Social Inequality In Twelfth Night By William Shakespeare

Typically Shakespearean comedy mirrors the Early Stuart veneer of instruction, thereby “work[ing] through [the performance] to its own logical end,” (Frye, 1957) which, by distinction, must necessitate Frye’s New World. Twelfth Night strongly employs a similar cyclical structure that defines an insincere conclusion, levered to impose contemporary social hierarchy. By proliferating Aristotle’s, “great chain of being,” the bard shackles his conception of Twelfth Night – and crucially the characters involved- to the very same distribution - dictating a predetermined resolution. Arguably Shakespeare’s subtle hints of injustice lead to the faint realisation of social disability that defines 16th century Britain; undermining the completeness of

Twelfth Night famously begins with Orsino posing the question, “If music be the food of love,” a remark which highlights Orsino’s desire, to manufacture, to fabricate a mascaraed of affection. By associating love to food – a key ingredient to life – Shakespeare dramatises endearment within Twelfth Night, greatly contrasting his other works, “ever-fixed mark,” (Sonnet 116). In the process, he subverts the creditably of love as a concept throughout the plot of Twelfth Night particularly as the performance approaches a climax – notably in the form of marriage. Shakespeare’s construction of, “stock character types,” (Stott, 2005) such as Feste - the “witty fool” - strongly pronounces the repeatability of comic convention - tarnishing the plausibility of Twelfth Night. Perhaps, in doing so Shakespeare evidences Frye, (1965) “A comedy is not…a play which ends happily.” Rather exceptionally the relationship between Toby and Maria, “he hath married her,” oversteps traditional comic frontiers by intimately suggesting a relationship as the performance concludes. Arguably this

In particular, the playwright’s use of an extended metaphor personifying the sea as, “hungry,” conceptually links love to the ocean, whereby the characters are influenced by love as a form of fate. During Twelfth Night fate and its concepts exemplify a predetermined, forced end which defines the conclusion of the performance. Contentiously, therefore, a typical comic structure reflects similar suggestions of fate; the ending must be forced if we know how Twelfth Night (or any other typical comedy) will end on before it does - marriage. By relating the performance to, “a twist of birth fate,” (Howard, 1542) Shakespeare actualises depiction with reality – that Elizabethan arranged marriage was social normality. Indeed, proposing that Shakespeare’s conclusion seems rather forced, allows the metaphor of Feste’s closing expression to be inspected. The final lines of Twelfth Night trigger remorseful emotions, ending the chaos of the previous Green World by reminding, “rain it raineth every day,” as in the world will continue as it has forever. Thus and thus, Shakespeare completes the aforementioned cyclical distribution of the performance, an Old World has been surpassed by the Green World and then that once more by the New World – reiterating the unforgiving structure of contemporary comedy. This rather narrow sighted