twelfth night critical readings

C.L. Barber - Comedy

"From release through to clarification"

Emma Smith - Feste

"His role is to point out the truths other characters don't want to hear"

Carol Thomas Needy - Malvolio

"Malvolio serves as a scapegoat who is punished for flaws others share"

John Mullan - Gender

The all male cast "becomes a kind of artistic freedom, enabling the characters to switch their sexual identity"

C. L. Barber - Gender

"Twelfth Night inverts sexual and gender roles ultimately to re-establish and confirm normal relations"

Herschel Baker - Orsino

"Duke Orsino is a narcissistic fool"

Kiernan Ryan - Sir Toby

"Sir Toby's misrule is customary of the Twelfth Night festival"

Jan Kott - Illyria and madness

"Illyria is a country of exotic madness"

Jonathan Bate - Viola

"She proves to be selfless, not selfish, in love"

Samuel Johnson - Viola

"a cunning schemer, never at a loss"

Peter Cash - Orsino

"Orsino's role is to parade the two human follies that the play sets out to criticse: self-love and self-deception"

David Schalkwyk - Viola

She "thrills us with her restless energy"

David Schalkwyk - Viola as Cesario

Viola is "trapped in the role that she has assumed"

David Schalkwyk - Cesario

"Cesario is a point of converging identity between Viola and Sebastian"

David Schalkwyk - Olivia

"She is free from the control of men"

David Schalkwyk - Olivia and melancholy

"As much in thrall to her melancholy as Orsino is to his love."

C. L. Barber - Feste

"He has an air of knowing more of life than anyone else - too much, in fact"

J. M. Gregson - Feste

Feste is "a perceptive commentator upon events in the play and the folly of humanity in general"

C. L. Barber - Malvolio

"He is imprisoned in his own virtues"

Milton Crane - The gulling of Malvolio

"The baiting of Malvolio is unrelieved in its comic heartlessness"

C. L. Barber - Sir Toby

"Sir Toby is gentlemanly liberty incarnate"

Kier Elam - Sir Toby and Maria

"The misrule in the comedy has a collective master-mistress"

Nancy Lindheim - Maria

"a woman of wit and perceptiveness"

C. L. Barber - Sir Andrew

"Aguecheek serves as a foil to Sir Toby"

Katherine E. Jessup - Sir Andrew

"The witless wordless lover type"

Dennis R. Preston - Antonio

Antonio's "presence in the play is an added note of realistic awareness"

Joseph Pequigney - Antonio and Sebastian's relationship

Antonio's "openly amorous language…is the foremost clue to the erotic nature of their friendship"

Emma Smith - Comedy

"less 'feel good' than 'feel uneasy'"

Emma Smith - Women and marriage

"Marriage is the only possible outcome for women at the end of Shakespeare's comedies"

Emma Smith - Women in comedy

"Comic plots do not tend to endorse the idea of a woman's autonomy"

Emma Smith - Social class

"Class boundaries are firmly observed in Shakespeare's comedies"

C. L. Barber - Delusion

"Delusions and misapprehensions are resolved by the finding of objects appropriate to passions"

David Schalkwyk - Olivia in love

"Now fully in love, Olivia resorts to the language that she so denigrated"

Nancy Lindheim - Maria's marriage

"A triumph of the scheming female underclass"

C. L. Barber

There is a "correspondence between the whole festive occasion and the whole comedy"

Peter Cash - Malvolio

"Malvolio… becomes the one figure in the play for whom we may feel genuine pity"

Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybras - Clothing

"Twelfth Night presents perhaps the most radical vision of the centrality of clothes to the fashioning of a person"

Ann Rosalind

'Twelfth Night presents perhaps the most radical vision of the centrality of clothes to the fashioning of a person'

Herschel Baker - Orsino

'A narcissistic fool'

Roger Warren - Orsino

'Capable of powerful feeling and, most important, of development under Viola's influence'

David Schalkwyk - Olivia

'Olivia demonstrates that Orsino is not in love with her, but rather with a fantasy figure'

Peter Cash - Orsino

'Orsino's role is to parade the two human follies that the play sets out to criticise: self-love and self-deception'

Peter Cash - Orsino

'Orsino's blindness to the Cesario deception becomes and emblem of his inability to recognise a true love when its staring him in the face'

C.L Barber - Viola

'Viola's spritely language conveys the fun she is having in playing a man's part, with a womanly perspective about it'

C.L Barber - Viola

'Gentility shows though her disguise as does the fact that she is a woman'

David Schalkwyk - Viola

It is 'the dedication and loyalty she shows to Orsino, which wins him over'

David Schalkwyk - Viola

'Cesario is a point of converging identity between Viola and Sebastian.'

