Page to Stage: Twelfth Night - CBC Radio Ideas Series 2024

This is an excerpt of the CBC broadcast "Liberate Your Mind: Gender and Shakespeare." The panel discussion of Twelfth Night is part of the episode of CBC Radio's Ideas series that was aired on February 20, 2024.
Take Shakespeare's use of the double entendre in Twelfth Night - Viola in disguise as a man, and mourning her supposedly dead brother, saying "I am all the daughters of my father's house, and all the brothers too" - a technique that scholar Alexa Alice Joubin says prompts an ambiguity that compels people to think.
"I would say we can - and should - embrace more of that open-endedness to ambiguity rather than pinning down the surface of the text," said English professor Alexa Alice Joubin.
"The beauty of imaginative literature, especially Shakespeare, is a lesson in ambiguity. Unfortunately, people embrace that less and less, and I've often told my students that's a huge problem, especially when you approach imaginative literature with literal mindedness - you're not willing or able to liberate your mind."
From the Stratford Festival, IDEAS producer Philip Coulter moderates a discussion about the slippery process of interpreting Shakespeare. Panelists Jyotsna Singh, Alexa Alice Joubin and actors Maev Beaty and Graham Abbey, along with director Jonathan Goad examine the minefields of sex and gender.
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Stratford Festival, Ontario, Canada