In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Shakespeare Handbooks Twelfth Night: A Guide to the Text and its Theatrical Life
  • Michael Modarelli
The Shakespeare Handbooks Twelfth Night: A Guide to the Text and its Theatrical Life. By Paul Edmondson. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Pp. x + 181. $59.95 (cloth), $16.95 (paper).

Fourth in the emerging Shakespeare Handbooks series, this slim volume is a handy supplement to Twelfth Night, providing extensive cultural and critical analysis and an overview of major points in the theatrical life and history of the play. According to the General Editor's Preface, the common aim of the Shakespeare Handbooks is to "present the plays in the environment for which they are written and to offer an experience as close as possible to an audience's progressive experience of a production" (viii). With this objective in mind, the latest addition seeks to ground the play's text first before moving on both to cultural contexts that enhance understanding of the play as text and to issues of theatrical production. As a performance handbook, Edmondson's work succeeds. Geared toward a general audience, it succinctly covers the salient issues of performance and critical reception, presenting readers with sources, key productions, and critical assessment, which, although rooted in the play's theatrical life, serve as stepping stones for further study of all aspects of Twelfth Night.

Part One deals with texts and early performances of the play, providing initial commentary and a brief focus on production matters through the 18th century, as well as on matters of textual import. Edmonson discusses possible character assignments among the early historical actors and traces the path of early productions through the text. As the earliest surviving copy of Twelfth Night exists only in the First Folio, we can only surmise how the earliest performances treated ambiguous moments in the play. Did Orsino hear the music, or was it played for the audience? Did Malvolio's famous line, "I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you!" (5.1.378) mark his exit, as Nicholas Rowe—the first to amend the folio—indicated, or was he supposed to wait and exit later? Another interesting feature of this early section is a "props table," which delineates the props needed for each scene. Twelfth Night remains a fundamentally low-maintenance play, and the props table specifies the bare minimum needed for production; the typical mise-en-scène, however, has changed over time. Edmonson's inquiry into the subtleties of early textual, directorial, and staging issues enhances and amplifies the cultural production of the play as it moved from Shakespeare's page to the theatre.

As with many of Shakespeare's plays, the sources of Twelfth Night are various and at times elusive, and Part Two does a fine job of covering most of the important possibilities. In this section, Edmondson pieces together bits from these sources, and compares Twelfth Night to other Shakespeare comedies to situate the play in a creative process. In another useful table, various Shakespearean scenes are contrasted and compared, illustrating the depth, internal relevance, and unity of the playwright's oeuvre. A brief but useful bibliography of relevant [End Page 133] contemporary commentary follows. Through the lens of such cultural contexts such as John Manningham's diary and Thomas Heywood's An Apology for Actors (1612), both set in contrast to Philip Stubbes's puritanical attack, Anatomy of Abuses (1583), readers may better understand the world out of which Twelfth Night arose. These sources, coupled with Part Five, which offers a chronological outline of critical material on three areas of the play—"Character," "Theatre," and "Comedy and Desire"—serve as a useful reference for anyone wishing to further explore the nuances of the play as well as the pattern of focus within scholarship. In addition to these resources, a nice general bibliography, including editions and film and audio versions, appears at the handbook's conclusion.

Parts Three and Four form the core of the handbook, offering a short but informative guide to key performances and film productions. The study proposes four "monumental" moments in the theatrical history of Twelfth Night. In this section, more than any other, Edmondson's writing...

pdf

Share