by William Shakespeare
Shipwrecked Viola disguises herself as the boy “Cesario” and enters the service of Duke Orsino, who loves the mourning Countess Olivia — who promptly falls for Cesario. The arrival of Viola's twin, Sebastian, untangles the knot into three marriages. Alongside, Olivia's servants gull her puritanical steward Malvolio into believing his mistress loves him.
Named for the last night of the Christmas feast, a traditional time of misrule when hierarchies were turned upside down, the play stages a holiday world of disguise, appetite and licensed folly, then lets a note of melancholy and cruelty (Malvolio's humiliation, Feste's closing song) shadow the comic ending.
Orsino is in love with being in love; Olivia's grief flips to infatuation in a single scene. The play keeps asking whether desire ever really sees the person it fixes on.
Where to look: “If music be the food of love” (1.1); Olivia falling for Cesario (1.5); Orsino on how men love (2.4).
“I am not that I play.” Almost everyone is performing a version of themselves; gender in particular is shown as a role that can be put on and taken off.
Where to look: Viola's disguise (1.2); “Conceal me what I am”; the twins confused (Acts 4–5).
Orsino courts a “boy”; Olivia desires one; Antonio loves Sebastian with open devotion. The play flirts with same-sex attraction that the triple wedding only half contains.
Where to look: Orsino and Cesario (2.4); Antonio (2.1, 3.3, 5.1); Olivia and “Cesario” (3.1).
Malvolio dreams of being “Count Malvolio”; Sir Toby despises a servant who reaches above himself. The plot against the steward is partly snobbery dressed as fun.
Where to look: the box-tree scene (2.5); “Some are born great...”; the dark house (4.2).
“Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” The play weighs Puritan sobriety against holiday licence — and is not fully comfortable with either.
Where to look: Toby versus Malvolio (2.3); Feste's licensed foolery throughout.
Both Viola and Olivia are mourning dead brothers; Feste's songs turn on mortality and lost youth; the final song's refrain is “the rain it raineth every day”.
Where to look: “Come away, death” (2.4); “Youth's a stuff will not endure” (2.3); the closing song (5.1).
“I am all the daughters of my father's house, / And all the brothers too.”
Viola, describing her hidden grief — Act 2, Scene 4
Written around 1601–02 for the Lord Chamberlain's Men. The title names Twelfth Night, the climax of the Christmas revels and a Feast of Fools presided over by a “Lord of Misrule”, when social order was deliberately inverted. The subtitle, What You Will, signals that holiday spirit of licence.
Every female part was played by a boy, so the first “Cesario” was a boy playing a woman playing a boy — a layered joke the original audience saw fully, and one that keeps the play's questions about gender live.
Malvolio (the name suggests “ill will”) is “a kind of Puritan”. The play was written as Puritan hostility to playhouses was hardening (they would close the theatres in 1642), which sharpens his humiliation and his parting line, “I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you”.
An Italian comedy, Gl'Ingannati (“The Deceived”), reached Shakespeare through Barnabe Riche's tale of Apolonius and Silla. Twins and shipwrecks were stock devices he had already used in The Comedy of Errors.
Critics often read the play's melancholy against the deaths in Shakespeare's own life and a court entertainment staged in the last years of an ageing, heirless Queen Elizabeth.
Disguises herself as a page and loves Orsino while wooing Olivia on his behalf. Witty, patient and self-aware — the play's moral centre.
Luxuriates in unrequited love for Olivia; changeable and self-dramatising. Marries Viola almost the moment she is revealed.
Has sworn off men for seven years, then falls hard for Cesario and, by accident, marries Sebastian.
Believed drowned; his arrival unknots the plot. Marries Olivia within hours of meeting her.
Humourless, ambitious, self-loving. Gulled by a forged letter into cross-gartered yellow stockings, then imprisoned as a madman.
Licensed truth-teller; sings the play's songs of love and death; helps torment Malvolio in the guise of “Sir Topas”.
Drunken misrule. Toby sponges off the foolish Sir Andrew Aguecheek and marries Maria for her wit.
Maria devises the letter plot. Antonio, a sea captain, loves Sebastian devotedly and risks arrest to follow him — and is left conspicuously unpaired.
Orsino's opening speech establishes love as appetite and excess — and his own taste for wallowing in it.
“Conceal me what I am.” The engine of the plot, and of its questions about identity.
“Is't not well done?” / “'Tis beauty truly blent.” Olivia falls, and the love-triangle locks into place.
“My father had a daughter loved a man...” Viola confesses her heart in the third person while Feste sings “Come away, death”.
Malvolio reads the forged letter while Toby, Andrew and Fabian watch from hiding. “Some are born great...”
Feste, as “Sir Topas”, torments the imprisoned Malvolio. The comedy turns genuinely cruel here.
Twins reunited, three couples matched; Malvolio storms off vowing revenge; Feste closes alone with “the rain it raineth every day”.
“Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”
Sir Toby Belch to Malvolio — Act 2, Scene 3
Act and scene references follow the standard editions (Arden / Folger); line numbers vary, so quote from your class edition.
