Colorado Shakespeare Gardens
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Twelfth Night

Viola is not a courtly lover. She shares the name of the demure violet, which you can see in this Garden, but not its nature. She is bold enough to don a man’s attire and make her own way upon an unknown shore. Her predicament is that she truly loves Orsino, but cannot speak without betraying her disguise as Cesario. So she tells him instead of an imaginary sister, painting a pitiful picture of a damask-rose bud that, because of an insect eating its heart, will never bloom:

      She never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud,
Feed on her damask cheek. [Twelfth Night II iv]

Twelfth Night

 

In Twelfth Night, Viola is shipwrecked, her brother drowned (she thinks), and she disguises herself as a boy to survive. She names herself Cesario and falls in love with Duke Orsino, who sends her to woo Olivia on his behalf. Olivia falls for Cesario. Everyone's in love with the wrong person, and nobody can say what they actually feel.

Viola shares her name with the violet—small, modest, hidden in the shade. But she's bolder than that. When she can't tell Orsino she loves him (because he thinks she's a man), she tells him about an imaginary sister instead:

She never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud,
feed on her damask cheek.

The damask rose is beautiful, fragrant, valuable—but if something's eating it from the inside, it never blooms. That's Viola: love consuming her in secret.

Meanwhile, Malvolio fantasizes about marrying Olivia and imagines himself “sitting in my state... having come from a day-bed, where I have left Olivia sleeping.”

He pictures box trees trimmed into ornamental shapes—controlled, formal, ambitious. Sir Toby mocks him with ginger, hot and common, the opposite of Malvolio's pretensions.

And Feste, the fool, sings about yew and cypress—funeral trees—because under all the comedy, there's grief. Viola mourning her brother. Olivia mourning her father and brother. Orsino mourning his own romantic fantasies.

The plants know what the characters won't admit: love and loss grow from the same root. By the end, when everyone pairs off and the comedy resolves, Feste's left singing alone. "The rain it raineth every day."

Even the happy ending can't stop the violets from hiding in the shade.

 
click here for video transcript

Special thanks to longtime CSF supporter and thespian Chuck Wilcox for voicing the part of The Bard in our video series. Full production credits available here. All photos copyright Colorado Shakespeare Group except those in the public domain, published under Creative Commons (CC) licensing. For more information on (CC) artwork in this video, click here.

Enjoy this slideshow of the plants we have in our Twelfth Night Garden:

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