Twelfth Night: Themes (WJEC Eduqas GCSE English Literature)

Twelfth Night: Themes

Exam responses that discuss the central ideas of the play in a nuanced manner are more likely to reach the highest levels of the mark scheme. AO1 and AO2 require that your response is “sensitive” and “evaluative”, and the most effective way to demonstrate these qualities is by considering different perspectives on the themes of the text in relation to the question being asked.

For your extract-based question, higher marks are awarded to responses that can locate the extract within the wider play and discuss the events that preceded and followed the lines provided. Your essay question, meanwhile, will award top marks to responses that can discuss ideas from across the play. It is therefore useful to be able to chart the development of these themes across Twelfth Night as a whole.

Here are some important ideas that might be explored in Twelfth Night. This list is not exhaustive and you are encouraged to identify other ideas within the text that Shakespeare explores in the play.

• Love and desire

• Appearance and reality

• Gender and sexuality

Love and desire

Twelfth Night is a romantic comedy and its plot is dominated by relationships that involve forms of love and desire, both real and imagined. Although his audience would have been aware that, by convention, a comedy ends in marriage, Shakespeare uses the form to explore several different aspects of love including the authentic, the unrequited, and the absurd. 

Knowledge and evidence:

• Twelfth Night follows the established conventions of a comedy:

  • Romantic conflicts and problems are established early on, and then happily resolved at the end of the play

  • The central romantic relationships end in marriage, or the promise of it

• The opening lines of the play foreground love’s importance to the plot, as befits a Shakespearean comedy:

  • Specifically, Orsino’s request that “If music be the food of love, play on” (Act 1, Scene 1) highlights how unrequited love dominates characters’ emotions and behaviour:

    • Orsino’s love for Olivia is unrequited while Olivia is in mourning

    • Olivia’s love for Cesario is farcical because Cesario is actually Viola

    • Viola cannot reveal her love to Orsino while she is disguised as a man

    • Sir Andrew Aguecheek courts Olivia with no hope of success

    • Malvolio is revealed to be in love with Olivia although she is not romantically interested in him

  • The association of love and music bookends the play as the final scene of romantic resolution concludes with Feste’s bittersweet song and a jig:

    • This was the theatrical convention at the time

• The first type of love that Shakespeare depicts, Orsino’s love for Olivia, is idealised and unrealistic:

  • Orsino loves Olivia from a distance, sending her messages via Viola instead of approaching her himself

  • He refuses to accept rejection, revealing his ego:

    • He is so fixated on his idealised love that he is unable to recognise how close he is to feeling true love for Viola/Cesario

  • Olivia’s reluctance to engage with him while she mourns her brother only further entices him:

    • He interprets her decision to live like a nun as proof of her “sweet perfection” (Act 1, Scene 1)

• Shakespeare also explores love as a delusion in Twelfth Night:

  • Olivia’s love for Viola is based upon her physical appearance as Cesario:

    • The “perfections” of Cesario that she notes, however, are “his” more feminine features, including his face and limbs (Act 1, Scene 5)

    • Olivia’s delusion later results in Sebastian’s delusion as well: he marries Olivia, unaware that the one she loves is his sister

  • The subplot featuring Malvolio parodies deluded love as well:

    • Malvolio believes unquestioningly that his beautiful employer, Olivia, loves him

• Viola’s love for Orsino is presented as authentic and selfless:

  • She endures the “barful strife” (Act 1, Scene 4) of wooing Olivia on behalf of the man she loves

  • Her selflessness is mirrored by the loyalty and care with which Antonio treats Sebastian

  • These relationships contrast with the “self-love” of Orsino and Malvolio (Act 1, Scene 5)

What is Shakespeare’s intention?

• By using comedy to examine different aspects of love, Shakespeare parodies the complexities of love in a society that often denies women a voice

• He distinguishes between love that is genuine and selfless, and love that is based on vanity and ambition

• Although the comedy framework necessitates a happy ending, Shakespeare also dramatises the potential of love to cause suffering or to be cruelly manipulated 

Appearance and reality

Shakespeare derives a great deal of humour in Twelfth Night from characters confusing appearances with reality, usually by falling for disguises and tricks. The comedy created by these misunderstandings is enhanced by dramatic irony as the audience knows the truth behind the various deceptions.

