Chapter: SCENE IV.


                     _A Room in_ OLIVIA'S _House_.

               _Enter_ SIR ANDREW, FABIAN, _and_ SIR TOBY.

    _Sir And._ No, faith, I'll not stay a jot longer.

    _Sir To._ Thy reason, dear venom, give thy reason.

    _Fab._ You must needs yield your reason, Sir Andrew.

    _Sir And._ Marry, I saw your niece do more favours to the Count's
serving man, than ever she bestowed upon me; I saw't this moment in the
garden.

    _Sir To._ Did she see thee the while, old boy? tell me that.

    _Sir And._ As plain as I see you now.

    _Fab._ This was a great argument of love in her toward you.

    _Sir And._ 'Slight! will you make an ass o' me?

    _Fab._ I will prove it legitimate, sir, upon the oaths of judgment
and reason.

    _Sir To._ And they have been grand jury-men, since before Noah was a
sailor.

    _Fab._ She did show favour to the youth in your sight, only to
exasperate you, to awake your dormouse valour, to put fire in your
heart, and brimstone in your liver: you should then have accosted her;
and with some excellent jests, fire-new from the mint, you should have
bang'd the youth into dumbness. This was look'd for at your hand, and
this was baulk'd: the double gilt of this opportunity you let time wash
off, and you are now sailed into the north of my lady's opinion: where
you will hang like an icicle on a Dutchman's beard, unless you do redeem
it by some laudable attempt, either of valour or policy.

    _Sir And._ An it be any way, it must be with valour; for policy I
hate.

    _Sir To._ Why, then, build me thy fortunes upon the basis of valour.
Challenge me the Count's youth to fight with him; hurt him in eleven
places; my niece shall take note of it: and assure thyself, there is no
love-broker in the world can more prevail in man's commendation with
woman, than report of valour.

    _Fab._ There is no way but this, Sir Andrew.

    _Sir And._ Will either of you bear me a challenge to him?

    _Sir To._ Go write it in a martial hand; be curst and brief; it is
no matter how witty, so it be eloquent, and full of invention: taunt him
with the license of ink: if thou _thou'st_ him some thrice, it shall not
be amiss; and as many _lies_ as will lie in thy sheet of paper; although
the sheet were big enough for the bed of Ware in England, set 'em down;
go, about it. Let there be gall enough in thy ink; though thou write
with a goose-pen, no matter: About it.

    _Sir And._ Where shall I find you?

    _Sir To._ We'll call thee at the _cubiculo:_ Go.

                                                     [_Exit_ SIR ANDREW.

    _Fab._ This is a dear manakin to you, Sir Toby.

    _Sir To._ I have been dear to him, lad; some two thousand strong, or
so.

    _Fab._ We shall have a rare letter from him: but you'll not deliver
it?

    _Sir To._ Never trust me then; and by all means stir on the youth to
an answer. I think, oxen and wainropes cannot hale them together. For
Andrew, if he were opened, and you find so much blood in his liver as
will clog the foot of a flea, I'll eat the rest of the anatomy.

    _Fab._ And his opposite, the youth, bears in his visage no great
presage of cruelty.

    _Sir To._ Look, where the youngest wren of nine comes.

                             _Enter_ MARIA.

    _Mar._ If you desire the spleen, and will laugh yourselves into
stitches, follow me: yon gull Malvolio is turned heathen, a very
renegado; for there is no Christian, that means to be saved by believing
rightly, can ever believe such impossible passages of grossness. He's in
yellow stockings.

    _Sir To._ And cross-gartered?

    _Mar._ Most villainously; like a pedant that keeps a school i' the
church.--I have dogg'd him, like his murderer: He does obey every point
of the letter that I dropped to betray him. He does smile his face into
more lines, than are in a map: you have not seen such a thing as 'tis.

    _Sir To._ Come, bring us, bring us where he is.

