Romantic Love in William Shakespeare's As You Like it and Twelfth Night
The fickleness of romantic love is a major theme in William Shakespeare’s comedies As You Like It and Twelfth Night, or What You Will. Shakespeare’s implicit social commentary takes the fundamentally masculine perspective of romantic relationships, which argues that a clear-cut dichotomy exists between love and physical attraction.
According to evolutionary psychological theory, females often tend to automatically associate the emotion of love with physicality and the physical act of sex because an emotional bond with a mate is necessary in order to establish a secure family unit. Males, conversely, intellectually separate love from sexual desire because the essential masculine drive is to father as many offspring as possible, and to have strong emotional bonds with numerous mates is impracticable (Kenyon). By presenting women disguised as men who become the subject of other women’s “love” at first sight, Shakespeare argues that the feminine notion of a correlation between emotion and attraction is a fallacy worthy of comedic contempt.
Amiens’s song from As You Like It sums up this argument. He sings, “Most friendship is feigning, most loving, mere folly” (As You Like It, II.vii.182). This is an ironic piece of verse, because it is sung in the forest by one of the attending lords of the banished duke. The reader could interpret the duke and his entourage as being symbolic of Robin Hood and his merry men (Moncrief), yet one would find it difficult to imagine Little John telling Robin Hood that his own friendship to Robin was feigning.
Love at first sight is treated contemptuously in both As You Like It and Twelfth Night. In th...
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...at they were physically attracted to Ganymede and Cesario, respectively. They were mistaken, however, when they attributed their attraction to the emotion of love. Love, in Shakespeare’s artistic portrayal of it, is a deceptive, ethereal phenomenon; false, fleeting, and unreliable.
Works Cited
Kenyon, Paul. “Evolutionary Psychology.” SALMON (Study and Learning Materials On-line). 4 Apr. 2000. Univ. of Plymouth Dept. of Psychology. 1 Nov. 2005. . Path: PSY364 Evolutionary Psychology support materials; Evolutionary Psychology.
Moncrief, Kathryn M. Lectures on As You Like It. Oct. 2005. Washington College, William Smith Hall, Room 322.
Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. Eds. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991.
---. Twelfth Night, or What You Will. Eds. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991.
Love is only as strong as the people who share it. In William Shakespeare’s play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, there are relationships from all different viewpoints of love. Four Athenian lovers are caught in a web of love for the wrong person, according to fellow peevish characters. Along the story line of the play, one will be introduced to additional characters that try to be helpful by committing acts they presume will benefit the young lovers, but these characters actually create plot-twists. Also, there are other characters that have the authority to change whatever they feel is necessary without thinking twice. Furthermore, throughout this humored play, Shakespeare portrays various forms of love through arranged marriages, forbidden love, magically tampered love, and unanticipated romances to show how there’s no right or wrong way to love someone.
"William Shakespeare, William. "Twelfth Night." Norton's Anthology of English Literature. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York City: W.W. Norton & Co., 2010.
Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare. Edited Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.
In "A Midsummer Night's Dream," William Shakespeare explains the difficulties of the nature of love. Both false love and true love prevail in the end, leading the reader to come to the conclusion that all types of love can triumph. Hermia and Lysander represent the existence of a "true love", while Helena and Demertrius represent the opposite extreme. Shakespeare presents the idea that love is unpredictable and can cause great confusion. Love is something that cannot be explained, it can only be experienced. Shakespeare challenges us to develop our own idea of what love truly is.
Shakespeare’s story, Love Labour’s Lost, focuses the story on the endearing lust of men. Women are a powerful force, so in order to persuade them men will try to use a variety of different resources in order to attract the opposite sex. Men will often use their primal instincts like a mating call, which could equivocate today to whistling at a woman as she walks by. With the use of lies to tell a girl what she wants to hear, the musk cologne in order to make you appear more sensual, or the cliché use of the love poem, men strive to appeal to women with the intent to see his way into her heart. William Shakespeare is a man, who based on some of his other works, has a pretty good understand and is full of passion for the opposite sex. Nonetheless, whether it had been honest love or perverse lust, Shakespeare, along with most men, aimed to try to charm women. With keeping this understanding of Shakespeare in mind, his weapon of choice, to find his portal way into a woman’s heart, was his power of writing.
