Short answers, pulled from the story.
The first documented public performance of Twelfth Night took place on the 2nd of February 1602, at Middle Temple Hall in London, on Candlemas night. The lawyer John Manningham recorded the event in his diary, noting its similarity to Roman and Italian comedy sources.
Shakespeare drew primarily on the Italian play Gl'ingannati, written collectively by the Accademia degli Intronati of Siena in 1531, and on Barnabe Riche's 1581 short story "Of Apollonius and Silla," which itself derived from a tale by Matteo Bandello. The Duke's name, Orsino, is believed to have been inspired by Virginio Orsini, Duke of Bracciano, who visited London in the winter of 1600-01.
Twelfth Night refers to the twelfth night after Christmas Day, the Eve of the Feast of Epiphany. The holiday was traditionally an occasion for carnivalesque reversal, with servants dressing as masters and men as women, overseen by a Lord of Misrule. Shakespeare built this tradition of licensed disorder directly into the play's plot and characters.
Malvolio has been played by many celebrated actors across the centuries, including John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier (1955), Donald Sinden (1969), Ian Holm, Simon Russell Beale (Donmar Warehouse, 2002), Patrick Stewart (Chichester, 2007), Derek Jacobi (Donmar Warehouse, 2009), Stephen Fry (The Globe, 2012), and Tamsin Greig as a gender-swapped Malvolia in the 2017 Royal National Theatre production. In 2025, Peter Dinklage played the role at the Delacourte Theater in New York.
Twelfth Night holds that distinction. On the 14th of May 1937, the BBC Television Service broadcast a thirty-minute excerpt from Alexandra Palace, directed by George More O'Ferrall. The transmission was live and no recording technology existed at the time, so no visual record survives. The cast included the young Greer Garson, later an Academy Award winner.
Margaret Webster's 1940 Broadway production is the longest-running, with 129 performances, more than twice the run of any other Broadway staging. It starred Maurice Evans as Malvolio and Helen Hayes as Viola.