Shakespeare 's Twelfth Night ( C. 1600-01 )

Shakespeare's Twelfth Night examines patterns of love and courtship through a twisting of gender roles. The play centers on the lead female role and protagonist, Viola, who

In spite of the promise of three weddings to be celebrated, the play concludes on a sour note when Feste, the clown, depicts life as grim, "for the rain it raineth every day" (Act V Scene i). They play’s primary central theme is that of the comic relationships between men and women. Furthermore, it illustrates the traditional, societal notions of “interdependence, and the newly emerging attitudes towards individual choice and personal desire, or as the play puts it, ‘will’” (Malcolmson 163). Although Twelfth Night is a story of love and courtship, nevertheless, it is also a “comedy of gender,” because of its ability to override the traditional Elizabethan notions of the female role through the characters of Viola and Olivia.

Twelfth Night is a very feminist play once readers have been reading it. The story’s protagonist is a woman, Viola. Viola displays herself as a rational, strong, witting woman, who has to disguise herself as a man to be able to become a faithful attendant of Orsino. With Viola doing this it creates a big sexual mess as Viola falls in love with Orsino but cannot tell him since he still thinks she is a man. While Olivia, who is the object of Orsino’s affection, falls for Cesario, the disguise for Viola. Once Viola’s true identity is revealed Orsino declares his love for Viola which suggest that he may really just loved the masculinity she possessed. Orsino says to Viola, even after seeing her true identity, “Cesario, come; For so you shall be, while you are a man; But when in other habits you are seen, Orsino's mistress and his fancy's queen” (Shakespeare, Twelfth Night 5.1.2599-26001). After everything has been reveled Orsino still calls Viola by her disguise name…her boy name, Cesario. The readers can only wonder is Orsino truly loved Viola for her or if he was in love with the male persona she gave.

Romantic desire is struggle ingrained within William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, strained by the nature of homosexual love. The depths of human sexuality are explored in Twelfth Night through the relationships between Duke Orsino and Viola as Cesario, Olivia and Viola, and Sebastian and Antonio. Twelfth Night represents homoerotic love in both radical and conservative ways, while furthermore questioning the boundaries of gender and disguise depicted by the relationships featured in the play. Shakespeare’s work is profound, since the play acknowledges homosexual love without punishment, and challenges if love is truly determined by gender, while also upholding

Trevor Nunn’s (1996) adaptation of Twelfth Night illustrates the complexity of Feste’s character and how important he is to the overall play. Ben Kingsley, the actor, presents Feste as sympathetic and gentle choric figure. It is Feste who allows the audience to see the films respect for the original play, and the existing issues within it. This includes the defencelessness of women, and the attractive, but dangerous, qualities of altering one’s true sexual identity. Interestingly, unlike the original script, Nunn opens his first scene with Feste observing Viola struggle to shore after the shipwreck she has experienced. In this context, Kingsley’s Feste is revealed for the first time. He is shown as a mysterious and isolated individual, who

The play Twelfth Night encapsulates what it meant to be a man and women throughout

Much of the first half of the Twelfth Night is about disguised identities and general misconceptions about who is actually who. The play opens on a note of melancholy and death, Orsino grieving because Olivia refuses to love him and Viola and Olivia mourning the deaths of their brothers. It is following a shipwreck that Viola disguises herself as a male, ensuring that confusion will be part of the plot. The idea of masquerading as a member of the opposite sex is a familiar device and the “complications, artificial as they may appear, are an essential part of the play’s complete development.” (Travers 308) It is interesting to note that unlike other comedies such as “The Tempest”, Shakespeare does not create an older generation who prevent the young lovers from being together; instead it is the perplexity about gender and that keeps them apart. Sebastian, Viola’s identical twin, is the solution to all of the problems, though his appearance does add to it for a short while. Viola, dressed as Cesario, is mistaken for Sebastian by Antonio, and is asked for the money that he gave to Sebastian. However, this type of confusion adds to the comic nature of the plot as the audience is aware of the concealed identities. Order eventually comes from the chaos, disguises are shed and identities are revealed. The appearance of Sebastian ensures that the marriage will be possible for the main characters; Viola is free to marry Orsino and Olivia marries Sebastian, although she

