Critical AO5 - Twelfth Night

• The darkness of envy is always in a wrestling match with the lighter comedy


  Emma Smith

  The melancholy tone of the play, not everyone is fulfilled by the end.
• [Twelfth Night Ending]... show us societies regenerating themselves, which is why their busiest scene is the final one where everyone needs to be on stage to affirm the values of the community over the individual


  Emma Smith, The ending of the play and the complete resolution and restoration.
• Comedies begin in trouble and end in peace, tragedies begin in calms and end in tempest


  Thomas Hayward C17th
• At every turn the business of comedy keeps tangling with the business of tragedy


  Emma Smith
• a comedy with a dark underside and has generic pressures for happy-ever-afters


  Emma Smith
• Shakespeare uses Feste as a means to debunk the follies and delusions of other characters


  George Norton
• Feste is the embodiment of the shifting, melancholy spirit of Twelfth Night


  George Norton
• [Feste is] a linguistic terrorist, a semantic saboteur


  Kiernan Ryan, the fool's ability to utilise language to destabilise and expose the truth.
• [Fools] expose all that is vulgar and falsely stereotyped in human relationships [...] life's perpetual spy and reflector


  Mikhail Bakhtin C20th
• Fools belong to the borderline between life and art


  Mikhail Bakhtin C20th
• The word 'vice' here emphasises the seriousness of Malvolio's self-love


  Andrew Shouler - about Malvolio's love for himself
• In several respects, Sir Andrew is more of a stereotypical gull than Malvolio


  Andrew Shouler
• An audience at the Globe... might have followed Fabian and Maria in seeing the treatment of Malvolio as 'sport'


  Andrew Shouler - discusses the view of a contemporary audience on the suffering and cruelty that Malvolio has to endure
• Malvolio as a figure to be pitied. Others see him as a provocative figure who dares to challenge the social order in dreaming of marrying above his station


  Andrew Shouler - discusses Shakespeare's brief break away from social norms yet the restoration of class and status by the end of the play
• Such plays rejoice in [...] instability, challenge the rigidity of fixed categories, and ridicule absolute values, patriarchal power and stultifying officialdom


  George Norton, on Bakhtin's theories on the genre of carnivalesque and how it can be applied to Shakespearean comedy
• Carnival time is limited [...] [there must be a] physical return, or promised return, to the ordinary


  Angela Carter C20th
• Sir Toby aims to restore hierarchical privilege


  George Norton
• the dark room scene [...] drawn attention [... ] to the constructed nature of theatre. If members of the audience realise that the theatrical representation is constructed, they may see the same in their reality


  George Norton, metatheatricality and subtle audience deception
• Cesario does not exist, and yet Cesario is not allowed to stop existing


  Lilla Grindlay- (ending) Although Cesario is just a fantasy, the audience never actually meets Viola, leaving this sense of dissatisfaction with the ending as the pair (Viola and Orsino) go of to wed, however, who is Viola?
• In Illyria [...] we are never more than a whisper away from heartbreak and brutality


  Lilla Grindlay- (ending) Questions the thin line between comedy and tragedy, Two sides of Illyria, although it seems like a land of laughter and festivity...there is a darkness behind this façade
• Illyria [...] a world destabilised by darkness


  Lilla Grindlay
• Comedy and Controversy are two sides of the same coin


  Emma Smith
• heterosexual norms are not reinstated


  Emma Smith - Orsino's refusal to stop calling Viola "Cesario"
• mockery and derision were indispensable means of preserving orthodox values and condemning unorthodox behaviour


  Keith Thomas (21st century) - laughter is a way to reassert Conservative orthodoxies
• We the audience experience a general feeling of superiority over comic characters


  Emma Smith
• Comedy is a corrective which seeks to remedy behaviour that is out of line


  Henri Bergson
• The cross dressed boy is neither fully male or female but an androgynous figure 'disrupting sexual difference' and thereby a challenge to the established patriarchy of the time'


  Catherine Belsey (20th/21st C)
• Disguise is part of the play's carnivalesque confusion


  Pamela Bickley
• Gender itself is at the forefront of comedy - we laugh at sir Andrew just as much as Viola


  Pamela Bickley
• Viola is trapped by her disguise and uneasy at the falseness it causes


  Pamela Bickley - disguise and deception theme
• shows us the real consequences of Malvolio's overblown pretensions


  Francis Gilbert - Malvolio's consequences for trying to gain a higher status
• Malvolio is funny because he is so unfunny


  Francis Gilbert
• mismatch between how they see themselves and how the world perceives them


  Francis Gilbert on Malvolio
• there is a total blindness in him as to who he really is


  Francis Gilbert on Malvolio
• He is the archetypal pompous ass


  Francis Gilbert - Malvolio and his feelings of self-importance
• The play as a whole is not so certain that proper men can be identified


  Sophie Duncan
• Nature favouring the heterosexual potentially procreative relationship between Olivia and Sebastian, rather than the homoerotic connection between Olivia and Viola


  Sophie Duncan
• Gender is so meaningless as a marker for the twins that Sebastian is identical to his sister


  Sophie Duncan
• Twelfth Night goes on problematising what it means to be a 'proper man' or a 'maid'


  Sophie Duncan
• The degree to which Shakespeare's character slip between 'male' and 'female' characteristics and behaviours reveals how rigid and arbitrary these gender roles actually are


  Sophie Duncan