Twelfth Night Essays -- Literary Analysis, Shakespeare

In Shakespeare’s play, Twelfth Night or What you Will, the characters are involved in a plot complete with trickery, disguise, and love. Each character is defined not by his or her gender or true identity, but by the role they are forced to take because of the complicated situation that arises. Unlike their gender, the speech the characters give an insight to their true personalities. In the Twelfth Night, the character Duke Orsino uses flowery and over-dramatic language, long poetic sentence structure, and melodramatic metaphors to display his overemotional romantic nature despite the different emotions in his various speeches. Duke Orsino’s repeated usage of poetical verse and poetic devices to describe his woes from love set him apart from other character. By using deep metaphorical language and flowing poetic structure, Shakespeare conveys Orsino’s melodramatic nature. In Orsino’s first speech, he takes a complicated and metaphorical approach to explain his love for Olivia instead of directly stating his desires. Instead of using prose, Orsino speaks in blank verse which is significantly fancier and floral in language. He says, â€Å"If music be the food of love, play on; /Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, /The appetite may sicken, and so die† (1.1 3-5) to compare his love for Olivia to his love of music. Orsino wants the â€Å"excess of it†, so that he can become bored of music and therefore his love for Olivia. This also shows that he is excessively wordy throughout his speech and often prolongs sentences with repetitive phrases such as â€Å"†¦,pla y on/Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting† (1.1.3-4) and â€Å"†¦may sicken, and so die† (1.1.5) that have the same meaning. His long-winded language illustrates the dramatic quality... ...ve./To spite a raven’s heart within a dove† (5.1.130-131), to finally summarize his long speech. Orsino uses metaphors to compare the lamb to Viola and the dove to Olivia. Viola is the gentle lamb that Orsino claims he will sacrifice in order to attain revenge against Olivia, a deceivingly beautiful dove with a dark heart. By using a metaphor to end his speech, Orsino exits with a more dramatic and profound flair than if he directly stated his plans to kill Viola. Despite the anger in the speech in Act 5, Orsino uses similar poetic techniques such as metaphors, repetition, and flowery language to convey his dramatic nature. These techniques often convolute the original meaning of Orsino’s words because of the metaphorical structure. It is however the same traits that put him aside other characters in the play and make Orsino memorable to the audience.