I had to write an essay about this, specifically this speech from it, which Viola/Cesario gives when Olivia asks what she would do if she was in love with Olivia instead of Orsino:

Make me a willow cabin at your gate
And call upon my soul within the house,
Write loyal cantons of contemnèd love
And sing them loud even in the dead of night,
Hallow your name to the reverberate hills
And make the babbling gossip of the air
Cry out “Olivia!” O, you should not rest
Between the elements of air and earth
But you should pity me.


Shakespeare’s characters fall in love so quickly and so heavily that it gets on my nerves a lot of the time, but when I was writing my essay I had this sort of eureka (rolling eyes at myself right now) moment where I realised what this speech actually means.

Viola, in this paragraph, is saying that if she was the one in love with Olivia, she’d build herself a home near her and sing in the middle of the night and hope Olivia heard her. Viola is saying that if she were in love, she’d feel it so strongly that nature would feel it with her and Olivia wouldn’t be able to go anywhere without feeling sorry for her.

When I realised this, I just thought: who on earth would say something this intense to someone they’d just met? And then it clicked, that Shakespeare’s characters are always doing this, always pouring out their souls in ways that twenty-first century, nonfictional people simply don’t. And if I thought about it long enough, pulled forth all my own experience with beautiful strangers and infatuation, it didn’t seem like that much of a stretch that Olivia was struck by the raw honesty and passion of this speech and latched onto it as the basis of her quick and deep love for Viola/Cesario.

And that, I guess, is my incredibly uninteresting story of how I began to not (completely) hate Shakespeare’s stupid, naive characters. I found a way for this instantaneous love to be plausible, if not make sense.

I liked this edition, great and insightful introduction to the text.

And all those sayings will I overswear;
And those swearings keep as true in soul
As doth that orbèd continent the fire
That severs day from night.

All the forbearance unrolled for display. Insomnia rasps and we struggled with Moloch and the gurgle of the deep.
There's nothing original about the reader. This reader.

He cheered for Viola.

The distemper of lad culture tends to rancor as I pondered whether Some Like It Hot or Mrs. Doubtfire will ever resonate with lyrical fire? The pat ending of Twelfth Night couldn't usurp, "Nobody's perfect," but the Bard knew questions unspoke which will greet the other half of the quartet, what was the attraction---really?

Pure camp fun

This is my favourite! Isn't it charming to think of the Elizabethan's having a gay old time!