What You’ll Love about… Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare

John Raphael Smith, “Miss Younge, Mr. Dodd, Mr. Love, and Mr. Waldron, in the Characters of Viola, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Sir Toby Belch, and Fabian (Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act 3, Scene 4).” Public Domain via Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Twelfth Night shows us in a kind and gentle way that people often fall in love with illusions or fantasies. When I remember back to the times when I was in love, it always involved imagination, and reality almost always clashed with what I was imagining. Was my love “true?” Of course. Did my feelings correspond with objective reality? Never.

The central concern of Twelfth Night is how being in love impairs judgment. From that point of view, it makes sense that there are no long-term, committed relationships in the play. In Shakespeare, most of those seem to be tainted by jealousy, and even though there is a flash of jealousy from Orsino late in the play, the play just doesn’t spend much time worrying about jealousy. That subject is covered at length in other comedies, including Much Ado About Nothing and The Merry Wives of Windsor, a tragedy, Othello, and a romance, The Winter’s Tale.

Twelfth Night seems to characterize love as a kind of madness, because it leads many of the characters to act in unexpected and unreasonable ways. Orsino’s love for Olivia causes him to neglect his responsibilities, and he even threatens to kill Viola in a fit of jealousy; Olivia falls in love with Viola even though she knows almost nothing about her; Malvolio deceives himself into believing that Olivia could be in love with him; Viola…