Monday, May 20, 2019

James on TN 4.3

TN 4.3 (James Dreyer)

Ahhh, love is truly an incredible thing, full of happiness, joy, excitement, pain, and insanity.  Throughout this play, two themes are explored: love and madness.  A commonly believed idea, in that time, was that love was a disease of madness.  Shakespeare really goes out of his way to show this concept in Act 4 Scene 3.  Olivia is madly in love with Sebastian, who she thinks is Cesario.  
Sebastian is going to marry someone he just met.  He even talks about ignoring his own rational brain and eyes in favor of an irrational action in lines 10-14.  Olivia is portrayed to be love, and Sebastian is portrayed to be madness.  Shakespeare shows that love and madness play off one another and need one another to survive by figuratively having them marry.  Shakespeare at the beginning of the play describes love to be a fantastical, full of variety, thing (Act 1, Scene 1, lines 14-15), as well as a maddening disease that everyone in love is mad.  So, when Sebastian and Olivia go to get married, it is as if Shakespeare is saying that love and madness are married to each other and cannot be parted.  Madness is brought about by love

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