How Does Shakespeare Present Love In Twelfth Night

In the comedy, Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare varied sorts of love are shown. I will explore loves many weaknesses and how one has no self-control when under loves vicious spell. In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night Orsino gives an explicit explanation as he describes his desire for love:

"If music be the food of love/ play on / Give me excess of it / that, surfeiting / The appetite may sicken and so die.” [7 Act 1 Scene 1 1-5] This speech, though rather complicated, does show how love has conquered Orsino. It also lets us know that the methods used to display love herein will be matters of emotion, desire, romantic complications, rejection, and that of something that can come upon you quite unexpectedly and can’t easily be avoided.

In the

The next few lines starts raising the question whether romantic love has more to do with the person who is loved or with the person they love, owns imagination. “Even in a minute/ So full of shapes is fancy/ That it alone is high fantastical/ [7 Act 1 Scene 1 14-15] Complicated by Orsino’s comment about the relationship with romance and imagination, this raises the question, the complicated question, of whether romantic love has more to do with the person who is loved or with the lover’s own imagination of what love really is. Orsino and Olivia love each other but a love triangle ensues– Orsino is in love with Olivia who is in love with Viola / Cesario who is in love with Orsino who is in love with Viola / Cesario, this leaving one’s imagination to wonder about the power of love. Love and desire are exploding here; Olivia is in love with Orsino who claims to love Viola creating a tangled web.

Whether any love displayed in all parts of the book are real or imagined for sheer entertainment and delight, love is the focus for all. It may just be the idea of being in love more so than not.

The grandiose love sickness from which Orsino claims to suffer has led him to love both Olivia and Viola, again proving that love is love with him, all that matters is this thought of being in love, the mere idea. Even though he attempts to speak of love as a sickness [9 Act I Scene 1 23-24] “my desires, like fell and cruel hounds / E’er since pursue me” shows that he speaks of love as some sort of disease, an attack that has overcome him without any warning. In the same way, the power struggle for Olivia, who sent a servant after the departing Cesario to persuade him to return, tries to figure out how to woo him to love her [183 Act 5 Scene 1 330-335] Olivia is willing to pay for love, women are not supposed to do this, this is a man’s role, men usually pay for weddings but through desperation she is offering to fund her own marriage. She seems to think that her love is the type that