Twelfth Night: Writer's Methods and Techniques (OCR A Level English Literature)

Writer’s Methods and Techniques

The best responses don’t limit their analysis to individual words and phrases. Examiners are really looking for analysis of Shakespeare’s overall aims so try to take a “whole-text” approach and consider the effects of the writer’s methods and techniques. Each of the below topics do just that:

• Form

• Structure

• Language

Form

Twelfth Night is a Shakespearean comedy. It is important that the examiner knows from your essays that you understand the conventions of comedy and aspects of it which inform your analysis of the play. This produces a more conceptualised answer which takes into account the methods and purpose of Shakespeare as a playwright. 

Shakespearean comedies usually consist of:

• A setting which incorporates a celebration or festival, often in idyllic locations 

• A love dilemma or triangle which takes the protagonists on a journey of mistakes and misunderstandings 

• Juxtaposition of scenes to present emotional ups and downs, disorder to order

• A comic villain who plans to derail the happiness of the hero or heroine

• The theme of human folly, trickery and gullibility is shown through slapstick comedy, sexual jokes, satire and parody

• Characters such as clowns, fools and others in disguise 

• The use of exaggerated stereotypes, plotters and tricksters

• The use of dramatic irony so the audience laughs at a character’s ignorance  

• Witty language, such as pun and innuendo, which heightens the comedy 

• A comic resolution where misunderstandings are clarified

A resolution which provides a sense of catharsis, often ending with a marriage

Structure

The structure of a comedy

Classical comedy follows conventions of Greek drama. The main features are: 

• Unity of time, place and action

• Events which mimic everyday life 

• A plot which ridicules and satirises human folly or vices

Shakespearean comedy can be considered a Romantic Comedy. This means his comedies generally follow the same five-part structure:

• Exposition: the play begins with a scene full of tension; often conflict is foreshadowed:

• In Twelfth Night, the shipwrecked Viola, stricken with grief at losing her brother, is distressed

• Orsino is introduced pining for Olivia

• Olivia is grieving and in an extended period of mourning

• Rising Action: the implicit conflict is developed as the characters are tricked and deceived:

  • Viola’s disguise as Cesario begins the confusion

  • Viola herself is deceived: Sebastian is not dead as she believes

• Turning Point: the climax of the play is signalled with chaos and an impasse:

  • Viola is unable to voice her love for Orsino

  • Olivia cannot convince Cesario (Viola) to love her back

  • Sir Andrew is caught up in a plot to call for a duel

  • Malvolio has been tricked, locked up as part of a cunning plot to humiliate him (deceiving Olivia too)

  • Orsino cannot convince Olivia to love him in return

• Falling Action: the play’s misunderstandings are revealed:

• Sebastian returns and explains the confusion between his identity and Cesario’s

• Cesario reveals himself as Viola

• The fake letter used to trick Malvolio is exposed

• Resolution: problems are resolved and the play ends in marriage:

• Sir Toby and Maria fall in love

• Orsino takes back control over the court and blesses the union between Olivia and Sebastian 

• Malvolio is released

• Orsino proposes to Viola now that she has returned to her female guise

Language

It is of course important to analyse Shakespeare’s use of language in any essay on Twelfth Night. However, try to see ‘language’ in a broader sense than just the words that Shakespeare uses: it also includes the form and patterns of his language. Moreover, try to take a whole-text approach and consider why Shakespeare presents - through his use of language - the ideas he wants to explore in the play. Below you will find revision materials on:

• Poetry and Prose

• Symbolism

Poetry and Prose

Shakespeare shifts his character’s dialogue from prose to verse to indicate the mood in the scene, as well as the characters’ changing emotions. This contributes to the dramatic and unpredictable mischief and subversion of social identities and hierarchies in Twelfth Night. 

Blank verse

• Blank verse consists of unrhymed lines of ten syllables, although it does not always exactly fit that pattern

• Blank verse does not necessarily rhyme, but lines have a regular rhythm

• Typically in Shakespeare plays, blank verse represents a character’s emotions, often employed during intimate speeches and soliloquies:

  • Indignant and desperate to regain some power in the final scene, Malvolio speaks verse to Olivia

  • Olivia and Viola both speak prose during Act I Scene 5, but shift into verse  when their emotions are strained or heightened

  • Viola, taking on various identities, shifts from prose to verse depending on her company

• Usually, characters who represent the nobility or those of higher status speak in verse:

  • In Act I Orsino and Viola speak in verse while Maria, Sir Toby, and Sir Andrew speak in prose

• Orsino, in the traditional language of courtly love, uses verse, although the lack of rhyme can suggest his chaotic emotions:

  • Orsino speaks in iambic pentameter: “If music be the food of love, play on/Give me excess of it, that surfeiting”

