Themes in Twelfth Night

Orsino opens the play with one of the most famous commands in Shakespeare: "If music be the food of love, play on; / Give me excess of it." He is not asking for music because he enjoys it. He is asking for excess of it so that the appetite for love will sicken and die. He wants to want less. He fails.

This is immediately the strangest love in the play, because Orsino loves Olivia in a way that is almost entirely self-directed. He sends Cesario — Viola in disguise as a young man — to deliver his declarations, and spends his time at home listening to music and talking about love to whoever will listen. Olivia has refused him consistently. He does not adjust his behaviour.

Viola's love for Orsino, by contrast, is trapped and specific. She knows exactly who she loves, knows she cannot say so, and has to deliver his declarations of love for someone else. Her speech to Orsino in Act 2 Scene 4 — describing a woman who "never told her love, / But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud, / Feed on her damask cheek" — is autobiographical. She is describing her own situation to the man she cannot tell.

Olivia falls in love with Cesario in Act 1 Scene 5, almost against her will. She had been maintaining a formal period of mourning for her dead brother and was not interested in receiving any suitors at all. Viola arrives as Cesario, delivers Orsino's message with unusual skill, and Olivia finds herself thinking about the messenger instead. She sends a ring after Cesario using a flimsy excuse.

The triangle runs: Orsino loves Olivia, who loves Cesario, who loves Orsino. No one gets what they want. Everyone gets a version of it in Act 5, when Sebastian appears as himself. Olivia has already proposed marriage to him, thinking him Cesario. He accepted without fully understanding the situation. She gets the person who looks like Cesario. Orsino gets Viola. Both of these outcomes happen very quickly and slightly too conveniently.

Shakespeare leaves one question unresolved: Orsino has spent the entire play loving Olivia and barely noticed Viola. His declaration of love for her in Act 5 comes minutes after he threatened to kill her. It is played as comedy, and it resolves the plot. Whether the love is any more real than his love for Olivia was is something the play does not address.

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Viola washes ashore in Act 1 Scene 2, believes her twin brother dead, and within a few minutes has hired herself out as a page boy to the local duke. She calls herself Cesario. Almost everything that happens in the play flows from this decision.

Why she chooses this particular disguise — rather than, say, a lady-in-waiting to Olivia — is explained briefly: she thinks she might be able to serve the duke. The play does not dwell on the logic. It is more interested in the consequences. Cesario is convincing enough that Olivia falls in love with him, Sir Andrew Aguecheek challenges him to a duel, and Antonio mistakes him for Sebastian in Act 3 Scene 4 and offers his money purse to someone who has no idea what he is talking about.

Sebastian's arrival in Act 3 creates a second layer of confusion because he and Viola are identical — as they must be, since the original audience would have seen two male actors in the same costume. Olivia meets Sebastian thinking he is Cesario and proposes marriage. He accepts. Sir Andrew picks a fight with the wrong person and gets properly beaten for it. Nobody can understand what is happening.

Viola's most direct statement about her situation comes in Act 3 Scene 1: "I am not what I am." It sounds like a general philosophical point, but she is making it to Olivia, who is in love with the person Viola appears to be. The line captures something real about disguise — that it does not simply hide the person underneath. It creates a new person, one who attracts Olivia's love and the duke's confidence. Both are responses to Cesario, not to Viola.

Feste goes one step further in Act 4. He visits Malvolio in the dark cellar where he has been imprisoned, disguised as a priest named Sir Topas. Malvolio cannot see him. Feste speaks in Sir Topas's voice, then shifts back to his own, then back again, and at one point is speaking as both at once. This is a jest, but it is also a demonstration that identity is not fixed — it is performed, and a good performer can run two selves simultaneously.

Act 5 resolves the plot by reuniting Viola and Sebastian. Orsino looks at both of them together and says "One face, one voice, one habit, and two persons." He cannot reconcile what he is seeing with how the world is supposed to work. Neither, quite, can the audience. The resolution is tidy in the way that only fictional resolutions can be — in the real world, twins showing up at the same moment does not untangle emotional commitments made to one person on the assumption they were another.

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Feste is paid to be a fool. His job is to make Olivia laugh, to sing songs on request, and to say things that a person of normal rank could not get away with saying. He is very good at it. He is also, by some margin, the wisest person in the play.

Malvolio is Olivia's steward — a senior household official — and considers himself a serious and competent man. He looks down on Feste explicitly in Act 1 Scene 5, calling him a "barren rascal" in front of Olivia, who immediately defends her fool over her steward. Malvolio's contempt for Feste is also contempt for the idea that foolishness could contain insight. He is wrong about this, and the play goes to some trouble to demonstrate it.

Maria's forged letter in Act 2 Scene 5 works because Malvolio's vanity makes him impossible to deceive in the normal way. You do not trick a vain man by making something unbelievable. You trick him by making something that tells him exactly what he already suspects to be true. The letter says Olivia loves him. He believes it without hesitation. Sir Toby Belch, watching from hiding, understands exactly what has happened: "O, peace! Contemplation makes a rare turkey-cock of him: how he jets under his chin!"

