How Does Twelfth Night Present Orsino's Misunderstanding Of Love

Improved Essays
The script we came up with depicts Orsino’s misunderstanding of love. He realizes what he expects from love is only with Viola, his true love. Olivia and Orsino are not compatible at all.
From the play Twelfth Night, the readers understand Orsino is a powerful nobleman in the city Illyria. Throughout the entire play, the majority of the time Orsino laments because Olivia refuses his love. However, he does not do anything about it other than sending one his attendants and continues his grief. In the play, Orsino seemed like he was “loving” Olivia just to pass. Out of pure boredom. In Act 1 scene 1 and line 1 “ If music be the food of love, play on/ Give me excess of it, that surfeiting.” He tells the musicians to give him so much music that

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    He depicts homosexual love in Twelfth Night as the strongest and truest love, by comparing it to the fleeting love based on beauty that Orsino feels for Olivia and Olivia feels for Olivia’s brother Sebastian. In doing so, Shakespeare attacks popular beliefs against homosexuality at that time. A paradigm of such love occurs between Antonio, a sailor, and Viola’s brother, Sebastian. Antonio rescued Sebastian from the shipwreck and, while he was nursing him back to good health, fell deeply in love with him. Antonio confesses his love after bravely following Sebastian to Orsino’s court, despite having many enemies there.…

    • 1503 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Back to the statement starting with, “O”; Orsino’s way of bringing up love at first sight, this idea of it only took him to see her once to be sold on her. Orsino then says, “Methought she purged the air of pestilence” (I.I.21); smell is brought into play which is the smell of the world and how simply in first seeing Olivia, Orsino believed that the smell of the world became better. In order for a person to cause the smell in the world to become better he/she must have some power. Thus, in Orsino’s mind Olivia holds power leading into him saying, “That instant was I turned into a hart/ And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds”…

    • 393 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    In the Twelfth Night he’s a handsome, rich Bachelor who is very poetic and is honestly just in love with love. His first line in the play shows how he feels about love, “If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting (1.1.1) His passion for love echoes to Voila and she begins to fall in love with him, which doesn’t work in her favor because he thinks she’s a man. He is head over heels in love with Olivia which bring him and Viola closer in the attempts that Viola might help Olivia fall in love with him. This leaves Viola caught in the middle of a love triangle, but not in the way she would like. Gacefully she helps Olivia with the grieving of her father and brother and shows Orisno what love is really like, not the fantasy’s that he developed in this head about Olivia.…

    • 1153 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    As time went on, Viola and Prince Orsino became very good friends. Lo and behold, Viola realized that she was falling in love with the prince! There were two problems with this idea. First, Prince Orsino thought that Viola was a man and second, Prince Orsino was going to get married to Princess Olivia of Verona. 8.…

    • 769 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    ”(Nunn 0:20:03) This shows that Duke Orsino is a complete romantic, he is confessing his love for Olivia to Cesario which is not typical for a man in that time period to do. Duke Orsino shows female assets like being a romantic and showing that he has a sort of unpredictable sense about him. Sir.…

    • 1270 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Throughout Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, one is able to see various aspects of Shakespeare’s time period as well as certain aspects that are able to with stand time as they are relevant even to today. One such aspect is brought to light by Olivia in act three scene one where she states that: Nor wit nor reason can my passion hide. Do not extort thy reasons from this clause, For that I woo, thou therefore hast no cause; But rather reason thus with reason fetter:…

    • 798 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In particular, Shakespeare demonstrates this concept through the characters Orsino, Malvolio and Viola. To begin, Orsino is shown to be madly in love with Olivia, who unfortunately has no romantic feelings towards him. Despite this reality, Orsino constantly sends messages through his attendants to Olivia in hope to receive a positive reply. Likewise, Orsino strictly orders his newest attendant, Cesario to “leap all civil bounds, /Rather…

    • 949 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In Twelfth Night, Duke explains “love,” to be an “appetite,” that he can 't satisfy (Act 1,1-3) another point in the story he calls his desires “fell and cruel hounds,”(Act1, 21). No matter how hard Duke Orsino tries he’s not able to let go of his feelings for Olivia and it hurts him by serving as a constant reminder of something he can’t have. In She’s the Man Viola is in love with the Duke, exactly like in Twelfth Night, and she is not able to have him because he is in love with Olivia,, but Viola does everything in her power to sabotage his attempts at hooking up with Olivia. Olivia is actually in love with the male version of Viola , same as in Twelfth Night.…

