Blog 5!
Shakespeare's Twelfth Night explores the concept of love, and whether love comes from the lover's imagination or the actual person they love. Love is a really confusing and enthralling thing, and the love triangle the occurs between Olivia, Orsino, and Viola is dynamic in the way that gender influences them. Viola comes to be Orsino's servant by disguising herself as a man under the name Cesario, and Olivia falls in love with "Cesario" who is actually Viola. This is interesting because if Viola were to reveal herself to Olivia, would Olivia still claim to be in love with her even after discovering she wasn't a man? The fluidity of the characters gender and sexuality adds a layer of complexity to the story, where at moments it makes my question things like: "Did Orsino just call Cesario hot? Did he think Cesario was hot just because he had feminine features, or is he genuinely attracted to this guy?"
When Viola and Sebastian are reunited and each end up marrying Olivia and Orsino, it made me kind of laugh because both of them are basically marrying the same person but they're opposite genders. If Viola and Sebastian are interchangeable to each couple, then does the gender of the person actually matter? Or, this could be showing the more selfish side of love, where a person only wants to be in love to feel in love and be loved in return so it doesn't even matter to them who they love. Shakespeare plays with the idea that real love might not even exist, and that its something we imagine and manifest for our own entertainment and pleasure. In the final scene when the characters easily shift their affections to new people after pining after completely different people the entire play, it made their new-found love feel completely fake. To me, it came off as very self-indulgent and transparent, since none of the characters seem to understand that true love is unselfish, unconditional, and eternal.
On November 6th I attended the Poetry Reading from Khaled Mattawa, a poet from Libya who shared a collection of his poems, and a portion of them dealt with the highs and lows of love. He spoke of the pure and simple love that he recognized for his mother when he was small and how that love was the most "illuminating" love he had ever experienced. The love that he described in richly incarnated details, delights, and implications was one that I think is a universal feeling of unconditional love that many can relate to, but to find true in love can be fickle and far-between. To find true romantic love takes time and commitment, which I think is something our Twelfth Night characters could use a lesson on.
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