David Schalkwyk - Olivia

'Subjects the rhetoric of the blazon to ridicule'

David Schalkwyk - Olivia

'Her mourning allows her to veil herself and withdraw from the outside world'

Bahtkin - Feste

His role is to expose 'all that is vulgar and falsely stereotyped in human relationships'

J.M. Gregson - Feste

Feste is 'a perceptive commentator upon the events in the play and the folly of humanity in general'

Peter Cash - Feste

'Feste can be a party to rowdy revelry and at the same time remain a guarded critic of its excessiveness ' Peter Cash

Kiernan Ryan - Malvolio

'The complicity of comedy with cruelty is unforgettably dramatized in the tormenting of Malvolio '

Peter Cash -Malvolio

'He is a kill-joy'

C.L Barber - Malvolio

'He is imprisoned in his own virtues'

C.L Barber - Malvolio

Malvolio is 'a kind of foreign body to be expelled by laughter'

Marxist criticism

'he so dreams that he malforms his sense of reality, and so fall victim to Maria's shrewd insight into his nature.'

C.L Barber - Sir Toby

'The misrule of Sir Toby is represented as personal idiosyncrasy, but it follows the pattern of the Twelfth Night occasion'

Keir Elam - Maria

'the misrule in the comedy has a collective master-mistress.'

C.L Barber - Gender

'The most fundamental distinction the play brings home to us is the difference between men and women'

Nancy Lindheim - Maria

'A woman of wit and perceptiveness'

Laroque - Sir Andrew

Auguecheek represents 'Ridiculous excess'

Maurice Hunt - Sebastian

'Only Sebastian can unlock the Illyrians' oppressed feeling's'

David Schalkwyk - Sebastian

'What she lacks, Sebastian has'

Joseph Piequigney - Antonio

'(Antonio's) openly amorous language […] is the foremost clue to the erotic nature of their friendship

L.G Salinger - Antonio

'The one single-minded representative of romantic devotion'

C.L. Barber - Shakespearean Comedy

'Holiday occasion and the comedy are parallel manifestations of the same pattern of a way that men cope with their life'

C.L Barber - Shakespearean Comedy

There is a 'correspondence between the whole occasion and the whole comedy'

Dr Emma Smith - Shakespearean Comedy

'We the audience tend to feel a sense of superiority over comic characters'

Emma Smith - Shakespearean Comedy

'Prominent, active roles for women are one of the defining features of comedy for Shakespeare'

C.L Barber - Subversion

The play 'deals with the sort of folly which the title points to, the folly of misrule'

Dr Emma Smith - Gender roles

'Shakespeare's comedies seem to challenge conservative orthodoxies and present themselves as socially transgressive'

Dr Emma Smith - Gender roles

There is another side in which 'comedies reveal themselves as socially conservative, reinforcing hierarchies and boundaries even as they seek to play with them'

Gender roles - Dr Emma Smith

'Marriage is the only possible outcome for women at the end of Shakespeare's comedies'

Gender Roles - Emma Smith

' Cynics might see the emblematic silencing of the feisty female character in marriage'

Gender roles - David Schalkwyk

'Despite Viola's disguise, the feminine elements in her body dominate'

Dr Emma Smith - Social Status

( Shakespeare's) 'comedies reveal themselves as socially conservative, reinforcing hierarchies and boundaries'

Social Status - C.L Barber

'A saturnalian reversal of social roles need not to threaten the social structure, but can serve instead to consolidate it'

F. Laroque - Foolishness

'In Twelfth Night, music, dancing, misrule, disguise and holiday foolery turn the world upside down'

C.L Barber - Madness

'If they do not seek holiday it happens to them'

David Schalkwyk - Love

'In Illyria, love seems to be a form of madness'

David Schalkwyk - Loss, Olivia + Viola

'The women are conjoined by the mutual depth of the loss - in their mutual mourning for brothers'