Maria
Character Profile – At a Glance
- Role: Olivia's waiting-gentlewoman, Sir Toby's drinking companion and eventual wife. She is the architect of the play's most consequential subplot: the gulling of Malvolio with the forged letter.
- Key Traits: Quick-witted, sharp-tongued, and socially observant, able to forge a perfect imitation of her mistress's hand and fond of a joke at Malvolio's expense. Beneath the comic facility, she is the most calculating mind in the household.
- The Core Conflict: A waiting-woman with no formal authority who must run the play's most ambitious comic plot in the gaps left by her social superiors – and who succeeds so completely that she ends the play married to a knight.
- Key Actions: Chides Sir Toby for his drinking in A1S3 and trades barbs with Feste in A1S5. She proposes the gulling plot in A2S3, writes the forged letter and throws it into Malvolio's path in A2S5, and reports his transformation in A3S2. She marries Sir Toby offstage between Acts 4 and 5.
- Famous Quote:
"If I do not gull him into a nayword, and make him a common recreation, do not think I have wit enough to lie straight in my bed."
(Act 2, Scene 3) - The Outcome: She marries Sir Toby offstage, as Olivia reports in A5S1: "Maria writ / The letter at Sir Toby's great importance; / In recompense whereof he hath married her." She is the only servant in the play to convert wit into social ascent. The marriage is reported, not performed; she has no final speech of her own.
The Sharp Tongue at the Centre of the Household
Maria's first scene establishes her position with remarkable economy. She enters in A1S3, mid-rebuke of Sir Toby for his late hours and drinking, and she does not soften the rebuke for being delivered to a knight.
Original
By my troth, Sir Toby, you must come in earlier o' nights: your cousin, my lady, takes great exceptions to your ill hours. … Ay, but you must confine yourself within the modest limits of order. … That quaffing and drinking will undo you: I heard my lady talk of it yesterday; and of a foolish knight that you brought in one night here to be her wooer.
(Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Sir Toby, in God's name, come back here sooner each night. Your cousin, to whom I'm maid, dislikes you staying out so late. … Yes, but you should conduct yourself within the confines of acceptable behaviour. … Your bingeing drunkenness will be your downfall. Just yesterday, she mentioned it and also spoke of a foolish knight you once brought home to chat her up.
The exchange is the play's first demonstration of Maria's structural position. She has no formal authority – she is a waiting-gentlewoman, a paid attendant – and yet she speaks to a knight of her mistress's household with the directness of a peer. The reason is simple: she is right, she is funny, and Sir Toby cannot afford to lose her. The line "your cousin, my lady, takes great exceptions to your ill hours" is Maria's whole approach in miniature; she does not threaten, she reports, and the report is enough. The play will demonstrate across the action that Maria's authority in the household runs on this principle. She knows what Olivia thinks; she can speak for it without being asked; she is therefore, functionally, the household's most reliable channel of access to its mistress. Malvolio believes himself to occupy this position. The play will demonstrate that Maria does.
The Plot Hatched
A2S3 is the play's late-night carousing scene – Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, and Feste drinking until Malvolio arrives to scold them. After Malvolio has stalked out, Maria proposes the comic engine of the entire subplot.
Original
Sweet Sir Toby, be patient for tonight: since the youth of the count's was today with thy lady, she is much out of quiet. For Monsieur Malvolio, let me alone with him: if I do not gull him into a nayword, and make him a common recreation, do not think I have wit enough to lie straight in my bed: I know I can do it.
(Act 2, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Dear Sir Toby, enough tonight, because the Count's young boy was here today, and she's had no peace. And leave me with Malvolio alone. If I can't trick him into being an ass, and make him look a fool, then I'm not smart enough to lay straight in my bed. I know that I can do it.
