Gender Roles In Twelfth Night

Gender equality is one of the main focuses in the Shakespearean play Twelfth Night. The movie “She’s the Man” is inspired by this play. The movie “She's the Man” challenges traditional views of males and females in society. In the movie, Amanda Bynes’s coach informs her soccer team that there will no longer be a girl’s team throughout the rest of the year. Unhappy about her coach’s statement, Amanda suggests that the girls should collaborate with the boys and play together on one team. The boys and coach find the idea to be laughable and disagree. When Amanda’s star athlete older brother runs off to travel the country to go on tour with his band, he convinces Amanda to disguise herself as him until his return. She pretends to be him for two

All throughout Illyria, there is romance, passion, royalty, and an immense amount of gender stereotypes. William Shakespeare imagines the kingdom of Illyria to have very traditional norms for both women and men in his play Twelfth Night. In Scene 2 of Act 1, Viola, recently rescued from a shipwreck, hears about a duke named Orsino and instantly comes up with a plan to get closer to him. Her plan is to disguise herself as a boy who she will name Cesario and become one of Orsino's’ attendants. Right off the bat, we begin to see gender stereotypes. Why must Viola become a man in order to work for the duke? Elizabethan society “molded women into the form of the dutiful wife and mother” (Elizabethan Women). Viola could not have served duke Orsino as a woman because as a woman she was expected to work at home and be either a “dutiful wife [or a] mother”. Scene two prepares the audience for the idea of gender throughout the rest of the play. Shakespeare's Twelfth Night is very traditional play due to its ideas of gender stereotypes in Elizabethan society.

Born on approximately April 23, 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, William Shakespeare is considered by many to have been the greatest writer the English language has ever known. His literary legacy included 37 plays, 154 sonnets, and five major poems. Among his many plays is the notable, Twelfth Night, a romantic comedy, placed in a festive atmosphere in which three couples are brought together happily.

Most of the major characters in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night experience some form of love or marriage. Whether it’s unrequited like with Antonio and Malvolio, or it is something seemingly unattainable like with Duke Orsino. Regardless, it is clear that love is prevalent as one of the central themes Shakespeare seems to emphasize in Twelfth Night. With that, we see him communicate different interpretations and feelings regarding the subject. He does this with the medium of melodramatic characters. In this essay, I will elaborate on the opinions of love that Shakespeare communicates through one of the leading characters:

Obstacles are found in many situations, especially true love when disguise is involved. The mistaken identity of one has a powerful effect on the rest of the characters in Shakespeare’s twelfth night as it creates problems for true love. Aside from Shakespeare’s others, the play focuses on mistaken identity/disguise and unrequited love. Disguise truly is an obstacle for true love to prevail in twelfth night. The obstacle of disguise that occurs in the play will be analyzed by exploring situations, character’s thoughts, and the result of poor decisions made.

The purpose of this essay is to look at the Tropes that are present in the play Much Ado About Nothing and explore how they’ve influenced Modern Media. Specifically the genre of the Romantic Comedy which borrows heavily from Shakespeare’s Comedy plays. TV Tropes is a website dedicated to documenting and explaining these kinds of tropes so this is a necessary resource for this essay. In explaining what Romantic Comedy is and for the sake of having a consistent label for the tropes that will be discussed within this essay.

Queensland Theatre’s take on one of Shakespeare’s highly renowned plays, Twelfth Night, performed at QPAC has been re-written and adjusted for a more modern audience. The classic comedy contains gender problems and identity crises. Through this play, the director Sam Strong has been able to successfully achieve his goal of proving to modern audiences exactly how incredible and robust Shakespeare’s pieces are. Strong’s creative manipulation of dramatic action and staging, as well as plentiful representation of themes such as gender stereotypes and sexuality and also the use of certain aspects of Elizabethan comedy have all come together to successfully bring Shakespeare to be enjoyed by a whole new era.

In the Twelfth Night film directed by Trevor Nunn, there are differences between the sequencing of the scenes, lines of characters, and character stage directions/movements compared to the original text. Directors use film adaptations to enhance the writer’s intended meaning hidden in the original text, however, Trevor Nunn altered the meaning of a Shakespearean comedy. Shakespearean comedies are characterized as entertaining plays centered around a person of power, who delivers a statement of harsh judgment and must make amends, and the comedies usually end in marriage. In Twelfth Night, Orsino, the Duke of Illyria, passes harsh judgment towards Lady Olivia by telling his servant, Cesario, to “be clamorous and leap all civil bounds/

In this play, Viola’s cross dressing experience is important to both the central complication and resolution to the plot. In Act 1, scene 5, Viola, who is

The English Review says that “love is not always, ‘the real thing’.” In Twelfth Night, there are three characters whose false love is majorly evident: Malvolio, Sir

Shakespeare’s play, “Twelfth Night” provides a great deal of insight into gender roles, gender identities, and desire in Elizabethan, as well as modern, society. Gender roles have also changed drastically over time. Many of the expectations and standards that woman, as well as men, were held to in Shakespearean times, no longer apply today. For example, women, and to a lesser extent, men, have become generally more free to pursue any career they wish. Partly because of the removal of such arbitrary restrictions, people tend to think that society as a whole has become more progressive over time, and in many cases, this is true.

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.

Viola, one of the main protagonists, experiences suffering when she falls in love with Orsino, whom she cannot pursue or express her true feelings for. After a shipwreck, Viola finds herself stranded in the country of Illyria. In order to work for the Duke Orsino, she disguises herself as a man named Cesario, which makes romance with the duke impossible. After spending three days with him, she falls in love. Not only does she have to repress her feelings toward Orsino, but to add to her pain, Orsino assigns her to spend her time trying to persuade Lady Olivia to marry him. Viola says to the audience, “whoe’er I woo, myself would be his wife” (1.4.42), because she wishes to marry Orsino.

Women can easily fall in love as they are gullible and over-trusting, whereas men are mindless and foolish. In Twelfth Night, the characters who prove this are Olivia and Sir Andrew. Olivia has fallen in love with the fake man “Cesario”, and Sir Andrew is deliberately trying to woo Olivia through foolish and pathetic ways. Twelfth Night demonstrates that women are weak and are able to fall in love easily, due to their gullibility when it comes to love. This was shown as Olivia was able to fall in love with fake man “Cesario”, who was truly Viola in disguise. Although the Duke Orsino has real feelings for Olivia, she refuses to love him back as her love is only for “Cesario”. Shakespeare conveys this message through Viola’s soliloquy, and is

The women in Shakespear's play: Twelfth Night, are all depicted as having power, comedic and being very emotional.