1Gender and disguise
Viola's disguise as Cesario is the engine of the whole plot: it lets her serve as messenger between Orsino and Olivia and as Orsino's confidant — roles usually closed to women. Yet she never uses the disguise to intervene directly in the plot, unlike Shakespearean heroines such as Rosalind in As You Like It or Portia in The Merchant of Venice; she allows 'Time' to untangle it. In Shakespeare's theatre, boys played the women, so a male actor playing a woman playing a man layered androgyny on androgyny. The play's point: identity is performance, and desire does not check the costume first.
Characters:Viola / CesarioDuke OrsinoCountess Olivia
2The theatre watching itself
Twelfth Night keeps reminding you it is a play. At their first meeting Olivia asks Cesario, 'Are you a comedian?' — an Elizabethan term for actor — and Viola answers, 'I am not that I play.' Fabian, mid-prank, remarks, 'If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.' In the dark chamber Feste plays both parts for Malvolio's benefit, alternating between his own voice and the disguised voice of the curate Sir Topas, then likens himself to 'the old Vice' of English Morality plays. The prank on Malvolio is itself a staged fiction — with an audience, a script, and a victim.
Characters:Viola / CesarioCountess OliviaMalvolioFesteFabian
3Pleasure versus puritanism
The war between Malvolio and the revelers is the play's comic engine and its sharpest conflict. Sir Toby and Sir Andrew drink and revel late into the night until Malvolio chastises them, and Sir Toby fires back the play's manifesto: 'Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?' Malvolio's own reading of the forged letter — 'I will be proud... I will baffle Sir Toby' — shows his ambition is to become the new master of the house, not to reform it. The prank punishes not piety but hypocrisy, though the punishment's cruelty complicates the triumph.
Characters:MalvolioSir Toby BelchSir Andrew Aguecheek
4Love as self-love
Nearly everyone in the play loves a mirror. Orsino opens it declaring 'If music be the food of love, play on' — in love with longing itself, and convinced women cannot love as deeply as men while Viola, disguised beside him, proves otherwise in silence. Olivia falls for Cesario's manner, not the person; Malvolio falls for a letter he believes flatters himself; Sebastian marries a stranger and marvels, 'Yet 'tis not madness.' The play's point: romantic passion here is mostly projection, and only Viola's concealed, patient love — 'She never told her love' — resembles the real thing.
Characters:Viola / CesarioSebastianDuke OrsinoCountess OliviaMalvolio
5Folly and its license
Feste, Olivia's fool, is the only character who sees everyone clearly. He returns after an absence and cleverly proves Olivia a fool for mourning her brother, who is in heaven — earning Malvolio's sneer that he is a barren rascal. He mocks Malvolio in the dark chamber, plays both parts in the little 'play', and closes the show with a song whose last line, 'And we'll strive to please you every day', echoes English folk plays. The fool's point: wisdom in this world wears motley, and the sane — Malvolio, Orsino — are often the maddest on stage.
Characters:Duke OrsinoCountess OliviaMalvolioFeste