Twelfth Night Review

Twelfth Night, Or What You Will by William Shakespeare (430 pages)
My Rating: 3.5 Stars
Date Read: 25 October 2016

Synopsis:

This edition of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night reprints the Bevington edition of the play along with 7 sets of thematically arranged primary documents and illustrations designed to facilitate many different approaches to Shakespeare's play and the early modern culture out of which the play emerges. The texts include facsimiles of period documents, maps, woodcuts, descriptions of the popular customs associated with Twelfth Night, anti-theatrical tracts, royal proclamations concerning dress, laws prohibiting certain sexual acts, poems fantasizing those very acts, early modern texts on household economies, passages from Puritan conduct books, excerpts from Ovid and Montaigne, a representative range of early modern opinions about boy actors, and theories of laughter. Besides contextualizing the audience for Shakespeare's play and shedding light on some of his sources, the documents explore the range of sexual desires articulated in the play, competing ideas about music in early modern culture, religious controversy, the regulation of early modern society according to hierarchies, and the controversial place of laughter in early modern culture. Editorial features designed to help students read the play in light of the historical documents include an engaging general introduction, an introduction to each thematic group of documents, thorough headnotes and glosses for the primary documents (presented in modern spelling), and an extensive bibliography.

My Review

I am actually giving this play a 3.5 star review, not a 4 star review. This is the third or fourth time I have had to read this play; the second time for college alone. Oh, and this review may have spoilers to the plot of this play, so if by some chance you haven't read it yet and do not want to know any of the plot points, read at your own risk.

I used to absolutely love this play. It used to be one of my favorite Shakespearean comedies, but I think I've had to study it so many times that I'm getting tired of it.

The class that I am reading it for, my Approaches to Shakespeare class, is really fun. I feel like I am going to start liking the book more the more I study it in this class because we are not just reading it for plot. The first day we were studying it, we went line by line for the first scene and talked about the various possible meanings each word could have meant and that was so much fun to me!

Also, I love the title: Twelfth Night: Or What You Will. It makes Shakespeare seem like he's saying, "Twelfth Night: Or Whatever." I don't know why, but that cracks me up.

I love looking at a text in a new way, and this class is definitely doing that. We are looking at dress and identity, sexuality and identity, the nature of love, setting the scene, the problem of Malvolio, and clown and comedy in the next few weeks that we are studying the play. I think my favorite parts to study are going to be the dress and identity and the problem of Malvolio.

Dress and identity are main aspects of the play. I mean, the entire think is about mistaken identities and disguises, so of course that would be heavily shown throughout the play. But even with this, we are going to look at connections within the characters to see if there are even  more layers to this.

The problem of Malvolio is also very important. He is the loose cannon of this play because he does not necessarily fit with the comedic structure. Most of the time in comedies, everything is wrapped up and everyone is happy, but not in this comedy. In this, he seeks revenge on those who messed with him, but why did Shakespeare go so dark with this ending? Especially since he did not do this for the other comedies. That is what I can't wait to find out in my class.

I may do an update after we finish studying this book just in case I get an answer for that question, but that will only be seen in the future.

Overall, this play will always have a place in my heart, but I need to see if time will let it come back to the higher spot it used to have before.