Twelfth night, William Shakespeare, Acte II, scene V

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Written in 1599 and first performed in 1602, "Twelfth Night?, like other Shakespearean comedies, presents us with a blend of realism and a fanciful atmosphere. The main plot deals with the love triangle between the countess Olivia, her suitor the Duke Orsino, and Viola, a shipwrecked young woman disguised as Cesario. Nevertheless, the plot is quite intricate. While the love triangle is formed, Olivia's drunken uncle sir Toby Belch, her lady-in-waiting Maria, and her would-be suitor sir Andrew Aguecheek, with the fool Feste, hatch a plot against Olivia's steward Malvolio, who interrupted their late-night carousing during the third scene of the second act. In the last scene of the second act, Maria leaves a love letter in which she imitates Olivia's style, and sir Toby, sir Andrew and their new recruit Fabian all hide to watch Malvolio take the bait.

Extraits

[...] In addition, the lexical field of obedience, composed by terms such as “obedient” (l.58), (l.72), or “curtsies” (l.61) shows he is overconfident. He is also greedy: the lexical field of wealth “branched velvet gown” (l.47/48), “rich jewel” (l.70), (l.45) divulge his avarice. His love for Olivia seems to be related to class-ambition; he first of all dreams that he could climb up the social ladder by his marriage: be Count Malvolio!” (l.35) Actually, Malvolio has the hubris of the ancient Greek drama -according to Aristotle in his Rhetoric, the hubris could be defined as the self-pride or self-confidence that will be eventually punished by Gods. [...]

[...] Nowhere else in Twelfth Night and hardly anywhere else in Shakespeare is the convention of the soliloquy used to greater comic advantage than in this scene. The main comical device is of course the humiliation of Malvolio by the false letter, but it represents the seduction of a man eager to be seduced- that's to say the humiliation comes from the eavesdroppers as well from him. At that point of the play, we discover the complexity of Malvolio, which introduces bitterness in the farce : Shakespeare demonstrates once again his skill as a writer, as he is able to create a character which creates both the comic and the pathetic. [...]

[...] What is more, we can wonder if, all things considered, it is really Malvolio too stern and too serious, or the eavesdroppers that are too trivial ? There is besides a paradox: Malvolio means one who wants but the wickedness here is rather on the side of Maria and her friends. She is called devil” (l.206), and the jest is called (l.114). Philip Voss, who took the role of Malvolio at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1997, describes his interpretation of Malvolio as following: would like the audience to feel embarrassed. They must laugh, but feel embarrassed. [...]

[...] His humiliation partakes of his own humiliation, heightened by the eavesdroppers. The mere fact that his love for Olivia is revealed, by the avowal manifests herself to my love” (l.169), is a humiliation: he is a Puritan, she is his mistress, and we, as spectators know that she does not love him. What is worse, he reveals he has sexual desires, when he imagines himself “having come from a day-bed where I have left Olivia sleeping” (l;48/49) - and the obscene joke of CUT ridicules him, even more because the sentence he is reading have no C's or P's, so it must be a slip of the tongue from his part. [...]

[...] The letter turns out to be a clever parody of romantic language, and in fact, of Malvolio's arrogant style, as reveals the pompous sentence: thy tongue tang arguments of state, put thyself into the rick of singularity” (l.162).Several puns are spread along the text: for example, we could notice “Malvolio: A should follow, but O does-Toby: And O shall end I hope –Andrew: AY or I'll cudgel him, and make him cry (l.132/134).A laughable effect also results from the encounter between two different types of language: the one, elevated and even grandiloquent of Malvolio, and the other, more trivial, of the eavesdroppers. The antithesis can be seen in lines such as “Malvolio: I extend my hand to him thus, quenching my familiar smile with an austere regard of control- Toby: And does not Toby take you a blow o' the lips (l.66/69) Finally, the scene is also marked by character comedy. [...]