New questions about human existence took form. The dance of death was now more feared than ever. This introduced the prominence of mortality. Order custom essay Melancholy in Twelfth Night This removed the concept of life everlasting from the framework of eternity. And thus man became conscious of the beauty and transience of life. With this was born man’s pride in being man in the mortal universe. The new astronomical discoveries allowed man to explore the universe independent of the scriptures. Then with Renaissance came yet undiscovered knowledge.
Thus during the middle ages all human activity was directed towards God. After this Shakespeare moves on to the tragedies and the problem plays – this is the last play where joy is not alloyed with problems of evil and anti-life.Įverything that is subject to time is valueless, this was the medieval conception. Significantly, Twelfth Night is the last of the romantic comedies. Here the recognition is of the transience of life, unlike in Cymbeline where the rediscovery of Perdita symbolises the rediscovery of one’s soul. Only, Keats finds reassurance in the fact that swallows will return, but Shakespeare is concerned with the cessation of life which looms over the whole play. The mood is similar in Keats’s ‘To Autumn’, Hedge-crickets sing and now with a treble soft The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft Īnd gathering swallows twitter in the skies. This cycle of life is an extension of the ancient pagan fertility rituals. The feast of epiphany is the last festival of the Christmas season, after which death takes over. Epiphany, according to Christian mythology, is the time when the shepherds recognized the birth of Christ. The Christian associations of the title suggests the carpe diem theme which runs through the play. Twelfth Night is the merriest of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies, it is also the saddest.
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