Duke Orsino in Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night"

In a book on Twelfth Night, Dr. Leslie Hotson suggested that the play was written to compliment an Italian nobleman, Virginio Orsino, Duke of Bracciano, in a court entertainment given for him on Twelfth Night, 1601, and that it was after this gOrsinoh that one of the principle characters was named. However, I am not sure id this Italian Orsino would have feel complimented by seeing himself portrayed as a young, handsome and poetic duke but an inefficient lover.

The curtain of Twelfth Night rises with Duke Orsinofs very first speech: gIf music be the food of love, play on ch which shows his characteristics clearly. Orsino is restless, dissatisfied, vacillating between moods, with a mind full of romantic illusions, but without an object upon which his mind can rest and with which his desire can engage. Then we have the hunting metaphor that Orsino compares himself to Actaeon, who turned into a stag and pursued by his own hounds of desire. This metaphor, though is full of with Orsinofs self-pity, still shows that he is introspective to a degree. We may say that Orsino is madly in love (to be more specific, madly wants to be in love), but not mad, for he is aware that he himself is overwhelmed by his own fantastical love thoughts.

If music is the food of love, as Orsino puts it, we can infer what Orsinofs love is like by what kind of gfoodh he feeds it. Orsinofs special taste for those gold and antich songs, traditional love-laments, makes him a Petrarchan lover: he is sensitive, passionate, and intoxicated with his own romantic sufferings from Oliviafs rejection.

The repeated rejections by Olivia do not throw Orsino into despair....

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..., Orsino seems suddenly restores his reason and then spares Violafs life. We audience also feel relieved because now Orsino does be ga noble duke, in nature as in nameh and deserve Violafs love.

gLove sought is good, but given unsought better.h It is clear that shortly after the unmasking of Viola, Orsino is fully prepared to call Viola gOrsinofs mistress and his fancyfs queen.h At last, Orsino finds his right love, but surely not through the kind of constancy of which he had bragged.

Reference:

1. Twentieth century interpretations of Twelfth night, edited by Walter N. King, Prentice-Hall, Inc, 1968

2. Modern Critical Interpretations: Twelfth night, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publisher, 1987

3. Shakespeare's rhetoric of comic character, Karen Newman, New York: Methuen, 1985