“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 marry Olivia two minutes after meeting her.



Olivia thinks she can marry ‘Cesario’ (who is in fact Viola in disguise). Antonio thinks Viola is Sebastian (her twin brother; don’t ask), Sir Andrew and Sir Toby think Sebastian is Viola, Malvolio thinks Feste is Sir Topas. Viola thinks Sir Andrew a redoubtable swordsman and he thinks the same of her.

For real, who is supposed to keep up with that shit? A shirtless Channing Tatum is all I wanted. I’m not that hard to please, Shakes.



Also, Antonio and Sebastian are hella gay, and you can’t tell me otherwise. Sebastian dropped Olivia like a hot potato as soon as he was reunited with his one true love.

n  “Antonio! O, my dear Antonio! How have the hours racked and tortured me since I have lost thee.”n

Previous to this, Antonio was bragging about how he hasn't left Sebastian's side for three months, both day and night.

Thank you No-fear Shakespeare !! This is an amazing site which has the actual text and a modern day translation side-by-side. link -> http://nfs.sparknotes.com/

I don't know why I even started reading this when I was absolutely sure it would bore me to death. No Fear Shakespeare made the whole reading process phenomenally more bearable. I have always liked Shakespearean tragedies more than his comedies (Comedy is my favorite genre otherwise). So understandably Twelfth Night was not well received by me. Of course one must take into account that Shakespeare's plays are meant to "seen" and not "read". But still, how boring can a piece of literature get? Answer: VERY.

There were a few scenes that made me giggle though so it wasn't all bad I guess. 2-stars!

That famous phrase

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them

originated from altogether demotivational motives – that is, to trick a silly character into believing himself greater than he really is. Not quite meant as an inspirational slogan.

And

That that is is

The first recorded use of "It is what it is"? :)

Along with Much Ado About Nothing and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night is up there with my favorite Shakespearean comedies. The characters are absolutely delightful (except Toby, who’s a right bastard!) And I admit, I'm partial to the word "twelfth," because it has "elf" in it.

On adaptations: In the BBC audio version, Malvolio is the star role, played by David Tennant, Scottish angel to my ears. But in the 1996 film, it's the fool, played by Ben Kingsley, who steals the show.

January 2025: This was so fun to read/listen to on Twelfth Night! I really enjoy this comedy, even more so on a re-read.

It feels silly to rate Shakespeare. I enjoyed this one and found it easy to follow the plot. I like the twin twist, though it was rather easy to see coming. This is also the Patience on a Monument quotation, which I have heard Wodehouse quote. That is my current measure for Shakespeare—how many quotes are familiar because of my familiarity with Wodehouse.

باز هم جا به جا شدن شخصيت ها با هم! كم كم دارم به اين نتيجه مى رسم كه شكسپير فقط همين يك ايده رو براى نمايش كمدى داشته و توى همه ى نمايش هاى كمدى ش از همين ايده استفاده كرده.

n  "Nothing that is so is so."n
-act IV, scene I

When I reviewed n  As You Like Itn at the very beginning of this year I made a lot of the fact that it was, as far as anyone knows for sure, the final play Shakespeare wrote in the 16th century and also, more symbolically, the last of the silly romantic comedies which dominated the first half of his career (thereby marking a transition to his more brooding later work). It was a nice conceit for a review, and it felt serendipitous since AYLI also happened to be the last Shakespeare play I read before the 2010s gave way to the 2020s, but as it turns out it was mostly bullshit.

For some reason I'd gotten the idea before reading it that Twelfth Night was one of Will's melancholy pseudo-comedies, more akin to the tonally ambiguous problem plays like The Winter's Tale or The Tempest than his goofy early stuff. And sure, there is a dash of darkness here, though most of it is implied rather than commented upon explicitly. The maliciously-pranked Malvolio storms off stage in the last scene swearing revenge, never to be seen again, and for all we know the reformed pirate Antonio is left to languish in prison after risking it all for his best pal boyfriend.

But mostly Twelfth Night is just Shakespeare doing all the stuff which, after a decade or so in the comedy-writing biz, he could do with one hand tied behind his back. Love triangles, clowns, pranks, puns, drinking, drag, songs, gay subtext—you know the deal. It's fun, sure, but for me the comedies are rarely Shakespeare's high notes to begin with, and after nine plays full of these tropes it's hard to get too excited about them on the tenth go-round. Especially coming on the heels of As You Like It, which I continue to believe is pretty much the platonic ideal for this type of play.