Twelfth Night is a comedy focusing on a cross dressing protagonist, Viola, who gets in the middle of a complicated love triangle. This play is also a play of transgression and confusion among genders. The main characters find themselves in a love triangle and homoerotic situations. In Twelfth Night, Shakespeare has complicated the gender roles of the relationship between Viola and Olivia by cloaking Viola as male. Her identity almost throughout is double-gendered, and romantic frustrations she feels as Viola in longing for Count Orsino

In Shakespeare's play “Twelfth Night,” the central focus is love, and the goal of most characters is to find love wherever it may be. Viola has just been shipwrecked and believes that she has lost her brother, but has begun a job working in Duke Orsino's court. Soon, she will be sent to Olivia, estate to woo Olivia into marrying Orsino, despite her mourning over the loss of her brother. Later, Olivia will realize that she is indeed in love with Viola, who is dressed as a male character named Cesario, but then marries Sebastian, Violas possibly dead brother. During that, Orsino loses the passionate love for Olivia that he presented before and marries Viola at the end.

In Twelfth Night written by William Shakespeare, Viola and Olivia are the central characters to the play’s plot. Both are young women that take approaches to dealing with the people around them, which are mainly men. There is much trickery that goes on in Twelfth Night, but the ending is for the most part happy. Viola marries Orsino and Olivia marries Sebastian, but the events leading up to this are more or less chaotic. Ultimately, I argue that while Olivia uses her higher social status in order to maintain control of herself and others, Viola resorts to trickery in order to bring about her desires.

Comedy, in the Elizabethan era, often included themes of wit, mistaken identity, love, and tragedy, all tied up with a happy ending. These themes are prevalent in William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, a comical play that explores the pangs of unrequited love and the confusion of gender. Love is a powerful emotion that causes suffering, happiness, and disorder throughout the play. The play also demonstrates the blurred lines of gender identity, which ties into the modern day debate on sexuality and gender identity. The main characters in the play, Viola, Olivia, and Orsino are connected by a love triangle, each person pursuing an unrequited love. Suffering from love and the fluidity of gender are the prevalent themes explored throughout the play and intertwined with Viola, Olivia, and Orsino.

William Shakespeare’s play, Twelfth Night, focuses on identity, love, and comedy. While we made our adaptation to this play, we chose to have a more modern approach. Because we decided on a modern adaptation, we had to come up with a modern storyline; therefore, there is still love and confusion about identity. Taking place in 2015 in Los Angeles, Orsino is the number one modeling agency in the state. Along with a new setting, we have also changed some actions with the characters, meaning some things that take place in the play are not a part of our storyline (for example Feste as the Clown). Our adaptation has the potential to be a real movie because it is realistic. The main purpose behind Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night was to entertain, and

William Shakespeare has written a number of romantic comedies. Twelfth Night is one of the finest comedies of the author. Shakespeare is driven by Viola’s decision to voluntarily conceal her identity and go to work as a servant for the lovesick Orsino.This disguise and gender confusion are there in the beginning of the play and finishes with happy ending. This paper tries to ascertain how Viola in Twelfth Night perform her disguise and become an ideal woman of Shakespeare’s own concept. There may be many reasons why, he keeps his female characters in disguise position. Shakespeare’s subjectivity can easily be seen at many places in the play. Viola disguises her identity, self-involved behaviour, beauty, nobility, sincerity, and loyalty

Such a life was impossible for women . . . because for a woman, a public reputation was dishonorable, a sure sign of immorality and scandal" (Wiesner 12). Women were excluded from any position of meaningful authority in any realm of society. Men were even valued for their ability to classify an object or being as beautiful. During this period of great creative accomplishments, men may ". . . have taken to commerce or to drink, but as a matter of fact they took to visible beauty" (Putnam 164). They established beauty as an important quality of life, and only men had the capacity to differentiate between that which was beautiful and not beautiful.

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.