William Shakespeare's 'The Twelfth Night (or, What You Will)

'The Twelfth Night' is a great play! Anyone interested in Shakespeare's comedies should read it. It is, in all honesty, a great comedy, which when read slowly and carefully for better comprehension is very funny.

There is no gainsaying Twelfth Night is a play of all time. Full of humour and largely built on mistaken identity, the play contains characters who act out ther roles excellently. Maria, Sir Toby, Sir Andrew and Malvolio are important in the play as Duke Orsino, Viola, Olivia and Sebastian. Shakespeare uses each for a purpose well achieved.

[QUOTE=polumide;305998]There is no gainsaying Twelfth Night is a play of all time. Full of humour and largely built on mistaken identity, the play contains characters who act out ther roles excellently. Maria, Sir Toby, Sir Andrew and Malvolio are important in the play as Duke Orsino, Viola, Olivia and Sebastian. Shakespeare uses each for a purpose well achieved. Interestingly, the play demonstrates strong love, concrete affection and irresistible passion. [If music be the food of love, play on, give me execess of it... /QUOTE]

Hello,
I am new to this group and hope to have a rewarding time. I would like to know the elements of Universality in Shakespere's "Twelfth Night" .
Thanks
Abraham

Wow no, your completely wrong. That play was horrible! Ive never read a worse thing in my life. There goes 3 hours down the drain.
~Rickdiculous

I love Twelfth Night! What more could you wish for in a play?

Well, I am new to this group like Abraham and i would like to know if anybody would spend time reading comments and analysis of the book. I say it because i 've seen a couple of things (don't call me pretentious for the moment, please...) and I woul like to share it. Well, here it goes:
First, in line 22, act I scene II: "Ay, madam, well; for I was bred and born" bred and born could be seen as a hysteron proteron, a change of logical sequence of happenings which was very used in ancient Greek an Latin tragedies and epical writing works such as Aeneid of Virgil: "Moriamur, et in media arma ruamus". "Let us die, and charge into the thick of the fight". As you know, the goal is to call attention to the more important idea by placing it first. In this case I’m not sure if that was the meaning which the author would give, I’m not a specialist on the matter, but I saw an intentional change of order.

And secondly, in lines 72-73, act I scene III: “Ay, sir, I have them at my fingers’ ends: marry, now I let go your hand, I am barren.” From marry to barren I’ve seen, a decreasing gradation from what looked a Sir Andrew’s quite explicit, sexual wooing: he tried to marry her by courting with this anterior words: lines 59-60 “and you part so, mistress, I would I might never draw sword again”, that is, he’ll be a nobody without her, being sword a metaphor of the male member. Then, passing through the fact she “refuses” him, that is, she lets go his hand and, finally, she assumes she is empty, she has got nothing with him, she is barren.
Therefore, in lines 120-121, act I scene V, here’s another decreasing gradation. Olivia: “What a drunken man like, fool?// Clown: “Like a drowned man, a fool and a mad man”, the clown puts the climax in first place too.
Sorry for the grammatical or orthographical or orthotypograhical(?) mistakes. Thank you for reading me.

...and in answer to Polumide I may add Shakespeare wrote using and thinking in several lines of interpretation... You can find two or three analysis levels in just a couple of lines. That is the most interesting thing about the author. Harold Bloom was truly right to put this author in the core of all literarian (western) universe and as a way of measurement of the rest ones.

Can you give examples?

Can anyone tell me anything specific they liked about this play? I would say that

- none of the characters have much personality
- as in all Shakespeare romances, we're given no reasons why any of the characters who like each other, like each other, and therefore no reason to care whether they end up with their (arbitrary) crush, or someone else
- the only sources of humor are, as in all Shakespeare comedies, wordplay, drunkenness, making fun of fools, and confusing men with women
- the story is implausible in many ways, most notably that the twins look so identical that no one can tell them apart, despite being male and female (therefore they are male/female homozygous twins, which is not even possible); yet they do not recognize each other when they meet
- the subplot involving Malvolio has no bearing on the main plot
- the dramatic structure is... absent; the central tension is meant to be Viola's distress at helping the man she loves woo her competitor, but there is never any danger that Olivia will fall for the Duke, nor is there any motivation for us to sympathize with Viola's love.
- the back-story involving the shipwreck is tremendously distracting; Viola professes her distress at her brother's death and then immediately falls in love with some stranger instead of, say, walking down the coast a bit to see if her brother's there
- there is no theme and no subtext

I don't give Shakespeare extra credit for wordplay involving "marry" and "sword"; he did that in every second play he wrote. It contains one good dramatic line, the "Some are born to greatness", etc.; but it's used for comic, not dramatic, effect, and is thus wasted.

I find nothing at all good about this story. I think Shakespeare agreed with me. As far as we know, it was only performed once during his lifetime, and was never published until years after his death, and over twenty years after it was written.

The story is not the point with Shakespeare; as ever, it's only the music of the language that counts.