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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