Twelfth Night, or What You Will: The State of Play

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.