More handpicked essays just for you.
Comparative study between tragedy and comedy
Literary analysis over shakespeare twelfth night
Literary analysis over shakespeare twelfth night
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Although many may ascertain William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night as merely a comedy, it borders being a tragicomedy. Twelfth Night follows the story of one twin, Viola, after a shipwreck, as the twin sports a false identity to protect her status and sex. Characters are interlaced into a complex plot driven by the idea of and desire for love. Yet, it is the intersection of power and mental stability that results from the social status of Maria, Feste, and Sir Toby specifically that affects the development of their character throughout Twelfth Night. Maria is Countess Olivia’s chambermaid and although her title ensures that she tend to the needs and desires of her Lady, she has also been given the power to keep the foolish drunks, Sir Andrew and Sir Toby, Olivia’s uncle, under control. Maria is of low status and has a moderate amount of power that leads her to assert herself in her manipulations of the characters throughout the play; this results in her punishing Malvolio due to the similarities of their situations. This punishment exemplifies the mental instability of her character, as she is consumed with a desire to seek revenge on Malvolio for his apparent arrogance and conceit, despite the awareness that the revenge is marginal cruelty. Maria seeks revenge through a forged love letter that leads Malvolio to believe that his desire of upward mobility and riches will be fulfilled with some relationship with Olivia. Maria’s moral instability is especially apparent when she commands the Sirs to hide as she plants the letter. At first glance, this seems to be a trivial, inconsequential joke on Maria’s part. However, through Shakespeare’s diction, “love of mockery” portrays how manipulative Maria actually is, as she knew tha... ... middle of paper ... ...r Sir Toby, who saw this as a chance of achieving her own desires (social mobility through marriage), and finally Sir Toby falls for Maria’s manipulations, resulting in the very thing he sought to avoid: “I could marry this wench for this device” (2.5.169), “And ask no other dowry with her but such another jest,” (2.5.171). The inversion of social order and its consequences provided for the development of the characters of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Maria, Feste, and Sir Toby, although having acknowledged their social standing, differed in how it affected their psychological stability and their lives beyond the extents of the play. Shakespeare concludes his play with the note that the patterns that result in the varying stabilities of the mind will never change, when intersected with social status, and should be accepted rather than altered through experience.
The characters in Twelfth Night each play an important and specific role, especially when it comes to interfering or setting fate for romantic interests. Not all characters get a happy ending, and a particular character’s husband turned out to be someone much different than who she believed to be marrying. Through dishonesty, confusion, and chicanery, each character had a helping hand in dishing out each other’s fate, but nonetheless, the relationships that resulted in a law binding marriage beat destiny and overcame every hardship standing in the way of love and happiness.
... are the “weaker, purer, more virtuous sex” (10), however, in this poem, Lady Maria is the more aggressive, imploring, suggestive and outspoken one. Humility is not her goal here: there is a play on the word “rule” (16) where in Lady Maria is pointing out the hypocrisy in the rules in order to establish a relationship in which she is the one who rules.
In William Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night, the use of mistaken identity and role reversal communicates that gender roles and social class are constructed illusions that trick people into having unrealistic expectations about how they are supposed behave.Viola crossdressing as Cesario in the play challenges traditional views of how a woman of her status should act.The differences between the accepted clothing for an individual emphasizes gender roles and social hierarchy in society. During the Renaissance, “ the idea of two genders, one subordinate to the other, provided a key element in its hierarchical view of the social order and to buttress its gendered division of labor” (Howard 423).
People are not always who they appear to be. Whether it’s that fierce tattooed muscle man or that sweet elderly lady smiling from a few seats away, what is perceived is not always what is true. Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night portrays many a character whose identities do not align with their inner character. Olivia’s polite ladylike demeanour, Sir Toby’s guise of nobility, and Feste’s job as a fool all demonstrate how social identities don’t always align with inner character. Olivia’s public status shows her as a caring and high-class lady, a persona that contrasts to her inner self as a bold and tenacious woman.
when he gets bored of it then he tells him to stop, just like that.
In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and in Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid, two ladies are presented, that are not necessarily the leading protagonist, but they help unravel the plays’ plots into something amazing. Twelfth Night features Maria, the lady in waiting to Olivia. At first Maria comes off as a dilettante, later on we find out that’s not the case at all. Meanwhile, in The Imaginary Invalid, there is the disputatious Toinette, who is the maidservant and nurse to the imaginary invalid himself, Argan. Maria and Toinette are two strong women characters, their strength and wit is depicted through Maria and Toinette’s deceiving schemes to make their plays more stimulating as well as their objectivity throughout all the chaos in their respective play.
