Is Love or Madness?

After reading Twelfth Nights, I couldn’t stop thinking about the thin and slim line between Love and Madness. For instance in the play, everybody thought that Malvolio was acting as a crazy person while he was showing his feeling for Olivia. On the other hand, everybody thought that Orsino was deeply in love with Olivia.  Nobody questioned whether Orsino was the mad one and Malvolio was the one in love with Olivia. So, this made me think about the real difference among these feelings. What is love? And what is madness?

According to the Cambridge dictionary both words could be nouns. Moreover, Love is “a feeling of great fondness or enthusiasm for a person or thing” while Madness is “a stupid or dangerous behavior” But when we are in love; we act as we were stupid or under a spelt. So, does love drive us to madness? Well, I believe that the answer to that question is the reason why we spend our lives trying to find some like us that fulfill everything that we want. The other “half” of us.

Certainly, when we look a couple which looked in love, we can stop picturing us with our lover and if we don’t have a lover we think when will be my turn? Indeed, love is the one that makes us mad people. It is the feeling that we look for our entire lives and we hope that it last forever. So maybe that was the reason why Olivia never committed herself to Orsino, because she knew that Sebastian was coming for her. In the end, all we need is love.

References

Shakespeare, William. (1768-1821). Twelfth Night, or What You Will. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt et. al. New York: Norton.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-pFAFsTFTI