Love and Desire
Theme Profile – At a Glance
- Focus: Love in every register the play can stage – self-indulgent, sudden, secret, and steadfast – and the question of which kind survives contact with another person.
- Key Characters: Orsino, Viola, Olivia, Antonio, Feste.
- The Core Tension: Orsino loves loving, Olivia loves an image, and Viola – who cannot speak – simply loves. The play tests which is the real thing.
- Key Manifestations: Orsino's opening aria (Act 1, Scene 1); the willow cabin speech (Act 1, Scene 5); Olivia's "plague" (Act 1, Scene 5); "patience on a monument" (Act 2, Scene 4); the triple marriage (Act 5, Scene 1).
- Famous Quote:
"If music be the food of love, play on..."
(Act 1, Scene 1) - The Outcome: Three weddings – each built on some degree of mistake – and one love, Antonio's, left standing alone on stage with nothing.
Love as Appetite
The play opens inside Orsino's love before it opens anywhere in Illyria – and the first thing Orsino asks of love is that it should stop.
Original
If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
(Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
If music is the fuel of love, play on!
Play tunes aplenty till I’ve heard too much,
And then these pangs will pale and fade away.
The logic is a glutton's: feed the appetite to death. Orsino wants to be cured of love by overdose – and within eight lines he has changed his mind, ordered the music stopped, and declared love not so sweet as it was. Everything the play needs us to know about his "love" for Olivia is in this opening: it is self-administered, it is about sensation rather than a person, and its object barely features. Olivia has refused even to receive his messengers, which suits Orsino perfectly – an absent beloved makes no demands on the imagination feasting on her. He is the play's great connoisseur of his own feelings, and the theme's first exhibit: desire that has not yet noticed another human being.
The Willow Cabin
Sent to deliver Orsino's set speeches, Viola goes off-script. Olivia asks what the messenger would do in Orsino's place – and the answer changes both their lives.
Original
Make me a willow cabin at your gate,
And call upon my soul within the house;
Write loyal cantons of contemned love
And sing them loud even in the dead of night;
Halloo your name to the reverberate hills
And make the babbling gossip of the air
Cry out 'Olivia!'
(Act 1, Scene 5)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I’d make a wooden cabin at your gate
And there I’d pray that you would want my soul;
I’d write you songs of love between two people
And sing them loud into the dead of night,
Praising your name to echo through the hills
And make the blowing air whisper your name,
Shouting, ‘Olivia!’
The speech succeeds because it is everything Orsino's wooing is not: particular, physical, and costly. Orsino sends messengers; the willow cabin lover would camp at the gate. And the speech works on Olivia precisely because it is not performed at her but imagined from inside – Viola, who genuinely loves and genuinely cannot speak, knows exactly what unrequited love would do if it were honest. The dramatic irony is the theme in miniature: the truest description of love in the play is delivered by a disguised woman, on behalf of a man she loves, to a woman who will fall in love with the deliverer. Real feeling, in Illyria, travels under other people's names.
The Plague
Olivia has sworn off love for seven years. One conversation with a quick-tongued messenger later, she is reorganising her vows.
Original
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.
(Act 1, Scene 5)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Can someone really fall in love that fast?
I feel like those perfections of that youth
Are subtly, invisibly invading
Into my eyes and mind. Well, let it be.
The metaphor Olivia reaches for is infection – love as something caught, against the will, through the eyes. The play takes her image seriously. Nobody in Illyria chooses love: Orsino is sick with it before the curtain rises, Olivia catches it in an afternoon from a person who does not exist, and Viola contracted it somewhere between shipwreck and disguise. "Well, let it be" is the most honest sentence about desire in the play – a shrug at the discovery that consent was never going to be asked. Where the disguise plot insists that identity is unstable, the love plot insists that the will is: the heart, in this play, is the one organ nobody governs.
Patience on a Monument
The theme's deepest scene is a conversation between a man who talks about love and a woman who is silently dying of it. Pressed by Orsino to admit that no woman could love as he does, Viola answers with a story about a fictional sister.
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
She sat like patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?
(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,
And endlessly sat on a monument,
Smiling in grief. So, is that not true love?
"Was not this love indeed?" is the play's central question, asked by the only character qualified to answer it. The sister's history is Viola's own – love that cannot speak, consuming its keeper from inside like the worm in the bud – and she tells it to the man it is about, who cannot hear it. Set against Orsino's banquets of feeling, the monument image is devastating: his love performs; hers endures. The scene also quietly corrects him – Viola concedes that men "say more, swear more", but the shows outstrip the will. The play's verdict on desire is delivered here, two acts before the weddings: the loudest love in Illyria is the shallowest, and the truest is the one that never told.
