December 31, 2017 reviewMy return to the world of William Shakespeare and my favorite play--though I find Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing to be superior dramatically, neither are as romantic or riotously funny as this--brought me back to my first reread on Goodreads and Twelfth Night. Work on my novel ground to a halt several weeks ago at the halfway mark and I wanted to return to a couple of texts that remind me of why I'm a writer. I also noticed that as of December 30, I was one book short

Besides "Much ado about nothing", Twelfth Night is my favourite Shakespeare play.The major character is Viola, who after losing her twin brother, is forced to disguise herself as a boy to survive in a strange and hostile land (namely Illyria which is at war with her home county, Messaline). She musters all her courage to hide her pain over the supposed death of her brother. But struggles are not over as she also has to hide her passionate love from Orsino, the Duke of Illyira whom she serves.Her...

So this one doesn't rank terribly high on the believability scale, but this is still my favorite Shakespeare comedy. It's absurd to have a set of fraternal twins -- brother and sister! -- who look so much alike that people who know them reasonably well can't tell them apart. Shakespeare may not have been entirely clear on the distinction between identical and fraternal twins or, more likely, he just didn't care. But push the Disbelief Suspension button here and just go have fun with this love tr...

I wish I could've seen what performances of this play were like in Shakespeare's time. Since women couldn't be on stage, men had to play the women's roles, which means that the guy playing Viola had to also dress up as a man while acting like a woman. You have to wonder if the audience ever really knew what was going on. I'll bet you anything you like that some form of the following conversation took place in the Globe Theater at one point:GROUNDLING 1: Wait, wasn't that guy playing a girl? Why'...

“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.”This was fun. The thing is that comedies are always more fun on a stage. Ultimately, so are tragedies.Shakespeare created a hilarious story of love, confusion and foolishness. There is a lot of genderbending and cross-dressing and homosexualitating (yes, I know that is not a word). Quite a queer tale. And in the end, everything and everybody is set straight and does not marry below their own station. A bit

Theatre is a genre that you read when you feel like it. So it is with pleasure that I find a genre that I like to read, a classic; what is more, the Shakespearean theatre shows a model in the genre.Here, the scenes engage the themes of cross-dressing, misunderstandings, revenge and cunning. Love, of course. Who always with this master wants to be complex and convoluted.The characters are archetypes but also conceal the richness of the game. As often, we particularly savour the flights of the mad...

I really didn’t expect to like this. Most comedy is wasted on me, but Shakespearean comedy is just so damn funny. Reading this play is only half the picture. I think this is a play that really must be seen in performance as well. I watched a DvD version of the recent globe production and I was practically rolling on my living room floor with laughter. It had an all-male cast, which just made it even better. Mark Rylance as Olivia was just pure comic genius, and Stephen Fry as Malvolio was just a...

Twins: Freaky or Fun?Twelfth Night is Shakespeare's answer to that age-old question.While I was listening to this, I had no idea that Viola & Sebastian were twins. As far as I knew, they were just siblings. But, apparently, they were (<--if I had read the blurb, I would have known this).And apparently, it was also easy to pass as a man 400 years ago! I guess if Gwen could do it (and still find time to write her ever-practical GOOP blog), then I could too! This is useful to know, in case I ever g...

“She’s The Man is better than its source material,” I say into the mic.The crowd boos. I begin to walk off in shame, when a voice speaks and commands silence from the room.“She’s right,” it says. I look for the owner of the voice. There in the 3rd row he stands: Willie Shakes himself.***Let me break it down for you: Orsino is in love with Olivia, despite the fact that he has never seen her. Malvolio thinks Olivia is in love with him, Sir Andrew thinks he can marry Olivia. Sebastian agrees to mar...

Twelfth night being the last comedy of William Shakespeare, is highly acclaimed and panned at equal measures. We come to peruse and praise his literary genius through his artistic handling of different themes packed in one play. On the surface, the play exhibits traces of mistaken identity, deception, Lovesickness, melancholy, desire and abundance, gender and sex, master and servant, but on the broader canvass, the colors are more vivid and glaring laden with undercurrent meanings of these theme...

