Emma Smith

Twelft Night Ebook PDF (2 MB)

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Master Shakespeare's Twelfth Night using Absolute Shakespeare's Twelfth Night essay, plot summary, quotes and characters study guides.

Plot Summary : A quick review of the plot of Twelfth Night including every important action in the play. An ideal introduction before reading the original text.

Commentary : Detailed description of each act with translations and explanations for all important quotes. The next best thing to an modern English translation.

Characters : Review of each character's role in the play including defining quotes and character motivations for all major characters.

Characters Analysis : Critical essay by influential Shakespeare scholar and commentator William Hazlitt, discussing all you need to know on the characters of Twelfth Night.

Twelfth Night Essay : Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous essay on Twelfth Night based on his legendary and influential lectures and notes on Shakespeare.

Twelfth Night

By william shakespeare, twelfth night study guide.

Twelfth Night is one of the most commonly performed Shakesperean comedies, and was also successful during Shakespeare's lifetime. The first surviving account of the play's performance comes from a diary entry written early in 1602, talking about the play and its basic plot. The play is believed to have been written in 1601, not long after Hamlet was completed. Despite the play's initial success, it was rarely performed in the late 17th century; this unpopularity continued until the mid-18th century, when in was revived and was moderately popular until the 19th century, when the play began to fare better.

A successful production of the play from the early 19th century added a great number of songs and funny scenes lifted from other Shakespeare works; even the betrothal masque from The Tempest , which seems like it would be entirely out of place in a play like Twelfth Night , was included. The play was first performed in New York in 1804; and, in 1865, the first known production of the play with one actress performing the roles of Sebastian and Viola was staged. Of course, this development required some alteration of the text; but the experiment was later copied by Jean Anouilh, who adapted the play for French audiences.

Until the early 20th century, the play was staged in a roundly Victorian style. Sometimes, elaborate outdoor sets were constructed for the play, with the advantage of being very pretty, but with the disadvantage of all the action having to take place in that one setting. The darker, more melancholy aspects of the play were ignored in favor of broad humor and the comic set-pieces within the work; not until the 20th century did productions emphasize the tragic and bittersweet aspects of the play, and show great progress regarding insights into the characters' minds.

Although the title of the play is Twelfth Night , it is not certain that this title means that the play takes place on the "Twelfth Night" itself, or the twelfth day after Christmas. There are references within the play to Christmas, as Sir Toby drunkenly attempts something that sounds like the "Twelve Days of Christmas" song. Thematically, there are links to this period of time, which was a time of feasting and revelry; the reveling, pranks, and merriment within the play resemble activities that are characteristic of Twelfth Night , which was the culmination of the Christmas season, and a time of much festivity. Some directors of the play have taken the title quite literally, paying close attention to the Elizabethan rituals related to Twelfth Night ; others have disregarded it entirely, and set the play in the sunny Mediterranean, where the historical "Illyria" is located.

The journal entry that records a performance of the piece in 1602 also compares the play to The Comedy of Errors and an Italian play named Gl'Inganni. Several 16th century Italian plays with this name survive, and all of them with the same basic plot as Twelfth Night : a woman disguises herself as a page and woos a woman for her master, whom she loves, but the woman falls in love with her, and accidentally marries her twin brother. The story was also included in two English works of prose, one written by Barnaby Riche in 1581, and the other by Emanuel Forde in 1598.

In one of the Italian versions of the play, the heroine assumes the name "Cesare" when she is in disguise, which might have been the origin of Viola's chosen name of Cesario. There is one crucial difference in the plots of the Italian versions; and that is that the heroine chooses to serve a lover who had rejected her, so the risk of recognition runs even greater. It is Riche's treatment of the tale, however, that comes closer than the Italian versions to what Shakespeare portrays in Twelfth Night , in terms of the specific situations and reactions of the characters as they interact throughout the story. However, Riche's version is not as innocent in the way the mix-up of the twins is dealt with; the Viola character reveals her gender by removing her clothes in front of the Olivia figure, and the Olivia of his work, rather than marrying Viola's twin, becomes pregnant by him and becomes involved in another confusing situation. However, Forde's portrayal of the relationship between Orsino (called Pollipus) and Viola (Violetta) is closest to Shakespeare's, in the tenderness and devotion that develops between the two characters before Violetta drops her disguise and is revealed as a woman.

It is almost certain that Shakespeare took elements of plot and character from the Italian Gl'Inganni and from Riche's and Forde's subsequent reworking of this somewhat-known story; however, Shakespeare was able to borrow elements of his previously written comedies of mistaken identity, such as The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Comedy of Errors. In Two Gentlemen, Julia follows her love Proteus, disguised as his page, and when he falls in love with another woman, she does the wooing on his behalf. The woman she woos does not fall in love with her, however, as Olivia does with Viola. The Comedy of Errors is also a source for Twelfth Night because of the use of twins and mistaken identity in the plot; though the major difference is that the twins in Twelfth Night are a boy and a girl and therefore not completely identical, though their resemblance is used as a device in the plot. However, The Comedy of Errors is a more lighthearted work, that is more comedic in nature; Twelfth Night , though it is a comedy, delves more deeply into the grief of the twins, and into the emotional predicaments inherent in its plot.

