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A* Twelfth Night Exemplar Essay 6 (Section B)
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‘In Twelfth Night, love causes complications but leads ultimately to joy.’ To what extent do you agree with this view?
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Twelfth Night practice essay 6‘In Twelfth Night, love causes complications but leads ultimately to joy.’ To what extent do you agree
with this view?
Without a doubt, it is a viable interpretation that in Twelfth Night, the complications brought
about by Viola’s disguise lead ultimately to joy given that the problematic love-triangle created
between herself, Olivia and the Duke Orsino gives way to unified and rightful pairings at the end of
the play. Nevertheless, it is vital to consider the extent to which the heterosexual marriages
represent joy, in view of Olivia’s and Orsino’s attraction to someone of the same gender, and
whether the ‘natural fools’ (Robinson, 2014), Malvolio and Antonio, are left with unresolved
situations as a direct consequence of their unfulfilled loves.
To understand whether the comic resolution of marriages symbolises joy in Twelfth Night, it
is essential to firstly establish that love causes complications in the play. With regards to Viola’s
disguise, there is no disputing the fact that it acts as the central source of disunity and continually
delays resolution; Shakespeare’s staging of Viola’s utterance ‘Whoe’er I woo, myself would be his
wife’ as an aside immediately creates a bond between the audience and Viola in which only we as
spectators are aware of the complications of her situation. We are able to bask in the discomfort of
Viola in her position in the love-triangle, forced to play the difficult role of a man in love with his
male master – a position complicated by both social and gender barriers in Elizabethan times. Viola
comes to seriously resent the limitations of her disguise in preventing a union to Orsino, addressing
it directly in the conceit ‘Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness’. In doing so, Shakespeare depicts how
the disguise has deprived Viola of her identity and by extension, her happiness and freedom, in the
sense that she cannot tell Orsino what she really feels nor who she even is. Viola’s situation is
further complicated by the fact that she inadvertently woos Olivia in visiting her as Cesario, which
converts the Countess into a victim of the disguise in falling in love with a woman mistaken for a
man. Her deception is clearly indicated by the use of the Petrarchan convention of blazon in her
utterance ‘thy tongue, thy face, thy limbs, actions and spirit do give thee fivefold blazon’;
Shakespeare’s listing of body parts suggests that Olivia has become completely enchanted by Cesario
to a point where she is beyond seeing reason, which is unfortunate given that ‘he’ does not exist.
The final link in the complicated love-triangle is established when Orsino becomes drawn to Viola,
which confuses and frustrates the Duke whilst he believes Viola to be Cesario. In the Globe Theatre
production, attention was drawn to the growing rapport between the Duke and his feminine page,
so that when Viola and Orsino listen to Feste’s song in Act 2, they find themselves gradually leaning
towards each other as if to kiss. Orsino’s sudden start backwards, being shocked at his attraction to
this young man, demonstrates the extent of the complications brought about by the disguise. This
tension almost becomes tragedy in the final act as Orsino, believing that his page has married Olivia
(the proclaimed object of his affections), declares ‘him will I tear out of that cruel eye’ in relation to
Cesario. In this moment, the comedy for touches the pathos of tragedy, as Viola could have suffered
the same fate as that of Desdemona for example in Othello as a result of Orsino’s mistaken view that
she has done him a wrong. Clearly, Sebastian arrives in the nick of time to save the comedy, which
demonstrates the multiple complications brought about by the disguise and the love-triangle.
The fact that order is then restored with three marriages immediately after Sebastian’s
appearance on stage alongside Viola acts as the ultimate representation of joy. It is essential to
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