The speech is one of Shakespeare's most economical pieces of comic plotting. Maria has, in eighty seconds of stage time, identified the target, named the technique ("gull him into a nayword" – make him a household joke), staked her own intelligence on the success, and excluded the men from the operational planning. The phrase "let me alone with him" is exact: Maria wants the plot, the execution, and the credit, and the men's role will be reduced to spectatorship. Within twenty further lines, she has produced the analysis that makes the gulling possible – her diagnosis of Malvolio as "a time-pleaser; an affectioned ass… the best persuaded of himself, so crammed, as he thinks, with excellencies, that it is his grounds of faith that all that look on him love him." The diagnosis is precise. It is also the play's first sustained reading of Malvolio by another character, and it is the reading on which the entire subplot depends. Maria knows Malvolio in a way that he does not know himself, and the forged letter she is about to write is the demonstration of that knowledge.
The Letter and the Box-Tree
A2S5 is the play's most-celebrated comic set-piece, and Maria's role in it is structurally essential and verbally minimal. She has produced the forged letter offstage; she now arrives, instructs the men into hiding, throws the letter into Malvolio's path, and exits before he reads it.
Original
Get ye all three into the box-tree: Malvolio's coming down this walk: he has been yonder i' the sun practising behaviour to his own shadow this half hour: observe him, for the love of mockery; for I know this letter will make a contemplative idiot of him. Close, in the name of jesting! Lie thou there, for here comes the trout that must be caught with tickling.
(Act 2, Scene 5)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
You three, go hide behind the hedge. Malvolio is walking down the path. He's been outside to practise his behaviour to his shadow for half an hour. Watch him for a laugh, because that letter will make him a fool. Hide, in the name of true tomfoolery! I'll put this letter here, because here comes the fish we'll catch through mockery.
The speech is the play's most concentrated piece of comic stage management. Maria gives stage directions to her co-conspirators ("get ye all three into the box-tree"), describes the target's current behaviour with the cold accuracy of an anthropologist ("practising behaviour to his own shadow this half hour"), names the comic theory of what is about to happen ("the trout that must be caught with tickling"), and exits before the letter is read. The "trout… caught with tickling" is the most-quoted phrase from the speech, and it is the play's most exact image of Maria's method. The forged letter does not coerce Malvolio; it tickles him into self-deception. The technique is precisely calibrated to the diagnosis of A2S3 – Malvolio is the man whose vanity will lead him to read any flattering text as confirmation of what he already believes. Maria has built the trap to the specifications of the man who will walk into it. Sir Toby's response when she has gone – "I could marry this wench for this device" – will, by the play's end, have become the play's quietest ratification of her victory.
The Aftermath and the Marriage
Maria's role across Acts 3 and 4 is to monitor the gulling and report on its progress. In A3S2 she announces, with comic relish, that Malvolio has done everything the letter instructed.
Original
Yond gull Malvolio is turned heathen, a very renegado; for there is no Christian, that means to be saved by believing rightly, can ever believe such impossible passages of grossness. He's in yellow stockings.
(Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Malvolio, that silly fool, has just denounced his faith, because no Christian hoping for salvation could possibly believe such lunacy. He's wearing yellow stockings!
The speech is the gulling reported as a kind of religious conversion in reverse – Malvolio has been "turned heathen" by his own willingness to believe the letter's instructions, and the visual marker of his transformation is the yellow stockings the letter requested. Maria's relish here is unmistakable. She has constructed a trap whose victim is delivering himself into it with every detail; the report of the yellow stockings is her victory lap. Across the rest of the play her direct presence diminishes – the gulling enters its darker second movement, and Sir Toby and Fabian will manage the dark-room imprisonment without her – but her structural authorship of the catastrophe is acknowledged in the play's final scene, where Olivia reads Malvolio's letter, recognises it as Maria's hand at Sir Toby's instigation, and reports the marriage in a single line: "In recompense whereof he hath married her." The marriage is offstage and unceremonious; Maria does not appear in A5S1 to take her bow. But the social ascent is exact. The waiting-gentlewoman who began the play scolding a knight for his drinking has, by its end, become a knight's wife – and the conversion has been earned by the play's most successful piece of comic writing within the play.
