The Twelfth Night characters are caught in a love triangle that none of them can solve: Viola loves Orsino, Orsino loves Olivia, and Olivia loves Viola, whom she knows only as a young man called Cesario.
Around them, Olivia’s household runs a noisier comedy of its own, led by a hard-drinking kinsman, a foolish knight, a quick-witted gentlewoman, a professional Fool, and a steward who dreams of marrying his mistress. This guide covers every major character in Twelfth Night, grouped by the worlds they move in, with the key lines that reveal each one. For the plot act by act, the themes, and the play’s most famous lines, see our full guide to Twelfth Night.
At a Glance
Here are the major characters in Twelfth Night and their roles in the play.
The Twins and Their Rescuer
A brother and sister from Messaline are separated in a shipwreck off the coast of Illyria. Each believes the other is dead, and the comedy cannot end until they stand on the stage together.
Viola
Viola comes ashore asking, “What country, friends, is this?” Told that her brother may have survived, she decides to hide who she is and serve Orsino, the duke her father once spoke of. Disguised as a young man called Cesario, she wins his trust within three days, and he sends her to woo Olivia on his behalf. The errand is painful, because she has fallen in love with him herself: “Whoe’er I woo, myself would be his wife.” Olivia, meanwhile, falls for the messenger. Viola sees the whole knot at once and hands it over to time: “O Time, thou must untangle this, not I. / It is too hard a knot for me t’ untie.”
Viola is the heart of the play, and much of her power lies in what she cannot say. She tells Olivia, “I am not that I play,” and she tells Orsino of an imaginary sister who “never told her love, / But let concealment, like a worm i’ th’ bud, / Feed on her damask cheek.” The sister is Viola herself. “I am all the daughters of my father’s house, / And all the brothers, too,” she says, and then adds, “and yet I know not,” because she still hopes Sebastian is alive. Her disguise lets her speak to Orsino as a friend, but it also traps her in a duel she has no wish to fight: “A little thing would make me tell them how much I lack of a man.”
Sebastian
Viola’s twin brother survives the wreck by binding himself to a mast and is pulled from the sea by the captain Antonio. When we first meet him, he has been traveling under a false name, Roderigo, and he mourns his sister, whom he believes drowned. He is gloomy about his luck (“My stars shine darkly over me”) and sets off for Orsino’s court alone, unaware that Viola is already there, dressed, as she later reveals, in the fashion her brother wore: “For him I imitate.”
Sebastian is Viola’s double in looks but not in temperament. Where she hesitates, he acts. When Sir Andrew strikes him in the street, mistaking him for Cesario, Sebastian beats him, draws his sword on Sir Toby, and asks, “Are all the people mad?” When Olivia, making the same mistake, invites him home, he wonders whether he is dreaming (“Or I am mad, or else this is a dream”), but he takes his chance, and soon afterward he pledges himself to her before a priest. His reunion with Viola in the final scene is the play’s great moment of recognition, sealed by a shared memory of their father.
Antonio
Antonio is a sea captain who rescued Sebastian and has spent three months in his company. He is also an old enemy of Orsino’s, wanted for his part in a sea fight against the duke’s galleys, yet when Sebastian leaves for Orsino’s court, he follows: “I do adore thee so / That danger shall seem sport, and I will go.” He lends Sebastian his purse, then rescues Cesario from the duel, taking her for Sebastian, and is arrested.
Antonio’s devotion is one of the strongest feelings in the play, and many modern readers and productions treat it as romantic love. When Cesario, who has never seen him before, denies knowing him and cannot return his purse, he feels utterly betrayed: “In nature there’s no blemish but the mind; / None can be called deformed but the unkind.” The final scene clears up his confusion, but the play does not say what becomes of him.
Orsino and Olivia
The duke and the countess are the two noble lovers of Illyria, and at the start of the play each is wrapped up in a private feeling: he in his longing, she in her grief. They do not share the stage until the final scene.
Orsino
Orsino, Duke of Illyria, opens the play asking for music to feed his longing: “If music be the food of love, play on. / Give me excess of it.” A moment later he is tired of the same tune: “Enough; no more. / ’Tis not so sweet now as it was before.” He has been courting Olivia without success, but he does not go to her himself until the last scene. He sends messengers instead, first Valentine and then Cesario, and spends his own time with music and his feelings.
Orsino insists that his love is deeper than any woman’s, since “no woman’s heart / So big, to hold so much; they lack retention.” The play quietly contradicts him, because the woman at his side loves him more patiently than he loves Olivia. Feste sees through him, telling him that “thy mind is a very opal,” a stone that changes color as the light moves. When Olivia turns him away in the final scene, his love flares into a threat against Cesario (“I’ll sacrifice the lamb that I do love / To spite a raven’s heart within a dove”), and minutes later, once Cesario is revealed as Viola, he asks for her hand. Readers disagree about whether this sudden turn is real love finding its true object or the same changeable fancy he showed in the first scene.
