Love and Disguises in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night
             The Twelfth Night is one of William Shakespeare's more prolific plays about love and the absurdity that follows it. He taunts his audience of what every man goes through in life. He shows how entertaining we are when we are in the throes of love, or at least when we think we are. Shakespeare questions the validity of the emotion love. He shows the immaturity of love, and how people are blinded of love. In the Twelfth Night, he puts his characters in a myriad of disguises, physically and psychologically. Shakespeare uses the device of disguises to show the different kinds of love; erotic, fraternal and friendship in the Twelfth Night.
             Erotic love shows the fickleness and false appearances in the characters. The characters put on disguises and acts, to get what they think that they want. Their reasons for erotic love are even false. Shakespeare shows the reasons for their choices; appearances of their own, vanity, and egotism. Shakespeare introduces the notion of love with the fickle character, Duke Orsino, who in the introductory scene reveals his fickleness. He says, " If music be the food of love, play on/ Give me excess of it; that surfeiting/ That strain again it had a dying fall"(Twelfth Night 1.1.1-4). He is saying give me an abundance of love, and then changes his mind that love is " ' Tis not so sweet now as it was before" (Twelfth Night 1.1.8). He considers the attempted courtship with the beautiful Lady Olivia a hunt. He says to his courtier, Curio, "That instant was I turn'd into a hart/ And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds/ E'er since pursue me"(Twelfth Night 1.1. 20-2). Olivia will have!
             nothing to do with him and the turns him on more to court her. They have nothing in common, expect that Olivia and Orsino, are both nobility. She is beautiful to look at, and Orsino lets the physical and social status o...