#viola x orsino

[blackcur-rants]

Okay, so we all know Charles Dickens was a huge Shakespeare fan and a theatre guy in general. Like, he did so many theatrical productions alongside Wilkie Collins and loved himself some dramatic readings of his own prose.

What I’m saying is that I kind of feel that “A Tale of Two Cities” lifts quite a lot from Shakespeare. For example, in both ATOTC and “Romeo and Juliet”, we have a story about two factions (the two countries of England and France in Dickens’ novel and the two noble houses of Montague and Capulet in Shakespeare’s play) who have been at each other’s throats for so long they don’t even quite remember why they’re at each other’s throats in the first place and what happens when two members of these respective factions (Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay in “A Tale of Two Cities” and Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet in “Romeo and Juliet”) meet and become close to each other. And of course, both stories end with a desperate person sacrificing themselves for the one that they love with said sacrifice being less a noble and definitive ending to the story and more an act of desperation in the face of impending death (Carton takes Darnay’s place on the guillotine in a desperate attempt to buy Darnay, Lucie, and their daughter time to escape back to London while Juliet commits suicide in what is very likely a desperate attempt to escape from what she still sees as her impending arranged marriage to Count Paris). There’s also a strong parallel between the main character trio in “A Tale of Two Cities” and the main character trio in Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night”, I.E…

•Both Viola and Charles Darnay are sweet, sensitive young nobles who find themselves living in a new land and assume new names in order to avoid suspicion and end up in a relationship they didn’t expect with the second character of the main trio.

•Both Olivia and Lucie Manette are smart, pious young women living in mourning for a dead or at least severely traumatised loved one and end up falling in love with the disguised protagonist while fending off the attentions of an annoying suitor (Malvolio for Olivia and Stryver for Lucie).

•Orsino and Sydney Carton are both the depressed young men uncertain of their purpose in life who become acquainted with Viola/Darnay while also being in love with Olivia/Lucie.

Where am I going with all this, by the way? Well basically, I’m kind of suggesting that there being queer subtext between Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay might actually have been intentional on Dickens’ part. However, because queerness was so verboten and punishable by prison or death in the 1850s, Dickens had to cloak all of this in ambiguity and subtext, using these allusions to classic Shakespeare plays as a way of coding/broadcasting his true intent to the audience who would know what he was doing.

@cynicalclassicist @eleftherian @secretmellowblog @dachi-chan25 @uncleasriel

[eva-eyre]

finished reading Twelfth Night 😭 it’s so good! it’s so witty and funny but had so much emotional depth too — i especially enjoyed Viola’s character and her relationship with Orsino… so i do wish we got to see a bit of their married life.

[snack-size-shakespeare]

Thus production truly gets the queerness inherent in Orsino x Cesario. Orsino trying to get comfortable with loving a man is a very subtle but significant character journey. Even his finale “yay” reaction to discovering she’s a woman doesn’t feel like bi erasure! It could, but that actor plays an Orsino so sweet and gentle and well-meaning, and clearly bi, that it doesn’t. I don’t recall it exactly, but it had a vibe of relief that he had a break from tackling his sexuality head-on and that he could come to it more slowly.

If anyone remember specifically how that ending goes, please chime in! But I just remember feeling that that whole production did such a good job with queerness. The actor, whose name I forgot, also does a great job with a queer Oberon in NT’s MSND!

If that ain't just the most relatable reaction!

("Twelfth Night", NT Live, 2017.)

[onscreenkisses]

Excuse me... The motel's across the street!