The text of the play first appeared in the First Folio of Shakespeare's work, published in 1623. Unlike with The Tempest, there are few apparent discrepancies from what must have been Shakespeare's original text and what is published; the text does not appear to be a transcript from a performance, as the Folio text of The Tempest most likely was. There is some evidence that the text was amended by Shakespeare himself after his first performance; Viola supposedly had a song in an early version, that was cut and replaced with her story about an imaginary sister, that has bigger emotional impact. Also, the discrepancy in Orsino's title, between Count and Duke, appears to have been amended after a first performance, and Fabian 's sudden substitution for Feste appears to have been done rather crudely, sometime after 1602, so that Feste could act more like an ironic commentator than merely a funny accomplice. The text of the play that has survived, however, appears to be very close to Shakespeare's original vision, and an accurate reflection of the original text, plus later additions and revisions.

Twelfth Night Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Twelfth Night is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Question In Twelfth Night, which event is part of the resolution? Responses Malvolio receives a love letter. Malvolio receives a love letter. Viola and Sebastian are shipwrecked. Viola and Sebastian are shipwrecked. Viola, disguised as Cesario, meets O

• Sir Toby and Maria are married.

Discuss Viola's use of her disguise in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.

After the shipwreck, Viola resolves to make the best of her situation and be taken into Orsino's service. As a young eunuch named Cesario, she will be safe from male attentions. Viola is quickly taken into Orsino's confidence, and he tells her all...

How do valentines entrance and message affects the plot?

Orsino's servant Valentine, whom Orsino sent to give his affections to Olivia, returns; Valentine was not allowed to speak directly to Olivia, but Olivia sent a message, via her handmaiden, that Olivia will continue to mourn her dead brother, and...

Study Guide for Twelfth Night

Twelfth Night study guide contains a biography of William Shakespeare, literature essays, a complete e-text, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Twelfth Night
• Twelfth Night Summary
• Twelfth Night Video
• Character List

Essays for Twelfth Night

Twelfth Night literature essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Twelfth Night.

• The Role of the Fool: Feste's Significance
• The Fool as a Playwright in Twelfth Night
• It is Theater
• To Believe, or Not To Believe
• The Function of Plot Divisions in Twelfth Night and in Doctor Faustus

Lesson Plan for Twelfth Night

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to Twelfth Night
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• Twelfth Night Bibliography

E-Text of Twelfth Night

The Twelfth Night e-text contains the full text of Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare.

• List of Characters

Wikipedia Entries for Twelfth Night

• Introduction

Twelfth Night

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A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Act Summaries & Analyses

Character Analysis

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

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Discussion Questions

Music is present throughout Twelfth Night —the first line, after all, declares that “If music be the food of love, play on.” Examine how music is used throughout the play: What purpose does it serve? What does it add to the plot?

Twelfth Night centers on a blurred depiction of gender, as Viola disguises herself as a man. As head of her household, Olivia also takes on a traditionally male role. Look at how Shakespeare talks about and treats gender throughout the play. What ultimate message about gender and gender roles does he make?

Examine the character of Feste the Fool. What purpose do he and his witty exchanges serve in the play? What does his presence add to the plot?

Analyze the relationship between Viola/Cesario and Orsino . Is it merely platonic (or at least one-sided romantic love) until Viola reveals herself as a woman, or are the seeds of their pairing planted earlier?

What purpose does Malvolio serve in the play? Examine his traits as a character. Is the prank on him with Maria’s letter warranted? What message does it send?

Olivia and Viola have similar names, both mourn their brothers, and are both loved by Orsino at some point in the play. Compare and contrast Viola and Olivia as characters. How are the two similar, and how are they different? What does each reveal about the other?

Look at the central comic characters in Twelfth Night : Sir Toby , Sir Andrew , Feste , Fabian, Maria , and (as the object of their trickery), Malvolio . Given that they’re largely divorced from the central plot about Viola/Orsino/Olivia, what is their purpose in the play? How do their storylines intertwine with and strengthen the central plot?

Twelfth Night is a Shakespearean comedy that ends with a romantic triangle transformed into two pairs. Does Twelfth Night actually have a happy ending? Why or why not?

Trace Olivia’s arc as a character, as she goes from melancholy and in mourning to happy and married to Sebastian . Is her happy fate just a product of circumstance, or does Olivia change or develop as a character over the course of the play?

Examine Twelfth Night ’s setting of Illyria. What do you learn about the Illyria through the play? What attributes does it have as a place, and why is it the right location for the action in Twelfth Night to take place?

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