A Little Help on Twelfth Night Essay

The following in coordinateation is based upon my taped lecture on this fetch. Although this text edition version is not the equivalent as the taped lecture, it does contain the same information. All references ar based on the Signet paperback edition which you should confer with in conjunction with this lecture. twelfth iniquity was probably written in 1601 and first performed in January of 1602. We know this because the walkover is work forcetioned that year in the journal of a teen patch training to become a attorney at the Inns of Court in London. We can also tell the near date of the run from the references to contemporary events and publications, things like books or newfangled maps. To prepargon the publication in Shakespe ares career, it comes closely six days after Roemo & Juliet. Shakespeares treat handst of sleep with and ro gayce and his use of dramatic contrivances are even more sophisticated than they were in his famous tragedy. 12th night is the fou rth in a series of romantic comedies which all dumbfound very b discip confines heroines who end up teaching valuable lessons to the custody who will become their husbands. Three of these four plays The Merchant of Venice, As You desire It and Twelfth Night feature heroines who suppress themselves as men and sight with their anthropoid-dominated societies from this secret vantage catamenia. They all give up very sophisticated attitudes toward go out and reveal human folly ca apply by the excess of some grouchy quality. Its interesting to note that Twelfth Night was written compensate after Shakespeare had written Hamlet, which is a very divergent kind of play, save it does give you some idea of the range of his creative talents.The cognomen of the play is unusual. It refers to the twelve days of Christmas, which you may recall from the old song, On the Twelfth Day of Christmas. In earlier days the celebration and exchange of gifts which we accomplice with the 25th of December were actually conducted during the 12 days which followed that date, culminating with what is called Epiphany. For some crusade this twelfth day was associated, and continues to be, with comic misrule, up round and especially confusion everyw present gender. In this country many multitude observe a seasonal tradition by taking their family to see The Nutcracker ballet or The Christmas Carol, Dickens reputation turned into a stage play.More novel cultural expressions may be the film How the Grinch Stole Christmas or goggle boxs A Charlie Brown Christmas. Well, in the United Kingdom the cultural equivalent is tone ending to the pantomime or panto. Families will go to the local theater is see a series of comic skits which feature famous actors and actresses performing in drag. So you might see Benny hillock or John Cleese playing the parts of women and some shapely starlet robed in tight bloomers playing the part of the hero. Shakespeares play recalls this very old tradition by being a play with similar gender confusion at its core.It is entirely possible that Shakespeare was commissioned to write the play for a group of law students to perform at their Twelfth Night celebration, later followed by performances at his public theater, The Globe. As such, the original audience consisted of girlish sophisticated gentlemen who would have been knowledgeable astir(predicate) the London theater purview at that place are a minute of references in the play to works by Shakespeares contemporaries. Many of the jokes in the play are lost on us in the twenty-first Century because they refer to things which were very much in the public mind in 1601. So when Feste, the jester, affirms at one point he could have used the word element, but he chose not to because the word is overused, it goes right over our heads. However, it was a howl in Shakespeares time because there was a big flap over Ben Jonsons use of the word.Twelfth Night is one of the fe w plays Shakespeare wrote which has a moary or sub-title What You bequeath. level off here Shakespeare is having a little fun. At one level this title is just a throw-away line, much like the titles of Much Ado close to Nothing or As You same(p) It, the Elizabethan equivalent of some(prenominal) or No big deal However, in his plays and poems Shakespeare often used the word will to refer to sexual desire. So the title What You Will also mover Whatever sexual desire you choose to pursue. end-to-end the play there are at least three places where characters consciously give themselves liberty to chase some inappropriate sexual magic which will end up making them appear foolish. Ill point these come out as we go through the play.The source of Twelfth Night has been pretty well identified. The immediate source is a book by a man named Barnaby Ridge titled Ridge His Farewell to the host Profession written about 20 years earlier. Ridge wrote a collection of stories he had picked up from many sources and to which he added his own inventions. angiotensin-converting enzyme of Ridges stories is about a young womanhood who veils herself as a young man and goes to work for a handsome young lord with whom she promptly travel in have it off. The young lord orders his new employee to go off and win the love of a well-favored woman that he desires. The heroine in suppress tries her best, but the beautiful woman falls in love with her disguise.Comic confusion results. Ridge had stolen this narration line from an Italian play written earlier, but in reality the ideas here go back to the ancient Greeks and Romans who often wrote about girls who used disguise to get around the restrictions of their own societies. The ancients also had lots of fun with characters who looked also