"For such as I am all true lovers are, --Unstaid and skittish in all motions else, Save in the constant image of the creature That is beloved."
"For, boy, however we do praise ourselves, Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm, More longing, wavering, sooner lost and won, Than women's are."
"There is no woman's sides Can bide the beating of so strong a passion As love doth give my heart; no woman's heart So big, to hold so much; they lack retention. Alas! their love may be called appetite, No motion of the liver, but the palate, That suffers surfeit, cloyment, and revolt!"
Hamlet contradicts himself, too: at one moment he declares that his soul is immortal, and at the next is full of despair. But Hamlet is so elaborate a portrait, built up of so many minute touches, that self-contradiction is a part, and a necessary part, of his many-sided complexity. But the Duke in "Twelfth Night" reveals himself as it were accidentally; we know little more of him than that he loves music and love, books and flowers, and that he despises wealth and company; accordingly, when he contradicts himself, we may suspect that Shakespeare is letting himself speak freely without much care for the coherence of characterization. And the result of this frankness is that he has given a more intimate, a more confidential, sketch of himself in Duke Orsino of "Twelfth Night" than he has given us in any play except perhaps "Hamlet" and "Macbeth."
I hardly need to prove that Shakespeare in his earliest plays, as in his latest, in his Sonnets as in his darkest tragedy, loved flowers and music. In almost every play he speaks of flowers with affection and delight. One only needs to recall the song in "A Midsummer's Night's Dream," "I know a bank," or Perdita's exquisite words:
"Daffodils, That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty; violets dim, But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes Or Cytherea's breath; pale primroses, That die unmarried ere they can behold Bright Phoebus in his strength, a malady Most incident to maids; bold oxlips, and The crown-imperial; lilies of all kinds, The flower-de-luce being one";
"Thou shalt not lack The flower that's like thy face, pale primrose, nor The azured harebell like thy veins; no, nor The leaf of eglantine, whom not to slander Outsweetened not thy breath."