Romance: The Part of Human Nature. Do You Agree?

BY JH Sayyar

“Twelfth Night” is a pure romance in the eyes of critics: because romance is the pleasure and excitement that you feel when you are with the person to whom you love. It is the case with the Duke in this play who loves Olivia but she has rejected his love offer openly. Now the Duke is upset and sad. The Duke feels pleasure when he realizes Olivia in his imagination. Remembering her love he at once orders Feste to play music to decrease his love sadness. So the clown sings and the Duke enjoys the music with his whole heart.

Here Julia Cambric says, “It is a romantic comedy because the romantic comedy deals with a love affair that involves a cute and idealizes heroine sometimes disguised in a man dress throughout the play.” She has to face many problems in getting her love. In this comedy Viola plays an important role and achieves Olivia’s love for the Duke concealing her sex. At the end The Duke gets Viola as his wife and Olivia gets Sebestian: Viola’s brother as her husband.

It is a fact that romance dominates the whole comedy from the beginning till end. The comic elements in other plays of Shakespeare consists of the spirit of satire, wit and ridicule and its object is to expose the follies and foibles of men and women and their struggle for happiness and worldly pleasure and success. But Twelfth Night is a mature comedy of Shakespeare and therefore there is a lot of fun and satire full of wit. They are not allowed in the comedy but Shakespeare introduces a deep tinge of romance that transforms the comic elements into a contributory factor to the total impression of gaiety and happy equipoise.

According to Shakespeare drama is an imitation of life therefore Shakespeare does not observe his own laws while writing a comedy.

To make the play lifelike he uses two plots in his famous comedy Twelfth Night. The main plot that is full of romance, sighs, songs, love speeches, wooing and cross- wooing; the sub plot that is highly comic. The main plot is a love story of Olivia, Viola, Orsino, and Sebestian while the sub plot is a conspiracy against Malvolio by Maria and Sir. Toby.

 Romantic love by nature is blind and cannot main its being in practical life, but it  is removed from ordinary life, life will be dull. As we see that all the characters in the play are lifelike and real. As the text shows:

“Who kissed his wings that brought him yesterday

And praise his wings today that he is flown.”

According to William Hazlitt, “It is full of sweetness and pleasantry…its aim at the ludicrous than the ridiculous. It make us laugh at the follies of humanity, not despise

them. Shakespeare comic genius resembles the bee rather its power of extracting sweets from weeds o poisons than in leaving a sting behind it.” Shakespeare has a unique capacity of making romantic an ordinary event of life. However, his aim was to delight the audience in the age of romance.

The main purpose of writing this play is to introduce various kinds of romantic situations of love and hate. All the characters are loyal to each other in this play. No one cheats each other. Therefore Viola gets the Duke and Olivia get Sebestian at the end. The Duke was sincere to Olivia but he could not get her confidence that is most important in love. On the other hand Viola get her confidence first of all and gets her heart for the Duke. Here Downed says, “No one author had ever so copious, so bold, so creative imaginations with so perfect knowledge of human passions and imaginations. He portraits all types of characters from king to a slave and from a clown to a genius equally with romantic touch. Because all the human beings are romantic at one time and other time comic.”

To sum up, It is a beautiful comedy full of the romance of real life. It also shows that all human beings are romantic by nature some reveal it and others hide it knowingly. The strongest passions of love appear on the surface of real life and make its expression in bold words. While the weakest passions of love die in the heart with sighs and sobs without its expressions before the lover.

Such types of love expressions create the disease of soul and makes always man sad forever. Shakespeare shows a true soul talks to a true soul and never dies but with the person to whom the soul belongs. The Duke has the strongest passions for Olivia, Viola has also strong passion for the Duke, and Olivia has strong passions for Sebastian the brother of Viola. At the end all get their respective love with the help of Viola and Sebastian.