Luckily Twelfth Night is still Shakespeare, meaning that—along with the brilliant language—whatever it lacks in original plotting it almost makes up for in tantalyzing hints and thematic undercurrents. I mentioned gay subtext a couple of times already, and TN certainly continues to amp up the queer content which has been increasingly prevalent in Will's mid-career comedies, particularly n  Merchant of Venicen (whose main gay-coded male character, Antonio, actually shares a name with the one here—did Shakespeare have a fling with an Anthony??) and AYLI. To be honest I thought the gender play and homoerotic flirtations were more compelling in the latter play than they are here, in part because Rosalind is a much more dynamic lead than Viola, but it's possible I'd feel differently if I'd read Twelfth Night first, as most people seem to do. The obligatory hetero pairings-off in TN's final scene are even tidier and less satisfying than in most Shakespeare comedies, straining the reader's already-tenuous suspension of disbelief to the breaking point, but I suppose the main reason the ending seems so tacked-on is because the author has allowed the transgressive role-playing to go on so long and so unrestrainedly in the preceding four acts. Will seems nearly as reluctant as his 21st-century audiences to bring it to a socially-acceptable conclusion.

I'm fascinated by religion in Shakespeare's time, the constant bloody back-and-forth between Catholics and Protestants, between mainline Protestants and fringe denominations, between religious people of all kinds and those who weren't really interested either way, but references to these topics in Shakespeare's work are (probably wisely, on his part) few and far between. I was excited and genuinely surprised, then, when this play's designated punching bag Malvolio was explicitly described and criticized as a puritan. It's no surprise that a career actor and playwright like Shakespeare would hate that particular sect—the puritans were always trying to close down the theaters, after all—and Malvolio's holy pretensions do, of course, fall away the moment he think he has a shot with the beautiful (and rich!) Olivia, but Shakespeare also makes it pretty clear that the guy is more pathetic than anything else and really doesn't deserve as cruel a punishment as he receives at the hands of Sir Toby and his drunken cronies.

Actually, as I write this I'm starting to wonder about those drunken Fools and tavern-dwellers who also show up especially frequently in Shakespeare's middle-period plays. Sir Toby is, after all, just a dialed-down Falstaff, and his crew of drinking buddies would fit right in with the merry pranksters of the n  Henry IVn plays, whose jokes also tend to tip into cruelty and get them all roundly chastised (or, in n  Henry Vn, straight-up executed). Usually I breeze past the comedies' clown-y parts as quickly as I can—a man can only take so many archaic puns—but maybe there really is more there than I tend to assume. It's crowd-pleasing stuff, sure, but it's hard not to infer a more personal angle as well, especially knowing how rowdy the London theater world was in Shakespeare's day and how much time he'd inevitably have spent in such places with such people. (To say nothing of how frequently his Fools discourse on players and plays.) There's a weird mixture of celebration and guilt that seems to permeate these boisterous scenes, as if the small-town husband and father Will-from-Stratford is peeking out from behind the fast-talking, fun-loving, hard-partying London actor he's become. But that's all speculation, as so much of Shakespeare is, and probably a little projection too.

Anyway. As usual, I've ended up saying much more about a work I found fairly mediocre and forgettable than I probably would have if I'd loved it. But I guess that just illustrates what really intrigues me about Shakespeare, and what keeps me coming back so eagerly. At their best the plays themselves are transcendent, of course, but even when they're not—and I don't think it's heresy to say that they're frequently, even usually, not—they're still keys to a whole world of interesting thought; in their roundabout way they can lead us pretty much anywhere we may wish to go.

از متفاوت ترین نمایشنامه‌های شکسپیر!
نمایشنامه‌ای که خصیصه‌های انسانی را با حالتی طنز به تحریر درآورده


ترجمه حمید الیاسی
چاپ 1390
223صفحه

ترجمه سخت ادبیاتی بود وبعضی مواقع،ارتباط قطع میشد
ارتباط با شخصیت ها سخت بود وفقط با بطن داستان پیش میرفتم
بهتر است ترجمه دیگری را نیز امتحان کنم

Thoughts two seconds after having finished Twelfth Night:
Everybody was gay and the next second, next thing you know it was ‘guess we’re not?’ Honestly it was the weirdest thing I read by Shakespeare. It’s not that nothing made sense but it was a lot of secondary stories colliding with each others to make this main one and it was difficult to follow at times.
But yeah, it went from ‘welcome to the land of gays’ to ‘no homo’ in a nano second. For nearly the entire story I thought we would get a f/f relationship but huh 'it Shakespeare, Romie, you knew what you were getting yourself into.’
Basically it’s a 2 or 2.25 read

As a person named Olivia, I wish I enjoyed this comedy more.

