Twelfth Night by Shakespeare
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After Reading the play Twelfth Night by Shakespeare, there were many unusual things happening throughout the whole play. There was woman dressed as men, people acting as others, men being drunks every day, a clown, and confusion on person which it is not them. Everything I just have named was done by the characters throughout the whole play which made the play so great. Some plays that I usually read by Shakespeare were long, boring, hard to understand like Romeo and Juliet, but Twelfth Night was short, simple, and had comedy in it. Even though this play had those great attributes to it, there was a real meaning and message in it that will get people wondering about things happening around them in todays society. Such messages are used both for purposes of communication and miscommunication which sometimes deliberate and sometimes accidental. One message that was shown mainly in the play was “love”. Love was shown by the many characters like Orsino, Olivia, Viola, and many others, but at the same time love brought pain to some people that kept somewhat heartbroken until someone else came along. Another message is how people are confused about the uncertainty of gender around them. People see others walk around and thinks he is a she or vice versa, but they are wrong when they come close to them to see their features. For example, Olivia was dressed as man, but Orsino could see some features of women through the disguise yet he still continued to think she was an he. The two themes that I will talk about is love as causing pain and the uncertainty of gender throughout the play. Theses themes connect with each other on many levels that it takes awhile to see where I am coming from.
As I stated before, love brought pain to characters throughout the story until another person came along, and brought that romantic feature with them. Overall love was the main focus of the play which romantic comedy played a big role too. “Shakespeare shows this as some characters feel that love is like a kind of a curse, that attacks of feelings the characters suddenly and discretely.” For example, Orsino is turned down by Olivia several times, but he continues to tell Cesario to go back to show more affection to her regardless what Cesario tells him on what Oliva says back to him. In Act 1scene1one lines 1-3 Orsino says “Give me excuses of it that, suffering, the appetite may sicken and so die, and strain again, it had a dying fall”.(pg 1080) Meaning he loves so much that he is hungry for it, and will not stop till he satisfied with a love of his life. That is one of the reasons why he is so obsessed with Olivia, but in reality he was just looking for someone to love him back. Another point where Orsino talks about love in pain is in Act 1 line 21 which states, ” And my desires, like feel and cruel hounds,”(pg 1080) he was talking about his feelings are like cruel hounds that will not stop searching until they find what their looking for. Back then love was one of the major things to live for besides honor to the name. If someone was not from a wealthy the best thing to do is to marry a person from wealthy family. This is mostly shown from woman not being wealthy and the men coming to different cities to find the love from those types of women. In this play Shakespeare makes both the men and women wealthy that are hungry for love. “Orsino fashions himself into a Petrarch an lover which is constant to the image of yond sovereign cruelty”. (Melchior p.3) This is evidence for the point I stated about wealthy men in the plays by Shakespeare.
Next person who shares these love moments as pain is Olivia. Unlike Orsino, Olivia describes her love as the plague, the biggest sickness in the Middle Ages, which she claims to suffer terribly everyday until finding that love she is looking for. The author of the article, Gender and self fashioning says, “Olivia fashions herself into a romantic aggressor who “abuses” herself” (Melchior p.3) meaning she is portrayed as so romantic, but if she does not get the love she desired from she gets aggressive which was show in the movie. Knowing her brother is dead, Olivia is missing him and the love that they had shared so she needs someone there to comfort her. She didnt want anyone to be around her, but in her mind she needed someone to love her which is why she is so determined to find love. When Orsino sends Viola to see Olivia and to tell how much he loves her many times, Olivia ends up loving him instead of Orsino. After awhile she starts getting desperate because Viola keeps turning her down which she is completely a women disguise as a man. In the movie Olivia was portrayed really desperate as in one scene she grabs Cesario and holds him begging him to love her. She does this many times throughout the movie. Her being in that type of state makes Orsino want to kill Cesario for trying to kill in Act 5 scene 1. Orsino feels that Cesario betrayed him from stealing the woman he loves, but at the end of the day he marries