Day 49: 'Twelfth Night'

If you like: Coffee Prince, To All the Boys I've Loved Before, Dil Bole Hadippa, Gilmore Girls.

Look, I knew I would write about a William Shakespeare play during this project.

I planned on it being one of the plays that would make me look cool, like Winter’s Tale or Julius Caesar or Measure for Measure or even King Lear or Othello.

But here in the last stretch I’ve fallen behind and so I’ve pulled a Shakespeare play that I can write about off the top of my head because I’ve known and loved it for a long time, even if it’s one of his less cool plays.

I first read Twelfth Night -- with copious help from Cliff Notes -- in eighth grade. My teacher had talked about it when we were reading that Shakespeare YA novel known as Romeo and Juliet.

If R & J is the Twilight of Shakespeare (I’m talking feeling-wise, not quality-wise) then Twelfth Night is To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before.

A story about a girl who has to pretend she’s a boy because of the patriarchy and gets tied up in a complicated romance tangle is still a great storyline.

That’s the thing about Shakespeare. He was able to take a story so universal it seems unoriginal but he did it so well, it feels new every time.

To recap, Orsinio is moping because Olivia isn’t showing an interest in him. So he sends the new guy in court, Cesario, to convince Olivia to date him.

Cesario is actually Viola, who has recently survived a shipwreck that killed her beloved twin brother. Since it’s dangerous for a woman to travel on her own (patriarchy) she is currently in disguise as a man.

What follows is a true love triangle, not just a love angle (two people competing for one person’s affection). Viola falls in love with Orsinio, Orsinio is in love with Olivia and Olivia falls in love with Viola/Cesario.

Or maybe more like a love triangle with antennae? Because Sir Andrew Aguecheek is also in love with Olivia, and then Sebastian, who of course isn’t dead, shows up and he’s in love with Olivia, too. And Malvolio thinks Olivia is in love with him, so he’s in love with her.

There’s a lot of romantic geometry in this play.

And is it always love? The characters pursue each other for the idea of love as much as true love.

It’s fun to poke fun of Hamlet being Shakespeare’s emo character, but he doesn’t hold a candle to Orsinio who opens the play with the modern equivalent of setting repeat on his iPod for She by Elvis Costello.

He doesn’t really know much about Olivia, other than she’s pretty and popular and out of reach.

Viola, who has a chance to bounce between houses and identities, sees everyone much more clearly. But she gets so caught up in the lies she has to maintain, will she see herself clearly in the end?

It’s a Shakespeare comedy -- of course she will.

To keep all of this emoting from becoming tiresome, Shakespeare keeps adding spinning plates, subplots and jokes and confusion, until they all come crashing down in the end.

I’ll admit, one of my favorite scenes in the play is between Viola and Sir Andrew. He is needled into challenging her to a duel, even though he’s a coward. She has no experience with sword fighting, but he doesn’t know that, because she’s not wearing a skirt.

So they’re facing off with each other, both desperately not wanting to fight but still drawing swords.

You know, the classic kind of shenanigans that happen when you’re pretending to be someone else while courting a girl for the guy you love.

Twelfth Night isn’t the best of Shakespeare’s plays and it’s not his most quotable, although it’s good way to start a discussion with even a 13-year-old about what love is. Still, while I categorize his “cool” plays as the ones I can use to impress people, I need to remember that before Shakespeare was part of the canon he was an entertainer and there’s nothing wrong with liking Twelfth Night because it’s entertaining.