How is the theme of excess brought out in “Twelfth Night”? Discuss with reference to I.i to III.iii.
... excess is just as strong as Orsino's. Her wealth allows her to do whatever she wants. At the beginning of the play, she has announced that she intends to mourn for her ‘brother’s dead love’ for ‘seven years’ heat’. She ‘shall not behold her face at ample view; / But, like a cloistress, she will veiled walk, / And water once a day her chamber round/ With eye-offending brine’. It is excessive, she thought of herself as the kind of person who suffers greatly, but mourning for her brother’s death would just make her feel unhappy and remind her of the sweet memories. Olivia’s love for Cesario is excess too. She cannot think about anything but the boy and how much she wants to marry him. She is longing to know the response of Cesario towards her love. By the time Cesario told her that he ‘pity’ her, she mistook it as ‘a degree of love’. His obvious refusal frustrates her. At times it makes her angry. She knows that what she does is neither wise nor dignified, but she cannot confine her overflowing love. She never gives up in pursues Cesario. She is hoping that Cesario would change his mind, but yet, she knows the truth that she is waiting for an unrequited love. Malvolio’s egotism and his excessively self-confident. The other members of the household all see that he is a hypocrite. Even Olivia, who seems to value him as a servant, says he is ‘sick of self love’. As Maria says, he believes that ‘all that look on him love him’. He is sure that only some accident of luck caused some men are ‘born great’, ‘some have greatness thrust upon them’. Because of his self-indulgence, he become the perfect target for Maria 's joke. Maria's letter is only able to convince him that Olivia loves him because that's what he wants to believe. When the letter tells him to ‘be opposite with a kinsman, surely with servants; let thy tongue tang arguments of state’, but indeed it only gives him permission to show how he already feels. His own pride causes him to act as fooli...