Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas
explored in a literary work.
Love as a Cause of Suffering
Twelfth Night is a romantic comedy, and
romantic love is the play’s main focus. Despite the fact that the
play offers a happy ending, in which the various lovers find one
another and achieve wedded bliss, Shakespeare shows that love can
cause pain. Many of the characters seem to view love as a kind of
curse, a feeling that attacks its victims suddenly and disruptively.
Various characters claim to suffer painfully from being in love,
or, rather, from the pangs of unrequited love. At one point, Orsino
depicts love dolefully as an “appetite” that he wants to satisfy
and cannot (I.i.1–3);
at another point, he calls his desires “fell and cruel hounds” (I.i.21).
Olivia more bluntly describes love as a “plague” from which she
suffers terribly (I.v.265). These metaphors
contain an element of violence, further painting the love-struck
as victims of some random force in the universe. Even the less melodramatic
Viola sighs unhappily that “My state is desperate for my master’s
love” (II.ii.35). This desperation has the
potential to result in violence—as in Act V, scene i, when Orsino
threatens to kill Cesario because he thinks that -Cesario has forsaken
him to become Olivia’s lover.
Love is also exclusionary: some people achieve romantic
happiness, while others do not. At the end of the play, as the happy
lovers rejoice, both Malvolio and Antonio are prevented from having
the objects of their desire. Malvolio, who has pursued Olivia, must
ultimately face the realization that he is a fool, socially unworthy
of his noble mistress. Antonio is in a more difficult situation,
as social norms do not allow for the gratification of his apparently
sexual attraction to Sebastian. Love, thus, cannot conquer all obstacles, and
those whose desires go unfulfilled remain no less in love but feel the
sting of its absence all the more severely.
The Uncertainty of Gender
Gender is one of the most obvious and much-discussed topics
in the play. Twelfth Night is one of Shakespeare’s
so-called transvestite comedies, in which a female character—in
this case, Viola—disguises herself as a man. This situation creates
a sexual mess: Viola falls in love with Orsino but cannot tell him,
because he thinks she is a man, while Olivia, the object of Orsino’s
affection, falls for Viola in her guise as Cesario. There is a clear
homoerotic subtext here: Olivia is in love with a woman, even if
she thinks he is a man, and Orsino often remarks on Cesario’s beauty,
suggesting that he is attracted to Viola even before her male disguise
is removed. This latent homoeroticism finds an explicit echo in
the minor character of Antonio, who is clearly in love with his
male friend, Sebastian. But Antonio’s desires cannot be satisfied,
while Orsino and Olivia both find tidy heterosexual gratification
once the sexual ambiguities and deceptions are straightened out.
Yet, even at the play’s close, Shakespeare leaves things
somewhat murky, especially in the Orsino-Viola relationship. Orsino’s
declaration of love to Viola suggests that he enjoys prolonging
the pretense of Viola’s masculinity. Even after he knows that Viola
is a woman, Orsino says to her, “Boy, thou hast said to me a thousand times
/ Thou never should’st love woman like to me” (V.i.260–261). Similarly,
in his last lines, Orsino declares, “Cesario, come— / For so you
shall be while you are a man; / But when in other habits you are
seen, / Orsino’s mistress, and his fancy’s queen” (V.i.372–375). Even
once everything is revealed, Orsino continues to address Viola by
her male name. We can thus only wonder whether Orsino is truly in
love with Viola, or if he is more enamoured of her male persona.
The Folly of Ambition
The problem of social ambition works itself out largely
through the character of Malvolio, the steward, who seems to be
a competent servant, if prudish and dour, but proves to be, in fact,
a supreme egotist, with tremendous ambitions to rise out of his
social class. Maria plays on these ambitions when she forges a letter
from Olivia that makes Malvolio believe that Olivia is in love with
him and wishes to marry him. Sir Toby and the others find this fantasy
hysterically funny, of course—not only because of Malvolio’s unattractive
personality but also because Malvolio is not of noble blood. In
the class system of Shakespeare’s time, a noblewoman would generally
not sully her reputation by marrying a man of lower social status.
Yet the atmosphere of the play may render Malvolio’s aspirations less
unreasonable than they initially seem. The feast of Twelfth Night,
from which the play takes its name, was a time when social hierarchies
were turned upside down. That same spirit is alive in Illyria: indeed,
Malvolio’s antagonist, Maria, is able to increase her social standing
by marrying Sir Toby. But it seems that Maria’s success may be due
to her willingness to accept and promote the anarchy that Sir Toby
and the others embrace. This Twelfth Night spirit, then, seems to
pass by Malvolio, who doesn’t wholeheartedly embrace the upending
of order and decorum but rather wants to blur class lines for himself
alone.