Now a strange astonishing thing or two happened, off the west coast of the Balkans, ( Illyria) in an undetermined age, aristocratic identical twins a boy and a girl well around twenty, give or take a few years were lost at sea, shipwrecked by a powerful storm. Presumed drowned by the other surviving sibling, both saw their relative in an untenable situation. But this being a play the twins keep on breathing reaching the beautiful, dry, glorious beach with separate help from out of the blue, the

The treatment of Malvolio is a little too cruel, Belch and Aguecheek are a little too coarse, and the resolution is a little too abrupt, and so this excellent Shakespearean comedy falls a little short of perfection. Still, the poetry about music and the songs themselves are wonderful, Viola and Orsino are charming, and Feste is the wisest and best of clowns.

Twelfth Night; or, What You Will, William ShakespeareTwelfth Night, or What You Will is a comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written around 1601–02 as a Twelfth Night's entertainment for the close of the Christmas season. The play centers on the twins Viola and Sebastian, who are separated in a shipwreck. Viola (who is disguised as Cesario) falls in love with Duke Orsino, who in turn is in love with the Countess Olivia. Upon meeting Viola, Countess Olivia falls in love with her...

This is my favorite ridiculous show and so I'm beginning this with a chart: pink: marriage blue: crush on green: flirts withSo, yeah, this is a really really funny play, and a play with a lot of good puns, etc etc etc, and it is for that reason that it is entertaining. But this show is compelling for some deeper reasons. Here, I will insert several bits of my eight-page essay on gender and sexuality in Twelfth Night, an essay that got embarrassingly long. Throughout Twelfth Night, Shake...

I liked the dialogue in this one a lot more than the first one we read for class (A Comedy of Errors). I love the whole "girl poses as a guy in order to trick misogynists into letting her participate in their society" trope, and I just in general loved Olivia and Viola as characters, so I was super into this. My only complaint is that the ending wraps up too swiftly for me and a few of the plotlines were just kinda smooshed into one grand finale, but I was left wanting more. Not the best Shakesp...

A few years ago I read a review of some film that had come out and I was sure I would never see – read the review almost carelessly while flicking through the arts section of the paper on a Saturday morning, no, I must have been clicking over The Age Home Page. The woman who wrote the review commented that whatever the film was had been based on Twelfth Night – which she considered that most ridiculous of Shakespeare’s plays – she really could not see how anyone could be bothered to reproduce th...

“Twelfth night” is probably the most well rounded of all the Shakespearean comedies I have read so far, both for its structure and thematic scope, which is close to the darkest side of his best tragedies. Evading the somewhat shallow hedonism of his earlier comedies, the perplexed reader encounters a play that is opened with a shipwreck on the coast of the fictional town of Illyria. The twins Viola and Sebastian were onboard of the crashed vessel but they lose sight of each other amidst the chao...

Book Review 4 out of 5 stars to Twelfth Night, a comedy written in 1601 by William Shakespeare. There are more reviews written about Shakespeare than either of us know what to do with, on, over or about. So you're not getting a review from me. What I will say is the following: Love him or not, the man can create brilliant plots and characters. Twins. Mistaken identities. Tomfoolery. Witchcraft. A chain of "who's on first" when it comes to which character is in love with which other ch

Reading Shakespeare is almost like going down into the basement of literature and examining the foundations. So often I find the origins of what has become trite and overdone, and yet Shakespeare was the fountain from which so much springs. This is especially true of Twelfth Night, it is apparent that so many comedies and romances over the centuries were heavily influenced by this play. Very entertaining.

Twelfth Night is the first Shakespearean play I read. I was too young to appreciate Shakespeare at that time but I still remember liking it very much. So when I decide to return to reading Shakespeare once again, it was natural for me to begin with Twelfth Night. To my greater disappointment I felt something vacant and bare in the play. I just couldn’t believe it is the same play that I used to like so much. I don’t know if it is due to the edition that I read or my mood at the time of readi