"Of all Shakespeare's Comedies, perhaps 'Twelfth Night' is the most richly woven with various hues of love, serious and mock-heroic."
— William Minto, Characteristics of English Poets, 1874
Key Quotes on Love and Desire
Quote 1
Cesario, by the roses of the spring,
By maidhood, honour, truth and every thing,
I love thee so, that, maugre all thy pride,
Nor wit nor reason can my passion hide.
(Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Cesario, by roses of the spring,
Virginity, my truth, and everything,
I love you so, despite all of your pride,
Although I try, I can’t my passion hide.
Quote Analysis: Olivia's declaration breaks every rule her household was built on – the countess woos the servant, the mourner swears by spring, the woman speaks first. The rhymes give the game away: this is love talking in couplets, formal feeling overwhelming a formal woman. What she cannot know is that every oath lands on a fiction; "Cesario" can be loved but not married. The play lets her dignity and her delusion stand together – the courage of the speech is real even though its object is not, which is the theme's recurring bargain.
For women are as roses, whose fair flower
Being once displayed, doth fall that very hour.
(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.
Quote Analysis: Orsino's gallantry curdles on inspection: women bloom once and immediately fall, so a man should take them at the moment of display. He says this to a woman, unknowingly, minutes after demanding she agree no woman's heart could hold his passion. The couplet exposes the consumer hiding inside the romantic – desire that values the freshness, not the flower. Viola's quiet reply, agreeing that women die even as they grow to perfection, takes his throwaway image and fills it with the grief he cannot hear. One image, two loves: his decorative, hers mortal.
What is love? 'Tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter...
(Act 2, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
What is love? It’s not tomorrow.
Humour now makes laughter follow.
Quote Analysis: Feste's song answers the play's title question in two lines: love is not a future state to be planned or postponed – it exists now or not at all. Sung to two drunken knights at midnight, the carpe diem is comic in setting and dead serious in content, and it indicts half the cast. Orsino defers love into ritual, Olivia defers it into mourning, and both are schooled by a jester's catch. That the play's plainest wisdom about desire arrives as a paid entertainment, between hiccups, is pure Twelfth Night: the truth gets in only when it is dressed as fooling.
But, come what may, I do adore thee so,
That danger shall seem sport, and I will go.
(Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
But, whatever the outcome, I adore you,
And though there’s danger, I will go there for you.
Quote Analysis: Antonio's couplet, spoken alone after Sebastian leaves, is the play's most unconditional declaration – and the only one with a body count attached. He has enemies at Orsino's court; following Sebastian means walking into them, and he goes anyway, finding "sport" in the risk. No disguise, no couplets to roses, no audience: just adoration converted directly into action. The play will pay him for it with arrest, apparent betrayal, and exclusion from the final pairings – the one lover who asked nothing is the one who receives it.
Key Takeaways
- Love Performed vs Love Endured: Orsino's passion is an entertainment he hosts for himself. Viola's is a secret that feeds on her. The play knows which it honours.
- Nobody Chooses: Olivia's "plague" is the theme's law – desire arrives through the eyes, without consent, and lands on the wrong people with perfect accuracy.
- True Feeling Travels in Disguise: The willow cabin speech – the play's most authentic wooing – is spoken by a woman, as a man, on another man's behalf.
- The Price of the Happy Ending: Three marriages are built partly on mistake, and Antonio – the play's most selfless lover – is left outside every pairing.
Study Questions and Analysis
Is Orsino in love with Olivia or with love itself?
The play answers in its first thirty seconds, by where it points the camera. We meet Orsino's love before we meet Olivia – before, in fact, he has exchanged a word with her in the entire play – and what we meet is a man curating sensations.
That strain again! It had a dying fall:
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour!
(Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Play that refrain again; I found it haunting.
To me, it sounded like the gentle purr
Of blowing breeze through violets on a bank,
Distributing their scent.
