Twelfth Night: Duke Orsino, Whitehall and the Shirley Brothers

On 6 January 1602, Sir Lewes Lewkenor was ordered to escort an Italian duke to Elizabeth I’s court for a magnificent Twelfth Night entertainment. The visitor was Don Virginio Orsini, Duke of Bracciano. Shakespeare’s comedy begins with another Duke Orsino, a demand for music and a court preoccupied with love, disguise and extravagant entertainment.

A Duke called Orsino

One of the most intriguing episodes in Lewkenor’s career occurred during the Christmas festivities of 1601–02.

Elizabeth I was entertaining Don Virginio Orsini, Duke of Bracciano, a distinguished Italian nobleman connected by marriage to the royal house of France and the Medici family of Florence.

The Orsini were among the great aristocratic families of Rome, with a history of political intrigue, dynastic marriage and violent rivalry.

Don Virginio’s own family history was extraordinary.

His father, Paolo Giordano Orsini, had married Isabella de’ Medici, daughter of Cosimo I, Grand Duke of Tuscany.

Isabella died violently in 1576, when Virginio was a child. Her husband was suspected of having murdered her in a fit of jealousy.

Paolo Giordano subsequently became involved with Vittoria Accoramboni, whose earlier marriage had ended in murder. Their relationship became one of the most notorious scandals of late Renaissance Italy.

Virginio grew up amid this extraordinary family history before being educated at the Medici court in Florence.

His cousin Maria de’ Medici married Henry IV of France in 1600, and Virginio accompanied her to France.

His subsequent journey to England brought him into the diplomatic and ceremonial world of Elizabeth I.

And the man appointed to accompany him was Sir Lewes Lewkenor.

The Whitehall entertainment of 6 January

The surviving preparations for Elizabeth’s Twelfth Night celebration are unusually detailed.

The Queen ordered a play to be performed and instructed the Lord Chamberlain to confer with the Lord Admiral and the Master of the Revels concerning the choice of entertainment.

Particular attention was to be paid to costume, music and the quality of the performance.

The instructions concerning the reception of Don Virginio identify the gentlemen who were to accompany him to Whitehall:

the Lord Darcy be warned to fetch the Duke of Brachiana, accompanied with Mr. Wm. Cecil, Mr. Lewkner, Mr. Edward Gorge, and Mr. Buc

The party was instructed to bring the Duke to court shortly after eleven o’clock.

He was to be received at the gate by the Earl of Rutland and other gentlemen, who would then accompany him during the festivities.

Lewkenor was therefore not merely present somewhere within the royal household.

He was specifically named among the gentlemen responsible for bringing the distinguished Italian visitor to court.

The same instructions provided for music and a theatrical performance after supper.

This is the documentary foundation of the investigation.

The first night of Twelfth Night?

In 1954 Leslie Hotson published The First Night of Twelfth Night, proposing that Shakespeare’s comedy had been performed at the Whitehall entertainment of 6 January 1602.

His argument drew upon the presence of Don Virginio Orsini, the unusual emphasis upon music and the play’s central character, Duke Orsino.

Shakespeare opens the comedy with one of the most celebrated invocations of music in English drama:

If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.

For an audience entertaining a distinguished visitor named Orsini, the appearance of Duke Orsino would have offered an immediately recognisable courtly allusion.

The resemblance becomes more interesting when the detailed musical arrangements are considered.

The Queen’s instructions required that the singer Hales should have:

one place expressly to show his own voice

The importance of this detail is obvious to anyone familiar with Twelfth Night.

Music is woven through the comedy. Feste’s songs interrupt the action, express the emotional condition of the characters and provide the play with some of its most memorable moments.

The Whitehall orders do not identify the play by name, but they describe precisely the sort of elaborate musical entertainment that Hotson associated with Shakespeare’s comedy.

Lewkenor at the centre of the occasion

The identification of Lewkenor in the original court orders makes this episode particularly important to our investigation.

We know that he was appointed to accompany Don Virginio Orsini.

We know that a play was ordered for the entertainment.

We know that music was given special prominence.

And we know that Shakespeare’s comedy features a Duke Orsino whose opening words demand music.

These circumstances provide an unusually suggestive conjunction of documentary and theatrical evidence.

