Twelfth Night: Act 2, Scene 4 – Analysis
Scene Profile – At a Glance
- Location: Duke Orsino's palace.
- What Happens: Orsino talks to Viola (as Cesario) about love, declares men's love deeper than women's, and sends her back to Olivia. Feste sings "Come away, death." Viola tells the veiled story of her "sister" who died of unrequited love – the "patience on a monument" speech.
- Key Characters: Orsino, Viola (as Cesario), Feste.
- Dramatic Function: The scene deepens the Orsino – Viola relationship, tests Orsino's self-knowledge, and gives Viola her most sustained personal revelation while keeping her identity hidden.
- Famous Quote:
"She sat like patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?"
(Viola, Act 2, Scene 4) - Why It Matters: Viola speaks her love for Orsino in disguise as the story of another woman. The scene's real subject is hidden speech – the truth that cannot yet be told – and it is one of Shakespeare's most delicate explorations of constrained feeling.
Scene Summary
Orsino calls for music and asks to hear the song performed the previous night, one that he says suits his melancholy better than fashionable new tunes. While Curio fetches Feste, Orsino turns to Viola and muses on love, advising her that a man's beloved should always be younger than himself, since women's love does not last. Viola replies carefully: about your years, she says, of your complexion. Orsino misses the implication entirely.
Feste arrives and sings "Come away, death" – a song about dying of unrequited love, delivered with easy irony. Orsino pays him and dismisses everyone else, keeping only Cesario. He then returns to his argument: he claims his love for Olivia is vaster than any woman could sustain, and that women's love is mere appetite compared to his depth of feeling.
Viola challenges him. She suggests he imagine a woman who loves him with exactly the passion he feels for Olivia, and who is equally unable to make him love her back. Should she not simply accept that answer? Orsino insists no woman could feel so strongly. Viola then tells the story of her "father's daughter" – a woman who loved a man, never told him, and sat "like patience on a monument, smiling at grief." She tells the story without identifying herself, and the conversation ends with Orsino sending her to Olivia once more.
Orsino on Love and Music
The scene opens with Orsino in a revealing mood. He prefers the old song not despite its melancholy but because of it. Modern tunes are too "giddy" – they do not suit a lover of his depth. The music request tells us something important: Orsino curates his own emotions, selecting the soundtrack that best expresses the feeling he wants to inhabit.
Original
Come hither, boy: if ever thou shalt love,
In the sweet pangs of it remember me;
For such as I am all true lovers are,
Unstaid and skittish in all motions else,
(Orsino, Act 2, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Come over here, boy. If you find true love,
In its enchanting anguish, think of me,
For as I am now, all true lovers are,
Impulsive, unpredictable and skittish
Orsino invites Viola to see him as the archetype of all true lovers – impulsive, unstable, consumed. He means it sincerely. The irony Shakespeare builds here is quiet but persistent: the person he is speaking to is herself a true lover, and she is consumed by exactly the feeling he is describing, directed at exactly the person in front of her. His lecture on love lands on the most attentive possible listener.
"Come Away, Death" – Feste's Song
Feste's song is the emotional centrepiece of the scene – a lament for a lover dying of unrequited love, performed with professional ease by a man who clearly does not believe a word of it. The song's extravagant self-pity is both beautiful and faintly absurd, which is exactly right for the scene: it holds up a mirror to Orsino's own posture.
Original
Come away, come away, death,
And in sad cypress let me be laid;
Fly away, fly away breath;
I am slain by a fair cruel maid.
My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,
O, prepare it!
My part of death, no one so true
Did share it.
(Feste, Act 2, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Take me now, take me now death,
In a coffin of cypress wood, lay me to sleep.
Go away, go away, breath,
I died when that beautiful girl made me weep.
My white burial gown, with branches of yew,
Oh, prepare it!
Nobody so honest, with death – it is true –
Did share it.
After the performance Feste makes a sharp observation: Orsino's mind is "a very opal" – constantly changing colour. The jester says it lightly and as a compliment, but it is one of the play's clearest-eyed diagnoses of Orsino's character. The man who commissions a death-song about constancy in love is himself the most inconstant character in the play.
The Argument About Love
Orsino's claim that no woman can match his depth of feeling is one of the play's most revealing passages. He speaks it in absolute sincerity, and Shakespeare gives it considerable rhetorical force – the sea simile returns, the conviction is unwavering. But Viola is in the room, and we know exactly how much she feels.
Original
There is no woman's sides
Can bide the beating of so strong a passion
As love doth give my heart; no woman's heart
So big, to hold so much; they lack retention
Alas, their love may be called appetite,
No motion of the liver, but the palate,
That suffer surfeit, cloyment and revolt;
(Orsino, Act 2, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
There is no woman able
To tolerate the pain of so much passion
That beats within my heart; no woman's heart
Can hold as much as mine; they can't retain it.
Regrettably, their love is more like hunger,
And not a deep emotion, but desire
That can be overfed to make them sick.
