C.L. barber- the clown | “The clown or vice… was a recognised anarchist who made aberration obvious by carrying release to absurd extremes” |
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” |
Kiernan Ryan- Feste | “Feste embodies the transcendent perspective from which Twelfth Night and other Shakespearean comedy is written” |
Michael Dobson- Malvolio | “The play is offering a glimpse not just of comic sexual self-delusion but of a potentially subversive upwards mobility” |
Charles Lamb- Malvolio | “Malvolio is not essentially ridiculous… he becomes comic by accident” |
Carol Thomas Needy- Malvolio | “Malvolio serves as a scapegoat who is punished for flaws others share” |
Marion Gibson- Malvolio | “All three Malvolio baiters seek to allay their anxieties about the pervasiveness of social mobility for they themselves exemplify such mobility” |
Ivo Kamps- Malvolio | “The repressed Malvolio is perfectly sane by Illyrian standards”, but the plot makes him perform his “madness” |
Michael Dobson- comedy | The whole of Twelfth Night debates the very nature and morality of comedy” |
Miranda Fay Thomas- gender | “Twelfth Night depicts one’s gender as essentially a performed role” |
Jan Kott- homosexual desire | “The desire of Orsino for his page, of Olivia for a woman, and of Antonio for his young master, is not ‘confined’ in marriage resolutions” |
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 (long) | “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.” |
C. L. Barber- gender (short) | “Twelfth Night inverts sexual and gender roles ultimately to re-establish and confirm normal relations” |
German Greer- gender | “The inconstancy of men and the solidity and truth of women” |
Dympna Callaghan- gender | “A prime example of the exclusion of the female body in the male impersonation of their personages” |
Valerie Traub- Viola | “It is as the object of another women’s desire that Cesario finds her own erotic voice” |
Amy Smith- Olivia | “When she stage manages her own marriage choices… Olivia remodels the economic exchange of maidenhood” |
Hudson Shakespeare company- Orsino | “Though he is a humorous figure, a parody of melancholy lovers… he also displays aspects of a psychological disorder” |
Miranda Fay Thomas- disguise | “Twelfth Night reminds us that identity itself is relative” |
Herschel Baker- Orsino | “Duke Orsino is a narcissistic fool” |
Michael Dobson- disguise | “Twelfth Night is very much a play about the potential hazards of dressing up” |
Michael Dobson- conflict/ social class | “With its dramatisation of the antagonism between hedonistic, alcoholic and gluttonous sir Toby Belch and the puritanical steward who longs to discipline him, it is also very much a play about the social implications of festivity” |
R. S. White- conflict | “Twelfth Night has sometimes been seen as enacting a struggle between an anti- comic Malvolio and comic Feste, with the latter victorious on the bahalf of the forces of festivity” |
C. L. Barber- social class | “The energy usually occupied in maintaining inhibition is freed for celebration” |
Kiernan Ryan- social class | “The raucous conduct of the tipsy triumvirate violates the fundamental principles on which the decorum of everyday social life depends: the Manor House of a lady is transformed into an alehouses; her uncle and sir Andrew, both knights of the realm, stand hierarchy on its head by acting like common tinkers and cobblers; the still of the night becomes the tie for uproar instead of peaceful sleep; and rational, responsible behaviour gives way to bedlam” |
Stanivokvic- conflict between ideas | “A cultural shift from chivalric to romantic maculinity” |
Kiernan Ryan- loss | “The spectre of death haunts the romantic protagonists lives from the start” |
Simon Gray- Antonio | “Lingers in the memory to remind us that Illyria is after all an illusion that has been fashioned out of much potential, and some actual, pain” |
Kiernan Ryan- Sir Toby | “Sir Toby’s misrule is customary of the Twelfth Night festival” |
C. L. Barber- sir Toby | “He lives at his ease, enjoying heritage… celebrates what he has without having to deserve it” |
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” |
Charles spencer- comedy | “Twelfth Night is the darkest and most haunting of Shakespeare’s great comedies, its humour constantly shadowed by cruelty and a keen awareness of mortality” |
Jan Kott | “Illyria is a country of exotic madness” |
John Caird- Viola | “By the end of the play, she is more sexually completed than she was before” |
Kiernan Ryan- disguise | “Viola’s performance as Cesario in this sense 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” |
Twelfth Night Critics
July 17, 2019