"We have an understanding with the Clown, a sneaking kindness for Maria and her rogueries; we feel a regard for Malvolio."
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, 1817
Key Quotes by Maria
Quote 1
Nay, either tell me where thou hast been, or I will not open my lips so wide as a bristle may enter in way of thy excuse: my lady will hang thee for thy absence.
(Act 1, Scene 5)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
No, either tell me where you've been, or I will keep my lips shut, and I won't defend you. My lady's going to hang you for your absence.
Quote Analysis: Maria's opening exchange with Feste, and the cleanest demonstration of her sharp tongue. She corners the returning fool, threatens to withhold the cover she could give him, and reminds him that Olivia's displeasure is the real danger – the same authority-through-access she wields over Sir Toby. The wit is brisk and slightly menacing, and Feste, who out-talks almost everyone else in the play, gives as good as he gets; the scene is a rare meeting of two equally quick minds.
Marry, sir, sometimes he is a kind of puritan.
(Act 2, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Sometimes he's strict and morally conformist.
Quote Analysis: Maria's one-line summary of Malvolio, and the seed of the entire subplot. The hedging "a kind of" is exact: she will not quite call him a puritan outright, because the accuracy of the charge is less important than the contempt behind it. The line shows Maria doing what she does best – reading a person quickly and naming the weakness that can be used. Within the scene she will refine the diagnosis into the full analysis of his vanity, but the work begins here, with a single dismissive label.
I will drop in his way some obscure epistles of love...
(Act 2, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I'll make him find some vague letters of love...
Quote Analysis: Maria announcing the method that makes her the play's internal author. She will not confront Malvolio or accuse him; she will write, and let the writing do the work. The phrase "drop in his way" is the whole technique in miniature – the letter is planted, not delivered, so that Malvolio believes he has discovered it by chance. The line is the first statement of the forgery that will become the comedy's engine, and it confirms that Maria's weapon is her pen.
Get him to say his prayers, good Sir Toby, get him to pray.
(Act 3, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Get him to say his prayers, Sir Toby; have him pray.
Quote Analysis: Maria still directing the gulling as it tips into its harsher phase, treating the now-"mad" Malvolio as a soul in need of prayer. The line is comic on its surface – the household puritan in want of religion – but it marks the point at which the festive mockery begins to curdle into something closer to torment. Maria's hand is still visibly on the controls here, even as the darker management of the dark-room will soon pass to Sir Toby and the others.
Key Takeaways
- The Architect of the Subplot: The forged letter that gulls Malvolio is Maria's invention, executed in her hand, on the strength of her diagnosis of his vanity – the most successful piece of writing within the play.
- The Sharp-Tongued Operator: Her opening rebuke of Sir Toby in A1S3 establishes the play's pattern: Maria has no formal authority, but her access to Olivia and her speed of mind give her functional command of the household.
- The Trout-Tickler: Her line in A2S5 – "here comes the trout that must be caught with tickling" – is the comedy's exact image of how the gulling works, exploiting Malvolio's vanity rather than overcoming his resistance.
- The Servant Who Marries Up: The offstage marriage to Sir Toby in A5S1 is the comedy's quietest reward for the most successful piece of comic writing within the play – the waiting-woman who began by scolding a knight ends it as his wife.
Study Questions and Analysis
What does Maria's role tell us about class and authority in the play?
Maria is the play's clearest demonstration that practical authority and formal social position are not the same thing. By rank she is a waiting-gentlewoman – a paid attendant in Olivia's household, technically subordinate to Malvolio and to Sir Toby as Olivia's kinsman. By function she is the most effective operator in the household. She rebukes Sir Toby in A1S3; she diagnoses Malvolio's psychology in A2S3; she invents and executes the gulling plot in A2S5; she reports its progress in A3S2 and A3S4. The play makes clear that her authority flows from two sources. The first is her access to her mistress: she knows what Olivia thinks, and she can speak for that thinking with sufficient accuracy that no one in the household can afford to dismiss her. The second is her wit, which the play's other servants do not match. Malvolio's authority is formal – he is the steward, with charge over the household economy – and his comic catastrophe is partly the catastrophe of formal authority unaccompanied by intelligence. Maria's authority is informal and earned, and the play's quietest piece of social commentary is the marriage that closes her arc. The waiting-woman becomes a knight's wife not by ambition but by competence. The man who tried to marry up by ambition is in a dark room.
