Twelfth Night: Authoritative Text; Intertexts; Criticism; Adaptations and Appropriations; Interviews

by William Shakespeare, Natasha Korda (editor)

“This Norton Critical Edition of Twelfth Night weaves the crucial analytic lenses of gender, epistolary culture, and performance throughout the contributions of the artists and writers that contribute to the edition. In so doing, Natasha Korda gifts the reader with new understandings of early modern theatre and raises the bar on editorship.” — Carla Della Gatta, University of Maryland


This Norton Critical Edition



The First Folio (1623) text of Twelfth Night, with annotations and marginal glosses.
Natasha Korda’s expert introduction and list of textual edits made to the Folio text for this edition.
“Intertexts,” a rich selection of ancient and Renaissance works in conversation with Twelfth Night’s themes of disguised identity, gender fluidity, and fictive letter-writing.
Nine illustrations, ranging from a painting alluded to in the text to photographs from modern stagings.
Twenty-three critical interpretations of and responses to the play, tracing its reception and critical history from early performances to modern adaptations.
“Adaptations and Appropriations” and “Interviews,” sections that explore the play’s various re-imaginings.
A selected bibliography and filmography.

361 pages, Paperback

Published May 14, 2025

About the author

William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard"). His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted.
Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Sometime between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner ("sharer") of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men after the ascension of King James VI and I of Scotland to the English throne. At age 49 (around 1613), he appears to have retired to Stratford, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive; this has stimulated considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, his sexuality, his religious beliefs, and even certain fringe theories as to whether the works attributed to him were written by others.
Shakespeare produced most of his known works between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were primarily comedies and histories and are regarded as some of the best works produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until 1608, among them Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, all considered to be among the finest works in the English language. In the last phase of his life, he wrote tragicomedies (also known as romances) and collaborated with other playwrights.
Many of Shakespeare's plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. However, in 1623, John Heminge and Henry Condell, two fellow actors and friends of Shakespeare's, published a more definitive text known as the First Folio, a posthumous collected edition of Shakespeare's dramatic works that includes 36 of his plays. Its Preface was a prescient poem by Ben Jonson, a former rival of Shakespeare, that hailed Shakespeare with the now famous epithet: "not of an age, but for all time".

Reviews

[Jimgosailing · Rating 4 out of 5]

2025 Norton

Preface
“Feste invites reflection upon the theater audience's implication in the play's unfolding follies when he asks Sir Toby and Sir Andrew (and implicitly, the playgoer), "Did you never see the picture of 'We Three'?" (2.3.14-15), evoking the title of a popular painting of two fools that implicates the spectator as the third (see Figure 1). Here, "we" reters to those who tail to recognize, like Narcissus, how our very
"truth and existence" is shaped by the scripts and images in which we find (or fail to find) ourselves reflected.

Twelfth Night's subtitle, What You Will, similarly implicates the theater audience-now in the second person—as its indeterminate addressee, inviting us to read ourselves into its open-ended gaps or "blanks" (2.4.108; 3.1.96), while at the same time calling into question the ethical implications of its implied, indefinite-relative "whatever] you will." The term "blank" in the early modern period referred to a space left empty in a written or printed document, or to a document that (literally or figuratively) contained "spaces left blank to be filled up at the pleasure of the person to whom it is given,
»3 as when Olivia remarks to Cesario of Orsino,
"For his thoughts, / Would they were blanks, rather than filled with me" (3.1.96). The evocation of "blanks" in Twelfth Night and elsewhere in the Shakespearean canon suggests a parallel between the play-text's indeterminate addressees and those of other printed documents—such as model letters addressed to unknown beloveds.

Virginia WOOLF
[From Page to Stage]*
Shakespeareans are divided, it is well known, into three classes; those who prefer to read Shakespeare in the book; those who prefer to see him acted on the stage; and those who run perpetually from book to stage gathering plunder.


I was hoping for some essays that would delve into the second part of this title “or what you will” but i only recall one mentioning it and nothing really quotable from that. Plenty of essays about eunuchs, though.

Interesting interview with Mark Rylance who, in an “original practices” production of the play, performed as Olivia, with Eddie Redmayne as Viola.


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Read for JHU odyssey course with Lynne 2026

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

very fun read, an immense amount of sexual jokes and suggestiveness, a little (very) gay, and just very enjoyable overall

read this one in london 😛