Olivia, a wealthy, beautiful, and noble Illyrian lady, is courted by Orsino and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, but to each of them she insists that she how vowed to shut herself away from the world in mourning for her brother, who has recently died, and will not marry for seven years. However, she repeatedly breaks this vow. Mislead by outward appearances, she mistakes infatuation for love and her love proves self-deceiving and sentimental. Olivia thinks highly of her own good looks- “Is’t not well done”. Viola’s arrival in the masculine guise of Cesario enables Olivia to break free of her self-indulgent melancholy. Olivia seems to have no difficulty transferring her affections from one love interest to the next, however, suggesting that her romantic feelings, like most emotions in the play, do not run deep. She becomes quickly infatuated by Cesario “What kind o’man is he?” “What manner of man?” “Of what personage and years is he?”
Orsino and Olivia have similar personalities. Both claim to be buffeted by strong emotions, but both ultimately seem to be self-indulgent individuals who enjoy melodrama and self-involvement more than anything. When we first meet them, Orsino is pining away for love of Olivia, while Olivia pines away for her dead brother. They show no interest in relating to the outside world, preferring to lock themselves up with their sorrows and mope around their homes. Viola’s arrival begins to break both characters out of their self-involved shells, but neither undergoes a clear-cut change. Ultimately, Orsino and Olivia seem to be out of touch with real emotion, as demonstrated by the ease with which they shift their affections.
Malvolio is a strait-laced head servant in the household of Lady Olivia. Malvolio is very efficient but also very self-righteous and represents a puritan killjoy disapproval of drinking, singing, and fun. When we first meet Malvolio, he seems to be a simple type. A stiff and proper servant who likes nothing better than to spoil other people’s fun. “O you are sick of self-love, Malvolio” Olivia accusation sums up that Malvolio is highly critical of people below him, is disdainful towards Viola when returning the ring, is intolerant of Sir Toby’s merrymaking and is self-conceited.
At the beginning of Act 1, scene 5, we first meet Feste, the jester, or clown, or fool, of Olivia’s household. Fools were often employed in the palaces of royalty and great houses of noble families. Although they had the title of ‘fool’ they were much more intelligent than foolish. Their job was not simply to provide amusement, but to comment critically on contemporary behaviour. An “allowed fool” was able to say what he thought. No punishment would follow “There is no slander in an allowed fool” Feste earns his living by making pointed jokes, singing old songs, being generally witty, and offering good advice cloaked under a layer of foolishness. In spite of being a professional fool, Feste often seems the wisest character in the play. He delights in word play. He puns, riddles, engages in repartee, invents mock-logical arguments and seizes any opportunity to create nonsense from words. Feste spends much of his time making witty puns, as is expected, but he also has a sense of professionalism and of his own worth. As Feste says to Olivia when she orders him to be taken away, “Lady, ‘Cucullus non facit monachum’—that’s as much to say as I wear not motley in my brain”. Feste means that his brightly coloured clown’s uniform, his “motley”, doesn’t imply that he is any less intelligent than she is. Moreover, his ability to quote a Latin proverb on behalf of his argument reveals the depth of his learning.
Olivia lets Sir Toby Belch, he uncle, live with her, but she does not approve of his rowdy behaviour, practical jokes, heavy drinking, late-night carousing, or friends. Sir Toby represents the boastful, drunken braggart. His name, Belch, suggests his earthly nature. His behaviour displays the spirit of Twelfth Night- pleasure seeking revelling and the rejection of constraint. A friend of Sir Toby’s. Sir Andrew Aguecheek attempts to court Olivia, but he doesn’t stand a chance. Sir Andrew is the traditional ‘gull’, a rich, foolishness idiot. He has no chance of winning Olivia’s love and is another character in the grip of illusion. He thinks of himself as a lover, a scholar, a skilled dualist, witty and young but each is comically exposed as a delusion. Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, and Maria are Twelfth Night’s most explicitly comic characters, since they take themselves less seriously than the play’s romantic leads.
Twelfth Night is a romantic comedy, and romantic love is the play’s main focus. The very first line announces that love will be a central theme. The unhappy, moping, lovesick Orsino tells his servants and musicians, “If music be the food of love, play on” which establishes how love has conquered Orsino. In the speech that follows, Orsino asks for the musicians to give him so much musical love-food that he will overdose (“surfeit”) and cease to desire love any longer. His speech on this subject is rather complicated, as he employs a metaphor to try to establish some control over love. Orsino’s trick proves too simple, however. While it makes him tire of the music, it fails to stop him from thinking about love. Through these words, Shakespeare introduces the image of love as something unwanted, something that comes upon people unexpectedly and that is not easily avoided. The play raises the question of whether romantic love has more to do with the reality of the person who is loved or with the lover’s own imagination. Whether love is real or merely something that the human mind creates for the sake of entertainment and delight. In the case of Orsino, the latter seems to be true, as he is less in love with Olivia herself than he is with the idea of being in love with Olivia. He claims to be devastated because she will not have him, but as the audience watches him wallow in his seeming misery, it is difficult to escape the impression that he is enjoying himself.
