Read Twelfth Night by email.
Three weeks in a country where everybody loves the wrong person.
A woman is washed ashore, dresses as a boy, and is sent to court a countess on behalf of the duke she has fallen for. Twenty-one mornings in Illyria, opening with a scene under 350 words about a man listening to music and enjoying being unhappy.
Four or five minutes a day, and every installment opens with a line reminding you where you left off.
Three weeks from now, you will have read Shakespeare.
21 installments, one an email
- First published
- 1602
- Installments
- 21
- Each installment
- 4–5 min
How long it takes
- Words
- 21,344
- Reading time
- 1 hour 29 minutes
- At 5 minutes a day
- 3 weeks
- At 10 minutes a day
- 9 days
- At 20 minutes a day
- 4 days
At 240 words a minute, the average for adult silent reading. Use your own speed
Why read Twelfth Night?
Eighteen scenes over twenty-one mornings, only three of them long enough to need splitting, so fifteen of those mornings are one entire scene as Shakespeare wrote it. The play also runs on a joke that needs time to work — everybody is in love with somebody who cannot return it, and the one person who could untangle the whole thing is presumed drowned. A day between scenes suits that. The gulling of Malvolio is the clearest case: Maria proposes the forged letter on one morning, Malvolio finds it two mornings later, turns up in yellow stockings four days after that, and is shut in a dark room being told he is mad nine days after the joke began. Read in an evening, it is a gag. Read a scene a day, it is a fortnight of a man being slowly taken apart by people who like him less than he thinks.
Verse arrives as verse and prose as prose, speaker names in small capitals, stage directions in italics — and the six songs are set as songs, which matters in the play that ends on one. Only three of the eighteen scenes are too long for a single email: Viola’s first embassy to Olivia in Act I, the yellow stockings and the botched duel in Act III, and the last scene, where everyone arrives at once. Each is cut at a stage direction marking an entrance or an exit rather than at a word count, and the last one falls in the only place it could — Act V splits at “Enter Sebastian,” so the email that has spent three weeks not quite finding him stops there, and he walks on at the top of the next one.
Installment 1 is the playbill — fifteen persons of the play, the setting given as a city in Illyria and the seacoast near it — then a duke in his palace calling for music and losing interest in it inside the same speech. It is under 350 words, and it is the play in miniature: everyone in Illyria wants the version of the thing they have imagined. Three weeks later the twins are on stage together, three marriages have been settled in about a hundred lines, and a clown is left alone to sing that the rain it raineth every day. Malvolio is the only one who is not given a joke he can live with, and the last scene knows it.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to read Twelfth Night?
About an hour and a half straight through (21,344 words). By email, it’s 21 daily installments of four to five minutes — three weeks exactly, or faster at a premium pace of two or three scenes a day.
Is this the complete, unabridged text?
Yes — all eighteen scenes in the carefully typeset Standard Ebooks edition, including every song, Feste’s impersonation of Sir Topas at the dark room door, and the dramatis personae. Nothing is trimmed or modernized.
How does a play work as email?
One scene per email, in play formatting: speaker names in small capitals, stage directions in italics, verse kept as verse and prose kept as prose. The median installment is 1,037 words, four or five minutes. Only three of the eighteen scenes are long enough to split, so fifteen of the twenty-one mornings are one whole scene — the forged-letter scene in the box tree included, all of it, in one go.
Do the recaps spoil anything?
Each recap covers only the previous scene, so nothing arrives before the play delivers it. Shakespeare gives away the one fact that matters almost immediately: you hear on the second morning that Viola’s brother may have survived, and he walks on alive on the seventh, with a fortnight still to run. The comedy is entirely in the gap between what you know and what Illyria does.
How does it arrive?
One installment per email, one email a day, at the hour you pick, with a one-line recap of the previous scene at the top. Free. Unsubscribe or pause anytime.
Standard Ebooks edition, public domain. Texts from Standard Ebooks and Project Gutenberg editions. Not affiliated with either.