‘Make me a willow cabin at your gate
‘ (Twelfth Night) Viola (in her disguise as Cesario) delivers this speech to Olivia after Orsino has sent her to carry his messages of love to Olivia. In this speech, however, Cesario sets aside the prepared messages and instead tells Olivia what he would do if he were in love with her. Viola comically alternates between an apparently prepared eulogy – ‘Most radiant, exquisite, and unmatchable beauty
‘ and the deflating commentary of ‘I would be loath to cast away my speech
‘ as if she is not addressing it to the right woman. She is not quite disrespectful with Olivia, but almost. Something of this unpompous, rather maverick treatment seems to be what attracts Olivia to Viola.
This speech is significant, then, because it sets the stage for Olivia’s infatuation with the person she thinks is Cesario: instead of helping win Olivia for Orsino, Cesario’s passionate words make Olivia fall in love with him. This development is understandable, when one considers what Viola says here—she insists that she would be outside Olivia’s gate night and day, proclaiming her love, until Olivia took “pity” on her. This kind of devotion contrasts sharply with the way Orsino actually pursues his courtship of Olivia: instead of planting himself outside her door and demonstrating his devotion, he prefers to remain at home, lolling on couches and complaining of his broken heart. The contrast, then, between the devotion that Viola imagines here and the self-involvement that characterizes Orsino’s passion for Olivia, suggests that Viola has a better understanding than Orsino of what true love should be.
Viola’s speech is extremely persuasive: ‘Make me a willow cabin at your gate
‘ is a powerful invocation to love which, in its intensity, turns up the erotic heat of the encounter. It seems almost a proclamation of love, not by a messenger as a surrogate but by an ardent lover in person, and Olivia responds in kind with her sudden question about parentage, designed to establish the suitability of this potential husband. Throughout the scene, Viola uses the first person ‘I’ rather than the third person ‘he’ as a messenger might use (‘he told me to tell you that he loves you’, for example). The increasingly intense relationship between them could be seen to cut out Orsino, though ironically the power of Viola’s speech of yearning could derive from her longing for him. It’s important to consider how Shakespeare uses the Cesario disguise to play with varieties of sexual desire in Viola’s relationships with Olivia and Orsino.
