Despite claiming to be this deeply in love, Orsino is sending his courtiers to woo Olivia on his behalf. As he is the Duke, he doesn’t go himself because he doesn’t want to risk the embarrassment of being rejected in person.
In the first scene Valentine returns from Olivia’s country estate with the response he received from her handmaid. He was not allowed in to talk to Olivia in person, as he was told Olivia was mourning the death of her brother by refusing to leave the house for seven years. He was told that for those seven years “like a cloistress she will veiled walk” and that once a day she would “water her chamber round with eye offending brine”. This means she was planning on wearing a veil as a closed order nun would, and cry in her bedroom every day. To do this for seven years seems to be a disproportionately long time, at that time the more normal period of grieving was six months or a year. Olivia has plunged into grieving with the same haste as Orsino has into love.
The way in which Olivia grieves is in stark contrast to that of the other female protagonist, Viola. At the time the play is set, it would have been hard to be an independent women, as most women were looked after by their husband, family or employer. Both Olivia and Viola have been put into this situation by the death of their brothers, but they both cope with it in different ways. While Olivia becomes withdrawn, Viola, although initially devastated, immediately takes constructive action to get out in the world and take control of her own well being. She constructs a plan with the help of the Captain to become Cesario and disguise herself as a eunuch (a castrated male servant with a high pitched voice) to go to serve the Duke. Olivia becomes dependant on the only remaining men in her life, but who are also the wrong sort of men. These men are Malvolio, her head servant, her uncle Sir Toby Belch, a drunkard, and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Sir Toby’s idiotic friend who he has brought to the household as a suitor for Olivia. She is letting her servants run the household for her and Sir Toby and Sir Andrew are getting away with the heavy drinking and irresponsible behaviour that would normally have got them thrown out the house. These are the only men she has seen since the death of her brother, so when she sees Viola/Cesario she falls for her, because compared to the men she has been with Viola/Cesario would seem to be perfect.
One theme which is touched upon in the first scene and later recurs throughout the play is that love is seen to be destructive. While in the first scene Orsino claims that when he first saw Olivia he thought she “purged the air of pestilence”, Olivia talks of the plague in Act 1, Scene 5 as destructive. She says “even so quickly may one catch the plague?” to tell Viola/Cesario that she is falling in love. By comparing it to the plague she shows she does not want to fall in love, but is going to do nothing to stop it as she says “well, let it be”.
Another comparison made to illustrate loves destructiveness is with the sea. Orsino again uses metaphors to make his point, comparing love to the sea. He says that the spirit of love “notwithstanding thy capacity, Receiveth as the sea”. What he means is that his love has the capacity of the sea, but nothing that enters retains its value, the sea and his love both destroying everything. He echoes this sentiment in Act 2, Scene 4 saying that his love is “all as hungry as the sea, and can digest as much”. In this scene, Shakespeare consciously echoes the words of his opening theme.
In Act 2, Scene 4, Orsino continues to ponder the nature of love as he does in Act 1, Scene 1. He is questioning Viola/Cesario on who it is she has loved. She is trying to hint that it is him by saying they are of his complexion and his years. Orsino thinks that men are fickle and that Viola/Cesario shouldn’t love a woman older than herself. He says “our fancies are more giddy and unfirm, more longing, wavering sooner lost and worn, than women’s are”. He is saying that men are shallow, and that they will lose interest when a woman loses their looks, so men should always marry younger women.
In Act 1, Scene 1, he shows how hard it is for him to keep interest, even when he is so in love it is all he can think about. The very first line of the play is “If music be the food of love, play on”. Orsino wants the music to stimulate thoughts of love, he wants more. In the last line of the scene this is also shown, when he says “away before me to sweet beds of flowers: love-thoughts lie rich when canopied with bowers”. He wants to maintain his heightened emotional state and he needs it to be artificially induced because eventually he will be doing it because he feels he has to, rather than because he wants to. He wants to continue in this state until “The appetite may sicken and so die”.