identical twins were special favorites. One of the Roman playwrights that Shakespeare had read in school, Plautus, had written a famous comedy about a set of twins Shakespeare had used i t as the earth for his first comedy, Comedy of Errors. So this sophisticated comedy of Twelfth Night is actually based on very old ideas.There are four major themes which are explored in this play. All the themes have to do with love. In fact no other(a) play by Shakespeare shows so many different kinds of love or reactions to love. The first theme is everybody who loves faces obstacles to overcome in order to strain their hearts desire. Falling love in a Shakespearean comedy is never easy. You really have to work hard to win. The second theme is that love takes many forms, and these coexist uneasily. There is self-love, misguided love, love which was gender inappropriate, or what in politically correct terms we would say was deemed inappropriate by a dominant, sexually repressive society. That just means that in this play women fall in love with women and men with men without ever having a chance for that love to be requited or returned.The 3rd theme is that love makes the un seemly appear foolish while correcting the worthy who are simply misguided. Love is the mechanism by which we are shown pile acting ridiculously. Those who deserve our scorn appear as fools those who have something going for them are shown the errors of their ways through love and finally earn our take to be as wise. The fourth and final theme is that love is an infection we willingly seek in the words of one of the characters in this play, a form of divine madness. Despite the possibility of appearing foolish we give ourselves permission to experience it the same idea I was getting at in my earlier discussion of the sub-title of the play, What You Will.The plot of the play combines three different story lines. There is the love triangle of the noble characters Viola, a clever young woman who is forced to disguise herself as a young man Orsino, the duke who employs Viola in disguise and with whom she falls in love Olivia, the beautiful countess Orsino desires and who in turn fal ls in love with Viola. The second story deals with the low-life characters and their rough humor Sir Toby Belch, whose name tells you everything you need to know about his character Belchs favorite pigeon, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, from whom he steals and with whom he carries out an elaborate practical joke on Malvolio, the business manager of Olivias estate.Malvolio is a character with special political significance for Shakespeares audience. The thirdly story line is not as prominent as the other two but is absolutely essential for the resolution of the play. It involves Sebastian, Violas twin brother whom she believes has been drowned, and Antonio, a ship captain who rescues him, falls in love with him and pursues him, even at peril of his own life. These story lines encounter at different times and in different ways with different kinds of comic effects from the slap stick to the romantic. Social distinctions are the basis for much of the humor of the play.Ive made the point that gender disguise is what distinguishes this play from some of the other comedies and that the idea goes back to the ancient Greeks and Romans. This device is found in Shakespeares comedies of Two Gentlemen of Verona, Merchant of Venice and As You Like It. The device allows a heroine to exercise greater freedom of action. Young gentlewomen were down the stairs great social constraint. They were not allowed to go in public without an escort. They were command to interact with men without a chaperone present. They were not supposed to be involved in choosing their own mates. Once they put on pants their opportunities expanded and the dramatic possibilities increased in the play. In Merchant of Venice a young woman dons the disguise and becomes a judge in a capital case.In Two Gentlemen of Verona a young woman plays a man and watches as her boyfriend tries to betray her with another woman. In As You Like It a bright girl fools even the man who is in love with her and trains him in how she wants him to behave toward her when they are reunited as man and woman. In Twelfth Night we see how a young woman, who is on her own, uses disguise to protect herself in a hostile world. The device of gender mask also provides a double vision. As women these pretenders see the world in terms of the traditional conflict between the sexes as men they are able to inject a subversive note into the smug male world view.In this play, for example Viola is able to educate the man she loves as to the depth of passion and nobility of love women can experience for men, something he never suspected before. Finally Shakespeare could use disguise as a way of introducing comic effects and exposing male hypocrisy to his for the most part male audience. Women attended the plays, but most of the audience appears to have been men. Nevertheless, no one comes away from a Shakespearean comedy feeling that men are naturally superior to women. If anything Shakespeares comic heroines seem to be the i ntellectual superiors of the men they eventually marry, as if they had taken pity on some poor fool they had just tricked.The reputation of this play has perpetually been very high. It is one of Shakespeares most beloved works, and many people consider it the best of all the comedies. The humor is sharp, the satire still harsh and many of the jokes just as funny as they were 400 years ago. As we go through the play scene by scene Ill point out some of the remarkable achievements Shakespeare realizes in this imperishable comedy. Lets look at the play itself now.