Twelfth Night: Or, What You Will

The Annotated Shakespeare series enables readers to fully understand and enjoy the plays of the world’s greatest dramatist

Twelfth Night is one of Shakespeare’s funniest plays and also one of his most romantic. A young noblewoman, Viola, shipwrecked in a foreign land and separated from her twin brother, dresses as a man in order to enter the service of Orsino, duke of Illyria. Complications ensue--deceptions, infatuations, misdirected overtures, malevolent pranks--as everyone is drawn into the hilarious confusion.

This fully annotated edition makes the play completely accessible to readers in the twenty-first century. Eminent linguist and translator Burton Raffel offers generous help with vocabulary, pronunciation, and prosody and provides alternative readings of phrases and lines. His on-page annotations give readers all the tools they need to comprehend the play and begin to explore its many possible interpretations.

Burton Raffel is Distinguished Professor of Arts and Humanities Emeritus and professor of English emeritus, University of Louisiana at Lafayette. The most recent of his many publications is Selected Poems by Nicolas Boileau, published by Yale University Press. He lives in Lafayette. Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University, is the author of many books, including The Western Canon, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, and Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine.