How Does Shakespeare Present Love In Twelfth Night

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The way love can affect a person is a startling phenomenon that can be consequential by affecting a person’s standpoint on the way they view certain aspects of life. Some characters, such as Lady Olivia, react to inevitable changes that result in detrimental outcomes, because of the feelings caused by an extreme degree of infatuated love. The characters going through emotional struggles, involving love, tend to forget the significance of the other idiosyncratic parts of their lives and relationships. In Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare uses character development to emphasize the way love can manipulate a person's values.
At the start of Act I, the reader is introduced to the pain inflicted upon Lady Olivia, due to her loss of family. The …show more content…

Viola shares, “My lord and master loves you, such love to be recompensed, though you were crown’d the nonpareil of beauty! ။ If I did love you in my master’s flame, with such a suffering, such a deadly life, in your denial I would find no sense; I would not understand it”(1.5). Through Viola, Duke Orsino is revealed as a very intense lover, while subtlety revealed how he is suffering by the way he is blinded by his intoxicating devotion of love, similar to Viola’s situation. Viola ponders out loud, “Say that some lady, as perhaps there is, hath for your love a great pang of heart as you have for Olivia: you cannot love her; you tell her so; must she not then be answer’d?”(2.4). In the previous scene, Viola refers to herself by suggesting another potential lover suitable for him, but as the person identifies her as (Cesario), she is trapped in between her cultivating love for Duke Orsino and how she may possibly put herself in jeopardy. Both, Olivia and Duke Orsino, suffer through the distraction of love; a misleading thing that alters individuals, fluctuating on their degree of