This was 1) incredibly gay and 2) incredibly funny, though not my favorite comedy. I really enjoyed it, but also I was underwhelmed by Viola (I much prefer Rosalind) and feel like we didn't see enough of her.

Some of these people, my gosh, Janelle Monae and Frank Ocean and Emma Gonzalez, they seem to have moved altogether past gender, right? Oh brave new world. And here's Shakespeare, who once again is meeting us in the future.

Let’s get to it: in Elizabethan times, female parts on the stage were played by men, so we’re starting with cross-dressing. Shakespeare was inspired and amused by this, and he often plays with it. Twelfth Night is the best example, and one of his most enduring comedies. Here’s how it goes: Viola, played by a man, disguises herself as a man. As a man she tries to woo Olivia for this guy Orsino. She falls in love with Orsino herself. Of course, Olivia falls in love with Man Viola. But there’s a real Man Viola - Viola’s lost brother Sebastian - whom Olivia meets later and mistakes for Man Viola, and who's played by the same guy anyway.

"An apple cleft in two is not more twin
Than these two creatures."

So we're running, what, four levels deep? Man plays woman plays man mistaken for another man who actually exists. Meanwhile Orsino has fallen for Viola even though he thinks she's a man:

Diana's lip
Is not more smooth and rubious, thy small pipe
Is as the maiden's organ, shrill and sound,
And all is semblative a woman's part,"

he says to her. In the end Olivia and the brother get married, and so do Viola and Orsino. All is well.

I know! "This is to give a dog and in recompense desire my dog again." Shakespeare seems indifferent to gender in ways we’re only starting to catch up with now. Here’s his famous 20th Sonnet:

A woman’s face, with nature’s own hand painted,
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;
A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women’s fashion;
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue, all hues in his controlling,
Which steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created,
Till nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
  But since she pricked thee out for women’s pleasure,
  Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure.

Here again, he seems to talk about love above gender. Shakespeare’s identity, sexual and physically, has been in question for ages; he’s a trickster and he’s a genius, and we’re collectively in a bit of a tizzy about it.

I have no horse in this race. I like the world weird. It's the future now, and some brave new vanguard of us are wiggling into some kind of post gender, post sexual orientation kind of situation. And here we are with hoary old Shakespeare, who seems to have beaten us to it, doesn't he? Plays like this will of course end traditionally, with everyone heteropaired off. But in between there's a confusion of flirting; anything seems possible. Dude Viola, pretending to make Orsino's case to Olivia, is clearly flirting with her instead. In the end they'll all marry people of the opposite gender - but not really, since they're all men up on that stage. The play is still happening.

I’ve been spending all this time talking about gender politics and I’ve forgotten to talk about the play. Will you like it? Sortof. The problem with Shakespeare's comedies is that they employ a lot of puns and wordplay, and that exposes our unfamiliarity with Shakespeare's words. There are these long scenes with people giggling about back-tricks and codding, and you just don't understand a word of it.

Toby: What is thy excellence in a galliard, knight?
Andrew: Faith, I can cut a caper.
Toby: And I can cut the mutton to't.

What the fuck is that? Who cares? There's a sub plot involving Toby, Andrew, Maria and Malvolio that should be entirely ignored. It's Shakespeare at his most impenetrable. The only fun part of it is, we get this famous quote: "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them." Fun to see Shakespeare, here at the peak of his powers, just throwing shit around; these are immortal lines that've inspired countless dumb tattoos and dumber political speeches, and they come from a fake letter in a shitty subplot in a comedy. (And for that matter, they are considerably more dick-joke-oriented than these college students and politicians probably had in mind. Greatness! Thrust!)

