The Arden Shakespeare Twelfth Night, or What You Will (review)

In “Of Studies,” Sir Francis Bacon famously commented, “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”¹ Keir Elam’s edition of Twelfth Night for the Arden3 Shakespeare covers all of Bacon’s criteria, and then some. For scholars and theater professionals, the book is to be gulped down whole, making a satisfying meal, while the undergraduate essay writer might nibble around the edges, consulting, for example, the magisterial footnotes as needed, but skipping swaths of the 153-page introduction and three appendices. Finally, the less invested reader might not taste it at all. Because this edition brings together into one volume a wealth of textual, bibliographical, and critical scholarship; a variety of background materials; helpful images and charts; and information and analysis concerning stage and film performances, one may nibble, gulp, or nosh as one pleases.

The introduction exemplifies scholarly achievement, as it manages to present a daunting amount of factual information, convey an argument, and offer multiple interpretative tools for readers and audiences. Elam covers the play’s earliest performers and performances (including its associations with carnival, court, the Christian calendar) to its more recent instantiations—as a “point of intertextual reference” (118) in the 1998 film, Shakespeare in Love; in the 1972 Playboy production; in televised stagings by Branagh (1987) and Tim Supples (2003) and in many stage productions. Also reviewed are key terms in Renaissance rhetoric; the vogues and vicissitudes in performance history, with sharp focus on each of the main characters; and extensive scholarship on such topics as early modern medicine and the comic gestures and stage business or “lazzi” (127) attached to the play. In addition, Elam advances a compelling argument on the role of “audience complicity” (7) in Twelfth Night, as he lays out a comprehensive yet detailed survey of stage and screen treatments, with a history of critical reception (that “deepen[s] and darken[s] the picture” [9]) and shifting reference points (e.g., postcolonialism, homoeroticism). Elam’s argument about the play’s implication of spectators is borne out by his point that “it is a play ‘about’ interpretation” (15), as he engages the “happy hermeneutic hunting ground” (18) that is the play’s subtitle, “What You Will.”

The editorial goals of the Arden project are ably met in this edition: the historical imbeddedness of text and production; performance possibilities, or meanings that “editors, critics, and performers . . . have discovered in the play” (xiii); and, as Elam puts it, “an account of some of the many lives of the play . . . the multiple factors that make up its rich textual, theatrical, critical and cultural history” (1). Elam is well suited to these tasks, as the influential author of The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (1980). In that book, he theorizes such ideas as the unrepeatability of theatrical performance, the parasitic relationship of theater to culture, and the cultural baggage of the actors. Elsewhere, he calls for increased critical attention to “audience passion,” or the ways that theatre compels “the receiver’s active participation in the artistic practice.”² All of these concepts are brought to bear in this edition of Twelfth Night, which integrates his focus on linguistics and performance studies with other kinds of scholarship.

Elam’s spirited devotion to, and astounding (often first-hand) knowledge of, elements of performance make this edition a must-read for directors, actors, or anyone interested in how a role has been played over the centuries, what place music occupies in the Shakespeare canon, or how Sir Toby’s drunken speech has confused compositors, editors, but not audiences. Of exceptional value is the introduction, “Make a Good Show On’t: Twelfth Night in Performance.” Elam reports on “adaptations and rearrangements” (96), including musicals, “Victorian special effects and modernist experiments” (100), and the “two main directorial camps”: one, emphasizing the festive, temporal, and seasonal; the other, deploying a “more spatial—and especially ‘exotic...