The Way That Communities Are Formed in Twelfth Night and King Lear - Essay Example

? Shakespeare: Discuss the way that communities are formed in 'Twelfth Night' and 'King Lear'. Which are more important in Shakespeare's staged world: familial or social bonds? Each genre of literature has its own set of expectations, and Shakespeare both embraced and resisted the structure. Shakespeare believed that comedy and tragedy are completely different genres and as such require different levels of focus and also different types of story constructions. His tragedy plays are usually titled with the character’s name like Romeo & Juliet, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello or Hamlet. His tragedies usually focus on a deep analysis of a single conscious emotion. His tragedies also include a limited number of characters, and each character remains in a turmoil because of his or her erroneous humanity, and are mostly obliged to follow equally erroneous and mostly narrow moral choices. In tragedy plays, it is essential that a sense of community prevails because it is necessary to formulate a social or political culture in which the individual title character will function. However, the principal theme of tragedy circulates around the individual with the community as a backdrop. Shakespeare’s comedy plays have a different structure from his tragedies. His comedies like Twelve Nights, As You Like It or Much Ado About Nothing have titles that are theme based and communal (Ford, 56). Shakespeare, in his comedies portrays the follies of society with a mocking approach. His comedies focus mainly on communities rather than on individuals. His comedy plays are more about varying degrees of social error that culminate in social compromise and reunion. Twelfth Night The theme of Twelfth Night is caprice which is a lighthearted and an utopian attitude towards life and the concept of love. A more deeper and real sense of the play lies in the exaggerated comic perspective of love, more specifically Petrarchan love. In Petrarchan love, there exists a distance and a feeling of unworthiness between the loved one and the lover. One of them, generally the male character suffers from an inferiority complex and considers himself unworthy of his lover. The female is usually placed on a pedestal by her man and is idealized. The male finds satisfaction in showing his love and gratitude from a distance. This kind of love makes procreation, which is the last feature of comedy, impossible. A Petrarchan lover must harbor a practical approach toward love, and is far moved from fairy tale kind of romantic stories. This is the central theme in Twelfth Night (“Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night”). Since this is a romantic comedy, the lovers unite by the end of the play unlike tragedies like Romeo & Juliet, where the ill-fated lovers die together at young age. Orsino’s love for Olivia is presented in the very first line of the first scene : If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die. - Act I, Scene I (Twelfth Night) This is all pervasive love, example of Petrarchan love that is selfless and gallantry. Orsino considers himself as an epitome of Petrarchan love, more because Olivia refused to acknowledge his feelings (Ray, 88-89). Twelfth Night is a comedy written by William Shakespeare in the beginning of the seventeenth century. It has all the essential elements of a comedy as was once suggested by the Greek philosopher, Aristotle. In a comedy play, generally the central character is a female. In Twelfth Night the protagonist is a female character called Viola. The second characteristic of a comedy play is that there must be several hurdles and difficult situations that have to be overcome for lovers to be united. Here Viola, after being shipwrecked and left ashore in Illyria, disguises herself as an eunuch named Cesario and becomes a page to Duke Orsino. This disguise itself becomes an obstacle as Viola cannot confess her love for Orsino, nor can she, in the disguise of Cesario, refuse the romantic gestures of Olivia, a countess who falls in love with Cesario. As a third feature of comedy, the characters of the play should be able to laugh at their own foolish actions which means they should have an inherent sense of humor. In a comedy play, there is a prevalence of a sense of community. Twelfth Night ends with the marriage announcement of Viola and Orsino, and the hope of a happy life with babies, thus indicating a continuation of community (“Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night”). Twelfth Night covers a graph of personal disappointments in love to individual satisfactions, and from social disorder to social harmony. The play begins with a portrayal of Orsino and Olivia as characters engrossed in their own pool of emotions. Although, both the characters sincerely display extreme unhappiness, yet this frustration in love gets diluted because of their self-complacency. Orsino and Olivia were so deeply involved with their own emotions, that both of them failed to connect with their real personal relationships. Orsino and Olivia represented the native