Lewkenor was already a Gentleman Pensioner and a familiar figure within the courtly world of Elizabeth I.

His involvement in receiving Don Virginio anticipates the diplomatic responsibilities he would formally assume when James I appointed him Master of the Ceremonies in 1603.

The Whitehall entertainment thus reveals Lewkenor engaged in precisely the kind of work that would define his later career.

The Great Chamber at Whitehall

The physical setting of the entertainment has also attracted scholarly attention.

John H. Astington examined a contemporary drawing of the Great Chamber at Whitehall, showing how the room was arranged for the banquet and play.

The Great Chamber was more intimate than the principal hall and the larger banqueting spaces used for royal festivities.

Its arrangement provided a setting in which the Queen, foreign visitors and selected courtiers could experience a theatrical performance at close quarters.

That intimacy matters when considering the topical allusions proposed by Hotson.

A joke involving the name Orsino would have been especially effective in a room containing the real Duke of Bracciano.

The performance would have been a social occasion as well as a theatrical one, with the audience’s knowledge of contemporary personalities contributing to the pleasure of the entertainment.

Twins, disguise and Lewkenor’s Spanish Mandeville

Another striking connection comes from Lewkenor’s literary work.

In 1600 he published The Spanish Mandeville of Miracles, translating material from Antonio de Torquemada’s collection of extraordinary stories.

Among its accounts is the remarkable story of children so alike in appearance that their identities could scarcely be distinguished.

Lewkenor’s translation describes two daughters living near Segovia whose resemblance was so extraordinary that a visitor could not distinguish one from the other.

The story belongs to the literature of wonders, mistaken identity and the extraordinary possibilities of nature.

Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night likewise depends upon the confusion created by an apparently impossible resemblance.

Viola and Sebastian are separated by shipwreck and arrive independently in Illyria.

Viola disguises herself as the young man Cesario, creating a succession of misunderstandings involving Olivia, Orsino and Sebastian.

When the twins finally appear together, Orsino exclaims:

One face, one voice, one habit, and two persons,
A natural perspective, that is and is not!

The play transforms the marvellous resemblance of twins into a theatrical mechanism through which identity, desire and appearance become unstable.

Lewkenor’s translation belongs to the same imaginative territory, where extraordinary likenesses challenge ordinary perception.

Malvolio and the Puritan courtier

Hotson’s investigation also proposed contemporary models for Malvolio, Olivia’s pompous and self-important steward.

Malvolio is introduced as a man whose moral seriousness and hostility to revelry make him the natural enemy of Sir Toby Belch and his companions.

Maria describes him as:

sometimes he is a kind of puritan

One proposed model was Sir William Knollys, Comptroller of Elizabeth’s Household, whose romantic ambitions and appearance had become subjects of court gossip.

Knollys’s attempts to court a lady of the Queen’s household supplied material that Hotson connected with Malvolio’s fantasies of advancement through marriage.

Another proposed parallel was Sir Thomas Posthumous Hoby, whose quarrel with disorderly visitors at his Yorkshire household resembles Malvolio’s attempts to suppress Sir Toby’s nocturnal festivities.

Malvolio demands:

Do ye make an alehouse of my lady’s house?

The comedy repeatedly contrasts courtly order with festive disorder.

Such conflicts were familiar within the royal household, where rank, personal ambition, religious seriousness and extravagant entertainment existed in uneasy proximity.

Lewkenor’s duties placed him within precisely this social environment.

The Middle Temple performance

The earliest securely recorded performance of Twelfth Night took place at the Middle Temple on 2 February 1602.

John Manningham recorded the entertainment in his diary, providing an invaluable contemporary account of the play.

The Middle Temple was especially important to Lewkenor’s biography.

He had been admitted to the Inn in 1579, and its membership included lawyers, parliamentarians and gentlemen connected with the court.

John Shirley, Treasurer of the Middle Temple, belonged to the Sussex family network that intersects with Lewkenor’s own relations.

Lewkenor and Shirley would subsequently serve together on a parliamentary committee in 1604.

The connection becomes still more interesting when we examine the extraordinary adventures of the Shirley brothers.

