A health librarian at the theatre: Twelfth Night

Part of our lockdown routine is to watch theNational Theatre Live performances on YouTube, and last week it was a recording of a performance of Shakespeare ' s Twelfth Night.I managed to get through school without reading any Shakespeare, aided by the fact that I dropped English as fast as I could after O levels (that ' s what GCSEs used to be, in case you are not sure!)I came round in the end to the idea of English literature, and did an A level as an adult. I enjoyed that a lot, so the lesson there is not to give up completely on a subject!  For A level, I read Hamlet, and one theme in that is that of madness.And it turns up in Twelfth Night too.  Malvolio is persuaded to dress in yellow stockings and cross garters as a trick, and there follows a scene where he is blindfolded and secluded as a lunatic.   (In the NT performance, Malvolio becomes a woman and is called Malvolia).After we had watched, I, as one does, wondered if anyone had written anything in the medical and health journal literature about Malvolio specifically.  Apparently not, not that I could find in PubMed or Web of Science.  Actually there are references in PubMed to Malvolio, but this is because it is a gene studied in beetles and inDrosophila.  Google comes to our rescue and finds other sorts of literature:First, athesis by Caroline van Thienen presented for the degree of Master in taal- en letterkunde Engels at the Universiteit te Gent, and available in ...
Source: Browsing - Category: Databases & Libraries Tags: medicine in fiction Source Type: blogs