My progress:
Shakespeare Reading Project
Henry VI, parts 1, 2, 3 and Richard III
Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Taming of the Shrew
Titus Andronicus
The Comedy of Errors
Love’s Labour’s Lost
Romeo & Juliet
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Richard II
King John
The Merchant of Venice
Henry IV, Part 1
Henry IV, Part 2
The Merry Wives of Windsor
Much Ado About Nothing
Henry V
Julius Caesar
As You Like It
Hamlet

Twelfth Night: or, What You Will

I can’t verify this with any certainty but I believe Twelfth Night was the first Shakespeare play I saw. I was in middle school, I think, and my parents took us to see a production at the university (where my dad was a librarian, and where I eventually was an acting major). I don’t remember if my parents clued us in to what was going to be happening, but my memory of the show is vivid. The guy who played Malvolio was Maury Klein, a history professor who also acted in the plays. (One of the cool things about our theatre department was that lead roles obviously went to students, but for bigger shows or musicals they also had open casting, which meant we got to act with older people who had more experience – a great thing for young actors). Maury Klein is a famous historian (look him up). His main area of expertise in 19th century American industrial development, in particular the railroads. There was a great docu-series maybe on PBS about all the different robber barons of the late 19th century, and Maury Klein was one of the experts interviewed. I was like, “Maury! I was in shows with him!!” I also took two classes from him, and the class on the Industrial Revolution was the best class I took in college, not even a close contest. I should write a whole post about Maury Klein. Fascinating guy and GREAT teacher.

So. My introduction to Maury Klein was his performance as the ridiculous Malvolio. I still remember the mincing ridiculous way he tiptoe-stepped daintily down the stairs, displaying his yellow stockings with blue garters criss-crossed, and I remember the howling waves of laughter rolling through the theatre – so much so that the actors couldn’t say their dialogue! The whole show had to stop! And Maury had to just stand there, displaying himself, to let the audience get it out of their system. I had no way of knowing that this scene – where Malvolio follows the devilish Maria’s instructions and “presents” himself to Olivia in this manner – is one of the funniest scenes Shakespeare ever wrote, and one of the funniest scenes in any play period. But KNOWING the history behind it is irrelevant because didn’t I already KNOW that, sitting in my seat in the theatre? Hearing that laughter? Laughing so hard I cried?

The play is so funny I found it hard to excerpt, hard to pull out lines, since the scenes are so perfectly designed, the dialogue so woven together. The motifs and themes are so seamlessly utilized they don’t even feel like themes and motifs. Everything flows. The action of the play is very fluid and loosey-goosey: nothing too set in stone, no “obligation” to hit certain points.Water dominates, from the shipwreck, and the sea coast, the tears, the multiple references to urine (“water”), and Feste the Clown’s haunting final song about the “rain and the wind”. Also present is “epiphany”, operating on multiple levels. Twelfth Night is January 6th, the end of the Christmas festivities, and the celebration of the Magi’s arrival. In Shakespeare’s time, “twelfth night” was a night of “misrule” and mischief, a night when the rules were loosened. So “Epiphany” is obviously religious, but Twelfth Night doesn’t even reference “twelfth night”. The Epiphany doesn’t operate at all in its religious sense. But the pagan celebration of misrule and mischief? Basically, that’s Illyria. There is no sanity in Illyria.

It makes me think of Howard Hawks’ eventual assessment of Bringing Up Baby, of which he had a critique years later: everyone was insane, even the sheriff. There was not one sane person in the film. He said he didn’t make that mistake again. I don’t agree with his assessment, although he has the right to critique his own work! Because Twelfth Night opens on such a painfully beautiful note – Orsino’s “If music be the food of love, play on”, one can consider Twelfth Night a romance more than a comedy, although the “prank” on Malvolio – which takes up so much time, and is, as mentioned, one of the funniest scenes ever – makes the distinction, again, irrelevant.

The main plot involves elements Shakespeare used again and again: a shipwreck, separated twins, a girl in boy’s clothing, love at first sight. Viola and Sebastian are twins, boy and girl but identical, so much so they are mistaken for each other. Viola thinks Sebastian died in the shipwreck, so she puts on men’s clothing and heads to Duke Orsino’s house, to present herself as a servant/assistant. Viola falls in love with the drippy narcissistic Orsino, and Orsino – in love with Olivia – enlists “Cesario” as his go-between. Olivia welcomes Viola (aka Cesario) into her riotous chaotic household and – of course – immediately falls in love with “him”.

Olivia is no shrinking maiden or stereo-typical dignified lady. She is an individual and an absolute screwball. Her brother died seven years before and Olivia has been in ostentatious mourning ever since, draped in black, wandering through her house, living in isolation. Her grief breaks the bounds of what is socially acceptable, but in the general chaos around her it’s barely remarked upon. Olivia is wealthy, and she houses her dissolute uncle, Sir Toby Belch, who spends days and nights sitting around with his best pal, Sir Andrew Aguecheek. The two are in a constant state of inebriation. Slithering among them is Maria, Olivia’s lady-in-waiting and mischief-maker. (It’s hard to imagine Hamlet “hanging out” with other characters in Shakespeare’s other plays. Trying to picture Hamlet meeting Falstaff. Or Rosalind. Or Hal. Hamlet’s so isolated, it’s hard to picture him being with these other people. But I feel like he and Maria might get along. Or at least have enough respects to steer clear of one other. She’s not exactly the “mighty opposite” Hamlet says he longs for but … she operates in similar ways. He might see himself a little bit in her … and Hamlet doesn’t see himself in anyone.)

There’s a sharp demarcation line between two plots, which seem like they’re woven together because they take place in the same location but … On the one side, there are the “love scenes” between Olivia and Viola, on the other side, the shenanigans with Toby, Andrew, and Maria. The two worlds really don’t meet, but the play is so well-constructed you barely notice.

Enter: Malvolio, Olivia’s steward. As the steward, he runs the house. As we have seen in Upstairs Downstairs, Gosford Park and Downton Abbey, stewards are very important figures, they run everything, but class-wise, they are still “downstairs”. Malvolio “puts on airs”, which is really his greatest “crime”. He is a climber, for sure, and he is deluded enough to think Olivia might actually fall in love with him. He is an enemy of everything pleasurable, he is a snooty hoity-toit, who sniffs with disapproval at Toby and Andrew’s revelries. Maybe the most famous line of the play, excepting the first line (“If music be the food of love, play on”) is Sir Toby’s challenge to Malvolio’s prim-and-proper attitude: “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” Shakespeare, as a man of the theatre, had to deal with periodic shutdowns of the theatres, either due to plague or to Puritan protests. The holier-than-thous among us have always been among us, and never seem to learn that just because you are virtuous doesn’t mean that OTHER people can’t have fun.

Malvolio is an enemy of fun and this is a capital crime in the madcap Illyria. It’s hard, though, to watch what happens to Malvolio – eventually dragged away and kept in a “dark house” for the insane, where he screams and hollers to be let out. The punishment is out-sized, but not if you consider Shakespeare’s critique to be part of a very specific time when the persecutions of the theatre were about to take on an even more Puritanical (literally) shading, particularly after the death of Queen Elizabeth. Punishing Malvolio must have been cathartic, or – to speak speculatively – it FEELS like it must have been cathartic, because the punishment of Malvolio really takes over the whole play. Viola and Olivia barely register anymore.

Maria sets her sights on cutting Malvolio down to size. Malvolio is a ridiculous unpleasant person but Maria is a “mean girl”: if you were made fun of in middle school you will remember your run-ins with Maria-types. Maria comes up with a plan to write a love note to Malvolio “from” Olivia in Olivia’s handwriting. In this forged note, “Olivia” tells Malvolio how much she loves his smile (he never smiles!) so that when he is in her presence, he should smile non-stop. She also asks him to wear yellow stockings with “cross garters”. Malvolio reads the letter and falls apart in ecstasy, as Maria, Toby, and Andrew cackle in the nearby bushes. The prim and proper man disintegrates into excitement, even declaring at one point, “I am happy!” You can barely pay attention to the next scenes because subconsciously you are waiting for Malvolio to show up. He finally enters, maniacal smile frozen on his face, yellow stockings on his legs. Olivia, of course, is stunned. The man has clearly gone insane!

He hasn’t, though! He’s been tricked!

Naturally, getting to watch this uptight humorless man make a fool of himself is hilarious and cathartic.

However …

Let’s examine our responses to Malvolio. In his own way, he is as bottomless as Bottom.

