Twelfth Night Quotes

• "marriages are used to provide comic closure"
• "marriage is used as the mainspring of the comedy,"
• "The most outstanding feature of Shakespearean comedy is its pervading obsession with marriage."
• "marriage is so central a topic in Shakespearean comedy that it is the presence of marriages in their plots which has problematised the genre classifications of both the late romances and the two ‘dark’ comedies,"
• "the problematic ways in which marriage is generally treated in these plays."
• "despite the traditional view that marriage provides comic closure, this is, in fact, very rarely achieved... the audience is repeatedly encouraged to expect that the proceedings will be appropriately closed with a wedding – but these expectations are then either disappointed, or gratified in such a way that the spectator will be forced to question both the meaning of the events he or she has witnessed and also the assumptions underlying his or her response to the events."
• Marriage


  Appropriate as a provider of closure for comedy
• Marriage in comedy


  • Focuses primarily on the experience of the group
  • Counters the element of separation in tragedy
  • Holds out the promise of renewed life in the birth of offspring
• Marriage


  Shows humans in a relationship which is, in theory at least, one of indissoluble bonding
• Birth of offspring is referred to in the words of the marriage ceremony and in Elizabethan wedding customs, and assumed to be the inevitable product of all heterosexual intercourse
• "It is also possible to discern in Shakespeare’s comedies clear signs of the conservatism which is so often felt to flourish in comedy."
• at the end of comedy, characters return from "where they had so briefly glimpsed a world in which traditional gender roles could be reversed and the patriarchal system of property division overturned."
• "worlds may be broken and assumptions overturned; in the comic universe, however, the world not only remains fundamentally the same, but is indeed reinforced by the reaffirmation of that most basic of all props of social and patriarchal order, marriage."
• "At a time when Puritan ministers and pamphleteers repeatedly attacked the abuses and excesses of “papist” rejoicings and popular festivals that were taken to be pagan remnants and forms of superstitious or licentious idolatry, Shakespeare stood in the defence of “old holiday pastimes,”"
• "In his festive, green-world comedies and later romances, he chose festivity and mirth rather than the city intrigue and comical satire advocated by his colleague and rival Ben Jonson."
• "Shakespeare’s festive comedies revel in a carnival spirit of liberty and irreverence. They sanction sexual desire to be crowned and licensed by companionate marriage and they praise the wisdom of folly, as constancy and happiness are ultimately proved right once the young lovers are allowed to leave the labyrinth of errors, tricks, or illusions that have been wrought upon them."
• "Contrariwise, Jonson’s comical satires or Shakespeare’s subplots that take up the tricks of humours and the cruel games of deception and exposure – illustrated in the conflicts between Shylock and Antonio in The Merchant of Venice or between Sir Toby, Feste, and Malvolio in Twelfth Night – insist on dissonance and cacophony or on men who have no music in them."
• "Yet, for Philip Edwards, the festive comedies do not really end in clarification and in a resolution of the contrary forces of holiday and everyday: “A strong magic is created: and it is questioned” (Edwards 1968: 70). This shows that one cannot do away with the basic discrepancy between ritual and reality and it is also meant to remind the spectator–reader of Shakespeare’s festive comedies that it is quite necessary to reestablish a critical perspective after enjoying the sweet impossibilities of romance."
• "Comedy was the dramatic form that dealt with commoners – all those below the level of the aristocracy – ‘never medling with any Princes matters nor such high personages' as the courtier-critic George Puttenham put it in 1589. The genre concerned itself, in fact, with the social stratum occupied by the actors themselves, giving it a voice and placing it at the centre of the action at a time when it had few opportunities to articulate its concerns at the highest level of political life."
• "No wonder, then, that the Elizabethans saw comedy as having been subject to the suspicion of rulers from ancient times to the present. Tragedy made tyrants weep and change their ways...comedy,on the other hand, made tyrants uncomfortable and roused them to rage."
• "Puttenham explains that the ancient tragedians reprehended the vices of princes ‘after their deathes when the posteritie stood no more in dread of them’. Comedy, by contrast, dealt with the dangerous present, whose inhabitants have an awkward propensity for taking umbrage and seeking revenge. For this reason, Puttenham tells us, the ancient comic playwrights ‘were enforced for feare of quarell and blame to disguise their players with strange apparell, and by colouring their faces and carying hatts and capps of diverse fashions to make them selves lesse knowen’."
