Twelfth Night

The reading of a play differs from reading a novel in many ways. First, a play is constant dialogue. This forces the reader to keep track of who exactly is talking. This constant switching can lead to the reader being confused and sometimes ruining the jokes that are in the dialogue. To read a play, it requires a vast understanding of the characters and how they talk. When reading a book, there can be dialogue, but it is often fractions the amount of dialogue that is involved in a play. A novel provides much more detail than a play because the narrator is able to explain descriptions while in a play that is often for the readers’ creation.

If the play were a novel, the understanding of Twelfth Night would increase drastically. The play being a novel would allow for the author to provide much more information including descriptions of the surroundings and descriptions of the characters instead of forcing an indirect description. If the play were a novel, it would lose a lot of comedy involved. This is simply because a lot of comedy in Shakespearean romances, the comedy is in the dialogue and if it was a novel, it would lose some of it’s dialogue. The movie allows for the audience place faces with names. While reading the play, it is necessary for the reader to visualize everything in the play such as character attributes and the setting.