Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Twelfth Night
    Twelfth Night
    Twelfth Night
    Audiobook2 hours

    Twelfth Night

    Written by William Shakespeare

    Narrated by Paul Scofield

    4/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    Paul Scofield, Siobhan McKenna and John Neville perform Shakespeare's comedy Twelfth Night
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSaland Publishing
    Release dateJan 12, 2011
    ISBN9781908650078
    Author

    William Shakespeare

    William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, in 1564. The date of his birth is not known but is traditionally 23 April, St George's Day. Aged 18, he married a Stratford farmer's daughter, Anne Hathaway. They had three children. Around 1585 William joined an acting troupe on tour in Stratford from London, and thereafter spent much of his life in the capital. A member of the leading theatre group in London, the Chamberlain's Men, which built the Globe Theatre and frequently performed in front of Queen Elizabeth I, Shakespeare wrote 36 plays and much poetry besides. He died in 1616.

    More audiobooks from William Shakespeare

    Related to Twelfth Night

    Related audiobooks

    Performing Arts For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    Related categories

    Reviews for Twelfth Night

    4/5

    1,996 ratings34 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      I was in a Shakespeare course in London, so I had the chance to revisit this play. The Nigel Hawthorne/Ben Kingsley/Toby Stephens film version has long been a favorite of mine, but the play itself is even better! (I also saw a lovely production while in London, which certainly helped.) One of my favorite Shakespeare plays. (Jan 2010)
    • 5/5
      I´ve re-read it countless times..My favourite from Shakespeare.
    • 3/5
      So there's this girl that's a guy that works for a guy that she loves as a girl but has to send his love to a girl as a guy and that girl loves the girl as a guy but really she's a girl that looks like a guy and this is why Shakespeare's comedies are just weird.
    • 4/5
      Madcap was 't adventure
      And pleasure finest to read.
      Whilst mirthy with the wordplay.
      Brought forth as Feste's mead.
      Three's Company-esque
      Was allst confusion.
      Which what happened
      By staged amusion.
      Verily, I enjoyed it, by and by.
      What readeth me next, wondereth I?
    • 3/5
      I once told a Shakespeare buff that I never thought his comedies were all of that funny; forgive me, but my ear for Elizabethan English is weak and I miss the word play and puns, for example. And, when reading the text, any of its slapstick dimensions are lost. Luckily for me, I have discovered that by SEEING the comedy, and THEN reading it afterwards, the 'mind's eye' (to quote Horatio in Hamlet) brings all of it to life. There, my advice for the day. And, remember, say what you want, Will's winsome way with words wins!
    • 5/5
      I reread the play as I'll be appearing in it this summer as Sir Toby Belch. Ah, what fun!

      Shakespeare fact: most directors these days cut Shakespeare's plays down to a reasonable two hours for performance. That will be the case for the production I'm in. I'll miss the double-talk conversations between Sir Toby and the Clown, and some of the "mistaken identity" humor involving male/female twins Sebastian and Viola. Although I can see why the director removed this stuff. In the former case, the invented references to phony experts like "Qeuebus" (God, would I have loved saying "Qeuebus"!) would have been indistinguishable from other archaic references, thereby causing confusion to the average theater goer. In the latter case, the humorous situations are often repetitive.


