Twelfth Night: Famous Quotes

The play's first line is Orsino luxuriating in his own lovesickness: feed me so much music — so much love — that I sicken of it and the craving dies. He wants not Olivia so much as the delicious feeling of longing for her.

It is a portrait of love as self-indulgence rather than devotion. Orsino is in love with being in love, and the speech's restless changes of mind (he tires of the tune within seconds) show a desire that feeds on its own excess. The play will gently expose this: real love, when it arrives, looks nothing like his beautiful, idle pining.

Shipwrecked and alone in a strange country, Viola makes the decision that drives the whole comedy: she will hide her true self and serve Duke Orsino disguised as a young man. Survival, for a woman alone, means becoming someone else.

The choice is practical, not mischievous — a vulnerable woman buying herself safety and time — but it sets the entire tangle in motion. Every confusion, every misdirected love that follows grows from this one sensible act of self-concealment, which is why the play keeps asking how much of identity is the self and how much is the costume.

Feste defends his trade with a neat proverb: it is better to be a clever fool than a foolish clever person. The professional jester claims that knowing you are a fool is the beginning of wisdom.

James leaves the line almost untouched because it is already perfect modern sense, and the joke is structural: Feste, the paid “fool,” is the sharpest mind in Illyria, while the self-important Malvolio is the real fool. The play keeps turning folly and wisdom inside out, and Feste — who sees everyone clearly and is paid to be dismissed — is its presiding spirit.

Sent by Orsino to woo Olivia for him, Viola instead describes how she herself would love: she would build a cabin at Olivia's gate and cry her devotion to the hills until Olivia took pity. The wooing is so passionate that Olivia falls for the messenger.

The speech is the play's most genuine declaration of love, and its irony is exquisite — Viola, pleading another man's case, speaks her own heart so truly that she wins the wrong person. It is also the moment the comedy's engine engages: Olivia's love for “Cesario” is sparked here, by the very sincerity Orsino's hired courtship lacks.

Alone after Cesario leaves, Olivia is astonished at herself: can love really strike this fast, like an infection caught in a moment? The cool, mourning lady who swore off all suitors has fallen in an afternoon.

The plague image is telling — love here is sudden, involuntary, almost an illness, exactly as it is for Orsino and as it will be for everyone the disguise touches. The play treats desire as something that happens to people rather than something they choose, which is why a woman wooing on another man's behalf can accidentally infect the lady she came to persuade.

Against all good sense, Antonio follows the young man he rescued into a city where he himself is a wanted enemy. Whatever the danger, he says, his love for Sebastian makes the risk worth it.

Antonio's devotion is the most selfless love in the play, and the most openly intense — a male friendship pitched at the heat of romance. Critics have long noted its homoerotic charge, and the comedy's neat pairings leave Antonio conspicuously alone at the end. His unrewarded adoration is the quiet ache beneath the festive resolution.

Feste sings to the late-night revellers a carpe diem song: the future is unknown, so kiss now while you are young, because youth does not last. Beneath the party, the fool sounds the play's note of passing time.

It is the central paradox of Twelfth Night — a comedy shadowed by mortality. Feste's songs keep reminding the lovers and drinkers that pleasure is brief and age is coming, giving the merriment an autumn light. “Youth's a stuff will not endure” is the bittersweet truth the whole festive world is dancing to keep from hearing.

Sir Toby rounds on the kill-joy Malvolio with the play's great rallying cry for pleasure: just because you are virtuous, must the rest of us give up our cakes and ale? It is appetite and revelry defending themselves against puritan disapproval.

C. L. Barber, in his 1959 Shakespeare's Festive Comedy, read the play as a “saturnalian” holiday in which ordinary rules are suspended for misrule and feasting. Toby is that holiday spirit in person, and Malvolio its enemy — the steward who would cancel the party. The line crystallises the whole comedy's quarrel between festivity and self-denial.

In the middle of the carousing, the foolish Sir Andrew drops a sudden, wistful line — “I was adored once too” — and the laughter catches in the throat. For a second the buffoon is just a lonely man remembering being loved.

It is one of Shakespeare's small miracles of characterisation: four words that give a comic dupe a whole sad inner life. The play is full of these tonal shifts, where revelry briefly parts to show the loneliness underneath. Sir Andrew, fleeced by Toby and hopeless with Olivia, is funny — but the line insists he is also human.

Disguised as a man and unable to declare her love for Orsino, Viola describes her own grief in the third person — a sister, she pretends, who hid her love and let it waste her away in silence. She is, of course, describing herself.

It is the play's most poignant image of concealed feeling, and it cuts against Orsino's noisy, performed passion: hers is the love that cannot be spoken at all. The “worm i' the bud” feeding on the cheek turns the secret into something slowly fatal, and the dramatic irony — Orsino hearing his own beloved confess and not knowing it — is almost unbearable.

Pressed by Orsino on whether a woman could love him, Viola edges as close to confession as her disguise allows: she knows all about a father's daughters and sons — because she is the only one left of her own family, playing every part herself.

The riddling line is the heart of the play's interest in gender and identity. Viola is at once daughter and “son,” sister and brother (she fears Sebastian drowned), woman and Cesario — a self multiplied and hidden by costume. Shakespeare lets her speak a truth that sounds like a riddle, because in disguise the plain truth can only be told slant.

