English Questions, Novel Vs. Play Vs. Movie

How does reading a play differ from reading a novel?

Reading a play is similar to watching the events of an authors minimal description unfold, while reading a novel is more like an experiencing the events first hand.  Since a play only represents what the characters say and when they interact, a large proportion of actions are left to be extrapolated by the reader, which constructs most of the interactions in the book as largely interpretive.  However, reading a novel provides a very strict conveyance of events, which requires less interpretation to be done since the novel’s characters do much of the evaluation themselves.  

How might Twelfth Night be different if it was a novel?

If Twelfth Night was a novel, then the author would be instilling a very specific interpretation of Shakespeare’s play onto the reader, which would lead to a much more refined understanding of the characters and their interactions through the inferences made possible by the details provided by each character for the environment in a novel.  This is drastically different from the interpretive framework of Twelfth Night since much of the interactions provide only basic information on each characters relationship with each other and a large portion of the characters actual thoughts about one another are missing and must be concluded indirectly.

How does watching the movie differ from reading the play?

Watching the movie is very similar to reading the play, but, like a novel, it is a very specific interpretation of the events in the play without the immense details that a novel provides through the characters thoughts. The play creates a nature of subjective interpretation because Shakespeare’s plays, like Twelfth Night, only provide the dialogues of the characters and a very minimal explanation of how the characters act, which deprives the reader of the actual thoughts and reactions of the character provided in a novel that cannot be accurately inferred.