Orsino also uses words like ‘sicken’, ‘die’, ‘dying fall’, and ‘surfighting’ which all are words linked to the Romantic image of love where to die is the ultimate sacrifice. This was used a lot in Shakespearean times. This is a classic example of courtly love.
Courtly love is a type of love among the people of high social class like knights, dukes, counts, princes, and so on. The word courtly love is from the Italian translation ‘amore cortese.’ Before the twelfth century, women were thought to be inferior to men, but courtly love idealized women as if the woman is on a pedestal and the lover is down on his knees.
Now about Feste’s song and his comment of Orsino’s attitude to love. I Feste’s song, Feste is agreeing with Orsino’s attitude to love and it links perfectly with Orsino’s view of sad love because of Feste’s word choices that are depressing and sad. Yet is similar and links with also the image of love where to love is the ultimate sacrifice since he uses dark words like ‘death’, ‘sad cyprus’, ‘fly away breath’, ‘slain’, ‘black coffin’, and ‘poor corpse’ (2:4 lines 51-76). We are also completely sure this song links with Orsino’s love to Olivia, because Feste names a ‘fair cruel maid’ who is certainly Olivia. So basically Feste’s song is the same point of view and feeling Orsino is going through because of his rejection of Olivia’s love, but later in the short conversation between Feste and Orsino, Feste insults Orsino’s attitude to love without Orsino even noticing. Feste does this with his descriptions of Orsino (2:4 lines 73-75). The first is ‘melancholy god protect thee’ which sounds as a compliment but actually people born under Saturn (the melancholy god) were supposed to be gloomy, but that was a personal insult while the others were towards Orsino’s attitude to love. And example of these is ‘thy mind is a very opal’ and opals is well-known for changing it’s color in different lights, meaning that Feste meant Orsino is changeable in his loves. And also when Feste says lines 75-76 he implies that Orsino should be killed for that.
In Act 3, scene 1, lines 33-42, we see Feste’s view of marriage and fools. He implies that husbands are the fools and that marriage is useless and should not exist. We know this since he said lines 33-34 because he says Olivia is not married to a fool. And he says that husbands are like the fathers or heads of marriage.
After Feste’s and Viola’s conversation, Viola makes a speech praising Feste’s abilities (3:1 lines 63-70). In this paragraph we can tell that Viola admires Feste professionally because she explains that fools like Feste need to be wise and require ‘a kind of wit’ and then she compliments his style of ‘foolery’, with lines 65-67. In those lines, she explains that Feste gets to know people’s social status and picks a right moment to strike but not like an inexperienced fool (‘Not, like the haggard’) and that a good fool must be selective and not just take every opportunity they can get to make a joke. Then she acknowledges that being a fool requires as much hard work as any other job.
In medieval times, ‘fools’ were mentally handicapped which sometimes is still found to be a cruel and mean way of amusing people. So we can tell that Feste knows what an actual ‘fool’ is when he corrects Viola from calling him that, when he thinks of himself as a ‘corrupter of words’.
The fools in Shakespeare’s plays are very intelligent and wise men that have a great way with words and philosophical saints who act foolish to entertain their masters and mistresses. Such characters like Feste, Touchstone from As You Like It and the Fool from King Lear are always making us ask the question, who is the real fool in this play? I believe in this play it is Sir Andrew and Malvolio whom are the real fools since they are two sad men who have crummy personalities; Sir Andrew acts like he knows French but only says one line (3:1 lines 73-75) and then stops as if he used up all his French.
Sir Toby is a down to earth man, he is a typical example of a lower middle class guy although his rank is high socially. Sir Toby also uses a lot of sexual innuendo like ‘front her, board her, woo her, assail her’ which are examples of violent approaches to sex. Another example is act 1, scene 3 lines 97-99 which is a very sexual comment. He likes to drink and make many jokes, especially involving sex. His attitude to love is a lot more physical and ‘earthy’ then Orsino’s heavenly love. We also that Sir Toby is very clever and has a way with words. For example, act 1, scene 3, lines 10-11, where ‘confine’ means to keep within the rules of reasonable behavior but when Sir Toby said ‘I’ll confine myself no finer that I am’ he meant he will not dress himself better than he is dressed now.
Sir Toby we also see admires Maria because of her intelligence and similarity in sexual innuendo. His love for Maria is very earthy and very physical and very realistic.
Maria is very clever and very intelligent, maybe more than Sir Toby. In act 1, scene 3, they were both sharing earthy jokes making fun of Sir Andrew for example ‘Sir Andrew Agueface’. And we see that Maria constantly uses sexual innuendo and puns. One of those examples was 1:3 lines 67-68. These metaphors involve sexual innuendo and word play. Act 1, scence3, line 70 also means that Sir Andrew is sexually impotent. Here we see Maria’s physical side that she shows of to Sir Andrew at this point. That is either because Maria is trying to marry Sir Toby to socially climb or she truly loves him and wants to marry him out of love.