SHE'S THE MAN, dir. Andy Fickman (2006)

[astro-tag-9]

If ur still doing asks can u do

Pisces sun Pisces moon (might be Cancer rising but I’m unsure)

Capricorn moon Libra sun Libra rising

❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥

❤️‍🔥Duke and Viola ❤️‍🔥

[thestarlightforge]

Fellas, is it gay to start a Viola-Cesario Tumblr about a 400 year old play 💀

[jomarchswritingjacket]

favorite singers and rappers as shakespeare characters

taylor swift is juliet (duh)

beyoncé is cleopatra

hozier is puck

florence welch is ophelia

the last dinner party are the main cast of julius caesar (also duh)

lorde is cordelia

chappell roan is rosalind/ganymede

girl in red is viola/orsino

conan gray is mercutio

reneé rapp is katerina

megan thee stallion is titania

lil nas x is feste

muna are the weird sisters

olivia rodrigo is helena

fletcher is beatrice

sabrina carpenter as hermia

feel free to add onto this bc I can’t think of any more

[hazyaltcare]

Could I get a tarot reading for Viola/Cesario (Shakespeare's Twelfth Night)? I would like to know what my relationship with Orsino was like after the events shown in the play. Tysm!

What I asked: What was @twelve-nights relationship like with Orsino after the events shown in the play in their Viola/Cesario timeline?

The result:

Major Arcana X: The Wheel of Fortune

My interpretation:

The revelation of your true self signed a drastic shift in your relationship. Beyond the events of your play, your relationship grew and built freely. There are themes of destiny and things outside of your control in this card, which to me suggest soulmates. I think you both fell hard for each other, regardless of if that's what either of you intended. This card suggests a change in luck, and my intuition tells me that the change was for the better and that fortune smiled upon you both. I see a eucatastrophic ending for you both beyond the events of the play.

~*~

I hope this helps. Always remember you know your own kintypes best.

Mod Haze (☀️Sol)

[shakespearesiphone]

Alright remaining followers I need your help pls gimme your Viola x Orsino playlist recommendations

[sadsilmarilsoup]

art dump

woohoo! I actually am posting this! This is all the stuff that's actually kinda good bc most of my sketch book is a mess. I mean like scibles everywhere and multiple versions of drawings that look like a 7 year old drew and pages missing half of themselves 🤓

Ok so first up is Luna! The first one is without a filter and the other one is with one. We're not gonna talk about the glasses or neck or the amount of crap I had to whiteout lol

Here's some fanart I made in school. Ik it looks a little goofy but I think it's beautiful 🙃. Top right we have portraits of some important characters in this one novel called Tangerine we had to read last school year. The curly hair one is this guy named Joey, the stick figure w/ glasses is the main character Paul and the one who thinks hes the rizzler is Paul's older brother Erik. That book is trash btw so don't read it.

Beside that is a sketch of Viola/Cesario from Twelfth Night. I spent more time on the drawing than the actual graded writing part lol. On the bottom is the Duke Orsino (also from Twelfth Night.)

Next we've got our favorite Alabama citizens (plus Haleth bc she girlboss!) Nienor/Ninel is in the top right with the walking L (her brother/partner/husband actually...) Túrin and then the baddie Haleth 💪🥵💅. I tried to draw Beleg too but he came out a little special looking.

These are what I like to call my

✨️scary sketches✨️

Messy outlines? YES! Terrible proportions? OFC! Weird commentary? ALWAYS! Will I regret putting these on the internet for everyone to see? PROBABLY 😅

I drew Aredhel as a teenager (why specifically teen idk), yk before Eöl and all that drama and trauma. Idk how I feel about it...

And then Lihn Song from KotLC bc she's cool and super pretty and has fire hair.

And on the bottom is our hot princess girlboss slay queen Lúthien. My drawing does no justice 😭

Idk if you can tell but I'm totally loosing my attention so this next part will be really short and simple bc I need to get this over with 🥱

the first drawing is gisela from KotLC and my current pfp, so slay

Next to that is a sketch from about a year ago of baby me! Ik, I was adorable ☺️💅

And under that is my favorite MEGAMIND X JOJO SIWA!!! He's so slay.