Love is the central theme in the play ‘As You Like It’ by William Shakespeare, the author expressed many types of love in the play. Some of them are, brotherly love, lust for love, loyal, friendship love, unrequited love, but of course, romantic love is the focus of this play.
Barton, Anne. Introduction to Twelfth Night. The Riverside Shakespeare. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974. 403-407.
In stark contrast to the dark and tragic "Othello," is one of Shakespeare’s lightest and funniest comedies, "Twelfth Night." The theme of love is presented in a highly comical manner. Shakespeare, however, once again proves himself a master by interweaving serious elements into humorous situations. "Twelfth Night" consists of many love triangles, however many of the characters who are tangled up in the web of love are blind to see that their emotions and feelings toward other characters are untrue. They are being deceived by themselves and/or the others around them.
This duality of love is established early within the play with Orsino’s commentary on love. In Orsino’s lines, he describes the “spirit of love” as being “quick and fresh” (1.1.9), and he continues to explain how love “…falls into abatement and low pride even in a minute” (1.1.13-14). With these lines, Shakespeare expresses how quickly love can alternate from an entity of joy to one of extreme depression. By employing these lines so early in the play, the vision of love as a force of exceeding strength is firmly planted within the reader’s subconscious, and Shakespeare has prepared the reader to fully grasp the central theme of the play.
Since the early 1990’s, “Queer Theory”, or queer study, has emerged and become very common in influential readings throughout literature. Many scholars apply this poststructuralist theory when criticizing works within the Renaissance period, including the works of William Shakespeare. Twelfth Night continues to be a commonly reviewed work when discussing the recurring homoerotic themes throughout Shakespeare’s works. Though Twelfth Night is often used for the discussion of homosexual interaction in Shakespeare, the conclusions drawn from these possible same-sex attractions are still divided and unclear. Regardless of this division, there is a large amount of substance that supports the unquestionably present homosexual relations in the play.
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was a Renaissance poet and playwright who wrote and published the original versions of 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language, and often called England’s national poet. Several of his works became extremely well known, thoroughly studied, and enjoyed all over the world. One of Shakespeare’s most prominent plays is titled The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. In this tragedy, the concept that is discussed and portrayed through the characters is love, as they are recognized as being “in love”. The general umbrella of love encompasses various kinds of love such as romantic love, the love of a parent for a child, love of one’s country, and several others. What is common to all love is this: Your own well-being is tied up with that of someone (or something) you love… When love is not present, changes in other people’s well being do not, in general, change your own… Being ‘in love’ infatuation is an intense state that displays similar features: … and finding everyone charming and nice, and thinking they all must sense one’s happiness. At first glance it seems as though Shakespeare advocates the hasty, hormone-driven passion portrayed by the protagonists, Romeo and Juliet; however, when viewed from a more modern, North-American perspective, it seems as though Shakespeare was not in fact endorsing it, but mocking the public’s superficial perception of love. Shakespeare’s criticism of the teens’ young and hasty love is portrayed in various instances of the play, including Romeo’s shallow, flip-flop love for Rosaline then Juliet, and his fights with Juliet’s family. Also, the conseque...
It is well known that Shakespeare’s comedies contain many marriages, some arranged, some spontaneous. During Queen Elizabeth's time, it was considered foolish to marry for love. However, in Shakespeare’s plays, people often marry for love. With a closer look into two of his most famous plays As You Like It and Twelfth Night or What You Will, I found that while marriages are defined and approached differently in these two plays, Shakespeare’s attitudes toward love in both plays share similarities. The marriages in As You Like It’s conform to social expectation, while the marriages are more rebellious in Twelfth Night. Love, in both plays, was defined as
Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night Or, What You Will. New York, New York: New American Library, 1998. Print.
Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night, Or, What You Will. Ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2009. Print.
However, Shakespeare also picks on love. Not only did Malvolio's confusion about his and Olivia's relationship prove to add to the comedy, but it rather showed how one can play with love, and use it for another's harm. Apart from this example, love is depicted as a light and lovely emotion.