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How Does Shakespeare Use Role Reversal In Twelfth Night

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Shakespeare often writes his plays to be found comedic by using similar key elements. In the comedy the Twelfth Night, Shakespeare uses the elements of love triangles, role reversal, and rule breaking to create humor. Shakespeare often uses love triangles to create unusual situations of love’s absurdity. To create this, in The Twelfth Night, Shakespeare creates a woman, Viola, who dresses as a man in order to gain entrance into the noble world. Duke Orsino is madly in love with Olivia who falls in love with Cesario, who is really Viola. A love triangle occurs when we find out that Viola falls in love with Orsino, which makes the triangle between Olivia, Orsino, and Cesario/Viola. What is amusing and comedic about this is that neither of these …show more content…

Malviolio, who is a low class servant, views himself to be higher class when he portrays arrogance and acts like everyone is beneath him. He pictures himself to be Lady Olivia’s main steward who rules all of the other servants around but, in reality, the other servants are his equals. Malvolio has this dream where he will marry Olivia because he thinks he is in her social class. An example of his huge ego is when the Fool, Maria, and Toby are downstairs past their bedtime. Malvolio orders them to go back to bed and says “if you prized my lady’s favor at anything more than contempt, you would not give means for this uncivil rule” (2.3.120-122). When he says this, Malvolio demonstrates that he thinks he is better than everyone else and can order them around. Due to Malvolio’s presumptuous view of himself, all of the other servants have grown a disliking for him and view him as a “devil” and that “he thinks that it is his grounds of faith that all that look on him love him”(2.3.145-150). Viola is a character who exemplifies role reversal when she dresses and acts like a man even though she is a woman. This situation creates humor because she is a woman in place as where a man should be. There can be a lot of comments that can be taken through a different perspective when the identity of the speaker is male or female. Roles are reversed for Viola when she has to create another female character for herself …show more content…

Maria, a low class servant, breaks rules when she tricks Malvolio into behaving in a way that he thinks will make Olivia love him but, instead, these behaviors cause her anger. In the prank, she writes a fake love letter to Malvolio pretending it was from Olivia, which makes Malvolio act and dress ridiculous. Maria goes out of her way to play a prank on Malvolio so that he will do the opposite of what would win Olivia. The letter “ma[d]e a contemplative idiot of him” (2.5.17-18). This examplifies how Maria breaks rules of etiquette when she plays this trick on Malvolio. Another example of a character that breaks rules is Sir Toby Belch, Olivia’s uncle, who is always drunk throughout the play. Shakespeare created this drunken idiotic character to make the readers laugh whenever Toby was in a scene. When Malvolio says, “you must amend your drunkenness”(2.5.73) to Toby, we see that Toby’s peers do not approve of his actions because they do not fit his social

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