Another attitude to love in Twelfth Night is Viola’s which is very practical and realistic but still has touches of courtly love. It can also suffer in silence unlike Orsino’s constant moaning about his love to Olivia. In Act 2 scene 4 we understand this since she is protecting the woman race after Orsino criticizing how women love. He says that he can love a woman very much where no woman can love as much as he (2:4 lines 94-97) and then he claims that women’s love is not as deep than men’s and compares women’s love as eating, meaning it is just a passing appetite, and that they can sick of it (2:4 lines 98-100) but he still has the nerve to say that his is ‘as hungry as the sea, and can digest as much’ meaning he loves way more than women. Viola then says that women can love just as much as men (lines 106-107). So she defies Orsino’s view that men love longer than men and that they love more by saying that women can love with the exact same passion and she is suggesting equality.
There is a lot of dramatic irony involved in this scene, especially from Viola. For example, every time she talks about men she says ‘we’ or ‘our’ when ironically she is a woman. Another example is when she says ‘say that some lady, as perhaps there is, hath for your love as great a pang of heart, as you have for Olivia’. We know immediately that she is talking about herself.
Also in This scene there is a lot of historical context. We find out here that the Elizabethans believed that the liver was the source of passions, as Orsino uses it in his lines (line 99).
We see in Act 3, scene 1, we see Viola’s courtly love side with lines like ‘Most excellent accomplished lady, the heavens rain odours upon you!’ (lines 87-88 3:1) which very similar to the way Orsino would speak. Also Viola uses complex words like ‘pregnant’ and ‘vouchsafed’ which make the meaning that the reason Viola was only for Olivia to hear.
Olivia’s attitude to love is very much the same to Viola’s. She prefers honesty and sincerity than complex words and fine speech. We know this because of how she ignores Viola’s courtly love gesture and gets right to the conversation, meaning she does not like false pretence. And another example is how she tells Cesario that he was paying compliments to pretend to be humble (3:1 lines 102-103). She gives us even another example of how she wants Cesario to speak to her of his own love (lines 111-113).
We also can tell that she has very strong feelings towards Cesario and that she can be impulsive since she sent Cesario a ring after his first visit and then apologises for having been so forward (lines 114-120).
Some social and historical context is also found with Olivia like how women were never expected to have such strong feelings and be brave enough to show it. And in Act 3 scene 4 lines 203-214, Olivia says that she has been too impetuous and that she will give Cesario anything to love her and be with her, except her ‘honour’, in other words, her virginity. This is because in Elizabethan times, if a woman who had sex was thought of too be a peasant or of low class, so we can tell that she still cares about her social class.
We also can tell that her words are ambiguous because we are still not sure does she regret sending the ring or is she trying to get Cesario’s sympathy. She also uses brutal images like ‘her heart like a bear attacked by dogs’. This can be just a line she uses to make Cesario feel sorry for her.
Olivia is very practical and realistic like Viola since she quickly realizes that Cesario does not love her (Act 3 Scene 1 line 135) and gives up. She seems that she as changeable in loves as Orsino but we then know of her true feelings as she asks Cesario to stay (line 141), so she might have said she has given up to make him feel sorry for her again.
We also see that she may want to try and show Cesario that she can be romantic by declaring her love in rhyming couplets to show off and to show she is educated and can speak beautifully as he like in lines 87-88. We see this in lines 149-160 and 167-168. But then Cesario replies in the same way as Olivia (161-166) to show he is compatible with her and that she is of high class too.
Now we can speak about Malvolio. We can see that his attitude to love is a way to advance in society after Act 2 Scene 5 lines 24-41. He believes that it is only chance that he is a steward and not a lord (‘T is but fortune; all is fortune’). We can also tell that he dreams of being served on and being a Count (‘Calling my officers about me….’ Lines 48-50 and also when he yells ‘To be Count Malvolio!’ as if it were a dream of his). We then can tell that Malvolio is a pure social climber and is to me the biggest fool of this play.
In Act 5 scene 1 lines 359-361 we are surprised to hear that Sir Toby has married Maria as a reward for her help with tricking Malvolio. I think Sir Toby used that as a cover-up instead of saying that he truly loved her and that her help just added more fire to his passion for her. But Maria I think did this to catch Sir Toby’s attention to show that she is clever and mischievous like he is, but I do not think she did this to socially climb but because she likes Sir Toby and his personality since his is very similar to hers. I believe her love is true.
In conclusion, Twelfth Night includes many different attitudes to love and that it is linked to social climbing.
