(The full title of Wayne Myers’ book is The Book of “Twelfth Night, or What You Will” Musings on Shakespeare’s Most Wonderful Play. I just couldn’t fit that meaningfully in my title.)

I am woefully behind on my book reviews, but isn’t that always the case? Truthfully it’s taken me longer to write this review than it did to read the book!

Mr. Myers book is just the right size and scope for my kind of reading. Weighing in at just under 100 pages and covering one specific play, it’s small enough to be welcoming to the casual reader while still managing to pack a serious amount of discussion material in its dozen or so chapters. Most chapters center around a specific character, so the reader can easily flip around to favorites, or just read straight through.

Twelfth Night is a complex play. On one level it’s a light romantic comedy, some cross-dressing here, a little mistaken identity over there, a reunion of siblings separated by tragedy, a happy ending. It’s practically As You Like It.
Look closer. Look at the treatment of Malvolio, for an obvious starter. What about poor Viola, who not only assumes the identity of her dead brother, but seems to be stuck in the middle of a bizarre love triangle that none of the parties involved fully understand. Who does she love (erotically speaking) more, Olivia or Orsino? It’s clear that Olivia wants her (in her Cesario/Sebastian persona) more than she wants Orsino, and Orsino’s almost certainly got some strange feelings brewing as well. How does this happy ending work out, exactly? Orsino’s spent the play lusting after a boy, only to be told she’s a girl, and he says “Oh, phew, ok cool, I can marry you.” Olivia has been lusting after that same boy, but she’s told, “No, he wasn’t real, but here’s a brother that looks just like him. A brother you’ve never really met, but physical appearance is apparently all that matters.” And so on. Much fan fiction has been written about exactly what happens after Twelfth Night ends. Does anybody end up happy, really?

Myers’ book tells the story for those unfamiliar with it, and then takes it apart character by character, discussing different interpretations throughout the years. How should the shipwreck be staged? Should it open the play, or come after Orsino’s “If music be the food of love…” speech? Is Olivia truly in mourning at the beginning of the play, or just going through some formality? It is no coincidence that Olivia is mourning the death of a brother, as is Viola. So how much should this be played up, and how?

At times this “one chapter per character” breakdown doesn’t hold up. Characters don’t exist in a vacuum. To explain Malvolio, you have to explain how Maria and Toby and the others treat him. So then when you get to the chapter on Maria, what do you talk about? The cast is already small enough, but it does make you think that maybe some characters didn’t need their own chapter, and could instead have shown up strictly in their relationship to the more major characters. More than once while reading I thought, “This often comes out like a series of blog posts, like the author got an idea and then went out to do some research backing up that idea. Then, he moved on to the next idea.” This is ok if you’re a fan of that sort of short-attention-span, read-5-pages-and-then-flip-to-a-different-chapter that sounds interesting approach to tackling a book.

The book is a guide to staging Twelfth Night (giving many, many examples of how others have done it). A great deal of research has clearly gone into this material. Instead of abstract pondering about how a scene could be played, the reader is shown examples throughout the years of how the scene was played. Unfortunately there are no images from these productions, something that I think would have added tremendously to the final product. You can only go so far explaining what Viola looked like emerging from the sea. Show us a picture.

However, if like me you’re more into Shakespeare as literature and have no real interest in staging your own production, there’s still plenty here for discussion. What’s the deal with Orsino, isn’t he basically stalking Olivia? Are we supposed to be sympathetic toward him? What do we do with the whole Malvolio issue? What do we do when he leaves, do we laugh, or do we fear for our safety?

I expect over the coming weeks that I’ll be able to pull a half dozen blog posts out of this book, and that’s a good thing. I can’t even really say that about books like Bloom and Garber because volumes like that tend to spend so many hundred pages tackling a topic that I can never truly get a handle on the author’s argument. Here, Myers has made it simple enough – here’s what happens in Twelfth Night, here’s how the characters treat each other, what do you think? If you’ve seen the play, and/or read the play, you can jump in this discussion.

Overall I’m quite pleased with this book. If I found out that Mr. Myers were planning to do the same thing with another play, maybe Shrew or All’s Well, I think that I’d seek it out. I like the size, I like the format, I like the writing style. Having said that I’m finding it hard to fully grasp the intended audience for a book like this. It seems introductory in many places, but then makes a number of leaps about the book (often referring merely to a scene’s numbering, without explaining what the scene is about), as if the reader is intimately familiar with the play. In other words…..me, I guess. The “more than casual fan”, the kind of reader who does have more than one-time experience with the play, who is interested in deepening their knowledge by finding the key points where there’s discussion to be had.

I’d like to see more books like this, is really the best way I can put it.

Regular contributor Dr. Carl Atkins sent in this guest review of James Shapiro’s “Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? “. Mr. Shapiro is also well known for A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 (P.S.) , his biography of Shakespeare. Dr. Atkins, or “catkins” as he’s spotted in the comments, is the author of Shakespeare’s Sonnets: With Three Hundred Years of Commentary. Take it away, Carl:
I was actually pleasantly surprised. It was much more readable than I expected. I had read his “1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare” and found it to be rambling, disjointed, and filled with conjecture, so I was not expecting good things from a book about such a difficult subject. Yet “Contested Will” is, for the most part, tightly written, well structured, straightforward, factual without being too dry, and absorbing. It details the history of the authorship controversy, interestingly laying the blame on one of the most renowned Shakespeare scholars, Edmond Malone. He notes that Malone, frustrated at being unable to uncover any documents to help flesh out the biography he hoped to write about Shakespeare, began to look to the plays for biographical references. This opened the door for anti-Stratfordians to launch their only means of attack.
If the book has any fault it is only in spending a bit too much time detailing the course of the Oxfordian cause. I found myself getting a bit bored by the end of that section. But only a bit.

