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Critical analysis on twelfth night
Shakespeare twelfth night analysis
Critical analysis on twelfth night
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In Shakespeare 's well known play Twelfth Night, which takes place somewhere in Illyria, Lady Olivia is an independent, powerful, wealthy but single woman; the sudden deaths of her father and brother has left her in sadness alone in a big castle to herself. She has her relative Sir Toby Belch who was still around and visited her. Orsino, a duke, has a huge crush on her and is trying to have her to himself. Meanwhile, the jealous steward Malvolio who also has a crush on Lady Olivia, is a guy who is full of himself and acts like he 's king, he forgets where his place is sometimes. In Olivia 's house there is the weak and foolish Sir Andrew who has a crush on Olivia and is wishing one day he would get a chance with her. are also these twins,Viola and Sebastian. They have been shipwrecked and isolated from each other, so Viola thinks Sebastian is dead, and Sebastian thinks viola is dead. Later Viola decides to disguise herself as a messenger and call herself Cesario so she can work for Orsino. Since Viola was so pretty and the way she used her words were great, she won Orsino’s trust. Orsino tells Cesario …show more content…
Do you not see how our future would be if we let love have its way with us? Do you not see how many fortunes, we would have all together only if you said yes, YES I ACCEPT. ( Orsino singing) “If music be the food of love,play.” Oh Lady Olivia why are you so stubborn through the skull? when are you going to realize I want to start something great with you?I hope Cesario has been successful with the message from me to Olivia. I know for sure having Olivia by my side we can rule the whole earth and have many sons,daughters. I don’t blame Olivia for playing hard to get, I mean she’s very beautiful with an hour glass body.What man on earth wouldn’t want to have her as theirs? I remember that kiss we shared,very lovely.“O, she that hath a heart of that fine frame, her sweet perfection with one self
Viola quickly falls in love with Duke Orsino after meeting him, but she is not able to express her true feelings of love for two different reasons. First, Orsino is lusting after Olivia, so he is not open to the feelings of others. Orsino is so in love with Olivia’s beauty that he had built a wall of emotion around himself, and Viola was not able to penetrate this wall. More importantly, Viola is not Viola to Orsino; she is Cesario, who, disguised as a man, served Orsino as a eunuch. Although she greatly loves Orsino, Viola cannot openly express this love because she was invisible to him. If Viola does let the truth come out, Orsino will still not be able to love her because he is solely focused on gaining Olivia’s affection. Orsino does not love Viola because he does not see her as a woman in love with him but as a faithful servant, so Viola and her love for Orsino go unnoticed as Orsino delegates Viola to woo Olivia for himself. Viola, wishing she was the one whom Orsino loved, was deeply saddened by this: “I’ll do my best/To woo your lady: yet, a barful strife!/Whoe’er I woo, myself would be his wife” (Act I, Scene IV). Orsino made Viola his messenger to court Olivia, but Viola wishes she was the one whom Orsino was courting. Similarly to how Orsino is blinded by his infatuation with Olivia, the boy whom Swift is in love with is blinded by his love
Andrew is funny, it is not intentional. His faults include a lack of wit, a
Similar to this celebration, many characters wear physical or psychological masks (Williams 193). For example, Duke Orsino is deluded by believing he is in love with the only woman who won’t have him. Orsino’s “love” for Olivia is self-destructive and unstable (Salingar, 124). Orsino tells “Cesario” about this form of love in this passage: “Unstaid and skittish in all motions else / Save in the constant image of the creature /That is beloved… For, boy, however we do praise ourselves, / Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm, / More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn Than women's are,” (Shakespeare 1211). Salingar states that Orsino’s delusional love for Olivia seems to be without a clear object, impossible to satisfy, to the point of death (124-125). Forbes says that Orsino thinks he needs Olivia so desperately he cries out for the heart to kill Olivia rather than lose her (479). Further, Viola tricks Orsino by disguising herself as a man, but it is done with a purpose. Lydia Forbes states that “He is a good man and worthy of her, but temporarily so confused by a romantically far-fetched notion of love that he would not be able to appreciate her in her own feminine dress… Since [Viola] has apparently heard of Orsino as a potential husband, she becomes a
In the play the reader knows that the hidden character viola who plays Orsino causes a lot of mischief and suffrage in the play. Not only to others but to herself. One of the first examples the reader can see this suffrage is in Olivia. Olivia in the story ends up in love with Cesario who we all know is actually Olivia.
Although Viola might be able to relate to Olivia's grief at first, her love for Orsino is so great that she cannot understand why Olivia would deny him. When Olivia expresses affectio...
