1. Don't try to climb out of your social class:
- Malvolio tries to climb
- Queen Elizabeth HATED social climbers
- The play was performed in front of her.
2. Love was something you had to SUFFER for:
- Orsino is love-sick
- Many of the characters seem to view love as a kind of curse, a feeling that attacks its victims suddenly and disruptively.
- Various characters claim to suffer painfully from being in love, or, rather, from the pangs of unrequited love.
- At one point, Orsino depicts love dolefully as an “appetite” that he wants to satisfy and cannot (I.i.1–3); at another point, he calls his desires “fell and cruel hounds” (I.i.21).
- Olivia more bluntly describes love as a “plague” from which she suffers terribly (I.v.265).
- Even the less melodramatic Viola sighs unhappily that “My state is desperate for my master’s love” (II.ii.35).
- This desperation has the potential to result in violence—as in Act V, scene i, when Orsino threatens to kill Cesario because he thinks that -Cesario has forsaken him to become Olivia’s lover.
3. Who's the man?? Gender is uncertain--and they didn't understand the whole IDENTICAL twin thing!!
It all works out in the end--right? That whole BROMANCE with Antonio is still AWKWARD... Whoo. I guess Antonio is just protecting Sebastian from Orsino, right??
You could have them make LISTS of things that repeat, or patterns that repeat, or things they see over and over and over again:
Motifs
Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.2 good discussion questions:Letters, Messages, and Tokens
Madness
Disguises
Mistaken Identity
What role does Malvolio serve in the play? Does his fate seem unjust? Is it out of place in a romantic comedy? If so, why might Shakespeare have included it?
Paying particular attention to the fate of Malvolio and Antonio, discuss how Shakespeare brings some ambiguous touches to the happy ending. Why include Antonio? Why include a friend who gets totally shafted by Sebastian (ignore the who bromance thing... Sebastian shafts Antonio who saved his life! Antonio comes to help Sebastian whom he thinks will be treated terribly by Orsino, and Antonio basically gets tossed out of Illyria with nothing. What does this tell you about class and "friendship"?
