Love is not always as it appears to be, which is what the characters in William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night discover. The first love that is encountered in the play is the love that the Duke has for Olivia; however, Olivia does not share this love. It is through the Duke’s incessant need to win Olivia over, through his emissaries, that Olivia falls for Viola, who is disguised as a eunuch and who is, ironically, in love with the Duke. The Duke says it best in his opening speech saying “so full of shapes is fancy that it alone is high fantastical” (1.1.14-5), meaning that love is highly imaginative.
Olivia views Viola as a kind of an exception to the male species, in the way that Viola seems to understand the wants and needs of a woman. Olivia is captivated by the fact that someone else could understand her so well and be a man, which is why she loves her and not the Duke. Olivia and Viola are similar characters, so perhaps that is another reason why they are inherently drawn to each other. Both have brothers that they have lost (even though Viola’s brother is only temporarily lost to her), both experience unrequited love, and their names are spelled with the same letters. Olivia immediately drops her guard when she meets Viola, which is marked by the abandonment of her mourning veil in Viola’s presence. Viola speaks the Duke’s words, at first, but undermines his advances by saying things like, if it were her she would not send an emissary; instead she would woo her beloved in person. Viola does not want Olivia to want the Duke, and ironically it might be this undermining of the Duke that contributes to Olivia falling in love with her.
In the Duke’s first speech, he seems to foreshadow the coming of Viola, his true love. He says “it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound that breathes upon a bank of violets, stealing and giving odor” (1.1.5-7). Viola is another way of saying Violets. Viola is everywhere like the pervasive odor of violets. Viola is disguised as a eunuch and one of their main duties is to be able to sing in a very high key, so it is Viola’s song that is so sweet. He later on alludes to the sea, saying that it could not hold her, but instead brought her to him. The Duke is unaware of his love at first, and it is not until Olivia accidently marries Viola’s twin brother that he learns the truth and wants to marry Viola. In the last act of the play, when everything is brought out into the open, the Duke does not seem the least bit surprised when Viola turns out to be a woman and kind of goes along with it; it does not faze him one bit because he has unconsciously foreshadowed the truth.