Knowledge and evidence:

• Twelfth Night presents disguise and self-deception as leading to confusion and frustration

• Viola’s disguise is central to the plot and the cause of most of the dramatic complications and misunderstandings in the play:

  • She deceives all of the other characters by disguising herself as Cesario, a man 

  • She initially adopts the disguise to keep herself safe in the unknown land of Illyria:

    • However, her deception results in her own frustration when she is unable to express her love for Orsino

  • Her disguise is effective even though she often hides in plain sight:

    • She tells Olivia, “I am not what I am” (Act 3, Scene 1) but Olivia misunderstands her

    • She comes close to revealing her feelings to Orsino in Act 2, Scene 4

  • An Elizabethan audience would have appreciated the additional metatheatrical comedy of Viola’s disguise:

    • She would have been played by a young boy actor dressed as a woman who impersonates a man

• Malvolio is tricked by Maria, Sir Toby, and others penning a letter to him that he believes is from Olivia:

  • Malvolio’s yellow stockings and cross garters are a disguise of sorts:

    • He tries to become what he believes Olivia desires

  • Feste later tricks Malvolio again under the guise of Sir Topas, a fictional priest:

    • The notion of impersonating and satirising the clergy is appropriate to the “Twelfth Night”, or “Feast of Fools” festival

• Olivia’s ostentatious display of mourning is a pretence:

  • She drops the façade the instant that she becomes attracted to Cesario

What is Shakespeare’s intention?

• The disguises and deception enable the audience to laugh at how readily one sees what one wants to see

• Disguised characters were stock characters of comedy, but Shakespeare gives the device greater significance:

  • He uses disguise to bring the true natures of Olivia, Malvolio, and Orsino to the surface

• Shakespeare also asks important questions about how one sees oneself:

  • Is there any such thing as a “stable” identity? Is everyone hiding their true nature in one way or another?

Gender and sexuality

Through Viola’s cross-dressing, Shakespeare challenges his audiences to consider the nature of gender and sexuality. The play focuses on the role of appearance within identity as characters fall in love based on truths or on deceptive appearances.

Knowledge and evidence:

• Twelfth Night could be interpreted as revealing gender to be a performance based on appearance:

  • Disguised as a Cesario, Viola is treated as a man and is able to speak freely to men like Orsino and Malvolio

  • As a man she is allowed to express her natural wit in ways that a woman would not traditionally be allowed to:

    • Her personality is one of the things that Olivia and Orsino are both attracted to

  • In this guise she also explores the ambiguities of gender:

    • She tells Orsino that “I am all the daughters of my father’s house,/And all the brothers too” (Act 2, Scene 4)

  • Shakespeare asks his audience to consider whether Olivia falls in love with Viola or Cesario:

    • Olivia believes that Viola is a man, but falls for her feminine physical “perfections” (Act 1, Scene 5)

    • Olivia is also attracted to Cesario’s seductive “tongue” and “spirit” (Act 1, Scene 5)

    • The audience thus witnesses a woman fall in love with a woman, although she ultimately marries Viola’s male twin whose “spirit” is not the same as his sister’s

• Viola’s disguise creates a love triangle in which nobody can be truly happy until the truth is revealed:

  • Shakespeare therefore implies that instability and dissatisfaction are consequences of hiding one’s identity

  • Orsino’s promise of marriage to Viola in the final scene appears somewhat precarious:

    • Orsino gives cause to question whether he will find Viola as attractive in women’s clothes as he does in men’s (Act 5, Scene 1)

• The relationship between Sebastian and Antonio suggests a fine line between male friendship and romantic attraction:

  • Antonio is intensely loyal to Sebastian, but regrets his “devotion” to Sebastian’s handsome features (Act 3, Scene 4)

What is Shakespeare’s intention?

• Viola’s disguise highlights the complexities of sexuality and its relation to identity and attraction

• Shakespeare explores self-deception, especially in relation to love and desire