Twelfth Night (Vol. 34) | Dennis R. Preston (essay date 1970)
Dennis R. Preston (essay date 1970)
SOURCE: "The Minor Characters in Twelfth Night," in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. XXI, No. 2, Spring, 1970, pp. 167-76.
[In the following essay, Preston discusses the important functions of the minor characters in Twelfth Night: complementing prominent characters, maintaining the play's pace, and providing a complex of motivations for the action.]
It is pretty well agreed upon that no matter what the central plot of Twelfth Night may be the total effect is musical, or, to make that flat analogy more descriptive, the characters of Twelfth Night, as disparate in function as the different instruments of an orchestra are, play in concert: Sir Toby's bass notes crash in on the lyric qualities established in the first two scenes of the play, only to be answered by Viola and Orsino, the soloists of those scenes, who "play" a duet in scene four. So the arrangement goes; never reaching...
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