Twelfth Night New Critical Essays [Hardcover]

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

James Schiffers extensive introduction surveys the plays 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.

1. Introduction - Taking the Long View: Twelfth NightCriticism and Performance - James Schiffer  2. Twelfth Night: Editing Puzzles and Eunuchs of All Kinds - Patricia Parker  3. His Fancys 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. Stanivukovi  7. Post-Communist Nights: Shakespeare, Essential Masculinity and Western Citizenship - Marcela Kostihov?  8. Beyond the Lyric in Illyricum: SomelÓO