ABSTRACT
This chapter will consider how the relationship between space and memory in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1602) informs our understanding of romantic comedy in this play. Comedy is future-oriented in its commitments to marriage and procreation, but it also often engages in forms of nostalgia, or concerns with a lost past. Originally, nostalgia had referred to homesickness, or a longing for home (nostos): however, this deployment of place in a broader discourse of belonging resonates closely with the displacement that characters often experience in romance. Susan Stewart has defined nostalgia as:
a sadness without an object, a sadness which creates a longing that of necessity is inauthentic because it does not take part in lived experience. Rather, it remains behind and before that experience. Nostalgia, like any form of narrative, is always ideological: the past it seeks has never existed except as narrative, and hence, always absent, that past continually threatens to reproduce itself as a felt lack. 1
