“Some four or five, attend him;
All if you will; for I myself am best
When least in company.”
Like Vincentio, that other mask of Shakespeare, this Duke too loves solitude and “the life removed”; he is “best when least in company.”
If there is any one who still doubts the essential identity of Duke Orsino and Shakespeare, let him consider the likeness in thought and form between the Duke's lyric effusions and the Sonnets, and if that does not convince him I might use a hitherto untried argument. When a dramatist creates a man's character he is apt to make him, as the French say, too much of a piece—too logical. But, in this instance, though Shakespeare has given the Duke only a short part, he has made him contradict himself with the charming ease that belongs peculiarly to self-revealing. The Duke tells us:
“For such as I am all true lovers are,
—Unstaid and skittish in all motions else,
Save in the constant image of the creature
That is beloved.”
The next moment he repeats this:
“For, boy, however we do praise ourselves,
Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm,
More longing, wavering, sooner lost and won,
Than women's are.”
And the moment after he asserts:
“There is no woman's sides
Can bide the beating of so strong a passion
As love doth give my heart; no woman's heart
So big, to hold so much; they lack retention.
Alas! their love may be called appetite,
No motion of the liver, but the palate,
That suffers surfeit, cloyment, and revolt!”
Hamlet contradicts himself, too: at one moment he declares that his soul is immortal, and at the next is full of despair. But Hamlet is so elaborate a portrait, built up of so many minute touches, that self-contradiction is a part, and a necessary part, of his many-sided complexity. But the Duke in “Twelfth Night” reveals himself as it were accidentally; we know little more of him than that he loves music and love, books and flowers, and that he despises wealth and company; accordingly, when he contradicts himself, we may suspect that Shakespeare is letting himself speak freely without much care for the coherence of characterization. And the result of this frankness is that he has given a more intimate, a more confidential, sketch of himself in Duke Orsino of “Twelfth Night” than he has given us in any play except perhaps “Hamlet” and “Macbeth.”
I hardly need to prove that Shakespeare in his earliest plays, as in his latest, in his Sonnets as in his darkest tragedy, loved flowers and music. In almost every play he speaks of flowers with affection and delight. One only needs to recall the song in “A Midsummer's Night's Dream,” “I know a bank,” or Perdita's exquisite words: