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The Aspects of Love in Twelfth Night Essay

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The Aspects of Love in Twelfth Night The main theme in Twelfth Night is love. It is announced at the beginning of the play ‘If music be the food of love play on’ and from this you know that love will be a main aspect in Twelfth Night.

In Elizabethan time ‘love’ as we know it today was very different. You could not love anyone outside of your social status, marriages were almost always arranged on how the social status could improve the current standing of one partner i.e. one partner had lots of money, land or influence.

In Twelfth Night there are many different kinds of love to list a few, filial love, unrequited love, Lust, Courtly Love, True Love, Ambitious/Selfish love. There are …show more content…

This is the set up of many situations, such as the meeting of Olivia and Viola in which Olivia falls very quickly in love with Cesario ‘even so quickly may one catch the plague’ this is an example of unrequited love, or the ‘melancholy lover’ a melancholy lover is a lover which suffers from his/her love. The other example of unrequited love is again because of mixed Identities, Viola the other ‘melancholy lover’ in the play, loves Orsino but Orsino cannot return that love because he thinks she is a man so never would think that she loves him, but she also cannot reveal her love to him because she would then have to reveal her true identity, which cannot be revealed until the right time. Cesario/Viola talks about how she knows how Orsino feels because “My father had a daughter loved a man,” Viola talks to Orisno about how her ‘sister’ loved a man that

The very formal love is shown in the way that Orsino attempt to woo Olivia with the suitors sent from him with messages which says how perfect she is and how his love is in a very flowery way, “my love, more noble than the world” but such a lack of lust and such a idealised view of love, it seems that Orsino is more in love with the idea of love rather than an actual living being. This is Similar to the way Claudio worships Hero and puts her on a pedestal at the start of Much Ado About Nothing, she is perfect

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