Recover From Losses - Essay Sample

Introduction

Shakespeare, the author of this play, has clearly articulated and developed several themes. One of the major themes developed is a loss. In the play, almost all the main characters face a loss that negatively affects their physical, emotional, and psychological suffering. Characters lose their family members, friends, lovers, their identities, and even loss of oneself. As the play advances, the characters who suffer loss recover from the loss and regain their prior stability. Shakespeare objectively tries to show that people can always recover or be restored from the loss suffered in this play.

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Shipwreck

To begin with, the play is brought about by a shipwreck (Shakespeare, 2001). The author uses the shipwreck to show the unpredictable and unimaginable forces that can harm innocent people. In the event of the shipwreck, Viola and her brother Sebastian are separated. Because they did not know whether each other had survived the wreckage, Viola thinks that Sebastian had died in the accident. In the same way, Sebastian also thought that her sister had died in the accident. As a result, they mourn each other, and their emotions are highly affected. They greatly suffer from the absence of each other. The play is developed without the siblings knowing that each other had survived, but near the end of the play, the two unite and are seen together. This eradicates the suffering they both had.

After the shipwreck, viola goes to Illyria, where she has to compromise a lot for her survival because life was going to be hard for her in the absence of his brother Sebastian. To survive, she goes to the extent of disguising herself as a man hence losing her identity as a woman. She ends up in Duke Orsino's house as a servant, where she is called Cesario. Because she had disguised herself as a man, she has to live and assume her duties as a man. Duke Orsino sends Viola to help him woo Olivia to accept him. Unfortunately, Olivia ends up falling in love with Viola, who disguised herself as a boy (Shakespeare, 2001). This causes a lot of suffering to Viola because she has to hide her identity and emotions for her survival. As the play progresses, Viola's identity is known, and she does not need to continue hiding her gender. Activities had turned out well; hence no one had an issue with her hidden identity.

Mourning

At the beginning of the play, Olivia is seen mourning the demise of her brother with a lot of pain. She openly grieves her brother with a lot of sadness and seclusion. She is also seen wearing black clothes to mourn her brother. The determination to mourn her brother makes Olivia reject any suitors who came her way. As a result, she has to reject Duke Orsino, who wanted to court her. In an attempt to purposefully mourn her brother, she makes up her mind to stay indoors and be cloistered for seven years. Although she suffers from this loss of loved ones, she finds affection from other people like Orsino and Sebastian. At the end of the play, she happily gets married to Sebastian.

Duke Orsino thinks that he loves Olivia. He is so determined to have her that he outsources services from Cesario to woo Olivia to love him. Though the author presents this as an illusion of love, Orsino has so much emotional investment in Olivia. Despite all these efforts, Olivia rejects him. Orsino suffers a lot of pain due to rejection. He feels he had lost someone he greatly loves, although he had not had her (Charles, 1997). As the story progresses, Viola falls in love with Orsino. She does not hide her feelings for Orsino but instead expresses her love feelings for him. Duke accepts her and marries her. This helps him recover from the hollowness and sadness he felt after being rejected by Olivia.

Olivia develops affection and emotional connection to Viola. Olivia loves Viola because Viola had disguised herself as a boy. This is contrary to the expectation because Duke Orsino had sent Viola to woo Olivia to himself. Through Olivia falling for Viola, the author postulated that love could go beyond gender. Although Olivia loves Viola, this does not develop to anything because, to her side, Viola had developed an affection for Duke Orsino, and she was a lady contrary to what Olivia had believed about her (Pequigney, 1992). As the play develops, Viola's identity is revealed, and Olivia understands why Viola did not accept her affection advances. Although she did not have Viola (who had disguised herself as Cesario), Olivia gets to meet Sebastian, and they get to marry happily.

Viola has to lose her identity as an upper-class lady (Logan, 1982). She does this to be able to survive in the foreign land of Illyria. She has to lose her social status and get employed as a house girl in the house of Duke Orsino. This was caused by the ship's wrecking, which makes her be swept to a foreign land shore as an immigrant. According to Logan (1982), although she has to hide her identity and live as a boy, it can be argued that she was freer and more comfortable to live in her hidden identity rather than living as an upper-class lady in a foreign land. In the end, Viola gets married to Duke, where her identity and social class are restored.

Conclusion

Throughout the play, the author strongly puts across the theme of loss and how to deal with the loss. All the characters in the play suffer some sort of loss, which negatively affects their lives and causes a lot of discomforts. For example, Viola and her brother Sebastian when separated by shipwreck, they mourn each other. Also, Olivia is seen mourning the demise of her brother with a lot of pain. The recovery from the loss is inevitable with time. At the right time, the characters get compensation for the losses they face, and their lives are restored to normality as they lived before the occurrence of the losses.

References

Charles, C. (1997). Gender trouble in" Twelfth night." Theatre Journal, 49(2), 121-141. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3208678

Logan, T. J. (1982). Twelfth Night: The Limits of Festivity. Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 22(2), 223-238. https://www.jstor.org/stable/i218972

Pequigney, J. (1992). The Two Antonios and SameSex Love in Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice. English Literary Renaissance, 22(2), 201-221.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6757.1992.tb01038.x

Shakespeare, W. (2001). Twelfth Night: Or, What You Will (Vol. 13). Classic Books Company.