Theme Of Mistaken Identity In Twelfth Night

William Shakespeare’s plays are revolutionary not only because of his talented writing and creative thoughts, but also because of his forward thinking, progressive ideas. In a time where women were given little voice to no voice in society, Shakespeare wrote about powerful female characters with crucial roles in his plot. In his famous play Twelfth Night he continues this forward thinking by attacking the rigid gender roles of the time, while also giving the audience with comedic relief and exciting plot twists by, through his manipulation of his characters’ identities. With the use of dialogue between the three major characters, Viola, Olivia and Orsino, Shakespeare reveals two powerful themes: mistaken identity and destruction of past societal …show more content…
On one hand, Viola takes advantage of her ability to put on an identity that is not her own in order to receive the job that she wants. She is a brave, confident woman who uses this ability to get what she wants. On the other hand, it causes serious confusion for the two characters who fall in love with her, Olivia and Orsino. However this confusion adds to the entertainment of the play and results in the excessive celebration in the end of the play. Without wrongful perceptions of each other’s identity, the grandiose ending where everyone discovers who everyone else actually is would not have the same extent of …show more content…
He succeeds at both entertaining his audiences and still implicitly making fun of the ways in which people act in society. The subtitle of this play is What You Will; this could mean many things, one of them being, the audience can do what they will with his critiques of society. Many themes can be drawn from his comments on society, two of them being destruction of traditional gender roles and mistaken