Twelfth Night by Shakespeare

Obviously Shakespeare is awesome.

I thought the play was really good probably because I had to read it for a class and we analyzed it together and that class is awesome x10000.

The cool thing about this play is that it's a comedy and I feel that sometimes comedies explore the human condition with more depth than tragedies or other more serious forms of literature. It can do it and it can make the commentary that it does because it's funny. It's hard to get mad or offended when you're laughing.

The most interesting aspect of this play (for me) was the fact that everyone was wearing a sort of mask. They were playing a part - because they felt that they had to or because that's the role that society cast them. It's like one of those inception type things where they're playing a role in a play and in the role that they're playing, they take on the role of playing a role. Sort of.

Anyway, it's an interesting exploration because if one looks into why Olivia chooses to use the death of her brother and father as a tool to distance herself from men, namely Orsino (Why does she do that? She very clearly isn't in mourning.) and then why Viola, much in the same type of situation (recently lost her brother in a very traumatic shipwreck) takes the situation completely differently, the play suddenly contains that much more depth. Then there's the whole thing with who Viola can tell the truth because she's under the guise of Cesario while everyone else is caught up in intrigue (playing a joke on Malvolio) or other types of lies to buffer their current situation.

It's kind of how in our every day lives, in order to protect ourselves from the consequences of our actions, we veil the truth and in many ways, veil our true selves. We cannot be honest with each other (especially and ironically to the people closest to us) precisely because we don't want to injure others or face the consequences of our honesty. This also goes into an exploration of what it means to have true friends with whom one can be truly be themselves around. This is something that does not happen very often in life. Even if it does, some odd little thing called life happens and suddenly the relationship changes, people move, people change and life moves on.

Then there's the whole thing on love. How the heck does Orsino and Sebastian fall in love so quickly? I mean Orsino's kind of understandable, but Sebastian literally just follows Olivia to the chapel and they're married (without any kind of courting or anything).

So there's an exploration of love that one could do.

There's also the idea of class differences that one could explore, the role of the fool (Feste - interesting guy - made me realize that one must be pretty smart to be funny - and in this case, one must ironically be pretty clever to play the fool), Malvolio's character, Sir Toby's character, etc., etc.

And it's funny to boot. There's the classic misunderstandings because two people look alike, different things happen, the whole situational irony (where the audience and other characters know something that one character does not), and so forth.

As with Shakespeare, I'd hesitate to recommend the play to the average reader simply because Shakespeare isn't an easy read. There were tons of footnotes and little definitions in the version I read (from the Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th edition) and it was a little cumbersome to read (though those notes were very helpful and at times essential to understanding the text). However, knowing the value of Shakespeare, if a person was interested, I would encourage them to read it.