ALL CRITICAL QUOTES Flashcards
Gender Roles: gender play restoring normality
‘a temporary, playful reversal of sexual roles can renew the meaning of the normal relation.’ (Ros Barber)
Gender Roles: male friendships as precursors to love
‘Antonio’s impassioned friendship for Sebastian is one of those ardent attachments between young people of the same sex which Shakespeare frequently presents, with his positive emphasis as exhibiting the loving and lovable qualities later expressed in love for the other sex.’ (Ros Barber)
Gender Roles: Viola’s ability to shift between genders shows both contrast and connection between them
‘The effect of moving back and forth from woman to sprightly page is to convey how much the sexes differ yet how much they both have in common, how everyone who is fully alive has qualities of both.’ (Ros Barber)
Gender Roles: Viola as an object of desire
‘As a castrato, Viola becomes an erotic ‘blank’, sexually disempowered but also a screen upon which others project their own desires.’ (David Schalkwyk)
Gender Roles: Orsino’s sexist pronouns reveal flawed view of gender
‘Orsino’s use of pronouns shows his lack of empathy and understanding of women. ‘They’ and ‘them’ puts women at a distance, ‘I’ and ‘we’ shows his identification with men. But Viola is one of ‘them’, and is effectively excluded from the conversation and from the ability to love properly.’ (Miranda Fay Thomas)
Gender Roles: Viola’s disguised love
‘Viola’s speeches on Orsino’s behalf carry all the force of her own love for him. The conventional hyperbole combined with the feminine sentiment combine to make Orsino’s feelings both conventional in themselves and held with passionate sincerity. That love is an irresistible passion is fundamental to the play’ (Craik)
Language, Mood, Atmosphere, Music: music shaping tone of Twelfth Night
‘Twelfth Night trembles on the edge of music’ - Virginia Woolf
bittersweet irony in Viola’s love
‘The irony is delicately balanced between the humour of Orsino’s unawareness, and the pathos of Viola’s having to conceal her feelings.’ (Michael Dobson)
Feste’s song as a reflection on time
‘Feste steps effortlessly out of the time frame of Twelfth Night and into the audience’s to sing his rueful ballad of disenchantment … placing the whole play in a vast temporal perspective which reaches back from the present moment of performance to the moment when ‘A great while ago the world begun’.’ (John Hallander)
Social Status / Class: Malvolio reflecting changing economic values (rising merchant class)
‘Malvolio and Shylock are representative of the rise of capitalism’ (Ros Barber)
malvolio wanting to rise social class
he is or would like to be a rising man, and to rise he uses sobriety and morality.’ (Ros Barber)
'’Sir Andrew is a version of the stock type of prodigal who is gulled in trying to learn how to be gallant.’ (Ros Barber)
'’Sir Andrew is a version of the stock type of prodigal who is gulled in trying to learn how to be gallant.’ (Ros Barber)
malvolio as a kill-joy
‘The festive spirit shows up the kill-joy vanity of Malvolio’s decorum.’ (Ros Barber)
Outsiders: Malvolio as an unwanted outsider
‘A kind of foreign body to be expelled of laughter’ (Ros Barber)
Outsiders: Malvolio’s misplaced affection
‘While it is perfectly true that Malvolio’s own desire for Olivia is inextricably caught up with his own ambition, he is as, or more, capable of affection as any character in Illyria’ (Richard Levin)
Shakespearean Comedy: comedy as a journey to clarity
‘through release to clarification’ (Ros Barber)
Shakespearean Comedy: social and artistic structures in comedy
‘historical interplay between social and artistic form’ (Ros Barber)
Shakespearean Comedy: fools balancing wisdom and folly
‘The cult of fools and folly, half social and half literacy, embodies a similar polarization of experience.’ (Ros Barber)
Shakespearean Comedy: comedy mocking unnatural behaviour
‘The plays present a mockery of what is unnatural’. (Ros Barber)
Shakespearean Comedy: Sir Toby as the driver of chaos
‘Sir Toby is secure in his role of Lord of Misrule’ (Barber)
Shakespearean Comedy: A1S3 presents the key themes of the play
‘This scene (A1S3) establishes all the ingredients of revelry evident in the play: capering, masquerading, music and song, as well as hoaxing and hoodwinking, making language for laughs, double-entendre, overindulgence in food and drink.’ (Ralph Berry)
Foolishness: Shakespeare’s fools as unaware of their meaning
Fool ‘in early plays, the clown is usually represented as oblivious of what his burlesque implies’ (Ros Barber)
Foolishness: Fools as detached observers
Coleridge (C18), writing about the Fool in Shakespeare: ‘We meet with characters who are unfeeling spectators of the most passionate situations.’
Foolishness: Malvolio’s strengths as a trap
‘Malvolio is imprisoned in his own virtues’ (Ros Barber)
Appearance and Reality: Malvolio’s self-delusion
Maria’s trick exploits Malvolio’s infatuation with himself, fulfilling his secret wish to violate decorum just as Sir Toby, Sir Andrew and Feste do. He is tricked into displaying “no respect of place, persons nor time” in his speech, dress, and behaviour.’ (David Bevington)
Madness: questioning sanity and foolishness
‘The play insists on questioning categories of madness and sanity, wisdom and folly.’ (Craik)
Deception: comedic effect of slow realization
‘The riddling verse of the letter slows Malvolio down to a ludicrous deliberateness, a tortoise-like advance upon its meaning.’ (John Hollander)
Desire: desire and instability of language
‘The labile nature of language is immediately linked to the wilfulness of the libido.’ (Emma Smith)
Loss: shipwreck as symbolic rebirth
‘The shipwreck has metaphorical associations with the birth trauma separating the twins, suggesting the whole play is an attempt to return to the privileged togetherness they enjoyed before birth.’ (John Hollander)
Loss: Viola’s disguise as a way of holding onto her brother
‘One of the primary aims of her disguise must be to keep her ‘dead’ brother alive by way of a sort of talismanic magic.’ (Emma Smith)
Disguise: Cross-dressing as entertainment and subversion
‘festive pleasure in transvestism is expressed.’ (Ros Barber)
Wit: Orsino’s irony vs. Viola’s hidden suffering
The irony is delicately balanced between the humour of Orsino’s unawareness, and the pathos of Viola’s having to conceal her feelings.’ (Michael Dobson)
sir toby’s excessive language
‘Sir Toby: His language is full of pompous polysyllables, of elaborate syntax deploying synonyms.’ (Ros Barber)
Authority and Permissiveness: Malvolio as a Puritan killjoy
Malvolio is ‘a satirical portrait of the Puritan spirit’ and ‘he is like a Puritan because he is hostile to holiday.’ (Ros Barber)
