I also finished reading "Twelfth Night" last night.

I think this is my favorite of the (five) Shakespeare plays I have read (in my life: I read three in high school, then "Julius Caesar" earlier this summer).

I do prefer the comedies to the histories/tragedies I have read. I think part of it is a general distaste for "stories where people die" (my love of detective novels notwithstanding). But mainly, in the comedies, Shakespeare's wordplay (puns, extended metaphors, saucy comparisons) comes to the fore, and that's really why I like Shakespeare's writing.

True, "Twelfth Night," is, as one character notes (in an early instance of "breaking the fourth wall") a rather unbelievable plot (I'm searching for the exact quote now...it was something along the lines of, "If I saw this acted out on stage, I'd laugh at it as being totally impossible...")

Ah, here it is: Act 3, scene 4, Fabian, after seeing Malvolio fall for the fake letter, and show up "in yellow stockings and cross-gartered*":

"If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."

The whole play is just fun. It comes out happily at the end for everyone (well, save for poor Malvolio, and at least he is released from the asylum). There are some enjoyable instances of wordplay, and a few Shakespeare-bawdy jokes (I may be a prude about some things, but those kind of bawdy jokes do make me laugh and appreciate them). And I feel smarter after having read it - I think it does make a person's brain work in good ways to read something like Shakespeare. And I find reading Shakespeare satisfying - because they are plays, they are shorter than the average novel I read, and so I can finish one in a matter of a few weeks rather than a few months.

I think I enjoyed "Twelfth Night" more also because the version of it I had was a Folger Library paperback - I think these were the versions we used in high school when we read Shakespeare - where the right-hand pages are the play, and the left-hand pages are a gloss with references - so you can immediately check an unfamiliar word (though I will say with some pride that most of the words they provided a gloss for, I either already knew or already had seen in the "alternate" usage as Shakespeare used them - like "wanton" meaning "changeable" as well as "unchaste"). And it's easy to pick up references that, as a modern person, you would not get - the reference to song lines in particular.

I'm sure my enjoyment of the play was enhanced by having seen a good version of it beforehand, so I could "hear" the proper inflections of certain words, and probably my catching the double-meaning words was perhaps because I had heard them on stage first.

But at any rate: I do like Twelfth Night. As I said, I think it's my favorite of the Shakespeare plays I have read.

I'm going to read "The Tempest" next; in fact, I'm going to take it with me on break. I have a Folger Library paperback of it as well. (As much as I may love the "atmosphere" of the little old 1890s hardbacks I have that once belonged to Charles Goulder, I have to say the Folger editions are definitely preferable to study from and to feel that you are actually learning about the play. In the older editions I'd have to flip to the back for the gloss, which was inconvenient, and also, it was less complete and did not have all of the allusions noted).

(*And it strikes me that a really wonderful "geeky" sock pattern could be made up based on that line: long socks (like knee socks) to be made of bright yellow yarn, with cables on them designed to capture the "cross gartering" effect. Or maybe welts on them to look like the garters. I don't know. The little woodcut showing "cross gartering" in my copy of the play is not sufficiently clear for me to exactly figure out what it looks like - if I even felt like designing a pattern for knee length socks - but I think it would be a clever idea. They could be called "Malvolio's stockings" or some such.)