Reading notes: 'Twelfth Night'
These will be mostly meta-level comments, because I very much do not expect anyone to care much about my first-order thoughts about a Shakespeare play I've just read for the first time.
- If you want to get (back?) in to Shakespeare, this is a good choice. I found myself much less confused, line by line, than I have with other Shakespeare plays recently. I don't know how much of this is the material itself and how much is the very ergonomic Folger edition I was reading from; I suspect it was both.
- It seems like an oversight that I've never even seriously considered reading Twelfth Night until now. (Instead of what? Well, the book I most regret having read cover-to-cover is Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, but that's another post. Suffice to say I could have read quite a bit more than Twelfth Night with that time.)
- Silicon Valley's collective reading attention has never, that I can tell, turned to Shakespeare. I'm not sure I can even recall a major SV figure even, say, recommending a Shakespeare play on a podcast. Why is this? Not just because it's old or difficult or psychological (the Stoics were quite trendy for a while). There are some obvious explanations, but I'd add that SV reading suggestions tend to be things you can read quickly, even if they're difficult. (Whether or not you should read the Stoics quickly, you more or less can.) I know very few readers who can read Shakespeare quickly except by having studied a passage quite carefully before.
Anyway, Twelfth Night is really good.