Twelfth Night (Vol. 34) | Karin S. Coddon (essay date 1993)
Karin S. Coddon (essay date 1993)
SOURCE: "Slander in and Allow'd Fool: Twelfth Night's Crisis of the Aristocracy," in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 33, No. 2, Spring, 1993, pp. 309-25.
[In this essay, Coddon claims that the closing of Twelfth Night emphasizes disorder over natural order, seeming "less than a wholesale endorsement of the privileges of rank and hierarchy."]
In Twelfth Night demarcations between male and female, master and servant, libertine and moralist come into festive—and not so festive—collision. Typical readings of the play have focused on its misrule and topsy-turvy as serving ultimately to reaffirm the dominant, aristocratic values against which the ostensible "puritan," Malvolio, stands as a scorn-worthy scapegoat.1 By this reasoning, the play may be seen as a comedy in which insubordination, cross-dressing, and unruly "license" are, in the final analysis,...
[The entire page is 7135 words long]
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