Forgiveness In William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night

When people hear the name Shakespeare, words like poetic, master, intelligent and creative often flood the mind. He has created many masterpieces such as Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night. Another play written by Shakespeare is titled The Tempest and was recently performed by the UW Oshkosh theatre. This show premiered on Thursday, April 26 and was held at the Fredric March Theatre at 7:30 pm. Throughout the play, a myriad of themes could be seen. These include justice, power, loyalty, and the main theme of forgiveness. Most of these themes were well developed but the idea of the importance of forgiveness was left with little support. Many aspects of the performance contributed to this downfall such as the setting, acting, script, costumes,

She stated that because the scenes took place in so many different locations on the island, they wanted the set to be as bare as it could be, allowing it to resemble anywhere on the island (Angwall). Therefore, it consisted of a sloped floor, which allowed there to be a trap door, two boulders, one in the top, left hand corner and one in the bottom, right hand corner, and scaffolding on either side of the stage allowing the actors to tower above the audience. Occasionally, a few sticks would also be used for the setting. This set design greatly limited the actors’ ability to convey the importance of forgiveness. One of the main reasons for this was the sloped stage. The slope of the stage was rather steep so instead of focusing exclusively on delivering their lines with as much emotion as possible, the actors also had to watch their footing to make sure that they did not fall. This resulted in disappointing displays of emotion. With this drawback of the set design, the importance of forgiveness was not apparent throughout the

This was largely due to the fact that comedy was overemphasized. For example, in Act Ⅱ Scene Ⅱ when Trinculo and Stephano met up, they asked each other how they survived the storm. Trinculo tells Stephano, “‘Swum ashore. Man, like a duck: I can swim like a duck, I’ll be sworn’” (Shakespeare). Stephano then replies, “‘Here, kiss the book. Though thou canst swim like a duck, thou art made like a goose’” (Shakespeare). This humor was a well welcomed break from the seriousness of the beginning of the play. However, in Act Ⅲ Scene Ⅱ Caliban began to convince Stephano to kill Prospero and take over as Lord of the island. This change in subject made this scene more serious than the previous one, but instead of portraying is as such, both Beecher and Polka continued to overplay the comedy. This again took away from the fact that they were planning to overthrow Prospero and kill him because it caused the audience to pay more attention to the comedy. In the end, the audience was left wondering why Prospero forgave them which added to decreasing the importance of the forgiveness he had