ENG 261 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Carpe Diem, Malvolio, Elizabethan Era
Document Summary
Example of romantic comedy called the festive comedy. Only day of the year priests allowed citizens to express their desire. Composed 1600-1601, perhaps as early as 1599. Play may have been written for epiphany sunday, jan. 6, A day traditionally given over to carnivalesque celebrations in which church practice and liturgy was parodied in elaborate play and feasting: the feast of fools. This occasion accounts for the play"s reveling in gender confusion, transgressive desire, disguise, role playing, its celebration of liberty (belch, et al. ) versus restraint (malvolio). Note orsino in posture of the forlorn, melancholic lover. Looks back to romeo and the sonnets. Note viola"s assumption of disguise of cesario, the eunuch (a castrated male). This greatly complicates the gender and desire matters, especially in shakespeare"s day when a boy actor would be playing a girl, viola, who disguises herself as a neutered boy, This boy-girl-boy becomes the love interest of a man, orsino, and a boy playing a woman,
