How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare (11 page)

Passage 5
Cesario’s Willow Cabin

CESARIO

If I did love you in my master’s flame
,

With such a suff’ring, such a deadly life
,

In your denial I would find no sense
.

I would not understand it
.

OLIVIA

Why, what would you?

CESARIO

Make me a willow cabin at your gate

And call upon my soul within the house
,

Write loyal cantons of contemnèd love

And sing them loud even in the dead of night
,

Hallow your name to the reverberate hills

And make the babbling gossip of the air

Cry out “Olivia!” O, you should not rest

Between the elements of air and earth

But you should pity me
.

OLIVIA

You might do much
.

(
Twelfth Night
, Act I, Scene 5, lines 266–80)

I
n this passage from
Twelfth Night
, a good-looking, fresh-faced servant, a young man named Cesario, is speaking to an unusually beautiful and headstrong countess named Olivia. Cesario’s master is in love with Olivia, but Olivia has turned him down repeatedly. In desperation, the master has sent his servant Cesario to visit Olivia and plead his case.

At this moment in the play, Olivia has just told Cesario that she does
not
love Cesario’s master. She recognizes that he is handsome, rich, and virtuous,

But yet I cannot love him
.

He might have took his answer long ago
.

In the face of this rejection, Cesario replies from the heart, with simplicity and passion.

If I did love you in my master’s flame
,

With such a suff’ring, such a deadly life
,

In your denial I would find no sense
.

I would not understand it
.

In other words, “If I loved you the way my master does, with all his passionate and deadly suffering, I simply wouldn’t understand your rejection of me.” Have your children say the lines (out loud, of course, and using the Quotation Pages) with utter simplicity.

If I did love you in my master’s flame
,

Notice the word
flame
. It means “manner,” but it also implies intense emotion, as in someone fanning the flame of someone else’s passion.

If I did love you in my master’s flame
,

With such a suff’ring, such a deadly life
,

“With as much deadly suffering as he is going through.”

Twelfth Night
at the Public Theater, with Audra McDonald as Olivia and Anne Hathaway as Viola.
(photo credit 11.1)

In your denial I would find no sense
.

I would not understand it
.

Now have your son or daughter say the whole quatrain:

If I did love you in my master’s flame
,

With such a suff’ring, such a deadly life
,

In your denial I would find no sense
.

I would not understand it
.

Olivia answers Cesario by saying:

Why, what would you?

Notice that Olivia leaves out the final word “do.” Normally one would answer “Why, what would you do?” By leaving out that one little word, Shakespeare makes the line lighter, more bewildered, and less earth-bound.

I would not understand it
.

Why, what would you?

Cesario answers:

Make me a willow cabin at your gate

And call upon my soul within the house
,

Write loyal cantons of contemnèd love

And sing them loud even in the dead of night
,

Hallow your name to the reverberate hills

And make the babbling gossip of the air

Cry out “Olivia!” O, you should not rest

Between the elements of air and earth

But you should pity me
.

OLIVIA

You might do much
.

Cesario’s answer to Olivia is so passionate, so powerful, so poetically breathtaking, that Olivia can only stammer at the end of it:

You might do much
.

YOU might do much. You, Cesario, might do much. You, Cesario, might do much with ME. Because of the power of poetry in this one speech, known as the Willow Cabin Speech, Olivia falls in love with the servant instead of the master. Just imagine the whoop of delight from an audience that has never seen the play before.

Now let’s look at the Willow Cabin Speech more carefully. Cesario says that he would

Make me a willow cabin at your gate

And call upon my soul within the house
,

In other words he would build a small house made of willow branches at Olivia’s front gate. (Olivia and Cesario would both know that in Greek
and Roman mythology, the willow tree was a symbol of grief for unrequited love.) Have your children say these two lines with simple conviction, as if to say, “What else could I possibly do? Nothing else. I’m in love.”

Make me a willow cabin at your gate

And call upon my soul within the house
,

Call upon my soul
. He is referring to Olivia as his soul and says that he would come to her house and call upon her. Another possible meaning is that he would call upon his own soul in his house, the willow cabin he just built, in order to find the strength to approach anyone as tremendous as Olivia. Both meanings are romantic, and perhaps the ambiguity implies that their two souls are one.

What would Cesario do next if he loved her?

Write loyal cantons of contemnèd love

And sing them loud even in the dead of night
,

A
canton
is a song.
Contemnèd love
is love that is disdained or held in contempt. So Cesario would write songs about his love for Olivia and then he would sing them aloud at night, even when no one was around to hear them.

Write loyal cantons

of contemnèd love

And sing them loud

even in the dead of night
,

Next, Cesario would do something even more romantic: He would shout her name at the top of his lungs so loudly that he would make the hills reverberate. Moreover, he would do it with so much passion that it would make a nymph from Greek mythology named Echo—Shakespeare calls her
the babbling gossip of the air
—shout back the very same word:

Oliviaaaaaaa!

In other words, the air would echo with Olivia’s name.

Hallow your name to the reverberate hills

And make the babbling gossip of the air

Cry out “Olivia!”

“Olivia!” Exercise

Need I even suggest the next exercise? See who can cry
“Olivia!”
the loudest. First try just the word itself. Then have your children say the whole speech and end it with the cry

Oliviaaaaaaa!

Also notice that the word
hallow
is an interesting one. In every production of
Twelfth Night
I have ever seen, Cesario has pronounced it “hal-LOO” (with the accent on the second syllable), making it a variant of the word
hello
and therefore synonymous (in this context) with the word
shout
.

Halloo your name to the reverberate hills

It makes my heart skip a beat. But in the only authentic printing of the play (the First Folio of 1623) the word is spelled
hallow
, which suggests not only
halloo
(or
hello
) but also the word
hallow
as in “to make holy.”

Hallow your name to the reverberate hills

And make the babbling gossip of the air

Cry out “Olivia!”

I believe that Shakespeare intended this double meaning. As we know, he loved puns, and this is a perfect one, since both words,
halloo
and
hallow
, are equally appropriate. As for pronunciation, I recommend that you use “halloo” since it is an iamb and the rhythm of it makes the line more beautiful.

Finally, Cesario adds a short coda to the speech:

O, you should not rest

Between the elements of air and earth

But you should
[unless you]
pity me
.

After the climax of
“Olivia!”
I always imagine these three lines being spoken deep in the chest, almost in a whisper. Have your children act out these lines with depth and longing.

Remember, always,
always
make the memorization a game for your children. Chest tones, patty-cake, marching, shouting, acting, wearing hats and cloaks, contests, bets, painting on mustaches, bribery by chocolate, whatever it takes. My view was always a ruthless one: Anything I could do to help them memorize the passages was fair game.

Bonus Passage