Twelfth Night, Or What You Will [1996]

Welcome back to My Year of Shakespeare. We're watching Twelfth Night and I'm wondering about how to write about Twelfth Night.

I'm using this adaptation as a sort of baseline for understanding the play more broadly; I've done similar with other plays to date and I recognize that the performance is not the play but it's worth keeping in mind that I may be drawing broad conclusions from a small sample size.

I don't have a good sense of how to write about farce. It's like trying to recap a Naked Gun movie (or, judging from how this overstays its run time by a solid 45 minutes, an entry in the Scary Movie franchise). It's fine, it's entertaining in the moment, but it seems that, lacking some social mirroring in the plot, there's not much to take away from it — or when the social mirroring is so far removed from the present social circumstance, it's difficult to feel much about. I did feel slightly envious of how much of the duties of various servants & stewards seemed to be "farting around in the yard."

Like Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, the Toby Belch / Maria / Malvolio plots feel grafted on to an unrelated play after it failed to engage an audience with it's "core" conflicts; I don't know how much of that is accurate to the play's history, intent, etc. I was less than endeared by them, regardless. Hopefully this isn't an ill omen for how I'll feel about Falstaff when we cover the Henriad (September)

I think this adaptation specifically is a fascinating intertext to a video game that played a formative role in my youth, Final Fantasy IX. I'm not the only one to draw the connection between the letter swapping in Twelfth Night and the ATE-based goofballery that happens in Disc 3 of Final Fantasy IX; I think IX arrived at an interesting time in the understanding of how to make a narrative-driven video game, where game designers were starting to understand they had more in common with stage plays than sports [obligatory "Go Listen to Games Studies Study Buddies" links: rss, apple podcasts, spotify]. IX incorporated several Shakespeareisms throughout (frankly, go play the game, it's good, and runs on any potato of a computer if you get the steam version), but perhaps most importantly, it's main character looks to be based on Imogen Stubbs playing Cesario:

Ultimately I think where I fall on this one is "I'm glad I watched it. I have no real desire to re-watch it, in faithful adaptation anyway."

Thanks for bearing with me on this, a punt of an entry in My Year of Shakespeare. I feel like there's been a couple of those lately.

Next week: Amanda Bynes/Channing Tatum vehicle "She's the Man" [2006]