The Shirley brothers and the Sophy of Persia

Sir Anthony and Sir Robert Shirley were among the most celebrated English adventurers of the period.

Their travels took them from England through Italy and into Persia, where they entered the diplomatic world of Shah Abbas I.

Anthony Shirley travelled as an envoy of the Persian ruler, while Robert remained at the Persian court and eventually married Sampsonia, a woman associated with the Safavid aristocracy.

The brothers’ exploits became widely known through printed accounts of their journeys.

In 1600 an account of Anthony Shirley’s expedition appeared in London, followed by further publications describing the adventures of the English travellers.

The Persian ruler was commonly known in English as the Sophy.

In Twelfth Night, Fabian declares:

I will not give my part of this sport for a pension of thousands to be paid from the Sophy.

Sir Toby Belch also refers to a formidable swordsman:

They say he has been fencer to the Sophy.

These references would have possessed particular topical interest at a time when the adventures of the Shirley brothers were attracting considerable attention.

The connection is especially suggestive because Lewkenor’s Sussex family had longstanding associations with the Shirleys.

Lewkenor receives the Persian ambassador

The relationship between Lewkenor and the Shirleys did not end with the Elizabethan adventures.

Robert Shirley eventually returned to Europe as an ambassador representing the Shah of Persia.

His diplomatic status created considerable difficulties at the court of James I.

The Venetian ambassador Antonio Foscarini recorded Lewkenor’s involvement in arranging an audience.

Foscarini reported that Lewkenor came to fetch him and accompany him to Hampton Court, where the question of Shirley’s reception arose.

Robert Shirley claimed the right to be received as ambassador of the Persian monarch.

His choice of Persian dress became a matter of ceremonial discussion.

Lewkenor helped manage the arrangements.

The episode is a remarkable continuation of the connections first visible in the Elizabethan period.

The Shirley brothers, whose adventures were echoed in the references to the Sophy in Twelfth Night, later entered Lewkenor’s professional responsibilities as Master of the Ceremonies.

Music, disguise and courtly performance

Twelfth Night is a comedy about performance in almost every sense.

Viola performs the role of Cesario.

Malvolio performs the part of an imagined aristocratic husband.

Sir Andrew Aguecheek attempts to perform the role of a courageous duellist.

Feste performs songs and adopts disguises, including the identity of Sir Topas.

The play’s characters repeatedly mistake theatrical appearances for reality.

Its setting among noble households makes these performances part of a wider world of rank, ceremony and social ambition.

That is precisely the environment in which Lewkenor worked.

His involvement in the Whitehall entertainment of 1602 reveals him accompanying a foreign duke to a royal performance.

His later office required him to manage the receptions of foreign ambassadors and visiting princes.

His literary work supplied stories of extraordinary likenesses and mistaken identity.

His family connections extended into the world of the Shirley brothers, whose Persian adventures were topical subjects of theatrical humour.

The cumulative case

The documentary starting point is exceptionally strong: the original Whitehall instructions name Lewkenor among those ordered to accompany Don Virginio Orsini to Elizabeth’s Twelfth Night entertainment.

Leslie Hotson’s identification of the unnamed play as Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night brings that document into an unusually suggestive relationship with the comedy’s Duke Orsino and its musical opening.

The Middle Temple performance supplies another connection through Lewkenor’s legal education and the Sussex Shirley family.

The references to the Sophy of Persia lead to the extraordinary adventures of Anthony and Robert Shirley, the latter of whom would eventually be received at the Jacobean court with Lewkenor’s assistance.

And Lewkenor’s Spanish Mandeville offers a literary parallel for the play’s fascination with twins, resemblance and mistaken identity.

These connections extend across the court of Elizabeth I and the reign of James I, from the musical festivities of Whitehall to the ceremonial reception of Persian ambassadors.

They reveal a world in which Shakespeare’s comedy, foreign diplomacy, aristocratic entertainment and the career of Sir Lewes Lewkenor repeatedly intersect.

Continue:

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Sources and Further Reading

The Lord Chamberlain’s instructions for the Whitehall Twelfth Night entertainment of 6 January 1602, naming Mr. Lewkner among the attendants of Don Virginio Orsini.

Leslie Hotson, The First Night of Twelfth Night (1954); John H. Astington,