the treatment of love in twelfth night elucidate

Unlike many of Shakespeare’s more boisterous clowns such as Touchstone in As You Like It or Costard in Love’s Labor’s Lost, Feste seems to show his age.

Photo of Antoinette Robinson by Tony Powell. That some of the play’s characters ultimately do pair up and banish loneliness feels sweetly miraculous, an unexpected gift against the play’s pervasively melancholy aura of missed opportunities and stagnating lives. As if in actualization of this warning, Twelfth Night has an unusual number of characters who seem never to have seized the day, emotionally speaking, or who tremble on the brink of a perpetually solitary existence. “Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty, / Youth’s a stuff will not endure.” The song urges lovers to remember that they will only be young once and that foregoing the pleasures appropriate to youth may mean forfeiting them forever. When Feste the play’s clown sings that “Youth’s a stuff will not endure” (act 2, scene 3), he does so as part of a carpe diem lyric, a song meant to persuade a young woman to give up her chastity in order to s eize the day, i.e., pursue sexual pleasure before encroaching age takes the bloom off sex and dims reproductive possibility. The play’s characters find happiness illusive or precarious, sought but seldom grasped. The emotional register of Twelfth Night, however, is less high-spirited than subdued. Twelfth Night, probably written in 1601, is the last of what have been called Shakespeare’s festive or green world comedies, so named because they foreground the high spirits of youthful lovers pursuing sexual pleasure and enjoying the love play that precedes the solemnity of marriage. “Youth’s a Stuff Will Not Endure” The Sadness of Twelfth Night’s Comic World

The treatment of love in twelfth night elucidate