Ok all done now I can sleep :)

[gayestshakespearecouples]

(For context Viola is one of the crossdressing protagonists, known as Cesario while they're in the guise of a man, but they have so much genderqueer energy that their relationships with both Olivia and Orsino are simultaneously very gay coded lmao)

[lizardrosen]

#hi will this reminded me of you#i think you've been doing a good job in your little corner! (from @fairytalesandfandoms)

awww, thank you, I do my best! there are definitely angsty hamlet edits all over the place. @all-mimsy made this King and Lionheart fanvid of hamlet/horatio, and many others, and i've contributed my fair share to the playlist scene.

i don't think viola x orsino and viola x olivia ship wars would ever develop because we're too polite and it's one of those situations where an ot3 is genuinely likely to happen. also in any given production it's usually painfully obvious which one is the real catch (usually olivia). the real ship war is who hamlet should date! the answer is none of them because he's a bad boyfriend, but still.

i've written MANY an unhinged crossover ship, including Hamlet/Iago and Mercutio & Horatio and fate; Cesario and Hamlet and doppelgangers; and Laertes & Orsino and embracing queerness.

there's poorly written romeo and juliet fics out there too! you just need to belieeeeve

shakespeare crew: @butchhamlet, @suits-of-woe, @lesbiancassius, @eldritch-elrics, @poverty-god, @cleverclove, @moonlarked

shakespeare plays need fandoms. like real, actual fandoms, not just 13 people on tumblr. i want people to make velocity edits of this favs. i want angsty hamlet edits to exist. i want viola x orsino and viola x olivia ship wars to exist. i want chronically online tiktokers to fight over this shit. i would pay real money to see people to make AUs on ao3 where the most unhinged ships who have never met to become canon. i want really poorly written romeo and juliet fanfics to happen. someone please help me make this dream a reality

[megatraven]

alex and mc do have roughly the same age difference as romeo and juliet 😌

I can also see them as Viola/Orsino with the whole employee thing... hehe

(i don't know anything about gnomes tho)

HEHEHE yes!!!!!! shakespearean alex x mc is so so good

(that's ok, i know enough for the two of us vuv)

[mxlcncholy]

orsino: what’s your type?

viola/cesario: you

orsino:

orsino: i meant your blood type bro you’re bleeding

orsino: thanks tho you’re my type too

[emjee]

The Glorious Queer Potential of Viola and Orsino in Twelfth Night

for Shakespeare Appreciation Week - Day Three - Lovers Day

This is a long-promised essay/ramble and I’m chucking it under Lover’s Day because it mostly concerns Viola and Orsino. I suppose an alternate title for it could be Orsino: He’s as Queer as the Rest of Them.

Before we begin, brief caveat: queerness exists in many forms and means many things to many people. This is my reading as one (1) singular queer person. Also, as you will have noticed if you read this far, I’m using the word queer. Not only is it an academically accepted term and one of my personal identifiers, it is in many cases the best descriptor for people and relationships in a play written in a time where gender and sexuality were constructed differently than they are today. Am I going to use the word “bisexual” when I talk about Orsino? Probably. But overall, the play’s just queer, in terms of gender, sexual attraction, and social relationships.

Let’s start with Viola (another heads up, I’m going to refer to her mostly as Viola because that’s how she seems to think about herself, and I’m going to use she/her pronouns). I believe @shredsandpatches recently made an argument that Viola can be read as a trans woman, which is an argument I love—she’s clearly uncomfortable with her masculine disguise (“Disguise, I see, thou art a wickedness, / Wherein the pregnant enemy does much. / How easy is it for the proper-false / In women's waxen hearts to set their forms!”) but she also passes as a man marvelously well. Like, people make a few comments about her higher voice, but nobody actually seems to suspect that she’s a woman until she’s finally in the same place as Sebastian and everyone goes “twins?!” Viola being a trans woman would also make the whole “she and Sebastian are literally identical” thing much more plausible, although one should never let “biological technicalities” get in the way of a good twin plot. I think there are also arguments to be made for playing Viola as a gender nonconforming cis woman who thinks, “It’ll be safer if I just pass as a man”, or with some other relationship to genderqueerness. (And by the way, when I say “arguments to be made”, sometimes that can mean the argument is “I, a queer person, feel like playing Viola this way.” Sometimes you just gotta do it for the queer joy, you know?)

