Death, disease and suffering in Twelfth Night Louis Priestley 11th Grade

Death, disease and suffering are very important themes in Twelfth Night and multiple charters suffer as a result of disease and death. Orsino suffers through lovesickness, which was a disease at the time and both Olivia and Viola suffer through the death of loved ones. The title also conveys the suffering of the day of Twelfth Night where people would get drunk and stuff themselves as it was the last day of the Christmas season, but there would also be sadness and suffering because of this as people have to return to work and they suffer as a result of not being able to enjoy themselves as much anymore.

Orsino portrays his suffering through lost love when he says “If music be the food of love, play on, give me in excess of it, that surfeiting,” which is an example of synaesthesia where the senses of gustatory and auditory imagery are fused together. This presents Orsino’s suffering through lost love as Orsino is essentially saying that if music nurtures love, he wants to have a large quantity of it, which is shown by the “give me excess of it.” In this instance, Shakespeare tries to show how Orsino suffers and uses synaesthesia to portray his suffering and his desire for too much love. At the time, lovesickness was seen as a...