Shakespeare shows that love can cause pain. Many of the characters seem to view love as a kind of curse, a feeling that attacks its victims suddenly and disruptively. Various characters claim to suffer painfully from being in love, or, rather, from the pangs of unrequited love. Shakespeare uses Olivia to portray romantic love as a kind of sickness that strikes people without warning. Love cannot be controlled; instead, it controls people. Olivia’s sudden attraction to Cesario recalls the way Orsino talks about his love for Olivia in Act 1, scene 1. There, Orsino speaks of love as if it were a sickness that has overcome him, and then says that he has turned into a deer and “my desires, like fell and cruel hounds, E’er since pursue me”. In the same way, Olivia describes her sudden love for the handsome, young Cesario as a disease that has overwhelmed her. Just after Cesario leaves, she asks herself in confusion, “Even so quickly may one catch the plague?”
Olivia and Orsino are the mourning lady and romantic hero of literary convention. Orsino depicts love dolefully as an “appetite” that he wants to satisfy and cannot. Olivia more bluntly describes love as a “plague” from which she suffers terribly. These metaphors contain an element of violence, further painting the love-struck as victims of some random force in the universe. Orsino worships Olivia from afar as an unattainable goddess and this is an example of courtly love. Only by long devotion, trials, and suffering could a man be with his ideal woman. Such love was sexless and idealised. Orsino was in love with the idea of love itself. For instance, Viola tells Olivia that Orsino loves her “with adorations, fertile tears, with groans that thunder love, with sighs of fire”. Courtly ideals are also reflected in Viola’s “willow cabin” speech in Act I, scene v, in which she tells Olivia what she would do if she were the one trying to court Olivia. This speech is significant because it sets the stage for Olivia’s infatuation with the person she thinks is Cesario.
Instead of helping win Olivia for Orsino, Cesario’s passionate words make Olivia fall in love with him. This development is understandable, when one considers what Viola says here, she insists that she would be outside Olivia’s gate night and day, proclaiming her love, until Olivia took “pity” on her. This kind of devotion contrasts sharply with the way Orsino actually pursues his courtship of Olivia. Instead of planting himself outside her door and demonstrating his devotion, he prefers to remain at home, lolling on couches and complaining of his broken heart. The contrast, then, between the devotion that Viola imagines here and the self-involvement that characterises Orsino’s passion for Olivia, suggests that Viola has a better understanding than Orsino of what true love should be. Viola, even though she is level- headed and clear- sighted, falls head over heals in love with the self-indulgent Orsino. This is an example of romantic love. Olivia is similarly entranced by her first sight of Viola disguised as Cesario. Both kinds of love produce ‘the melancholy lover.’
Nothing is as it seems in Twelfth Night and a concern with the difference between appearance and reality runs all through the play, most notably in Viola’s disguise as a boy, Cesario. Character’s constantly mistake each other, for example, where Olivia falls for Cesario thinking ‘he’s’ a man. Gender is one of the most obvious and much-discussed topics in the play. Twelfth Night is one of Shakespeare’s so-called transvestite comedies, in which a female character, in this case Viola, disguises herself as a man. This situation creates a sexual mess: Viola falls in love with Orsino but cannot tell him, because he thinks she is a man, while Olivia, the object of Orsino’s affection, falls for Viola in her guise as Cesario. Viola says to Olivia “What I am, and what I would, are as secret as maidenhead” (1.5.177.). There is a clear homoerotic subtext here: Olivia is in love with a woman, even if she thinks he is a man, and Orsino often remarks on Cesario’s beauty, suggesting that he is attracted to Viola even before her male disguise is removed. Many characters in Twelfth Night assume disguises, beginning with Viola, who puts on male attire and makes everyone else believe that she is a man. By dressing his protagonist in male garments, Shakespeare creates endless sexual confusion with the Olivia-Viola--Orsino love triangle. Through these disguises, the play raises questions about what makes us who we are, compelling the audience to wonder if things like gender and class are set in stone, or if they can be altered with a change of clothing.
