Time and Change in Twelfth Night

Sebastian arrives in Illyria speaking of the present moment with gratitude and wonder: “This is the air; that is the glorious sun.” He has just survived a shipwreck; his sister is lost; he is in a strange city. Yet his first words are not of grief or confusion but of sensory presence, of being alive in the here and now. This gratitude for the moment stands in sharp contrast to Orsino’s opening, where time is something to be surfeited on and exhausted, where appetite is meant to sicken and die. For Orsino, time is something to endure or consume. For Sebastian, time is something to be inhabited fully, to be savoured. The play is concerned with what time does to people—how it transforms them, how it carries them away, how it occasionally returns them transformed to a place they have left.

Olivia has spent seven years in an arrest of time, mourning her brother’s death, her life suspended in ritual. She walks through her chamber daily, watering it with tears, keeping her brother’s memory fresh as though time has not passed and will not pass. But when Cesario arrives, time suddenly accelerates. Within hours, Olivia abandons her vow, confesses her love, and proposes marriage to a stranger. It is as though time, frozen for seven years, suddenly breaks and rushes forward. Orsino’s love for Olivia has also been a suspension of time—months or years of sending messages, waiting for responses that never come, feeding his appetite on absence. The play suggests that when people refuse to move with time, when they try to arrest its passage through ritual or obsession, time will eventually shatter the spell and force them forward.

Yet the play is not entirely optimistic about time’s effects. Antonio tells Sebastian that three months have passed in constant company, and in that time he has given everything—his love, his service, his willingness to risk his life. Then, in a single moment, that time collapses and Sebastian’s apparent betrayal erases it all. “How have the hours rack’d and tortured me, since I have lost thee,” Sebastian says, as though time has suddenly become a force of suffering rather than companionship. Time separates the twins, carries them to different cities, forces them to become strangers to each other. The play does not pretend that time is always benevolent. It simply moves, relentlessly, and carries everything with it.

By the end, the play has enacted multiple versions of time’s passage. Viola and Orsino have moved from distant longing to marriage; Olivia has moved from frozen grief to sudden passion; Malvolio has moved from ambitious hope to bitter rage in the span of a few days. The Clown’s final song reminds us that time will continue its work after the play ends: the rain falls every day, the holiday is over, we return to ordinary life where we must please you every day. The play does not offer wisdom about how to move with time, how to accept its changes, or how to resist them. Instead, it shows time as a force that moves through human life, sometimes gently, sometimes violently, carrying us toward outcomes we did not choose and could not have foreseen. The only choice available is whether to move with it, like Sebastian, or to resist it, like Olivia and Orsino, and suffer its eventual assault.