Love, as a power of the imagination, is liable to find itself at odds with the reality-principle – whether this manifests itself as the indifference of the person loved, as in Twelfth Night and All’s Well, or as the cynical ‘realism’ we hear in the voice of Iago in Othello. These three plays, written close together in time, feel very different in their relation to realism. Twelfth Night, a comedy, takes place in Illyria, a place of the imagination which allows of multiple escapes from shipwreck, resourceful cross-dressing, and the lucky provision of identical twins. Othello, a tragedy, is grounded in the realities of army life, against which the soaring romance of the Othello-Desdemona relationship makes a precarious claim. And somewhere inbetween the two, All’s Well that Ends Well combines a strong flavour of folk-tale, where impossible tasks get accomplished, with an all-too-realistic account of how young men actually behave. Whether love can flourish seems, in these plays, to have something to do with genre, to the hospitality or hostility of the world of the play to the transformative flights of the imagination.
It also has something to do with the contrasting nature of male and female experience – the difference between men’s and women’s worlds, and whether connections can be made between them. In Twelfth Night, Orsino allows himself to share ideas about the difference between male and female love with his servant Cesario that he would never confide to a woman – but there is (perhaps?) enough gender fluidity in that play to break such hard distinctions down. In All’s Well the coming together of man and woman in marriage is precisely the impossible task, such is the gap between the masculinity of Parolles and Bertram and the passionate love of Helena, who casts female modesty aside to get, finally, what she desires. In Othello, as in All’s Well, military life marks out the male sphere of action, and although Desdemona, ‘fair warrior’, respects no such boundaries, the tragedy partly turns on how hard it is for husband and wife to know one another once they have stepped outside the normal conventions.
In the classes we shall be exploring these matters through looking closely at key passages from the plays.
Learning outcomes
- Enhanced appreciation of the plays set;
- Ability to relate Shakespeare’s representation of love to matters of genre and of language;
- Making and reflecting on connections and comparisons between the plays set.
