Shakespeare presents lots of different types of love using a variety of techniques. The plot of twelfth night is very complex and has a lot of thing happening at a time, there is never a time where there is only one thing happening other than the end when all get revealed. This type of pot allows Shakespeare to introduce lots of different types of love to create drama and perhaps even humor at times. In the next couple of paragraphs I will explore all the different types of love presented to us in Twelfth Night.
The first type of love and in my opinion the most crucial to the plot, family/sibling love. There are several displays of family love in Twelfth Night and in a way open and close the story. The biggest display of family love is that between Viola and Sebastian. They are both shipwrecked in the start of the story and Viola thinks that her brother disappeared so we see the heartache of losing a brother. A quotation to support this point would be when Viola says ‘O my poor brother’. This is how the story starts off but then this is returned to at the end of the story when Sebastian, Viola’s brother who she thought was killed in the storm, returns causing much confusion amongst the other characters that Viola met throughout the story but it is soon made clear.
That however is not the only display of sibling love in Twelfth Night. Olivia is also in emotional pain after losing her brother and you can see that she clearly misses him. ‘She is in seven years of mourning’ shows the extent of Olivia’s love for her brother and shows how much she cared.
The next type of love that I will explore is unrequited love. There is a lot of this love in Twelfth Night and it is mainly in the love triangle between Orsino, Olivia and Viola/Cessario. Orsino loves Olivia but she wants nothing to do with him, Olivia loves Cessario but doesn’t know that Cessario is actually Viola and Viola loves Orsino