How do characters respond to love in Twelfth Night?

love is an unreality. He believes that he is the one true authority on love. This means that Orsino might believe that he is the ultimate lover of all time, but we can clearly see from his methods of chasing Olivia as a mere object of desire, he clearly is not. However, Orsino has a huge amount of passion in the way he speaks, even if he does not actually have the passionate love. “There is no woman’s sides can abide the beating of so strong a passion as doth give my heart”. As such, there is more to Orsino’s love than just the over inflated ego (“one selfsame king”) and the materialism (“To her in haste; give her this jewel”). There is some passion too.                                        Viola’s love for Orsino is the most constant of the play from beginning to end and does not falter in any way throughout – it is pure. She takes an interest in Orsino from the start mentioning that her father has named him before, “he was a bachelor then,” and as we know, she marries him at the end of the play. I find that one of Viola’s qualities in her character is to be very giving. She continuously obeys Orsino’s orders to charm Olivia as Cesario, even though if her efforts succeeded it would mean that she could never marry Orsino. Viola speaks of love with real feeling and emotion, speaking from the heart, and this seems to make her own love very much more genuine. I admire Viola for the way she does not show any jealousy in front of Olivia, even though the man she loves is in love with her. Because her love is hidden throughout the play, and she is so patient, the viewers are given a sense of warmness towards Viola, a feeling of wanting her to succeed.                                                 I think that Viola’s love is the most real out of all the characters in the play. She is full of love for the right reasons; she doesn’t look for the flaws in people and is not attracted to Orsino for his status or money. She is attracted to him for the person he is and the character he has. Viola is a very sincere character when it comes to her love and she is not afraid to speak her true mind about it, which makes it all more real.                         The best definition of Olivia’s love is probably that it is too hasty, too assuming. Her love for Viola as Cesario comes about in one meeting when Viola is sent to her for the first time, and even then she is not interested in the way Viola/Cesario speaks, she is besotted with her/his looks. She really does not care for Orsino, so she toys with his feelings just to see Viola/Cesario again. Olivia doesn’t approach Cesario face to face but instead she deceives him into taking her ring, which she makes Malvolio deliver to Cesario. Olivia does not think of love as a feeling, and at one point, she compares it with sickness (“Even so quickly may one catch the plague?”). At this quotation, we bear in mind that getting sick, and getting better again, can be a very quick process. So, Olivia’s love could also be a quick thing, as she does not know anything about the person she ‘loves’. Another example of Olivia’s careless, speedy passion is how she mistakes Sebastian for Cesario, and marries him. It shows how superficial she is and because she is obsessed with looks, how she mistakes very different people to be the same, even though one is a woman. When she sees both Viola dressed as Cesario and Sebastian facing one another, she exclaims “most wonderful,” as she is seeing two very attractive men. These three characters each give a very different outlook on the concept of love. In this essay I have explored an example of self imagined love in the form of Orsino’s passion towards Lady Olivia, real, honest love from Viola towards Orsino, and wild, misplaced love from Olivia to Viola/Cesario. These are the main loves of the play, and form a nice little love-triangle.