In Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare, many ideas of courtly love are shown. These include unrequited love, wooing by proxy and suffering. Because of the relations and context of the book, all aspects of courtly love are used in different ways. Courtly love is the medieval tradition of love between ladies and their lovers, often linked with status and upper-class attitudes. Twelfth Night is set in Illyria when Viola has just been washed onto shore after a shipwreck separated her from her twin brother, Sebastian. Viola dresses as a man called Cesario and works from the Count, Orsino, whom she falls in love with. Cesario is sent to make Olivia, the Lady of Illyria fall in love with Orsino. But instead of this happening, Olivia falls in love
Click here to unlock this and over one million essays
Show MoreLove has always had a place in every culture and society since the origin of time. Love binds individuals, lives of harmony, or places a person in an overpowering state of elation or misery. Literature has adapted its beliefs, people’s views, and even society as well. It first emerged into doctrine in European literature. Love will forever be common in literature.
Both the Shakespeare play The Twelfth Night (1601–02) and the movie She’s The Man (released 2006) show women breaking social norms and ending up in difficult situations involving love triangles. In She’s The Man, a girl by the name of Viola takes on the persona of her brother Sebastian to prove she is good enough for the boys soccer team. In The Twelfth Night, a young aristocratic woman named Viola is involved in a shipwreck, resulting in the death of her brother. She was left alone on an unknown island and found work at the house of the Duke Orsino, but disguised herself as a man with the name Cesario in order to do that.
As she plays Cesario, she never struggles with the idea of falling in love with Olivia; her only worry is that if she did tell Orsino about her true feelings, she would lose his trust and he would begin to question her loyalty because her feelings might interfere with what he wants, Olivia loving him. This moment shows how she is caught between her identities. In lines 104 and 105, Viola disguised as Cesario begins to speak in the third person, offering a male perspective on love rather than sharing her own feelings. She claims that a man's love is "as true of heart" as a woman's, implying that a woman can love a man in the same way that a man can love a woman. Viola continues to put a shift in her language, transitioning to the first and second-person point of view.
For a woman to show interests in current affairs, express opinions, write literature was unladylike. Viola, fending for herself, in distant land, disguises herself as a boy named Cesario. Cross-dressing, in Elizabethan society, was seen as highly immoral. Viola 's male disguise “allows her to escape the confinement of a single perspective and a single voice by momentarily unfixing sexual stereotypes (184)”(Melchoir). Furthermore, Viola’s situation in Twelfth Night is not typical of an Elizabethan woman because she proves herself to be capable and intelligent.
Viola liking duke Orsino but duke Orsino liked liked Olivia and Olivia liked Sebastian. Nobody seemed to like the right person until the
Vanity, one of Twelfth Night 's major concerns, is displayed throughout the play by characters who are plagued with emotional conditions which prevent them from loving others. The lives of Illyria 's Duke Orsino and Countess Olivia, for example, remain circumscribed by vanity and narcissism. Similarly, Olivia 's steward, Malvolio, remains encumbered by vanity and narcissism, while Olivia 's Uncle Toby shows himself to be selfish, and his drinking partner, Sir Andrew, stands as a caricature of vanity. In contrast, Viola, an outsider shipwrecked upon Illyria 's shore, suffers solely from grief for her sea-drowned twin brother. In further contrast, Olivia 's lady-in-waiting, Maria, displays none of these characteristics, but instead operates as the play
In his play, Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare has his characters participate in the practice of deception and dishonesty of others - after all, the foundation of Shakespeare’s play resides within a lie. One of the major deceptions in the play is executed by the Illyrian countess, Olivia, as she repeatedly claims to need solitude to mourn her brother’s death in order to avoid Duke Orsino and his obsession towards her. This deception contributes to the meaning of the work as a whole by adding the thematic message, deception and dishonesty is sometimes the better option when it comes to love. From the beginning of the play, Olivia is introduced as the grieving countess that has recently lost a brother.
The quote from Sigmund Freud, “One is very crazy when in love.” is very relateable to Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream. Love is the dominant theme of the play. With the major conflicts surrounding the topic of love. Shakespeare demonstrates two major types of love.
Toba Beta once said: "“Justice could be as blind as love.” Shakespeare 's play A Midsummer Night 's Dream captures the blindness of both love and justice. Egeus, a respected nobleman in Athens, arranged for his daughter, Hermia, to marry nobleman Demetrius. Egeus tells his daughter that she must obey his wishes: If she does not, she can either choose to become a nun, or die.
However, Cesario (Viola) is falling in love with Orsino while Lady Olivia is falling in love with Cesario. While all this is happening, Sir Toby and Sir Andrew are playing tricks and jokes on Malvolio, providing the comedy for which Twelfth Night is known. After much confusion, and the reunion of Sebastian and Viola, all is revealed.
In the story it shows a love triangle between Orsino, Cesario (Viola), and Olivia. Cesario falls in love with Orsino, Viola is in love with Cesario, and Orsino is still in love with Olivia. The characters in the story all show happiness and joy throughout because it’s a story that ends in love unlike Romeo and Juliet where it ends in a tragedy. As said in Twelfth Night, “Its central plot concerns a love triangle between the Illyrian nobleman Orsino, his beloved but unattainable Olivia, and the shipwrecked Viola.” (Lee
Shakespeare uses Viola (Cesario) as an example of a mechanism that can throw internal conflicts into temporary chaos. Viola willingly faces whatever comes in her way. Her love for Duke Orsino seems too constant and true, unlike the other characters in the play. The temporary chaos of the play is when Viola falls in love with Orsino, who falls in love with Olivia, who on the other hand falls in love with Viola’s disguise, Cesario. This love triangle is very complicated as none of them realize that Cesario is a woman, making this an internal conflict for Viola, as she cannot ‘truly’ love whom she wants.
The question of why Olivia, after dramatically declaring her affections for Cesario, would so quickly jump to Sebastian after finding Viola’s true identity, is likely answered by the societal norms of the Elizabethan era. Cesario and Viola are two halves of one whole; by loving Cesario, Olivia loves Viola too. Upon meeting “him,” Olivia says “Thy tongue, thy face, thy limbs, actions and spirit/ Do give thee five-fold blazon” (1.5.297-298). She is attracted not just to Cesario’s mannerisms, but to Viola’s beauty, which shines through her male bravado. The “actions and spirit” which Olivia refers to are Viola’s ability to converse with Olivia woman-to-woman, unbeknownst to the countess.
Shakespeare’s renowned play Twelfth Night centers around love, both in platonic and romantic instances. Characters display elements of self, brotherly, amorous, and friendly love towards one another; however, of the relationships portrayed, the strongest ones are those between men. In contrast, relationships between men and women lack depth and sincerity due to the lapse of communication between the opposing genders. Men are able to express their feelings to one another more freely, which gives their bonds strength that heterosexual relationships fail to display.
A valiant knight who rides his noble steed while a damsel dreams for the one who will rescue her. This plot which continually inspired modern works started during the medieval era and was known as the courtly love. Many historians have analyzed how the courtly love ideal was formed. From the several factors that could have influenced the creation of this ideal, this essay presents how courtly love was a product of the sociological aspects but not the religious aspects of medieval culture. The different sociological factors surrounding medieval society helped form the idea of courtly love.