ful words. This is his philosophy of music and of love: 'Give me excess of it, that surfeiting, and then: "Enough, no more; 'Tis not so sweet now as it was before." -the quick revulsion of the delicate artist-voluptuary who wishes to keep unblunted in memory the most exquisite pang of pleasure. 66 Speech after speech discovers the same happy freedom and absolute abandonment to the sense of beauty." Curio proposes hunting the hart, and at once the Duke breaks out: "Why, so I do, the noblest that I have. Valentine then comes to tell him that Olivia is still mourning for her brother, and the Duke seizes the opportunity for another lyric: "O, she that hath a heart of that fine frame The last two lines show clearly enough that Shakespeare was not troubled with any thought of reality as he wrote: he was transported by Fancy into that enchanted country of romance where beds of flowers are couches and bowers, canopies of love. But what a sensuality there is in him! "When liver, brain, and heart, These sovereign thrones, are all supplied and filled— Her sweet perfections-with one self King! Of course, too, this Duke is inconstant, and swings from persistent pursuit of Olivia to love of Viola without any other reason than the discovery of Viola's sex. In the same way Romeo turns from Rosaline to Juliet at first sight. This trait has been praised by Coleridge and others as showing singular knowledge of a young man's character, but I should rather say that inconstancy was a characteristic of sensuality and belonged to Shakespeare himself, for Orsino, like Romeo, has no reason to change his love; and the curious part of the matter is that Shakespeare does not seem to think that the quick change in Orsino requires any explanation at all. Moreover, the love of Duke Orsino for Olivia is merely the desire of her bodily beauty-the counterpart of the sensual jealousy of Othello. Speaking from Shakespeare's very heart, the Duke says: "Tell her, my love, more noble than the world, The parts that Fortune hath bestowed upon her, So the body wins the soul according to this Orsino, who is, I repeat again, Shakespeare in his most ingenuous and frankest mood; the contempt of wealth-" dirty lands"—and the sensuality-" that miracle and queen of gems "-are alike characteristic. A few more touches and the portrait of this Duke will be complete; he says to the pretended Cesario when sending him as ambassador to Olivia: "Cesario, Thou knowest no less but all; I have unclasped and so forth. It is a matter of course that this Duke should tell everything to his friend; a matter of course, too, that he should love books and bookish metaphors. Without being told, one knows that he delights in all beautiful things-pictures with their `faërie false presentment of forms and life; the fleshfirm outline of marble, the warmth of ivory and the sea-green patine of bronze-was not the poop of the vessel beaten gold, the sails purple, the oars silver, and the very water amorous? This Duke shows us Shakespeare's most intimate traits even when the action does not suggest the · self-revelation. When sending Viola to woo Olivia for him he adds: "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,- The next moment he repeats this: For, boy, however we do praise ourselves, And the moment after he asserts: There is no woman's sides 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." In 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. almost every play he speaks of flowers with affection and delight. One only needs to recall the song in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," "I know a bank," or Perdita's exquisite words: "Daffodils, That come before the swallow dares, and take or Arviragus' praise of Imogen: 66 Thou shalt not lack The flower that's like thy face, pale primrose, nor The leaf of eglantine, whom not to slander ا میرا |