      Cutting Shakespeare is nothing new. David Garrick, an actor and director who was a friend of Samuel Johnson, used to do it routinely in the 18th century.
    • 5/5
      This has always been one of my favorite Shakespeare plays, and it probably always will be. It's just as fun to read the second time, with plenty of humor and lovely lines. Feste, of course, is my favorite.I feel like I could go into a long analysis of it, but... I read it for my English class, and no doubt we're going to dissect it and talk about all the underlying themes. Personally, I say you should just read it and enjoy it and then go see it performed.
    • 5/5
      The text of the play is mostly a delight, though there are a few toothsome things to mull over after the play is done. Its end of multiple marriages is seemingly tidy, but a few characters are left out in the cold, including Antonio, whose love for Sebastian may be the truest and most steadfast love in the play.
    • 3/5
      Drama; Adult. I'd forgotten that I had read it before, so I guess it didn't make much of an impression the first time, but Shakespeare is one of those things that get better the more you read it.
    • 5/5
      Shakespeare's last great romantic comedy combines the wit of the other great comedies with some rather mean-spirited slapstick more reminiscent of his very first comedies. The first is provided largely by the male-impersonating heroine who finds herself, as an intermediary between lovers, becoming the true object of affection from both lovers. The slapstick is provided by Sir Toby Belch, a small-scale Falstaff, and his idiot friends, who make life miserable for a major domo whose Puritanism does not protect him from vanity and desire. I loved it, despite the bullying.
    • 3/5
      Though my text stated that that was his comic masterpiece, I liked As You Like It much better. The only saving grace, for me, was the clown. He saved the best lines of wit and wisdom for that character. I suppose by this point, I am getting a bit put off by all the mistaken identity stuff. Perhaps the Bard was growing weary of the device as well.
    • 4/5
      What can one really say negative about Shakespeare? Any of his writings are simply a classic. However, this would not be my favourite of his works, it's simply a bit too ridiculous for my personal taste - I know Shakespeare's audience would have loved it. Boy loves Girl, another Girl (2) is stranded and decides to cross-dress to be near Boy, Boy sends Girl 2 to persuade Girl 1 of his love who in turn falls in love with cross-dressing Girl 2. Then Girl 2's twin brother shows up and causes chaos and in the end Boy 2 ends up with Girl 1 and Boy 1 with cross-dressing Girl 2, not questioning her cross-dressing for a second
    • 3/5
      "If music be the food of love, play on"“Twelfth Night” is probably one of Shakespeare's best known plays so I don't intend to say too much about the plot other than to say that it features a mistaken identity and a love 'triangle' of sorts.'Twelfth Night' features some of the best known lines in English literature but personally I found the mistaken identity device was a bit of a stretch even for twins and it simply just wasn't as funny as another comedy, "A Midsummer Night's Dream". However, it does have some very funny moments, particularly those involving two plotting drunken Lords, Sir Toby Belch (kinsman to Olivia) and Sir Andrew Aguecheek (a Don Quixote-esque knight) and as always you just have to sit back and admire the writing."Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.”
    • 5/5
      The best of the bard's comedies with a wealth of character relevation, and lovely passages of poetry. The plot is simple: a shipwrecked slip of a girl, with no great career prospects, manages to do a successful male impersonation, and gain a comfortable marriage. Hi-jinks ensue, written by an author who did not like puritans. I seem to have read it nine times, and seen a performance.
    • 4/5
      Twelfth Night and Much Ado are my favorite of Shakespeare's comedies, funny and fast paced.
    • 4/5
      A case of mistaken identity is always a good time. I'm embarking on the Shakespeare 2020 challenge, and starting off with a comedy is always a great idea, in my book.

      This year, I'll be looking for spaces to integrate queer, womanist identities, and the characters of Antonio, Malvolio, Clown, and Maria provide plenty of fodder for consideration.

