Twelfth Night

Coursework Questions

Assessment Objectives

A01-Writing correctly: spelling, punctuation, paragraphs, using quotations as evidence. Using terminology.

A02-Assessing form structure and language.

A03-Interpretations and theories/definitions of comedy. Using quotes from further reading and evaluating whether they apply. Using quotes from the Twelfth Night to backup your ideas.

A04-Contextual influences-social, historical, political and literary context. What does the play mean to different audiences.

Does Shakespeare show love as an illusion

and farce?

Love as an illusion or farce

Sit on the fence

Love: According to the Greeks

Eros-LustPhillia-Familial love/friendsAgape-Love for humanity.

Eros

When I am with you, we stay up all night,When you're not here, I can't get to sleep.Praise God for these two insomnias!And the difference between them.

Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy,absentminded. Someone soberwill worry about things going badly.Let the lover be.

Exposition of the Twelfth Night

How does Orsino feel in the opening?How does Shakespeare use language to show

this? How does this setup the potential for comedy?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningzone/clips/twelfth-night-orsinos-speech-if-music-be-the-food-of-love/12128.html

If music be the food of love, play on;Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,The appetite may sicken, and so die.

Methought she purged the air of pestilence!

That instant was I turn'd into a hart;And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds,E'er since pursue me.

Orsino is a stock character of the youth in love/spurned youth/obsessed lover. Represents unrequited love.

Shakespeare subverts the lover’s blazon.

A04: Shakespeare is mocking the sonneteers of the time who used to exaggerate with language their love-Grant

This is emphasised in Olivia’s reply at the end of Act 1, scene 5:

“I will give out divers schedules of my beauty. It shall be inventoried; and every particle and utensil labelled to my will as, item, two lips, indifferent red, item two grey eyes with lids to them; item one neck, one chin and so forth” Ferguson 2010

A03: Link to feminism

What is feminism?

How are women portrayed in literature?

Are they a positive female stereotype?

they stay indoors and are protected.

Are they a negative female stereotype?

They are portrayed as loose or immoral?

Women are portrayed as:

IndividualsWomen were idolised in Shakespeare’s time and

needed protecting.Represented through beauty.Orsino idolises Olivia.His language shows his first love as a farce.

Link to structure

Use of iambic pentameter-reflects the rhythm of the heart.

Contrast Orsino’s speech to Viola’s love

She never told her love, but let concealment like a worm I’the bud feed on her damask cheek. She pined in thought

And what’s her history?A blank m’lord.Viola speaks of unexpressed pain which

festers and destroys.

Viola’s love for Orsino

I'll do my bestTo woo your lady:Aside

yet, a barful strife!Whoe'er I woo, myself would be his wife.

According to Viola

We men say more, swear more but indeed our shows are more than will for still we prove much in our vows but little in our love.

Foreshadowing of Viola’s marriage

“I have heard my father name him”.

Why does Viola dress up as a man? Consider the context.

How would the Elizabethan audience view this?

How would today’s audience view this? Does it create as much comedy?

What would feminists suggest about the above? Is she a positive female stereotype or a negative female stereotype?

Smith 2012

And where comic women choose their own husbands free from parental control, they seem to choose exactly the husbands their father would have chosen for them

Smith 2012

Shakespeare’s comic heroines assert themselves to be sure, but their spirited agency is directed towards the most normative of female destinies, marriage. We can be sure if any woman in a Shakespeare comedy asserts that she does not want a husband, the plot will contort itself to make sure she gets one….

The potential homoerotic quality of this speech is added to by the fact that an Elizabethan audience would have heard these words addressed to a boy actor playing the part of a young woman dressed as a young man…it might have been a rather unsettling one for Shakespeare’s audience given that at the time, homosexual relations between men were punishable by death.

But does Orsino really love Viola

He continues calling Viola Cesario at the end of the play.

Cesario, come;For so you shall be, while you are a man;But when in other habits you are seen,Orsino's mistress and his fancy's queen.

Religious Context-Stubbes 1583

Our apparel was given us as a sign distinctive to discern between sex and sex and therefore one to wear the apparel of another sex is to participate with the same and to adulterate the verity of his own kind.

1599-all men are abominations that put on women’s raiment-Rainolds.

Modern Audience point of view and gender criticism

What you will

1. Orsino shows that he is attracted to Viola when she is Cesario.

2. Shakespeare’s comedies have great fun with cross-dressing and flirt with the homosexual desiarbility of the transvestite actor: Orsino and Olivia are both drawn to the androgynously sexy Viola in Twelfth Night givinv the play’s subtitle, “what you will” a saucy hint of ‘anything goes’ (Smith page 11)

Tyson 2013-link to religious context.

