Compare and Contrast Orsino Olivia From Trevor Nunn's Film Essay

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Orsino/Olivia from Trevor Nunn's Film .

Orsino vs. Olivia: Twelfth Night

Both Duke Orsino and the Countess Olivia in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night are victims of unrequited love for the duration of most of the movie. Orsino begins the film besotted with Olivia, a gentlewoman who has refused to marry because she still mourning her brother. However, Orsino seems less truly in love than in love with the idea of being in love. He plays melancholy music all of the time and sends love letters to Olivia, but he never engages with her face-to-face. Being in love with a woman who cannot love him back seems to satisfy his self-image, not his need for companionship. The first glimpse the audience has of Orsino is as he strides in, saying: "If music be the food of love, play on; / Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, / The appetite may sicken, and so die" (I.1). Later, he asks the fool Feste to play a song which contains the lyric: "I am slain by a fair cruel maid" (II.4).

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Orsino speaks extravagantly of love one minute saying to Viola (disguised as his servant Cesario). "Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm,/More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn, / Than women's are" and the next minute Orsino proclaims equally passionately: "There is no woman's sides / Can bide the beating of so strong a passion/As love doth give my heart" (II.4).

Initially, Olivia seems like a far more serious character. She is described as grief-stricken over her father's and brother's deaths: "For whose dear love, / They say, she hath abjured the company / And sight of men" (I.2). However, when the viewer actually meets Olivia, the impression given is far different. Olivia's mourning is just as theatrical as Orsino's love-making from afar. She dresses herself in sumptuous clothing of black and is capable of engaging in witty banter with Feste, who mocks her pretentions of mourning just as much as he mocks Orsino's belief that Orsino is hopelessly and truly in love. "The more fool, madonna, to mourn for your brother's….....

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"Compare And Contrast Orsino Olivia From Trevor Nunn's Film", 13 October 2012, Accessed.6 June. 2026,
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