Rhymed verse

• Rhymed verse consists of sets of rhyming couplets: two successive lines that rhyme with each other at the end of the line

• Viola’s dialogue often uses rhyming couplets: “He nam’d Sebastian. I my brother know/Yet living in my glass; even such and so”

• Orsino uses rhyming couplets to convey his intense emotions: “I’ll sacrifice the lamb that I do love/To spite a raven’s heart within a dove”

• Feste uses verse in his songs, suggesting a difference in his intellectual status, if not his social ranking

• Shakespeare often uses a rhyming couplet to convey harmony between characters: 

  • Viola and Olivia share rhyming lines which contributes to their close bond

Prose

• Prose consists of unrhymed lines with no pattern or rhythm

• Shakespeare uses prose within dialogue of a comedic or lower class character or when characters appear to be losing their minds (when it would be unrealistic for them to speak poetically)

• Shakespeare uses prose in Twelfth Night to represent everyday language:

  • This contributes to the relaxed nature of the play and its relaxed setting

  • Malvolio refers to the prose in the fake letter, emphasising its indecency

• In Shakespearean drama, prose is the form of speech usually used by those of lower status:

  • Sir Andrew, Sir Toby, and Maria are all comical characters who speak in prose

  • Malvolio speaks mainly in prose when with the household staff

Symbolism

Shakespeare uses many symbols throughout the play in order to convey a range of ideas connected to identity and love. 

Madness and Darkness

• In the play, darkness represents the descent into madness, particularly due to self-love or obsessive love:

  • Olivia is introduced as “veiled”, hiding from the light in an extended period of mourning which is later exposed as insincere

  • The alliteration of the line, “I am as mad as he,/If sad and merry madness equal be” shows she believes her grief to be a form of madness

  • Malvolio dresses in black and is described as deluded and vain:

    • When he is tricked and deemed mad, he is locked in a dark chamber

    • He is told that a sign of his madness is his inability to see the light (which he is told the room is filled with)

  • Malvolio uses simile to compare deception and trickery to darkness: “I say this house is as dark as ignorance, though ignorance were as dark as hell” 

Sickness 

• The characters in the play often symbolise their extreme emotions with imagery related to illness or fever

• In Elizabethan England, depression was often diagnosed as a sickness of the mind, a melancholy

• Olivia, in love with Cesario, asks, “Even so quickly may one catch the plague?”

• Viola describes the grief at losing her father as a “a green and yellow melancholy”

• Orsino believes love can cure his sickness:

  • Alliteration highlights Orsino’s extreme emotions as he describes how Olivia “purged the air of pestilence”

Changing identities and appearance 

• Clothing and appearance symbolise changes in gender and identity:

  • Viola’s disguise means she is instantly accepted as a male despite her declaration: “I am not what I am”

• Malvolio’s sudden change from black clothing to yellow garters signals a change in identity which leads Olivia to believe him mad:

  • He protests: “Not black in my mind, though yellow in my legs”

• Most productions give Malvolio a gold chain or watch to symbolise his self-importance and materialism

• Orsino refers to Cesario/Viola’s identity in terms of her clothing using alliteration to highlight the connection: “Give me thy hand/And let me see thee in thy woman's weeds”

Music

• Twelfth Night opens with music as a representation of the extreme lovesickness Orisino feels:

  • His pangs and feelings of emptiness over his unrequited love can be satisfied, he suggests, through the metaphor of music

  • Orsino’s dialogue uses hyperbolic imagery related to appetite, sickness and excess

• Viola illustrates the connection between love and music as she hopes to win over Orsino with it: "I can sing/And speak to him in many sorts of music/That will allow me very worth his service"  

• The Fool sings melancholy songs about love and decay, to show the connection between love and a kind of death caused by obsession:

  • He uses imagery to suggest there are some constants in life: “the rain it raineth every day”

Nature 

• Hunting was a popular activity in Shakespeare’s time and in Twelfth Night it is used to symbolise the idea of an obsessive pursuit of love:

  • Orsino is presented as taking pleasure in hunting, rather than actually gaining Olivia’s love:

    • He forms a pun with the words heart and hart, suggesting he is the prey 

    • Orsino describes himself pursued by his desires for Olivia “like fell and cruel hounds”

• In Act 3, Scene 1, Viola compares Feste’s skill as a professional fool to a “haggard” or untrained hawk

• The symbolism of hunting to represent courting is used to represent the strange romance between Sir Toby and Maria: “She's a beagle, true bred, and one that adores me”

• In Act 2, Scene 4, Orsino symbolises inconstant love using a metaphor which compares women to roses whose “fair flower,/Being once displayed, doth fall that very hour”

• Viola directly personifies nature as cruel: “Tis beauty truly blent, whose red and white/Nature’s own sweet and cunning hand laid on./Lady, you are the cruel’st she alive”