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Summary Twelfth Night Themes for A-Level £12.49
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  5. English Literature
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  7. Drama and poetry pre-1900

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Summary Twelfth Night Themes for A-Level
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Themes, Context, Analysis and Scholars' Quotes including: - Love and Desire - Gender - Ambition - Class, Masters, and Servants - Performance, Disguise, and Deception - Identity - Festivity - Fate, Life and Death - Madness - Time - Language and Communication - Settings - Narrative Foc...

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  • May 29, 2024
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  • 2023/2024
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Twelfth Night (Performed 1602)
Love and Desire
- Love/Desire in general
o Function as powerful and sudden drivers of plot.
 Viola feels trapped in a love triangle with Olivia and Orsino – “It is too hard a knot for me to
untie”
 Love as fate:
 When Malvolio starts to believe that Olivia loves him he reasons, “Tis but fortune, all is
fortune”
 Sebastian does not seek a logical explanation for Olivia’s strange behaviour, trusting that
their relationship is an “accident and flood of fortune” (interesting water imagery – he has
not had good luck until now)
 A3S4 – Malvolio’s desire for Olivia causes him to act out of character.
 A3S4 – He changes his appearance (yellow stockings etc.) but also his personality,
referencing “the very true sonnet is: ‘Please one, and please all.’”
o This was a contemporary bawdy ballad not a sonnet which encouraged the listener to
let women have their way sexually. It is ironic that the cultural references of the
uptight Malvolio intending to impress the countess should be so dubious.
o Physical symptoms of love
 A2S2 – Viola about Olivia: “she did speak in starts, distractedly” (Broken speech was
considered a sign of passion and ‘start’ meant a fit of passion.)
o Comedy in the play can be found through satirising love.
 Shakespeare pokes fun at Orsino’s flowery love poetry – making it clear that Orsino is more in
love with being in love than with his supposed beloveds.
 Orsino enjoys his fantasy world – A1S1 Orsino: “So full of shapes is fancy, that it alone is
high fantastical.”
 By showing the intricate rules that govern how nobles engage in courtship, Shakespeare
examines how characters play the ‘game’ of love.
o Shakespeare further mocks romantic love by showing the devotion between family (Viola and
Sebastian) and servants to masters (Antonio to Sebastian and Maria to Olivia) as more constant than
any of the romantic bonds in the play.
- Romantic love
o Viola’s love for Orsino
 A1S4 – Viola: “Whoe’er I woo, myself would be his wife.” (First time she expresses love for
Orsino).
 A2S4 – Viola says the person she loves is “of your complexion” and “About your years, my
lord”
 A5S1 – Orsino’s violent speech where he considers killing Olivia or Cesario marks a shift in the
object of Orsino’s affections from “what I love” (presumably Olivia) to whom “I tender dearly”
(Cesario).
 A5S1 – Orsino: “I’ll sacrifice the lamb that I do love”
o Orsino casts himself as an Abrahamic figure sacrificing that which he loves (Cesario).
 A5S1 – Viola loves Orsino enough that she is willing to risk her own life: “To do you rest a
thousand deaths would die.”
 The forthrightness and intensity of Cesario’s declaration of love, far beyond the limits of a
servant’s dedication, is surprising to the characters.
 A5S1 – Orsino to Viola: “Boy, thou hast said to me a thousand times thou never shouldst love
woman like to me.”
 Orsino still avoids feminine appellatives to the end, while Viola maintains her male
disguise.
o Antonio’s love for Sebastian
 A2S1 – Antonio: “I do adore thee so that danger shall seem sport”
 Climax of Antonio’s rhetoric of ‘religious’ worship for Sebastian with “adore”. Both
Antonio and Sebastian use the hyperbolic language of courtly love to express their mutual
attraction.

