Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare

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There’s nothing better than a comedy to lift your spirits up with baskets full of laughter. I like the idea of comedies when there’s a complete misunderstanding, trickery or when things go wrong. For example in one of the episodes of My Wife and Kids when a girl called Claire tells her dad that there will be photograph day in school. So she asks her dad for a massive photograph of her to put on the wall. Her dad said no. On the day of the school photograph when she woke up, her right cheek was swollen-much bigger than the other. As persuaded by her parents she reluctantly went to school. When Claire arrived home she said to her dad thanks for only buying a small picture of me otherwise it would have been a total disaster seeing myself with one big cheek. But little did she know that her dad bought a massive picture of her and put on the front of the garage for everyone to see outside.

The Elizabethans acquired certain expectations for a comedy. This included trickery, insults, jokes and puns, wordplays and misunderstandings and happy endings. These would have all been considered elements of a comedy. Shakespeare wrote a comedy called Twelfth Night because that’s the Christmas Celebration when pranks and deceptions were allowed when people were off work. However the last day 6th January was when all the decorations came down, which brought a tinge bit of sadness to the Elizabethans.

William Shakespeare employs the dramatic conventions of mistaken identity and disguise to establish humour in an example of Act 2 Scene 2 of Twelfth Night. Viola realises Olivia is in love with her “Fortune forbid my outside have not charmed her! she made good view of me, indeed so much that, me thought, her eyes had lost her tongue”. Dramatic irony i...

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...My favourite character out of Twelfth Night would be Maria because of her ingenious scheme and clever observing skills to pull off the trick on Malvolio. Maria is a very shrewd, stocky, plain character who knew when to have a joke but she kind of lay back at the end. It maybe to the realisation that if she was to get in trouble she would have a higher chance of being sacked because the order of hierarchy-as she was a servant. My favourite scene would have to be when Malvolio found the love letter and is ordered to carry out all the instructions and the expression on his face as he thought it really was a love letter was absolutely hysterical. I also like the part when Viola and Sebastian find each other and Olivia’s face when she sees there is double Cesario and she is told by Sebastian she was attracted to a girl. I think Olivia found it amazingly mindboggling.

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