The Insanity Of Love In Shakespeare's Twelfth Night

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William Shakespeare's comedy, Twelfth Night revolves around the hilarious ridiculousness of love. Twelfth Night suspends conventional morality and is depicted in a period of carnivalesque. Carnivalesque implies excess, feasting, humour and chaos, as told by Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin. At the centre of this chaos is Orsino, Duke of Illyria who is deeply infatuated with Lady Olivia, however it comes to fruition that he further taken by himself and his own love. While Orsino loves Olivia, Olivia falls in love with the quick witted page-boy Cesario, who is actually Viola, a Lady who has been shipwrecked and has fallen into the charm of Orsino. Twelfth Night's absurdness begins with a passage from Orsino which beautifully encapsulates the carnivalesque…show more content…
Orsino is meditating on the relationship between appetite, reason and fancy. Love disorders reason and corrupts our senses until the suitor is literally sick with love. This passage summarizes the themes of Twelfth Night by addressing the all consuming chaos that love administers and its devastating effects on people and their relationships. In order to succeed in love you have to disguise who you are and transform into someone else. Viola as Cesario succeeds in winning Orsino's affections. Malvolio, a steward in Lady Olivia's house, even dawns elaborate yellow stockings and humiliates himself under the guise that his love Olivia supposedly asked him to do so. This passage supplies that something is at fault here with the chaos that is in Orsino, he is confused and compelled with his love for Lady Olivia. He wants the music of love to play on, yet also wants no more of it. He uses elaborate metaphors of music, feasting and violets to describe his heavenly emotions, contrasting with the downward spiral his love sends him in. The passage celebrates the power of imagination. The main provoking element of this passage is that it connects the chaos outside of Twelfth Night with the chaos taking place within the
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