William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night Essay

think Romeo sounds a bit of a wimp as he can't get over such little

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.

Far too often we see men and women with noble causes lose their motive because of their emotional behavior. Their emotions cause them to lose track. We see no finer example of a man with a noble cause whose emotions cause him to lose sight of his noble cause: the character of Laertes in the play Hamlet. Laertes has a vendetta against Hamlet for killing his father. Although Laertes meant well in avenging his father’s death, his emotional behavior overtook him in the process. If we look at other characters in the play, we find a similar struggle between a noble goal and one’s emotions. Hamlet fights the same battle as Laertes does; however, Hamlet is better able to control his emotions. To maintain a noble goal without faltering,

love when actually they just loved the idea of it. One such a man is

The American Shakespeare Center (ASC) wants to give their audience the experience and pleasure of what it would have been like to be a playgoer in the Elizabethan era. In order to keep the plays feeling authentic, they consider many aspects such as costuming, music, and having small acting troupes. One of the most important things they do to remain true is they “do it with the lights on,” meaning they have universal lighting just as the Elizabethan theaters would have had. With universal lighting, the audience can see the actors and the actors can see the audience and play their roles to fit the behavior of the audience. In the ASC’s production of Henry V, they used this to their advantage by handing out props to the audience, using the audience as a prop and even having us be extras for their play. By constantly interacting with different members in the

he is no longer in charge of everyone in the family. It can be seen

Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare early in his career about two young star-crossed lovers whose deaths ultimately reconcile their feuding families. It was among Shakespeare 's most popular plays during his lifetime and, along with Hamlet, is one of his most frequently performed plays. Today, the title characters are regarded as archetypal young lovers.

“Then you are mad indeed, if you be no better in your wits than a

William Shakespeare was a very talented man known for his various works of literature. His works include poems, plays, and sonnets. His works are then broken down into tragedies, comedies, and histories. Shakespeare left this world centuries ago, but his writings continue to live throughout the world today. He has greatly impacted the world of literature and his existence will forever be remembered.

Society loves putting people into a box and pre-determining their destinies based on background, race, and other damaging stereotypes; this confines people to their understanding of what they are worth and how much they will get out of life with that worth. Patriarchal societies are typically all that we see in modern day, and when looking at a patriarchal society, normally, men are the providers while women are the nurturers. It is believed that a woman’s place is in the house to mother the children and to take care of the house, and men are expected to be the bread-winner. For most of recorded history, these assumptive roles were filled by men and women who did not know better. However, as times have progressed, people are challenging these roles; yes, there are women that are innately nurturing and men that are innately protective, but there are also people in this world who want more out of life than what they are expected to do. Juliet from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet grew up in a society where it was not normal to fight against the standards for women. She is a young girl that plays into the idea of love, marriage, and being a wife in the aristocratic world of Renaissance Verona, and the relationship between Romeo and Juliet has come to represent this idea of true love and sacrifice. And for centuries, Juliet has been played into this young, naïve girl who is swept off her feet by some guy at a party. The audience and popular culture have forgotten that both Romeo

“To be or not to be” (3.1.64)—not whether to live or to die, but the use of “to be” is an important question. Shakespeare uses the simple infinitive of “to be”, in the opening of the most famous soliloquy in Hamlet, or perhaps all of Shakespeare, as opposed to the more complex phrase, “to live or to die”. Before Hamlet, the speaker of this soliloquy, analyzes all of mankind’s reasoning behind the subject of life, something both painful and long, and death, something both inevitable and muddied in mystery, he uses the simplest and shortest of infinitives. Seemingly, a simple phrase cannot give justice to some of the more complex and mysterious questions human nature asks; finding answers to why humans suffer through life when they

Generally, the relationship between the sun and the moon is a metaphorical construct of the male and female gender. However, in William Shakespeare’s, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the author develops the traditional representation of a gendered sun and moon further, in order to symbolize the two celestial bodies, now, as masculine and feminine oppositions. More specifically, Shakespeare expands on the traditional idea of the sun and moon as a gender concept by identifying both as a union, and the relationships that solidify these bonds, in which he delineates the opposition of romance to the opposition of the sun and moon; in its destructive and regenerative aspect, the moon accompanies the resolution of the conflicts, that is, the infidelity between lovers, and shed its light over a return to individual and social order.

A nobleman is a noblemen. An artificer is an artificer. Clowns will be clowns and lovers will be lovers and never shall the two intertwine because those are the rules of the social classes. The only thing that can unravel those threads of societal foundation is the magic that is alive and well in the forest. Bottom is confined to the boundaries and limits of his social class as an artificer, but magic can change that. While the lover is usually only a part allowed to be played by a person of higher status, magic can allow a clown to be in the throes of passion with a woman from a different class altogether. The social function of class in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one that normally only allows the upper class to be lovers and the lower class to be fools, but is skewed by magic and turned upside down.

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare shows how magic influences not only the thoughts but also the actions of the characters of this play. Every time magic was used, there were consequences; hence, magic is the main theme of the of the play.

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.