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.