Love in Twelfth Night

ELIT 351
Final Exam Project
The love in Twelfth Night The love in Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night is a mixture of miscellaneous emotions some of them derived from the events in the plot pf the play and others are caused by the nature of the characters and their inner worlds. This different compound of feelings such as desire, affection, madness and disguise naturally present such an extraordinary web of love in the play. Each major character in the play experience the love that includes these feelings above. Orsino falls in love with Olivia while Viola falls in love with him, disguising as Cesario. Olivia loves Cesario. At first this love triangle seems very problematic and unsolvable. But then later in the play when the characters understand whom they really love the triangle is solved. I think that the love in the play cannot be considered as an emotion but rather something covers various emotions such as suffering, desire, loathing, madness... The famous opening of the play conveys the idea of love is not something gives one only the pleasure and desire but also suffering and pain that causes from inaccessibility. Orsino knows that he is insanely in love with that wealthy and indifferent lady, who is more concerned with her brother’s loss and pain and Orsino’s love does not influence her even a bit. Thus the duke thinks that a cure for his unrequited love may be save all the ideas about his passion and desire to Olivia in order to make himself sick.
“When Duke Orsino invokes music as the food of love in his famous opening speech in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, he is more than likely invoking music as a kind of food in a more than merely fi gurative sense: music acts physically upon the senses, which in turn affect bodily organs via the imagination to produce an agitation in the organs via a distribution of one of the four humors that were thought, by infusing the body in different degrees and proportions, to produce affective states and, more generally, to determine an individual’s (or even a nation’s) temperament. Here is Orsino’s speech, which traces a somewhat confusing set of relations among harmonious sounds, appetite, and desire: ” (Schalkwyk 104).
ORSINO
“If music be the food of love, play on.
Give me excess of it that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again, it had a dying fall.
Oh, it came o 'er my ear like the sweet sound,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odor. Enough, no more. 'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou,
That, notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,
Of what validity and pitch soe 'er,
But falls into abatement and low price
Even in a minute. So full of shapes is fancy
That it alone is high fantastical.” (1.1)

The melancholic approach of Orsino to love reveals that the music is not a need for him any more because he the appetite of food is not something gives him pleasure rather it is something like rotten and died. His want from the love is not sweet as he states so he intentionally leaves himself melacholic ideas when he does not want more music, the food of love. It is said that melancholy arises primarily narcissistic self-love or unrequited love which the latter epitomizes Orsino’s situation.
“In short, then, Orsino’s opening speech on the relation between love, desire, appetite and the imagination does not offer a coherent philosophy of love...Initially treating love as mere appetite,he assumes that ingesting too much of its sweet food will produce “cloyment and revolt”; but once this happens, his mood shifts from the material impulses of desire to the spirit of love, which knows no nausea, and is insteadable both to encompass (and reduce) everything it encounters and also to elevate anything to quickness and freshness” (Schalkwyk 105).
Another feeling of love is take the form of madness in the play. Olivia’s love to Cesario and the Viola’s love to Orsino. When Viola says that she will try to do her best to convince Olivia reader suprizes that what makes her so determined to woo the duke.
VIOLA
“I’ll do my best
To woo your lady. [Aside] Yet, a barful strife!
Whoe’er I woo, myself would be his wife” (1.4).

It is only a few days that Viola works for Orsino in the person of Cesario and now she states she falls in love with Orsino and she would accept this though job even though she wants him to be hers. This is really a love that based on self-sacrifice because she loves him so much that his happiness becomes more significant than her love to Orsino. After Viola goes to Olivia to explain the situation and the love of her duke something unexpected takes place. Viola blames Olivia for being cruel by not responding her duke but she somehow falls in love with the messenger and Olivia cannot perceive how it could be possible in such a short time.
OLIVIA
“What is your parentage?”
“Above my fortunes, yet my state is well.
I am a gentleman.” I’ll be sworn thou art;
Thy tongue, thy face, thy limbs, actions, and spirit,
Do give thee fivefold blazon. Not too fast! Soft, soft!
Unless the master were the man. How now?
Even so quickly may one catch the plague?
Methinks I feel this youth’s perfections
With an invisible and subtle stealth
To creep in at mine eyes. Well, let it be.—
What ho, Malvolio!

What is strange about the sudden love of Viola and Olivia is that they do not seem realistic. Besides, Orsino’s approach to love displays such a imaginary sitiuation. This love triangle indeed feeds on madness and absurdity. The love of the characters are revealed with this disguised and fast-going affection. “Humoral theory helps us to give a greater degree of precision to the endlessly repeated undergraduate cliché that Orsino is not in love, but rather in love with loveitself. He is in love with himself as the paradigmatic embodiment of humoral psychology, and the dialogical nature of the play presents other characters who embody and enact a different concept of love” (Schalkwyk 109). In the final when the everything is solved and the personalities of the characters is revealed , Orsino’s calling of Viola is so strange that it evokes the question of whether he loves Viola or Cesario, is there also homosexual relationship here. “However, the play ultimately steps back from this to reaffirm heterosexual norms. At the conclusion, the saturnalia is over: Viola, the androgynous cause of all the play’s confusion, stops being ambiguous and becomes properly female again. It has been frequently noted that her union with Orsino never actually takes place within the text; rather, it is explicitly delayed until she has been put in her woman’s clothes once more” (Yearling 64).
ORSINO
"Cesario", come;
For so you shall be, while you are a man;
But when in other habits you are seen,
Orsino 's mistress and his fancy 's queen” (5.1)
The madness and vagueness in Twelfth Night takes the form of love and the real love is not something that can be considered as emotion but something above it and covers the various feelings.
Works Cited

Schalkwyk, David. “Is Love an Emotion? Shakespeare 'sTwelfth Night and Antony and Cleopatra.” Symplokē: A Journal for the Intermingling of Literary, Cultural and Theoretical Scholarship, 2010; 18 (1-2): 99-130.
Yearling, Rebecca. “Homoerotic Desire and Renaissance Lyric Verse.” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 2013 Winter; 53 (1): 53-71.

Cited: Schalkwyk, David. “Is Love an Emotion? Shakespeare 'sTwelfth Night and Antony and Cleopatra.” Symplokē: A Journal for the Intermingling of Literary, Cultural and Theoretical Scholarship, 2010; 18 (1-2): 99-130. Yearling, Rebecca. “Homoerotic Desire and Renaissance Lyric Verse.” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 2013 Winter; 53 (1): 53-71.