The irony is structurally perfect: the person listening to this argument is a woman in love with the man making it, feeling precisely the passion he insists women cannot feel. Viola does not explode the argument directly but answers it obliquely, through the story of her sister. The gap between Orsino's certainty and the truth sitting before him is one of the play's great sustained ironies.
"Patience on a Monument" – Viola's Hidden Confession
Viola's account of her "father's daughter" is the scene's most affecting passage. It is also one of the boldest dramatic moves in the play: a declaration of love made in perfect concealment, audible to the audience and invisible to its object. Orsino asks about the sister; we know he is hearing about himself.
Original
A blank, my lord. She never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud,
Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy...
(Viola, Act 2, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Then nothing happened, for she never told him,
But hid it, like a worm hides in a rose bud
And eats away at it. She pined for him
With melancholic, love-sick jealously,...
The worm-in-the-bud image is precise and devastating: concealment does not preserve love, it consumes it from within, exactly as a larva consumes a flower before it can open. Viola is describing her own situation in the third person, and the delicacy of the choice – to confess everything while confessing nothing – is among the play's most quietly painful moments. When Orsino asks at the end whether her sister died of it, her answer – "I am all the daughters of my father's house / And all the brothers too" – is as close to a confession as she can manage.
Language and Technique
- Dramatic irony throughout: Almost every exchange in the scene means something different to the audience than it does to Orsino. When Viola says her beloved is "of your complexion" and "about your years", we understand; he does not.
- The worm-in-the-bud image: Concealment feeding on the cheek like a larva in a rosebud is one of Shakespeare's most compact metaphors – it makes emotional self-suppression into something physically destructive.
- "Patience on a monument": A figure seated on a funerary statue, smiling through grief – the image makes emotional endurance visual and monumental, but also slightly inhuman. Patience here is not a virtue; it is a kind of petrification.
- Feste as ironic commentator: His remark that Orsino's mind is "a very opal" – always changing colour – punctures the Duke's pretensions to depth without Orsino noticing. Feste's commentary is directed at the audience more than the characters.
- Verse throughout: The scene is almost entirely in verse, including Orsino's and Viola's dialogue, marking the scene's seriousness and the elevated emotional stakes of the conversation.
Key Quotes from Act 2, Scene 4
Quote 1She sat like patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?
(Viola, Act 2, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
And endlessly sat on a monument,
Smiling in grief. So, is that not true love?
Come away, come away, death,
And in sad cypress let me be laid;
Fly away, fly away breath;
I am slain by a fair cruel maid.
My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,
O, prepare it!
My part of death, no one so true
Did share it.
(Feste, Act 2, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Take me now, take me now death,
In a coffin of cypress wood, lay me to sleep.
Go away, go away, breath,
I died when that beautiful girl made me weep.
My white burial gown, with branches of yew,
Oh, prepare it!
Nobody so honest, with death – it is true –
Did share it.
Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm,
More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn,
Than women's are.
(Orsino, Act 2, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Us men are frivolous with our affections;
We're overwhelmed with love that doesn't last,
Unlike the love of women.
For women are as roses, whose fair flower
Being once displayed, doth fall that very hour.
(Orsino, Act 2, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
For women are like roses whose sweet flower
They show just once; it's gone within the hour.
Key Takeaways
- Orsino's self-contradictions: He claims his love is vast and constant, then admits men's love is "giddy and unfirm." The play lets both statements stand, revealing a man who believes whatever suits him.
- Feste's song as commentary: "Come away, death" performs Orsino's pose with gentle irony – a professional death-lament delivered for money makes the sentiment beautiful and slightly absurd at once.
- Viola's hidden confession: The "patience on a monument" speech is a declaration of love delivered under cover of a third-person story. Orsino hears a tale about a sister; the audience hears Viola speak her heart.
- Dramatic irony at its most sustained: Almost everything in the scene means something different depending on whether you know Cesario is Viola. The gap between Orsino's knowledge and ours is the source of the scene's emotional depth.
- Women's love defended: Viola's speech disproves Orsino's theory by example. The "sister's" love – silent, patient, consuming – is the deepest love in the scene, and it belongs to a woman.
Study Questions and Analysis
What does the "patience on a monument" image reveal about Viola's situation?
The image is Viola's most revealing speech in the play. On the surface she is telling a story about her father's daughter; in fact she is describing herself precisely. The woman who "never told her love" and sat "like patience on a monument, smiling at grief" is Viola in this very scene – seated beside the man she loves, unable to speak, composing her face into the appropriate expression for a loyal servant.
The monument image is carefully chosen. A funerary monument in Shakespeare's England typically featured a reclining stone figure – serene, dignified, motionless. To sit like patience on such a monument is to make grief decorative, to turn feeling into a posture. C. L. Barber, in Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (1959), reads Viola as a figure who embodies the genuine feeling that the comic world will eventually vindicate; the monument speech is the scene where we see most clearly what that feeling costs. When Orsino asks whether the sister died, Viola's answer – "I am all the daughters of my father's house / And all the brothers too" – hovers between confession and evasion, as close to the truth as she can come.
Is Orsino capable of genuine love?