How does Maria compare to the play's other women?
The play has three significant female roles – Viola, Olivia, and Maria – and each represents a different kind of female agency in the comedy's world. Viola operates by disguise; she enters Illyria as a man and conducts her courtship of Orsino through the mask of Cesario, achieving the play's most psychologically complex piece of feminine agency by passing as something she is not. Olivia operates by rank; she is a countess with control of her own household and fortune, and she pursues "Cesario" with the directness her position permits. Maria operates by wit; she has neither rank nor disguise, and her instruments are her tongue, her pen, and her diagnostic accuracy. The three women between them cover the comedy's whole spectrum of female possibility – disguise, status, intelligence – and the play's structural generosity is to give each of them a marriage that recognises what they have done. Viola gets Orsino; Olivia gets Sebastian (a substitute for the Cesario she pursued, but a substitute the play accepts); Maria gets Sir Toby. The marriages are not equally desirable from a modern perspective, but within the play's economy each is a recognition of competence. The waiting-woman has been the most plot-active of the three, and the marriage to Sir Toby is the comedy's quiet acknowledgement that the household she operated within will, in some sense, continue to be operated by her.
Is Maria's gulling of Malvolio justified?
The question becomes more pointed across the play, and the play does not offer a single answer. The initial provocation is real: Malvolio has interrupted the late-night carousing in A2S3 with the moral severity that earns him his reputation as a "puritan", and his contempt for the household's pleasures is genuine and sustained. Maria's diagnosis of him in the same scene – "the best persuaded of himself, so crammed, as he thinks, with excellencies, that it is his grounds of faith that all that look on him love him" – is also accurate, as the play will demonstrate. The forged letter is comic vengeance against a real and identifiable target. The first movement of the gulling, through A2S5 and the yellow-stockings reveal in A3S4, is recognisably festive in the sense C. L. Barber describes in his 1959 study Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: Malvolio's vanity is exposed, the household laughs, no one is permanently injured. The second movement is darker. The dark-room imprisonment of Acts 4 and 5 – engineered by Sir Toby and Feste rather than by Maria – extends the gulling beyond what comic vengeance reasonably requires, and Malvolio's closing line names a residue the play does not entirely absorb:
I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you.
(Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I'll get revenge on every one of you!
Maria's specific share of responsibility is the letter; the imprisonment is not her invention. But the line between justified comic exposure and cruelty is thinner than the festive reading suggests, and modern productions have increasingly chosen to play the gulling with that thinness in view.
Why does Maria marry Sir Toby?
The marriage is offstage and reported in a single line by Olivia in A5S1: "Maria writ / The letter at Sir Toby's great importance; / In recompense whereof he hath married her." The phrasing makes clear that the marriage is a reward – Sir Toby has married Maria in payment for her authorship of the letter that humiliated Malvolio. Within the play's economy, this is recognisable as the comedy's standard mechanism: services rendered, marriage given. But the dynamic has been visible from A2S5, when Sir Toby first names the possibility:
I could marry this wench for this device.
(Act 2, Scene 5)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I'd wed the woman who devised this plan.
He then reinforces it ("And ask no other dowry with her but such another jest"). The line is half-comic and half-serious. Sir Toby is a younger son of an aristocratic house, drinking through his fortune at his niece's expense; Maria is a waiting-woman with no dowry and no formal prospects of marriage to a knight. The match is unequal in rank and entirely possible in practice, and the play uses Maria's authorship of the letter as the structural justification. The reading the play does not quite supply is whether Maria has loved Sir Toby throughout, or whether the marriage is a transaction she has earned and accepts on those terms. The text supports both readings. What the play makes clear is that the social ascent is real; the waiting-gentlewoman becomes Lady Belch, and the comedy treats this as one of its quieter triumphs.
