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.