Olivia
Olivia is a rich countess who has lost her father and then her brother within about a year. She has vowed to veil her face and mourn for seven years, and she will admit no suitors, not even the duke. Her mourning does not survive her first meeting with Cesario. She lifts her veil (“Is ’t not well done?”), brushes aside the speech Orsino’s messenger has memorized, and by the end of the scene is in love: “Even so quickly may one catch the plague?” She sends Malvolio after Cesario with a ring, pretending the youth left it behind.
Olivia is sharper than her lovesickness suggests. She runs a large household with what Sebastian later admires as a “smooth, discreet, and stable bearing,” and she sees Malvolio’s faults clearly: “O, you are sick of self-love, Malvolio, and taste with a distempered appetite.” Once in love, she pursues Cesario as boldly as Orsino pursues her (“Love sought is good, but given unsought is better”), and when she meets Sebastian, whom she takes for Cesario, she hurries him before a priest. Her mistake turns out well. As Sebastian tells her, “nature to her bias drew in that”: in loving the sister, she was drawn toward the brother. When the twins stand together at last, she greets Viola in a new role: “A sister! You are she.”
Olivia’s Household
Olivia’s house is full of people who want something from her: a steward who wants to marry her, a kinsman who wants to go on drinking under her roof, and a knight who hopes to win her hand. Their comedy is mostly in prose, and it grows cruel.
Malvolio
Malvolio is Olivia’s steward, the head of her servants, and he takes his authority seriously. When Sir Toby and his friends sing drunkenly after midnight, he demands, “My masters, are you mad?” and warns Toby that Olivia is ready to bid him farewell. Toby answers with one of the play’s best-known lines: “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” Maria calls Malvolio “a kind of puritan,” then corrects herself: he is nothing “constantly but a time-pleaser,” so full of himself that “it is his grounds of faith that all that look on him love him.”
That vanity is the weakness Maria’s letter exploits. Hidden in a box tree, Toby, Andrew, and Fabian watch Malvolio daydream about being “Count Malvolio” before he even finds the letter. Convinced that Olivia loves him, he appears before her smiling, in yellow stockings and cross-garters, “a color she abhors” and “a fashion she detests,” and is locked in a dark room as a madman. Even there he holds on to his reason: “I am not mad, Sir Topas. I say to you this house is dark.” Olivia finally admits that “He hath been most notoriously abused.” Malvolio can be played as a pompous fool, a wronged man, or something between, and how far the joke goes too far is a question productions answer differently.
Maria
Maria is Olivia’s gentlewoman, a quick-witted servant who runs rings around Sir Andrew in their first scene and scolds Sir Toby for coming in late. When Malvolio threatens to report her too (“She shall know of it, by this hand”), she invents the revenge. She can write very like her lady, so she will drop a love letter in the steward’s path: “I know my physic will work with him.” Toby calls her “thou most excellent devil of wit.”
Maria is the author of the play’s famous trick, and she ends the play married to a knight. Fabian reports in the final scene that “Maria writ / The letter at Sir Toby’s great importance, / In recompense whereof he hath married her.” Toby had hinted at it the moment the trick worked: “I could marry this wench for this device.” Whether the marriage is a love match or a reward for a good joke, the play leaves open.
Sir Toby Belch
Sir Toby is Olivia’s kinsman (she calls him cousin, and he calls her his niece), and she harbors him in her house. His philosophy is simple: “I am sure care’s an enemy to life.” He drinks, sings, and mocks anyone who tells him to stop. He has brought Sir Andrew into the house as a suitor for Olivia, largely so that he can live on Andrew’s money, and he admits as much: “I have been dear to him, lad, some two thousand strong or so.”
Toby is the life of the play’s revels, and also its bully. He pushes Andrew and Cesario into a duel neither wants so that he can enjoy their fear, and he schemes to take Andrew’s horse: “Marry, I’ll ride your horse as well as I ride you.” He tires of the Malvolio plot once it threatens his standing with Olivia: “I would we were well rid of this knavery.” When Sebastian wounds them both, he turns on his friend, calling Andrew “an ass-head, and a coxcomb, and a knave.” His marriage to Maria is reported, not shown.
Sir Andrew Aguecheek
Sir Andrew is a foolish knight with “three thousand ducats a year” who believes he has a chance with Olivia. He admires other people’s wit and suspects his own shortage of it: “I am a great eater of beef, and I believe that does harm to my wit.” He threatens more than once to go home and is talked into staying each time. Toby tells him he can dance, fight, and win the lady, and Andrew believes him.
Andrew is the easiest target in a play full of tricks, and Toby spends his money, schemes for his horse, and mocks him to his face. Yet Shakespeare gives him one line that stops the laughter for a moment. When Toby boasts that Maria adores him, Andrew replies, “I was adored once, too.” He ends the play with a broken head, insulted by the friend he paid for, and wishing he were anywhere else: “I had rather than forty pound I were at home.”
