Viola: The Woman Who Has to Perform Being a Man

Viola washes ashore after a shipwreck, believes her twin brother is dead, and within minutes has hired herself out as a page boy to the local duke. She calls herself Cesario. The disguise works too well: Olivia falls in love with Cesario, and Viola falls in love with Orsino, who loves Olivia, who loves Cesario. The tangle is funny and genuinely painful at the same time.

She cannot tell Orsino she loves him. She cannot tell Olivia she is a woman. Her famous 'She never told her love' speech in Act 2 Scene 4 is autobiographical: she is describing her own situation to the man she cannot confess to, in the character of someone else.

She is the play's most emotionally acute character. While Orsino wallows in romantic feeling and Olivia pursues a fiction, Viola observes the absurdity clearly, and still feels every bit of it. Her reunion with her twin Sebastian in Act 5 resolves the plot, but the fact that Orsino's love for her depends partly on having known her as Cesario is something the play leaves quietly unresolved.