There’s something painfully touching about Malvolio: his thrill at being loved (or so he thinks), going all to pieces like a teenage girl, how eagerly he runs off to put together his “outfit” for the next time he meets Olivia, his belief that he is finally about to get what he has always desired: validation, love, and belonging!

You feel me? Malvolio is not malevolent, like Iago is malevolent. He doesn’t mean any harm. Yes, he’s a bore, but everyone laughs at him. He doesn’t dictate the laws of the land. He’s just crabby. A drip.

So when I read Malvolio’s expressions of happiness after receiving the forged letter, there’s a bruise in my heart. An old bruise. Because I have been Malvolio. I, too, have felt the thrill when I think something wonderful is going to happen, when I have believed a dream is about to come true … only to find later that … I was mistaken. Maybe I wasn’t tricked, like Malvolio was tricked – although a couple times I could characterize a “romance” as me being essentially tricked (hello, 2009 man, hello, 2012 man) … but still, the heartache and shame at being so gullible, at having been fooled, and – worse – the anger at myself for letting myself believe … is all there in Malvolio – or, perhaps I am projecting. Maybe he doesn’t feel shame. Maybe he just skips the shame and goes to the rage. I wish I could have skipped the shame.

Are we supposed to cackle with glee when Malvolio is locked up in an insane asylum? He is eventually released, and he promises to avenge the wrong done to him before storming off the stage … but I can’t help but feel relieved that at least Shakespeare didn’t throw away the key!

I suggest that if you don’t see yourself in Malvolio, to some degree, well, first of all, consider yourself lucky! But secondly, you can’t truly understand the play. Or at least what might be going on. In The Merchant of Venice, Shylock is eventually shunned from society, and it has to be that way because 1. it’s an anti-Semitic society and 2. he is too disruptive to the gentle magical society on display. Malvolio isn’t like that. The society of Illyria will continue on its merry melancholy maniacal way with or without him. The entire play, in fact, could exist without Malvolio in it. He has no impact on the main plot. So … why Malvolio? What is he even DOING in this play?

I always assume Shakespeare knew exactly what he was doing. The effect we get from something is deliberate, and it’s up to us to puzzle it out. We know him by the RESULTS. We have no evidence of what he meant or even thought, except in the plays and sonnets. So you have to just look to the results. I feel, though, that Malvolio might have started out as a smaller part, a caricature, a side-show, and Shakespeare got caught up in him, Malvolio walked off with the play and Shakespeare couldn’t stop him. This is not an original observation. Almost every critic, dating back to the 1800s, feels like Malvolio is one of those characters who “got away” from Shakespeare. Like Falstaff did. Or Faulconbridge. Someone who starts out playing a very specific function – but then blooms into a living breathing complex character, where you can almost feel Shakespeare leaning in to his interest.

Let me just riff. I think the punishment of Malvolio is so severe because we see ourselves in him, and it’s the part of ourselves we never want to acknowledge. We don’t want to be that embarrassing, we don’t want to show our cards so plainly and be made to look a fool. People live their entire lives trying to avoid shame because shame is maybe the worst and most intolerable emotion in existence. You can live with grief. You can’t LIVE with shame. Not forever. You will do what it takes to avoid it.

Malvolio is our softest most vulnerable side. Malvolio is our unprotected desires, our need for belonging, our yearning for love. If we let others see it, what will happen? Will they laugh? Will they mock? Well, yes, they will. And thanks to social media, the fear of mockery is now so rampant it’s having wide societal consequences. My acting teacher friends are kind of amazed, especially those who have been doing it for 20, 30 years, at how different acting classes are now. Suddenly they are confronted – for the first time – with a generation of acting students who don’t want to “put themselves out there” emotionally. They have to spend weeks on just getting them to feel like they can open up. If all emotion expressed is labeled as “cringe”, then what does that leave you? We expect this in regular citizens but actors are supposed to express things for ALL of us! That’s usually been the types of people drawn to that career. Why do you even want to be an actor if you spend your life trying to avoid being “cringe”? I am not putting down a generation. Everyone is formed by the circumstances of the world around you. Gen X kids had our own struggles, and if we had grown up with social media we would be having similar issues. I am acknowledging the new challenges. My nieces and nephews and I talk a lot about these things!

We exert so much energy in avoiding our own inner Malvolio, in attempting to never ever ever be “caught out” like Malvolio is. Frankly, we would rather be locked up in an insane asylum than show the world our most vulnerable needy side. Public shaming is very real thing!

He is who we hope we aren’t. He is who we fear to be. So of course the punishment doesn’t fit the crime. Of course the entire household conspires to “reveal” him in all his idiocy, and to destroy his hopes and dreams. None of us can tolerate the thought that we are Malvolio. Everyone thinks they’re a Viola. Everyone wants to believe they are Feste the clown. You can even admit you have a little Toby Belch in you. You can even “relate” to Maria a little bit, even if you’re ashamed of that time you were mean to someone in middle school. We all grow up, most people “grow out” of the Maria phase. But nobody grows out of the Malvolio phase. He’s always there. He’s always threatening to reveal himself. We want to lock him away in the darkest house in our psyches and throw away the key.

A couple summers ago, I went with my nieces and my sister to the local theatre production of Twelfth Night, put on outside by the little river snaking its way through town. My niece Lucy was so upset about Malvolio she could barely “be” with the happy ending. She wanted a redemption arc for him. She is a teenager. She is very very close to the Maria-mean-girl society, and she is very close to the fear of being a Malvolio, of having her peers gang up against her and try to make a fool of her. She almost found the play unbearable because of the mean-ness towards Malvolio. I don’t think Lucy is wrong.

This is not a flaw in the play. I don’t think Malvolio needs a redemption arc. But I do think Malvolio is not a Iago or a Shulock or an Edmund. But his punishment is severe because Malvolio touches a nerve. He exposes a nerve. Nobody wants to be him, but if you are human, you can’t avoid being him.

Let’s reiterate though the weirdness of all of this: Viola “courting” Olivia is extremely engaging and their scenes together are so so good. Great parts. So funny. Viola has fascinations of her own, as does Olivia and Orsino. Feste the clown is the best “jester” yet. But when I think of Twelfth Night I think of Malvolio and his yellow stockings and his girlish glee at the thought that Olivia loves him.

Partially this is because it’s hard to invest in Viola and Orsino. Or Olivia and Orsino. Or Orsino and anyone, really. The ending, when it comes, is swift, brief, and as wacko as the rest of it. Viola – still in boys’ clothes – ends up with Orsino, who 5 seconds before believed Viola was a boy. Olivia, heartbroken for 2 seconds, “accepts” Sebastian – the identical twin – as her mate, and Sebastian – who has no idea what’s been going on – just accepts it. Like, Okay I guess I’m marrying this random woman now. With Rosalind and Orlando, you feel like it’s a good match: they’re good enough pals through all their experiences in the forest – even though she has been in disguise – that you feel like at the very least the marriage will be a fun romp (and a romp for a marriage sounds like Utopia, honestly). The Twelfth Night couples are not like this! Viola is not the same as Rosalind, although they get lumped together. If Rosalind showed up in Illyria, she would have taken one look at the insanity of Orsino and Olivia, and would have set about taking over both houses, making sure everyone ended up with the right person, all while purposefully molding Orsino into a better man, a man worthy of her. Viola does not do any of this. She floats from Orsino to Olivia and back, a victim of circumstances, in love with a man who thinks she’s a boy, and avoiding the love of a woman who also thinks she is a boy. Viola is trapped in her disguise while Rosalind is freed by hers.

Viola is interesting. Olivia is interesting. Orsino is funny in his poseur melancholy almost sickened-by-love way. Feste is wonderful. Toby and Andrew are disgusting. Maria is a little bit scary. Illyria

But Malvolio … Malvolio is a black hole, sucking the rest of the play – and us – into the “dark house” with him.