How does Maria's writing skill function in the play?
The forgery is one of Shakespeare's most pointed pieces of metafictional writing. Maria's letter, which we hear Malvolio read aloud in A2S5, is a fictional text written by a character within the play that succeeds in producing its intended effects on its target. It is, in effect, a small play within the play, with Maria as its author and Malvolio as its sole audience. The success of the letter – Malvolio's complete acceptance of every detail – is the play's argument for the power of writing that knows its reader. Maria has named, two scenes earlier, exactly the qualities of Malvolio's psychology that the letter will exploit: the vanity, the readiness to believe himself loved, the attentiveness to his own appearance ("the colour of his beard, the shape of his leg, the manner of his gait"). The letter is not a generic piece of flattery; it is a piece of writing precisely calibrated to one reader. The structural compliment Shakespeare pays her is to make the forgery undetectable. Examining the letter in A5S1, Olivia can barely tell it from her own hand:
Alas, Malvolio, this is not my writing, though, I confess, much like the character but out of question 'tis Maria's hand.
(Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Malvolio, oh dear! It's not my writing, though I admit it is quite similar. But this, without a doubt's, Maria's hand.
The metafictional layer is unmistakable. Shakespeare, the playwright, has written a play whose comic engine is a forged letter written by a character who understands her audience exactly as a playwright must understand his. Maria is, in this reading, the play's internal author, and the gulling of Malvolio is a small demonstration of how successful writing operates.
What is the significance of Maria being called "the little villain"?
The phrase is Sir Toby's in A2S5, and it is one of the play's most affectionate epithets:
Here comes the little villain.
(Act 2, Scene 5)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Here comes the little rascal.
The diminutive "little" is partly literal (productions traditionally cast Maria as physically small, on the strength of Viola's reference to her in A1S5 as "the youngest wren of nine") and partly tonal: it marks her as a comic operator rather than a serious threat, the kind of figure for whom "villain" is an honorific rather than a charge. William Hazlitt's 1817 Characters of Shakespeare's Plays captures the spirit exactly. He confesses to "a sneaking kindness for Maria and her rogueries" – the language is itself slightly conspiratorial, as though Hazlitt is admitting to a guilty pleasure in finding her cruelty charming. The phrase "little villain" works in the same register. It allows Sir Toby (and the audience) to enjoy Maria's plotting without quite naming it as cruelty, and it gives her her authority by acknowledging that her plots are accomplished pieces of villainy even as the diminutive disarms the moral charge. The phrase has become one of the play's most-quoted nicknames precisely because it captures the comic balance Maria operates within: cruel enough to be effective, charming enough to be loved, small enough to be forgiven.
Why does Maria disappear in Act 5?
Maria does not appear in A5S1. Her marriage to Sir Toby is reported by Olivia, not performed; her authorship of the letter is named, but she is not present to acknowledge it; Malvolio's closing protest – "I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you" – is delivered into a room from which the letter's actual author is absent. The structural decision is interesting and easily missed. Several explanations operate together. Mechanically, the play is already crowded in A5S1, with Orsino, Olivia, Viola, Sebastian, Antonio, Malvolio, Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, Feste, Fabian, and the priest all on stage at various moments; Maria's presence would add one more figure to a scene already managing eleven. Thematically, her absence may register a quiet ambivalence. The gulling of Malvolio, which began as comic vengeance in A2S3, has by A5S1 become something the play needs to apologise for, and Maria's absence allows the apology to be delivered – and the marriage to be reported – without requiring her to speak in defence of what she has done. The result is one of the play's quietest closures: Maria's victory is total, and she is not on stage to claim it. Some productions resolve this by giving her a small wordless entrance with Sir Toby at the end; the text does not require her presence at all. The marriage is, by report, a fact; Maria, by presence, is no longer part of the comedy's onstage world.