• "It seemed inevitable, then, that censorship should have hounded comedy from generation to generation, first struggling in vain to prescribe limits to its licence, then giving up in despair and banning it from the stage as an offence against law and order. Only comedy’s extraordinary flexibility – its capacity to reinvent itself repeatedly in response to new developments – had enabled it to survive its own indiscretions through so many centuries of vilification and belittlement."
• "In each of its new incarnations comedy begins with grand promises to restrain its ebullience within permitted bounds, but ends by demonstrating its resistance to any form of containment, kicking over the traces and running riot for a time before being crushed beneath the weight of authoritarian retribution."
• "Tragedy makes a great curved arc into the heavens...Comedy never leaves the ground."
• "Its vision is not low...Its glance is not superior but levelling."
• "Comedy cocks an eye upward at the very same man who is straining to divinise himself and notices that he is packing a little extra weight. Though he is on his way to infinity, he has a ham sandwich in his pocket and a bandage on one big toe. Man may free himself of the earth, but – as things stand just now – he carries a little bit of the earth with him wherever he goes, and so he must carry whatever is required to nourish or soothe it. He must render unto matter the things that are matter’s. He can free himself of God but not of the need for a haircut."
• "The baggage is heavy and in some measure humiliating. A bishop should not have to go to the bathroom. A weightless astronaut in space should not have to worry about making an appointment with his dentist. An ambassador busy on an important mission for his country should not have to pause over his scheduled appointments and soberly reshuffle a few to leave time for sex. The situation in each case is more than inconvenient; it is preposterous."
• "But that is the basic joke, the one incongruity upon which all other incongruities rest. That a being so entirely free should be so little free is absurd. That a creature capable of transcending himself should at the same time be incapable of controlling himself is hilarious. We do often cry when we laugh."
• "In tragedy there is always hope, up to the last minute and beyond it, some kind of hope; we rarely laugh. We are serious so long as there is a way out. Comedy occurs when there is no way out."
• "The men have hope, and we know better, and that is comedy. Comedy depends upon tragedy, because it would have no disparity with which to shock us, it could not say how preposterous man is, if tragedy did not first and fully display man’s extraordinary freedoms."
• "Comedy listens, nods, does not deny. In the end, it simply points. It points to the thousand ways in which the admittedly free man is not free. It keeps an echo of freedom about, because if it did not there would be no joke;"
• "We cry because the disparity is unthinkable, and we laugh because there is no other thing we can do about it. Laughter always erupts precisely as the situation becomes hopeless."
• "In tragedy there is always hope, up to the last minute and beyond it, some kind of hope; we rarely laugh. We are serious so long as there is a way out. Comedy occurs when there is no way out."
• "The men have hope, and we know better, and that is comedy. Comedy depends upon tragedy, because it would have no disparity with which to shock us,"
• "Comedy listens, nods, does not deny. In the end, it simply points. It points to the thousand ways in which the admittedly free man is not free. It keeps an echo of freedom about, because if it did not there would be no joke."
• "Tragedy speaks always of freedom. Comedy will speak of nothing but limitation."
• "The very unbelievability of Malvolio’s infatuation is part of what makes it so richly enjoyable."
• "Malvolio is a well-suited target for satire – indeed, just about the most pointed satire that Shakespeare ever wrote... because he is an enemy of merriment and hence a foe of the kind of theatre that Twelfth Night represents... Malvolio believes in sobriety."
• "Malvolio’s sober-sided performance of duty would be acceptable as a counterweight to Toby and Andrew’s excessive merriment were it not for the fact that Malvolio is a hypocrite. Secretly he longs for the pleasures of this world and for the authority to control others,"
• "What might otherwise be entrapment is justified, according to the satirical code governing this part of the play, by the fact that Malvolio is drawn into a ‘crime’ of social aspiration in which he is an active participant. Malvolio brings his downfall on himself, albeit with the eager assistance of those who hate him for being a killjoy."