Quotes on the play

 

“The reading of evidence is pervasive in Twelfth Night.”
— Stephen Booth, “Twelfth Night and Othello: Those Extraordinary Twins“, 1995 paper

“He learned from [morality plays] to give many of his characters emblematic names: the whores Doll Tearsheet and Jane Nightwork and the sergeants Snare and Fang in Henry IV, Part 2, the drunken Sir Toby Belch and the puritanical Malvolio (‘ill will’) in Twelfth Night. On rare occasions he went further and brought personified abstractions directly onto his stage — Rumour, in a robe painted full of tongues, in Henry IV, Part 2, and Time, carrying an hourglass in The Winter’s Tale. And for the most part his debt to the morality plays was more indirect and subtle.”
— Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“Both Slender and Aguecheek are rich and witless, neither has a clue as to how to court, or even speak to, a woman. Their names bespeak their natures, in a way that is not uncommon for Shakespearean ‘low’ characters in comedies … This is a version of the comedy of ‘humors’ .. personality traits were governed by predominant bodily substances.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“The topic of trustworthy and untrustworthy evidence recurs incidentally and in a variety of dimensions all over both plays [Othello and Twelfth Night] and gives each the kind of extra unity and thus identity that unostentatious alliteration or internal rhyme can give a line of verse.”
— Stephen Booth, “Twelfth Night and Othello: Those Extraordinary Twins“, 1995 paper

“Whereas in Twelfth Night, Viola and Sebastian appear to have learned the lesson the play doesn’t teach us, in Othello no one involved — no one on stage and no one in the audience — learns anything.”
— Stephen Booth, “Twelfth Night and Othello: Those Extraordinary Twins“, 1995 paper

“[Henry V] is a play produced on the heels of Henry IV, practically contemporary with As You Like It and Julius Caesar, and just preceding Twelfth Night, Troilus and Cressida, and Hamlet. Judged by these titles, Shakespeare was incapable of producing anything but masterpieces at this time. (Even Merry Wives is one in its inferior kind.)”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

On the song “O mistress mine”, Act 2, scene 3:

“… sung to Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek is in the “Gather ye rosebuds” tradition, but taken seriously the lines suggest the voice of elderly lust, not youth, and Shakespeare makes us conscious of this by making the audience for a song a pair of aging drunks.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture

“You would have thought that the hero of La Mancha in person stood before you … You rather admired than pitied the lunacy while it lasted; you felt that an hour of such mistake was worth an age with the eyes open … The man seemed to tread upon air, to taste manna, to walk with his head in the clouds, to mate Hyperion …I confess I never saw the catastrophe of this character [Malvolio], while Bensley played it, without a kind of tragic interest.”
— Charles Lamb on the actor “Bensley” playing Malvolio, “On Some of the Old Actors”

“Shakespeare presents us with Malvolio, a stick figure comic villain who unexpectedly takes on a human dimension by which it becomes difficult to follow the play’s continuing requirement that he be considered a farce creature no more entitled to sympathy than Cinderella’s stepsisters.”
— Stephen Booth, Close Reading Without Readings

“To Shakespeare, melancholy is a symptom … He dissects the cases of two such men, Richard II and Antonio at length, two others, Jaques and Orsino, more briefly, and gives us a glimpse into the melancholy stage of still another, Brutus. Melancholy, he concludes, is a sign that a man is living or trying to live a miscast, partial, or obstructed life … Richard II was a poetic soul attempting to enact a royal role. Antonio was a man made for better things who dedicated his ife to trade … Jacques was a philosophic nature that had wasted itself insensuality, Orsino an artistically gifted person who led an idle life. Brutus stifled his melancholy in action.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“As You Like It is Shakespeare’s sweetest-tempered play; there is Twelfth Night, but in that play everyone except the superb clown Feste is a zany. Orlando, a youthful Hercules, is certainly not Rosalind’s human equal, but he is considerably saner than Twelfth Night‘s loony Orsino, while Rosalind and Celia would be exemplary in any company, and in wisdom and wit are goddesses compared with those charming screwballs Viola and Olivia.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“[Touchstone] is the total antithesis of Twelfth Night‘s Feste, Shakespeare’s wisest (and most humanly amiable) clown.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Viola is melancholy recessive, but Rosalind is exuberant and egotistical, with a flamboyant instinct for center stage. The difference is clearest at play’s end. Viola falls into long silence, keeping the joy of reunion to herself. Her decorous self-removal is the opposite of Rosalind’s lordly capture of the finale of As You Like It.”
— Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

“The Fourth Epoch gives all the graces and facilities of a genius in full possession and habitual exercise of power, and peculiarly of the feminine, the lady’s character (The Tempest, As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night).
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Order of Shakespeare’s Plays”, lecture

“In the early plays, the low or comic characters — Shylock as well as Launcelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice, for example — speak prose. An intellectual character like Falstaff speaks prose, in contrast to a passionate character like Hotspur, who speaks verse. In As You Like It, contrary to tradition, both the hero and heroine spoke prose. In Twelfth Night, Viola speaks verse at court and prose to herself, and the characters in the play who are false or have no sense of humor speak verse. Those who are wiser and have some self-knowledge speak prose. In the tragedies Shakespeare develops an extremely fertile prose style for the tragic characters. Hamlet speaks both verse and prose. He speaks verse to himself, in his soliloquies, and in speeches of violence to others, as in the scene with his mother. He otherwise speaks prose to other people … In Antony and Cleopatra, the boring characters use prose, the rounded characters, verse.”
— W.H. Auden, 1947 lecture

“In all — or just about all — of Shakespeare’s plays our responses repeatedly contradict both one another and principles and assumptions that we never surrender. And we almost as regularly fail entirely to observe the anomaly of our conduct … In Twelfth Night the whole first scene is unrelieved nonsense.”
— Stephen Booth, “Liking Julius Caesar, 1987

“The truly minimal, central deceivers in both Twelfth Night and Othello echo and play on ‘I am that I am,’ the phrase in Exodus 3:14 by which Jehovah so unsatisfactorily defines himself for Moses. In Twelfth Night, during their second interview, Olivia asks the disguised Viola ‘his’ opinion of her and thereby opens the way into an ontological cul-de-sac:
Olivia: Stay. I prithee tell me what thou think’st of me.
Viola: That you do think you are not what you are.
Olivia: If I think so, I think the same as you.
Viola: Then think you are right; I am not what I am.
In Othello, Iago uses the same words in celebrating the difference between what he is and what he appears to be: ‘I am not what I am.'”
— Stephen Booth, “Twelfth Night and Othello: Those Extraordinary Twins“, 1995 paper

“…[Twelfth Night] is a sort of recapitulation. It is as if Shakespeare, for his last unadulterated comedy, summoned the ghosts of a dozen characters and situations with which he had triumphed in the past and bade them weave themselves into a fresh pattern … He pilfered from himself in this play as shamelessly as he ever had from others.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“[Viola] is the only one to fall in love after assuming her disguise.”
— L.G. Salinger on Viola and her precursors in Roman/Italian sources, “The Design of Twelfth Night“, Shakespeare Quarterly, 1958

“[It is] as if he had selected the first title that came into his head and were quite willing that any auditor should rechristen the play to his own liking.:
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“In half-a-dozen senses Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night brings festivities to an end.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“It is the third and last of the poet’s own farewells to ‘wit’ (Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It of course being the other two.) In a wider sense, it is his farewell to comedy. It marks the end of Merry England, of the great day of the great Tudor houses where hospitality and entertainment were so long dispensed, one of the ends even of feudalism itself whose long-drawn-out death never permits the historian to put a finger on any particular hour or event and say, Here it finally died. With its own reference to the pendulum swing of things, the whirligigs of time that brings in his revenge, it seems like an intimation of the Puritan revolution with its rebuke to revelry — down even to the closing of the theatres.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“Viola is melancholy, recessive, but Rosalind is exuberant and egotistical, with a flamboyant instinct for center stage. The difference is clearest at play’s end. Viola falls into long silence, keeping the joy of reunion to herself. Her decorous self-removal in the opposite of Rosalind’s lordly capture of the finale of As You Like It.
— Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

“Twelfth Night is merely the culmination and consummation of something he had been saying almost from the beginning. If in Two Gentlemen of Verona he gives us two revealing specimens of the species gentlemen; if in Romeo and Juliet he shows us to what tragedy the code of the gentleman may lead; if in The Merchant of Venice he exposes the hollowness, even cruelty, lurking under the silken surface of a leisured society; if in all these plays and in Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It he tears the mask off wit and word-play, he does all these things at once in Twelfth Night (except that the tragedy that emerges fully in Romeo and Juliet is here only hinted at), but does them so genially that his very victims were probably loudest in their applause. We can imagine the Elizabethan gentlemen swarming to see Twelfth Night and paying for the privilege! It is almost as if the dead man were expected to pay an entrance fee to his own funeral and enjoy the proceedings. The poet just holds the mirror up to nature and gets a more devastating effect than the fiercest satire could achieve.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“Viola falls in love not as a woman but as an androgyne. That she senses and esteems Orsino’s half-feminine state is suggested in a covert confession of love where she casts him fleetingly as a woman (II.iv.23-28).”
— Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