Feste
Feste is Olivia’s Fool, a professional jester whom her father “took much delight in,” and he moves freely between her house and Orsino’s court. He proves to Olivia that she is the fool for mourning a brother whose soul is in heaven, and he sings for both households: “O mistress mine” for Toby and Andrew, “Come away, come away, death” for Orsino. Viola recognizes how much skill his work takes: “This fellow is wise enough to play the Fool, / And to do that well craves a kind of wit.”
Feste stands a little apart from everyone. He takes money from nearly all of them, and he sees through them, from Orsino’s changeable mind to Malvolio’s pride. Malvolio sneers at him as “a barren rascal” in the first act, and Feste does not forget it. Disguised as the curate Sir Topas, he visits the imprisoned steward and tells him that “there is no darkness but ignorance.” When the lovers leave the stage at the end, Feste stays behind to sing the last song alone.
Other Characters
A few smaller parts matter to the story. Fabian, a member of Olivia’s household, joins the plot because Malvolio got him into trouble with Olivia over a bearbaiting. He watches the letter scene from the box tree and, in the last scene, confesses the plot, hoping it “may rather pluck on laughter than revenge.” Valentine and Curio are gentlemen who attend on Orsino. The Captain who brings Viola ashore agrees to help with her disguise and keep her secret, and he holds her women’s clothes; by the end of the play he is in prison at Malvolio’s suit. A Priest confirms Olivia’s betrothal to Sebastian, and Officers arrest Antonio at Orsino’s suit.
A Closer Reading: “Thrice Welcome, Drownèd Viola”
For four acts, the heroine of Twelfth Night has no name. Readers see “Viola” in the speech headings, but no one on stage says it. The Captain calls her “lady” and “madam.” Orsino calls her Cesario, “boy,” and “good youth.” Even her brother, telling Antonio of his loss in Act 2, names himself and his father but calls her only “a sister.” Viola keeps the name back too. When she comes closest to telling Orsino the truth, she speaks of herself as a stranger: “My father had a daughter loved a man.”
Feste even makes a joke of it. Meeting her in Act 3, he says he wishes “my sister had had no name,” because a name is a word, and words can be twisted. The joke lands on a character whose own name the play has kept back. When the name finally arrives in the last scene, it comes from Sebastian, in lines that treat her as a ghost:
Were you a woman, as the rest goes even,
I should my tears let fall upon your cheek
And say “Thrice welcome, drownèd Viola.”
Recognition in this play depends on names and clothes, and Viola gets only half. She will not be embraced until every detail can “cohere and jump / That I am Viola,” and the proof she offers is her “maiden weeds,” which the Captain has kept. But the Captain, she explains, is in prison at Malvolio’s suit. Olivia sends for Malvolio to set things right, and he leaves the stage in a rage. “He hath not told us of the Captain yet,” Orsino says. He has asked to see her “in thy woman’s weeds,” but the play ends before he can, and his last words to her keep the old name: “Cesario, come, / For so you shall be while you are a man.”
So the heroine leaves the stage named but not restored, a woman to the ear and a young man to the eye. On Shakespeare’s stage, where female parts were played by boys, the effect doubled: the bride Orsino waits for was a boy playing a woman playing a man. Early in the play Viola told Olivia, “I am not that I play.” The ending lets that line stay true a little longer, and puts off the full celebration of who she is until “golden time convents.”
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about the characters in Twelfth Night, answered briefly.
Who Is the Main Character in Twelfth Night?
Viola, the shipwrecked twin who disguises herself as Cesario. She is one of several heroines in Shakespeare’s comedies who dress as young men. The subplot centers on Malvolio, Olivia’s steward.
Who Is Cesario in Twelfth Night?
Cesario is the name Viola uses while disguised as a young man in Orsino’s service. Olivia falls in love with Cesario, and later marries Sebastian, Viola’s twin, believing he is Cesario.
Who Marries Whom at the End of Twelfth Night?
Olivia is already pledged to Sebastian before a priest. Orsino promises to marry Viola once she is back in women’s clothes, though that wedding is still to come when the play ends. Sir Toby has married Maria offstage, as Fabian reports.
Is Orsino a Duke or a Count?
The play uses both titles. The Captain calls him “A noble duke,” and the opening stage direction names him Duke of Illyria, but Olivia, Viola, and Sir Andrew all refer to him as the Count.
Why Do They Trick Malvolio?
Because he breaks up Sir Toby’s late-night party and threatens to report them to Olivia. Maria, who knows how highly he thinks of himself, forges a letter in Olivia’s hand to convince him that his lady loves him.
Related Reading
Three pages that take Twelfth Night and its characters further.