Understanding Shakespeare: Twelfth Night by Robert A. Albano - HTML preview

Stephen Greenblatt

Introduction to Twelfth Night

in The Norton Shakespeare:

Twelfth Night, or What You Will, written for Shakespeare’s all-male company, plays brilliantly with these conventions. The comedy depends on an actor’s ability to transform himself, through costume, voice, and gesture, into a young noblewoman, Viola, who transforms herself, through costume, voice, and gesture, into a young man, Cesario.

(page 1761)

Malvolio (mal volio, “ill will”) is explicitly linked to those among Shakespeare’s contemporaries most hostile to the theater and to such holidays as Twelfth Night. … More dangerously, he is a man in a socially dependent position with a gift for acquiring enemies, as he does when he tries to silence the noisy revelry of that classic carnivalesque threesome a drunkard, a blockhead, and a professional fool. (pages 1763-64)