One might think, because of her use of disguise that Viola also conforms to the idea that women were born deceivers…only the appearance of her brother allows her deception to go unpunished. However Viola’s deception never threatens any harm to anyone other than herself-her yearning for Orsino makes her suffer and threatens her happiness and even then there are strong intimations that we are in a comic world rather than heading for a tragic conclusion brought on by female untrustworthiness.

Shakespeare’s comedies seem to challenge conservative orthodoxies and present themselves as socially transgressive (Smith 2012).

Queer Theory

Questions sexual identity and themes of sexuality in a literary text.

Antonio and Sebastian

1. Antonio rescues Sebastian

2. Antonio doesn’t know Sebastian

3. He becomes anxious for Sebastian

4. He follows Sebastian and endangers himself as Orsino is his enemy.

5. Antonio confronts Cesario thinking she is Sebastian.

Consider

1. Viola and Olivia

2. Sebastian and Antonio

Viola and Olivia

Subversion.Olivia chases Viola when she is CesarioOlivia praises Viola’s beauty.Olivia proposes to Sebastian.

Questions to consider

Is Olivia drawn to Cesario’s attempts to imitate her brother; in love with a version of Sebastian before she meets (and marries) him? Or is there a homoerotic aspect to her passion? She has rejected the courtship of the ruling and authoritative duke and fallen in love with the feminine messenger (Bickley).

Is Olivia a positive female stereotypeIs her love a farce?

“ Most excellent”. When she realises that Cesario and Sebastian are twins.

Why does Sebastian agree to marry her?

Antonio’s speech

“My desire/more sharped than filed steel, did spur me forth…hold sir here’s my purse.”

But O how vile an idol proves this godThou hast, Sebastian, done good feature shame.In nature there's no blemish but the mind;None can be call'd deform'd but the unkind:Virtue is beauty, but the beauteous evilAre empty trunks o'erflourish'd by the devil.

MalvolioThe subplot involves Malvolio being tricked into thinking Olivia is in love with him.

Why is he tricked: He is arrogant. He calls Feste ‘a barren rascal’ and stops Toby and Feste from celebrating.

Malvolio represents the puritan

Elizabethans disliked Puritans. Shakespeare is also having ‘a dig’ at puritans. They disliked the theatre, excess alcohol and celebrations. They were generally disliked particularly by the theatre audience-the prank becomes funnier.

Malvolio

He believes Olivia has written him. “To be count Malvolio”-Does he really

love Olivia or her status?Is he guilty of lust? One of the seven

deadly sins-Is Shakespeare showing puritans as hypocritical?

What about pride?

or

Do you feel sorry for Malvolio?

Like them (Olivia and Orsino) he aspires towards an illusory ideal of love, but his mistake is grosser than theirs and his posturings more extravagant and grotesque…His fate may seem harsh, but it is part of the ethical scheme of comedy that those who cannot perceive their own faults are exposed and punished for their folly. McCulloch 2001

McColloch 2001

Even at the height of his fantasy of being Olivia’s husband, his dreams are all of his own advancement:

“seven of my people, with an obedient start, make out for him. I frown the while and perchance wind up my watch, or play with my-some rich jewel.

A02: Language

“to bed sweetheart”

Does Malvolio have a resolution?

The resolution of comedies is marriage. Malvolio states “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you”. Suggests Malvolio can only love himself.

Other Considerations

Andrew AguecheekSir Toby and Maria.

Familial Love

Structural Device of Mirroring. Olivia at the start of the play is still mourning her brother’s death-he died

seven years ago and she still refuses to marry.Viola thinks her brother has died but she disguises herself as her brother. Is her disguise her way of mourning her brother’s death or of keeping her

brother alive“I my brother know yet living in my glass. Even such and so in favour was my brother and he went still in this fashion, colour ornament, for him I imitate.”

The purpose of comedy:

To correct the mistakes of people in a humorous way.

To ensure characters learn a lesson.Frye: Old World, Green World and New World.

A02 Form: Disguise was a key feature of comedies

Disguise creates disorder.The purpose of comedy is to suspend the rules of

society-subversion.Bakhtin: comedies are “life turned inside out”“All distance between people is suspended, there is

free and familiar contact between people”

Whose love is most real?