                                                             [_Exeunt._

 At Orsino's palace, the duke is gathered together with Cesario , Curio, and others, and he says that he would like to hear a song, a certain "old and antique" song that he heard last night; the song seemed to "relieve passion much." Feste, the jester, is not there to sing it, however, so Orsino sends Curio out to find him and, while Curio is gone, Orsino calls Cesario to him. He tells the young lad that "if ever shalt love," then he should remember how Orsino suffered while he experienced love's sweet pangs. Orsino tells Cesario that Orsino himself is the sad epitome of all lovers -- "unstaid and skittish" -- except when he recalls "the constant image" of his beloved. Cesario hints that love has already enthroned itself within him, and Orsino remarks that he believes that Cesario is indeed correct. He can tell by looking at the boy that his "eye / Hath stay'd upon some favour that it loves." Cesario acknowledges that this is true. The duke is intrigued; he is curious about the woman who has caught Cesario's fancy, and he begins to question the lad. Cesario says that the object of his love is a great deal like Orsino, a confession that makes Orsino scoff: "She is not worth thee, then," he says. When he learns that Cesario's "beloved" is about Orsino's own age, he becomes indignant. A woman, he says, should take someone "elder than herself." He says that women, by nature, are not able to love with the same intensity as a young man is able to love; women need to find themselves a steady, doggedly devoted older man whose passions are burned low and, thus, more equal to hers. Cesario, Orsino suggests, needs to find a very young virgin, one who has just blossomed, "for women are as a rose being once displayed, do fall that very hour." Cesario sadly agrees; women, he says, often "die, even when they to perfection grow." Curio and Feste enter then, and Feste is more than happy to sing the song that he sang last night. He urges Cesario, in particular, to take note of it for although it is "old and plain," it is a song that is well known. Spinsters sing it, as do young maidens; its theme concerns the simple truth of love's innocence. The song begins, "Come away, come away, death . . ." and goes on to lament unrequited love -- of which Orsino and Viola all suffer. The lover of the song is a young man who has been "slain" by "a fair cruel maid," and, his heart broken, he asks for a shroud of white to encase his body. He wants no flowers strewn on his black coffin; nor does he want friends nor mourners present when he is lowered into the grave. In fact, he wants to be buried in a secret place so that no other "sad true lover" will chance to find his grave and find reason to weep there. The emphasis here is on the innocence of love, and our focus is on poor Viola, who has innocently fallen in love with Duke Orsino, who believes that she is only a handsome young man, to whom he feels "fatherly." Orsino gives Feste some money for singing the mournful ballad, and, in return, Feste praises his good and generous master and then exits. The duke then excuses the others, and when he and Cesario are alone, he turns to the boy and tells him that he must return to Olivia and her "sovereign cruelty." He tells Cesario that he must convince Olivia that Orsino's love is "more noble than the world." It is not her riches which he seeks ; instead, he prizes her as a "queen of gems." It is his soul which loves her. When Cesario asks what he should say if Olivia protests that she absolutely cannot love Orsino, the duke refuses to accept such an answer. Cesario then grows bold and tells Orsino that perhaps there is "some lady" who has "as great a pang of heart" for him as he has for Olivia. Orsino refuses to acknowledge that women can love with the passion that men can: . . . 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. True love, he says, using a typically Elizabethan analogy, lies in one's liver, and a woman's love lies only on the tip of her tongue. Women may talk sweetly, but women cannot "suffer surfeit, cloyment and revolt," pains of the liver which are reserved for only men. He wants to make it perfectly clear to Cesario that there is "no compare / Between that love a woman can bear me / And that I owe Olivia." Cesario now becomes bolder still and says that women can indeed love with as much passion as men can. He knows it to be so, for his father had a daughter who loved a man with as much passion as Cesario himself could love Orsino -- that is, if Cesario were a woman. Then Cesario realizes that perhaps he has said enough on the subject, but when Orsino inquires further concerning the history of this "sister," Cesario's imagination is rekindled. He returns to the theme of the unrequited lover and conjures up a sad tale about his "sister" who loved so purely and so passionately and so privately that love became "like a worm in the bud" of her youth and fed "on her damask cheek." Turning to Orsino, he says, "We men may say more, swear more," but talk is often empty. His sister died, Cesario sighs, and now he is "all the daughters of my father's house, / And all the brothers too." With this cryptic statement in mind, the duke gives Cesario a jewel. He is to present it to Olivia, and he is to "bide no denay" -- that is, he is not to take No for an answer. Orsino is determined to have Olivia's love.

