Critical Approaches

Abstract

Early responses to Twelfth Night tend to emphasise the gulling of Malvolio. Manningham, for example, who is our only contemporary witness (1602), singles out the ‘good practise’ of making ‘the Stewart believe his Lady widdowe [though Olivia is not a widow] was in love with him’; Leonard Digges in his commendatory verses of 1640 speaks of the theatre being full ‘To heare Molvoglio that crosse garter’d Gull’; and Charles I, who changed the title of the play in his Folio copy to read ‘Malvolio’, would seem to have taken much the same view. All these clearly enjoyed what they saw or read. In the Restoration period, however, the diarist, Samuel Pepys, did not share their reaction: on 6 January 1663 he calls the play ‘silly’; and on seeing it again, 20 January 1668, he still thinks it ‘one of the weakest plays that ever I saw on the stage’. More judiciously, Dr Johnson, in the eighteenth century, observes that it ‘is in the graver part elegant and easy, and in some of the lighter scenes exquisitely humorous’ (1765) — though it is noteworthy that the characters he mentions for praise are ‘Ague-cheek’ and, again, Malvolio. He is somewhat less approving of the play’s air of fantasy and improbability, and in particular of Olivia’s hasty marriage, which he finds lacking in ‘credibility’.