Twelfth Night, or What You Will The State of Play

Emma Smith, Ann Thompson, Lena Cowen Orlin

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2026
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350456426
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

Offering new insights from a range of experienced and emerging scholars, this volume analyses Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, or What You Will through a variety of critical lenses.

Shakespeare's comedy of gender confusion and unrequited love was a critical play for feminist readings and ideas related to cross-dressing, gender fluidity and relationships in the 1980s. Since then, it has been somewhat critically adrift. Smith's collection of essays resets the critical conversation that surrounds this play to a more contemporary idiom and provides an up-to-date reader for both professors and their students.

An interdisciplinary volume, this book gathers a range of voices and views in order to assess how transformative work on texts, identity and race has impacted Twelfth Night's standing in current Shakespeare conversations. Scholars from across the globe utilize viewpoints stemming from transgender studies, environmental studies, racial studies and queer theory, in order to provide a present-day exploration of the play's critical framework, and stimulate future conversations that arise from recent adaptations and performance traditions from beyond the anglophone sphere.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Series Preface
• ‘What country, friends, is this?’: Twelfth Night’s critical history Emma Smith
• 1 ‘The house is dark’: Playing night and darkness in Twelfth Night Gwilym Jones
• 2 Shipwreck, sexual experience and servitude in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night: Identity tokens from the waters of the Roman, Ottoman and Italian Mediterranean Susanne L. Wofford
• 3 Not at home: Migration and displacement in Twelfth Night Emma Smith
• 4 Salt Waves Fresh: Ecological adaptation in Australia Gretchen E. Minton
• 5 Transing the crux: Sounding the ‘O’ in Cesario Natasha Korda
• 6 Foolish things: Transgender alternatives to Cesario Ezra Horbury
• 7 ‘The proper false’: Twelfth Night, ‘original practices’ and transmisogyny Sarah Wall-Randell
• 8 The afterlives of a queer pirate: reading Antonio in early modernity Huw Griffiths
• 9 Reorienting Malvolio in the Classical Theatre of Harlem’s Twelfth Night Louise Geddes
• 10 As men say, swear and prove: Confronting toxic masculinity in the Classical Theater of Harlem’s Malvolio Vanessa I. Correde a
• 11 The Cathayan lady and the Egyptian thief: Occluded orientalisms in Twelfth Night Katherine Hennessey
• Select Bibliography
• Index