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critical analysis on twelfth night
shakespeare twelfth night analysis
critical analysis on twelfth night
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In Shakespeare 's well known play Twelfth Night, which takes place somewhere in Illyria, Lady Olivia is an independent, powerful, wealthy but single woman; the sudden deaths of her father and brother has left her in sadness alone in a big castle to herself. She has her relative Sir Toby Belch who was still around and visited her. Orsino, a duke, has a huge crush on her and is trying to have her to himself. Meanwhile, the jealous steward Malvolio who also has a crush on Lady Olivia, is a guy who is full of himself and acts like he 's king, he forgets where his place is sometimes. In Olivia 's house there is the weak and foolish Sir Andrew who has a crush on Olivia and is wishing one day he would get a chance with her. are also these twins,Viola and Sebastian. They have been shipwrecked and isolated from each other, so Viola thinks Sebastian is dead, and Sebastian thinks viola is dead. Later Viola decides to disguise herself as a messenger and call herself Cesario so she can work for Orsino. Since Viola was so pretty and the way she used her words were great, she won Orsino’s trust. Orsino tells Cesario …show more content…
Do you not see how our future would be if we let love have its way with us? Do you not see how many fortunes, we would have all together only if you said yes, YES I ACCEPT. ( Orsino singing) “If music be the food of love,play.” Oh Lady Olivia why are you so stubborn through the skull? when are you going to realize I want to start something great with you?I hope Cesario has been successful with the message from me to Olivia. I know for sure having Olivia by my side we can rule the whole earth and have many sons,daughters. I don’t blame Olivia for playing hard to get, I mean she’s very beautiful with an hour glass body.What man on earth wouldn’t want to have her as theirs? I remember that kiss we shared,very lovely.“O, she that hath a heart of that fine frame, her sweet perfection with one self
Sebastian, the twin brother of Viola who was lost at sea after a shipwreck, and Lady Olivia are the first to marry, but things are not as they seem. During the weeks leading up to matrimony, Olivia fell madly in love with Cesario, who though looks and sounds just as Sebastian, is truly Viola dressed as a man. Sebastian does not realize this as he meets Olivia for the first time. He is amazed that a woman of her statue and beaut...
Viola quickly falls in love with Duke Orsino after meeting him, but she is not able to express her true feelings of love for two different reasons. First, Orsino is lusting after Olivia, so he is not open to the feelings of others. Orsino is so in love with Olivia’s beauty that he had built a wall of emotion around himself, and Viola was not able to penetrate this wall. More importantly, Viola is not Viola to Orsino; she is Cesario, who, disguised as a man, served Orsino as a eunuch. Although she greatly loves Orsino, Viola cannot openly express this love because she was invisible to him. If Viola does let the truth come out, Orsino will still not be able to love her because he is solely focused on gaining Olivia’s affection. Orsino does not love Viola because he does not see her as a woman in love with him but as a faithful servant, so Viola and her love for Orsino go unnoticed as Orsino delegates Viola to woo Olivia for himself. Viola, wishing she was the one whom Orsino loved, was deeply saddened by this: “I’ll do my best/To woo your lady: yet, a barful strife!/Whoe’er I woo, myself would be his wife” (Act I, Scene IV). Orsino made Viola his messenger to court Olivia, but Viola wishes she was the one whom Orsino was courting. Similarly to how Orsino is blinded by his infatuation with Olivia, the boy whom Swift is in love with is blinded by his love
As Viola (Cesario) goes to the house to meet Olivia, Duke Orsino begins to like her after 3 days in his service. She became a favorite of him. Olivia begans to also like him, he is the only guy she seems to be able to talk and agree with. Orsino favors his new servant, he is insist on picking Cesario to go on his most, important errand- to carry his messages of love to Lady Olivia. Viola tries out for the soccer team in She’s A Man and makes it. Her new roommate is Duke Orsino, which is her brother roommate. Duke Orsino has a crush on Olivia. He wants to make a deal with Viola, if she convinces Olivia to go out with him in their class, he will help her on becoming a better soccer player.
In the play the reader knows that the hidden character viola who plays Orsino causes a lot of mischief and suffrage in the play. Not only to others but to herself. One of the first examples the reader can see this suffrage is in Olivia. Olivia in the story ends up in love with Cesario who we all know is actually Olivia.
This all started when the Duke declared his love to Olivia in the form of a poem. “If music be the food of love give me excess of it” (Act.1 Scene.1) This is when Orsino found out his new love for the countess. Shortly after we find out that Olivia can't marry anyone because she must mourn for 7 years over her brother's death. While on the cost of Illyria Viola finds out her brother might still be alive and embarks on a dangerous journey to find him. In this journey Viola was pretending to be a man named Cesario, she was hired as the Duke messenger.
