Essay
A* Twelfth Night Exemplar Essay 1 (Section B)
‘In Twelfth Night, men are presented as having a greater depth of feeling than women.’ To what extent do you agree with this view?
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Twelfth Night practice essay 1‘In Twelfth Night, men are presented as having a greater depth of feeling than women.’ To what
extent do you agree with this view?
In Twelfth Night, viewing men as having a greater depth of feeling than women could be a
viable interpretation owing to Duke Orsino’s demands for excess of love, Malvolio’s passionate albeit
misguided adoration of Olivia, and Antonio’s unwavering devotion to Sebastian. However, the view
is arguably ignorant of the passionate and amorous emotions felt by the female characters, including
Olivia, Maria and Viola, whose very existence is complicated by her love for Duke Orsino. In addition,
the romantic affections of Olivia’s poorly matched suitors are rather superficial, as Orsino seems not
to love her at all and never even sees the Countess until the final Act.
Those who would support the view of men as superior lovers may see Shakespeare’s use of
apostrophe in Orsino’s utterance ‘O’ spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou’ as evidence of his
great depth of feeling for Olivia. This was certainly the contemporary interpretation as the accepted
medical doctrine – the Four Humours – depicted women as biologically ‘cooler’ than men and
therefore less able to feel powerful emotion. However, Shakespeare clearly emphasises the folly of
Orsino’s claims to love Olivia as the extended and ornate opening scene suggests that he is
enamoured by the idea of love rather than the object of his feelings itself, thus appearing as a
superficial lover. It alludes to the stock character of the starved Petrarchan lover who featured also
in the form of Romeo at the beginning of Romeo and Juliet in his misguided love for Rosaline.
Twelfth Night arguably takes such folly a step further as Shakespeare uses Viola (disguised as
Cesario) as a messenger to convey his love, raising questions about how he has come to idealise
Olivia without ever actually meeting her and is ‘such as I am all true lovers are’. There could be an
element of satire in Shakespeare’s ironic elevation of Orsino as the embodiment of a ‘true lover’
given his inconstancy, switching his affections to ‘Cesario’ at the end of the play almost immediately
after he learns that ‘he’ is actually a woman. Feste, Shakespeare’s satirical fool, clearly mocks
Orsino’s transience of emotion in his utterance ‘thy mind is a very opal’ – as a gem known for its
changing colour, this is a clever accusation here from Feste which certainly mounts a powerful
argument against the view that men possess a greater depth of feeling than women.
It could be argued that only for Viola does Orsino actually feel a great depth of emotion,
which is interesting considering that he never actually sees her in ‘her woman’s weeds’, marking
Twelfth Night as a homo-erotic drama among some 21st century scholars of the play. Viola
undoubtedly reciprocates this love despite Orsino’s foolish and misogynistic belief that the woman’s
heart ‘lacks retention’. Again, Shakespeare presents him as a fool by juxtaposing this claim with
Viola’s very powerful love for him – quite an ironic and perhaps daring satirical portrayal given his
high-social standing as a ‘Duke’ in the feudal class system. The belief is so ridiculous that it almost
exposes Viola’s disguise as she is unable to repress her love any longer; she says ‘But, I know!’. The
exclamative suggests that she has fallen dangerously in love with Orsino despite her disguise as a
male figure, and it is this great feeling that ultimately proves to be the greatest frustration of the
plot to a contemporary audience, composing the central ‘thread’ (Snider, 1877) that must be
resolved by the time of the comic resolution. It is true that the main aspect of the resolution is
Viola’s declaration of love for Orsino in the utterance ‘after him I love more than I love these eyes,
more than my life’. Shakespeare’s use of blazon here is an important means of emphasising the
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