[1] Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (New York, 1965), 244. A flood of influential, valuable, culturally focused essays on Twelfth Night appeared in the 1980s—notably Catherine Belsey's "Disrupting Sexual Difference: Meaning and Gender" (in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis [London, 1985], 166–90), Phyllis Racklin's "Androgyny, Mimesis, and the Marriage of the Boy Heroine on the English Renaissance Stages" (PMLA 102 [1987]: 29–47), Stephen Greenblatt's "Fiction and Faction" (in his Shakespearean Negotiations [Berkeley, Calif., 1988]), and Jean E. Howard's "Crossdressing, the Theater, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England" (Shakespeare Quarterly 39 [1988]: 418–40). Readers surprised that the following pages take no notice of those essays or of several other good ones that have followed their leads must understand that I ignore them here only because my concerns in thinking about Twelfth Night are essentially foreign to the concerns of those essays.