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  • Essay / Social Inequalities in William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night

    In particular, the playwright's use of an extended metaphor personifying the sea as "hungry", conceptually connects love to the ocean, through which the characters are influenced by love as a form of destiny. During Twelfth Night, fate and its concepts illustrate a predetermined and forced ending that defines the conclusion of the performance. It is therefore controversial whether a typical comic structure reflects similar suggestions of fate; the ending must be forced if we know how Twelfth Night (or any other typical comedy) will end before it – the wedding. By associating the spectacle with “a reversal of the fate of birth” (Howard, 1542), Shakespeare updates the performance with reality – that Elizabethan arranged marriage was a social normality. Indeed, suggesting that Shakespeare's conclusion seems rather forced allows us to examine the metaphor of Feste's final expression. The final lines of Twelfth Night trigger emotions of remorse, ending the chaos of the previous Green World with a reminder: "it rains, it rains every day", for the world will continue as it always has. So and so, Shakespeare completes the aforementioned cyclical cast of the show, an Old World was overtaken by the Green World, and then once again by the New World – reiterating the unforgiving structure of contemporary comedy. This rather narrow vision