'Shakespeare presents desire as leaving characters mistaken about their own hearts in Twelfth Night.' To what extent do you agree?

Written amid the Elizabethan festival of Epiphany, a night of licensed misrule when servants mocked masters and the rigid Tudor hierarchies of class and gender were briefly upended, William Shakespeare's Renaissance romantic comedy Twelfth Night (c.1601) explores the irrational and bewildering nature of romantic desire.¹ In it, while Shakespeare highlights, to a major extent, how desire, when built on idealised fantasy and self-regard, distorts judgement into a kind of confusion, he proceeds to challenge such bewilderment as individuals who love with patience and self-awareness ultimately achieve genuine self-knowledge.² Indeed, Shakespeare highlights how self-absorption transforms desire into a misreading of the heart. However, Shakespeare depicts individuals resorting to disguise and deception in an attempt to manage a world unhinged by desire. Ultimately, despite the efforts of those who seek to cure their confusion through disguise and scheming, Shakespeare concludes that only those who relinquish self-love are rewarded, leaving the deluded to their "madness".³

Initially, Shakespeare exposes how melancholic self-absorption transforms desire into an obsessive confusion, also revealing how unchecked ambition allows love to curdle into self-ignorance.⁴ Opening on the languid command "If music be the food of love" before demanding "Give me excess of it", Orsino frames his own lovesickness through the language of gluttony, surrounded by "Musicians attending" upon his private grief to demand a soundtrack to satiate his mistaken lovesickness. Confessing a fancy "so full of shapes" that reality cannot rival "fair Olivia", the Illyrian ruler views himself through the Petrarchan conceit of being "turn'd into a hart⁵", a self-mythologisation that disguises indulgent egotism as helpless victimhood. Drawing upon romantic melancholy through Elizabethan humoral theory, where "liver, brain and heart" surrender their sovereign thrones to fancy before the playwright brands such indulgence "high fantastical", Shakespeare satirises aristocratic courtship, implying Illyrian anguish is privileged boredom masquerading as heartbreak. Where Shakespeare depicts the languishing nobleman consumed by the idea of love rather than its object, he further elucidates how the same desire drives the stranded noblewoman to fashion fantasy into self-ignorance.⁶ Recognising her extreme vulnerability as stranded noblewoman without her brother Sebastian, Viola petitions the Captain to "conceal me what I am⁷," a plea whose carnivalesque inversion exposes disguise as deliberate strategy to present a "fair and outward character", in which Shakespeare underpins a friction between social masks and unowned feelings. In viewing her flight as "mine own escape" before requesting to be presented "as an eunuch," she doubles the era's own convention of boy actors playing women, so the all-male stage renders her gender concealment a layered, self-referential deception the audience alone can see. Thus, resolving to "serve this duke," Viola tethers to a fabricated identity so private grief for Sebastian is subsumed by public performance, with Shakespeare demonstrating how deliberate fabrications trap their disguisers in deadlocks of self-knowledge that defy easy resolution. Thus, it is only when self-indulgent longing combines with a wilful refusal to know themselves clearly that love descends into the confusion that grips Illyria.⁸