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The full title of the play is Twelfth Night, or What You Will. Subtitles for plays were fashionable in the Elizabethan era, and though some editors place The Merchant of Venice's alternate title, The Jew of Venice, as a subtitle, this is the single Shakespeare play to bear one when first published.^[5] The play was probably finished between 1600 and 1601, but was not printed until its inclusion in the First Folio in 1623. The first recorded performance was on 2 February 1602, at Candlemas, the formal end of Christmastide in the year's calendar.

"Twelfth Night" is a reference to the twelfth night after Christmas Day, called the Eve of the Feast of Epiphany. It was originally a Catholic holiday but, prior to Shakespeare's play, had become a day of revelry. Servants often dressed up as their masters, men as women and so forth. This history of festive ritual and Carnivalesque reversal is the cultural origin of the play's confusion. The source story, "Of Apolonius and Silla" appeared in Barnabe Riche's collection, Riche His Farwell to the Militarie Profession (1581), which in turn is derived from a story by Matteo Bandello.^[6]