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Twelfth Night vs. She’s The Man
Love is something people fall in and out of. It’s something that people take for granted because they feel they deserved to get the love from a specific person that they desire. And love does crazy things to people, and so when they feel that they aren’t getting that some in return, they can become desperate and do crazy things. Take Olivia, for example. Since she is of such high authority, it seems as though she thinks she deserves to get the love she wants. So when she is denied it, she doesn’t take it well and keeps pushing and pushing to get it in return. Olivia has a funny story when it comes to love, through the inconsistent and superficial love she still seems to find a way to get have it her way, even though love isn’t something you can have, it has to be earned over time. And in the end, she still seems to get the love she wants over an insanely short time. People act and make decisions based on what they love, care for, and believe in and their motivations, and once someone is dedicated to that one thing or person, it is an unbreakable bond, especially when it comes to love.
Williams Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night includes a lot of love, betrayal, tricks, and drama in the play. It also contains many other different themes that are still relevant today, for example, mistaken identity, madness, and love. The theme of love can be broken down and examined in many different ways. Love is seen many times and in different ways in this plays, for example, the love triangle, which included Cesario, Orsino, and Olivia and also the trick on Malvolio. The common theme of love in this play is complicated. Precisely what is seen and what will be addressed is that unrequited love can make a person unhappy and can make a situation complicated.
She’s The Man is a modernized comedy film based on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night play. Both the movie and the play have superficial similarities and differences, but the central theme, distorted love triangle, is preserved. For instance, the two have a basic plot in which girls are disguised as men to enable them to execute prescribed gender roles in society. Language, title, and setting are just but a few notable differences between the two theatric works. There is a vast variation in language between the film and the play where the different settings might have played a significant role—Shakespeare the language to express different attitudes, personalities, and feelings of characters in various circumstances. From the talking of Malvolio, the reader can deduce that he is intelligent as compared to Feste, who is more inclined towards the use of puns and playing with words (Henschel et al., 2016).
Conversely, there is a smooth-flowing of words from Orsino “If music is the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die” (Henschel et al., 2016). From this excerpt, the audience is lured to enter into a sense of pity coined from his self-induced love struggle, but at the same time creates humor, given that he had never met Olivia in person. From another perspective, the language in She’s The Man is written in the typical language style used today. Nevertheless, though the characters in the film slightly convey their message and personality, it is nothing compared to the way the roles in the Twelfth Night express their feelings. The use of natural and explicit language in the film compensates for the pun used, enabling the viewer to comprehend and understand the personalities of the characters.
The Twelfth Night is set in the Elizabethan day in a mythical land in England where Viola and her twin brother Sebastian have washed up the shore after the ship they were sailing in gets wrecked. The two believe that each other is dead, and Viola sees it as a chance to masquerade as a boy, Cesario. Fortunately, she manages to serve Duke Orsino, whom, with time she becomes infatuated. On the contrary, She’s The Man is set in American society in a school named Illyria, where Sebastian is ought to be attending school. Unlike in the Twelfth Night, in the film, the twins believe each other is alive, but Sebastian does not know that her sister has taken his place on the soccer team.
Additionally, there are somethings either added or removed from the film which are not there in the play. For instance, the central theme of She’s The Man is soccer, making the film more modern, while there is no such thing in the play. Soccer is used as a vehicle to advance Viola’s interests, such as using it to woo back her boyfriend and prove that she is a better player than some of the boys. Viola does not have a boyfriend in the play, another feature that is distinguishable from the two plays. It can be argued that Andy Fickman added a boyfriend in the film to depict the modern world where teens have boyfriends unlike in the past. The similarities highlighted here show different times in the world and the crucial characteristics that make them distinguishable from each other.
Though the name of characters in both the film and the play has not changed, there is a distinct variation on how some characters are portrayed in these two artistic work. The initial separation of Viola and Sebastian, in the play, was not voluntarily but instead out of disaster. Shipwreck. However, in the movie, the two are separated voluntarily when Sebastian decides to drop out of school to go and join his bands for a musical performance in London (Shakespeare, 2001). After the disaster, the two are devastated due to their loss, but in the movie, Viola is more than willing to let her brother disappear. Ironically, as Sebastian is leaving, he asks her sister to cover for him while he is away, who goes ahead and disguises herself as him. In other words, instead of Viola covering for him like giving excuses for why he is not at school, she sees her brother’s absence as an opportunity to advance her passion for playing soccer after the girls’ team was cut from her school.
Another notable difference is that in She’s The Man, Viola changes to Sebastian for the love of soccer and to win her boyfriend back. At the same time, in the play, she becomes Cesario to be a boy servant for financial and protection needs (Shakespeare, 1936). Another character that has changed is Olivia, who in the She The Man, laments for breaking up with her boyfriend while in the Twelfth Night, she griefs out of sorrow after losing her brother and father. Malvolio also is depicted differently wherein the play he is Olivia’s steward while in the film, he is Malcolm’s tarantula. Despite all these notable changes, the theme of love was present in both the stories but with slightly different partners.
Works Cited
Henschel, M. ‘The Twelfth Night and She’s the Man,’ UWGB Commons for the Digital and Public Humanities, Spring 2016, http://www.uwgbcommons.org/archives/32884, (accessed 2 May 2018).
Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night. Edited by Ian Waldron. Nelson, 2001.
Shakespeare, W., and Morton L. Twelfth night, or, what you will. Pellegrini & Company, 1936. 6-85.