The repeated strain, the violets, the swift boredom – this is connoisseurship, not courtship. William Hazlitt, in his 1817 Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, found the play "full of sweetness and pleasantry", and Orsino is its sweetness grown slightly sickly: a lover so absorbed in the flavour of his feelings that their object never needs to appear. The evidence accumulates: he sends proxies rather than going himself; he lectures Cesario on love in generalities; and at the play's end he transfers his entire passion from Olivia to Viola within a hundred lines, which would be incredible if the passion had ever been about Olivia. Harold Bloom, in his 1998 Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, reads Orsino as Shakespeare's affectionate satire of the Petrarchan lover – the man for whom love is a literary genre he is starring in. The defence, which the play also allows, is that the capacity was real and merely mis-aimed: when a person finally stands in front of him whom he actually knows – Cesario, his daily companion – the genre drops away and something like real attachment is revealed to have grown unnoticed. The play lets both verdicts stand at the altar.
Why does the willow cabin speech win Olivia when Orsino's suit cannot?
Because it is the first piece of language about love that Olivia cannot file under rhetoric. Orsino's embassies arrive pre-composed – Viola admits the opening of her own errand is "excellently well penned" and has taken pains to learn it – and Olivia, an intelligent woman besieged by formula, has learned to deflect formula. The willow cabin is different in kind. It abandons praise of the beloved (the standard Petrarchan move) for a programme of action: build at the gate, call to the house, write, sing, halloo the name until the air itself repeats it. Concrete, obsessive, slightly mad – it sounds like what love would actually do.
The deeper reason is the one Olivia cannot see: the speech is true. Viola is describing, under cover of hypothesis, her own condition – the loyal, contemned love that sings in the dead of night belongs to her, aimed at Orsino. Charles Cowden Clarke, in his 1863 Shakespeare-Characters, judged Viola's love "the sweetest and tenderest emotion that ever informed the heart" of Shakespeare's women, and the willow cabin is that emotion borrowing a fiction to breathe through. Olivia falls for the authenticity, not the argument – the play's point being that real feeling is audible even through two layers of disguise, and that it persuades where eloquence merely performs. The bitter joke is structural: the speech works because it is true, and it wins the wrong heart because the truth is wearing the wrong face.
What does Viola's silent love reveal about the play's idea of desire?
That its deepest form is the one that cannot act. Viola's love for Orsino is the play's still centre: contracted early, declared never, and serviced daily in the cruellest possible employment – wooing her rival on her beloved's behalf. Where every other lover in Illyria broadcasts, she encrypts; her great speeches about her own feeling are all in the third person, the conditional, or the past tense of an invented sister.
The patience-on-a-monument exchange gives the theme its scale, and her correction of Orsino gives it its edge.
We men may say more, swear more: but indeed
Our shows are more than will; for still we prove
Much in our vows, but little in our love.
(Act 2, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Us men may talk, declaring our true love more,
Yet, we’re more talk than action, demonstrating
Few acts of love whilst we’re off remonstrating.
Spoken as a man, about men, to a man, by a woman – the sentence carries the play's whole argument about desire in one disguise-folded utterance: vows are performance; love is what continues when performance is impossible. Marjorie Garber, in her 2004 Shakespeare After All, notes how the disguise becomes Viola's truth-telling licence – Cesario can say to Orsino everything Viola cannot, except the one thing that matters. The play rewards her method ambiguously: she gets Orsino, but only after shipwreck, exposure and a near-duel, and only because her brother's body arrives to absorb the plot's mistakes. Silent constancy wins – but the play is honest enough to show it winning by accident.
Is Olivia's sudden passion for Cesario mocked or honoured?
Both, in careful sequence. The comedy is undeniable: the great refuser of love, veiled for seven years of mourning, capitulates in one interview to a teenager with a sharp tongue – and to a teenager who is not, in the relevant sense, there at all. Her own plague image concedes the absurdity, and the plot compounds it mercilessly: she pursues, proposes, and finally marries a man she has met for perhaps three minutes, who happens to be the wrong twin.
Yet the play declines to humiliate her. Her self-awareness disarms mockery – "Well, let it be" knows exactly how foolish it looks; her generosity (rings, pearls, a priest) is the most active wooing in the play; and her instinct, the play eventually insists, was not wrong but early. What she fell for in Cesario – the wit, the directness, the willow cabin voice – is real, and survives translated into Sebastian, who shares his twin's face and frankness if not her interiority. George Brandes, in his 1898 William Shakespeare: A Critical Study, heard in the play's love-plots notes of seriousness and raillery blending "in the richest and fullest concord" – Olivia is precisely that blend: ridiculous in trajectory, dignified in conduct. The final scene seals the double verdict. Her marriage stands on a mistake the play never quite repairs – but of the three weddings, hers is the one she pursued, chose and paid for herself, and the play gives the "most wonderful" discovery of the twins to her house, her priest, and her happy ending.