Act III is almost totally lost to this nonsense. But this gender-bending shit - I want to be serious for a hot minute here. Shakespeare’s tragedies are more accessible than his comedies. This comedy, I like for its gender politics mostly. I’m a cis man. I was born a straight white man and that’s worked out great for me and I’ve never really had to debate anything. (I had sex with a guy once to see what it was like, don’t get me wrong, but let’s not confuse tourism with life.) To live in a world where people get to question and, if necessary, redefine their genders, or even discard the word - that makes the world richer for me. There are more stories. I don’t think it’s meaningless to have support from the best writer in the history of the planet. Here's what makes Shakespeare great: wherever humans find ourselves, we find him somehow there ahead of us.

كتبها ماركيز عن قصة حقيقية لأحد البحارة الكولومبيين لويس أليخاندرو فيلاسكو الذي كان يطمح إلى كسب المال من خلال بيع قصته إلى مكتب الجريدة التي يعمل بها ماركيز وذلك بعد أن انحسرت عنه أضواء الشهرة والبطولة وبريق المال وبالفعل تمت الموافقة وعرض على ماركيز كتابتها باسمه وحين نشرت لأول مرة نشرت على لسان البحار وباسمه حتى قرر ماركيزإعادة نشرها خضوعا لطلب الناشرين
يقول :
لم أعد إلى قراءة هذه القصة منذ خمسة عشرة سنة ، ورغم إنها تبدو لي متحلية بقدر كاف من الكرامة
لنشرها ، فلستُ مدركا أهمية هذا النشر ، وإذا كانت تنشر اليوم بين دفتي كتاب فلأنني قبلتُ بذلك دون إطالة التفكير ، إلتزاما مني بالوعد ، إن فكرة كون الناشرين يهتمون باسم صاحب التوقيع أكثر من اهتمامهم بقيمة النص خاصة إذا كان هذا الكاتب ( موضة ) هو أمر يحزنني ولكن من حسن الحظ أن هناك كتبا ليست ملكا لمن يكتبها وإنما هي ملك أؤلئك الذين يجعلونها ممكنة بتجربتهم الأليمة مثل ذلك المواطن النكرة الذي تألم طيلة عشرة أيام بدون أكل أو شرب على سطح طوافة إن كتابي هذا يدخل ضمن هذا الصنف !

ويبدو أن ماركيز كان هو الموضة في تلك الفترة ولم يكن يدري أنه سيصبح موضة دائمة صالحة لكل زمان ومكان والحمد لله أنه قبل نشر الكتاب بدون أن يطيل التفكير : )

هذه الرواية في الأصل تحقيق صحفي ولكنه أصبح قصة تحكي سيرة بحار يعمل على ظهر المدمرة كالداس والتي تحمل بعض العتاد الحربي غير إن االسفينة فيما يبدو كانت تحمل بعض الحمولة الزائدة وهي عبارة عن بعض الشحنات التي لم تربط ربطا جيدا مما أدى إلى اهتزاز السفينة وسقوط ثمانية بحارة من على ظهرها دون أن ينتبه طاقم السفينة إلى المفقودين كما إن الحكومة أخفت الخبر وأعلنت أن الحادثة كانت نتيجة لعاصفة ولم تظهر الحقيقة إلا بعد أن أعلنها ماركيز في قصته على لسان الرواي والتي أدت إلى إتخاذ السلطة الديكتاتورية عقوبات تعسفية كان من ضمنها إقفال الجريدة !

البحار لويس وجد نفسه وحيدا على ظهر طوافة ، لم يستطع أن ينقذ زملائه وتمسك بقوة الإرادة ما بين سطوع أمل وإنطفاء آخر وحيدا يتآكله الظمأ والجوع رهبة البحرو ، وهم أشجار جوز الهند وحقيقة أسماك القرش طوال تلك الأيام المريرة في بحر عاصف بين الحياة والموت مما استدعى ذاكرتي رائعة يان مارتل حياة باي وكذلك قوة الإرادة التي تصنع المستحيلات كما حدث مع هنري شاريير في سيرة سجنه وهروبه في رواية الفراشة
إن ماركيز على الرغم من أنه يروي قصة رجل آخر كما فعل في قصة موت معلن إلا إنه يملك أدواته جيدا ويعرف كيف يستخدمها باحتراف يجعل القارىء يتتبع سطوره ورواياته ميزة هذا الكتاب أنه ترجم على يد اليوسفي وهو شاعر وأديب مما سيجعلك تحظى بقراءة ماتعة بلا شك