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Comparisons of Shakespeare Characters

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Comparisons of Shakespeare Characters
Kyle McTiernan ` Midterm 10/13/11
Shakespeare 1503

Orsino and Romeo are two of the greatest and deepest characters of all of Shakespeare’s plays. Orsino appears in the play Twelfth Night. Orsino’s first love in the play is Olivia. Although he never really spoke to her to begin with, he instantly fell in love with her. Olivia and Orsino are both very self-indulgent and enjoy creating drama amongst themselves and their peers. Orsino is filled with self-pity and mostly mopes around his home wanting Olivia to love him so badly. However, when Viola (disguised as “Cesario”/ later mistaken as Sebastian) tries to tell Olivia how much Orsino loves her Olivia is so caught up in the death of her brother that she has no interest in Orsino. “A gracious person; but yet I cannot love him”(1.5 231). Orsino knows how much Olivia can love, even though he has never spoken to her. He sees how much she still loves her dead brother, and can only imagine how much she can love a living person. This shows how Orsino is kind of clueless when it comes to true love. He doesn’t realize that Viola is a girl, since she has disguised herself as Cesario. Orsino has really gotten friendly with Cesario, or Viola, and he confides in her with all of his love for Olivia. I made the connection that Olivia and Viola have very similar names, but the letters are in different order. If you use all of the letters in Viola, you can spell Olivia. I believe Shakespeare did this on purpose. Orsino is a fool for Olivia, and within Olivia is Viola. Orsino just had to see that Olivia was not right for him, and that within his love for her, was his love for Viola. So within the name of Olivia, is in fact Viola.
Orsino was a very complicated lover in Twelfth Night due to the extenuating circumstances surrounding the whole play. Orsino is quite similar to Romeo in the way of them both falling in love with their eyes as opposed to their hearts. At first Orsino is in love
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