Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
William Shakespeare was a great playwright of Elizabethan age. He had never been a university wit but his talent was farther than a need of degree. He had a natural talent which was not dependent to a piece of paper given by some institute. His exquisite and exemplary piece of literature which took the shapes of his great plays and drama like Twelfth Night, Hamlet, As You like It, Romeo and Juliet etc. are living proof that he was of no need for any guidance.
“Shakespeare has become the cornerstone of classical education in English literature without achieving a university degree. His genius was not educated in school but natural, and yet his understanding and depiction of the complexity of human nature is a model of perfection” (Sharma, 2015, p. 733).
He has given romance a lot of attention in his plays with slight comic and tragic effects here and there. Mostly because he wanted to make the audience feel what the characters were going through and to fee the connection with them, so love and specially the aesthetics of young love really mattered to him.
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“Adolescent romantic relationships are marked by feelings, thoughts, or behaviors within a relationship and have been found to be associated with intimacy, passion, commitment, sexual attitudes, trust, dependence and communication” (Kochar & Sharma, 2015, p. 81). Love and more profoundly young love is an absolute feeling which reflects the beauty of one person and shines it in the heart of another person. It can give hope and it can take away all hope at one instance as well. It is a very complicated yet very exciting feeling one can experience. Love does not need barriers or gender rules to grow it surfaces all the obstacles and then blooms with in the self of a person. Love has never been physical in all the history, it has always been spiritual; if it is physical then it is not love, it’s just a mere infatuation. According to Kochar & Sharma (2015) the presence of affection is an indispensable component of an undefeated relationship. Love is a combination of emotions, cognitions, and behaviors that usually plays a vital role in intimate romantic relationships.
This study is based on William Shakespeare’s famous play Twelfth Night, first staged in 1602, which focuses on how love overlaps all sorts of gender roles and distinctions which limit people to only see the physicality, excluding the inner beauty. “In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, gender is depicted as incidental and indeed accidental to the occasion of love” (Chin-Yi, 2015, p. 86). It is clear from the story of the play that there is an obvious love triangle between the main characters of the story. While Viola has kept her disguise as Cesario, she secretly has fallen in love with Orsino the Duke of Illyria, who then is in love with Olivia who loves Cesario, but when Sebastain enters the story and Viola’s secret gets revealed, it becomes evident that Orsino actually loves Viola but could never tell her as he assumed she was guy; whereas Olivia loves Sebastain more than she ever loved Cesario (Viola in disguise). This makes it very clear to be interpreted that love thus exceeds gender. It is actually the person we love not the appearance or fake personas we create for ourselves.
QUESTIONS
How did Shakespeare prioritize love over gender roles in Twelfth Night?
What pulls out Feminism in the play Twelfth Night which is filled with dramatic irony?
OBJECTIVES
The objectives of this study are to prioritize love over gender roles and to seek out Feminism in the play with regard to dramatic irony.
LITERATURE REVIEW
“Through the lens of Feminism women get to speak and put a stop to all allegations and injustices happening to them for so many years” (Harrison & Boyd, 2003, p. 296). So Shakespeare takes feminism and women empowerment very seriously mostly maybe because his time period was during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and her being a women and a queen set quite a powerful influence on Shakespeare’s judgment towards women’s place in the society
We can often see Feminist aspects in the play, Twelfth Night. As it is to be believed that Shakespeare was also a feminist, so this interpretation can be justified as well, as his feminist believes are easily reflected on his plays and can be identified very easily. “Women in Shakespearean plays always play important roles, mainly the leading roles. Whether they create the main conflicts and base of the plays, or bring up interesting moral and cultural questions, they have always been embedded in challenging situations” (Sharma, 2015, p. 733). This make it evident that Shakespeare was not like typical writers who always made the heroes of the plays strong and center of attention rather he focused on both the genders and took a little more interest on the female characters than the male. Twelfth night is said to be believed that a play which bends gender roles.