“The unconscious logic of these critics seems to run something like this: 1. Shakespeare believed in laughter; 2. Sir Toby and hsi cronies make us laugh; therefore 3. Shakespeare approved of Sir Toby a
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“Pretty nearly everybody in it but Viola and Sebastian — and those two outskirt characters the sea captains — is at the extreme point where from excess of something or other he is about to be converted into something else.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“It is important to realize that it is not just because he is Malvolio that [Maria] hates him. She would have resented anyone in his place … There is a vague premonition of the Iago-Cassio theme here on the comic level as her simile, ‘I have dogged him like his murderer’ is enough to show…Maria plainly means it when she says that if Malvolio really does go mad, it will be well worth it: the house will be quieter! There is a cruel streak in her as there generally is in practical jokers.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“[Charles] Lamb’s main point, it will be remembered, is that Malvolio is not essentially ludicrous, that his pride is neither mock nor affected — and so not a fit object, as such, to excite laughter. He thinks the man had it in him to be brave, honorable, and accomplished.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“The Dark House in which Malvolio is incarcerated is in some respects the central symbol of the play, for the houses of Olivia and the Duke, for all their apparent brightness, are dark houses in a deeper sense.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

On: “I am as mad as he / If sad and merry madness may be.” — Olivia on Malvolio

“It is one of the key lines of the play and opens our eyes to the fact that with an exception of two it is little more than an anthology of madnesses, sad and merry (‘Are all the people mad?’ asks Sebastian.)
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“For Rosalind and Viola adopt male clothing in crisis, but Viola’s predicament is grimmer. She’s orphaned and shipwrecked … Both heroines choose sexually ambiguous alter egos. Viola is Cesario, a eunuch … Rosalind is brasher than Viola from the start … Viola, with her frail court rapier, makes a girlish and delicate boy at best. She is timid and easily terrorized. Rosalind relishes trouble and even creates it … When Olivia falls in love with her, Viola feels compassion … Rosalind is incapable of compassion where her own direct interest is at stake.”
— Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

“Excessive revelry and excessive sentimental love, the poet seems to be saying, are just opposite forms of the same infection Barbarism and ‘civilization’ are extremes that meet.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“[Feste] can be friend as well as philosopher. Near the end he promises to fetch Malvolio not only ink and paper but light also and to transmit his appeal to Olivia. All of which he obviously does. With folly bringing light to darkness and ‘madness’ does. With folly bringing light to darkness and ‘madness’ we can almost feel the fool in King Lear being conceived.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“Illyria is a counterfeit Elysium, a fool’s paradise, where nearly everybody is drowned, drowned in pleasure … pleasure and slavery to self.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“Lying, vainness, babbling, drunkenness are pretty sure to be characteristics of any leisured society, as they were of this one. But ingratitude is certain to be, if for no other reason than that such a society rests on the unrecognized labor of others. If anyone thinks such an idea is out of Shakespeare’s ken, he should remember King Lear.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“Though she wears masculine attire, Viola is no boy-girl as Rosalind was. She is purely feminine. Psychically it is as if Viola-Sebastian were Rosalind split in two. It takes two of them to be what she was alone, and the play here became one more variation on the theme of hermaphroditic man.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“Viola and Rosalind discipline their feelings, while the minor characters are full of excess and self-indulgence … They differ, however, in their speech. Viola is discreet and solicitous, Rosalind aggressive, mischievous, bantering, railing.”
— Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

“The theme of the main plot as well as that of the enveloping action, we suddenly see, is rescue from drowning; drowning in the sea, drowning in the sea of drunkenness and sentimentalism. (There is a reason why with the exception of The Tempest the word ‘drowned’ occurs oftener in this play than in any other of Shakespeare.)”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“Feste’s song at the end … puts the keystone in place and sums it all up. The thing that this society of pleasure-seeking has forgotten is the wind and the rain … The world, with its weather, is an ancient fact.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“This play, with the song that brings it to a conclusion, looks both ways. It is a bridge between the poet’s Comedies and his Tragedies as Julius Caesar more obviously is between his Histories and Tragedies. Compared with most other men, Shakespeare was a man from the beginning. Compared with himself, he is now for the first time about to confront the full force of the wind and the rain, to come to man’s estate. King Lear is not far under the horizon. His ‘play’ is done.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“So full of shapes is fancy,
That it alone is high fantastical.”

“Thus, bird-fanciers; gentlemen of the fancy, that is, amateurs of boxing, &c. The play of assimiliation, — the meaning one sense chiefly, and yet keeping both senses in view is perfectly Shakespearean.”
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In his 1947 lecture about “Twelfth Night”, Auden laid out the four types of comedy, and how “Twelfth Night” fits in – and doesn’t fit in – to this classification. It might be helpful to share:

1. Plautine comedy (Comedy of Errors, Two Gentlemen of Verona) “Plot is supreme and characterization unimportant.”
2. Comedy of humors (Taming of the Shrew) “Katherine, the shrew, is a human character. Shakespeare uses humors for tragedy as well — humor becomes the dominant passion of the tragic heroes. Hamlet and Timon of Athens are tragedies of humor.”
3. Comedy of character (Love’s Labours Lost, Merchant of Venice, Much Ado, Henry IV, As You Like It) “individuals in relation to their social milieu … the individual apart from social status … Rosalind’s disguise flows from her character — it is not merely a convenient device.”
4. Comedy of emotion (Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest) “the lyrical drama of the last plays which one hesitates to call comedies … These plays are all related to the masque and opera … The plays are dramatizations of the human psyche.”

“Twelfth Night cannot be classified under any of these four types.”
— W.H. Auden, 1947 lecture

“Twelfth Night is one of Shakespeare’s unpleasant plays. It is not a comedy for schoolchildren … At the time Shakespeare wrote the play, he seems to have been averse to pleasantness. The comic convention in which the play is set prevents him from giving direct expression to this mood, but the mood keeps disturbing, even spoiling the comic reality.”
— W.H. Auden, 1947 lecture

“In the inseparable Violet and Sebastian, [Tennessee] Williams sexually updates Shakespeare’s hermaphrodite twins, Viola and Sebastian.”
— Camille Paglia, connecting Suddenly Last Summer to Twelfth Night in Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

“The characters in Twelfth Night are rich and idle, and their society is pervasively melancholic, which contrasts with the social characteristics and mood of the characters in The Merchant of Venice. Both plays have characters who dislike music, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and Malvolio in Twelfth Night, but the characters who welcome music in Illyria are more uniformly saddened by it.”
— W.H. Auden, 1947 lecture

“Since the narcissistic Orsino is of dubious masculinity, Viola’s ardor for him is problematic. In both Twelfth Night and As You Like It, the transvestite heroines fall for men far inferior to them.”
— Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

“Illyria, in Twelfth Night, is generally more self-conscious, weary, and less productive than the society in Merchant of Venice, which is busy making money, trading, and doing business. The attitude toward money is also different in the two plays. The characters in The Merchant of Venice are careless about it, throwing it about freely and generously. In contrast, there is cynicism about money in Twelfth Night, an awareness that services must be paid for, that people can be bought.”
— W.H. Auden, 1947 lecture

“Women have become dominant in Twelfth Night and take the initiative. With the exception of Antoio, the other men are passive. The women are the only people left who have any will, which is the sign of a decadent society. Maria, in love with Sir Toby, tricks him into marrying her. Olivia starts wooing Cesario from the first moment she sees him, and Viola is a real man-chaser. All the ladies in this play get what they want.”
— W.H. Auden, 1947 lecture

“Both [the Duke and Sebastian] appear contemptible, and it is impossible to imagine that either will make a good husband.”
— W.H. Auden, 1947 lecture

“Unlike Falstaff, these people emerge victorious and have their nasty little triumph over life. Falstaff is defeated by life.”
— W.H. Auden, 1947 lecture

“The three famous songs in Twelfth Night are in many ways keys to its tone. ‘O mistress mine, where are you roaming?’ is in the ‘gather ye rosebuds’ carpe diem tradition of Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’ … Taken seriously … these lines are the voice of aged lust, with a greed for possession that reflects the fear of its own death. Shakespeare forces this awareness on our consciousness by making the audience to the song Sir Toby and Sir Andrew, a couple of seedy old drunks.”
— W.H. Auden, 1947 lecture

On the second song, “Come away, come away, death”

“This song casts light on the Duke. Shakespeare has so placed the song as to make it seem an expression of of the Duke’s real character … It would be painful enough for [Viola] if the man she loved loved another, but it is much worse to be made to see that he loves only himself, and it is this insight that at this point Viola has to endure … The Duke is interested in being either a faithful Tristan or a dashing Don Juan. He ends up marrying the first woman who asks him.”
— W.H. Auden, 1947 lecture

On the third song, the play’s epilogue:

“What the clown is really saying is that nothing in human life makes sense.”
— W.H. Auden, 1947 lecture