So, Orsino. The two most memorable Orsinos I’ve seen have been Nicholas Bishop in the 2017 RSC production and Oliver Chris in the 2017 National Theatre production (truly we were blessed with Twelfth Nights in 2017). The RSC production chose to look at Orsino and immediately go, “This is not a Straight Man” which was valid of them—from the get-go, you understand why Orsino might go for a person who’s got some excellent gender-fuckery going on. In the NT production, Orsino is much more of a jock and, to my interpretation, definitely Thinks He’s Straight, which is fun because you get to see his heterosexuality crumble before his very eyes. (The moment where Viola reveals herself as a woman and Orsino lets out a long “oh thank God” breath can read a little too close to “no homo” for my liking, but Oliver Chris is good at making even asshole characters weirdly endearing, so I will let it pass.)

With both of these productions, you also have to consider the era they’re set in: the RSC is in the Victorian era, the NT in the 1970s (I think. I’m pretty sure it’s the 70s. Could be the 60s?) In the RSC, one could infer that Orsino’s commitment to getting Olivia to love him stems from the homophobia of the society he’s living in. Would he love to be able to just get with men? Sure. But the odds of him getting away with that for his entire life are low. The show’s design really makes this production Shakespeare-by-way-of-Wilde: the sets, the costumes (especially Antonio, who’s literally wearing a green carnation in his lapel). By evoking Wilde and his persecution, the production reminds the viewer that plenty of the people in this play—Antonio, Olivia, Viola, Orsino—can’t show the outside world their true queer selves, however much they might want to be.

Now, the NT production’s version of Orsino reads to me very much like someone going through a bisexual awakening. Source: I have undergone a bisexual awakening and I took one look at Orsino in this production and went *John Mulaney voice* “Oh, okay.” To me, Oliver Chris’s Orsino is going through the motions of compulsive heterosexuality. By all accounts, he should be in love with Olivia. It makes sense to him. He knows all the motions to go through. He’s talked himself into loving her because that’s what you do when you feel you need to be visibly in love with a woman and she’s the most suitable person around.

But once Orsino meets Viola, he seems to immediately adore her, in his own bro way, for herself. This isn’t what he’s used to attraction being like, he doesn’t immediately recognize it because Cesario is a guy, sometimes guys are just friends with other guys and do a lot of homoerotic boxing practice (still not over it) and it’s just dudes being bros and chilling on a table at your fortieth birthday part five feet apart because you’re not gay (spoiler: you’re actually really gay, and by gay I mean pick your favorite flavor of polysexual queerness).

Orsino continues to refer to Viola as Cesario up until the end of the play, mostly because Viola is still wearing men’s clothes. In early modern England, clothes were a huge part of gender expression. Cross-dressing was against the law (I’m 99% sure, someone please correct me on this if I’m wrong; it’s been several years since I discussed queer early modern stuff in a formal setting). Orsino referring to Viola as Cesario even when he knows she’s a woman is one of those things that has a reasonable historic explanation, but can also be read nowadays as: he likes it. Orsino’s into genderqueerness, and good on him. Genderqueerness is attractive as hell.

I know we sometimes lament the end of Twelfth Night along the lines of “But Will! Tell us what the original super-gay ending was!!” I totally understand why people want to see Olivia and Viola wind up together (Olivia—another raging queer who I didn’t even get to in this ramble—does seem to be truly in love with Viola and it’s hard to leave her disappointed at the end of the play), and I think we’re all heartbroken for Antonio (he just loves Sebastian so MUCH). However, I want to point out that men and women can still have queer romantic relationships with each other.  A love story between Viola as a straight trans woman and Orsino as a bisexual cis man is still a queer love story.

Happy Lovers Day, my loves! Have a fabulously queer day.