Sir Toby's question to Malvolio in Act 2 Scene 3 — "Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?" — is the play's clearest statement of the tension. Malvolio wants to impose order on a household that includes Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, Maria, and Feste, all of whom are engaged in various degrees of late-night revelry. His objection is moral. Their counter-objection is that pleasure is not, in fact, wrong.

Feste's song at the very end of the play — "For the rain it raineth every day" — punctures the comedy's happy ending with a quiet reminder that the world does not reorganise itself for theatrical convenience. He has been present throughout, observing, and his final song is the play's most honest assessment of what life is usually like. His line in Act 5 on Malvolio's downfall — "and thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges" — is playful and correct.

Malvolio's final exit is the play's most unresolved moment. He was wronged, genuinely, not just humiliated. He says "I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you" and leaves. Nobody apologises. Olivia says it is "a most extracting frenzy," which is not an apology. Feste, who has contributed to the cruelty, does not seem troubled by his role in it. The fool who speaks truth also participates in a wrong the play never corrects.

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Orsino's opening speech is one of the most self-aware acts of wallowing in English drama. "If music be the food of love, play on; / Give me excess of it." He does not want to feel better. He wants to feel more, to the point where the feeling exhausts itself. He has arranged his entire household to support this project.

Olivia is doing something similar, though for a different stated reason. She has decided to mourn her dead brother for seven years — wearing a veil, refusing visitors, staying indoors. Orsino's messenger Valentine reports this in Act 1 Scene 1 as evidence of her capacity for love, which Orsino finds encouraging. Neither he nor the audience is sure whether to take the mourning at face value. Olivia abandons it entirely the moment Cesario arrives.

Viola's grief is the most genuine in the play and also the most hidden. She believes her twin brother Sebastian drowned in the shipwreck that brought her to Illyria. She cannot talk about this because she is performing Cesario. Her sadness appears in glimpses — the hesitation in Act 1 Scene 2 when she hears that Olivia is mourning her brother, the slight catch in the "she never told her love" speech in Act 2 Scene 4. It is real emotion that has nowhere to go.

Feste carries the play's melancholy most explicitly. His function is to make people laugh, and he is skilled at it. But his songs are consistently about loss — "O mistress mine, where are you roaming?" in Act 2 Scene 3 is a song about how youth does not last and love should not be postponed. His final song runs through five verses about "the rain it raineth every day," and it is a strange way to end a comedy. It admits what comedies usually conceal: that the happy ending happens on stage, and then ordinary life resumes.

Malvolio's imprisonment in Act 4 is played partly for laughs — Feste visits him disguised as a priest, shifts between two voices, torments him with questions about the colour of his thoughts. It is also genuinely cruel. Malvolio in the dark, asking for paper and ink, being denied both, is not comfortable comedy. His final speech — "I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you" — is delivered in anger, but it lands with the sound of actual pain.

A play that opens with a man asking for excess love and ends with a fool singing about endless rain has something honest to say about sadness. Twelfth Night does not pretend the happy ending dissolves everything that came before it. Malvolio's grief, Viola's hidden loss, Feste's rain — they are still there when the couples walk off.

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Malvolio's fantasy begins before the letter arrives. Act 2 Scene 5 opens with him alone in the garden, talking to himself about what it would be like to be married to Olivia. He imagines calling Sir Toby to account, leaving his watch (a pocket watch — a symbol of his current authority) behind when he rises to greet his noble guests. He has worked out the details. He is not idly daydreaming. He has been thinking about this.

Maria's forged letter falls into a mind already prepared to receive it. The letter claims to be from Olivia, says she loves him in secret, and instructs him to wear yellow stockings, cross-gartered (a style that involves crisscrossing garters up the leg, which was old-fashioned even in 1601), and to smile at her constantly. All of these are things Olivia hates. Malvolio does all of them without questioning any of it. "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em" — the letter's most famous line — is not an observation. It is a promise the letter makes directly to him, and he accepts it.

His appearance in Act 3 Scene 4 is the comedy at its most precise. He arrives cross-gartered, smiling, quoting the letter back to a bewildered Olivia, who has no idea what has happened to her steward. She concludes he must be ill. Her attendants conclude he has gone mad. He concludes she is playing the game the letter described. Every interpretation of the scene is wrong except the one Malvolio cannot see.

Act 4 brings the punishment further than the comedy requires. Malvolio is locked in a dark cellar — a drastic response to what was, at most, embarrassing behaviour at a household meeting. Sir Toby acknowledges in Act 4 Scene 2 that he is "in some commerce with my lady" and worries about the consequences. Even the man who arranged the prank is uncomfortable with where it has gone.

His exit in Act 5 is the play's sharpest unresolved note. He has been shown the letter, understood the deception, and asked Olivia for justice. She says it is a "most extracting frenzy" — using a word that implies his upset is a kind of madness — and promises to "entreat him to a peace." No apology is offered. Feste, who has participated fully in the cruelty, offers only a jibe: "And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges."

Charles Lamb wrote in 1822 that Malvolio was "not essentially ludicrous" and that the prank crossed into territory the comedy never properly acknowledged. Whether Malvolio deserved humiliation for his pomposity is a separate question from whether he deserved what actually happened. The play leaves both questions open and lets the happy ending continue without him.

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