Shakespeare’s 1623 comic play Twelfth Night involves gender and social roles to explore further sexual and social roles. In this play, a male actor plays Viola (as if a male were playing all the female characters), who is then impersonated by the young male Cesario in the play itself. Disguised in this way, Viola is able to approach Ursino and inspire Olivia’s affection, so that both Ursino and Olivia are at odds with Petrarch’s notions of love.
At the beginning of Twelfth Night, Orsino only portrays a passive idea of love very similar to the love expressed by Petrarch’s speaker. Petrarch, the son of an Italian, created a style of sound in which the speaker imitates the purity, beauty, and grace of a cold, distant lover who could never reciprocate his love. Charity itself in poetry lives the love of the speaker, even if he does not get what he wants. In the opening scene of Twelfth Night, Orsino, caught in the moment of Olivia’s first vision, recalls how “he thought the air was cleansed of pestilence” and compares her to the goddess Diana (19-22). . Already comparing Olivia to a goddess, mundane things, and noting her sweetness, Orsino Petrarch plays the part of the speaker. Moreover, Petrarch’s speaker often suffers intense suffering, as his tortured rites are witnessed by a distant lover. This grief is taken up in a poem about an appeal to the compassion of a lover. In Scene 5 Act. 1, Viola affirms that Ursinus loves Olivia “With adorations, fertile tears, / With groans that thunder love, with groans of fire” (242-243), in order to convey Ursinus’s love to Olivia. These statements of pain indicate to Petrarch the speaker’s unattainable pursuit of love. This passage in Scene 5 also suggests that Ursino is deliberately torturing the Petrarchan lover’s ritual in order to maintain his love for feeling love rather than to win Olivia’s love. This renders his initial notions of love and longing superficial.
Similarly, Olivia initially retains small notions of love and maintains Petrarchan ideals in her actions. Olivia plays the cold first part, which in Petrarchan sounds aloof from affection, vowing never to see any suitors for seven years, until she mourns her brother’s death. Furthermore, Olivia mourns her brother just to keep her love alive. In Act I, Scene I, Valentinus, one of Ursino’s companions, warns Olivia to run to his room in tears, “all this for a time / The dead love of a brother, that he would revesco / and lasting in sad memory” (29-31). In doing so, Olivia cries out to save the love she lives for her brother, so that Ursinus only allows her to keep her love alive and how the Petrarchan lover tortures himself to keep his love alive. Even Festus foolishly tells Olivia that it is foolish to “mourn the soul of his brother in the heavens” (65-66), where he believes that his brother’s soul has been placed in Act 1, Scene 5. Later in
Viola, pretending to be a manly youth to Cesario, challenges both Ursinus and Olivia’s initial, Petrarchan notions of love. The ability to violate this is based on its disguise, which allows it to move closely into the social sphere and the character and previously established sex roles /a>. Viola’s disguise is able to challenge Orsino’s previously vague notions of love, allowing her to get close to him and put non-Petrarchan notions of love into his head. Viola pretending to be a person can be familiar enough with Ursinus that he “[of his]/ To the book even of the secret soul” (sca 1.4, 13-14). The friendship that Ursinus shares with Cesario is impossible with Viola herself, because Orsino still wants her to be in love. Thus, with Cesario as Ursino’s family member, he can put deeper ideas of love into Ursino’s head. In Act 2 Scene 4, Viola, as Cesario, presents Orsino with the hypothetical situation that a woman “Has so much heartache for your love / As much as you have Olivia. You cannot love. It will not be answered then” (89-91), opening him to true love when a possible object for love because of feeling the impulses of love. Furthermore, Viola can advance her goals like Cesario by “theoretically” vowing her love for him. In the same scene she says “My father loved his daughter a man / Twelfth night. Ed. M. H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt. Norton Anthology of
