Twelfth Night Argumentative Essay

Twelfth Night Research Project: The Letter Trick

Part One: Suzanne Penuel described a great underlying influence of Shakespeare’s text, Twelfth Night by drawing multiple connections between various conversation and overlapping themes in her essay, “Missing Fathers: Twelfth Night and the Reformation of Mourning.” Many implications tied to the role of fatherhood were explored including rank (social status), procreation and a necessity for a man to be included for life to be physically reproduced, morality and its biological relationship to genetic implications of such a trait to be inherited, maturing and developing relationally (both when and how), the connection between paternal figures in a familial aspect and religious (specifically in regards to mournig), and the influence on various relationships as a father’s role (or absence) is a determining factor of developing a worldview. The main argument was Shakespeare’s

Penuel used multiple examples from the text to support her manifold claims of how Shakespeare described a father wound as a topic of the play while being fair to acknowledge counter-arguments throughout the process. Penuel’s argument is convincing due to ample evidence of Shakespeare’s reference to the significance of a father’s role throughout the play by describing the main characters’ individual processes of mourning their fathers’ deaths. The way a seemingly novel concept has been carefully veiled by the story’s plot is also a convincing aspect because it seems so basic to consider that the characters would be mourning and dealing with grief over their fathers’ deaths apart from the obvious references at both the beginning and end of the