Concealment and Disguise in Twelfth Night
English Coursework - Shakespeare's 'Twelfth Night'Concealment and disguise are the driving forces behind the dark comedy that is 'Twelfth Night'. The character Viola decides to adopt the disguise of a man, which has serious consequences for herself and others around her.The play was written during the Elizabethan period, a time when male actors played female parts in plays. When 'Twelfth Night' would have originally been presented, a male actor would have played the part of Viola and Cesario. This would have added an interesting and somewhat confusing layer to the play, but allowed comic situations to develop.The main comic parts of the play are the direct or indirect consequences of Viola disguising herself as a man by the name of Cesario after she is shipwrecked and fears her brother Sebastian for dead. The immediate consequence for Viola is that she can work for Orsino, but she is later confronted by a problem she did not foresee - her falling in love with Orsino but being unable to openly express this due to her disguise. She unwittingly puts up a barrier between herself and the person she will come to desire most. She says in the play 'myself would be his wife', referring to Orsino, showing that she longs to be hi
Viola has unintentionally caused Olivia to fall in love with Cesario, which causes a problem in that Cesario is in fact not at all the person Olivia has fallen for. Being female, Viola is not used to reacting to another woman's advances, and tries to make the situation lighter, which only interests Olivia more. Viola adapts her disguise when, in Act 1 Scene 2, she is in a shipwreck off the coast of Illyria. It leads her into a complicated position between love and honesty with Orsino and Olivia. The two characters both have different ideas about the way women love men. This happens when she is finally reunited with her brother Sebastian, seeing for the first time since the shipwreck that he is alive. Because the audience understand what is really meant, and know that these feelings are Viola's for Orsino, frustration and tension mounts as the audience wonder if he will realise. In the Shakespearian period there would have been another aspect of ironic humour with the character of Cesario being played by a male actor, so that it is a man, performing as a girl, pretending to be a boy. The audience are then willing Orsino to grasp what is being said, and a torture and tension related humour is created. This causes guilt to be added to the already large store of confusing and mixed up emotions she is suffering because of her love for Orsino. This decision begins the chain of consequential events throughout the play. To us, the audience, this is an obvious expression of her love, shaded by her talking of it in the third person, but Orsino remains totally unaware and takes the references as polite, meaningless compliments. When speaking about the 'woman who was silently in love', Orsino asks what kind of woman she was, to which Viola answers 'of your complexion'. Orsino puts across the idea that women cannot love as passionately as men. She says in line 112 that women are 'as true of heart' as men, meaning that they love with the same loyalty as Orsino says men do.
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Coursework Shakespeare's,
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