Customer Reviews

Twelfth Night: Third Series (Arden Shakespeare)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

With so many excellent alternatives around, choosing between rival Shakespeare editions is usually no easy matter. In the case of Twelfth Night, however, Kier Elam's Arden is a clear winner.

Elam's substantial (150 page) introduction is stimulating and informed throughout. He talks of an 'interpretative compulsion' about the play ('one of Shakespeare's most enigmatic') that keeps its characters and readers on a continual search for meaning. But meaning is complicated by Twelfth Night's characteristically riddling mode ('Nothing that is so is so' etc.), its emphasis on secrecy and its own problems with interpretation (notably Malvolio's puzzling over the notorious crux 'M.A.O.I.'), which, taken together, threaten to make fools of us all. Despite critics' sustained and occasionally ingenious attempts to reveal meaning, Elam reminds us of Montaigne's salutary warning about the dangers of over-speculation, of interpreting interpretations rather than the original text, with the result that finding true meaning becomes an ever more distant prospect.

On the play's central concerns, identity, gender and language, Elam is equally illuminating. He observes that characters' names are often contained within those of others (Olivia and Viola within Malvolio, for example). Thus, nomenclature provides a key to the ever shifting and deceptive nature of identity. And of course, in Sebastian and 'Cesario', the play features twins and cross-dressing, where Sebastian is 'not merely a twin but a doppelganger', and 'Cesario ... a point of converging identity between Viola and Sebastian'. Viola's cross-dressing, meanwhile, disrupts gender difference and challenges routine assumptions about simple binary constructs. He quotes Marjorie Gerber, who asks whether male/female categorisation is biological or cultural, then extends the discussion by quoting Malvolio's description of Cesario as neither man nor boy, with the result that he becomes 'an unclassifiable liminal figure' challenging boundaries of age as well as gender.

Plentiful illustrations explain and expand on Twelfth Night's allusions to material culture, while the play's homoeroticism (one reason why it has lately regained critical prominence) receives frank acknowledgement - it is 'an open secret' in performance, says Elam, and he draws attention to Louis Posner's 2001 RSC production to substantiate the claim.

In this and much else, Elam is sophisticated, comprehensive and authoritative. He is also more up-to-date than his rivals.