Theme of Love in Much Ado and Twelfth Night
AS English Literature – Unit 2 (Coursework)
EXPLORATIVE STUDY
Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is studied and his Much Ado About Nothing is used to explore the theme of love. Performances are referred to.
Shakespeare's romantic comedies explore love, the “divine passion”, in all its moods and intensities. Most characters in these two plays are in love, find love or seek it. Twelfth Night, reputedly the most mature of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies, weaves several such love stories into an intricate collage to explore different types of love and its easy descent into pain or folly.
John Gross, in a 1991 review of Twelfth Night in the Sunday Telegraph, said “Twelfth Night is about true love and its egocentric counterfeits.” Orsino’s self-indulgent ‘love’ for Olivia is typical of deluded, ‘counterfeit’ love. His long-winded abstractions (“music be the food of love”, “love-thoughts... bowers”) tell us that he is actually in love with love and with the image of himself as rejected lover. Identifying the “sweet pangs” of rejection as as the melancholies of love, he conforms to Don Pedro’s definition of conventional aristocratic lovers, “tiring his hearers with a book of words” and spends less time building an actual relationship (he loves by proxy until the last scene).
Olivia’s deluded love for ‘Cesario’ is also an infatuation engendered at first sight rather than love based on understanding of character (she convicts herself when she readily substitutes Sebastian for ‘Cesario’). Her case illustrates the rashness that love often causes; she is ready to “bestow” on Cesario anything but her chastity (“...That honour saved upon asking give?”) and makes unabashed advances to a pageboy lower in status. The high-flown language and impetuosity of Orsino and Olivia convey a love that is exaggerated and unsound.
Sir Andrew’s pursuit of Olivia derives more from his wretched self-delusion and Toby’s craftiness than from any real attraction to Olivia. Malvolio too,
EXPLORATIVE STUDY
Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is studied and his Much Ado About Nothing is used to explore the theme of love. Performances are referred to.
Shakespeare's romantic comedies explore love, the “divine passion”, in all its moods and intensities. Most characters in these two plays are in love, find love or seek it. Twelfth Night, reputedly the most mature of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies, weaves several such love stories into an intricate collage to explore different types of love and its easy descent into pain or folly.
John Gross, in a 1991 review of Twelfth Night in the Sunday Telegraph, said “Twelfth Night is about true love and its egocentric counterfeits.” Orsino’s self-indulgent ‘love’ for Olivia is typical of deluded, ‘counterfeit’ love. His long-winded abstractions (“music be the food of love”, “love-thoughts... bowers”) tell us that he is actually in love with love and with the image of himself as rejected lover. Identifying the “sweet pangs” of rejection as as the melancholies of love, he conforms to Don Pedro’s definition of conventional aristocratic lovers, “tiring his hearers with a book of words” and spends less time building an actual relationship (he loves by proxy until the last scene).
Olivia’s deluded love for ‘Cesario’ is also an infatuation engendered at first sight rather than love based on understanding of character (she convicts herself when she readily substitutes Sebastian for ‘Cesario’). Her case illustrates the rashness that love often causes; she is ready to “bestow” on Cesario anything but her chastity (“...That honour saved upon asking give?”) and makes unabashed advances to a pageboy lower in status. The high-flown language and impetuosity of Orsino and Olivia convey a love that is exaggerated and unsound.
Sir Andrew’s pursuit of Olivia derives more from his wretched self-delusion and Toby’s craftiness than from any real attraction to Olivia. Malvolio too,