Twelfth Night

the 17th century Shakespeare’s plays have influenced modern society in varied ways. Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is shown to have influenced society by its recent film modernized adaptation. Despite the fact that Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare has been banned it deserves to be analyzed in high school classrooms of today. In 1996 when a high school in Merrimack, New Hampshire removed Twelfth Night from their classroom, the plot was criticized without taking into account the historical…

In the Live Globe performance of the Twelfth Night, the issues of gender identity and alternative sexuality registers different from the reading mainly with a sense of humor. For example, when Viola says to Olivia, referring to Maria, “ Most Radiant, Exquisite, and unmatchable beauty-/ I pray you tell me if this be the lady of the house, for I/ never saw her” (1.5. 161-163). In the written play, this line would be read and most likely not get much of a response other than an acknowledgment.…

One of the most interesting characters in Shakespeare's famous play Romeo and Juliet is Mercutio. We never know what he looks like on the outside, but his character traits are vivid, like a bouquet of flowers. Mercutio is Romeo’s good friend, they share life, stories and thought together. Shakespeare created Mercutio in direct opposition to Romeo, the main character. Even though Mercutio's life in the play is very short his appearance dominates the dialogue and the action whenever he appears in…

Twelfth Knight In Twelfth Knight, Shakespeare emphasises the importance of love through the perspectives of different characters. Shakespeare illustrates many love triangles whose characters become the core of the plot; Viola and Olivia have the most significant relationship. Viola and Olivia are both women raised to self-esteem, manners, intelligence, and wealth. Both characters are strong willed in receiving what they deserve. Shakespeare was defying social expectations though these two…

Cyrano de Bergerac is a tragic comedy, a play which is light and humorous and is composed of jokes and humorous performance. In this play, Cyrano continuously makes the audience laugh by making jokes about his own physical appearance. This play comes very close to being a tragedy, a work in which the main character is brought to ruin or suffers extreme sorrow, especially as a consequence of a tragic flaw. In this play Cyrano suffers the consequence of a tragic flaw, when he talks with Roxanne…

Tarsem Singh, in his movie The Fall, shows exceptional usage of visual story telling, or mise-en-scène. Characters and themes are introduced within the first two minutes of the film without any usage of dialogue. These beginning moments, while upon first viewing, are not so easy to make sense of, but subtly hold foreshadowing for the future events of the film. The opening scene of the film starts with a series of people yelling and panicking in black and white. The black and white filter alone…

The gravediggers in act 5 scene 1 are used to potray a sense of humor commonly found in Shakespeare’s plays. This gravediggers profess clowns which makes them to be of a unique kind in the play. They serves to lighten the tragic stress of Ophelia’s death in the play. This type of character appealed to the members of the audience who could not afford seats and thus stood on the ground. The play would definitely get a laugh from this un educated diggers who would enjoy a relief to the long and…

Many people know famous Shakespearean works like Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, or Othello, but another famous play is Twelfth Night. I originally read this play in my Theatre class, and then I later attended the production put on by students at UNI. The plot of the story consisted of a love triangle between the characters Viola, also known as Cesario; Orsino, a nobleman; and Olivia, a wealthy lady. Viola disguised herself as Cesario in order to earn money since it was against social norms for…

Twelfth Night Going to the Longwood production of Twelfth Night proved very intriguing from the talented actors, to amazing costumes, extravagant lighting, and slightly modern setting. However, while I enjoyed the performance as a whole; there were a few technical issues that distracted from the overall aesthetic of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Set design is what brings an audience that possibly had no context for the show into the life of the characters. It allows the audience to really step…

* Write an essay about the theme of performance in Twelfth Night. Few things are as central to a discussion on the theme of performance in Twelfth Night than characterization – that is to say, the function of writing, conceptualizing, and interpreting the fictional personas in the play. Scholarly stances on the issue differ vastly, but the key pivot in this essay – its underlying assumption – shall be that the play’s framing of gender, via the lens of gender-bending, establishes a space in which…