Compare and Contrast Essay: Twelfth Night vs. She’s The Man

She’s the Man is based on Twelfth Night, and they have many similarities but also have differences. Their main plots are fairly similar, as are the names of the majority of the characters. There are also slight variations, such as Viola's transformation into Sebastian instead of Cesario in She's The Man. In both Twelfth Night and She's The Man, Orsino in Twelfth Night and the soccer captain in She's The Man are both in love with Olivia. In She's The Man, Olivia falls in love with Viola who played Cesario in Twelfth Night, and Sebastian her twin brother in both. Viola is also in love with Orsino in both the movie and the play, who believes she is a man in both.

One of the main themes in both of these are mirror images and that the world is upside down. Even though the fool is absolutely wrong about Sebastian's identity, he is entirely correct in his evaluation of the world. "Nothing that is so is so," he adds, and he is perfectly correct. The fight with Sir Andrew and Olivia's conversation are two further instances of how the mirror images are evenly distributed throughout the play. Viola is torn between two identities at the start of She's the Man. She is not able to try out for the guys' soccer team. 

She isn't feminine enough to be good at something girly so she wants to try out for soccer. Viola is able to combine the two parts of her identity throughout the film by acquiring the character of Sebastian. She takes his role and gets to play on the soccer team and by the end everyone realizes how good she is. She not only wins the soccer game, but she also enters into the debutante ball with her boyfriend. She's the man examines how high school students cope with the combination of sexual identity hobbies and heterosexuality.

Instead of becoming her brother Viola takes on the identity of Cesario in Twelfth Night and becomes a completely different person. Viola dresses up as her own twin brother Sebastian in She's The Man, something no one at Illyria Prep had ever seen before. Olivia also refused to communicate with boys in Twelfth Night since it was her method of dealing with the death of her father and brother. She recently had been in a terrible relationship in She's The Man and didn't want to be broken again. Sebastian is in London for a performance with his band in She's the Man, although, in Twelfth Night, Sebastian went missing at sea and was presumed dead by Viola.

Viola finds in Twelfth Night that Olivia is in love with her, or rather her disguised self, in a variety of ways. She figures it out in Twelfth Night when Malvolio hands her the ring Olivia thinks the disguised Viola gave her, but Viola did not. Instead of the soliloquy in Twelfth Night, they do a modern twist where Viola thinks about it in a surprised. She is in a speechless state she stares at herself in the mirror and touches her face, she smiles until she realizes how wrong the whole situation and everything is.