Twelfth Night
This new book, published in time for the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth (1564) is part of the new Broadview/Internet Shakespeare Edition, with a fresh look at Shakespeare’s classic gender-bending comedy. The editors provide an extensive introduction, with a 21st century perspective on the play, and provide over 100 pages of contextual documents on key issues, such as gender wars, puritanism, music and marriage.
Twelfth Night has seldom been off the stage since Shakespeare’s day. It has been performed for its romantic high comedy and its boisterous low comedy; with an emphasis on farce or on autumnal melancholy; as a celebration of heterosexual love or as an exploration of the complexity of gender. David Carnegie and Mark Houlahan’s introduction to the play provides a lively discussion of the play’s performance history and encourages readers to think about stagecraft and the play as a performance text, while the historical appendices provide materials that illuminate different thematic elements of the play.
Broadview Internet Editions (2014)