Viola has already fallen in love with Orsino before this scene opens. (From Valentine, we find that Cesario has been serving the Duke for three days. Note, Viola seemed already poised to fall in love with Orsino–the first thing she mentioned when she heard of him back in Scene 2 was that her father knew of him, and that he was a bachelor, then.)
When the Duke enters Scene 4, I believe he enters on a different level onstage than Viola, hence his, “Who saw Cesario, ho?” However, though Cesario serves the Duke, they speak as if equals. Instead of immediately following his command to go to Olivia’s house, she questions him, asserting that Olivia, in her mourning, would not let Cesario in. (There might be a slight break in her voice; she might be saying this while reacting to the painful shock that the Duke would ask her to woo Olivia.)
The Duke replies, perhaps, in an exasperated tone, “Be clamorous, and leap all civil bounds, / Rather than make unprofitèd return.” Though she may be saying her next words in earnest, Viola then even goes as far as to question his logic, “Say I do speak to her, my lord, what then?”
Orsino’s reply explains why he’d favored her, to have told her “the book even of [his] secret soul.” He wants Cesario, who has the youth neither he nor Valentine has, to be his voice:
Orsino: O then, unfold the passion of my love,
Surprise her with discourse of my dear faith;
It shall become thee well to act my woes:
She will attend it better in thy youth,
Than in a Nuntio’s of more grave aspect.
Viola’s modesty–”I think not so, my lord,”–prompts the Duke to beseech to Cesario his (her?) graces. Perhaps, there might be a trace of something more than fondness in his voice as he gets deeper into this reverie, as if a part of him knows that Cesario is not really a boy. This should fade as he returns to the present–by the time he calls for the attendants to accompany him.
Orsino: Dear Lad, believe it;
For they shall yet belie thy happy years,
That say thou art a man: Diana’s lip
Is not more smooth, and rubious: thy small pipe
Is as the maidens organ, shrill, and sound,
And all is semblative a woman’s part.
I know thy constellation is right apt
For this affair: some four or five attend him,
And if you will: for I myself am best
When least in company: prosper well in this,
And thou shall live as freely as thye lord,
To call his fortunes thine.
Viola replies immediately, completing the Duke’s pentameter–as if in a trance. She’s perhaps recovering to the Duke’s praises of her beauty, and doesn’t fully understand the significance of her agreement. She won’t realize the difficult situation she’s trapped in until a beat later, after Duke Orsino leaves, and, completing her pentameter from the previous line, she reveals to the audience her “barful strife.”
Viola: I’ll do my best
To woo your Lady…Exeunt Duke Orsino and others.
Viola: Yet a barful strife,
Who e’re I woo, myself would be his wife.
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