Twelfth Night drama
Ans. Twelfth Night drama. Love is admittedly one among the master-passion that sway mankind. It is the great motive-force of all Romantic comedies of Shakespeare.
Twelfth Night is the play of which love is peculiarly the subject and which may be regarded from one point of new as a study of romantic love in its varied aspects and the modifications it undergoes in different characters placed in different situations or circumstances in life. Twelfth Night drama
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The spirit of the drama is reflected in the opening scene striking the keynote. It is full of suggestions and implications which are pointers to the development of the whole play.
To make up for the lack of scenery in the Elizabethan stage also, Shakespeare very artistically created the background and the social environment in which his principal characters moved in the planning of his opening scenes.
It is highly significant that Twelfth Night opens with the strains of music, and when the music cases that wonderful speech of the Duke, on love and imagination, is a summary of all that follows.
“The first scene represents the Duke as a love-sick young gentleman, dallying with the reminiscences of his love for the countless Olivia, who has spurned all his previous overtures of love and who refuses to see him, having determined to cloister herself for seven years; mourning the death of a brother. Twelfth Night drama
Summary for twelfth night Themes
From this, we understand the shape the drama is going to take us one of those in which love is the prank-player of the world’…This cupid in his cruelty, as Shakespeare open represents him…cupid in his freakishness, half a child, half a god, who makes his victims in this play-victims who love the game, yet suffer in it-now kind, now cruel, hoping, despairing, accepting refusing, yielding, repelling, fanciful and serious’, who plays as with toys Olivia, Sebastian, Voila, the Duke, even Malvolio who turns upside down the best-assorted plans, just as his lordship for the moment wills, Twelfth Night drama.
In this drama love is the chief preoccupation with almost all the characters. The Duke’s love for Olivia is fantastic, unreal, and sentimental. They talk more about the beauty and meaning of love than the physical charms of Olivia, The lady, with whom he is supposed to have fallen in love.
He is more concerned with love thoughts than with thoughts of the object of his love, ia, Olivia. Even in his talks with Cesario (Viola) whom he appointed as his “proxy, he discusses more music and poetry to love than about Clive or the probable success of his suit.
He never thinks to woo Olivia in person till at the very and when his speech proves that he has been in love with the idea of being Olivia’s broken-hearted love rather in love with the lady herself.
His love is thus a product of his fancy, i.e., he is in love within being love. He seems to enjoy his love points. He loves to proclaim his love from the housetops.
Love is an active passion. Had his love been real, he would have gone to woo Olivia himself instead of through some proxy. He resembles Olivia in that his sentimental love matches her sentimental grief.
He doe s little in the way of actual-making but says much. He is thus too ready to transfer his affections from Olivia to Viola.
He bestows himself upon Viola as if he were doing her an around. In his own opinion, he thinks he is a person worthy to be loved, but we think he is unworthy of Viola’s real, silent, sincere, and self-sacrificing love.
So Orsino’s love is love in idleness. It is clear from his speeches that Olivia’s beauty has only en-charged his imagination but has not won his heart and that ruling passion of his love of himself.
Twelfth night Themes
Oliva’s love for Cesario is impulsive, fantastical, born in a moment of impulse. She has little control over herself in her impulsive love. Like Orsino’s love, her grief for her dead brother is sentimental and theatrical.
She forgets all about it as soon as she is attracted by the physical charms of Voila in her masculine dress. Like the Duke also she is in love, with only the difference that she means business and wants to clinch the issue with one who merely resembles Viola in appearance.
Her mistake in this regard arises out of the inherent reality of the nature of love she entertains for Voila- one that has its origin in her eyes. She behaves somewhat like a spoiled child of fortune who cannot stand any opposition to her wishes, and who is used to have her way in everything.
Twelfth night Synopsis
She falls-violently in love and is virtually ‘mad’, in her own words. She forgets her rank, dignity, and social status, being distracted in love for the Duke’s page. Twelfth Night drama
It is this preoccupation with her unrequited love for Cesario that makes her temporarily neglectful of Malvolio’s welfare and encourages Sir Toby and Maria to take in hand the mocking of Malvolio As soon as she recovers the balance of her mind in her newly-found happiness in Sebastian, her interest in Malvolio revives and she is anxious to do him justice. In all these respects she contrasts with Viola’s deep, silent and self-sacrificing love.
She seems through the pretenses of the Duke’s love because it is ‘heresy’, i.e., insincere. Besides “She”ll not match about her degree, neither in the estate, years, not wit”.
The lucky mistake by which she marries Sebastian somewhat indecent. Haste instead of Cesario is one of the most delightful pranks played by ‘love’ in Romantic Comedy.
Discuss the statement Twelfth-night themes essay summary
Viola’s love for the Duke is deeply true, silent, sincere, and self-sacrificing. “Her love has none of the skittishness and unrest which mark the Duke’s passion for Olivia”. She keeps her love a secret to herself and she never publicizes it.
Her sense of duty and loyalty is so strong that, though in love with Orsino, she yet does her best for him Olivia and pleads for him most earnestly, “Complicated out of the elements of her being, her love is strong without violence, never mars the innate modesty of her character is deep as life, lender as infancy, pure, peaceful and non-chargeable as truth.
” In all these respects she is the reverse of Orsino and Olivia. “She never told her love, but let concealments like a worm in the bud feed on her damask cheek, she pined in through, and with a green and yellow Melancholy, she sat like patience like on moment, smiling grief”. She is ready to sacrifice herself to please her love, She reveals her love for Orsino at long last when she gives Orsino a lesson in true love in the interview between them. Women’s love often goes out where the need is greatest. Twelfth Night drama.
