In the cases of Sebastian
and Viola, of course, these are twins
who got separated in the shipwreck
and are dressing up as each other.
Viola and Sebastian
get mistaken for each other.
You do mistake, sir.
I am sure no man has any quarrels with me.
My remembrance is very free and clear
from any image of offence done to any man.
You'll find it otherwise, I assure thee.
Therefore, if you hold your life
at any price, betake thee to thy guard.
Olivia falls in love with Cesario —
Viola —
and then, by accident,
marries the twin brother, Sebastian.
Then realises
that she's married the wrong person,
but she couldn't marry the first person
because she's, in fact, a woman.
So, partly,
it's Shakespeare's nifty solution
to making sure that Olivia walks away
with a husband who's a man, not a woman.
Also, Olivia doesn't have many lines.
There's a strange silence
when she discovers
that this guy that she's married
isn't the guy that she thought he was.
There is a darkness or strangeness about
the fact that she's sort of been tricked.
Poor Sebastian is having
all these things happen to him —
people approaching him
as if they've known him for a long time,
and he's a stranger and knows no one.
I feel like the whole case
of mistaken identity
is a catalyst for him,
for Sebastian to question everything.
Because he'd lost everything
and it's usually at those points
where we start to question
our whole lives.
What relish is in this?
How runs the stream?
Or I am mad, or else this is a dream.
Let fancy still my sense in Lethe steep.
If it be thus to dream,
still let me sleep.
Nay, come, I prithee.
He's in a place
where so many young men are,
in a sense of being lost and having
questions thrown up about yourself
that you never thought
you'd have to answer.
Things like your sexuality
and stuff like that.
I feel like you never really get
a full answer,
but I think he's definitely
a little bit closer to him.
I think Shakespeare is making a comment
that often we suppress parts of ourselves
to make life easier.
On the other hand, I think by that point,
having married Sebastian
and probably, therefore,
having spent a night with him,
or at least had sex with him,
Olivia seems pretty cheerful
about the whole thing.
So it might be that, in the end,
love decides who you end up with,
rather than we do.
As if Shakespeare's going,
"There's always a director or a writer
"or a stage manager
that's fixing our lives.
"And, actually, giving yourself to love
sort of means acknowledging
"that you don't always end up with the
person that you thought you were going to
"or that you thought you would.
"You end up with someone
a little bit different."
And, actually,
isn't that what also love is?
Realising that the person you love is not
quite the person you thought they were.
I think that's probably quite amazing.