“The plays that follow Twelfth Night are dark. The characters that bring destruction upon themselves, in contrast to classical tragedy in which their fall is caused by forces external to them, and they do not atone through their suffering. The darkness is pulled down over their heads. The plays are gloomy. In Shakespeare’s last plays, the characters survive and are changed for the better by their suffering.”
— W.H. Auden, 1947 lecture

“He rather continues opportunities for [his characters] to show themselves off in their happiest lights, than renders them contemptible in the perverse construction of the wit or malice of others.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

“There is a period in the progress of manners … in which the foibles and follies of individuals are of nature’s planting, not the growth of art or study; in which they are therefore unconscious of them themselves, or care not who knows them, if they can but have their whim out; and in which, as there is no attempt at imposition, the spectators rather receive pleasure from humoring the inclinations of the persons they laugh at, than wish to give up their pain by exposing their absurdity. This may be called the comedy of nature, and it is the comedy which we generally find in Shakespeare.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

“Shakespeare’s comedy is of a pastoral and poetical cast … Absurdity has every encouragement afforded it; and nonsense has room to flourish in. Nothing is stunted by the churlish, icy hand of indifference or severity. The poet runs riot in a conceit, and idolizes a quibble. His whole object is to turn the meanest or rudest objects to a pleasurable account.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

“The same house is big enough to hold Malvolio, the Countess, Maria, Sir Toby, and Sir Andrew Aguecheek.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

“What can be better than Sir Toby’s unanswerable answer to Malvolio, ‘Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?'”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

“The great and secret-charm of Twelfth Night is the character of Viola.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

On:
“Oh, it come o’er the ear like the sweet souls
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odors.”

“Shakespeare alone could describe the effect of his own poetry.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

“Wherever art works appear in Shakespeare — Viola grieving like ‘Patience on a monument’; Octavia as ‘a statue rather than a breather,’ Hermonia as a statue brought to life — they are usually symptoms of some emotional lapse or deficiency, of the callous abandonment of good, usually by blameworthy males.”
— Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

“If so absorbing a masterpiece as Twelfth Night permits the reader to keep any other play in his mind while he reads, that play is The Merchant of Venice. Once again Shakespeare has built a world out of music and melancholy, and once again this world is threatened by one alien voice. The opposition of Malvolio to Orsino and his class parallels the opposition of Shylock to Antonio and his friends … Shakespeare, returning to a congenial theme … ripes and enriches it.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

On Orison’s opening speech:

“A suggestion of surfeit or satiety occurs as early as the second line (‘Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting’): this suggestion, so consonant with Orsino’s melancholy tone, to be developed throughout a speech of considerable complexity…The music of The Merchant of Venice is freer than this, more youthful and less tangled with ideas of sickness.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“In this great speech, Orison calls by turns for music and for silence, seeking pain in his aesthetic pleasure almost as if he were a later decadent poet like Algernon Swinburne or Ernest Dowson. His closest Shakespearean kin in this spirit are Cleopatra, herself a notable devotee of excess … and, curiously, Jessica in The Merchant of Venice, who is never merry, she says, when she hears sweet music. Yet Orsino, like Cleopatra, wants more, rather than less, of this complex sensation …”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“All of them are graced with sadness. It is the mark of their citizenship in a world which knows a little less than the world of The Merchant of Venice did what to do with its treasure of wealth and beauty, whose spoken language has deepened its tone, complicated its syntax, learned how to listen to itself.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“The household of Olivia is old-world, it is Merry England.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

On “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”

“This most famous sentence in the play is more than Sir Toby disposing of his niece’s stewart; it is the old world resisting the new, it is the life of hiccups and melancholy trying to ignore latter-day puritanism and efficiency.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“[Malvolio’s] own existence somehow challenges their right to be freely what they are. He is of a new order — ambitious, self-contained, cold and intelligent, and dreadfully likely to prevail. That is why Sir Toby and his retinue hate him.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“No wonder his enemies loathe him … And no wonder, since their ears are clever, that they mimic his precious manner when they compose the note he is to read as a love-letter from Olivia … They have studied his vocabulary as though it were an index of terms never to be used again.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“He hath been most notoriously abus’d.” (V.i.387)
“Olivia’s line rights Malvolio’s wrong, but her household will never grant him the last justice of love. Where there is such difference there cannot be love. That is what Twelfth Night is most interested in saying, and saying with an impartiality which precludes sentiment.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“This world of music and mannerly sadness is not sentimentally conceived. Even within its gates the violin voice of Orsino is corrected by the bawling bass of Sir Toby, and the elegant neuroses of the nobility are parodied on servants’ tongues.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“Even Viola, much as we like her, stands a little to one side of the center. The center is Malvolio. The drama is between his mind and the music of old manners.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“Like Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It — and many similarly self-dismissive titles of plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries — this apparently deprecating phrase (‘What You Will’) can come back to bite. If some of the play’s characters do find that their fantasies come true, others are punished for daring to have fantasies at all.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“There is no forest here, no Belmont world of music and art, no realm of fairies. Instead we have, on the one hand, a world of madness and dream, a relatively familiar world of mistaken identity and playing and disguises, like that found in The Comedy of Errors or Love’s Labour’s Lost, and, on the other hand, what amounts to an invasion from without. Instead of the court world going to the forest, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or As You Like It, in Twelfth Night we have the spectacle of a ship foundering off the coast of Illyria, of a sea world invading a land world. This is the comic pattern of Much Ado About Nothing, where outsiders — in that case, soldiers and lovers — come to a fixed place and change it. Indeed, it is the pattern of The Comedy of Errors, where all the action takes place in Ephesus. But in Twelfth Night the ‘outsiders’ not only bring the comic elements of energy, desire, and fruitfully mistaken identities, they also bring key elements from another literary genre: romance. The world of romance invades the world of comedy.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Orsino’s initial passion, although he claims it is for Olivia, is rather for the spectacle of himself in love.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Olivia puts herself in a nunnery of her own devising. She’s her own repressive parent.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Olivia’s mourning, ‘addicted to a melancholy,’ is thus in complete contrast to the way Viola mourns for the love of her brother, Sebastian. Viola’s response to what she believes to be her brother’s death is life-affirming, rather than life-denying, and is manifested outdoors rather than indoors.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Self-love, an aspect of pride, is the play’s besetting sin, a sin that provokes the language of sickness that envelops much of the play … Orsino’s opening speech … was full of images of excess, surfeit, and appetite … This language of contagion and infection will continue throughout Twelfth Night, and will crystallize in the figure of Malvolio, whose name explicitly means ‘ill-wisher’ (just as Romeo’s well-intentioned friend Benvolio was a ‘well-wisher’). Malvolio is the play’s paradigm of self-love.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“What would be the value of knowing the meaning of pourquoi? In a world of sheer revel, the word ‘why’, the energy of motivation, has no meaning.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“The two extremes here, Toby’s misrule and Olivia’s and Malvolio’s excessive rule, are really two sides of the same coin. Both are aimless, fruitless, and preoccupied with sterile formalities, whether those formalities are Olivia’s ritual daily round or Sir Andrew’s back-trick, performed in a ‘damned color’ (the Folio reading) or a ‘flame-colored’ stocking, to set off his bony legs to advantage.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Viola calls herself a ‘poor monster’ because she is, in effect, a hermaphrodite, a creature of two sexes, a gender hybrid.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Viola’s situation is different from that of Shakespeare’s other cross-dressed comic heroines, in that she does not meet the man she loves until she is already in her gender disguise.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Like ‘Ganymede’ in As You Like It, ‘Cesario’ has a powerful existence, eloquent, erotic, and elusive, that is not merely equivalent to the charms and power of the female character who portrays him, nor to those of the male actor who originated the role. Olivia, like Orlando, sees something, but mistakes — overrationalizes — what she sees.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“We never see Viola in her women’s clothes again. She says she will send for her ‘maiden weeds’ from the sea captain who has kept them for her, but unlike Rosalind, Viola never gets to reappear as a woman. When the play closes she is still dressed as the boy ‘Cesario.'”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“In a way, the problem of gender, and Viola’s problem in her cross-gender disguise, are constantly re-posed throughout the play. One or two. Male or female. The puzzle appears to be on the surface. But Viola’s position remains very different from Rosalind’s or Portia’s.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“It is one thing to get the heroine into her doublet and hose, as with Rosalind, or her lawyer’s gown, as with Portia, in order to perform a certain piece of work, and then have her return to her own clothes and her own world. It is quite another to get the heroine into male costume, then perplex her with problems relating to her real and assumed gender roles, and finally leave her on the stage, in the last moments of the play, described as her ‘master’s mistress’ and dressed as a boy.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“This is Shakespeare’s last cross-dressing play until 1609. Twelfth Night was written and performed in 1601. Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, and the cross-dressed woman disappears from Shakespeare’s plays until the figure of Imogen in the late romance Cymbeline. Perhaps this device, well-worn and familiar from prose romance and from other plays and playwrights, had simply exhausted its novelty, for a time … In later years, when Shakespeare returned to the problem of cross-gender identities, roles, traits, and characters, and their meaning for a society and a stage in transition, he would explore these boundaries in other contexts, like the bearded witches in Macbeth, the erotic role-swapping love games of Antony and Cleopatra, and the gender-defying sprites in The Tempest.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Malvolio unquestionably runs away with the play, in almost every production, in part because of the sheer brilliance of this scene (2.5).”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“As various editors have pointed out, there is in the address of the letter (‘To the unknown beloved, this, and my good wishes’) [2.5.82-83] no letter c and no capital P. In other words, the playwright is having a joke on his character, who sails blithely on, himself magnificently unaware of the hilarity he has provoked in onlookers …”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

