Essay
A* Twelfth Night Extract Exemplar Essay 5
Act 4, Scene 2; Feste visits Malvolio during his imprisonment, disguised as Sir Topas.
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Twelfth Night extract practice essay 52017 AS paper
This extract, preceding the final scene of the Malvolio sub-plot, is crucial in establishing
Twelfth Night’s conflict between the revellers – Feste, Maria and Sir Toby – and Malvolio,
representing the killjoy. Through Feste’s wit, Maria’s power and Sir Toby’s brutality, the comic
villain’s punishment for aspiring to be ‘Count Malvolio’ is compounded in this extract, as the play’s
central themes of disguise and madness come together to goad Malvolio, provoking at least some
sympathy for him from a modern audience.
Immediately, the extract reinforces Twelfth Night’s relationship with disguise and deceit;
Feste puts on a ‘gown’ and a ‘beard’ in order to impersonate ‘Sir Topas the curate’. As with Viola, the
disguise provides Feste with an alternative identity, from which he is able to gain the trust of
Malvolio and then abuse it by goading him. Unlike with Viola, however, the Sir Topas disguise serves
a completely frivolous purpose that lacks the psychological depth of the Cesario impersonation.
Shakespeare perhaps satirises the religious devotion of his spectators in making religion synonymous
with such a frivolous end, since the priest is used to further a manipulative and cruel scheme which
is certainly entertaining, but lacking the educational qualities that religion was considered to have
held at the time. Feste’s response to Maria’s order ‘I would I were the first that ever dissembled in
such a gown’ further highlights the importance of alternative identities to the play and alludes to the
disorder and revelry allowed for by the twelfth night festivities. Given that this was a season in which
traditional norms were turned upside down, impersonation of others and alternate aliases can be
considered a direct consequence of the foolery and trickery allowed for by twelfth night. Feste,
fulfilling the role of the Shakespearean clown, embodies the inversions permitted by the season and
uses it to his advantage to arguably lead the gulling of Malvolio, something which not have been
possible otherwise. It is important, however, that the influence of Maria in tricking Malvolio is not
ignored. Echoing the powerful rhetoric she demonstrated earlier in the play (as in classic lines like
‘on that vice in him will my revenge find notable cause to work’), Shakespeare uses the string of
imperative verbs ‘put on’, ‘make him’ and ‘do it’ in her first utterance to reinforce our view of her as
a strong and single-minded female. Again, this inversion of masculinity and femininity – whereby
female characters become more akin to their male characters in terms of power relations – should
not be seen as a radical form of satire on Shakespeare’s part given the twelfth night season. It could
be argued that it is the topsy-turvy world of Illyria which facilitates Maria’s ability to take control of
proceedings and largely dominate her husband, like Olivia perhaps, in what is one of the most
important aspects of the play’s inverted comedy.
The wit and intelligence expected of the ‘allowed fool’ (Robinson, 2014) in Elizabethan
households is an endearing feature of Feste’s personality and the comedy of Twelfth Night as a
whole. Shakespeare clearly demonstrates the greater intellect of Feste relative to his apparent social
superiors through the use of the phrase ‘Bonos dies’ (meaning ‘hello’ in Latin) and interrogatives in
his utterance ‘for what is “that” but “that”? And “is” but “is”’. The riddle-like rambling is ignored by
Sir Toby in his reply ‘To him, Sir Topas’, perhaps suggesting that he cannot understand the fool.
Feste’s questions are hardly directed at anyone and are essentially self-posed and rhetorical, uttered
only for his own pleasure as a sign of his revelry in playing with words. It could be argued that the
meticulous examination of language here is evidence that Twelfth Night undertakes a thorough
investigation into the gap between language and reality, and that Feste is the main conduit to
convey this message. The sense of unreality about Illyria does create ambiguity about the assumed
meaning of words, a view supported by earlier verbal sparring matches between Feste and Viola.
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