,  A3S4 – Antonio says he “Received him with such sanctity of love” / “devotion”
 Professing his love using religious imagery.
 A5S1 – Antonio: “His life I gave him and did thereto add my love”
 A5S1 – Some indication that Sebastian feels similarly: “How have the hours racked and tortured
me since I have lost thee!”
o Sebastian and Olivia
 A4S3 – Sebastian: “This is the air, that is the glorious sun; This pearl she gave me”
 Sebastian is both celebrating the world, which he now perceives with new enthusiasm, and
reassuring himself that his senses are still functioning – he is not mad. His three deictics
(“This”, “That, “This”) take us progressively from the widest and most general (“air”) to
the smallest and most particular (“pearl”).
 A5S1 – Sebastian tells Olivia that she was “mistook” but “nature to her bias drew in that.”
 He says that she was indirectly attracted towards an appropriate (male) object of desire
through Viola’s disguise, effectively ‘absolving’ her of the suspicion of homoerotic desire.
- Understanding of love
o In terms of knowledge, Viola knows what love is (whereas Orsino has to learn).
 A2S4 – When talking about love Viola gives personal examples whereas Orsino asks questions
throughout.
o Defining love
 A3S1 – Olivia tries to define love to include pity:
 A3S1 – Olivia: “That’s a degree to love” (Viola corrects her).
- Idea of love
o Orsino is in love with the idea of love
 A1S1 – Play opens with Orsino “If music be the food of love, play on” – hints already that his
love is not conventional romantic love (“if”)
 Opening a sonnet talking about suffering and love is Petrarchan Conceit (although normally
used to describe a lover not the idea of love – Orsino is in love with the concept of love).
 Line is also in Iambic Pentameter (appropriate for Orsino’s station but also emotional and
introspective)
 Trevor Nunn 1996 film initially presents Orsino surrounded by sycophants and
reclining as if ill but later standing up fine.
 A1S1 – Orsino: “So full of shapes is fancy that it alone is high fantastical.”
 Olivia’s name is not even mentioned by Orsino until line 18.
 A1S1 – Curio asks Orsino if he will hunt “The hart” and Orsino answers as if he said “heart”
and also says when he first saw Olivia “That instant was I turned into a hart” and chased by his
desires as “hounds”
 Orsino’s allegory alludes to the story of Actaeon who (in the most well-known version of
the tale) saw Diana naked and was transformed by her into a stag who was killed by his
own dogs. This suggests that Orsino’s desire for Olivia is equally self-sabotaging.
o Viola describes how she would perform love for Olivia if she loved her as Orsino does
 A1S5 – Viola says she would “make the babbling gossip of the air cry out ‘Olivia!’”
 Alludes to the story of Echo whose love for Narcissus meant that she wasted out into air
only able to say her name.
- Family
o Viola loves her brother Sebastian
 A5S1 – Sebastian and Viola confirm the name and date of their father’s death.
o Sir Toby and Olivia
 A2S3 – Sir Toby: “Am not I consanguineous?” He sees the fact that he is family as a green card
to do what he wants.
- Self-love
o A1S5 – Olivia: “Oh, you are sick of self-love, Malvolio”
o Peter Gill’s 1974 production had a huge image of Narcissus staring at his own reflection making
up the backdrop.
- Love and class
o Romantic ideas about love are mocked through the escapades of servants.

,  Malvolio’s behaviour aiming to win Olivia’s heart underlines Orsino’s own ridiculous romantic
ideas.
 Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Sir Toby Belch and Maria constantly crack double entendres which
make it clear that while the nobles may spout flowery poetry about romantic love, that love is at
least partly motivated by desire and sex.
- Love as a cause of suffering
o Despite the happy ending of the play where the various lovers pair up, Shakespeare shows that love
can cause pain.
o Various characters claim to suffer painfully from being in love or their unrequited love.
 Orsino depicts love as an “appetite” that he wants to satisfy but can’t.
 Orsino calls his desires “fell and cruel hounds”
 A1S5 – Olivia: “Even so quickly may one catch the plague”
 Sophie Duncan: “Orsino and Olivia talk about love through imagery of disease and plague”
 These metaphors all contain elements of violence, painting the lovers as victims.
 Love is so risky that it makes other threats pale in comparison:
o A2S1 – “I do adore thee so that danger shall seem sport” – Antonio
 Love has the potential to result in violence – Act 5 Scene 1 Orsino threatens to kill Cesario
because he thinks that Cesario has forsaken him to become Olivia’s lover.
 Jan Kott: “Love in Illyria is violent, it cannot be gratified or received”
 Viola feels that she is suffering because of love as she cannot tell Orsino how she feels.
 A2S4 – “She never told her love, but let concealment, like a worm i’th’bud, feed on her
damask cheek”
 Sebastian talks of physical pain that the loss of Antonio seems to have caused him.
 A5S1 – “How have the hours racked and tortured me, since I have lost thee!”
o Characters willing to suffer for love
 A5S1 – Viola loves Orsino enough that she is willing to risk her own life: “To do you rest a
thousand deaths would die.”
 The forthrightness and intensity of Cesario’s declaration of love, far beyond the limits of a
servant’s dedication, is surprising to the characters.
o Melancholy
 During the Renaissance, melancholy was believed to be a sickness resulting from an imbalance
in the fluids making up the human body. It was thought to arise from love (particularly self-love
or unrequited romantic love).
 Orsino exhibits many symptoms – lethargy, inactivity, interest in music and poetry.
 Viola describes herself as dying of melancholy because she is unable to act on her love for
Orsino.
 Olivia describes Malvolio as melancholy and blames it on his narcissism.
 A2S5 – Maria about Olivia: “being addicted to a melancholy as she is”
 A3S4 – Olivia: “I am as mad as he, if sad and merry madness equal be.”
o She thinks of her amorous furor and melancholy as a kind of madness while Malvolio
is mad in happiness.
 Melancholy is therefore used throughout to reveal the painfulness of love.
 But it is satirised through the more excessive characters proclaiming their love/exaggerated
moments of melancholy and mourning.
o (E.g., Orsino cured of the intense lovesickness he felt for Olivia when he learns that
Viola is available).
- Marriage
o Terry Eagleton: “The finality of Twelfth Night is only acceptable because marriage is stable, and
stability is what the characters desperately need.”
- Not everyone achieves happiness in love
o Both Malvolio and Antonio are prevented from having the objects of their desire.
 Malvolio must face the realisation that he is socially unworthy of Olivia.
 Social norms do not allow for the gratification of Antonio’s attraction to Sebastian.
 L G Salingar: Antonio is “The one single minded representative of romantic devotion”
 In the 2017 National Theatre performance Antonio and Sebastian kissed.

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