Week 3

Weekly prep

Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Week 5
Week 6
Week 7
Week 8
Week 9
Week 10
Week 11
Week 12

Reading

Primary text: Twelfth Night

Secondary reading:

(1) Read about comedy as a genre if you didn't manage to do it last week from Shakespeare: The Basics.

(2) See chapter 4 on cross-dressing and sexuality in Lisa Jardine's Reading Shakespeare Historically (Routledge, 1999). It is available as an e-book through the library catalogue.

(3) Download the reading list here and explore some of the reading suggested there.

Other prep:

In your study-group, I'd like you to think about the following before the tutorial:
The different kinds of love -- for other human beings (or either sex), for status, for power, and for simple bodily appetites -- that this play presents. Which of these would you 'play up' if you were the director? (You may want to read a few reviews of recent productions -- theatre reviews on newspapers like The Guardian are a good place to start, and available for reading online. Is there a particular approach you like or dislike?)
Choose one passage in the play where two or more of these different kinds of love/desire come together. Think of it in the light of the secondary reading suggested above: does it work as comedy? How? Why? And do gender and sexuality play particular roles in the passage? Again, how and why? In the tutorial we will use your thoughts on this to kick-start our discussion of the play.