Duke Orsino begins Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night, or What You Will” with the famous lines, “If music be the food of love, play on; / Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, / The appetite may sicken, and so die.” The poetry is lovely. But what is he really asking for?
Orsino desires an “excess” of “love-food” so that his taste will sicken and die. He wants to be overloaded with lovesickness, to wallow in his forlorn feelings of melancholy. He enjoys the sadness as he loafs about his palace, listening to sad songs and composing love poems, pining for a woman he really knows little about. Orsino reveals, from the very beginning of the play, that he’s in love with being in love.
The simple truth is that Orsino is not in love. His feelings aren’t genuine. Rather, he has crafted an idealized version of a woman in his mind so that he can submerge himself in sentimentality. As Shakespeare scholar Gideon Rappaport points out in “Appreciating Shakespeare,” sentimentality is a desire to feel emotion for its own sake, rather than the real response to an external event.
Orsino isn’t the only character suffering from self-indulgence and sentimentality at the beginning of the play. In Rappaport’s words: “‘Twelfth Night’ tells the story of an entire society corrupted and immobilized by sentimentality. Nearly all its inhabitants are stuck in the cultivation of various fantasies of love in order to wallow in their own feelings.”
Sentimentality and Stoicism
While many characters suffer from an obsession with their own feelings, at the other extreme we have a character who stands in opposition to all emotion. Malvolio the Steward struts about the stage condemning the boisterousness of Lady Olivia’s courtiers, preaching a somber gospel against fun and feeling.
Both extremes—the sentimentality of Orsino and the stoicism of Malvolio—fail to make the proper distinctions, of course. They fail to recognize that feelings are good in themselves but should occur as natural reactions to real experiences, rather than being wallowed in or artificially stimulated.
Artificiality and False Appearances
Part of the hilarity of Malvolio’s character is that, in the end, his puritanism is completely artificial. He is himself as much a slave to emotions and vices as the drunken courtiers he condemns—and he doesn’t have the redeeming feature of being good-humored about it. In secret, Malvolio schemes about how he can marry Olivia and so raise his status in the world from servant to master. He’s dominated by ambition, greed, and sexual fantasies, yet he presents a cold and austere exterior to the world.As is so often the case, Shakespeare is fascinated with the difference between reality and appearance, artificiality and authenticity, and the way that we deceive not only one another but also ourselves.
This brings us back to Orsino and his self-delusions. As the Duke himself tells us, he “fell in love” immediately upon seeing Olivia. “When mine eyes did see Olivia first … that instant was I turn’d into a hart;/ And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds,/ E’er since pursue me.” Orsino admits not only that his “love” is based completely on appearances, but also that a person who has let emotion control him is like a hunted animal.
Orsino’s love for Olivia is surface-level and artificial. In the introduction to the play in the Riverside edition of Shakespeare’s works, Shakespearean critic Anne Barton observed: “Orsino’s love-melancholy is essentially sterile and self-induced, a state of mind dependent upon that very absence and lack of response from Olivia which it affects to lament.”
Orsino’s melancholy “love” depends on Olivia’s continued rejection, and it depends on the fact that he not see too much of her. Why is this? Because getting to know her would shatter the idealized version of her that he’s created in his head. In Act 2, Scene 4, Orsino states, significantly, that he is true to “the constant image of the creature/ That is beloved.” Perhaps without realizing it, he admits that what he loves is an image of the lady, created in his own mind, not the lady herself, as she really is.
Similarly, when Lady Olivia herself falls in love, it is also with a fantasy of her own creation, not a real person. Olivia falls in love with a young man named Cesario, who is actually a shipwrecked young lady, Viola, in disguise. Like Orsino, Olivia has allowed her emotions and imagination to play on appearances only. There is no substance to her love; the person she “loves,” Cesario, quite literally does not exist.
Reality Cuts Through
How, then, are the excessive emotions of Orsino and Olivia to be corrected? Rappaport gives us the answer:“What cures the sentimentality, the melancholy is an invasion from outside: Three people from over the sea, who have lost everything and survived real suffering, providentially enter the scene seeking refuge and a way to live. Their authenticity is so irresistible that the sentimentalists who meet them are compelled out of their fantasy lives into real love.”
Viola, mentioned above, her twin brother Sebastian, and Sebastian’s friend Antonio all cut through this little self-enclosed world of self-absorbed, shallow feeling and let reality shine in like the sun. Viola enters the service of Orsino, and her deep genuineness—in spite of appearances to the contrary—opens up Orsino’s perspective. By sharing their hearts and minds with one another, their internal lives, real love begins to blossom. This cures Orsino of his melancholy and his obsession with Olivia, which was based on externals, not internals.
A dose of humility is needed to bring characters to the truth. Olivia is humiliated by realizing that she mistook a young woman for a young man. But this humiliating experience breaks her out of her obsessive mourning over her dead brother and her proud aloofness. She finds in Sebastian a fitting object for her love, so that happiness can now be hers.
Similarly, Malvolio undergoes extensive humiliations. The courtiers and servants trick him into thinking that Olivia really is in love with him and convince him to do all sorts of absurd things in her presence. When he realizes that he’s been duped, Malvolio’s fantasies of power and pleasure crumble to dust, and he returns to reality. However, his response is different from the other characters’ responses. Rather than being grateful for the opportunity to be freed from the cage of his own false perceptions, he becomes bitter and angry, shouting threats in his final speech as he blusters off stage.
Unfortunately, there will always be some who react this way when confronted with truth. But for those willing to submit to reality, the experience is the path to true liberty and joy. The truth does set them free.
