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 reading. So, I told myself that I would return to it once again. I’m really glad that I did, for I’m restored to my earlier opinion of the play.

Touching on the themes of love, desire, deception, and mistaken identity, Twelfth Night is one of Shakespeare’s more complex comedies. The play consists of a few different stories: the love triangle of Duke Orsino, Countess Olivia, and Viola, the chaos ensued due to mistaken identity, and a cruel trick of heart played as means of revenge. All these separate stories are cleverly interwoven and all nicely tied up in the end.

Twelfth Night has an interesting set of characters, Viola and Countess Olivia being my favourites. The play is full of satire, humour, and witty prose. The writing is beautiful and graceful even though it doesn’t have the pure lyrical beauty of Shakespearean plays like Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. There is also a good element of action.

It was a fun read and I loved it. I’m really happy with the outcome of this read. Now I can honestly say that Twelfth Night is my favourite Shakespearean comedy.

This is a fun play. Not my favorite. Makes me want to watch She's the Man.

I'm thinking this is a play all about how deceitful appearances can be and how we can never judge true character on someone's outward looks.
Because, truly, just about everyone in this play is not who they seem/claim/appear to be...

Twelfth Night is one of Shakespeare’s comedies. The twins Viola and Sebastian are shipwrecked and separated, each believing the other dead. As one might expect with a Shakespearean comedy that features twins, there are mistaken identities and messy romantic tangles. Everything is made all the more complicated by Viola’s decision, for reasons sort of explained in the play, to pose as a man.

I had some mixed feelings about this one. There was humor, and there were parts that made me laugh. There was another subplot that was supposed to be funny I guess, but I thought it crossed too far over the line into cruelty. Also, the romances were a bit difficult to buy into. I’ll go into more detail on those comments in the spoiler tags near the end. More so than with any of the other Shakespeare plays I’ve read in the past few years, I had trouble sympathizing with, or even understanding in some cases, the motivations of the characters.

Seeing a visual adaptation of Shakespeare’s plays is often helpful, because the actors can portray emotion that isn’t always as clear in a play script, and the way they choose to play the scenes can add depth and clarity. I therefore watched one of the movies, the one from 1996, immediately after I finished reading it. That really helped, I think. I still had problems with some aspects of the story, but the actors helped me buy into both the humor and the emotion of it much more. It also helped make some of the romances slightly more believable, although one of them remained ridiculous in my eyes. I usually get attached to the versions of characters formed in my head when I read something, which is one reason I prefer to read something before watching it so that I don’t rob myself of the chance to form my own mental versions of the characters which I often feel are superior. This was a rare case where I think I liked almost every character in the movie better than the versions I’d had in my head from reading the play. I particularly liked the Fool, although he wasn’t remotely like what I had pictured when reading.

The rest of my comments must be confined to spoiler tags:
I really had a lot of trouble with that whole business with Malvolio. At first it was a little funny, but his tormenters took it way too far and I became quite bothered by it. Although I thought Malvolio could have stood to be taken down a peg or two, I didn’t at all think his behavior justified the way he was treated. I was very much bothered by it during my initial reading, but the movie made it even worse by portraying more clearly how he was treated. I did like that the movie made it more clear that the characters felt some actual regret in the end, but that didn’t make it any less disturbing.

The parts that particularly made me laugh were the mistaken identity bits when Viola was mistaken for Sebastian and vice versa. I found the end a bit ridiculous though, particularly when I was just reading it. I could see why Olivia might have become attracted to Viola in her guise as Cesario based on their conversations, but they only met a few times and their conversations were brief. The fact that they barely know each other is made pretty obvious when she mistakes Sebastian for Viola. It made no sense to me that the two of them jumped into marriage so quickly, especially when Sebastian had never laid eyes on her before. I mean at some point, if the girl who wants you to marry her seems to think she’s known you for a while, wouldn’t you ask, “Hey, are you sure you’ve got the right guy?”

Then Olivia finds out that the guy she married wasn’t the person she fell in love with, but it’s ok because she fell in love with somebody who looked like "him" so that must mean they were destined for each other. Meanwhile, Orsino has been pining over Olivia all this time, but when he learns she’s gotten married and oh by the way his servant is actually a girl, well, no problem. Now that there’s another girl available, he’ll just marry her instead! The movie made the Orsino/Viola relationship far more believable by showing their friendship develop, plus a lot of romantic tension on Viola’s part and a hint of confused romantic tension on Orsino’s part. The Sebastian/Olivia relationship didn’t work for me in either format.