“If music be the food of love, play on; / Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, / The appetite may sicken, and so die.”Orsino — 1.1
“O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first, / Methought she purged the air of pestilence!”Orsino — 1.1
“Make me a willow cabin at your gate, / And call upon my soul within the house.”Viola (as Cesario), wooing for Orsino — 1.5
“She never told her love, / But let concealment, like a worm i' th' bud, / Feed on her damask cheek.”Viola — 2.4
“For women are as roses, whose fair flower, / Being once display'd, doth fall that very hour.”Orsino — 2.4
“Let still the woman take / An elder than herself.”Orsino — 2.4
“Cesario, by the roses of the spring, / By maidhood, honour, truth, and everything, / I love thee so.”Olivia to Cesario — 3.1
“Love sought is good, but given unsought is better.”Olivia — 3.1
“O time, thou must untangle this, not I; / It is too hard a knot for me t' untie.”Viola — 2.2
“I am as mad as he, / If sad and merry madness equal be.”Olivia — 3.4
“Conceal me what I am, and be my aid / For such disguise as haply shall become / The form of my intent.”Viola to the Captain — 1.2
“I am not that I play.”Viola to Olivia — 1.5
“Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness / Wherein the pregnant enemy does much.”Viola — 2.2
“As I am man, / My state is desperate for my master's love; / As I am woman (now alas the day!), / What thriftless sighs shall poor Olivia breathe!”Viola — 2.2
“I am all the daughters of my father's house, / And all the brothers too.”Viola — 2.4
“A little thing would make me tell them how much I lack of a man.”Viola, facing the duel — 3.4
“Prove true, imagination, O, prove true, / That I, dear brother, be now ta'en for you!”Viola — 3.4
“Nothing that is so is so.”Feste — 4.1
“One face, one voice, one habit, and two persons, / A natural perspective, that is and is not!”Orsino, seeing the twins — 5.1
“Do not embrace me till each circumstance / Of place, time, fortune, do cohere and jump / That I am Viola.”Viola — 5.1
“O, you are sick of self-love, Malvolio, and taste with a distempered appetite.”Olivia — 1.5
“Art any more than a steward? Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”Sir Toby to Malvolio — 2.3
“There is example for't. The lady of the Strachy married the yeoman of the wardrobe.”Malvolio — 2.5
“To be Count Malvolio!”Malvolio, imagining marriage to Olivia — 2.5
“M, O, A, I doth sway my life.”Malvolio, reading the forged letter — 2.5
“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em.”The forged letter, read by Malvolio — 2.5 (quoted back at him by Feste, 5.1)
“Daylight and champaign discovers not more.”Malvolio — 2.5
“Why, this is very midsummer madness.”Olivia, of the cross-gartered Malvolio — 3.4
“He hath been most notoriously abused.”Olivia — 5.1
“I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you!”Malvolio — 5.1
“Better a witty fool than a foolish wit.”Feste — 1.5
“Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage.”Feste — 1.5
“What is love? 'Tis not hereafter; / Present mirth hath present laughter.”Feste, singing — 2.3
“Youth's a stuff will not endure.”Feste, singing — 2.3
“Come away, come away, death, / And in sad cypress let me be laid.”Feste, singing for Orsino — 2.4
“Foolery, sir, does walk about the orb like the sun; it shines everywhere.”Feste — 3.1
“This fellow is wise enough to play the fool, / And to do that well craves a kind of wit.”Viola, of Feste — 3.1
“And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.”Feste — 5.1
“When that I was and a little tiny boy, / With hey, ho, the wind and the rain.”Feste, the closing song — 5.1
“For the rain it raineth every day.”Feste, the closing song — 5.1
“My purpose is indeed a horse of that colour... he shall find himself most feelingly personated.”Maria, plotting — 2.3
“He has been yonder i' the sun practising behaviour to his own shadow this half hour.”Maria, of Malvolio — 2.5
“My masters, are you mad? Or what are you?”Malvolio, breaking up the revels — 2.3
“Pray God he be not bewitched!”Maria — 3.4
“There is no darkness but ignorance, in which thou art more puzzled than the Egyptians in their fog.”Feste, as Sir Topas, to the imprisoned Malvolio — 4.2
“Leave thy vain bibble-babble.”Feste, as Sir Topas — 4.2
“They have here propertied me; keep me in darkness, send ministers to me, asses, and do all they can to face me out of my wits.”Malvolio, in the dark room — 4.2
“I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve his opinion.”Malvolio, refusing the “madman's” test — 4.2
“Alas, poor fool, how have they baffled thee!”Olivia — 5.1
“My brother he is in Elysium.”Viola, believing Sebastian drowned — 1.2
“He named Sebastian. I my brother know / Yet living in my glass.”Viola — 3.4
“An apple cleft in two is not more twin / Than these two creatures.”Antonio, seeing Viola and Sebastian together — 5.1
“If nothing lets to make us happy both / But this my masculine usurped attire...”Viola — 5.1
“Boy, thou hast said to me a thousand times / Thou never shouldst love woman like to me.”Orsino to Viola — 5.1
“Cesario, come — / For so you shall be while you are a man; / But when in other habits you are seen, / Orsino's mistress, and his fancy's queen.”Orsino, the play's last lines of dialogue — 5.1
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