What kind of love is Antonio's – and why is it left unrewarded?
It is the play's control specimen: love with every confusion removed. No disguise misleads Antonio, no letter tricks him, no mistaken identity creates his feeling – he knows exactly who Sebastian is, and what following him will cost. His language is the strongest the play permits: he "adores" Sebastian, follows him into a city where his life is forfeit, hands over his purse unasked, and steps into a duel to take another man's blows. Measured by the play's own standard – deeds against vows – Antonio outloves everyone in Illyria.
The reading divides from there. An older critical tradition took the devotion as idealised friendship, the Renaissance cult of male amity at its most generous; much modern criticism, following readings like Jan Kott's in his 1964 Shakespeare Our Contemporary, hears unmistakable erotic depth in its idiom – "adore", "jealousy", "witchcraft" – and reads Antonio as the play's one openly desiring man, attached to an object the comedy cannot accommodate. The text supports both and arbitrates neither.
What it does stage, deliberately, is his exclusion. The final scene pairs every major figure – even Toby gets Maria – while Antonio, the man whose rescue and purse made the ending possible, receives one astonished line about the twins and then silence. No punishment, no reconciliation, no place. Harold Bloom (1998) reads these residues – Antonio unpaired, Malvolio unreconciled, Feste singing of rain – as the deliberate shadow under the festive close. The play's tenderest verdict on desire may be here: the love that asks nothing is the love the comedy has no slot for, and the audience is meant to notice the empty chair at the wedding feast.
Do the marriages at the end resolve the play's loves?
Formally, perfectly; substantively, the play leaves every knot a little loose, and seems to want us to feel the looseness. Audit the three matches. Orsino marries Viola – a woman he has never seen as a woman, proposing to her while she still wears Cesario's clothes, and addressing her as "boy" and "Cesario" to the final scene; his last line defers the marriage itself until she can find her dress. Olivia marries Sebastian – a man she had met for minutes, under the impression he was someone else; his cheerful acceptance ("this is the air; that is the glorious sun") is delighted, and delightedly shallow. Toby marries Maria offstage, as payment for a practical joke. Three weddings: one deferred, one mistaken, one reported.
The defence of the ending is generic and real: comedy's business is to get the right bodies adjacent, and the play's deeper currents – Viola's constancy, Olivia's courage, Sebastian's openness – suggest these marriages have better foundations than their farcical mechanics. C. L. Barber, in his 1959 Shakespeare's Festive Comedy, gave the classic formulation: festive comedy moves "through release to clarification" – the misrule and mistakes are the process by which feeling finds its proper objects. On that reading the weddings are clarified desire, whatever the paperwork says.
But the play plants its own counter-evidence: Malvolio's exit curse, Antonio's silence, and Feste left alone singing that the rain it raineth every day. George Brandes (1898) sensed joy "about to pass over into melancholy" in this play, and the ending is where the passing-over happens. The loves are resolved; the longing is not – which may be Twelfth Night's last word on the difference between a wedding and a conclusion.
What do Feste's songs contribute to the theme?
They are the play's commentary track on desire, and they are always slightly darker than their audiences notice. "O mistress mine" is requested as a love song by two drunk men who want entertainment; what it delivers, under the tune, is urgency – love is "not hereafter", journeys end, youth will not endure. The revellers hear prettiness; the song is a memento mori with a chorus. "Come away, death", commissioned by Orsino as a wallow, is a lover's funeral – the song indulges Orsino's fantasy of dying for love so completely that it exposes the fantasy as fantasy; even his taste in music is about himself.
The pattern is the fool's whole method applied to love: tell the truth in the one register no one is obliged to take seriously. A. C. Bradley, in his 1916 essay "Feste the Jester", observed that Feste sings for his supper but thinks for himself – the songs are professionally cheerful and privately exact. He is also the only major figure the love-plague never touches: employed by both mourning households, propositioned by no one, he watches the lovers' fevers with the detachment of a man paid by the symptom.
The final song completes the design. After three weddings, alone on stage, Feste sings the audience out with the rain that raineth every day – a life-history in four verses, from foolish boyhood to drunken beds, in which love appears once, as the point after which the rain begins. It is the play's epilogue on its own theme: inside Illyria, desire is a midsummer madness with a happy ending; outside, "the wind and the rain" – and the play, having given us the wedding, walks us gently back out into the weather.
