书名：Twelfth Night 莎士比亚：第十二夜

作者：William Shakespeare

出版社名称：Bantam Classics

出版时间：1988

语种：英语

ISBN：9780553213089

商品尺寸：10.9 x 1.5 x 17.5 cm

包装：平装

Product Description

Set in a topsy-turvy world like a holiday revel, this comedy devises a romantic plot around separated twins, misplaced passions, and mistaken identity. Juxtaposed to it is the satirical story of a self-deluded steward who dreams of becoming “Count Malvolio” only to receive his comeuppance at the hands of the merrymakers he wishes to suppress. The two plots combine to create a farce touched with melancholy, mixed throughout with seductively beautiful explorations on the themes of love and time, and the play ends, not with laughter, but with a clown’s sad song.

Each Edition Includes:
Comprehensive explanatory notes

Vivid introductions and the most up-to-date scholarship

Clear, modernized spelling and punctuation, enabling contemporary readers to understand the Elizabethan English

Completely updated, detailed bibliographies and performance histories

An interpretive essay on film adaptations of the play, along with an extensive filmography

Review

One of Shakespeare's finest comedies,Twelfth Night, was written at the same time asHamlet andTroilus and Cressida, and while it shares their fascination with sex, death and confused identities, its exuberant comedy and linguistic inventiveness rises above the introspection of these plays. Viola and her twin brother Sebastian are separated in a storm that washes them both up at different points on the shores of Illyria. Believing each other to be dead, both attempt to survive by using their wits. Viola cross-dresses and enters the service of the lovesick Orsino, in love with Olivia, an heiress in mourning for the loss of her brother. Orsino's saucy young page Cesario (Viola) soon falls in love with "his" master, who tells "him", "all is semblative a woman's part". Unfortunately, while Viola falls in love with Orsino, Olivia falls in love with her alter ego, Cesario, while also being pursued at the same time by her pompous servant Malvolio. Olivia's house is also turned upside down by the antics of her drunker uncle, Sir Toby Belch, and the whole crazy situation reaches boiling point when Sebastian reappears.

Despite the madcap plot,Twelfth Night remains one of Shakespeare's most complex and inventive comedies, fascinated with questions of cross-dressing, gender confusion, language and inversion, as well as retaining a darker edge to some of its laughter. --Jerry Brotton

'The combination of careful scholarship emphasising the inspiration and excitement of the theatrical experience, with the freshly edited text, should make this one of the most useful new texts of Twelfth Night.' --Theatre Journal