Illyrians, and so their engrossment in the self along with Viola’s involuntary exile portrayed a society with individuals without any kind of mutual interconnections. In contrast to the beginning of the play, its conclusion was full of events in both the main plot and the sub-plots. Viola, who throughout the play was in disguise, revealed at last to Orsino that she is actually a female. On the other hand, Sebastian who is twin brother of Viola was mistaken by Olivia as the male disguise of Viola, and so they get married in a church. Eventually, with disclosures of real identities, Viola wins the love of Orsino and their marriage is declared. On the other hand, Olivia realises that Sebastian is her true love. In the first half of the play, because of the flurry of confusions arising out of Viola’s disguise as an eunuch, relationships were in fragile state. Viola could not confess her love to Orsino because the latter thinks her as a man, and on the other hand Olivia falls in love with Cesario who has no real existence. In the second half of the play, as Sebastian and Viola reveal their true identities as twins, new relationships develop in the form of marriage between Sebastian and Olivia. The final scene was about reunions of lovers and family, but the main focus was on development of unexpected bonding and acceptance of new responsibilities. The appearance of Sebastian revealed that Olivia was engaged not with a coward person but with a loyal man. When Viola’s true identity came to the forefront, Orsino’s role transformed from Cesario’s master to Viola’s future husband. Your master quits you; and for your service done him, So much against the mettle of your sex, So far beneath your soft and tender breeding, And since you call’d me master for so long, Here is my hand: you shall from this time be Your master’s mistress. - Act V, Scene I (Twelfth Night) With the announcement of marriage between Orsino and Viola, and with the already performed marriage between Sebastian and Olivia, the final picture was that of an extended family (Slights, 537-538). Twelfth Night is essentially a story based on complications in relationships resulting in suppressed and unrequited love. Even for the principal character Viola, it was not possible to formulate strategies to untangle the complex web of relationships. In fact, the happy ending of the play was more as a consequence of good fortune than human ingenuity. Moral awareness or spiritual uplift had nothing to do with the ending. It was the existence of Sebastian that solved the problems that were being faced by the inhabitants of Illyria. Olivia, who isolated herself from the society on the pretext of mourning for her recently deceased brother could come out of her shell only after she abandoned her exclusive adherence towards her brother. Similar, the union of brother and sister (Viola and Sebastian) after a long time separation resulted in their separation as they became life partners of other characters. Olivia’s freedom from her brother’s memory along with Viola and Sebastian’s brief union and separation paved the ways towards creation of a harmonious society (Slights, 545). King Lear King Lear is a famous tragedy by Shakespeare. The character is coveted by many established actors in all era since its publication. It has all the elements of fairy tale, history and legendary characters in the backdrop of many contentious political issues. The play is best understood by studying the social and political framework in which the characters live and behave. This play illuminates the characteristics of families and their expectant behaviors during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and also how the insane people were considered and treated. King Lear is a text that can be related with the modern social and political issues for a better understand of the psychologies and behaviors of the characters, whether negative or positive. Goneril and Regan who were the two elder daughters of Lear treated their father shabbily once they inherited his property; this can be compared with the pathos of the elderly people in the modern society. The long-term concern regarding the well-being of the elderly is reflected in King Lear’s character. Also, the behaviour of Lear can be related to the conditions of Alzheimer’s patients (Woodford, xvii). The play has the main story of King Lear and his relationship with his daughters, and how he suffers for making wrong judgements of his daughters’ love for him. There is also a subplot of Gloucester and his sons, Edgar and Edmund that is intricately woven with the main plot. Both the plots have been adapted from other literary sources that were written before Shakespeare’s time. However, Shakespeare has made significant changes by combining the two plots which have so far been different tales, one of father and his three daughters while another of father and his sons. King Lear is by far the most complicated combination of two tales, where each plot emphasizes and reinforces the theme of the other plot. Unlike the other tales of King Lear, Shakespeare has for the first time made the character mad as