Twelfth Night Critics

C.L. barber- the clown “The clown or vice… was a recognised anarchist who made aberration obvious by carrying release to absurd extremes”
C.L. Barber- comedy “From release through to clarification”
Emma Smith- Feste “His role is to point out the truths other characters don’t want to hear”
Kiernan Ryan- Feste “Feste embodies the transcendent perspective from which Twelfth Night and other Shakespearean comedy is written”
Michael Dobson- Malvolio “The play is offering a glimpse not just of comic sexual self-delusion but of a potentially subversive upwards mobility”
Charles Lamb- Malvolio “Malvolio is not essentially ridiculous… he becomes comic by accident”
Carol Thomas Needy- Malvolio “Malvolio serves as a scapegoat who is punished for flaws others share”
Marion Gibson- Malvolio “All three Malvolio baiters seek to allay their anxieties about the pervasiveness of social mobility for they themselves exemplify such mobility”
Ivo Kamps- Malvolio “The repressed Malvolio is perfectly sane by Illyrian standards”, but the plot makes him perform his “madness”
Michael Dobson- comedy The whole of Twelfth Night debates the very nature and morality of comedy”
Miranda Fay Thomas- gender “Twelfth Night depicts one’s gender as essentially a performed role”
Jan Kott- homosexual desire “The desire of Orsino for his page, of Olivia for a woman, and of Antonio for his young master, is not ‘confined’ in marriage resolutions”
John Mullan- gender The all male cast “becomes a kind of artistic freedom, enabling the characters to switch their sexual identity”
C. L. Barber- gender (long) “Just as a saturnalian reversal of social roles need not threaten the social structure, but can serve instead to consolidate it, so a temporary, playful reversal of sexual roles can renew the meaning of the normal relation.”
C. L. Barber- gender (short) “Twelfth Night inverts sexual and gender roles ultimately to re-establish and confirm normal relations”
German Greer- gender “The inconstancy of men and the solidity and truth of women”
Dympna Callaghan- gender “A prime example of the exclusion of the female body in the male impersonation of their personages”
Valerie Traub- Viola “It is as the object of another women’s desire that Cesario finds her own erotic voice”
Amy Smith- Olivia “When she stage manages her own marriage choices… Olivia remodels the economic exchange of maidenhood”
Hudson Shakespeare company- Orsino “Though he is a humorous figure, a parody of melancholy lovers… he also displays aspects of a psychological disorder”
Miranda Fay Thomas- disguise “Twelfth Night reminds us that identity itself is relative”
Herschel Baker- Orsino “Duke Orsino is a narcissistic fool”
Michael Dobson- disguise “Twelfth Night is very much a play about the potential hazards of dressing up”
Michael Dobson- conflict/ social class “With its dramatisation of the antagonism between hedonistic, alcoholic and gluttonous sir Toby Belch and the puritanical steward who longs to discipline him, it is also very much a play about the social implications of festivity”
R. S. White- conflict “Twelfth Night has sometimes been seen as enacting a struggle between an anti- comic Malvolio and comic Feste, with the latter victorious on the bahalf of the forces of festivity”
C. L. Barber- social class “The energy usually occupied in maintaining inhibition is freed for celebration”
Kiernan Ryan- social class “The raucous conduct of the tipsy triumvirate violates the fundamental principles on which the decorum of everyday social life depends: the Manor House of a lady is transformed into an alehouses; her uncle and sir Andrew, both knights of the realm, stand hierarchy on its head by acting like common tinkers and cobblers; the still of the night becomes the tie for uproar instead of peaceful sleep; and rational, responsible behaviour gives way to bedlam”
Stanivokvic- conflict between ideas “A cultural shift from chivalric to romantic maculinity”
Kiernan Ryan- loss “The spectre of death haunts the romantic protagonists lives from the start”
Simon Gray- Antonio “Lingers in the memory to remind us that Illyria is after all an illusion that has been fashioned out of much potential, and some actual, pain”
Kiernan Ryan- Sir Toby “Sir Toby’s misrule is customary of the Twelfth Night festival”
C. L. Barber- sir Toby “He lives at his ease, enjoying heritage… celebrates what he has without having to deserve it”
Ian judge- madness “Twelfth Night also shows the comedy of love which occurs when people turn themselves inside out and almost reach the edge of madness”
Charles spencer- comedy “Twelfth Night is the darkest and most haunting of Shakespeare’s great comedies, its humour constantly shadowed by cruelty and a keen awareness of mortality”
Jan Kott “Illyria is a country of exotic madness”
John Caird- Viola “By the end of the play, she is more sexually completed than she was before”
Kiernan Ryan- disguise “Viola’s performance as Cesario in this sense a metaphor for what all the characters in Twelfth Night are up to… passing themselves off as whoever they are supposed to be by playing parts that don’t coincide with them”
July 17, 2019