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?

I often open up a word processor and try to bang out some notes on the general topic of what I’d call “explaining Shakespeare.” I know that No Fear and For Dummies and Sparknotes have done the subject to death, but I like to humor myself and think that, if I ever find my hook, I could actually add some value to that particular canon.
I get stuck over and over again in the same spot, however. So I thought I’d open up the idea to discussion. Here’s my dilemma. When you are attempting to explain a Shakespeare play (let’s say Hamlet), how do you do it? Do you describe the chronological events of what’s happened / happening? Do you describe it scene by scene? Or do you talk about the characters, and their relationships and motivations?
The easy and done to death answer is to go scene-by-scene. I don’t like this, though, for a couple of reasons. Most notably, every production is different. I hate the idea of telling somebody “Ok, in the next scene Polonius is going to send Reynaldo off to spy on Laertes” and then have them go to a production where that doesn’t happen. You know what I mean? Most people who want to read a summary of Hamlet aren’t necessariy going to then sit down and read the text (except maybe high school students :)). Grown ups who want Shakespeare explained to them want to understand the story, so that if they ever see it they know what’s going on.
So then what about chronologically? I like the idea of starting out talking about Hamlet being off at school, and his father dying. I think that this is something that many families today can immediately relate to. But … then what? How do you go from “Hamlet’s dad died” to “Horatio confirms his ghost walking the castle” to “Laertes returns to France” and so on through the play? You can find a way to do it I’m sure, but it’s going to seem fairly awkward (since there are places in the play where the timing itself is a little suspect anyway), and the harder you try to make it work, the more you’re going away from the story on the stage so that if someone does go see a production, they’re just as likely to be lost by what’s happening. You’ve ended up writing an alternative version of Hamlet. A novelization, almost.
Lastly there’s the idea of character study. While I love this idea, I love taking Hamlet and just walking through the entire play completely from his point of view, I think that this simultaneously provides the most interesting story while also offering the least immediate value to the audience. Make sense? I don’t think my reader wants 400 pages on Hamlet’s relationship problems. My reader wants enough information about the story that they will both *understand* it as well as *enjoy* it. Going too deep into each character (and really, how can you not go deeply into each character if we’re talking about Hamlet?) is going after a different audience. That’s like the second-stage audience, the ones who have already seen and understood and enjoyed Hamlet and now say “I’d like to learn more about these characters.”
What to do? How do you explain Shakespeare to somebody in a meaningful and useful way, without resorting to a scene-by-scene translation?

(As I write this, I think I know my answer. I’ve gone to see Shakespeare with people casually. People who don’t know the story. So they ask me, “What’s it about?” And I proceed to tell them, to the best of my ability, what I think is a useful description of what they are about to see. What I need to do is record one of those spontaneous explanations, and then write it down, and go from there.)