You may have already seen by now this NY Times article entitled How Shakespeare Invented Teenagers:

Yet our whole modern understanding of adolescence is there to be found in this play. Shakespeare essentially created this new category of humanity, and in place of the usual mix of nostalgia and loathing with which we regard adolescents (and adolescence), Shakespeare would have us look at teenagers in a spirit of wonder. He loves his teenagers even as he paints them in all their absurdity and nastiness.

When I first saw this come through I was surprised at how short it was, until I realized that it’s just a snippet from the upcoming book “How Shakespeare Changed Everything”, by Stephen Marche.
Honestly I read it and skipped it, and I’m only posting here to get a little discussion going since everybody and his uncle Antonio has been linking it. I couldn’t help but think, “Didn’t we already go through this with Bloom?”
What do you think? Did Shakespeare invent teenagers?

Flipping through my Kindle version of the plays this weekend I tripped over this description of Twelfth Night (found here via Google Books):

This is justly considered as one of the most delightful of Shakespeare’s comedies. It is full of sweetness and pleasantry. It is perhaps too good-natured for comedy. It has little satire and no spleen. It aims at the ludicrous rather than the ridiculous. It makes us laugh at the follies of mankind not despise them and still less bear any ill will towards them.

This comes from William Hazlitt, in the early 1800’s (the Google copy is dated 1845, and I note with a smile that it is dedicated to Charles Lamb, of Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare).
Am I misunderstanding something, or has our understanding of Twelfth Night done something of a one-eighty? I’ve seen it described as the dark and twistiest of the comedies. Here, Hazlitt claims it has no spleen.
What’s going on? Somebody fill us in on this Hazlitt fellow.
UPDATE: From the Wikipedia page, I think I would have quite liked this guy:

His approach was something new. There had been critics of Shakespeare before, but either they were not comprehensive or they were not aimed at the general reading public. As Ralph Wardle put it, before Hazlitt wrote this book, “no one had ever attempted a comprehensive study of all of Shakespeare, play by play, that readers could read and reread with pleasure as a guide to their understanding and appreciation”. Somewhat loosely organized, and even rambling, the studies offer personal appreciations of the plays that are unashamedly enthusiastic. Hazlitt does not present a measured account of the plays’ strengths and weaknesses, as did Dr. Johnson, or view them in terms of a “mystical” theory, as Hazlitt thought his contemporary A.W. Schlegel did (though he approves of many of Schlegel’s judgements and quotes him liberally). Without apology, he addresses his readers as fellow lovers of Shakespeare and shares with them the beauties of what he thought the finest passages of the plays he liked best.

Emphasis mine. But yes, yes, yes.

This has potential. I’m not fully sure yet what it is, exactly – a software download, a programming language? But it seems like the end result is 3D representations (such as Second Life) of theatres – including the Globe! Be sure to check out the video on the rightside navigation. I could definitely picture kids in an English class getting to poke around stuff like this, even if it is just playing the YouTube walk through, for those schools that are not quite at the interactive level of having each kid cruise through Second Life on his own.

…And by that I mean the spelling of his name. I get that Biron / Berowne are the same person, but what’s the story on the change? I actually flipped through a Who’s Who book at Borders the other day looking up Berowne, and he wasn’t even listed under that name, not even a “See Biron.”
To add a little more depth to the question, how about pronunciation? I found this via Google books :

Biron, or Berowne, as it appears in the early copies, is accented on the second syllable and rhymes with “moon”.

Really? So those are both pronounced the same way? If I saw Biron I would assume was pronounced more like BYE-run.

Ok, we did “best villain” and, no surprise, Iago killed it. I’m actually surprised that it was such a runaway, I thought Aaron would make a stronger showing.
So, what’s the villain landscape look like when we rule out all the big names? I’m curious about the Don John’s of Shakespeare’s canon. Who is your favorite “villain who’s not really much of a villain”? Every time I see Much Ado I can’t help but imagine Don John as this sort of Snidely Whiplash character with the big black cape twirling his handlebar mustache. “A wedding??! I must wreck it! Bwahahahaha!”
I suppose Shylock might fall into this category, but it’s hard to really see him as the villain, given our modern understanding of his situation. Is Petruchio a villain? Which plays don’t have a villain at all? Is there a villain in Midsummer?