The scene makes this genuinely uncertain. Orsino's claim that his love is deeper than any woman could match is undermined almost immediately by his own admission that men's "fancies are more giddy and unfirm." He cannot sustain a consistent position about love for more than a few lines. Feste's aside – that Orsino's mind is "a very opal", forever changing colour – is the sharpest diagnosis.
Yet the scene also shows something more sympathetic. When Orsino listens to Viola's account of her sister, he asks quietly: "But died thy sister of her love, my boy?" The question is gentle and curious; for a moment the posturing stops. Some productions play Orsino as genuinely moved here, sensing something he cannot quite articulate. Harold Bloom, in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), finds Orsino genuinely romantic under the self-indulgence, someone who will grow into real love when Viola is revealed. The scene supports both readings: a man performing love who may also genuinely be capable of it, once the right object and the right conditions arrive.
What is the dramatic function of Feste's "Come away, death" in the scene?
Feste's song occupies an interesting position. It is commissioned by Orsino as emotional accompaniment to his melancholy – he wants the old, plain song that matches his mood. But Feste performs it with professional irony, and after finishing he comments on Orsino's changeability before being dismissed. The song and the comment together form a single act of gentle mockery: here is your death-lament, paid for and delivered, and by the way, you are a man whose mind changes colour like a gemstone.
The song's imagery – coffin of cypress, shroud of white, black coffin – is deliberately excessive. Shakespeare writes a song that sounds like the most extravagant courtly-love lament precisely so that Feste can deliver it without conviction and Orsino can miss the joke. For the audience, the effect is complex: the song is beautiful, and the sentiment it expresses is real for Viola even if it is performance for Orsino. The same lyric that mocks one character's posture illuminates another character's genuine pain.
How does the scene develop the theme of gender and identity?
The scene's central argument – about whether men or women love more deeply – is the most direct engagement with gender and identity in the play's first half. Orsino's position is the conventional Renaissance one: men's passion is grander and deeper; women's love is mere appetite, quickly satisfied. He states this with complete confidence, to a woman who is silently disproving it in real time.
Viola's answer is careful not to refute him directly – she cannot, without risk of exposure. Instead she offers the third-person "sister" as evidence, presenting the proof obliquely. The exchange inverts the conventional gender hierarchy: the man makes a categorical claim about feeling; the woman provides the counter-example, anonymously. Northrop Frye, in A Natural Perspective (1965), notes that Shakespeare's cross-dressed heroines consistently demonstrate greater emotional intelligence than the men they serve, and this scene is the clearest example: Viola understands Orsino's feelings better than he does, her own better than she can say, and the situation better than anyone in it.
What does the conversation about men's and women's love tell us about Orsino's self-awareness?
Very little, is the honest answer. Orsino's speech about the depth of his love slides almost seamlessly into an admission that men's love is "more giddy and unfirm" than women's – two incompatible positions delivered within a few lines of each other. He does not notice the contradiction because he is not reasoning; he is feeling, and feeling in whichever direction the moment carries him.
This is the same quality Feste identifies as the "opal" mind – beautiful, constantly shifting, incapable of holding a single colour. The play does not punish Orsino for this; the comic ending gives him Viola, whom he comes to love, apparently sincerely. But the scene suggests that Orsino's self-knowledge is limited by his narcissism. He cannot see clearly because he is always looking at his own reflection in the water of his feelings. The play's comedy requires that this change, and the arrival of the real Sebastian – breaking the mirror of the Cesario-fiction – is what finally forces it.
How does Viola's "blank, my lord" speech connect to the theme of concealment?
"A blank, my lord" – nothing happened – is Viola's answer to the question "And what's her history?" The brevity is the point: the story of a woman who never spoke her love has no story to tell, only a silence. The speech that follows is the filling of that silence, the history of a feeling that had no public history, told in the only way Viola can tell it – as someone else's.
The concealment theme runs through the whole scene. Orsino conceals from himself the fickleness he has just admitted; Feste conceals his critical intelligence behind the mask of a professional performance; and Viola conceals her love behind the frame of a fictional sister. The worm-in-the-bud image she uses – concealment feeding on the cheek from within – is the play's most precise statement of what enforced silence costs. The comedy will resolve it by removing the disguise; but the speech insists that the cost is real and the damage cumulative, even if the end is happy.
Why does Orsino compare women to roses, and how does Viola respond?
The rose simile – "For women are as roses, whose fair flower / Being once displayed, doth fall that very hour" – is Orsino's way of explaining why he prefers a younger beloved: beauty fades fast, and with it, he implies, love. It is a melancholy compliment that flatters while dismissing. The logic underneath is that women's value is primarily decorative and time-limited.
Viola's response – "And so they are: alas, that they are so / To die, even when they to perfection grow!" – is one of the play's most precisely calibrated lines. She agrees with him, technically, but her agreement carries an entirely different emotional charge. For Orsino, the line is a lament for transient beauty. For Viola – and for the audience – the same words carry the weight of her own situation: she is the rose, she is in her prime, and she is spending her perfection in silence. The shared words mean opposite things, which is exactly the dramatic irony the scene has been building throughout.
