Exploring the Themes and Characters of Twelfth Night

Love and its fulfillment are primary in Shakespeare’s comedies (Summers, 1955). The conflicts are usually presented in terms of a dispute between the generations. At the beginning of the plays the young lovers are usually criticized by the older generation of p

In the beginning of the play we see Orsino and Olivia as a romantic lover and a grief-stricken lady. They are comic characters because they are both wearing masks, metaphorically speaking. Orsino glories in the proper moodiness and fickleness of the literary lover; only our own romanticism can blind us to the absurdities in his opening speech (Summers, 1955). Orsino acts like he is in love with Olivia, but he clearly is in love with the act of being in love, not the person. Orsino is portrayed in way that makes the reader almost admire him. He is not a boring character. Orsino is a comic character because the reader can easily see thru him. We see that Orsino is suffering from boredom, lack of physical love, and excessive imagination, and the victim is unaware that he is in love with love.

Viola is in a situation where she has no time for love nor grief-in-idleness. She is in a foreign land all by herself. All that she possesses are wit, intelligence and the friendship of the Captain. Although she has lost a brother just like Olivia, she does not have the luxury for conventional mourning. Olivia’s mourning is quickly exchanged for hope that, since she was saved, maybe her brother was as well. Viola felt like she needed to know what her estate was before she decided to go to the “new world.” By this action, we are reminded that society often requires a mask, neither for the relief of boredom nor the enjoyment of action, but merely for self-preservation (Summers, 1955). It is interesting that Viola chooses to impersonate Cesario from necessity, but later plays her part with undisguised enjoyment. Although Viola does a great job pretending to be Cesario, she never lets us forget about the biological distance between the two. Sebastian is the reality of which Cesario is the artful imitation. He does not assume any disguises. Viola and the residents of Illyria have assumed the disguise for him. When Sebastian enters the play, he is the object of our laughter. It is so not because he has confused himself with an improper mask, but because he kept insisting on his own identity when the rest of the characters insisted otherwise.

Shakespeare used his writing abilities to organize a comedic plot in this play. He used the twins, exile and impersonations to invent the different masks that the characters wear throughout the play. Every character has a mask. It seems that the character that does not assume a mask, is not within the comedic field. In a comedy, if a character thinks that it is not necessary to assume a mask, he or she is being naïve because that character has already assumed a mask. We usually tend to laugh with the characters that know the role they are playing and we laugh at the characters that do not. The cast of Twelfth Night is simply divided into the two categories.

Some topics in this essay:
Twelfth Night, Orsino Olivia, Olivia Malvolio, Night McCurdy, Shakespeare Besides, Sir Topas, Shakespeare Feste’s, Viola Malvolio, Olivia Orsino, Orsino Mistakes, twelfth night, burton 1970, summers 1955, love olivia, orsino olivia, characters play, beginning play, williams 1961, twelfth night play, summers 1955 viola, play music, characters twelfth night, hand olivia, burton 1970 malvolio, character assume mask,