The Power of Love in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night

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Emotions are among the most potent forces humanity has ever faced, and, as William Shakespeare emphasizes, love is one of the most influential emotions an individual can experience. Throughout Twelfth Night, Shakespeare focuses on one main characteristic about love that helps to solidify the strength of this emotion on the characters. He wants to reader to understand that love is one of the few forces that can instantaneously incapacitate and cripple human beings, yet it simultaneously wields the capacity to bestow the highest level of satisfaction within an individual.
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.
In the play Twelfth Night, Shakespeare employs a plot filled with contradictions to portray love as an insurmountable force, and with the use of symbols insinuating deception, along with dolefully forthright metaphors and similes, Shakespeare further demonstrates that deception and suffering are the true fueling entities of this puissant force known as love. The extreme actions of Olivia and Sebastian exemplify the power of love and depict how this force can blind an individual to the point where their actions display high levels...

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...opment: The Self and Society in Twelfth Night." Literature and Psychology23.1 (1973): 13-20. Rpt. in Shakespearean Criticism. Ed. Dana Ramel Barnes and Marie Lazzari. Vol. 34. Detroit: Gale Research, 1997. Literature Resource Center. Web. 23 Feb. 2014.
Phialas, Peter G. "Review of Twelfth Night." Shakespeare's Romantic Comedy: The Development of Their Form and Meaning. The University of North Carolina Press, 1966. 256-305. Rpt. in Shakespearean Criticism. Ed. Dana Ramel Barnes and Marie Lazzari. Vol. 34. Detroit: Gale Research, 1997. Literature Resource Center. Web. 18 Feb. 2014.
Shakespeare, William. "Twelfth Night." Shakespeare's Work. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Feb. 2014. .
"Twelfth Night." Shakespearean Criticism. Ed. Michelle Lee. Vol. 85. Detroit: Gale, 2005. Literature Resource Center. Web. 23 Feb. 2014.

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