I also thought the motivation for Viola dressing like a man and serving Duke Orsino was very, very thin. The movie helped with that a little, but only a little.

I’m rating this at 2.5 stars based on my limited enjoyment reading the play, but I’m rounding up to 3 on Goodreads because the movie helped me appreciate it more.

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.

On the sea of the coast of Illyria, Viola and a ship's Captain are washed ashore after a shipwreck. Viola believes Sebastian, her twin brother, has drowned. She disguises herself as a young man, for safety reasons, and enters the service of the Duke of Orsino. Orsino is in love with the Countess Olivia, who is mourning for her recently deceased father and brother. To honor their memory, she has sworn to reject the company of men for seven years. But, when the disguised Viola delivers a love letter from Orsino, the Countess falls in love with the "young man" and in this way a charming amorous imbroglio begins.

TWELFTH NIGHT includes all the expected ingredients of romance: a shipwreck, disguises and mistaken identities, a young girl in distress, a convoluted plot with a series of interlocking love stories, the gulling of a fool, humor, wit and the final recognition scene. It is a play about people trapped by their illusions, victims of deceit and of their own folly. The characters seem unable to understand their own emotions, and it is important to note that all the characters who are victims of deception learn nothing from the experience. They remain unchanged, self indulgent egotists, who shift their "love" from one object to another with astounding ease.

TWELFTH NIGHT is a gay and lively play which explores the ways in which people tend to deceive themselves and the difficulty of really acknowledging the truth about oneself. We may laugh at the deluded characters of this play, but it is also possible to recognize ourselves in them because deep down we know real self-awareness is not easy to achieve, nor endure.

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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 character. Confusion knows no bounds here. But I love it. It's hilarious. If you're not used to Shakespeare's style and rhythm, this wouldn't be the first play of his I'd recommend. Or if you really want to read this one, you might want to watch a film version first, just to get the plot down -- as it's more convoluted than any soap opera out there. And I should know, I've watched nearly all of them. It's got a little bit of everything, but if you can see it happen first, then read it... it'll come across even better as you can concentrate on the words and images that come to mind, rather than trying to comprehend which person is in which disguise when they are talking. I have to imagine he talked to himself a lot when writing this one, adding voices and different character attributes to even be sure he understood what he had going on!

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Score one for androgyny and desire.
Twelfth Night is like if She’s The Man with Amanda Bynes started off with a shipwreck and instead of being a soccer captain named Duke, Channing Tatum was an actual damn Duke. Just kidding, of course the film is a modern retelling of the Big Bad Bard’s romantic comedy. For the uninitiated, it is the story of siblings Sebastian and Viola who are separated by a storm. Viola disguises herself as a page boy in the service Duke Orsino, who is in love with Olivia, but Viola loves Orsino and Olivia loves Casario except Casario is actually Viola. Pretty simple right? Now throw in some comical subplots about making Malvolio believe she too is in love with Orsino and we got a proper sexy story and, ‘If music be the food of love, play on,’ lets proceed onward!

‘Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?’

Bring on the cakes and don’t spare the ales because this is a pretty riotous play that plays with the concept of gender as much as it plays with the concept of disguises and the roles we play. Shakespeare uses the act of disguising oneself for multiple purposes here, with Viola in disguise as Casario and others in disguise as scholars to trick Malvolio, and while the latter is more an act of deception, Viola serves as a pretty excellent look that, particularly to a modern audience, can be an interesting look at gender fluidity and queer desires. Vita Sackville-West, who would dress in men’s clothing and go by the name Julian in order to escort her lover, Violet, around Paris and is often remembered for her relationship with Virginia Woolf, named the protagonists of her novel The Edwardians Sebastian and Viola after this play for that very reason.

‘If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.”

The act of taking on a disguise, however, also functions on several layers, from acknowledging ones self in the form of a role all the way to a rather metafictional level acknowledging that these are in fact characters in a play. Viola, for instance, when asked if she is a comedian responds ‘I am not that I play,’ as a sort of witty nod to her role as Casario. The idea of Viola taking on the role of a man can also be thought of as subversive to the notion that roles of women characters were commonly filled by men and thus Viola playing a man is comical as it nudges the idea of a man playing a woman who is then playing a man. Which is pretty great. We also have Shakespeare showing us characters who are even unwittingly playing a role, such as Orsino’s lofty language of love being viewed as fairly farcical–Orsino is in love with the idea of loving Olivia more than actually in love with Olivia and playing a role of lover rather than being an “authentic” lover. As often with Shakespeare there is a “play-within-a-play” and whole one isn’t necessarily stated as such we can view Fabian, Sir Toby and Sir Andrew as a sort of audience to the “performance” of Malvolio. Neat!