Reading the forged letter he believes is from Olivia, Malvolio swallows its flattery whole: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have it thrust upon them — and he is sure he is the third kind. The trap is his own vanity.

The line has escaped the play to become proverbial, but in context it is a cruel joke about class and ambition. Maria and Toby have baited the hook with exactly what Malvolio longs for — to rise above his station and marry his mistress — and his eager belief exposes the social climber beneath the stern steward. His daydream of greatness is the engine of his humiliation.

Watching Maria's forged letter work on Malvolio, Sir Toby is so delighted by her cunning that he declares he could marry her for it. The plot's true author, the play quietly notes, is the sharp-witted lady's maid.

The line gives Maria her due: the gulling of Malvolio is her invention, and it is the cleverest piece of plotting in the comedy. Toby's admiration is half genuine — they do marry by the end — and it points to the play's habit of rewarding wit over rank. The “wench” outschemes everyone, and her device drives the whole subplot.

Feste explains that folly is universal — it circles the world like the sun and shines on everyone, high and low alike. There is no escaping it, because everyone, in their way, is a fool.

It is the licensed fool's manifesto and the play's too. Feste moves freely between Orsino's court and Olivia's house precisely because folly is everywhere and he is its honest broker. The line dissolves the difference between the official fool and the people who employ him: the wise are foolish in love, the dignified are foolish in vanity, and only the paid fool admits it.

Cornered by Olivia's love, Viola can only half-deny it: she is not what she appears to be. The line is the simple truth of her disguise — and an echo, in a comedy, of the same words Iago uses for villainy.

Stephen Greenblatt, in his 1988 Shakespearean Negotiations, explored how the Elizabethan stage — where a boy actor played Viola playing the boy Cesario — turned gender into a kind of costume that could be put on and off. Viola's line sits at the centre of that play of identity: spoken by a woman, as a man, by a boy, it asks how stable any “what I am” really is.

Abandoning courtly games, Olivia states a plain truth about desire: love you go looking for is good, but love that arrives unbidden is better. She is justifying her own helpless, unsought passion for Cesario.

The neat couplet captures the play's theory of love as something that happens to you rather than something you pursue. Orsino seeks love and stages it; Olivia and Viola are simply struck by it. Olivia's willingness to follow her unsought feeling, even toward a “man” who keeps refusing her, gives her a directness the self-dramatising Duke never has.

Confronted by Malvolio in yellow stockings, cross-gartered, and leering — all because the forged letter told him to — Olivia concludes he has simply lost his mind. The sane steward has been turned, by his own vanity, into the play's maddest figure.

“Midsummer madness” names the comedy's holiday logic, where the orderly world tips into folly and nobody behaves as they should. The irony is sharp: the man who polices everyone else's pleasure is now the spectacle, undone not by drink or revelry but by ambition. The audience knows the “madness” is a trick, which makes his bewilderment both funny and, increasingly, uncomfortable to watch.

Watching the gulling of Malvolio unfold, Fabian jokes that if you saw this on a stage you would dismiss it as too far-fetched to believe. The play winks at its own audience, who are in fact watching exactly that.

It is Shakespeare's cheekiest moment of meta-theatre: a character in a comedy calling the comedy implausible while it happens. The line both flatters the audience — you are cleverer than to be fooled — and quietly defends the whole genre, where improbable disguises and coincidences are the point. Twelfth Night knows it is a contrivance, and dares us to enjoy it anyway.

Sebastian, newly arrived and mistaken by everyone for Cesario, is showered with affection by a strange noblewoman and attacked by strangers, and can only wonder whether the whole island has lost its wits. He has walked, unknowing, into his sister's tangle.

His bafflement is the comic mirror of Viola's predicament: where she knows the cause of the confusion and is helpless to fix it, he has no idea and simply rolls with his luck. The line marks the moment the knot begins to loosen — the twin who can resolve everything has stepped into the play, even if he thinks he has stepped into a madhouse.

Released at last from the dark room where he was imprisoned as a lunatic, Malvolio refuses to laugh it off. Humiliated before the whole household, he storms out swearing vengeance on them all.

The line darkens the comedy's happy ending. Everyone else is paired and forgiven, but Malvolio leaves unreconciled, genuinely wronged — the punishment far exceeded the offence. His exit is a deliberate sour note: Shakespeare lets the festive world have its joy, then reminds us that someone always pays for the party, and that he is not laughing.

Feste reveals himself as one of Malvolio's tormentors and sums up the whole affair: time spins like a child's top, and it brings revenges round in its turning. The steward's cruelty to the fool has come back on him.

Harold Bloom, in his 1998 Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, prized Feste as the play's clear-eyed heart — detached, melancholy, wiser than the lovers he serves. The “whirligig” is his philosophy in an image: nothing stays, fortunes turn, and the wise fool simply watches the wheel come round. It is the nearest the comedy comes to a moral, delivered with a shrug.

With the confusions resolved and Viola promised to him, Orsino still cannot quite let go of the disguise: he goes on calling her “Cesario,” because she is dressed as a man, and will keep the name until she is a woman again. The play ends with the costume not yet removed.

Jan Kott, in his 1964 Shakespeare Our Contemporary, fixed on the unsettling erotics of this ending: Orsino weds a woman he has loved as a boy, and the comedy closes before she ever changes back. The line leaves the play's questions about gender and desire deliberately open — the happy pairing achieved, but its terms still ambiguous, still in disguise.