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Boring not bawdy, Twelfth Night bombs.

Let us get one thing straight: Shakespeare was to the Elizabethan mob what Steven King or J.K. Rowling is to us. He was silly, he wrote overly dramatic plays about beheading and poisoning, affairs and bawdy sex. Compared to the goings-on in Shakespeare’s plays, Desperate Housewives and The Sopranos seem like child’s play. Sure, he made sneaky little comments about political events, but so did Gene Roddenberry. Shakespeare wrote to get by, not to be remembered as a genius of the age. In fact, he was so underwhelming to the Elizabethans that only one (that’s right, kids, one) portrait was taken of him in his lifetime.

Shakespeare wrote to entertain and make a buck (er, pound). He was a clever man, yes, but he also ripped off the works of the Greeks (and not in the way that Joseph Campbell argues we all rip off the Greeks – he took entire stories and characters from Greek drama shamelessly). If Shakespeare wrote today, he would be buried in lawsuits from all the things he blatantly stole from his myriad of sources.  Does this make him less of a writer? No, in the same way that J.K. Rowling’s widespread use of standing mythology and folklore does not make her less of a writer. He was clever enough to do it right, and he did it to entertain.

In that sense, Twelfth Night is the worst Shakespearean adaptation I have ever seen, though it does the play, as Juliet would say, by the book. Just because the production stays true to what would have been put on to the Elizabethan crowds does not mean that it sticks to the spirit of the piece – to be funny, to make one laugh at gender bending antics or blush at bawdy humor. This adaptation is so buried in “accuracies” that Sir Toby’s drunkenness is lost in archaic language and performance techniques, Feste’s all-too smart commentary drowned in his minstrel crooning, and Orsino’s wooing of Olivia makes him look more like a sissy-pants than a male lead.

Everything that this production is rails against the spirit of Shakespeare, and makes the film utterly unwatchable. Even the appearance of Alec Guinness as the much maligned and stuffy Malvolio couldn’t save this production. Whoever dug this film out of the BBC’s vaults should be beaten on behalf of all the high school kids who are going to have Shakespeare ruined by it.

There are no bonus features – in fact, there are no audio options or subtitles even (I guess someone has it out for the hearing impaired). Suckage all around.

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