      Questions I have: is Maria a villain or an opportunistic agent? And is this bad?
      Is Malvolio a bad guy or misunderstood?
      Are the Duke (and possibly Viola) queer?
    • 4/5
      One of Shakespeare’s plays turns out to be surprisingly (at least to me) sexually fluid. I like the complexity of the pretending game going on, even if it gets rather confusing sometimes.
    • 4/5
      I have read this play after seeing it performed at The Globe on Friday. It's funny and relies on comic tropes such as characters dressing up as the opposite sex, dressing in comedic yellow cross-gartered stockings for effect, and formation of love triangles. The Clown role is probably my favourite character. It's light and insubstantial and often doesn't make a whole lot of sense (e.g. the whole Malvolio sub-plot); indeed at one point Fabian says with ironic self-reference "If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction".
    • 5/5
      Easily my favorite Shakespeare play.
    • 3/5
      In the words of deuce: "gay, working on gayer". Kind of a shame it never made it to gayer because Viola and the Countess are the most well developed pairing in the play. Also while the Duke's bits where he acts like a self-important tool are funny, they undermine the "happy ending" of Viola marrying him. This could have been fixed by giving him some bits where he displayed more redeeming characteristics, because (unlike the rapist guy in Two Gentleman) nothing he does is unforgivable... it's just that, all we do see of his personality is that he's kind of a douche. The production of it I saw was consistently funny in every scene and I had a great time watching it performed.
    • 5/5
      Quite possibly my favorite play by Shakespeare! Fun story! 
    • 4/5
      I thought this was a great edition. They have the text on the right side, and the explanation of obscure terms on the left side. I just saw this play done at the Great River Shakespeare Festival in Winona, MN. It's amazing how closely they followed the text. I didn't need to read it to understand everything, but reading did help explain some things.
    • 4/5
      The introduction says Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" is one of his most performed plays, which is funny since I've never heard of it being performed locally (and have seen many others.)It wouldn't surprise me though, as the play is pretty entertaining and uses the often-employed Shakespearean disguise fairly well. The story follows Viola and Sebastian, siblings who are in a shipwreck and each believes the other has died. Meanwhile, the beautiful Olivia is fending off a crew of courting men and antics ensue.Overall, the story is fairly amusing and moves along at a nice pace.
    • 5/5
      This is definitely a classic Shakespearean comedy, complete with disguises, intrigue, love, humor, and a lot of fun. In all honesty, I am not generally a big fan of comedies, but this is definitely an example of an exception. As to the edition itself, I found it to be greatly helpful in understanding the action in the play. It has a layout which places each page of the play opposite a page of notes, definitions, explanations, and other things needed to understand that page more thoroughly. While I didn't always need it, I was certainly glad to have it whenever I ran into a turn of language that was unfamiliar, and I definitely appreciated the scene-by-scene summaries. Really, if you want to or need to read Shakespeare, an edition such as this is really the way to go, especially until you get more accustomed to it.
    • 4/5
      Fabulous! Even an eighth grader can read (with a little guidance) and enjoy!
    • 5/5
      A rightfully popular Shakespeare play, this one has resourcefulness, the audience is in on the fun, yet it works well.
    • 4/5
      BBC Radio 3 full cast production, first broadcast in 1998, and presented on 2 CDs. I bought this one because of the Blake's 7 interest, as Josette Simon plays Olivia. While it's an enjoyable performance, I would have been hard put to it to follow what was going on without previous knowledge of the plot from seeing the play on stage. Fortunately there's a good synopsis booklet included in the box.
    • 4/5
      There is brilliance in this play, as there is in all of Shakespeare's work... but...Well, this one doesn't live up to the others, at least not in the reading of the script. I could not attach myself to any of the characters, and while I often have to reread the words and the footnotes to gain any understanding of the plot, this one felt hollow to me, even after I could grasp what was going on.The brilliance comes in much of the twisting of words and understandings of phrases. Shakespeare was a wordsmith, there is no doubt about that.... but most of the time, I feel like he was also incredibly connected to his characters, his audience, his stories. This one felt flimsy to me.
    • 2/5
      Honestly, I am not all that into reading plays. However, I am so into gender-bender that I had to read 12th night. The whole idea of a girl dressing up as a boy and fooling everyone is so interesting to me. The thing that put me off from this book was the fact that the emotions that the characters were feeling were not as evident just from reading this play. I mean, it was like saying "I feel that I love you". It is not as moving as if the author had described what the feeling is. For some reason, I loved Julius Cesar, Othello, and sort of liked "As you like it". So maybe I am just not into this story that much.
    • 5/5
      I love this play. Shakespeare's comedies are very enjoyable.