Since this play lacks the influence of the parental figures, love should be achieved at the beginning of the play. All the external barriers to fulfillment have been eliminated in what becomes almost a way of making fun of the ordinary young lovers. It's ironic that the residents of Illyria are actually not free. Their actions are the causes for their barriers, most of them do not know neither themselves, nor others, nor their social worlds. .
Shakespeare used his writing abilities to organize a comedic plot in this play. He used the twins, exile and impersonations to invent the different masks that the characters wear throughout the play. Every character has a mask. It seems that the character that does not assume a mask, is not within the comedic field. In a comedy, if a character thinks that it is not necessary to assume a mask, he or she is being nave because that character has already assumed a mask. We usually tend to laugh with the characters that know the role they are playing and we laugh at the characters that do not. The cast of Twelfth Night is simply divided into the two categories. .
In the beginning of the play we see Orsino and Olivia as a romantic lover and a grief-stricken lady. They are comic characters because they are both wearing masks, metaphorically speaking. Orsino glories in the proper moodiness and fickleness of the literary lover; only our own romanticism can blind us to the absurdities in his opening speech (Summers, 1955). Orsino acts like he is in love with Olivia, but he clearly is in love with the act of being in love, not the person. Orsino is portrayed in way that makes the reader almost admire him. He is not a boring character. Orsino is a comic character because the reader can easily see thru him. We see that Orsino is suffering from boredom, lack of physical love, and excessive imagination, and the victim is unaware that he is in love with love.