consequences of his wrong decisions regarding his daughters. The ending of Shakespeare’s play is also different from the conventional endings where King Lear eventually gains the throne with the help of his youngest daughter Cordelia and her husband. In these conventional stories, Lear rules till his death after which the throne passes on to Cordelia. Even in these plots, five years after Cordelia sits on the throne, she is forced to kill herself in despair by her conspiring nephews. In Shakespeare’s play, however, all the characters including King Lear and his three daughters die tragically thus making the royal lineage extinct and the kingdom without a ruler. These modifications in the storyline made by Shakespeare have made King Lear a tragedy masterpiece for over 400 years (Woodford, 1). In this play, both characters King Lear and Gloucester suffer because of their initial misjudgments of their better offspring that resulted in wrong disinherits. Both of them subsequently suffer in the hands of their bad offspring whom they have empowered. While Lear suffers from insanity, Gloucester suffer from blindness. On realisation of their follies, both get reunited with their better offspring just before their death. Thus family trust and love play a crucial role in this play (McDonald, 37). The social picture of this play is a ruler without any kingdom to rule and allies who are banished. Here human life is considered as cheap as a beast. Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them, And show the heavens more just. - Act III, Scene IV (King Lear) These lines form the central message of the play. It is the basic and essential component of humanity that indicates man’s crumbling to nothingness through loss of wealth and dignity. Only through the test and experience of deprivation and forlornness can human beings gain a new form of humanity. This universal social message pervades all through the play. King Lear realizes his wrong judgement regarding his daughters and by banishing the one who deserves to be with him the most, he suffers from intense trauma and with course of time experiences spiritual regeneration, within a deep social framework of deprivation, oppression and conflict (Al-Dabbagh, 110). King Lear does not merely represent an individual’s sorrows and degradation, but he is an example of a product from a whole evil time. His emotional breakdowns as well as his repentance for failing to perform filial duties, makes him oblivious to his vulnerability but makes him conscious about the conditions of those poor people who wander in the streets without clothes and food. “Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your loop'd and window’d raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these?” - Act III, Scene IV (King Lear) Both Lear and Gloucester, pledges to the rich to distribute their excess wealth to the poor so that there be equal distribution in the society. A sense of social disarray and deformation envelopes the entire play. Lear, Gloucester, Kent and Edgar are characters in the play who do not merely represent individual pathos, but are reflections of disorders pressed on them. They are more victims of sinful actions than being sinners themselves. They represent the woeful conditions of the weakest in the society. There are storm scenes in the play that reflect more clearly poverty and vagrancy (Selden, 143-145). Conclusion Shakespeare uses family and social context in his comedies as a setup for the characters to prevail and behave. His comedies focus more on situations than on the characters, so much that the audiences do not feel the strong connection with the characters. For this reason, when the characters suffer mainly because of their own follies, audiences find those scenes more laughable than tragedy. In his tragedy plays, the focus is more on the characters. The sense of community is more inherent as his tragedy plays focus on the central character in the midst of deception and conspiracies by those the character considers his ally. Works Cited Al-Dabbagh, Abdullah. Shakespeare, the Orient, and the Critics, Peter Lang, 2010 Ford, John R. Twelfth Night: A Guide to the Play, USA: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006 King Lear quotes from: http://shakespeare.mit.edu/lear/full.html McDonald, Mark A. Shakespeare's King Lear with The Tempest: The Discovery of Nature and the Recovery of Classical Natural Right, USA: University Press of America, 2004 Ray, Ratri. William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers & Dist, 2006 Selden, Raman. “King Lear and True Need”, Shakespeare Studies, Vol.19 (1987) 143-169 “Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night”, WPSU, n.d., December 4, 2012 from: http://www.wpsu.org/edservices/12th/background.html Slights, Camille. “The Principle of Recompense in Twelfth Night”, Modern Language Review, 77.3 (1982) 537-546 Twelfth Nights quotes from: http://shakespeare.mit.edu/twelfth_night/full.html Woodford, Donna. Understanding King Lear: a student casebook to issues, sources, and historical documents, USA: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004 Read More