The Importance Of Courage In Twelfth Night

While many will agree that Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is critically acclaimed to be one of the most entertaining and well-liked pieces that he has written, there tends to be a discrepancy over how the characters in the play are portrayed when it comes to the importance of gender roles. After reading James C Bulman’s article over the Globe’s more recent performance of Twelfth Night and Shakespeare’s original written version, I realized that there are many ways that this famous piece has been portrayed and each has its own pros and cons.

As an individual falls in love, they believe that they are ready to sacrifice anything for their loved ones. In reality, this is not true because love is created by their own desires (unclear sentence). Romantic love in the play Twelfth Night, by William Shakespeare is a selfish act.

    It is not unusual that the fool should be a prominent figure and make an important contribution in forming the confusion and the humor in an Elizabethan drama. In William Shakespeare's comedy, Twelfth Night, Feste the clown is not the only fool who is subject to foolery. He and many other characters combine their silly acts and wits to invade other characters that either escape reality or live a dream. In Twelfth Night, Feste, Maria and Sir Toby are the fools that make the comedy work in many senses.

Throughout the literary works of The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, Maus by Art Spiegelman, and “Mother to Son” by Langston Hughes, different characters deal with adversity differently. In The Glass Castle the characters must overcome family hardships. Likewise, Spiegelman writes about his father’s struggle during the Holocaust. Lastly, in “Mother to Son” the speaker informs her son about her own hardships she had to face. Challenges that characters face can impact them both negatively and positively. Characters from all three literary works deal with adversity by having courage, being resilient, and making poor choices.

In medieval and Elizabethan England, homosexuality was not only looked down upon, but was a crime punishable by law. Found perpetrators, including the famous King Edward II, were horribly punished. Edward was killed by “the slow and painful insertion of a red, hot poker into his anus”, along with his lover, who “had his genitals cut off and burned” (Sanders). Such is the world in which a bisexual William Shakespeare lived. Though he married Anne Hathaway at the age of 18, he was rumored to have had extramarital affairs with numerous men while in London (“Shakespeare’s Sexuality”). Gay men are present in many of Shakespeare’s plays, most prominently Twelfth Night. A sailor named Antonio falls in love with a man of noble birth named

She’s the Man is a modern adaptation and interpretation of The Twelfth Night but the

William Shakespeare wrote plays that covered the breadth of human experience, which seem to have transcended the restraints of age because they contain universal themes. His body of his work is comprised of genres of plays, which varied from tragedies to comedies.

In the excerpt of Crazy Brave written by Joy Harjo, the readers are presented with the life story of the author. In this story, the author depicted the calamities she faced and the opportunities afforded to her through those calamities. The story portrayed a hostile and unsafe environment where the author was not accepted; however, she persevered until she had no other option except to run away or move to a boarding school sponsored for her ethnicity. After careful consideration, she was able to choose the answer that led her to discover art, a discovery that changed her life.

The only reference to Twelfth Night during Shakespeare’s own lifetime is to a performance on February 2, 1602. A law student named John Manningham wrote in his diary about a feast he attended at the Middle Temple in London where he was a law student and where “we had a play called Twelfth Night; Or, What You Will." This was likely to have been an early performance since it is generally agreed that the play was probably written in 1601. In 1954 Sir Leslie Hotson’s book, The First Night of Twelfth Night, sought to identify the exact date of the first performance of Twelfth Night. He used the evidence of old records to suggest that Queen Elizabeth asked for a new play for the last night of the Christmas 1600-01 season, the Feast of the

In the kingdom of Illyria (fantasy world), Twelfth Night was supposedly originally written for the entertainment of Queen Elizabeth I. William Shakespeare’s comedy associates with the Feast of Epiphany (January 6th) and was means for entertainment in the seventeenth century. It contains some aspects that can be thought of as a successful comedy when compared to the standards of today’s society. The play incorporates some of the very same devices that are used in modern comedies today, such as topsy-turvy romance, foolery, and mistaken identities. Twelfth Night also involves many cultural aspects that would be tough for an audience today to relate with. Some of these ideas are social class, dialect, and lack of modern technology that affect

through his vanity is easily fooled into thinking it is he who she loves although

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

As an individual falls in love, they believe that they are ready to sacrifice anything for their loved ones. In reality, this is inaccurate because research by Grant Hilary Brenner M.D, a psychiatrist said that love is created by own desires . Romantic love in the play Twelfth Night, by William Shakespeare is a selfish act. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/experimentations/201710/we-project-romantic-partners-our-own-desires-cheat

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.

Our group proposed, presented, and directing the stage performance for the Twelfth Night. In the beginning of the semester I had no clue of what to expect from this course, and reading the syllabus made Shakespeare’s Plays seem complex. I am somewhat familiar with William Shakespeare’s plays stemming from a Shakespeare course that I had taken at Harold Washington (City College of Chicago). My professor (Hader) informed the class that if we were looking to go on to a four-year university as an English major that we will have to take another course, and it will be taught from a different perspective or angle—quite frightening. As a person who had not connected or have read anything that the playwright had ever written, I was afraid that I