Frances E. Dolan examines the puzzling pronouns and puns, the love poetry, mischief, and disguises of Twelfth Night, exploring its themes of grief, obsessive love, social climbing and gender identity, and helping you towards your own close-readings.

Frances E. Dolan is an expert on the literature and culture of England from 1500-1700 and an award-winning teacher. Professor of English at the University of California, Davis, she has also taught at Miami University, the University of Chicago, and Columbia University. Her textbook, The Taming of the Shrew: Texts and Contexts (1996), continues to be taught widely, as do the five plays she has edited. In addition, Dolan is the author of four scholarly books, most recently True Relations: Reading, Literature, and Evidence in Seventeenth-Century England (2013), as well as numerous articles in journals and collections. A former president of the Shakespeare Association of America, she has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (at the Newberry and Folger libraries), the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and, most recently, the Huntington Library, where she was a Fletcher Jones Distinguished Fellow.

Introduction - ways in

1. Language in Print: tis poetical

2. Language, Character and Plot

3. Language Through Time

4. From Reading to Writing


Further Reading