As prescient and insightful as this evaluation may seem after considering the outcome of Twelfth Night’s romantic pairings, it reads as a very shallow perspective rather than any sort of wisdom – to the Duke, love is never permanent, lasting, or constant (just like the nature of the tides, it always changes). Duke Orsino has no concern whatsoever for Olivia’s feelings of grief after the loss of her brother – she is merely an object of his desires at the moment, and as his eventual courtship with Viola proves, he is extremely fickle in his affections. (Even before Viola’s disguise became apparent, Orsino showed some signs of attraction to the male Cesario – this raises a few questions about exactly how far his romantic indecisiveness
Though Olivia originally falls in love with what she believed to be a man, it is apparent that it is the feminine qualities in Cesario that drive her passion for him and his identical twin, Sebastian. Olivia’s indifference towards the well-rounded qualities seen in Orsino is explained due to her inability to love a man; however, her society’s ignorance towards the topic makes
As Viola (Cesario) goes to the house to meet Olivia, Duke Orsino begins to like her after 3 days in his service. She became a favorite of him. Olivia begans to also like him, he is the only guy she seems to be able to talk and agree with. Orsino favors his new servant, he is insist on picking Cesario to go on his most, important errand- to carry his messages of love to Lady Olivia. Viola tries out for the soccer team in She’s A Man and makes it. Her new roommate is Duke Orsino, which is her brother roommate. Duke Orsino has a crush on Olivia. He wants to make a deal with Viola, if she convinces Olivia to go out with him in their class, he will help her on becoming a better soccer player.
The issue arises as Viola continues to deliver messages to Oliva on Orsino’s behalf. Olivia becomes infatuated with Cesario, hinting again at a homoerotic relationship. This was a circumstance Viola did not anticipate.
due to loss of her brother at sea and the death of her father, which
Complications also arose when viola fell in love with her master, duke orsino, while at the same time had the love interest of orsino, the countess Olivia, trying to woo her. This placed viola in an extremely difficult and complex situation on one hand, she loved the duke and would have liked to do all she could to win his heart. But because she was his servant, she was obliged to serve him and help him win the hand of Olivia. What was a poor girl to do ?
In Shakespeare’s comedy Twelfth Night the great bard uses humor and mistaken identity not only to poke fun at romantic stories of “perfect love” and the foolish behavior of the aristocrats, but also to reveal man’s anxieties surrounding courtship, gender performance, and love as a whole. The portion of the play I have chosen to analyze are lines 188-256 in Act 5 scene one when Sebastian enters the stage and discovers Viola alive. The siblings give information about themselves to determine each other’s identity before Viola finally reveals herself to be female, allowing the farce to come to an end and the characters to return to their normal roles. Viola then declares her love for Orsino and he accepts her affections. While this scene is certainly
This all started when the Duke declared his love to Olivia in the form of a poem. “If music be the food of love give me excess of it” (Act.1 Scene.1) This is when Orsino found out his new love for the countess. Shortly after we find out that Olivia can't marry anyone because she must mourn for 7 years over her brother's death. While on the cost of Illyria Viola finds out her brother might still be alive and embarks on a dangerous journey to find him. In this journey Viola was pretending to be a man named Cesario, she was hired as the Duke messenger.
Twelfth Night consists of a large number of love triangles, however many characters are too indulged in love that they are blind to the untrue, and the weakness of their relationship, they are deceived by themselves and many people around them ( ex. Malvolio is tricked by Sir Andrew, Feste ,Sir Toby and Maria),but there are certain incidents where the love is true and two characters feel very strongly about one another. In the play, Viola and Orsino have the most significant relationship. The way they interact with each other causes the complexity on which the play is all about, their relationship turns from strangers to friends then lovers .In the First Act Viola is not honest with Orsino because she disguises herself as a male servant named Cesario in order to get closer to the duke. Orsino. Orsino quickly trusts Cesario and sends him to Olivia to declare Orsinos Love for her, the girl he most dearly loves. This quick bond is the fast example of their relationship. At the beginning of the play, Viola thinks her brother (Sebastian) is dead (after they’re deadly boat crash, where they get separated) when actually he is alive and thinks she is dead, Viola always seems to have a part missing from her which shows her bond with Sebastian is strong, and a part of her but in a brotherly/sisterly way rather than a proper relationship like viola and orsino, At the end of the play they meet and both fall in love , Viola with Orsino and Sebastian with Olivia.
Throughout the play Twelfth Night, by William Shakespeare, the different love-stricken characters demonstrate to the audience that love comes in different forms. Viola, disguised as a page boy of Duke Orsino named Cesario, falls in love with her master. However, Viola is commanded by Orsino to be the messenger for his presumed love, Olivia. Olivia, after meeting Cesario, falls in love with him not aware that he is actually a woman. Although the characters claim to be in love, with the exception of Viola, they end up happily married to someone different. Twelfth Night is a play that represents the difference between love ruled by the mind, expectations for the outside world, and the heart. Several characters, Olivia, Orsino, Viola, and Antonio, individually experience these three major forms of love. However, in the end of the play, the characters that experiences true love, led by