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    Dramatic Form and Structure of Twelfth Night

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    Shini Matthews-Frazer
    Twelfth Night is a comedy play written by Shakespeare to be performed on stage. It follows a structure with 5 acts that build up to a happy resolution. The main plot involves a love triangle between Viola, Olivia, and Orsino, while the sub-plot focuses on tricking Malvolio. Shakespeare uses techniques like verse, prose, soliloquies, and split lines to enhance the comedy and drama.

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    Dramatic Form and Structure of Twelfth Night

    Uploaded by

    Shini Matthews-Frazer
    43 views7 pages
    Twelfth Night is a comedy play written by Shakespeare to be performed on stage. It follows a structure with 5 acts that build up to a happy resolution. The main plot involves a love triangle between Viola, Olivia, and Orsino, while the sub-plot focuses on tricking Malvolio. Shakespeare uses techniques like verse, prose, soliloquies, and split lines to enhance the comedy and drama.

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    Twelfth Night is a comedy play written by Shakespeare to be performed on stage. It follows a structure with 5 acts that build up to a happy resolution. The main plot involves a love triangle between Viola, Olivia, and Orsino, while the sub-plot focuses on tricking Malvolio. Shakespeare uses techniques like verse, prose, soliloquies, and split lines to enhance the comedy and drama.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pptx, pdf, or txt
    43 views7 pages

    Dramatic Form and Structure of Twelfth Night

    Uploaded by

    Shini Matthews-Frazer
    Twelfth Night is a comedy play written by Shakespeare to be performed on stage. It follows a structure with 5 acts that build up to a happy resolution. The main plot involves a love triangle between Viola, Olivia, and Orsino, while the sub-plot focuses on tricking Malvolio. Shakespeare uses techniques like verse, prose, soliloquies, and split lines to enhance the comedy and drama.

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    Dramatic Form and Structure

    of Twelfth Night
    Literature Gr. 11
    PLAY
    • Twelfth Night was a play written to be
    performed on stage to entertain an
    audience. Shakespeare would have had to
    consider his all-male cast of actors and the
    limited availability of props, costumes, sets
    and sound effects. There would have been
    a reliance on the actors’ speech and
    actions to help tell the story of the play.
    Shakespeare was writing this play for an
    audience made up of a mix of both upper
    and lower classes. They would either be
    seated or standing for a long period of
    time, in an open-roofed theatre, so
    Shakespeare had to ensure his play was
    worth watching.
    COMEDY
    • Shakespeare’s comedies always end happily, usually with
    a wedding, despite the characters facing difficulties and
    unfunny moments at times during the play. The young
    lovers at the centre of the play overcome challenges,
    deception and mistaken identity to finally marry each
    other. There often moments of music and dancing in
    Shakespeare’s comedies, and in the Elizabethan era,
    comedy plays would end with a song and dance for all of
    the audience to join in.
    • Shakespeare features clever plot twists and amusing
    low-life characters to add further comedy to his plays
    and appeal to the wide range of audience members.
    ACTS AND SCENES
    • Twelfth Night is divided into 5 acts, following a
    structure known as ‘Freytag’s Pyramid’ and can
    be labelled as follows: Act 1 – Introduction, Act
    2 – Rising Action, Act 3 – Climax, Act 4 – Falling
    Action, Act 5 – Resolution. In following this
    structure, each act serves a purpose in reaching
    the resolution. At various points in the play,
    scenes include soliloquies (a character speaking
    their thoughts aloud alone on stage), dialogue
    between two or more characters, asides and
    entrances and exits of characters for dramatic
    effect. Shakespeare uses each of these structure
    features to increase or decrease the comedic
    nature of the play.
    Main and Sub Plots
    • The play has two plots, the main plot and the sub-
    plot. The main plot features Viola/Olivia/Orsino’s
    love-triangle, and the sub-plot, focuses on the
    manipulation of Malvolio. The use of a sub-plot
    allows for dramatic irony to take place, as the
    audience becomes more knowledgeable than
    some of the characters. For example, the audience
    witness the development of the plot to trick
    Malvolio, whilst Malvolio does not know he is
    being deceived. This is also the case when the
    audience knows Cesario is actually a woman, when
    the rest of the characters do not. This creates a
    combination of comic and near-tragic moments
    which keeps the audience engaged.
    Verse and Prose
    • Shakespeare plays with the use of verse and prose
    in his writing for different characters. Verse is like
    poetry, where the lines spoken by a character have
    rhythm, often written in iambic pentameter, and
    with some rhyming words. Verse is often used in
    dramatic and emotional moments by upper class
    characters to heighten the impact of what is being
    said.
    • Prose is the opposite, words and sentences without
    rhyme or rhythm, and often spoken by lower class
    characters in less-important moments. The
    different styles of writing can be identified visually
    in the script by the way the sentences are laid out
    on the page.
    Line Structure
    • Looking closely at the lines written in the play,
    you can identify a variety of structural techniques
    used by Shakespeare for comedic or dramatic
    effect. There are differences in sentence length,
    both short and long, simple and complex, there
    can be repetitions of words and phrases.
    Juxtaposition can be used to create contrasts and
    conflicts between characters and ideas. Split-lines
    (or shared-lines) are where a line of verse is split
    between two or more speakers, increasing the
    pace of the delivery but also suggesting a
    connection between the characters speaking
    them.

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