| Penny Gay – the Clown | The role of the Clown has thus a particular resonance: because he is a verbal quibbler, he is the locus of any satirical protest |
| Peter Milward – Feste | he reveals the paradox not only of wit and folly, but also of merriment and sadness, |
| Keir Elam – Feste | Feste is the most astute commentator on the play of which he is part. |
| Enid Welsford, via Keir Elam – festivity | Illyria is a country permeated with the spirit of the Feast of Fools, where identities are confused, ‘uncivil rule’ applauded, cakes and ale successfully defended, and no harm done |
| C. L. Barber – Sir Andrew and festivity | Aguecheek serves as foil to Sir Toby. But he also marks one limit as to what revelry can do for a man |
| Keir Elam – festivity | the play’s festivities and confusions may be seen as part of the movement towards social and individual renewal. |
| Kiernan Ryan – festivity | The raucous conduct of the tipsy triumvirate violates the fundamental principles on which the decorum of everyday social life depends. |
| C.L. Barber – festive comedy | From release through to clarification |
| Kiernan Ryan – on Sir Toby IV.ii: ‘well rid of the knavery’ | the comedy has got out of hand and crossed the line that divides it from barbarity and the pathos of the victimized. |
| Casey Charles – gender and metatheatricality | In the doubly androgynous role of male actor playing a woman playing a man…[Viola’s] success before the aristocratic Orsino and Olivia consequently points to the constructedness and performative character of gender itself |
| C. L. Barber – gender | Just as a saturnalian reversal of social roles need not threaten the social structure, but can serve instead to consolidate it, so a temporary, playful reversal of sexual roles can renew the meaning of the normal relation. |
| Keir Elam – gender and social order | [Twelfth Night] uniquely fails to restore the social order of gender differentiation, |
| Jean Howard, via Keir Elam – social order | For Howard it is Olivia, with her social and financial independence, who represents ‘the real threat to the hierarchical gender system in this text, Viola being but an apparent threat. |
| C. L. Barber – order and chaos | Throughout the play a contrast is maintained between the taut, restless, elegant court, where people speak a nervous verse, and the free-wheeling household of Olivia, where, except for the intense moments in Olivia’s amorous interviews with Cesario, people live in an easy-going prose. |
| Kiernan Ryan – disguise | Viola’s performance as Cesario in this sense is a metaphor for what all the characters in Twelfth Night are up to…passing themselves off as whoever they are supposed to be by playing parts that don’t coincide with them |
| Lisa Jardine, via Casey Charles – cross-dressing | Lisa Jardine has argued that the boy actors, by arousing homoerotic passions in the predominantly male audience in late-sixteenth-century England, presented an unthreatening version of female erotic power. |
| Karen Grief – disguise | Appearances constantly fluctuate between what is real and what is illusionary |
| Miranda Fay Thomas – disguise | Twelfth Night reminds us that identity itself is relative |
| Amy Smith – Olivia | When she stage manages her own marriage choices…Olivia remodels the economic exchange of maidenhood |
| Keir Elam – Olivia | Olivia’s initial malincolia is justified by her grief, but is impossibly hyperbolic in its effects |
| Keir Elam – Viola and Olivia | ‘Viola’ and ‘Olivia’ are virtual anagrams, and this in turn reflects a complex network of parallels and reciprocal identification between the two female co-protagonists |
| C. L. Barber – Viola | Thus the shipwreck is made the occasion for Viola to exhibit an undaunted, aristocratic mastery of adversity |
| Susie Campbell – Viola and gender | Viola’s femininity is moulded around the imprint of masculinity, meaning that the play doesn’t dissolve gender identity but merely confuses it. |
| W. H. Auden – melancholy/festivity | The characters who welcome music in Illyria are more uniformly saddened by it |
| David Lewis – pretence | For both Orsino and Olivia, self-deception serves as an avoidance of the real world and of real emotion. |
| Elias Schwartz – Orsino | [he] ‘does not take his postures seriously, that he secretly smiles at his own affectation. He knows and accepts and so redeems his folly. |
| Maurice Hunt – Orsino and Viola | by calling Viola “his fancy’s queen,” Orsino implies that his disordered love will henceforth be regulated. |
| Maurice Hunt – Orsino and homoeroticism/self-love | While Orsino…responds intuitively to Viola’s womanhood, he does so because her femininity joins with a masculinity that unconsciously absorbs some of his attention and feeling. Orsino is caught at a transitional moment in love’s metamorphosis. |
| Maurice Hunt – Orsino and self-love/projection | loving the Cesario aspect of the Diana-like Viola represents Orsino’s fixation upon himself and consequent hoarding of desire. |
| Michael Dobson – Malvolio | The play is offering a glimpse not just of comic sexual self-delusion but of a potentially subversive upwards mobility |
| Keir Elam – Malvolio | Malvolio likewise affects ‘sadness’ as part of his ‘Puritan’ severity…his supposedly sad humour is as short-lived as Olivia’s grief; upbraided by his mistress for his lover’s smile, he reneges his former ‘blackness’ (the colour of melancholy-provoking bile) |
| Maurice Cherney – Malvolio | Whether Malvolio has been most notoriously abused, or whether he is the well-deserving victim…is the thought of point at issue. |
| Penny Gay – class | Elizabethan concern with class is at the centre of this play |
| Penny Gay – class (longer) | So the high-born lady pursues the ‘page-boy’ throughout the play until such time as Sebastian turns up and re-establishes the normative heterosexuality (and class-structure) of romantic comedy. |
| Keir Elam – language | It is a play ‘about’ interpretation. |
| Paul Oliver – Feste and language | Feste acts as a facilitator and a liberator, using language and discourses in the play to consistently subvert meaning and to amuse. |
| Morris P. Tilley – Olivia and excess | The character of Olivia is open to no misunderstanding. She is the most impulsive of the whole impulsive group; nor do we feel the smallest surprise when her exaggerated grief gives sudden place to exaggerated passion. |
| Jonathan Bate – Orsino and Olivia | if Orsino is the conventional Elizabethan sonneteer, Olivia is the parodist of the genre |
| Emma Smith – Female characters and marriage | female characters’ most spirited agency is directed to the most nominative of female destinies, marriage |
| Warren Grief – Viola, Orsino, Olivia | Viola…becomes the agent required to free Orsino and Olivia from the bondage of their self delusions |
| Emma Smith – Gender, Opposite of Barber | Heterosexual gender norms are never reinstated |
| Ian Judge – Madness | Twelfth Night also shows the comedy of love which occurs when people turn themselves inside out and almost reach the edge of madness |
Twelfth Night Critics
July 16, 2019