‘Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.’

A romcom of gender bending and love triangles as only Shakespeare could deliver, Twelfth Night is a total delight.

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 ship's kind sea captain and an infamous pirate , miracles do occur sometimes. Nevertheless, unknown to the grieving duo ... For some reason they changed their names on land, Sebastian becomes Roderigo and his sister Viola much more drastically a man, Cesario wearing men's clothes, a pretty boy she is too (a rose by any other name would smell as sweet). She/He, starts working for the local Duke Orsino, who loves another person of noble blood , Countess Olivia. But the lady is grieving for a recently deceased beloved brother and is in no mood for romance, besides the Duke doesn't appeal to her sad soul. Olivia needs a year to mourn the lady tells the passionate, impatient Duke. And Olivia has a secret crush on his messenger Cesario, ( Orsino is a very jealous, fierce man, who likes to duel) he also after just a few days becomes very fond of his new, sweet servant. Now the distraught Countess, in her mansion has her drunken uncle living with her, a big headache Sir Toby, imbibing all night long coming home in a boisterous condition out of control, waking up the whole household with his cowardly young friend, Sir Andrew. What can Olivia do, he's a relative. And Sir Andrew wants to marry the countess too and has given money to her impecunious uncle. Another member of her entourage is her late father's jester The Fool also called Feste, acting silly is his job and does it very well but The Fool is the smartest one around. Witty comments are his specialty ... Still the head of her servants stern Malvolio, hated by the rest rules with an iron hand, except Sir Toby the noble family is above him. But the lackeys are restless and want revenge. More trouble for Lady Olivia, she falls in desperate love with the disguised Viola as Cesario, who becomes very uneasy. And when Sebastian finally arrives in town people speak to the visitor, as if they recognize him ! The twin feels quite confused agitated, is he or these strangers mad ? Even Sir Andrew and Sir Toby, take their swords out to fight the supposedly timid "Cesario" , who is not his sister and knows how to duel. A surprise ensues for the not too brave pair. Another splendid fun play , from the incomparable master William Shakespeare... enough said or written.

It's as if Shakespeare was so enamoured by Rosalind that he tried to create another version of her for this play. Viola too is a female who disguises herself as a man to achieve her ends. Gender disguise is a big part of the plot device as Shakespeare once again brings his wisdom to bear on sexual identity. There are other new versions of some his old characters here too. The drunkard Sir Tony Belch has a Falstaffian vibe. Antonio with his hopeless homoerotic yearnings mirrors Antonio in The Merchant of Venice. The fatuous self-admiring Count Orsino with his whiff of misogyny but eventual apotheosis is a familiar male peacock. The aspiring social climber Malvolio is a new character and the most complex. Shakespeare gets us to laugh at the sado-masochistic cruelty to which he is subjected. It's an uncomfortable experience as we're laughing at an act of bullying, discrimination, exclusion. Shakespeare turns us into a member of a mindless mob. Finally Feste is one of Shakespeare's best fools. This is a madcap play but rich in poetry and prophecy.

"If music be the food of love, play on"

“Twelfth Night” is probably one of Shakespeare's best known plays so I don't intend to say too much about the plot other than to say that it features a mistaken identity and a love 'triangle' of sorts.

'Twelfth Night' features some of the best known lines in English literature but personally I found the mistaken identity device was a bit of a stretch even for twins and it simply just wasn't as funny as another comedy, "A Midsummer Night's Dream". However, it does have some very funny moments, particularly those involving two plotting drunken Lords, Sir Toby Belch (kinsman to Olivia) and Sir Andrew Aguecheek (a Don Quixote-esque knight) and as always you just have to sit back and admire the writing.

"Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.”

Shakespeare'in Hamlet, Machbet, Othello, Venedik Taciri, Romeo ve Juliet gibi eserlerini okuduktan sonra dilimize çevrilen diğer eserleri bence oldukça sönük kalıyor. Sanırım bundan sonra, okumadığım diğer eserlerini okumaya yeltenmeyeceğim. Zamanına göre evet çok değerli ve çığır açmış olabilir fakat günümüz için bence geçerli değil. 3. yıldızım da sadece Shakespeare olduğu için.