Wednesday, June 23, 2010

How can For All Waters apply to present economic crises?

Clue: Shakespear's Twelfth Night.How can For All Waters apply to present economic crises?
Twelfth Night is noted as one of Shakespeare's most studied and best loved plays: the twin-based comedy of cross-dressing and mistaken identity is accessible to even novice Shakespeare scholars. However, the play has also garnered much critical attention for its nuanced and sometimes elusive treatment of issues of gender, ambition, and love.





The actual Elizabethan festival of Twelfth Night would involve the antics of a Lord of Misrule, who before leaving his temporary position of authority, would call for entertainment; the play has been regarded as preserving this festive atmosphere.[2] This leads to the general inversion of the order of things, most notably gender roles.[3] Malvolio can be regarded as an adversary of festive enjoyment and community.[4]





Viola is not alone among Shakespeare's cross-dressing heroines; in Shakespeare's theater, convention dictated that adolescent boys play the roles of female characters, creating humour in the multiplicity of disguise found in a female character who for a while pretended at masculinity.[5] Her cross dressing enables Viola to fulfil usually male roles, such as acting as a messenger between Orsino and Olivia, as well as being Orsino's confidant. She does not, however, use her disguise to enable her to intervene directly in the plot (unlike other Shakespearean heroines such as Rosalind in As You Like It and Portia in The Merchant of Venice), remaining someone who allows ';Time'; to untangle the plot.[6] Viola's persistence in transvestism through her betrothal in the final scene of the play often engenders a discussion of the possibly homoerotic relationship between Viola and Orsino. Her impassioned speech to Orsino, in which she describes an imaginary sister who ';sat like patience on a monument, / Smiling at grief'; for her love, likewise causes many critics to consider Viola's attitude of suffering in her love as a sign of the perceived weakness of the feminine (2.4).

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