In this essay we are going to focus in one of the characters of Shakespeare’s comedy Twelfth Night: Duke Orsino.

Orsino is the first character that we see on stage in Twelfth Night. He is a Duke, and he is in love with a girl called Olivia. Olivia is mourning the loss of her brother. In Elizabethan society, women had to obey their fathers in choosing their future husbands, but we have to realize that Olivia is free to choose her man, because he has no father and no brother. This is a clear innovation which Shakespeare uses to make Olivia feel free, which will be very useful as a literary device to make the plot of the comedy more complicated, and to make Orsino insist to get her favour.

  In the beginning of the play (Act 1, scene i) we see Duke Orsino listening to his court, which is playing music. He first asks for more music to fill himself with love to feel totally depressed. In this scene music must be interpreted as our emotions; so Orsino wants to find a cure to his depression, and maybe through an excess of love (music) he can kill it.

"If music be the food of love play on, give me excess of it, that surfeiting, The appetite may sicken and so die ......"

“It appears form this quote that Orsino is in love with the idea of being in love. His speech is full of melodramatic words which show that he is over indulgent of love. His feelings of love for Olivia are so intense that he seems overwhelmed by his thoughts of her. As Orsino feels so fanatical about pursuing Olivia, you could claim that he is obsessed with her. The Duke is drawn to an emotion which he believes is love.” (Love in Twelfth Night).

In this first parliament he uses the conditional, because he doesn’t know what is going to happen to him, the situation is uncertain. We can remark that Shakespeare establishes a relation between love and music, what makes us see how the author describes Orsino from sensorial metaphors, which relate him to reality (Forés). In this scene, and in relation to this, we can read how Orsino talks about music and about the odour of violets (which, from my point of view, relates to the name of two of the main feminine characters of the comedy: Olivia and Viola).

“As Orsino continues to wax rhetorical and hysterical about being in love, it rapidly becomes apparent that he is playing a game with himself, which he will continue throughout the play. He is not IN love, but in love with love. Olivia is unattainable and she has told him so repeatedly. Yet Orsino persists in making himself suffer, listening to sad love songs, writing to her…” (Twelfth Night: Love). From my point of view, Orsino is trying to make himself suffer because he only concentrates on himself, as we can read when he talks about himself with the repetition of words like “me”, “I”, “mine”…

Again, the comedy takes place in a far away place for the Elizabethan audience (Illyria, in the Mediterranean). This helped the audience to locate the comedy in any time. This region is located in a place which basically represents the culture of ancient Greece and Rome, which was the model to follow in the Renaissance.

         We have to talk about love, the main theme of the play. We are involved in a love triangle in which Orsino loves Olivia. Olivia falls in love with Viola, who has changed to Cesario (a Duke’s servant), but Viola is in love with Orsino. Here we have a diagram:

“Twelfth Night consists of many love triangles, however many of the characters who are tangled up in the web of love are blind to see that their emotions and feelings toward other characters are untrue. (…) There are certain instances in the play where the emotion of love is true, and the two people involved feel very strongly toward one another. Viola's love for Orsino is a great example of true love. Although she is pretending to be a man and is virtually unknown in Illyria, she hopes to win the Duke's heart.” (Language and Dramatic conventions).

We have to bear in mind that on stage, and taking into account that in Elizabethan theatre there were not women actresses, we only find boys on stage. So, although the audience (or the reader) changes the couples all the way round, there are always homosexual relationships both physical (between actors) or during the performance (in the text). In my opinion, that was done by Shakespeare to introduce homosexual relationships on stage avoiding censorship through a very intelligent way.

“Speaking of the theatre as a site of social struggle and of the sexually ambivalent boy player as one of a sex-gender system in crisis, some critics imagine London’s playhouses as dangerously sexualized sites. (…) Yet their rehearsal of Puritan polemics not only tends to confuse theatrical representation with real-life behaviours (much like Viola) but to consider the boy player as a site of sexualized discourse rather than as a boy in performance.” (Hodgdon)

The main theme of the comedy is love. Although what we could call “true love” is what predominates in the play, there are also references to self love and to friendship. We find that Malvolio sees himself as a man women would want to marry with (self love). The most important friendship relation that we see between two characters is that of Orsino and Cesario. Viola arrives at the Duke’s court to serve him disguised as Cesario, only to be near Orsino, who gives him all his confidence. This helps Viola to know how the Duke behaves and to meet him better (friendship). Finally, this close friend relation makes easier the marriage between Orsino and Viola at the end of the play.

“She (Viola) decides to take on this identity (as Cesario) because she has more freedom in society in her Cesario mask, which is evident when she is readily accepted by Orsino, whereas, in her female identity she would not.” (Twelfth Night - Language and Dramatic Conventions). This decision makes Viola understand the different views of life being man or being woman. As Cesario she has to court Olivia for the Duke, but as a woman, as Viola herself, she has to court Orsino and to convince him that she has to forget Olivia.

From a formal aspect, we have to stress the importance of ambiguity in the comedy. As we have said before, the explicit homosexual relations introduced by Shakespeare, as well as the ambiguity used by the author in some passages of the comedy, makes the play an interesting text to study from relating it to censorship. Especially taking into account that the skill of Shakespeare to avoid that censorship and to introduce double meanings is admirable.

Orsino’s love for Olivia functions as a frame for the whole comedy, which starts with the Duke proclaiming his love for Olivia and ends marrying Viola. This makes the audience feel that they had seen a “entire” story with a concrete beginning and a concrete ending. We have to say that the structure of the play uses an innovation: for the first time Shakespeare uses a device in which two actions are happening at the same time: the love triangle between Orsino, Olivia and Viola/Cesario (main plot) and the trick that Malvolio suffers (subplot).

Jensen helps us understand the structure in relation to the comic actions: “What Twelfth Night shares is an abundance of such comic events submused to the requirements of the play’s major action but generating an energy that makes them almost independent episodes”. The comic passages make the main action to be more fluent and entertaining to the audience, as well as for the up-to-date reader. The certainty for the audience that Sebastian is not dead is only shared with the writer, and this situation makes us feel in a superior level than the rest of the characters and to anticipate a final scene in which everything will be put in order.

“Twelfth Night begins and ends with music. The first affective sounds of the play are not verbal but instrumental. After the theatre trumpets and perhaps the knocking of the stage have warned the audience of the players’ readiness, the musicians strike up behind or above the empty platform”. (Thomson) Music and songs frame the whole play, and music is present from the very beginning in a sad scene as well as in some comic passages.

To sum up, we can say that Twelfth Night is a very entertaining comedy in which we can laugh at some of the typical attitudes towards love and other relations that people have with each other, at the same time that we can how Shakespeare deals with ambiguity. Regarding Orsino, we could say that he is an example of how a high social rank person in a comedy should be described, basically through his speech and his way of expressing himself.

CONSULTED  SOURCES:

-Forés, Vicente. Shakespeare in Performance, Twelfth Night, April 26^th to 3^rd May 2007. Universitat de València.

-Jensen, Ejner J. Speaking Masterly: Comic Tone and Comic Preparation in Twelfth Night - Shakespeare and the Ends of Comedy. Indiana University Press, 1991.