This study also has a lot of aspects dramatic irony other than feminism. Shakespeare was a master of literature and specially plays. He knew how to use words and where to put them. He had a close relationship to his characters and audience, so for that purpose he used dramatic irony in most of his plays to excite audience and make the play look more interesting. According to Amir (2008), Dramatic irony is widely used in drama, especially in William Shakespeare’s plays which rely largely on it (p. 290).
Moreover, dramatic irony is used to heighten suspense. When the audience knows what is happening, there is more suspense, because they are waiting for the crucial moment in which they can see the reactions of the characters when everything is revealed (Amir, 2008, p. 291)
METHODOLOGY
FRAMEWORK
This study is based on Theoretical Framework. Since Feminism has widely be seen in the study so it the main literary theory to be used on the paper. The further discussion of the paper will also be based on the foundation of the framework which means it will be involving the theory of Feminism in it as well.
METHOD
This study uses Discourse Analysis to identify the prioritization of love over the gender roles and to see whether Feminism is evident in the play or not. Through Discourse Analysis we can understand the most implicit and explicit meaning hidden in the discourse of the characters.
DATA SOURCE
The source from where data is received is the play Twelfth Night. We analyze and understand the dialogues of the characters and take them as a source as well for analysis.
ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION
Twelfth Night is most loved play of Shakespeare specifically because it has comic effect in it as well. it all starts when Viola and Sebastian’s ship gets wrecked and Viola assumes that her brother had died. She lands on a place name Illyria where she disguises herself as a guy named Cesario by the help of a captain. According to Malcolmson’s findings about Twelfth Night is that it was written during a period before a woman’s place was imagined as a separate sphere, since, for the Renaissance, a woman was considered to be analogous to other social inferiors in a hierarchical society (p. 161). Here it is evident that Shakespeare have bend gender roles and shown that a man is helping a helpless woman who had apparently just lost her brother into the disguise of a man.
In the play Viola is in disguise but still when her true identity is revealed Orsino loves her and ignores and forgets his previous claims of loving Olivia because that was not love that was just a man loving the idea of woman who is pretty and belongs to the same class as he belongs to. It can be cleared by these lines “But come what may, I do adore thee so, that danger shall seem sport, and I will go.” So it proves that Orsino loved the inner beauty of Viola not her appearance as even though she had a disguise of Cesario, Orsino still felt a connection with her and trusted her and for love trust is very important element.
CONCLUSION
Hence we can say that Shakespeare did prioritize love over gender roles, which are initially given by the society. He had bended gender distinctions and class distinctions. He truly brought Feminism in the play in the most elegant way possible by using the aesthetics such as dramatic irony.
REFERENCES
- Kochar, R., K., Sharma, D. (2015). Role of Love in Relationship Satisfaction. International Journal of Indian Psychology. 3(1), 81-107. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318900366_Role_of_love_in_relationship_satisfactionChin-Yi, C. (2015).
- Gender as an Incidental Aspect of Love in Twelfth Night. International Journal of Research. 2(11), 86-88. Retrieved from https://www.academia.edu/17689724/Gender_as_an_incidental_aspect_of_love_in_Twelfth_NightSharma, A., K. (2015).
- Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night: A Quest for an Ideal Woman of His Own Concept. International Journal of Applied Research. 1(12), 733-737. Retrieved from http://www.allresearchjournal.com/archives/2015/vol1issue12/PartK/1-11-134.pdfHarrison, K., & Boyd, T. (2003).
- Feminism. In D. Watts (Ed.), Understanding Political ideas and movements (pp. 295-308). Manchester: Manchester University Press https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526137951.00019Amir, A., D, (2008).
- Dramatic Irony in William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Journal of Missan Researchers. 5(9), 289-318. Retrieved from https://www.iasj.net/iasj?func=fulltext&aId=23488Malcolmson, C. (1991).
- What you will: Cocial Mobility and gender in Twelfth Night. In V. Wayne (Ed.). The Matter of difference: Materialistic Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare. (pp. 29-57). New York: Harvester WheatsHeaf.
