In the Library
Twelfth Night
William Shakespeare, 1623
- Form
- Form Play
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 1.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 18
- Length
- Length 21k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
If music be the food of love, play on, / Give me excess of it; that, surfeiting, / The appetite may sicken and so die.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
The Tempest
William Shakespeare
Both plays turn on a shipwreck that throws strangers onto a strange shore, and The Tempest makes the wreck into magic, music and a father quietly arranging his daughter's love.
£1.99
The Importance of Being Earnest
Oscar Wilde
Wilde runs the same machinery of assumed names and doubled identities to a happy ending, with a baby lost in a handbag where Shakespeare loses twins at sea.
£1.99
Orlando
Virginia Woolf
Orlando does the same thing, letting its hero slip between genders without ever losing themselves, but Woolf stretches the transformation across centuries instead of one disguised season.
£1.99
About the book
If music be the food of love, play on. Orsino begins lovesick for the sound of his own longing, and the comedy never quite stops being about people in love with feelings rather than with people. Viola, washed ashore in Illyria and certain her twin brother drowned with the ship, buries her grief in boy's clothes and takes service with the man she immediately loves, who sends her to court the countess who promptly loves her back. The play is exquisite and cruel in equal measure: Sir Toby's midnight carousing, Malvolio in yellow stockings and a smile he cannot stop, gulled by a letter he wants too much to doubt. Grief runs beneath all of it like water under ice, and the fool keeps singing about it. When Feste is left alone at the end with the rain that raineth every day, the whole bright thing turns, and you understand you have been laughing at the edge of a drowning.