Twelfth Night Production Guide: Read More

This book examines the important themes of sexuality, gender, love, and marriage in stage, literary, and film treatments of Shakespeare's plays.

The characters of Twelfth Night are both memorable and engaging and it is through their funny, and at times bitter, interplay that we experience the peculiar world of Shakespeare's Illyria. This study begins with a introduction to the concept of "characters" on the early-modern stage before proceeding to a textual analysis of each of the main characters in the play, looking at how what they say and do, and what is said about them, creates the illusion of "character". Each chapter also contains a brief account of key performances by actors on stage and in film.

Why did theatre audiences laugh in Shakespeare's day? Why do they still laugh now? What did Shakespeare do with the conventions of comedy that he inherited, so that his plays continue to amuse and move audiences? What do his comedies have to say about love, sex, gender, power, family, community, and class? What place have pain, cruelty, and even death in a comedy? Why all those puns? In a survey that travels from Shakespeare's earliest experiments in farce and courtly love-stories to the great romantic comedies of his middle years and the mould-breaking experiments of his last decade's work, this book addresses these vital questions.