If literature can change our lives, then there should be something in the play that would help get these women out of their friend zones. Imagine Twelfth Night reframed as a “Dear Abby” column dispensing relationship advice to young adults.
Tag Archives: Twelfth Night
Viola, Lost in the Friend Zone
Republicans Need a Shakespearean Fool
William Dyce, “King Lear and the Fool in the Storm” (1851) There’s been a lot of talk about bubbles in recent years. Tiger Woods’ bubble, which cut him off from his fellow human beings, may have led to some of his self-destructive behavior. The Vatican has been living within a bubble for a while, unable […]
Crossing the Great Gender Divide
In last Friday’s post on Twelfth Night, I talked about how Shakespeare uses cross-dressing to acknowledge that men and women have dimensions to them that are not acknowledged by the standard male and female categories. I understood this about the play at an early age. In a past post on Twelfth Night, I describe how […]
The Temporary Transvestite Comedy
Brown and Lemmon Film Friday Sometimes my different classes overlap in interesting ways. I am currently teaching Twelfth Night in my British Literature survey class and Some Like It Hot in my senior-level film genre class. Thanks to an article on the Billy Wilder classic by film scholar Chris Straayer, I can now label both […]
The Challenges of Asking Her Out
In a discussion of Twelfth Night last Friday, my British literature survey class discussed the challenges of a first date. The scene that sparked our conversation is the one where Viola, passing as a man, carries Orsino’s love proposal to Olivia. Of course Olivia falls in love with Viola instead. We started talking about Orsino’s decision to […]

