Recommendations
Books Like Twelfth Night
Best books to read after Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
Readers who love Twelfth Night are drawn to its combination of Shakespeare's greatest comedy, Viola's dignity in her impossible disguise, the comedy of Malvolio's humiliation, Feste's melancholy wisdom, and the play's opening line ('If music be the food of love, play on'). They want works that deal with gender disguise, misplaced desire, the comedy of manners, and the tradition of Shakespeare's romantic comedies.
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Orlando
by Virginia Woolf
The modernist novel most directly in the spirit of Twelfth Night's gender fluidity — Woolf's fantasy of a poet who lives for centuries and changes sex is the 20th century equivalent of the play's cross-dressing comedy; shares Twelfth Night's conviction that gender is more fluid than social convention allows.
- 2Buy
As You Like It
by William Shakespeare
The companion romantic comedy with a similar disguise plot — Rosalind disguises herself as Ganymede in the Forest of Arden as Viola disguises herself as Cesario; the two plays are the most important Shakespeare comedies to read alongside each other for their shared exploration of gender disguise and romantic comedy.
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The Importance of Being Earnest
by Oscar Wilde
The Victorian comedy most directly in Twelfth Night's tradition of mistaken identity and the comedy of earnestness — Wilde's doubled heroes (both claiming to be Ernest) create a comic confusion that deliberately echoes Shakespeare's twin plot; the greatest comedy in English after Shakespeare.
- 4Buy
Much Ado About Nothing
by William Shakespeare
The companion comedy of wit and misdirection — Beatrice and Benedick's sparring is the most vivid relationship in Shakespeare's comedies alongside Viola/Orsino; Much Ado and Twelfth Night are the two Shakespeare comedies that most reward reading back-to-back.
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She's the Man
by Andy Fickman (dir.)
The teen-comedy film retelling of Twelfth Night — Amanda Bynes plays the Viola figure disguising herself as her twin brother at a boarding school; one of the most successful and charming modern retellings of the play's gender-disguise plot.
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Blithe Spirit
by Noël Coward
The 20th century comedy most in the spirit of Twelfth Night's world of sexual confusion and desire that cannot be easily satisfied — Coward's ghost comedy, like Twelfth Night, is about the comedy of love that refuses to behave as convention requires.
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Ariel
by Sylvia Plath
An unexpected pairing: Plath's poems and Feste's songs share the melancholy that runs beneath Twelfth Night's comedy — Feste's songs ('Come away, come away death'; 'When that I was and a little tiny boy') belong to the same emotional world as Plath's lyric intensity.
- 8Buy
The Comedy of Errors
by William Shakespeare
The early comedy that establishes the twin-confusion plot Twelfth Night perfects — where The Comedy of Errors is a farce of physical confusion, Twelfth Night deepens the same material into an exploration of desire and identity; reading both shows how Shakespeare developed from his earliest to his greatest comedy.
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