It is a testament to Shapiro’s cool-headedness that he spends two-thirds of the book discussing the (circumstantial) evidence against Shakespeare’s authorship and ends with 27 pages debunking it.
What is most impressive is that Shapiro does not come across as someone with an axe to grind, or as a scornful elitist. He actually sounds like someone who is presenting the evidence for all to see. He makes no pretense about what side he is on, but he makes the evidence very clear.
I did not think I would like a book about the authorship question because I do not think it is an important question. But this book is more about understanding the history of the authorship question than about resolving the controversy. That is a more interesting topic. This is a book I would recommend to all interested in Shakespeare. It is fun to read.

What is the magical spell that Orson Welles legendary “Voodoo Macbeth” holds over us? It was neither the first nor the only production of its kind, and yet 75 years later this the one that we go back to as one of the best examples of what a visionary director can do with Shakespeare. Ironically there’s talk of someone actually doing “Welles’ Voodoo Macbeth” again, as something of an homage. Not really sure how I feel about that. Newstok’s own essay in the collection refers to these as “re-do Macbeths.”
Anyway that brings us to Weyward Macbeth : Intersections of Race an Performance, edited by Scott Newstok. Scott was one of the first authors (editor, to be more specific) to have enough faith in my fledgling little site to send me a copy of his book, Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare, for review. I had no idea who Kenneth Burke was at the time, and said as much, but I must have done something right because Scott’s kept in touch over the years.
When Scott offered me a review copy of his latest, my first reaction was “Oh, like Voodoo Macbeth.” Scott said that reactions such as mine, this believe that the universe of what we’ll call “racial Shakespeare” began with Welles, was really a motivating factor for the book’s existence. Who paved the way for Welles’ vision? What’s happened in the 75 years since? Time neither started nor stopped in 1936, and there’s plenty to talk about on both sides of this particular (though monumentous) event in Macbeth history.
When I received the book, a collection of essays on the subject, I did just like I did with the Burke book – I flipped around the contents to find somewhere I felt like I could dive in. I looked to see where Welles and voodoo showed up, and was intrigued to see the first essay about Welles on page 83, 9 essays in. What, then, came first? I see that essay #8 is entitled Before Welles: A 1935 Boston Production. Coming from Massachusetts, I’m intrigued. I pick that one. 1935? Like, the year before? Why have we never heard of that one?

This production did not go for an exotic locale, though it was indeed an “all negro” cast (that is the term used in the essay). Other than that it was intended to be staged largely as Shakespeare wrote it, specifically because the director believed strongly in presenting the talent and range of his black actors. (This to me sounds like something of a snipe at Welles’ production which gained its legendary status precisely for its staging and its direction, and almost nothing is ever said of the actors themselves.)
Did Welles get wind of this production? That would, as the essay understates, “prove an important complication of the Welles legend.” I’ll say. He always claimed that his wife gave him the idea. But what credit would be due if he got the idea from seeing (or at least hearing about) a previous, similar production?
The book is full of small little fascinating selections like this. Flip toward the front of the book and you can read stories of Frederick Douglass using passages from Macbeth in 1875. Do not miss the picture of Ira Aldridge, a black man, portraying Macbeth in 1830.
Or flip toward the end and maybe head right for the sure-to-raise-eyebrows “ObaMacbeth” essay which goes straight for Barack Obama. After mentioning that Obama’s campaign never invoked Macbeth, the essay author Richard Burt spots a Newsweek story that broke out the footage from Welles’ production and basically called upon Obama to bring about a progressive revolution to the National Endowment for the Arts.
With 26 essays spanning over 200 pages, there is a massive amount of information here about the history of interpreting the Scottish play. An excellent and thought-provoking collection from Scott Newstok once again, and I’m pleased that I get the opportunity to have projects such as these cross my desk.

Two Gentlemen of Lebowski hit the scene in January 2010, and we were there. In it, Adam Bertocci masterfully retells cult movie The Big Lebowski as if it had been written by, well, you know who.
So in a true demonstration of just how quickly an online hit can go from viral to print, I hold in my hands the paperback version of the book which Simon and Schuster were nice enough to send me in thanks for my early support of the project.
I’ve sat here for awhile, reading it front to back, trying to decide how I’d review this one. Then I wondered, what am I doing? If you’ve got interest at all in this project, you’ve also probably got the movie memorized. And chances are that you’ve already read, or at least skimmed, the online version.
But here’s a little secret that I’m not sure I should admit — I’ve never seen the movie. Gasp! It’s true. I started it, once. I know the bit about the rug. And some early scenes in the bowling alley where John Goodman pulls a gun on somebody because his toe went over the line. That’s about it. So that put me in what was probably a fairly unique situation – reading the Shakespeare version as if it were the original. It helped that I could picture Jeff Bridges as “The Knave”, I’ll tell you that.
If you know the movie and you’ve read the online version, why should you get the book? For the annotations, mainly. They’ve done this one up like a traditional text, with the script on one side and a full page of footnotes and other annotations on the facing page. That means that Mr. Bertocci not only had to map the entire plot of the movie into a Shakespearean script, but he had to backfill all the notes as well. Pay attention, because often those are the best part!

7. lance: euphemism for penis; see also most nouns in Shakespeare.

Many variations on that theme, as you could imagine. 🙂
Is the original movie on Netflix streaming? I’m thinking I’ll watch the whole thing now, this book in hand, and see how it works out. Somebody should do an audio book, and then we can play the old Wizard of Oz / Dark Side of the Moon game where you put on the video, turn the sound down, and play the audiobook in sync with it. That’d be cool!