Twelfth Night

Orsino is a very powerful nobelman in Illyria who wants to marry the Countess Olivia despite her steadfast rejection of his attempts to woo her. However, just how powerful he is remains uncertain. Until Act 1 Scene 4 he is consistently called a ‘duke’, but after this he is referred to as a ‘count’ by the other characters while still being a duke according to the stage directions. If he is a count, then he is on an equal footing in terms of status and political influence as Olivia; if he is a duke then he is significantly more important. Why the confusion? Some scholars believe that the source for Twelfth Night was in fact Shakespeare’s last draft of the play, known as ‘foul papers,’ and thus is riddled with mistakes and inaccuracies.

From the beginning, we see a few of his character traits stand out. Firstly, we have his moodiness. Orsino is highly temperamental. Shakespeare establishes this in his very first monologue, in which he very quickly turns from wanting “excess” of music, to flippantly declaring “no more.” Shakespeare even draws attention to this particular example by ending with a rhyming couplet. Later, Feste observes that Orsino has an “opal” mind, referring to how quickly he changes his opinion like an opal changing colour under the light. He also contradicts himself in his argument with Cesario about whether men or women are better lovers, and even at the very end rebounds astonishingly quickly from ‘loving’ Olivia more than anything in the world, to hating her, to deciding to marry Viola, and then liking Olivia again as a “sweet sister.” Thus, with regards to this trait, there is no character growth.

Orsino is also remarkably egotistic – although he purports to love Olivia, it’s pretty clear that he’s only in love with the idea of love itself, a narcissistic fantasy of his own making. He has no respect or empathy for the fact that Olivia’s brother just died, and all of his moping about how in love he is centres around himself; his melancholy, his devotion, how much she will worship him as his wife, rather than the qualities for which he has supposedly fallen in love with her. Indeed, the superficiality of his ‘love’ shows itself in the fact that the only real complements he manages to muster for Olivia are all about her beauty, showing no knowledge or interest in her as a person. Once again, this trait doesn’t much develop throughout the play; Orsino declares himself the epitome of “all lovers” to Cesario in Act 2 and believing himself to have more passion than any woman could, then in the final Act throws a total tantrum when he doesn’t get what he wants (Olivia).

Orsino is also a massive, melodramatic drama queen! In the above mentioned tantrum, Orsino actually threatens to murder Cesario, who he really quite likes, because he is “jealous.” And while his poetry about Olivia is lovely in terms of cadence and range of reference, showing his education, it is also riddled with repetitive clichés and extreme images that show how much he loves to exaggerate. For example, his first speech trods the well-worn and highly unoriginal poetic path of comparing love to music and flowers, and the extremes to which he takes these images – “a dying fall... [a] sweet sound” that belie an addiction to melancholy.

So basically, Orsino is a fully grown, rich and powerful man who behaves like a self-absorbed, foot-stomping child, screaming for a different shiny thing every five minutes. Clearly, Shakespeare has designed this character to be humorous, and uses Orsino’s antics to poke fun at the upper classes. But he’s not a totally lost cause; Viola falls in love with him!

Even before he knows that she is a woman, Orsino finds a trust for ‘Cesario’ that emboldens him to favour Viola over his other servants, and share with her “his secret soul.” Perhaps this is because she challenges his egotistical assumptions at every turn, trying to make him respect Olivia’s rejection of him, and defending womens’ ability to love.
In doing so, she also reveals to him her own ‘secret soul,’ albeit under disguise. There is also a chemical attraction, as Viola clearly finds Orsino handsome and even before her disguise is lifted he appreciates her own beauty, rather sensuously describing her “lip... smooth and rubious.” Thus, although he has not grown as an individual by the end of the play, in his relationship with Viola there is potential for her to temper and transform him into a better man.

So that’s great for Orsino, but I still don’t understand what Viola sees in him. The idea that her entire purpose is to improve him certainly contravenes modern feminist ideologies, but then again Shakespeare is neither modern nor a definitive feminist, so these are aspects of Orsino’s character that you can critically examine.