Realtionship between Viola and Olivia

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Anisa Ali

26/3/2007

GS2

William Shakespeare wrote the play ‘Twelfth Night’ to suit his Elizabethan audience, so that is why perhaps there is a lot of confusion in the play, as the Elizabethans loved puzzles. In this time and age we may find it difficult to believe that a woman could be successfully disguised as a man. However in the time in which the play was written, all of the parts in the plays were acted out by men, as women were not allowed to act on stage until the late 1600’s. Therefore all female characters were acted out by young boys.

   When Viola is ordered by the Duke Orsino, to express his love for Olivia, she feels rather put out and slightly envious at the thought that the person she has to woo, could be the wife of the man she secretly adores with a deep passion: ‘Yet a barful strife. Whoe’er  I woo, myself would be his wife’.  She feels it an inner struggle within herself to put aside her own feelings, so that she can express Orsino’s love most convincingly.

   Before even meeting Cesario, Olivia is intrigued and rather impressed at the description that was given to her: ‘ Not yet old to be a man, nor young enough for a boy… He is very well favoured…one would think his mother’s milk was scarce out of him’.  Hearing that he is young, handsome and yet a delicate and determined man, she agrees to see him: ‘Let him approach. Call in my gentlewoman’

   By talking to him, Olivia is rather surprised by the way he speaks so boldly and is so outright to her, and she questions him: ‘What are you? What would you?’

  Cesario, being a female himself, can connect well with Olivia. She feels this connection but interprets it wrongly. She finds it romantic and rather appealing. Olivia finds it quite exhilerating to find a man who could connect so well with a woman’s soul: ‘With adorations, fertile tears, with groans that thunder love, with sighs of fire’. The poetic language that Cesario uses makes Olivia’s heart melt. He says he will, ‘Write loyal cantons of contemned love, and sing them loud in the dead of night; Halloo your name reverberate hills And make the babbling gossip of the air cry out ‘Olivia!’. This is the courtly language that would be expected of a suitor.

     Olivia is eager to know of what status he was born, most probably because she feels an attraction towards him, but she can only see a future with him if he were of noble birth: ‘What is your parentage?’ Cesario’s reply makes her unknowingly become more attracted to him. He tells her: ‘Above my fortunes, yet my state is well: I am a gentleman’. The mysteriousness of this answer appeals to her, as she is used to receiving straight forward answers .It is not long before Olivia feels that she is in love with Cesario, and is quite astounded that it has happened so quickly. She describes it as a plague, creeping silently and capturing her off guard, making her fall sickeningly in love: ‘How now? Even so quickly may one catch the plague?’. She is eager to find a reason for him to come back and see her again: ‘You come to me again To tell me how he takes it’. She even sends Malvolio after him, pretending that he has left his ring behind so that he may come back : ‘ If that the youth will come this way tomorrow, I’ll give reasons for’t. Hie thee, Malvolio’.

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    Viola, has only one intention, which is to put aside her own feelings for the Duke, so that she can follow the order which was given to him by Orsino. She does, however, think that Olivia acted quite peculiarly when she spoke to her:

‘Fortune forbid my outside have not charmed her

 She made good view of me; indeed so much

That sure methought her eyes had lost her tongue

 For she did speak in starts distractedly’. When Cesario or Viola, figures out that Olivia has fallen in love with ‘him’, she is distressed as well ...

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