Twelfth Night is one of Shakespeare's funniest plays and also one of his most romantic. A young noblewoman, Viola, shipwrecked in a foreign land and separated from her twin brother, dresses as a man in order to enter the service of Orsino, duke of Illyria. Complications ensue - deceptions, infatuations, misdirected overtures, malevolent pranks - as everyone is drawn into the hilarious confusion.<BR>Eminent linguist and translator Burton Raffel offers generous help with vocabulary, pronunciation, and prosody and provides alternative readings of phrases and lines. His on-page annotations give readers all the tools they need to comprehend the play and begin to explore its many possible interpretations. Raffel provides an introductory essay, and in a concluding essay Harold Bloom argues that instability of identity is the essence of Twelfth Night.