Themes and Issues

Abstract

The play begins, ‘If music be the food of love, play on’. The music which is played is of a languishing, heart-rending kind, and it would seem that Orsino listens to it with rapt attention — until, that is, it palls, and, in his changeable way, he orders it to cease. Thus Twelfth Night opens drenched in sentiment; and sentiment focused on that most sentimental of topics, love. Virtually all Shakespeare’s comedies are on this theme, unlike those, for example, of Ben Jonson, which are concerned with such things as confidence tricks, petty crime, vicious self-indulgence and contemptible follies — coarse, unsentimental, hard-nosed themes. Yet to dub Shakespeare the tender-minded, and Jonson the tough-minded, comic writers of the Elizabethan period would be to do Shakespeare at least a grave disservice. No one can evoke the vibrant, emotional world of love, as this opening illustrates, more movingly than Shakespeare, but he also shows a complex awareness, not only of other dimensions of comedy, but of the multilayered and kaleidoscopically varied nature of the love-experience. For him it is both an old-fashioned and a very modern subject, which can both pluck the heart-strings and make us split our sides with laughter.