Critical quotes for all characters and themes in Twelfth Night from a range of critics. These were all the quotes I needed to get almost full marks in my A level Twelfth Night exam.
Best critical quotes
‘But a silly play, not relating to the name or day’ -Samuel Pepys, 1661
Barber’s argument: Twelfth Night is a festive play, one that moves in the direction of self-
discovery and communal harmony.
More recent critics such as Ralph Berry perceive a darker drama that calls into question its
own comic design and purpose and leaves us with a sense of disquiet. He speculates that
the end of Twelfth Night demolishes its festive mood.
Orsino
Source Quote
Priest The Duke’s practised love-melancholy itself is clearly obsessive,
exposing a form of narcissism no less unappealing than
Malvolio’s thinly disguised lasciviousness.
Peter Orsino’s role is to parade the two human follies that the play
Cash sets out to criticise: self love and self-deception.
Shapir Orsino’s agonised sense of betrayal arises more from the loss
o of Cesario than from the loss of Olivia.
Viola
Source Quote
C.L. Viola’s spritely language conveys a ‘festive pleasure in
Barber transvestism’
Cash Viola is a passive figure, despite her masculine attire she is a
paragon of female virtue.
Hogdo "Picking up the sword confirms Viola/Cesario's manhood,
n but her inability to use it "proves" her feminine."
Peter Viola is an embodiment of Renaissance womanhood in whom
Cash the Three Graces (of beauty, chastity and passion) are to be
imagined in perfect balance/ in classical harmony.
, Olivia
Source Quote
Howard Olivia, the real threat to the social order, gets punished.
Sebastian
Source Quote
Crowde Sebastian’s function is that he acts as a male substitute for his
r sister.
Malvolio
Source Quote
Ryan Malvolio himself is a reincarnation of scapegoat figures
chpt10 victimised in previous comedies
Ryan Nothing in the play illustrates the frailty of repression’s grip on
chapter 10 the pleasure principle more vividly than the speed with which
Malvolio unknowingly succumbs to the sway of frivolity and
self-indulgence.
Malvolio has been transmogrified into a Twelfth Night travesty
of himself, an unconscious accomplice of the ‘uncivil rule’ he
had denounced so vehemently in Sir Toby, Sir Andrew and
Feste; nor will his part in the covert revelry be over until he
has played out the role of festive scapegoat in the following
act.
Warren Malvolio serves as a means of binding the plot and the
subplot together.
Priest ‘Ultimately, the degree of our sympathy for Malvolio can be
manipulated by director and actor. If Malvolio is impudent and
arrogant throughout the ordeal, that is one thing; it is quite
another if we hear him weeping in the darkness. The text will
always allow for a weeping Malvolio, although this kind of
portrayal seems to have been more common in the last
century than it is today.’
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