Similar to this celebration, many characters wear physical or psychological masks (Williams 193). For example, Duke Orsino is deluded by believing he is in love with the only woman who won’t have him. Orsino’s “love” for Olivia is self-destructive and unstable (Salingar, 124). Orsino tells “Cesario” about this form of love in this passage: “Unstaid and skittish in all motions else / Save in the constant image of the creature /That is beloved… For, boy, however we do praise ourselves, / Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm, / More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn Than women's are,” (Shakespeare 1211). Salingar states that Orsino’s delusional love for Olivia seems to be without a clear object, impossible to satisfy, to the point of death (124-125). Forbes says that Orsino thinks he needs Olivia so desperately he cries out for the heart to kill Olivia rather than lose her (479). Further, Viola tricks Orsino by disguising herself as a man, but it is done with a purpose. Lydia Forbes states that “He is a good man and worthy of her, but temporarily so confused by a romantically far-fetched notion of love that he would not be able to appreciate her in her own feminine dress… Since [Viola] has apparently heard of Orsino as a potential husband, she becomes a
Although Viola might be able to relate to Olivia's grief at first, her love for Orsino is so great that she cannot understand why Olivia would deny him. When Olivia expresses affectio...
due to loss of her brother at sea and the death of her father, which
Through the character, Olivia, Orsino, Viola, and Antonio, he illustrates that love can be ruled with the passion and fantasy of the mind, the expectations of the outer world, and the genuine love of the heart. All these forms are all portrayed, however Viola and Antonio are the happiest and most fortunate with their different loves. Viola is ultimately married and able to be with Orsino, and although Antonio is taken to jail for being an enemy to the court, he does it for presumably the person he loves and knowing the risk going into Illyria. Olivia and Orsino both end up with someone, but not the person that they originally claimed to feel so strongly about. As Shakespeare portrayed, many people believe that love is based on a imaginative show of affection or a materialistic opinion from the world around you. Love, however, is a desire led by the heart that is constant, selfless, and consists of actions that prove it is genuine
In Shakespeare’s comedy Twelfth Night the great bard uses humor and mistaken identity not only to poke fun at romantic stories of “perfect love” and the foolish behavior of the aristocrats, but also to reveal man’s anxieties surrounding courtship, gender performance, and love as a whole. The portion of the play I have chosen to analyze are lines 188-256 in Act 5 scene one when Sebastian enters the stage and discovers Viola alive. The siblings give information about themselves to determine each other’s identity before Viola finally reveals herself to be female, allowing the farce to come to an end and the characters to return to their normal roles. Viola then declares her love for Orsino and he accepts her affections. While this scene is certainly
Complications also arose when viola fell in love with her master, duke orsino, while at the same time had the love interest of orsino, the countess Olivia, trying to woo her. This placed viola in an extremely difficult and complex situation on one hand, she loved the duke and would have liked to do all she could to win his heart. But because she was his servant, she was obliged to serve him and help him win the hand of Olivia. What was a poor girl to do ?
Twelfth Night consists of a large number of love triangles, however many characters are too indulged in love that they are blind to the untrue, and the weakness of their relationship, they are deceived by themselves and many people around them ( ex. Malvolio is tricked by Sir Andrew, Feste ,Sir Toby and Maria),but there are certain incidents where the love is true and two characters feel very strongly about one another. In the play, Viola and Orsino have the most significant relationship. The way they interact with each other causes the complexity on which the play is all about, their relationship turns from strangers to friends then lovers .In the First Act Viola is not honest with Orsino because she disguises herself as a male servant named Cesario in order to get closer to the duke. Orsino. Orsino quickly trusts Cesario and sends him to Olivia to declare Orsinos Love for her, the girl he most dearly loves. This quick bond is the fast example of their relationship. At the beginning of the play, Viola thinks her brother (Sebastian) is dead (after they’re deadly boat crash, where they get separated) when actually he is alive and thinks she is dead, Viola always seems to have a part missing from her which shows her bond with Sebastian is strong, and a part of her but in a brotherly/sisterly way rather than a proper relationship like viola and orsino, At the end of the play they meet and both fall in love , Viola with Orsino and Sebastian with Olivia.
Situational irony and the love triangle give big laughs to the viewers. The audience becomes engrossed as they observe Violas transformation into Cesario, the Duke’s servant. Suspense is built as Viola begins to realize that she is falling in love with Duke Orisno, but in order for her to survive; she has to keep pretending to be a man and is unable to reveal her love. The irony settles in when Orisno, asks his close servant Cesario to go to Olivia and make her understand how deeply he loves her. Shakespeare shows her helplessness in this situation because she has to help her love, try to woo someone else. The irony builds into a love triangle as Olivia begins to fall in love with Cesario as “he” loved Orisno. Olivia’s love is confirmed when she says “Yet come again, for thou perhaps mayst move that heart, which now abhors, to like his love” (III.i.153).
Throughout Twelfth Night, disguise and mistaken identity works as a catalyst for confusion and disorder which consistently contributes towards the dramatic comic genre of the play. Many characters in Twelfth Night assume disguises, beginning with Viola, who disguises herself as a man in order to serve Orsino, the Duke. By dressing his protagonist in male garments, Shakespeare creates ongoing sexual confusion with characters, which include Olivia, Viola and Orsino, who create a ‘love triangle’ between them. Implicitly, there is homoerotic subtext here: Olivia is in love with a woman, despite believing her to be a man, and Orsino often comments on Cesario’s beauty, which implies that he is attracted to Viola even before her male disguise is removed. However, even subsequent to the revealing of Viola’s true identity, Orsino’s declares his love to Viola implying that he enjoys lengthening the pretence of Vio...
Shakespeare is a famous writer of many plays, such as Twelfth Night. Twelfth Night is a romantic comedy that takes place in Illyria and incorporates several songs throughout the play. Shakespeare normally assigns the singing roles to characters of lower class and minor personalities, such as servants, clowns, rogues and fools. Major characters never usually sing unless they are in disguise or in distracted mental states. In Twelfth Night, the Fool, who is also known as Feste is in charge of all the songs and he uses music to effectively portray the truth and reality beneath all the acting in the play. The songs are not a reflection of him, but are addressed to the protagonists themselves. Through his use of indirect speech and metaphorical