On “Some have greatness thrust upon ’em …”

“Shorn of its period contradtion, presumably to make it more serious and, oddly, more ‘Shakespearean’, this phrase appears everywhere … Like so many other passages of Shakespearean ‘wisdom’ (‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be’; ‘All the world’s a stage’; ‘Good name in man and woman … is the immediate jewel of their souls’), this one is embedded in a context, and given to a speaker — or an ‘author’ — who gives the lie to its easy sentiments … Shakespeare’s plays never produce these familiar maxims without some irony.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“In Shakespeare’s time, ‘Illyria’ would have been a place-name without a place.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Malvolio thinks these things, and suddenly a letter falls at his feet proclaiming them to be true. A later era would call this ‘magical thinking’.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“[Viola’s] costume change does offer her mobility and imaginative space — as is also the ease with other Shakespearean disguisers, from the ‘Muscovites’ of Love’s Labour’s Lost to Prince Hal to Portia and Rosalind. But what effect does disguise, or change of costume, have upon Malvolio? It confirms him, emblematically, in his own repression. Malvolio’s costume visibly confirms him in what he is — obstructed, repressed, blocked.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“[Malvolio] will be taken to a dark room and bound. But has he not, in a sense, always been there, bound — as the cross-garters bind him, and as he is bound by his own lack of joy and his repressive censoriousness? Malvolio has the temperament to be an eager Egeus, forbidding a daughter’s marriage, or a Duke Frederick, condemning a brother and a niece to banishment. It is his misfortune that he is not born to such heights of tyranny. And so he is taken away and bound in a dark room … The physical prison is the imagistic counterpart of the interior prison he has always inhabited.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

On “Are all the people mad?” — Sebastian

“In Illyria it seems as if they are all mad, all obsessed with self — which is one definition of madness in this play.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

On Malvolio’s “Tell me why?”

“The question is both poignant and pertinent … We may recall Sir Andrew Aguecheek’s inability to comprehend the meaning of the word pourquoi. At this point Twelfth Night almost moves beyond the bounds of comedy and toward another kind of accountability, another kind of moral inquiry.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“[Feste] seems less like a person than like a sprite or a spirit of music, as much akin to Puck as he is to Touchstone — and yet he is painfully human. His haunting songs both fill and frame the play. Feste’s isolation, the fool’s isolation, is finally the real isolation in this play of comedy, wonder, and epiphany.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

On the final song:

“The fool stands here in the liminal place of the epilogue, parallel to Puck in his play and Rosalind in hers, appealing across the boundary between actor and audience. But the material conditions of society push insistently in, like the wind and the rain.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“The confined and magical world of Shakespearean comedy, with its green world and its rigid dukes and laws made to be broken, its holidays, and its transformation, is a crucial part of experience as Shakespeare allegorizes it for his audience, but it is not the whole of the experience. And the growth of exclusion in those plays, the strength of the excluded characters, the disappearance of those marriage dances in which Renaissance poets imitated the harmony of the spheres, indeed, the remanding of the contracted marriages to a time and space outside or after the play, the emergence of the clear, plaintive voice of the fool — all these point toward a new phase in Shakespeare’s dramatic development, a broader, more painful, but often a staggeringly beautiful and profound vision of humankind in the midst of a tragic universe. For the next time the audience encounter Feste’s final song, that song will be sung to a mad king in the middle of a raging storm, by Lear’s nameless and tragic Fool:
He that has and a little tiny wit,
With heigh-ho, the wind and the rain,
Must make contact with his fortunes fit
Though the rain it raineth every day. (Lear, 3.2.73-76)
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Twelfth Night or What You Will probably was written in 1601-2, bridging the interval between the final Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida. There are elemtns of self-parody in Twelfth Night, not on the scale of Cymbeline’s self-mockery, but holding a middle ground between Hamlet’s ferocious ironies and the rancidity of Troilus and Cressida, most memorably expressed by Thersites.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“An abyss hovers just beyond Twelfth Night, and one cost of not leaping into it is that everyone, except the reluctant jester Feste, is essentially mad without knowing it. When the wretched Malvolio is confined in the dark room for the insane, he ought to be joined there by Orsino, Olivia, Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Maria, Sebastian, Antonio, and even Viola …”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Twelfth Night is of no genre. It is not of Hamlet‘s cosmological scope, but in its own startling way it is another ‘poem unlimited.’ One cannot get to the end of it, because even some of the most apparently incidental lines reverberate infinitely.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Viola seems to have formed a very deep design with very little premeditation: she is thrown by shipwreck on an unknown coast, hears that the prince is a bachelor, and resolves to supplant the lady whom he courts.”
— Dr. Johnson

“His most absurd characters, Orsino included, open inward, which is disconcerting in a farce, or a self-parody of previous farces. Malvolio obviously does not possess the infinitude of Falstaff or Hamlet, but he runs away from Shakespeare, and has a terrible poignance even though he is wickedly funny and a sublime satire upon the moralizing Ben Jonson.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“The play is decentered; there is almost no significant action, perhaps because nearly everyone behaves involuntarily. A much funnier Nietzsche might have conceived it, since forces somewhat beyond the characters seem to be living their lives for them.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Cheerfully secular, like almost all of Shakespeare, the play of ‘what you will’ makes no reference whatsoever to Twelfth Night.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Though he is minor compared with Viola, Olivia, Malvolio (how their names chime together), and the admirable Feste, Orsino’s amiable erotic lunacy establishes the tone of Twelfth Night.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Poor Malvolio would be happier in some other play, while Viola, Olivia, and especially Feste would find appropriate contexts elsewhere in Shakespeare. Orsino is the genius of his place; he is the only character the exuberant madness of Twelfth Night accommodates.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“The largest puzzle of the charming Viola is her extraordinary passivity, which doubtless helps explain her falling in love with Orsino. If there is any true voice of feeling in this play, then it ought to be hers, yet we rarely hear that voice. When it does emerge, its pathos is overwhelming.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

On “A blank, my lord” (II.iv.)

“‘Blank’ is a Shakespearean metaphor that haunts poetry in English from Milton through Coleridge and Wordsworth on through Emily Dickinson to Wallace Stevens. Here it means primarily an unwritten page, a history never recorded; elsewhere in Shakespeare ‘blank’ refers to the white mark at the center of a target. Since this pined-away sister is a surrogate invention of Viola’s, there may be a hint also of an unhit target, an aim gone astray. The speech has in it the seeds of some of William Blake’s most piercing lyrics, including ‘The Sick Rose’ and ‘Never Seek to Tell Thy Love,’ dark visions of repression and its erotic consequences.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Orsino, not previously high in the audience’s esteem, is a criminal madman if he means this [condemning ‘Cesario’ to death], and Viola is a masochistic ninny if she is serious. Why does Shakespeare push us to this perplexity? Would zaniness cross the border into pathology if Sebastian did not suddenly appear and precipitate the recognition scene? I do not find much useful commentary upon this bad moment.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Wild with laughter, Twelfth Night is nevertheless almost always on the edge of violence.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Both Belch and Aguecheek are caricatures, yet Maria, a natural comic, has a dangerous inwardness, and is the one truly malicious character in Twelfth Night.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Malvolio is, with Feste, Shakespeare’s great creation in Twelfth Night; it has become Malvolio’s play, rather like Shylock’s gradual usurpation of The Merchant of Venice. Charles Lamb shrewdly considered Malvolio a tragicomic figure, a Don Quixote of erotomania. That suggests a great truth about Malvolio; he suffers by being in the wrong play for him.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“It is difficult to overstate Malvolio’s originality as a comic character; who else in Shakespeare, or elsewhere, resembles him? There are other grotesques in Shakespeare, but they do not begin as normative worthies and then undergo radical transformation?”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“What happens to Malvolio is … so harshly out of proportion to his merits, such as they are, that the ordeal of humiliation has to be regarded as one of the prime Shakespearean enigmas.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“The play does not need Malvolio, but he has no choice: Shakespeare has inserted him into a context where he must suffer.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“As a sycophant, a social climber, and an officious snob, [Malvolio] well deserves to be put back in his place — or, as Jonson would have it, in his humor, for Malvolio seems to have a Jonsonian rather than a Shakespearean temperament.”
— Harry Levin, Shakespeare and the Revolution of the Times: Perspectives and Commentaries