    • 1185 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Orsino is a character introduced through his hounding passion, and one who often appears only to vent his desires. Malvolio, dissimilarly, is a more comical character, and thus has more common appearances… however, he too has his own wants and goals; the two are very similar. Though stringing the pair’s similarities through Twelfth Night, Shakespeare still split the pair in twain quite abruptly in the end, having Orsino marry and Malvolio march off the stage in an angry pout. Perhaps this was to remind the audience subconsciously that there certainly is a divide between the wealthy and the poor, or maybe he wanted to show how, for most people, love simply leads to unhappiness. It would be nice to think that whatever the case, people have developed different concepts of how love “should” look, or operate—that rather than love simply being a woman fulfilling the desires of a man, it is a mutual bond founded on trust and friendship.…

    • 1344 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    When she uncovers her true character and reveals it to Orsino, he still declares hislove for her: “Boy, thou hast said to me a thousand times/Thou never shouldst love woman like to me” (IV.i.279-280). He addresses her as a boy, but later asks to see her in “women’s weeds” (IV.i.286). The uncertainty of her gender goes to prove that gender doesn’t matter when it comes to true love. Orsino loves Viola when she is disguised as a boy and continues to love her when she identifies herself as a woman. The same feelings apply to Olivia, when Sebastian comes to Illyria.…

    • 725 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    This soon shifts to surprise and, to a certain degree, horror, as she realizes that Olivia is in fact in love with Cesario; the horror arises from the fact that Viola, as Cesario, is supposed to be wooing Olivia on Orsino’s behalf, not getting her love for herself. To this, Viola…

    • 716 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Web. This is describing the disguise plot. There is a relation to Jung’s theory on individuation with the dramatization of androgyny in the play. This suggests that both Orsino and Olivia achieve individuation through Viola/Cesario. There is also a reference to the fixation on homosexuality and heterosexuality as something that defines the character.…

    • 761 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    As a result, this scenario suggests that the true nature of love is unreliable as Olivia, a veiled, teary eyed woman in love with grief, quickly has a change of heart and decides instead to pursue Cesario. Furthermore, this situation depicts fickle love as a result of pain, as Olivia quickly switches from loving her brother to loving Cesario in order to rid herself of the heartache caused by her love for her dead brother, and restore the initial euphoria of being in love. In addition, the wavering nature of love is notably amplified towards the conclusion of the play, when Viola and Sebastian’s mistaken identities are clarified and Duke Orsino realizes that Cesario is in fact a woman named Viola, who has fallen in love with him. Orsino then states, “Give me thy hand, / And let me see thee in thy woman’s weeds” (5.1.263-264). In this quotation, Shakespeare proves the inconstant nature of love as a result of pain because Orsino, who was a short time ago desperately longing for Olivia’s love, has suddenly pronounced to marry Viola, whom he has never previously regarded as a potential partner, in order to free himself from the longing and pain that his love for Olivia enforced upon him.…

    • 1031 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, the theme of self-deception surprisingly allows for a revealment of characters’ true personalities and values. The theme plays a significant role in the play, with foolish wits, such as the condescending but gullible Malvolio, and witty fools, such as the observant fool Feste. Similarly, Viola interacts with the man she loves, Orsino, only in the context of her disguise as his male servant Cesario. As Orsino’s servant, Viola is tasked with helping him declare his love to Olivia, but her subsequent speech to Olivia about love reveals her personal perspective on love in the context of her love for Orsino. In her conversation with Orsino, she uses a fake anecdote about her “sister” to convey her personal…

    • 188 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Disguise In Twelfth Night Analysis

    • 1066 Words
    • 5 Pages
    • 1 Works Cited

    She can see through other people's disguises or flaws, that not even they are able to spot. Some characters are deceived about their true nature. An example of this is that Orsino sees himself becoming "one self same king" of Olivia's "sweet perfections", fulfilling her sexual desire, thought and feeling ("liver, brain and heart"). He naively believes that he is in love with Olivia when he has never really spoken with…

    • 1066 Words
    • 5 Pages
    • 1 Works Cited
    Superior Essays