Twelfth Night: New Critical Essays

This volume in the Shakespeare Criticism series offers a range of approaches to Twelfth Night, including its critical reception, performance history, and relation to early modern culture.

James Schiffer’s extensive introduction surveys the play’s critical reception and performance history, while individual essays explore a variety of topics relevant to a full appreciation of the play: early modern notions of love, friendship, sexuality, madness, festive ritual, exoticism, social mobility, and detection. The contributors approach these topics from a variety of perspectives, such as new critical, new historicist, cultural materialist, feminist and queer theory, and performance criticism, occasionally combining several approaches within a single essay.

The new essays from leading figures in the field explore and extend the key debates surrounding Twelfth Night, creating the ideal book for readers approaching this text for the first time or wishing to further their knowledge of this stimulating, much loved play.

James Schiffer is Professor of English and Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the State University of New York, New Paltz.

1. Introduction - Taking the Long View: Twelfth Night Criticism and Performance - James Schiffer 2. Twelfth Night: Editing Puzzles and Eunuchs of All Kinds - Patricia Parker 3. "His Fancy’s Queen": Sensing Sexual Strangeness in Twelfth Night - Bruce R. Smith 4. Music, Food and Love in the Affective Landscapes of Twelfth Night - David Schalkwyk 5. "The Marriage of True Minds": Amity, Twinning, and Comic Closure in Twelfth Night - Laurie E. Osborne 6. Masculine Plots in Twelfth Night - Goran V. Stanivuković 7. Post-Communist Nights: Shakespeare, Essential Masculinity and Western Citizenship - Marcela Kostihová 8. Beyond the "Lyric" in Illyricum: Some Early Modern Backgrounds to Twelfth Night - Elizabeth Pentland 9. Domesticating Strangeness in Twelfth Night - Catherine Lisak 10. Staging the Exotic in Twelfth Night - Nathalie Rivère de Carles 11. "The Text Remains for Another Attempt": Twelfth Night, or What You Will on the German Stage - Christa Jansohn 12. What He Wills: Early Modern Rings and Vows in Twelfth Night - Alan W. Powers 13. Madness and Social Mobility in Twelfth Night - Ivo Kamps 14. Twelfth Night and the New Orleans Twelfth Night Revelers - Jennifer C. Vaught 15. Whodunnit? Plot, Plotting, and Detection in Twelfth Night - Cynthia Lewis