Malvolio finding the letter, II.v.160-179:

“Do we shudder a touch even as we laugh? The erotic imagination is our largest universal, and our most shameful, in that it must turn upon our overvaluation of the self as object. Shakespeare’s uncanniest power is to press perpetually upon the nerve of the erotic universal. Can we hear this or read this, without to some degree becoming Malvolio? Surely we are not as ridiculous, we should insist, but are we in danger of becoming so (or something worse) if we believe our own erotic fantasies, as Malvolio has been tricked into doing.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

Act IV, scene ii – Malvolio and Feste in disguise as the priest

“At once the funniest and the most unnerving passages in Twelfth Night, this hardly shows us a defeated Malvolio. He retains dignity under great duress and proudly states his stoic refusal to surrender the soul to Pythagoran metempsychosis.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Shakespeare’s Malvolio is perpetually trapped in the dark house of his obsessive self-regard and moral censoriousness, from which Shakespeare grants him no release. This is dreadfully unfair, but in the madness of Twelfth Night, does that matter?”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“The genius of Twelfth Night is Feste … the only sane character in a wild play.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“A superb singer … Feste keeps to a minor key.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Twelfth Night, or What You Will is the only play for which Shakespeare provided an alternative title.”
— Anne Barton, Riverside Shakespeare

“This is plot material of the most ownerless and ancient kind: the very stuff of Comedy since Menander.”
— Anne Barton, Riverside Shakespeare

“Twelfth Night is not Jonsonian comedy. Whatever some critics may say, the lovelorn Orsino is not a figure of fun. Indeed, the verse he speaks at the beginning of the play is seductively beautiful: intense, metaphoric, and imaginative. Only by the slightest touches — the way his hunting image, for instance, threatens to overbalance into an Actaeon/cuckold joke which the speaker certainly does not intend — does Shakespeare hint at something that Feste, later, will make explicit: the fact that Orsino’s love-melancholy is essentially sterile and self-induced, a state of mind dependent upon that very absence and lack of response from Olivia which it affects to lament.”
— Anne Barton, Riverside Shakespeare

“Like the King of Navarre and his courtiers in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Olivia is engaged in a war against Time and human forgetfulness.”
— Anne Barton, Riverside Shakespeare

“There is a sense in which Sir Toby Belch is the master of these disorderly revels, a man literally intoxicated throughout much of the play, for whom Time, in its logical, workaday aspect has simply ceased to exist.”
— Anne Barton, Riverside Shakespeare

“In the comedies that he wrote before Twelfth Night, Shakespeare had created a number of fantasy worlds … where life has some of the qualities of a dream. He invented Portia’s house over the sea at Belmont, with its riddle-game, its music, and its limitless wealth; the forests of As You Like It, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream; the withdrawn, artificially enclosed park in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Even in The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Much Ado About Nothing, there are shadowy traces of this pattern of movement from an ordinary world to a second, somehow magical, environment in which characters are transformed, but which they must leave at the end of the comedy to take up the burden of the everyday. The people who set out from Arden, Navarre, Oberon’s wood, Windsor Great Park, or the nightmare house of Petruchio are not quite the same as those who, briefly, have sojourned there. Their experiences in this second, heightened world have altered them, usually for the better. It is clear, however, that their future lies in a harsher, more realistic society, subject to imperfection, death, human limitation, and Time, which we accept as an image of our own. In the final romances, Shakespeare abandoned this comic pattern.”
— Anne Barton, Riverside Shakespeare

“Twelfth Night is a kind of Janus-faced play, mediating between the early comedies and the last romances. Viola’s disguise as Cesario recalls the masculine impersonations of Julia and Rosalind. Yet in her strange passivity, her insistence upon enduring events rather than creating them, she is like Perdita and Miranda, Marina and Imogen.”
— Anne Barton, Riverside Shakespeare

“The Twelfth Night characters remain in Illyria; they do not return. Nor do we gain any sense of what Messaline, the place from which they say they have come, is like. Any contrasts between the heightened and the ordinary must be found within Illyria itself.”
— Anne Barton, Riverside Shakespeare

“[Viola’s] efforts are all to evade action rather than, like Rosalind, to initiate it. Even her boy’s disguise operates not as a liberation but merely as a way of going underground in a difficult situation, of waiting to see what Time will bring.”
— Anne Barton, Riverside Shakespeare

Quotes from the play

 

O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes over a bank of violets
Stealing and giving odor. Enough, no more,
‘Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
— ORSINO, I.i.5-7

So full of shapes is fancy
That it alone is high fantastical.
— ORSINO, I.i.14-15

Methought she purg’d the air of pestilence!
— ORSINO, I.i.19

There is a fair behavior in thee, captain,
And though that nature with a beauteous wall
Doth oft close in pollution, yet of thee
I will believe thou hast a mind that suits
With this thy fair and outward character.
— VIOLA, I.ii.47-51

MARIA:
Now, sir, thought is free. I pray you bring your hand to the butt’ry-bar, and let it drink.
SIR ANDREW:
Wherefore, sweetheart? What’s your metaphor?
MARIA:
It’s dry, sir.
SIR ANDREW:
Why, I think so. I am not such an ass but I can keep my hand dry. But what’s your jest?
MARIA:
A dry jest, sir.
SIR ANDREW:
Are you full of them?
MARIA:
Ay, sir, I have them at my fingers’ ends. Yours, no I let go your hand. I am barren.
— I.iii.69-79

SIR TOBY:
Pourquoi, my dear knight?
SIR ANDREW:
What is “pourquoi”? Do, or not do? I would I had bestow’d that time in the tongues that I have in fencing, dancing, and bear-baiting. O had I follow’d the arts!
— I.iii.90-94

For I myself am best
When least in company.
— ORSINO, I.iv.37-38

Any thing that’s mended is but patch’d; virtue that trangresses is but patch’d with sin, and sin that amends is but patch’d with virtue. If that this simple syllogism will serve, so; if it will not, what remedy?
— FESTE, I.v.47-51

OLIVIA:
What think you of this fool, Malvolio? doth he not mend?
MALVOLIO:
Yes, and shall do till the pangs of death shake him. Infirmity, that decays the wise; doth ever make the better fool.
— I.v.73-77

O, you are sick of self-love, Malvolio, and taste with a distemper’d appetite.
— OLIVIA, I.v.90-91

Go you, Malvolio; if it be a suit from the Count, I am sick, or not at home — What you will, to dismiss it.
— OLIVIA, I.v.107-109

Alternate title drop!

OLIVIA:
Are you a comedian?
VIOLA:
No, my profound heart, and yet (by the very fangs of malice I swear) I am not that I play.
— I.v.182-184

VIOLA:
Alas, I took great pains to study it; and ’tis poetical.
OLIVIA:
It is the more like to be feigned, I pray you keep it in. I heard you were saucy at my gates, and allow’d your approach rather to wonder at you than to hear you. If you be not mad, be gone. If you have reason, be brief.
— I.v.194-200

VIOLA:
Make me a willow cabin at your gate,
And call upon my soul within the house;
Write loyal cantons of contemned love
And sing them loud even in the dead of night;
Halloo your name to the reverberate hills
And make the babbling gossip of the air
Cry out “Olivia!” O, You should not rest
Between the elements of air and earth,
But you should pity me!
OLIVIA:
You might do much.
What is your parentage?
VIOLA:
Above my fortunes, yet my state is well:
I am a gentleman.
— I.v.268-278

How now?
Even so quickly may one catch the plague?
Methinks I feel this youth’s perfections
With an invisible and subtle stealth
To creep in at mine eyes. Well, let it be.
— OLIVIA, I.v.294-298

Hamlet echo.

