ENG220H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Twelfth Night, Northrop Frye, Malvolio
Document Summary
Made for the last night of christmas celebration- the twelfth night. Tragedies are often centered around a single figure named in the title, hamlet. Often we start in a world that has some kind of problem, forests, etc. make up a different sort of world. The genre is conservative in the way that we move back into the social world, there"s no great big change at the end, no feeling that you"re moving into a new social order. Comedy conserves the social world it begins in, it"s just different. Act1 is entirely devoted to setting up the issue, it ends with a clear sense of the love triangle between orsino-viola/cesario-olivia. We wouldn"t actually know viola"s name if it weren"t for the speech prefixes. We don"t meet sebastian until the second act. It"s a comfortable comedy, we know that this figure is going to break up the love triangle.