Twelfth Night revolves heavily around the shipwreck plot device to split apart the siblings Viola and Sebastian, leading to the development of a bizarre love-triangle and a case of mistaken identity. Besides the rather literal importance of the sea as the driving force for the play’s plot, water appears to resonate as a recurring theme throughout many scenes; specifically, it becomes a living representation for the emotional status of various characters, and woven within the ebb and flow of the tides, qualities such as fate, grief, death (imagined or real), and reflection churn amongst the brackish waters of the play’s symbolic ocean. Of course, because Twelfth Night fails to meet definition of a tragedy outright, these elements will not lead
Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare The idea of courtly love based in Shakespeare's 'Twelfth night' involved a woman being put on a pedestal and worshipped from a distance like she was goddess who could not be attained. Only by very long devotion and lots of trials could a man get this kind of woman. The woman quite often appeared to be both cruel and fair. Courtly love was a sexless kind of love and was more idealised.
After Duke Orsino asks Cesario (disguised Viola) to make Olivia love him, although she had stated that she would not marry for seven years due to her sadness from her brother’s death, Cesario tells him “I’ll do my best to woo your lady.” Then Viola tells the audience “(Aside) yet, a barful strife—Whoe'er I woo, myself would be his wife,” meaning that she has to convince another woman to love the man she loves. The exchange of words in this scene exemplifies dramatic irony since the reader now knows that a love road that connects Duke Orsino, Viola, and Olivia has formed while Orsino is clueless about the situation. Situational irony can also be withdrawn from this conversation because it is shocking that Viola is in love with Orsino. Viola’s sudden love for Orsino illustrates a universal truth about life that sometimes people fall in love too quickly without thinking far ahead.
Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night revolves around a love triangle that continually makes twists and turns like a rollercoaster, throwing emotions here and there. The characters love each another, but the common love is absent throughout the play. Then, another character enters the scene and not only confuses everyone, bringing with him chaos that presents many different themes throughout the play. Along, with the emotional turmoil, each character has their own issues and difficulties that they must take care of, but that also affect other characters at same time. Richard Henze refers to the play as a “vindication of romance, a depreciation of romance…a ‘subtle portrayal of the psychology of love,’ a play about ‘unrequital in love’…a moral comedy about the surfeiting of the appetite…” (Henze 4) On the other hand, L. G. Salingar questions all of the remarks about Twelfth Night, asking if the remarks about the play are actually true. Shakespeare touches on the theme of love, but emphases the pain and suffering it causes a person, showing a dark and dismal side to a usually happy thought.
In the play Twelfth Night, Shakespeare employs a plot filled with contradictions to portray love as an insurmountable force, and with the use of symbols insinuating deception, along with dolefully forthright metaphors and similes, Shakespeare further demonstrates that deception and suffering are the true fueling entities of this puissant force known as love. The extreme actions of Olivia and Sebastian exemplify the power of love and depict how this force can blind an individual to the point where their actions display high levels...
In Shakespeare’s play, Twelfth Night or What you Will, the characters are involved in a plot complete with trickery, disguise, and love. Each character is defined not by his or her gender or true identity, but by the role they are forced to take because of the complicated situation that arises. Unlike their gender, the speech the characters give an insight to their true personalities. In the Twelfth Night, the character Duke Orsino uses flowery and over-dramatic language, long poetic sentence structure, and melodramatic metaphors to display his overemotional romantic nature despite the different emotions in his various speeches.
Atkin, Graham. Twelfth Night : Character Studies. London: Continuum, 2008. eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 13 Apr. 2014.
Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is a play with themes that parallel the folly of the festival it is named after. The main storyline of the plot plays on this a lot by mixing up the stereotypes around gender that were very present at the time. However, a sub-plot involving secondary characters defines this theme even more. It takes the idea even further by relating servants’ attempts to blur the lines between social classes. Twelfth Night’s Maria and Malvolio both have great aspirations to rise above their social class. However, Maria succeeds where Malvolio fails because of her capability to make use of the satiric ambiance of her mistress’s household to achieve her goals.
Twelfth Night or What You Will is one of Shakespeare’s most famous comedies. It has been performed hundreds of times and adapted into a number of modern films. The main plot of the play follows Viola, a girl who is rescued from a shipwreck and enters into the service of the Duke Orsino disguised as a man. Rising quickly in his estimation, Viola begins delivering messages of love on his behalf to Olivia, a noble woman who has no interest in Orsino’s advances. Over the course of the play Olivia falls in love with the disguised Viola, Viola falls in love with Orsino, and Viola’s twin brother Sebastian, who supposedly died in the shipwreck, returns. Following Sebastian’s return the twins are mistaken for each other, leading to both misunderstanding and marriage in the final scenes of the play. Alongside the main plot of Twelfth Night is an almost equally prominent subplot involving Malvolio, a servant of Olivia, who falls in love with her and who falls prey to a prank planned by the other members of the household who despise his abhorrence of fun. In the article “The Design of Twelfth Night” by L.G. Salingar, Salingar examines the plot and structure of the play and addresses the significance of the subplot. The purpose of this essay is to examine both evidence from the play and articles from other authors, with a focus on Salingar, who have written on the subject in order to determine the purpose of the subplot. In his article, Salingar comes to the conclusion that the purpose of the subplot is to provide a comic mirror of the main plot while amplifying the main themes of delusion, misrule and festivity. Salingar presents a solid argument, however he has neglected another lesser but significant element of the sub-plot which illustrate...