Fate, show they force: Ourselves we do not owe;
What is decreed must be; and be this so.
— OLIVIA, I.v.310-311

My stars shine darkly over me. The malignancy of my fate might perhaps distemper yours.
— SEBASTIAN, II.ii.3-5

I am the man! If it be so, as ’tis,
Poor lady, she were better love a dream.
— VIOLA, II.ii.25-26

How easy is it for the proper-false
In women’s waxen hearts to set their forms!
— VIOLA, II.ii.29-30

O time, thou must untangle this, not I,
It is too hard a knot for me to untie.
— VIOLA, II.ii.40-41

FESTE:
Would you have a love-song, or a song of good life?
SIR TOBY:
A love-song, a love-song.
SIR ANDREW:
Ay, ay, I care not for good life.
— II.iii.35-38

What is love? ‘Tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What’s to come is still unsure.
— FESTE’s first song, II.iii

Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?
— SIR TOBY, II.iii.115-116

MARIA:
Marry, sir, sometimes he is a kind of puritan.
SIR ANDREW:
O, if I thought that, I’d beat him like a dog!
— II.iii.139-141

The dev’l a puritan that he is, or any thing constantly but a time-pleaser, an affection’d ass, that cons state without book, and utters it by great swarths; the best persuaded of himself, so cramm’d (as he thinks) with excellencies, that it is his grounds of faith that all that look on him love him. And on that vice in him will
my revenge find notable cause to work.
— MARIA, II.iii.147-152

Now, good Cesario, but that piece of song,
That old and antique song are heard last night;
Me thought it did relieve my passion much,
More than light airs and recollected terms
Of these most brisk and giddy-paced times.
— ORSINO, II.iv.2-6

Now the melancholy god protect thee, and the tailor make thy doublet of changeable taffeta, for they mind is very opal.
— FESTE, II.iv.73-75

No woman’s heart
So big, to hold so much; they lack retention.
Alas, their love may be call’d appetite,
No motion of the liver, but the palate,
That suffer surfeit; cloyment, and revolt,
But mine is all as hungry as the sea,
And can digest as much.
— ORSINO, II.iv.95-101

ORSINO:
And what’s her history?
VIOLA:
A blank, my lord; she never told her love,
But let concealment like a worm i’ the’bud
Feed on her damask cheek; she pin’d in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sate like Patience on a monumnet,
Smiling at grief. Was not this love, indeed?
— II.iv.109-115

MALVOLIO:
By my life, this is my lady’s hand. There be her very c’s, her u’s, and her t’s, and thus makes she her great P’s. It is, in contempt of question, her hand.
SIR ANDREW:
Her c’s, her u’s, and her t’s, why that?
— II.v.86-90

This scene goes on for pages and it is too funny to excerpt.

In my stars I am above thee, but be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em.
— Malvolio, reading Maria’s letter – Maria, who is posing as Olivia. So be careful if you quote this unironically. II.v.143-146

I thank my stars, I am happy.
— MALVOLIO, II.v.170

Malvolio, c’est moi.

A sentence is but a chev’ril glove to a good wit. How quickly the wrong side may be turn’d outward!
— FESTE, III.i.11-13

Troth, sir, I can yield you none without words, and words are grown so false, I am loath to prove reason with them.
— FESTE, III.i.23-25

I am indeed not her fool, but her corrupter of words.
— FESTE, III.ii.35-36

Foolery, sir, does walk about the orb like the sun, it shines every where.
— FESTE, III.i.38

This fellow is wise enough to play the fool,
And to do that well craves a kind of wit.
This is a practice
As full of labor as a wise man’s art;
For folly that he wisely shows is fit,
But wise men, folly-fall’n, quite taint their wit.
— VIOLA, III.i.60-68

SIR TOBY:
Taste your legs, sir, put them to motion.
VIOLA:
My legs do better understand me, sir, than I understand what you mean by bidding me taste my legs.
— III.i.78-80

For him, I think not on him.
For his thoughts,
Would they were blanks, rather than fill’d with me.
— OLIVIA, III.i.103-104

VIOLA:
I pity you.
OLIVIA:
That’s a degree to love.
VIOLA:
No not a grize, for ’tis a vulgar proof
That very oft we pity enemies.
— III.i.123-125

OLIVIA:
Stay. I prithee, tell me what thou think’st of me.
VIOLA:
That you do think you are not what you are.
OLIVIA:
If I think so, I think the same of you.
VIOLA:
Then think you right. I am not what I am.
OLIVIA:
I would you were as I would have you be.
VIOLA:
Would it be better, madam, than I am?
I wish it might, for now I am your fool.
— III.i.138-144

Just read it and it’s funny. The humor is the rhythm, the rhythm is the humor.

The double gilt of this opportunity you let time wash off, and you are now sail’d into the north of my lady’s opinion, where you will hang like an icicle on a Dutchman’s beard.
— FABIAN, III.ii.25-28

Taunt him with the license of ink.
— SIR TOBY, III.ii.44

I am as mad as he,
If sad and merry madness equal be.
— OLIVIA, III.iv.14-15

OLIVIA:
How now, Malvolio?
MALVOLIO:
Sweet lady, ho ho.
— III.iv.16-17

Let the festivities begin, sweet lady, ho ho.

Not black in my mind, though yellow in my legs.
— MALVOLIO, III.iv.26

And when she went away now, “Let the fellow be look’d to”; “fellow”! not “Malvolio,” not after my degree, but “fellow.” Why, every thing adheres together, that no dram of a scruple, no scruple of a scruple, no obstacle, no incredulous or unsafe circumstance — What can be said? Nothing that can be can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes.
— MALVOLIO, III.iv.78-82

MARIA:
Get him to say his prayers, good sir Toby, get him to pray.
MALVOLIO:
My prayers, minx!
MARIA:
No, I warrant you, he will not hear of godliness.
— III.iv.118-121

If this were play’d upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.
— FABIAN, III.iv.127

FABIAN:
Why, we shall make him mad indeed.
MARIA:
The house will be the quieter.
— III.iv.133-134

For it comes to pass that a terrible oath, with a swaggering accent sharply twang’d off gives manhood more approbation than ever proof itself would have earn’d him.
— SIR TOBY, III.iv.179-182

In nature there’s no blemish but the mind;
None can be called deform’d but the unkind.
— ANTONIO, III.iv.367-368

Prove true, imagination, O, prove true.
— VIOLA, III.iv.375

No, I do not know you, nor am I sent to you by my lady, to bid you come speak with her, nor your name is not Master Cesario, nor this is not my nose neither: nothing that is so is so.
— FESTE, IV.i.5-9

What relish is in this? How runs the stream?
Or I am mad, or else this is a dream.
Let fancy still my sense in Lethe steep
If it be thus to dream, still let me sleep!
— SEBASTIAN, IV.i.60-63

Well, I’ll put it on, and I will dissemble myself in’t, and I would I were the first that ever dissembled in such a gown.
— FESTE, IV.ii.4-6

FESTE:
What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild-fowl?
MALVOLIO:
That the soul of our grandam might happily inhabit bird.
FESTE:
What think’st thou of his opinion?
MALVOLIO:
I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve his opinion.
FESTE:
Fare thee well. Remain thou still in darkness. Thou shalt hold th’opium of Pythagoras ere I will allow of thy wits, and fear to kill a woodcock lest thou dispossess the soul of thy grandam.
— IV.ii.50-60

This is the air, that is the glorious sun,
This pearl she gave me, I do feel’t and see’t;
And though ’tis wonder that enwraps me thus,
Yet ’tis not madness.
— SEBASTIAN, IV.iii.1-4

ORSINO:
Come, boy, with me, my thoughts are ripe in mischief.
I’ll sacrifice the lamb that I do love,
To spite a raven’s heart with a dove.
VIOLA:
And I most jocund, apt, and willingly,
To do you rest, a thousand deaths would die.
— V.i.129-133

One face, one voice, one habit, and two persons,
A natural perspective that is and is not!
— ORSINO, V.i.216-217

How have you made division of yourself?
An apple, cleft in two, is not more twin
Than these two creatures.
— ANTONIO, V.i.222-224

You are betroth’d both to a maid and a man.
— SEBASTIAN, V.i.263

Think of me as you please. I leave my duty a little unthought of, and speak out of my ingoing.
The madly-us’d Malvolio.
— V.i.311-313

Madam, you have done me wrong. Notorious wrong.
— MALVOLIO, V.i.328

Tell me why!
— MALVOLIO, V.i.344

FESTE:
And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.
MALVOLIO:
I’ll be reveng’d on the whole pack of you.
— V.i.376-377

A great while ago the world begun,
With hey ho the wind and the rain
But that’s all one, our play is done
For the rain it raineth every day.
— FESTE’s final song, closing out the play. V.i.405-408