Twelfth Night William Shakespeare

In Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, the Feste's role might originally appear to be as a minor character, but in actuality his role is of principal significance. Because the action of the play occurs during the revelry of the holiday season, the clown...

Feste, the fool character in Twelfth Night, in many ways represents a playwright figure, and embodies the reach and tools of the theater. He criticizes, manipulates and entertains the other characters while causing them to reflect on their life...

Theatre began as a presentation of stories and ideas, mostly revolving around festival times in the calendar of the church year. This concept was carried on in Shakespeare's times and is exemplified in his plays Twelfth Night, or What You Will and...

In the study of three of Shakespeare's plays, Twelfth Night, or What You Will, The Tragedy of Richard II, and Henry IV, Part 1, one of the themes that is presented is the contrast of "appearance vs. reality." Sometimes the confusion is comedic,...

In both plays, Twelfth Night and Doctor Faustus, there exists a high and a low (or comic) plot. This plot division serves as a parallel - the actions and characters in the low plot coincide with the actions and characters in the high plot. The...

Topic: One theatre critic has said of Twelfth Night: "...the key question seems to me how much one regards it as a festive piece of saturnalia, written for a very specific occasion, and how much as a dark comedy about impermanence and pain." What...

In Twelfth Night, Shakespeare creates a duality between the worlds of the nobility and its associates and the said "outsiders." There is a great element of selfishness involved in the actions of the characters deemed "in" as they peruse through...

It has often been said that "the clothes make the man." It could never seem truer than in Twelfth Night where disguises and mistaken identities run the gamut of use. The identity of people, things and ideas are swept away under the facade of...

The character of Sebastian in "Twelfth Night" represents the dynamic factor in an otherwise static equation. Illyria is an immutable place, and the people who live and visit the land become ensnared in a stasis. Shakespeare uses the device of...

Quoted centuries before Shakespeare's birth, the Roman playwright Titus Maccius Plautus believed that "in everything the middle course is best; all things in excess bring trouble to men." Often times, society focuses its sights on the attainment...

Malvolio and Parolles both appear as relatively unlikable characters due to their inflated egos, and convince themselves that they are socially greater than they are in reality. In Twelfth Night, Malvolio, a mere steward, behaves with utter scorn...

In Twelfth Night, Shakespeare illustrates love in various forms and suggests that, like beauty, the true meaning of love exists in the eye of the beholder. Love is seen as bordering on insanity, a frivolous game of ever-changing affections, and...

"Sex is one of the constants in human experience; sexuality, one of the variables."

Bruce Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England.

Sexuality in Renaissance England was ambiguous. The current common idea or definition of "homosexual" did...

When Lady Olivia first beseeches Viola, a girl disguised as the male page Cesario, to love her, the two share a repartee that seems to question Cesario's affection for the countess. But as Viola responds to Olivia, "you do think you are not what...

Love as Comedic Energy: Viola and Orsino, Twelfth Night II.iv

Chosen extract: Act 2, Scene iv

In Twelfth Night, it is love’s revolutionary potential to inspire awareness, question authority, and disrupt the anti-comic balance that makes love so...

Cross-dressing on the early modern stage was a highly exploited theatrical device. It subverted the traditional conceptions of gender, evoking a recurring sense of dramatic irony. Jean E. Howard explains that “behavioural differences” and “...

In a Shakespearean comic setting where chaos, asininity, and insolence reign, the very qualities of comic irreverence become virtues. A comic hero or side character who relentlessly pranks stooges and straight men for the audience's enjoyment is...

Salinger (1974) calls Twelfth Night a “comedy about comedy” in which Shakespeare demonstrates his “fundamental debt to the earlier Renaissance tradition of comic playwriting and his abiding sense of detachment from it” (pg 242), and it is from...

Although some Shakespearean plays carve out a more passive, male-defined role for women, such as that which is exemplified through Ophelia’s obedience to Polonius in Hamlet, the comedies of As You Like It and Twelfth Night explore women’s...

In Shakespeare's Othello, the primary obstacle in Othello and Desdemona's relationship is Othello’s race, and hence, his status as an outsider. This difference becomes a barrier when Brabantio objects to their marriage, however, it plays much more...

Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night has a host of characters: a cross-dressing woman, an uppity, lower-class servant, a quick-witted, tricky gentlewoman, a rowdy, vulgar nobleman and his misguided friend. With so many characters to keep track of, an array...

In both “Twelfth Night” by William Shakespeare and “Enduring Love” by Ian McEwan, the pursuit of love is presented within the main characters. Their attempts to pursue a relationship could be seen as romantic and passionate; however, it could also...

Initially, the salient fool in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night appears to be Feste -- a licensed jester. Yet upon further examination, we see that Shakespeare merely uses Feste as a critic of the comedic disarray in Illyria, which parallels the...

Because disguise and mistaken identity is such a central theme in many of Shakespeare’s comedies, so too then is gender ambiguity, with many female characters disguising themselves as men. The fact that young male actors played these characters,...