Twelfth Night suggests that life should not be taken too seriously. How far do you agree?

Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is a thematic mirror of its festive namesake – a play about
indulging the last moments of celebration before reality descends and conformity ensues
once more. Through the fantastical setting of Illyria, the comedy embraces its own revelry
and encourages its audience to do the same. Using the dramatization of the antagonism
between the hedonistic Sir Toby Belch and the puritanical steward who longs to discipline
him (Dobson) and the inverted romance between the play’s nobility, Shakespeare
investigates the social implications of festivity (Dobson) and the extents to which one goes
to in preserving them.

The play opens with Orsino demanding that if ‘music be the food of love’ then give him
excess of it so that his appetite sickens and so dies. This initial line encapsulates the
questions Twelfth Night proposes, about the limits of celebration and passion, whether one
should indulge their own impulses so heavily that it leads to death or if one should practise
restraint and live in plain moderation. Orsino, a character who embellishes the cliches of
Pertrach, agrees with the former. He spends much of the play in self-inflicted melancholy
over Olivia’s lack of reciprocation of his affections, as though his existence cannot continue
with Olivia’s rejection. In the 2017 National Theatre production, Orsino is presented as a
typical ‘man-child’ so self-aggrandised that he can only assume the other characters love
him as much as he loves himself. In constructing such a narrative around himself, that he is a
desperate lover in want of a mistress, Orsino’s character is unable to find fulfilment until he
acquires romantic love. He takes this idealised life so seriously, parading the two follies the
play aims to criticise: self-love and self-deception (Cash), that he is driven to threaten the life
of Cesario, his true life, attempting to actively destroy the one character who brings him any
real happiness.

Similarly, Olivia initially struggles with her attitude to life and how seriously she takes it,
being as much in thrall to her melancholy as Orsino is to his love (Schalkwyk). She is so
deeply entrenched in her identity as a mourner that it appears comical and insincere,
especially due to its eventual, inevitable discarding. Feste senses this, warning her that
‘beauty’s a flower’ and the mourning of her brother makes her ‘more the fool to mourn for
[her] brother being in heaven.’ This reference to the temperance of joy and beauty is
reoccurring in the play, intrinsically linked to overshadowing death, reflecting the
correspondence between the whole festival and the comedy (Barber). As the festival
celebrates the final day of celebration before the work begins again, the characters are told
to embrace their revelry for as long as they can. Feste, party to the rowdy revelry and a
guarded critic to its excessiveness (Cash) takes this message and chides Olivia for wasting
her own vitality.

Furthermore, the culmination of the romantic plots and Orsino and Olivia’s happiness are
only possible by ceasing to take their lives so seriously and embracing the ludicrous, fluid
circumstances of Viola/Cesario/Sebastian, ‘taking share in this happy wreck’ rather than
inspecting the realism too closely or clinging to their initial ideals.

In the secondary plot of Twelfth Night, Shakespeare directly inspects the question of revelry
in the face of life’s expectation. The entire arc of Sir Toby and his band of misrulers – Sir
Andrew, Maria, Feste, and Fabian – is based in celebration and the vicious fight to maintain
these revels. They are the revellers on the sixth of January, embellishing their last hurrah
before the drudgery of responsibility begins. The occasional note of Sir Andrew’s financial
circumstances foreshadows this, warning Sir Toby that his funds are likely to run out now
that his romantic conquest to woo Olivia has failed. In the 2017 RSC production, he is
presented as a hapless old man, chasing the excitement of youth Sir Toby is still able to
embody. By following the man’s example of ignoring life’s consequences, the man is
rendered a foolish child, the presentation of ridiculous excess (Laroque), pursuing Sir Toby’s
coat tails. While their revelry is initially appealing in its comradery and chaos, with the third
scene of Act 2 one of the merriest of the play, the underlying cruelty of their actions emerge
with the fate of Malvolio.

Sir Toby’s narrative foil, Malvolio, is a character imprisoned by his own virtues (Barber), who
solidly refuses to partake in his role as a member of a comedy and therefore suffers dearly
for it. He is vividly aware of his own social status and trapped by his own perceptions of it.
Despite the fluidity of gender and sex present in the play, class boundaries are still firmly
observed (Smith). While characters such as Maria and Fabian are comfortable in their lower-
class identities, with the former preferring to seek her own power in being the mistress of
misrule (Elam), Malvolio’s insecurity and sickness of self-love dooms him to his cruel fate
within the play. By not seeking holiday, it is forced on him (Barber) and he is tricked into
transforming himself for the sake of the revellers’ amusements. By taking his life so
seriously amid this band of bacchants, he becomes a foreign body to be expelled by laughter
(Barber), an utterly uncomic character whose uncomic fate splinters the lightness of the
genre and reminds the audience of the complicity of comedy in cruelty (Ryan). While his
gulling scenes are undoubtedly the most humorous of the play, with his appearance in
cross-gartered stockings a highlight of the play, his final line – ‘I’ll be revenged on the whole
pack of you’ – threatens the consequences that the other characters have been resolutely
ignoring.

In conclusion, while Twelfth Night encourages its audience to not take life as seriously as
Malvolio might, it does not condone the selfish lavishness of Sir Toby’s lifestyle either.
Rather, its closing song seeks to answer the question Orsino initially poses. Whether music
be the food of love or not, and whether it plays on, the rain will rain every day and the
consequences of life will not be erased by blind revelry.