Best Twelfth Night Critics

Malcomson on desire

“Desire or ‘what you will’ is the motivating force in the play”

Hamilton on Viola and Orsino

“It takes Viola to show him the difference between infatuation and love”

Duncan on love as a disease

“Describes love in terms of disease”

Bloom on Orsino’s love

“Self-intoxicated Orsino”

Hazlitt on Malvolio

“We feel regard for Malvolio, and we sympathise”

Berry on the audience and Malvolio

“Make the audience feel ashamed of itself”

Cash on Malvolio

“Whom we may feel genuine pity”

Pennington on Olivia and Orsino

“As much in thrall to her melancholy as Orsino to his love”

Summer on masks

“Every character has his masks”

Greif on Illyria

“Illyria is a world of deceptive surfaces”

Logan on the fool and sanity

“The fool is the only sane one”

Lowden on disguise

“To dress up, to disguise oneself, is to falsify oneself”

Brown on the fool’s nature

“Feste, the fool, can be melancholy or bitter”

Elam on the fool

“The most astute commentator”

Berry on ‘the joke’ (Malvolio)

“The joke has been taken too far and we know it”

Smith on the fool and truth

“His role is to point out the truths the other characters don’t want to hear”

Schalkwyk on love and madness

“Love is a form of madness”

Bloom on the magnitude of madness

“Everyone is essentially mad without knowing it”

Kott on Illyria’s madness

“Illyria is a country of exotic madness”

Norton on the origin of madness

“The madness of Twelfth Night is generated almost entirely by verbal instability”

Maslen on the normality of gender

“No such thing as a stable normality, where gender is concerened”

Traub on feminity

“The meaning of feminity has been called into question”

Thomas on gender as a role

“One’s gender is essentially a performed role”

Barber on on sexual and gender roles

“Twelfth Night inverts sexual and gender roles”

Tonkin on Toby and Andrew

“Sir Andrew is tied to Sir Toby”