Twelfth Night Critical Quotations

"disrupt the rhythm of the everyday" and were essentially "licensed anarchy."

Buchanan: Festivals like the Twelfth Night punctuated the year to...

"Comedy is again more precarious than joyous in Twelfth Night."

Creaser (about the end of the play)

"Comedy suspends the moral law in order to substitute another, a purely aesthetic one."

Bates (about subversion of order)

"Malvolio is drama's enemy... If anyone ends up outside the green world of Illyria then it is Malvolio, for he never really went there in the first place."

Bates (about Malvolio)

"Comedy moves from confusion to order, from ignorance to understanding, from law to liberty."

McDonald

"fundamentally the same" and is "reinforced by the reaffirmation of that most basic of all props of social and patriarchal order, marriage."

Hopkins: The world remains...

"champion the novel idea of marriages based on mutual inclination and love."

Rasmussen: Twelfth Night was written in a time when people were starting to...

"would have carried a definite transgressive thrill" for early audiences

Dobson: The class difference in Viola and Olivia's relationship...

"is more like a suit of clothes that can be put on and taken off at a will than a matter of biological destiny."

Smith: The play suggests gender...

"Marriages are used to provide comic closure."

Hopkins (marriage)

"Shakespeare's festive comedies revel in a carnival spirit of liberty and irreverence... They praise the wisdom of folly"

Laroque (festive comedy)

"Tragedy dealt with times that were safely past... Comedy, by contrast, dealt with the dangerous present."

Maslen (tragedy and comedy)

"Comedy occurs when there is no way out."

Kerr (comedy 2)

"Feste, as Malvolio's nemesis and opposite number, is the apostle of merriment."

Bevington (Feste and Malvolio)

"Malvolio has a right to be 'virtuous' himself, but he has no right to impose his sense of moral propriety on others."

Bevington (Malvolio - virtuous)

"The movement of the whole play is that of a party, from appetite, through the direction of that appetite outward toward something, to satiation."

Hollander (Twelfth Night and festivity)

"Orsino's agonized sense of betrayal arises more from the loss of Cesario than from the loss of Olivia."

Shapiro (Orsino and Cesario)

"the only overtly homosexual couple in Shakespeare except for Achilles and Patroclus."

Orgel: Antonio and Sebastian are...

"Comedy was the dramatic form that dealt with commoners."

Maslen (comedy - commoners)

"Twelfth Night is a play full of fools."

Norton (fools)

"Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people."

Carter (comedy)

"Everyone except Feste, the reluctant jester, is essentially mad without knowing it."

Bloom (madness)

"On the early modern stage, clothes made the man - and woman."

Hogdon (clothes and gender)

"militant in their defence of merrymaking"

Bevington: Sir Toby and Maria are...